Quote:
Originally Posted by rubecube
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.
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I believe the anti-sodomy laws were rescinded well before the 1970s in Canada and England. Anyway, talking about America, and the other Anglo democracies is really comparing apples and oranges, which is Cliff's main point here. But you are right to say that MLK was far more radical than Cliff gives credit. Near the end of his life, he was talking about class politics from a Marxist perspective. That said, he was also a Baptist minister, a philanderer, a plagiarist, maybe one of the best modern democratic public speakers, and a strong believer in the American Founding.
As they say... only in America.
They have an activist culture, they have a political crab pot, and they have much higher levels of social dysfunction. That isn't the way Canadian political culture works, and it is why so many of us oppose the importation of such aggressive methods.
Now, we can have a talk about social injustice, and how that can be addressed, but let's not mistake opposition for identity politics activism for racism, homophoba, white middle-class insouciance or whatever. You should know by now that many of us on the other side of these things tend to care a lot about those things, but maybe just not the chosen method.
EDIT: A lot of this is why I choose to say I am a conservative rather than a liberal. "You" - rube, Pepsi et al. - are right. There is something ridiculous to the liberal notion of "can't we all just get along." It is an important dictum, but one that depends upon a very fragile social fabric. Clearly, there are social injustices that have gone unaddressed for so long as to make the continuation of that fabric to be tenuous at best. The future forward is uncertain.