Can we retain privacy in the era of Big Data?
The ubiquity of digital gadgets and sensors, the pervasiveness of networks and the benefits of sharing very personal information through social media have led some to argue that privacy as a social norm is changing and becoming an outmoded concept. In this three-part series Don Tapscott questions this view, arguing that we each need a personal privacy strategy. Part one can be read here.
Privacy is nothing if not the freedom to be let alone, to experiment and to make mistakes, to forget and to start anew, to act according to conscience, and to be free from the oppressive scrutiny and opinions of others.
It may seem an odd notion today, but in its infancy the Internet was a favorite refuge for many seeking privacy. A famous New Yorker cartoon published almost 20 years ago featured two dogs sitting in front of a computer, with one saying to the other: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Today such anonymity is essentially non-existent. Practical obscurity – the basis for privacy norms throughout history – is fast disappearing. Our society is collectively creating, storing and communicating information at nearly exponential rates of growth. Most of this data is personally identifiable, and third parties control much of it. This personal data will be archived online forever and be instantly searchable, and few appreciate how many ways this data might be used to harm us.
Building a new future for Turkey
The crisis in Syria and the confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program have highlighted the renewed importance of one of the oldest and most enduring relationships of the United States: its alliance with Turkey. The U.S.-Turkey partnership was forged during the Korean conflict and the Cold War, and Washington and Ankara stood shoulder-to-shoulder to confront the Soviet challenge. Now, the two countries have an opportunity to work together to help shape the Middle East, ensure the stability of Iraq, contain Iranian ambitions, end the Assad regime in Syria and ensure reliable energy supplies to Europe.
In the past decade, Turkey has become the 17th-largest economy in the world and undertaken far-reaching political reforms. It has gone from being a cautious actor in international affairs to being an influential player in its neighborhood and beyond. In a new Council on Foreign Relations report, a bipartisan panel we chaired makes the case that the two countries should define a new partnership of close coordination in confronting today’s challenges.
There are, however, questions raised about Turkey’s commitment to the West. This is a function of three factors: the rise of the Islamist-oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP); the broadening of Turkey’s foreign policy ambitions under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan; and the failure in the West to understand the dramatic changes in Turkey over the last decade.
By most indicators, Turkey today is more representative, modern and economically successful than when the AKP first came to power in late 2002. Although it has pursued a more active foreign policy, Ankara’s outreach to Syria, Libya and Iran began well before the AKP came to power – indeed, before the party even existed.
Turkey’s evolution is not all good news, of course. Washington and Ankara remain divided over the Arab-Israeli conflict. And while Turkey’s position toward Iran is evolving in a direction more consistent with that of the United States, between 2008 and 2010 the Turkish government pursued its interests there without regard for American policy. Turkey’s initial reluctance to host an early-warning anti-missile radar station on its territory aroused concern that it was distancing itself from NATO, but Ankara ultimately decided to honor its security commitment to its traditional allies.
There is also continuing friction over how to characterize the mass killings of Armenians in 1915, the division of Cyprus and Turkey’s relationship with Hamas. The Turkish government has its own views of these issues, and while Washington should help Turkey and Armenia improve their relations, support a resolution to the Cyprus conflict and seek an end to the estrangement between Turkey and Israel, these matters should not preclude the deepening of U.S.-Turkey relations.
On the domestic front, Turkey may be more democratic, but it is not yet a full-fledged democracy. Democratic change is a process that in any country will result in both steps forward and reversals. Turkish leaders have at times manifested a majoritarian view of democracy, without due regard for minority and individual rights, making them appear no more liberal than their predecessors. Turkey’s detention of almost a hundred journalists is inconsistent with a country that aims to deepen its democratic practices.
The USA is incapable of acting independently in the Middle East. All we do is what Tel Aviv tells us to do. We are a slavish colony of Israel.
In addition, the anti-Muslim propaganda in the USA continues without let up. How can anyone posit a positive relationship with Turkey? For a long time now, having “improved” relations with a Muslim land means our rulers invade it and militarily install a puppet government. And use our Social Security taxes to do so while claiming we “cannot afford” to pay any social insurance benefits.
Get ready for more of the same. There is only one Party here, only one policy. Just two faces.
from MacroScope:
Is U.S. economic patriotism hurting?
