Supporters of DOMA, Prop 8, and Texas Special Session SB 5 – How Their Authoritarian World View Can Predict Their Actions

While driving home from lunch today and listening to the discussion on NPR’s ‘Talk of the Nation’, the strong unreasonable comments of a caller disturbed me.

This caller was stating that overruling California’s Proposition 8 was not right. Prop 8 was the will of the voters of California and as such was the law of California voters. The courts had no authority to overrule people’s desires. What the people wanted was what was right.

There was no reasoning with this caller about the legal process of determining if a law was constitutional or not. For him it was all about the will of the people, as if they were always right.

In the battles against DOMA, Prop 8, Texas 2013 Special Session SB 5 and others to come, we need to understand why this caller, and millions of others like him, including Perry, Dewhurst, Taylor, and Dan Patrick, don’t see these issues the way progressives do.

Throughout my blog, I refer to these individuals as right-wing authoritarians (RWA) or conservatives without conscience as John Dean calls them. The key word is authoritarian. These authoritarians come from what Professor George Lakoff calls the strict-father family model. There is a dominant male figure who rules this family and who uses severe punishment to teach respect for authority and to teach what is right. This family model includes a subordinate female who does as directed by the authoritarian male.

The male authoritarian places high value on his sense of what is right. His gut tells him he is right. His authority cannot be questioned and if it is, he will mete out the appropriate level of physical punishment to correct the situation.

In the case of the RWA who called supporting Prop 8, his gut told him he was right about that support and it’s authority/constitutionality could not be questioned. How dare the US Supreme Court, or any other court, question what he ‘knows’ is right. These courts are wrong and deserve some level of punishment. How he and others like him will vent their anger, who knows? They will certainly use their anger to GOTV.

Now apply this to what happened in Austin with SB 5 on June 25th. There are a lot of upset Texans, grown as RWAs who strongly desire to teach the orange shirted mob what is right by applying an appropriate punishment.

With that it mind, I predict our state leaders will come back in the second special session with a more evil SB 5 to punish women even more deeply, and they will line the walls of the visitors’ gallery and halls of the capital with as many state troopers and other law enforcement as they can muster to keep the “unruly” orange shirts under control.