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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyApril 15th, 2011
Former Sen. Rick “Man on dog” Santorum yesterday hosted a town hall meeting where he unveiled his 2012 Presidentical campaign slogan, “Fighting to make America America again.” Turns out, the pithy phrase didn’t come from Santorum’s creative genius. It’s from a pro-union, pro-racial justice, and pro-immigrant poem by that famous Harlem Renaissance gay poet Langston Hughes. The poem, “Let America Be America Again,” goes, in part, like this:
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
[…] Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
When informed of the phrase’s origin, Santorum told a reporter from ThinkProgress, “well, I’m not too sure that’s my campaign slogan, I think it’s on a web site.” I can understand how he may not have been too clear about it. I hear Santorum is afraid of the Google.
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Regan DuCasse
April 15th, 2011
Hughes wrote one of the greatest anthems about America. The one some of us still hope for and can believe in.
There is the America Santorum has lived in. The one that’s never challenged his humanity, moral qualifications or character to be what he is, or have what he has.
And this is the America he expects for others like you and me my friends. He’s not sharing, and doesn’t want to.
THAT is his America.
Not ours.
Edwin
April 16th, 2011
Santorum is just another trouble maker that we for sure don’t need as a president or even as a dog catcher.
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