They can't say what we can't accept By LEONARD PITTS JR.

Three little words.

That's what keeps bringing us back to this intersection of low comedy and pathos. Three words, none longer than three letters -- and yet, some of us still find them nearly impossible to say.

Three words: I am gay.

If he'd been able to say those words, who knows what Roy Ashburn might be today? But we already know what his inability has made him: an object of ridicule.

Ashburn is a Republican state senator in California. He has always been rather reliably anti-gay in his law making, voting against virtually every gay-friendly piece of legislation from marriage equality to a simple motion to set aside a day in honor of Harvey Milk, a gay political icon who was assassinated in 1978.

So naturally, we're all shocked -- shocked, I tell you, shocked! -- to learn that Ashburn himself is gay. This revelation came after he was arrested for drunk driving early this month. Turns out he'd done his drinking at a gay bar.

``I am gay,'' he told a conservative radio host. As for his anti-gay record? He said he was just following the wishes of the people he served.

Because who wants a leader who thinks for himself?

Then there's Eric Massa, a now-former Democratic representative from New York. He stands accused of sexual harassment by a number of his male staffers who claim he groped them. It has since come to light that he faced similar accusations two decades ago when he was in the Navy.

Massa who, according to The Washington Post, shares a townhouse with several unmarried male staffers, still declines to speak the three little words, but he confirmed the latest charges in a bizarre interview with Glenn Beck on Fox News. He also tried to portray it as non-sexual. ``Not only did I grope [a male staffer], I tickled him until he couldn't breathe, and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday.''

Oh. Well, that explains it, right? When we turn 50, all us manly men like nothing better than to jump atop one another and tickle ourselves silly. Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Alan Greenspan . . . all the manly men do it.

Sorry. As I said, low comedy. And pathos.

Because for all the laughter these men evoke with their lies to self and tortured rationalizations to us, I find I have also, hidden in the breath between ha and ha, a certain bittersweet pity. There's just something ineffably pathetic in the inability of these middle-aged men, in the Year Of Our Lord 2010, post-Will & Grace, post Ellen DeGeneres, post-Barney Frank, Elton John, Meredith Baxter and Neil Patrick Harris, to simply stand up and say those three simple words.

Perhaps that sounds judgmental. Perhaps it is.

But if so, it is a judgment fueled by the cowardice and mendacity of those who lack the courage to be what they are, by anger at the hypocrisy of a Roy Ashburn willing to sell out his own for 40 shekels of political approval from those who would hate him if they only knew, and, ultimately, by the realization that we have been at this intersection too many times before.

So you have to wonder: how many Massas and Ashburns, how many James Wests, Ted Haggards, Mark Foleys and Larry Craigs do we have to see, how many shocked spouses and embarrassed children do we have to endure, how many lies, alibis and justifications do we need to hear, before we accept the obvious: Gay is not a choice, gay is not a sin, gay is not a shame.

Gay simply is.

And their inability to say ``I am gay,'' doesn't just speak poorly of gays and lesbians.

Because if what we see here at the intersection of low comedy and pathos indicts certain of them for cowardice and mendacity, you could argue that it indicts the rest of us for much the same thing.

After all, their inability to say what they are only reflects our inability to accept it.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/17/1532939/they-cant-say-what-we-cant-accept.html#ixzz0idooyzpX

Breeding Contempt for The Poor

By LEONARD PITTS JR.
Miami Herald
Feb. 1, 2010, 7:19PM
If he'd said it of Jews, he would still be apologizing.
If he'd said it of blacks, he'd be on BET, begging absolution.
If he'd said it of women, the National Organization for Women would have his carcass turning slowly on a spit over an open flame.
But he said it of the poor, so he got away with it.
“He” is South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer, running for governor on the GOP ticket. Speaking of those who receive public assistance, he recently told an audience, “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better.”
You read that right. The would-be governor of one of the poorest states there is likens the poor to stray animals.
And though it drew some newspaper notice, a riposte from The Daily Show and rebukes from Bauer's opponents, it never quite rose to the level of national controversy, as it would've had Bauer compared, say, women or Jews to the dogs one feeds at one's back door. The relative silence stands as eloquent testimony to the powerlessness and invisibility of the American poor.
One is reminded how earnestly shocked news media were at the poverty they saw five years ago when New Orleans drowned. “Why didn't they get out?” observers kept asking — as if everyone has a car in the driveway and a wallet full of plastic.
The poor fare little better on television. The Evanses of Good Times and the Conners from Roseanne aside, television has been heavily weighted toward fresh-scrubbed middle- and upper-class families for 60 years.
Politicians? They'll elbow one another aside to pledge allegiance to the middle class; they are conspicuously less eager to align with those still trying to reach that level.
Who, then, speaks for the poor? Who raises a voice when they are scapegoated and marginalized? Who cries out when they are abused by police and failed by schools? Who takes a stand when they are exploited by employers and turned away by hospitals?
As near as I can tell, no one does.
Unfortunately, poor people have never learned to think of and conduct themselves as a voting bloc; historically, they have proved too readily divisible, usually by race. As Martin Luther King once observed: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the ‘poor' white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.”
It takes some helluva psychology to get two men stuck in the same leaking boat to fight each other. You'd think their priority would be to come together, if only long enough to bail water. But the moneyed interests in this country have somehow been able to con the poor into doing just that, fighting tooth and nail when they ought to be standing shoulder to shoulder.
One hopes André Bauer's words will provide a wake-up call — in South Carolina and elsewhere — for people who have been down too long and fooled too often, that it will encourage them to organize their votes, raise their voices, push their issues into the public discourse. In America, one is invisible and powerless only so long as one chooses to be.
And the Bauers of this world need to know: Sometimes stray animals bite.