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Source:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-jewish-leaders-drove-gay-012202293.html
Biden: Jewish
leaders drove gay marriage changes
Associated
Press
Josh Lederman,
Associated Press
Associated Press•May
21, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Joe Biden is praising Jewish leaders
for helping change American attitudes about gay marriage and other
issues.
Biden says culture and arts change people's attitudes. He cites social
media and the old NBC TV series "Will and Grace" as examples of what
helped changed attitudes on gay marriage.
Biden says, quote, "Think — behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of
those changes, whether it's in Hollywood or social media, are a
consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry."
Biden says the influence is immense and that those changes have been
for the good.
Biden was speaking Tuesday night at a Jewish American Heritage Month
reception hosted by the Democratic National Committee. He says Jewish
values are an essential part of who Americans are.
Source:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/05/biden-praises-jews-goes-too-far.html?gtm=bottom>m=bottom
MAY 22, 2013
Biden Praises Jews, Goes Too Far, Accidentally Thrills Anti-Semites
By Jonathan Chait
Joe Biden spoke last night in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month.
Biden has long, deep ties to the Jewish community — Obama actually
picked him in 2008 in part to reassure skittish Jewish Democrats. Biden
indeed offered fulsome, heartfelt praise in his remarks, before
wandering into highly uncomfortable terrain and delivering a speech
that is likely to be quoted by anti-Semites for years and decades to
come. (It’s already the subject of excited discussion among the white
supremacist community.)
Biden’s remarks were not anti-Semitic. They were very, very
philo-Semitic. The thrust of his largely unscripted monologue is that
Jews have contributed enormously to the United States. That’s obviously
a standard spiel for praising any ethnic group, but Biden took care to
emphasize that Jews have not just contributed their share to the United
States, but far more:
The Jewish
people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an
outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and
all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you …
You make up 11 percent of the seats in the United States
Congress. You make up one-third of all Nobel laureates …
I think you, as usual, underestimate the impact of Jewish
heritage. I really mean that. I think you vastly underestimate the
impact you’ve had on the development of this nation.
It’s obviously
true that Jews have flourished in the United States and, as Biden says,
have achieved massively disproportionate representation in fields like
science, culture, politics, academia, and so on.
Jews regard this fact with a mixture of pride and neurosis. The
neurosis is a fear that our success will be seen as a kind of invidious
control, that the broader society will at some point say, no, you have
too much. Ivy League schools in the last century imposed first overt
quotas, and then more subtle geographic and “character”-based
admissions standards, precisely to suppress the disproportionate Jewish
share of their student body. The first generation of Hollywood moguls
lived in terror that they would be seen as using their control of film
to impose a particular Jewish slant upon the culture and labored
endlessly to dispel any such suspicions.
It’s also true that, while Jewish opinions run the ideological gamut,
they have clustered heavily on the left end of the political spectrum.
When you combine that fact with the fact of disproportionate Jewish
representation in politics and culture, you have a weirdly shared
belief among philo-Semites and anti-Semites. As Biden proceeds to laud
Jewish contributions to American politics, you can see the audience go
from kvelling to shvitzing:
“The embrace of
immigration” is part of that, as is the involvement of Jews in social
justice movements.
“You can’t talk about the civil rights movement in this
country without talking about Jewish freedom riders and Jack
Greenberg,” he said, telling a story about seeing a group of Jewish
activists at a segregated movie theater in Delaware. “You can’t talk
about the women’s movement without talking about Betty Friedan” …
“I believe what affects the movements in America, what
affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts
as anything else,” he said. That’s why he spoke out on gay marriage
“apparently a little ahead of time.”
“It wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was ‘Will and
Grace,’ it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed
peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority
of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” gay marriage, Biden said.
“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those
changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of
Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense, the influence
is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good.”
Biden’s
intentions here are obviously as friendly as can be, but the execution
is awkward. The civil rights movement today is so widely sanctified
that mentioning the disproportionate Jewish role in it is in the same
category as mentioning Einstein, Jonas Salk, and so on — look at all
these wonderful things the Jews have helped bring us. Because Biden is
liberal, it feels natural to segue into the Jewish role in the gay
civil rights movement. (And I share his belief that popular culture has
played an enormous and underappreciated role in promoting gay civil
rights, among other liberal causes.)
Also, and this is a small thing, when you’re pulling numbers completely
out of your ass, you should probably round them off to the tens digit
rather than the fives. (Jews are 85 percent responsible for changing
cultural attitudes toward gays? Ninety percent felt too high, 80
percent not high enough?)
The main problem here is that gay rights, unlike black civil rights,
are politically controversial at the moment. Biden may find it “all to
the good” that Jews have used their influence over popular culture to
change societal attitudes toward homosexuality, but lots of people
don’t find it good at all.
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