Any Americans believing that their country is being bought up by the Chinese might want to pay heed to a new report from the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment. It says that China is a minimal player in terms of foreign direct investment in the United States and that Washington should in fact be doing a lot more to get it to gear up its buying.
To start with, look at the magic number. In 2010, the last year for which numbers are available, only 0.25 percent of FDI into the Untied States came from China. Switzerland, Britain, Japan, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Canada were all far bigger. In the U.S. Department of Commerce's report on the year, China, numbers were so small they were lumped into a category simply called "others".
This is not enough, the Vale Columbia report says. Given China's burgeoning economic role across the globe, America can benefit from a lot:
First, FDI provides an influx of capital into the struggling economy, increasing employment at no cost to the taxpayer. Second, jobs in foreign affiliates are typically better remunerated than similar jobs in domestically owned companies. Third, keeping the US open to foreign investment demonstrates a global example for international openness. Finally, Chinese money refused by the U.S. could alternatively be directed to competitors or even the U.S.’s enemies.
(On the latter point, its worth reading our global economic correspondent Alan Wheatley's story on China's influence in Europe)
The Vale Columbia report acknowledges that Chinese FDI is controversial - primarily because a lot of Chinese companies are state-controlled and therefore raise fears that FDI may be more strategic that profit-seeking. There is also the concern about subsidies, piracy and economic espionage.
But the gains from opening the door to Chinese outweigh the risks, the report -- entitled Economic Patriotism: Dealing with Chinese direct investment in the United States -- says, recommending a series of steps such as dumping reciprocity clauses in FDI bilateral dealings.
Should we ditch the idea of privacy?
The ubiquity of digital gadgets and sensors, the pervasiveness of networks and the benefits of sharing very personal information through social media have led some to argue that privacy as a social norm is changing and becoming an outmoded concept. In this three-part series Don Tapscott questions this view, arguing that we each need a personal privacy strategy.
Since I co-authored a book on privacy and the Internet 15 years ago I’ve been writing about how to manage the various threats to the security and control of our personal information. But today I find myself in a completely unexpected discussion. A growing number of people argue that the notion of having a private life in which we carefully restrict what information we share with others may not be a good idea. Instead, sharing our intimate, personal information with others would benefit us individually and as a society.
This is not a fringe movement. The proponents of this view are some of the smartest and most influential thinkers and practitioners of the digital revolution.
Jeff Jarvis, in his thoughtful book Public Parts, makes the case for sharing, and he practices what he preaches. We learn about everything from details of his personal income to his prostate surgery and malfunctioning penis. He argues that because privacy has its advocates, so should “publicness.” “I’m a public man” says Jarvis. “My life is an open book.” And he provides elaborate evidence on why this has benefited him, and says that if everyone followed his lead, the world would be a better place. He concludes that while releasing information should be a personal choice, privacy regulation should be avoided.
Facebook is the leading social-media site that promotes information sharing, and part of the company’s mission is to “make the world more open.” In his book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick explains that Facebook founders believe that “more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things.” Some at Facebook refer to this as “radical transparency” – a term initially used to talk about institutions that is now being adapted to individuals. In other words, everyone should have just one identity, whether at their workplace or in their personal life.
Stanford University professor Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com, says that “the notion of privacy began with the creation of cities, and it’s pretty much ended with Facebook.” He says “our social norms are changing.”
Other thought leaders like Tim O’Reilly (he coined the term “Web 2.0″) or Steward Brand (author of the Whole Earth Catalog) defend an individual’s right to privacy. But they argue that the benefits of sharing personal information are becoming so beneficial to each of us and so widespread that we need to shift the discussion from what to share, to how to ensure the information we share is used appropriately. Says Brand: “I’d be totally happy if my personal DNA mapping was published.”
I do agree with “DifferentOne”. Furthermore the socialnets are just a reproduction of the consumption and publicity (Has the author read about “Cutural Industry” by Adorno and Horkheimer???). It keeps the mass out of policy, cause rarely the majority of people will discuss complex-deeper-timespending themes such as welfare, sustentability or health (financial, mental, spiritual…); they chat away about parties, shopping, sports and celebrities instead. It maintains their ilusion of living an extraordinary reality full of happines (unless their friends don`t “like” it).
