This story (making the rounds on the internet with the most recent mention I’ve seen at TPM) is further proof of the existence of a disease that appears to strike Republicans disproportionately: one issue liberalism. I’ve remarked on this before. This time the sufferer is the mayor of San Diego, who ran for office vowing to stop gay marriage in its tracks. Seems he’s had a change of heart:
A tearful Mayor Jerry Sanders made a dramatic shift yesterday, explaining that he can no longer oppose same-sex marriages because he does not want to deny justice to people like his daughter, who is a lesbian.
Joined at a late afternoon news conference by his wife, Rana Sampson, the San Diego mayor announced he will back a City Council decision to support same-sex marriage before the state Supreme Court, where California’s ban on it awaits review.
“I decided to lead with my heart, which is probably obvious at the moment,” said Sanders, moments before he revealed his daughter’s sexual orientation.
I’ve remarked on this disease before, and I’ve observed it first hand on many occasions. The State Senator who towed the Republican line except for her support for programs to help the developmentally disabled comes to mind on the local level, while the Evil One in the Undisclosed Location with the Lesbian Daughter comes to mind on the national level. On this very blog we had a gay Republican commenter who made an eloquent plea for tolerance of gays, who on other issues appears to be a down the line Republican conservative.
One wonders. Has Mr. Sanders found religion on other issues, including those that require him to feel empathy for people he doesn’t know and love? Is there something in the genes of some humans that prevents them from putting themselves in other people’s shoes? I sometimes see this with my clients, who often have difficulty coping with the fact that the system is not structured to maximally benefit them. Why, they wonder, should the court allow the other side to present a defense. Isn’t it obvious that they are right? They would of course, feel differently if they were on the other side of the fence, but they’re not on that side of the fence, and they can’t mentally put themselves there.
Lord knows the Democrats have their problems, all too evident in the past week, but they don’t appear to suffer from this particular genetic defect (or at least it’s not endemic with them), if that’s what it is. If it is inherent in some people, then to paraphrase the gentle man from Nazareth, “the Republicans will always be with us”. We must hope, if we are to survive as a species, that this trait will prove to be recessive, since we no longer live in a world in which we can hope to survive if it is dominated by people who cannot mentally see the world through the eyes of others. If we look around ourselves today, we can’t help but conclude that the greatest threat to human survival, world peace and social justice is intolerance, a trait that goes hand in hand with lack of empathy and, not coincidentally, the stock in trade of the Republican Party.
Unfortunately, the Republicans are not alone in building political movements on a firm bedrock of intolerance. They exist everywhere, and tend to have a sort of symbiotic relationship with each other. There’s no better example than Bush and Ahaminejad, each of whom attempts to shore up his flagging popularity at home by whipping up fear of the other.
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