Today's Maher

Rushdie makes the point that the bigots are always on about how everybody's treating them oh so very badly.  You may notice, btw, that this is the standard play that so many "conservatives" pull all the fucking time.

• Calling them out for being intolerant means you're being intolerant.
• Call them out for some racist shit they say, and it means you're the real racist.
• Tell them to stop using their religious beliefs to rationalize discrimination against LGBT, and you're discriminating against them because of their faith.
• Smack down a bully, and that just means you're bullying the bully.

But the killer point comes (starting at about 2:00) when Linda Chavez demonstrates perfectly that she's way past her freshness date.  She launches into the same old crap about how (paraphrasing) "people need time to be brought along slowly".  Bullshit.  Comfortable white people said exactly the same thing in the 50s and 60s when asked about Segregation and "Black Rights".  Comfortable owners and managers said exactly the same thing when union organizers were demanding fair labor practices.  

US history is chock full of examples of foot-dragging on issues that basically have centered on getting this country to start living up to the promises it made to itself.  You know - "all men are created equal" and that silly old notion of "a more perfect union" thing.  Go back as far as you feel like going, and you'll find another Linda Chavez telling us that "they want too much too soon - it's all moving too fast - people need time to get used to it - it's all so new, these ideas of equality and fairness".

Stay with this Tim Wise thing til about the 4:00 mark:

If I plug in the word "gay" when I hear "black" or "people of color", and substitute "straight" for "white", suddenly it seems as if some of these concepts are in fact kinda universal - oooh, maybe that's what Mr Jefferson meant by "we hold these truths to be self-evident"(?).

Change can be a scary thing, but we're supposed to treat people right - and we can't afford to continue not treating people right just because it's inconvenient; or because we think we need our families and our friends and our neighbors to agree with us first.