On the other hand socialnets are doubtless efficiant to pull like-minded people together!
from MediaFile:
Instagram’s Facebook filter
The startup had millions of users, but, from the beginning, just one customer.
The predominant way of interpreting Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram, in light of the social-networking giant's forthcoming IPO, is that Mark Zuckerberg had to pick up the photo-sharing app to boost his company’s mobile engagement. That would allow him to guard the mobile flank against incursions from Google, Twitter, and whatever other social-media tools might next arise.
That may be true – and it may even be the way Zuck thought about the deal when he swallowed hard and ponied up the purchase price. But that way of analyzing Facebook’s pickup, and the pickup of dozens of other startups, not just by Facebook but by Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, is probably not telling the whole story. Here’s a different theory, one that better describes the tech world that we, the users of the Internet, now inhabit: Instagram may have had millions of us as its users, but it was really built for just one customer: Facebook.
Silicon Valley, for too long, has confused the issue of what it means to be a user of a website, service or app, and what it means to be a customer of the app. Intuitively, you’d think they would be one and the same: The person using the app is the person consuming the app. But increasingly, apps are being made to grab the attention of the hegemonic companies in tech. Whatever it takes to get bought.
Sure, startup CEOs are careful to refer to their user bases as just that – users – but even when money changes hands, those users are cattle to be herded toward a cell on a venture capitalist’s spreadsheet, to help the VC decide whether to fund another pivot, engineering acquisition, rack of servers, whatever. Users are just another dart, basically, that startups have to hurl at the bull's-eye and ensure success.
A colleague of mine tells a story: You can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a farmer, and you can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a corporation to be used by its employees. Tractors whose users are also the customers come equipped with every convenience, from a satellite radio to Wi-Fi to all the cupholders a farmer could dream of. They drive well, and their controls are intuitive, because that’s what the average tractor driver wants, and what the tractor competition provides. Tractors bought by companies, for earthmoving, rock breaking and the like, come equipped with nothing but a hard seat and a prayer. Employees – mere users – don’t get any say on the amenities, or lack thereof.
Should ExxonMobil be broken up?
This book review was originally published in the American Prospect, and is republished here with permission.
Even granting that testifying to congressional committees is not on the list of an oil CEO’s favorite things to do, when ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, known to his employees as “Iron Ass,” arrived at the Dirksen Senate Office building one morning in November 2005, he was in an especially reticent mood. Among other things, the Senate Energy Committee wanted to know about the corporation’s role in formulating policy with Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Raymond – who was chummy with Cheney and seven weeks away from his retirement, after 12 spectacularly profitable years at the helm first of Exxon and then Exxon-Mobil – did not think the committee needed to know. Thus when New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg asked Raymond whether he or any ExxonMobil executives participated in a 2001 meeting with Cheney, Raymond responded with a single syllable: “No.”
The truth of that statement was something only a lawyer or a comedian could love, but it was consistent with how the company prefers to be seen: independent, apolitical, above the muck of any particular political fight. Yet as Steve Coll documents in his groundbreaking investigation, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, sometimes even the aloof need a little assistance. Just days before the hearing, the company had found itself frustrated with the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which seemed to be stalling on giving ExxonMobil its slice of a hugely valuable 50-billion-barrel oil field. The State Department did not seem to be pressing ExxonMobil’s case as hard as Raymond wanted, so he called Cheney and asked, according to Coll’s paraphrase, “What in the hell is with this country?” Cheney called the UAE government himself, and ExxonMobil got what it wanted.
Coll gained a unique perspective on the history of ExxonMobil’s power from his two-plus decades covering business and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Middle East politics, and national security – early on for The Washington Post, in recent years for The New Yorker, and most notably in Ghost Wars, his book on Afghanistan and the CIA. He approaches the company almost as if reporting on the State Department, finding a sprawling global network led by insular executives often unaware of what is being carried out in their name. At the heart lies a contradiction best illustrated by Raymond’s duplicity. The corporation long ago decided it was best to flex its immense muscle as discreetly as possible, because almost all publicity – whether it’s news of gas prices, climate change, or congressional fights over industry subsidies – is bad.
