As usual, there were a few big news stories of the week I didn’t include in Friday links, and a few that have had more developments that I didn’t see until after I set up the posts to publish. Because I put the Friday Links post together Thursday night, but also because I post a full version of the post to my old LiveJounal and Dreamwidth blogs and my Blogger site, none of which I’ve ever been able to fully automate, so I spend way longer putting them together than I probably ought to.
Anyway, my social media streams were flooded with a lot of Caitlyn Jenner stuff. Mostly people reacting to other people’s snark and derision, especially about her winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, Caitlyn Jenner at ESPY Awards: Accept People ‘for Who They Are’. The speech itself was awesome, with a lot of heart, and focused on the problems of trans kids: Caitlyn Jenner honors transgender boy with Macomb County ties during her ESPYs speech. But haters gotta hate. And I think all we can do when they do is shut them down, like Joey Vicente, a U.S. Army behavioral health specialist did in the post I’ve pictured here. Click it to embiggen and read it.
Tangentially: GoodAsYou.Org’s Jeremy Hooper reads all the news blogs and such of the professional anti-gay haters so we don’t have to, and reports that Maggie Gallagher of NOM is trying to claim that support for gay marriage is suddenly plummeting. Jeremy explains how Maggie has constructed this lie (or is it self-delusion), but there’s also this: U.S. Support for Same-Sex Marriage Stable After High Court Ruling. Which isn’t stopping the wingnuts (especially my relatives on Facebook) from continuing to post foaming-at-the-mouth rants about the coming apocalypse because of the gays, how the rainbow flag is a “dark symbol of tyranny,” and the need to assert their religious liberty by discriminating agains the gay. Patheos has a nice counter to this: Your “Deeply Held Religious Belief” Isn’t Biblical. If only there was some way to get people to stop screaming and listen, eh?
As the number of people officially announcing their candidacy for the Republican nominee for president keeps going up and up, I’ve noticed a lot of people making the same lame meta-joke: “Looks like instead of a clown car, we need a clown van.” This joke, besides being lame because each political observer has been repeating the van comment several times, is bad because it completely misunderstands the whole point of calling the field of potential candidates a clown car to begin with…Continue reading Of clowns, cars, and twits→
The folks at Queerty.Com have asked comedian Sam Kalidi to create a new meme each week for Queerty readers. This is this weeks. They want you to share it! (Click to embiggen)Yesterday’s Friday Links was epically longer than usual. There was just so much crazy news this last week!
Individuals like Tony Perkins and Bryan Fischer and organizations such as the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, or the American Family Association want a resistance against marriage equality… As if they are puppeteers, anti-gay organizations and personalities are pulling the strings, buoying the arrogance and recklessness of clerks and various other government officials and thereby manipulating them to refuse to carry out their duties… Anti-gay groups are attempting to manipulate us all into an unnecessary holy war in which they hope to reap the benefits of pointing and saying “see, we told you so.”
Related, there are a couple of stories making the rounds (particularly on the Facebook pages of your most conservative relatives and former classmates) that are trying to fan the same flames: Gay Man Sues Bible Publisher For $70M For Causing Him Distress, Turns Out He’s Not Crazy. While he isn’t crazy in that there are some big problems with Biblical translations, he filed the suit seven years ago and it was thrown out. The other one is partially true and current, but there is a very important detail being left out: Oregon bakers forced to pay $135,000 after sharing lesbian couple’s home address. So the fine isn’t for refusing to sell the cake, it’s for publishing private information of customers (who they refused) leading to so many death threats to the couple, the social services almost removed foster children from the home for fear that those loving Christians leaving the death threats might actually follow through.
Completely unrelated to all of that: one particular link in yesterday’s post caused one friend to stop reading and send me a message to tell me it stopped him from looking at the rest. It was a story about a particularly awful child abuse incident which I put under the heading “This Week in Heart-wrenching” because like any child abuse case it was heart-wrenching. This is not the first time someone has told me they wish I wouldn’t include bad news in the links.
I don’t want to get into a weird pedantic argument about what constitutes bad news, other than to say that each person who has made that request has also, at other times, commented on other links to things that someone would classify as bad news in ways indicating that they were glad I linked to it.
