by John Spritzler

August 31, 2004

Many of the people who are put off by the liberal agenda are as opposed to capitalism and its atrocities, like the Iraq war, as are self-described "progressives."

I discovered this when I went to a demonstration against same-sex marriage recently in front of Boston's City Hall, where they were passing out bumper stickers that read: "Power to the People, Not the Courts." I asked a young college man who was holding one of their banners if he agreed with the Pope's opposition to the Iraq war. This led to a discussion of the war and 9-11 between me and him and a handful of others in their group who joined in. It turned out the college student was deeply opposed to the war. One of the other members of the group began backing me up by telling a third person how the whole 9-11 story we've been told is a lie and how the military jets were not scrambled, etc. The college student was the son of working class parents in the nearby housing development. He told me how his mother told him that all the politicians were liars, and how he shouldn't trust his college teachers when they bad-mouthed the working class. (He was opposed to same-sex marriage, by the way, because of his concern for its negative effect on children in such marriages who don't have the benefit of being raised by their real mother and father; he was sensitive to this because his father had left when he was young.) People like this student and his mother and the others demonstrating with him against same-sex marriage are part of the majority of Americans who want a democratic revolution, even if they have never heard it spoken of in those terms before.

But many people in the anti-war movement unfortunately use the same-sex marriage issue as a litmus test, and treat those who oppose it as the enemy. Go here, for example, to read about how an anti-war demonstration in Boston, at its conclusion, confronted and terrified opponents of same-sex marriage who were meeting, coincidentally, in a nearby church at the same time.