Indeed, ExxonMobil may have reached the point of being more powerful and entangled than any government. The company’s leaders look at an untapped oil or gas field as a relationship that might last a half-century or more; during that time, politicians and policies will come and go even in settled democracies. Its perspective is so geological, so Olympian, that it has been willing to anger sitting American governments – as in 1997, when Raymond, a Republican, challenged the Democratic administration’s policy with a speech in Beijing urging China’s communist rulers not to sign the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement. At the same time, because so much oil and natural gas is locked up in places with unstable regimes or unsavory leaders – from Equatorial Guinea to Indonesia to Russia – ExxonMobil often finds itself with more power to affect the local society than the best-intentioned State Department functionaries. In a nail-biting chapter on a showdown between the World Bank and the besieged government of Chad, Coll writes that “Exxon-Mobil had made its own choice clear: It was more interested in the survival of Chad’s oil production than it was in the World Bank’s experiment in nation building.”
Private Empire jumps around the globe to illustrate such conflicts, drawing on an impressive array of lawsuits, State Department cables, Freedom of Information Act documents, and interviews with 400 or so subjects, from former executives to tribal leaders who have sued the company. The image that emerges is of some kind of metabolically challenged creature unable to eat enough to sustain its weight. Because its production is so vast, the company is constantly depleting its existing energy supply. It is therefore under intense pressure to appear to book new reserves, to a degree that has encouraged some fudging on the math: For many years, the company would report actual figures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, then issue a press release announcing a bigger amount – a gambit that was technically illegal, though the company doesn’t seem to have ever paid a price (nor is it clear if anyone who matters was fooled).
The company’s culture is almost as strange as the places its engineers now have to go to find oil and gas. Exxon was so shaken by the fallout from the Valdez spill that it adopted safety procedures that sound like the handbook of a paranoid cult. Employees had to back their cars into garage parking spaces, minimizing difficulty if they needed to leave in a hurry. Executives were prohibited from pursuing dangerous behavior even outside the workplace and urged to confess publicly “near misses” they had, from shaky ladders to stones flying out of lawnmowers. Yet all these rituals didn’t keep 24,000 gallons of gas from leaking into the ground in Maryland in 2006, in an area where residents relied on well water, or any of the other countless mishaps that have occurred as part of ExxonMobil’s sprawling operations.
Morgan Stanley’s Facebook curse
As Morgan Stanley’s retail force is learning, it’s hard being the anointed one. To most of the world, Morgan Stanley got the plum job of lead manager for the most important public stock offering since Google in 2004. But among the retail sales force at the firm, the Facebook Blessing might as well be known as the Facebook Curse.
The refrain from Morgan Stanley’s rank and file: The IPO of the decade is a lose-lose proposition. That’s because retail investors as well as smaller institutions are likely to be disappointed with their Facebook allotment. Institutional players know how things roll, but for the retail brokerage force, the situation is particularly vexing. Many clients assume that because it is a lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley brokers are on the inside track. That’s true, but means less on a popular IPO like Facebook’s. Financial advisers in the lead group, which also includes Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, do have an edge over the 30 other investment banks tasked with distributing shares. But it’s not much of an advantage. Global demand for the $11 billion in shares appears to be much bigger than the deal itself. Institutional salespeople at Morgan Stanley are already warning clients that they expect the deal to be 20 times oversubscribed, one source explained to me.
It’s always been the case that only a thin sliver of retail investors would be able to get hot IPO shares. They were typically high-net-worth clients who reliably invest in every single IPO that would come their way – hot or not. Shakier deals, of course, were always available to retail clients. In its heyday, Lehman Brothers brokers used to say that some of the mediocre IPOs they pushed were from the “institutional waste basket.”
Over time, retail investors have been even less likely to win any meaningful amounts of shares in hot IPOs. That’s in part because fewer companies are going public. Meanwhile, institutional investors have grown bigger and bigger – which means that they need a bigger slice of a new issue if it is to have any impact on portfolio performance. The most recent super-hot, social-media IPO, LinkedIn, went to a remarkably few number of institutions, my sources tell me.
These facts don’t do much for morale at Morgan Stanley, which announced earlier this year that advisers who have produced less than $500,000 per year in gross commissions would not get any shares in IPOs – that is, they don’t get to share in the syndicate for Facebook. That was just before Facebook announced its plans to go public. Talk about timing. Morgan Stanley’s joint venture with Smith Barney has not been the smoothest; adviser count has dropped 5 percent in the past year; this year alone, the firm lost at least 87 advisers who managed about $7.2 billion in assets. The Facebook deal is adding oil to that simmering fire. One broker at another wirehouse told me disaffected Morgan Stanley clients have announced that they will move their accounts to him if they don’t get any Facebook shares.
