Healthcare reform: A complex issue, dumbified

As many of you know, Massachusetts recently hosted a heavily contested Senate race. Throughout the campaigning, national healthcare reform was a hot-topic, as one would expect given the razor-thin Congressional margins on reform proposals. What I found unsettling about the debate on healthcare reform was how simplistic and politicized the discussions were about arguably the most pressing issue of the next decade.

The healthcare reform debate raised by the Coakley/Brown teams never seemed to develop beyond cursory exclamations of “Yay/Nay for Obamacare” . The question became not what type of reform proposal would best serve America?, but are you for or against Obamacare?, as though there were only one way to go about healthcare reform.

In the current American political landscape, supporting healthcare reform has become synonymous with supporting Obamacare and by extension, the Democrats, whereas supporting the status-quo (and being anti-Obamacare) is a marker of a true Republican. Just as with the issue of global warming, healthcare reform has become a litmus test for your political values. If you tell people you support healthcare reform, you won't be asked about specific plan you are vouching for; you will simply be labelled as a flag-burning, Soviet-worshipping, tree-hugging liberal (at worst).

The only winners when it comes to the polarized reform debate are the interest groups that support these definitions. When the Republicans or the Democrats paint reform as a case of two extremes, they've cornered their moderate constituencies into supporting the mockery of a reform they espouse. The moderates are bullied into believing that if they don't support THE definition of what healthcare reform should be, they're not true Democrats/Republicans.

What has been lost in the process are the innovative opinions about how healthcare can be structured to satisfy the demands of the American citizenry. When the public discourse is narrowed to a simplistic and politicized discussion of whether you are for or against Obamacare, viable alternatives and civic debate are stifled. Is it any wonder that people are increasingly tuning out the reform debate?

Few people believe in either a fully laissez-faire (pay your way) system or total government control of medical care. Moderation is the rule, but the binary discourse has made moderation a dirty word. As a result, the more palatable solutions to a pressing problem are lost in favor of two unsavory extremes. My hope is that as the reform debate rages on, moderates will succeed in redefining the issues to better reflect the values of ordinary Americans.

Homophobia masked as comedy

I saw Bruno a few days ago, and I thoroughly disliked the experience. The movie had received excellent reviews from many respected movie critics, some of whom claimed that the triumph of Bruno was that it mocked societal acceptance of homophobia.

It was my experience that the only thing that Bruno seemed to mock were the homosexuals it purported to defend. Although I lost track of the number of scenes where gays were portrayed as lascivious perverts, I cannot think of a single scene where there was a sympathetic gay character.

I am reminded of one scene in particular (spoiler alert!) where a naked Bruno is portrayed seated in a hot tub with his adopted African toddler and two naked men. In this hot tub scene, despite the presence of a child, the men in the hot tub pose in lewd positions that would raise the ire of any Children's Aid Society. This scene was unsettling on many accounts, one of which was the fact that such a scene does nothing to quash public fears about the ability of gay men to properly raise children. Another problem with the scene was that there was no follow-up attempt to correct this child-predator stereotype of gay men. Bruno was homophobic without questioning homophobia, and therein lied the offense.

There were many other equally tactless scenes in the film, some of which mocked not only homosexuals, but blacks, foreigners and theists as well. It was as though the screenwriters of Bruno decided they would try to denigrate as many groups of people as possible in 81 minutes of film reel.

Some people will say that the goal of Bruno was not to mock classes, but to mock our caricatures of these classes. That is, it was not Bruno's exaggerated gay mannerisms that were funny, but the fact that we attribute such mannerisms to gays. If this indeed was the intent of the Bruno screenwriters, they failed in a very important respect: At no point in the film was the audience presented with a normal homosexual male who, in contrast with Bruno, would have caused the audience to question stereotypes about homosexuals. If there had been a sympathetic gay character named Joe, for example, who was not overly flamboyant and sexual like Bruno, the film would have done a better job questioning societal acceptance of homophobia. Instead, every gay character in the film was portrayed as either a child abuser, a sexual pervert or a superficial fashionista.

It is tempting to defend Bruno on the grounds that the screenwriters have a right to free speech (a right I heartily support) and, as a result, nit-picky 'liberals' like me should just stay away from the movie if we don't like it. However, as I will discuss in my next post, I believe that there is a critical difference between what you have the right to do, and what you should do. Too often, the right to free speech is used to justify morally questionable behavior.