Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Sorry, I don't see it that way. Black Americans made far more progress under the leadership and tactics of Martin Luther King, who was a genuine liberal who wanted blacks to be treated no differently than other Americans, than they did once the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, and Angela Davis seized the spotlight. And it bears keeping in mind that those latter groups failed miserably in their agendas of overthrowing the American government and setting up autonomous black states.
Anti-obscenity laws that prohibited references to homosexuality were rolled back under the banner of the freedom of unpopular speech, another liberal value.
Ending the systemic discrimination against natives in Canada was a liberal project. They gained the right to vote, etc. within the legal framework of Canada, which could not sustain the practice of treating them differently from other Canadians.
The problems we're faced with now are not legalistic. They're problems of poverty, of social segregation, and of cultural attitudes. These are not easy problems to address, especially as there's fierce disagreement over the source of the problems and the best way to redress them. But they won't be resolved by turning our backs on the liberal principles that drove the tremendous progress of the last 50 years. Identity politics is a siren call to tribalism and the dubious comforts of us vs them. It's folly.
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Come on Cliff, everything from race riots to sit-ins were as key to the civil rights movement as Dr. King's speeches, and those were about as clear-cut examples of identity-based civil disobedience as there's ever been. Do you truly believe that Stonewall wasn't a monumental moment in the gay rights movement? You can't sit there and talk about anti-obscenity laws, but ignore anti-sodomy laws, which were 100% used to target gay people.