Meanwhile, another Morgan Stanley broker complained to me that even marginal clients are trying to ingratiate themselves with him in the mistaken belief that they can get a piece of the Facebook IPO from him. The joke’s on them. He doesn’t expect to get any shares. Even big producers who are confident that they can get some shares are bracing for flak because they are unlikely to get enough to satisfy client demand. Some are hoping that the firm will bend some rules by factoring in client account sizes, not just broker gross commissions, as a basis for handing out the prizes. This would widen distribution to large clients whose brokers aren’t usually part of the syndicate group.
Halting the Corvair made America safer
This is a response to an excerpt from Paul Ingrassia’s Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars, published this month by Simon & Schuster.
The causal stretch by Paul Ingrassia over three decades and millions of intervening human events leads him to conclude that “decades after its demise, in the election of 2000, the Corvair’s legacy improbably helped to put George W. Bush in the White House.”
Egads! – as the British say. His otherworldly trek through American history reminds me of Edward Lorenz’s “butterfly effect,” in which the trail of a tornado is traced all the way back to the flapping of a butterfly’s wings thousands of miles distant. It is one thing to lament the deadly, dancing design of the Corvair until the 1965 model, when the stabilizing, dual-link suspension system was finally installed; it is quite another to burden this automotive offspring of GM’s Ed Cole with the lawless, corporatist, war-starting, anti-democratic Bush regime selected by five Supreme Court justices-turned-Republican politicians in their 5-4 dictate of Bush v. Gore.
The Corvair was an attractive but lethal car. The government-sponsored taskforce, under President Richard Nixon, shaped by a former GM man, could not whitewash the Corvair’s role in the avoidable deaths and injuries of so many unsuspecting motorists. The novel Corvair, with its air-cooled rear engine was widely disliked by auto dealers, but for the wrong reasons. As the famous John DeLorean (former GM vice-president and author of On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors) related, inside the company it was common knowledge that on certain turns the Corvair became unstable. This loss of control even led to the deaths of some children of GM executives. GM also designed the leading edge of the steering mechanism just two inches from the surface of the front tire, thereby exposing the driver to the rearward displacement of the steering column, especially in a left-front collision. Moreover, as GM admitted in a belated public recall, Corvairs emitted a risky amount of odorless carbon monoxide from their heater exchange system during cold weather.
The tragic saga of the Corvair and its victims did, as Ingrassia points out, produce consequences, but only as part of broader revelations regarding the industry suppression of long-known safety devices now taken for granted by car owners.
Today people expect air bags, seat belts, padded dash panels, head-restraints, better brakes, steady vehicle handling and overall crash protection. Auto companies now boast about their vehicles’ safety in their advertisements. Consumers expect their cars to be recalled and fixed when there is a defect attributed to the manufacturer.
Federal auto and highway safety regulation, still too intermittent in my view, has worked to save over a million American lives while helping to diminish or prevent many more injuries. Hundreds of billions of dollars in medical and disability expenditures have been saved as well. To his credit, after warning that the first federal motor vehicle regulations could shut down the industry in 1966, Henry Ford II recognized a few years later that federal standards made cars safer, more fuel-efficient and cleaner.
Mr.Nader, you know so much about a 1960 Corvair, you should the President of a foreign country since cars are being made overseas now a days.
The gay-rights cause Obama can actually do something about
On Wednesday, President Obama declared his evolution complete. In an interview with ABC News he said: “At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”
Gay-rights groups rejoiced; conservative groups scolded. But what the president thinks about gay marriage is, ultimately, symbolic. There is a different issue on which Obama could achieve real, tangible results for gays and lesbians, and gain electoral advantage over Mitt Romney: employment discrimination.
Obama has already done everything he can on gay marriage. His administration has declared the federal law banning gay marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), to be discriminatory and declined to defend it in court. He has extended spousal benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. Marriage laws, on the other hand, are written at the state level. Even a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman, which Romney supports and Obama already opposed, is not actually signed by the president.
Meanwhile, it is still legal in 29 states to discriminate against gays and lesbians in hiring and firing employees, and in an additional five it is legal to discriminate against transgender people. There has been a Democratic bill floating around Congress called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would extend the federal protections of the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Thus far Obama has said he supports the legislation, but has not called much attention to it.
Instead he’s spoken out on gay marriage, which may come with some political costs in November. It is preposterous to assert, as many political pundits do, that black voters will be receptive to attacks on Obama over gay marriage. Polling shows blacks have become roughly equal to whites in their acceptance of gay marriage. Obama enjoys high approval ratings among black voters, and they agree with him more than with Romney on every other issue. They are also accustomed to voting for more socially liberal politicians, just as wealthy pro-choice Republicans have accepted that they must vote for anti-abortion-rights candidates.
But perhaps it could hurt Obama at the margins among certain key demographics that lean against gay marriage, such as working-class white voters in the Midwest or Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. Meanwhile Democrats in socially conservative states who face a tough re-election fight, such as Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), are surely seething at the attack ad Obama just handed their opponents.
@ raylinx: Do you have even a shred of empirical evidence that God is judging anyone? I know you believe what you say but what facts, what data do you have to support your claims? Many studies have shown that True Believers, such as yourself, further entrench themselves in their belief system the more facts to the contrary are presented. True Believers do not present facts because they have none. Yes, it is your absolute right to believe what you want to believe. You do NOT have the right to foist your beliefs on anyone else without hard data to support those beliefs. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” You have no evidence.
Republicans could join Obama on same-sex marriage
In finally evolving to support marriage equality, President Obama has not only placed himself firmly on the right side of history with respect to an issue of fundamental rights and justice but he has also thrown down the gauntlet for Republicans, especially his presumed challenger, Mitt Romney.
In his comments to ABC News, the president said his attitude toward gay marriage has been shaped over time by voters and members of his own staff “who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together” – who are clearly in love. In other words, the president let the human reality around him shape his personal views and will now lead accordingly – a stark contrast, say, with Mitt Romney, who seems to have little grasp of the struggles and experiences of actual voters and instead rotates his political viewpoints as often as he rotates the cars on his vehicle elevator. In President Obama’s “evolution,” America saw a leader who is not afraid to be wrong and not afraid to change his mind. It’s refreshing.
And now it’s the Republicans’ turn. As Fox News anchor Shepard Smith suggested in reporting the president’s shift, Republicans are “on the wrong side of history.” Indeed. But they have plenty of time to make amends. Republicans should be ashamed enough that theirs is the party that stood in the way of interracial marriage and civil rights. Is that really a legacy the GOP wants to continue into the 21st century? It seems to me the GOP has a choice between courting the open-minded next generation of voters, or continuing to be marred by scandals in which anti-gay Republican after anti-gay Republican is embarrassingly outed and shamed. Apparently this is a tough choice for the GOP, which would rather keep implicitly firing up bigotry than stand firm for equality.
In our exceptionally and often disgustingly hyper-partisan political environment, it can be difficult to remember that political decisions affect real people – and that the politicians who make those decisions are people, too. People can make mistakes. People can change. The same goes for presidents. I believe the president genuinely did evolve on this issue. Sure, it’s easy to be cynical that the same Obama who has been conflict-averse since day one of his administration was merely letting his opinion on gay marriage sail with the winds of political pressure. As the New York Times editorialized, the president “dampening the enthusiasm of allies without gaining the support of equality’s opponents [is] not an unfamiliar place for this president to be, unfortunately.” Unfortunate but accurate. But he deserves our praise now for coming out on the right side of marriage equality and having the decency to call his shift a shift rather than maneuver like Romney, who plainly flip-flops on issues like gay marriage for political gain while trying to feign consistency. Not only should the gay community (including gay Republicans) be thoroughly fed up with being political pawns, but voters in general should be fed up with politicians who refuse to do what’s right and merely, cautiously do what they think is popular.
The great leaders in history were not the ones who did what was popular, but those who did what was difficult – yet ultimately right. In standing up for marriage equality, President Obama showed that he has the capacity to be that kind of leader. Here’s hoping Republicans will follow his lead.
PHOTO: President Barack Obama gestures during the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS) 18th annual gala dinner in Washington, May 8, 2012. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
How dare you speak of human beings this way? Homosexuality is not a disease or disorder, or anything you ignorant people call it. Please educate yourselves.