But I do want to talk a little bit about why I include links like that. One of the other links under the same heading was about efforts to identify the body of a dead child. I believe that as a human being (let alone a citizen), I have an obligation to that murdered child. She deserves to be buried with her name. She deserves to have law enforcement find out how she was murdered and at least attempt to bring her killers to justice. Both of those things require that she be identified. If I can increase the chances, no matter how little, by sharing the link to the artist’s reconstruction of her face, I think I should do it. That one, for me, is a no-brainer.
Also, literally no-brainer in that the reason both of those links ended up in Friday Links was because I saw the headline in my news aggregator, I clicked on it out of emotional reaction. Then I read the stories. They were both heart-wrenching, and I tapped the share link to send to my list for Friday Links as a totally visceral, emotional, non-rational surge of “Oh My Goodness! This is too horrible to be ignored!”
That’s how those sorts of stories get into the list.
For a long, long time sex advice columnist, gay rights activist, and Seattle gadfly Dan Savage has had a continuing feature on the blog of the local alternative weekly’s paper called “Every Child Deserves a Mother and a Father.” He started it because, when he and his husband adopted a baby 17-or-so years ago, they began being harassed by even more threats, hit-pieces in conservative news sources, and so forth by various anti-gay people. The charge that the reason queer couples shouldn’t be allowed to adopt, shouldn’t be allowed to have civil unions, and shouldn’t be allowed to marry is always couched in an argument that children can only properly and lovingly be raised by a pair of opposite-sex parents because reasons. The argument usually summed up as “every child deserves a mother and a father. So any time a story of a straight couple abusing (sometimes to the point of murdering) a child crossed his news feed, Dan would share it under the “Every Child Deserves a Mother and a Father” heading. His point being that the mere fact that the adults raising a child don’t have matching genitals never guarantees that the children will be loved and cared for.
This feature always drew its detractors, too. “You don’t have to share these horrible stories to make your point,” or “Don’t make it sound like you’re happy to have your point proven correct” et cetera. For a while in reaction to those comments, Dan started including links to charities such as The National Children’s Alliance or The Child Help Foundation, giving those of us who read the stories of the horrible abuse an option to do something to help. Which maybe I should do the next time one of these stories winds up ripping my heart out and making we want to share the story.
I didn’t include the story because I was trying to make a political statement. I included it because it was heart wrenching, because I think it is too horrible to be ignored. I can’t save either of those kids. Sharing the news won’t bring either one back. But pretending I don’t know about their deaths doesn’t do anything to prevent other cases like theirs, either.
I don’t have any clever conclusion to this digression. All I can say is that there is a National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-Child/1-800-422-4453) that anyone can call if you suspect a child is in danger and you’re not sure who to notify. There is a lot of social pressure to hope for the best, to assume that the parent or significant other of the parent is just having a bad day. There is a fear of getting an innocent person in trouble. And there is an aversion to even thinking about the bad things that might be happening out of sight. All of those things contribute to cases like the sad one I linked to Friday.
So I share it as a reminder that there are awful people in this world who don’t always look awful. To make us mindful. To, maybe, encourage someone who has seen something like this, to call someone before the next child dies.
National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-Child/1-800-422-4453)
MemeoGraphs.Com (Click to embiggen)So CatholicVote.Org, a political action organization that tries to portray itself as serious but is known far and wide as a haven for the most bigoted of wingnuts, put out a video depicting people who discriminate on the basis of their religious beliefs as victims. To call it ridiculous, melodramatic, ludicrous, or even batshit stupid would be an insult to actual bat guano.
MemeGraphs.Com posted a review pointing out that the video has received over 1 million views, far surpassing any previous video by the group by more that 800,000 views. Unfortunately, it’s also gotten 30,000 thumbs down and and even for YouTube a truly amazing number of negative comments. Here’s the best part of the MemeGraphs review:
The auteurs at Catholic Vote have created an instant classic Christian cinematic masterpiece to rival Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. Not since National Organization for Marriage’s “Gathering Storm” of 2008 have we seen delusional hyperbole, paranoia and self-pity lifted to such delirious heights. Like an episode of The Bachelor or a Lindsey Lohan court appearance, Not Alone is both terrifying and impossible to look away from. This important piece of filmmaking will surely inspire countless imitators, but Not Alone is so earnest in its own clueless, privileged insensitivity that parody may be superfluous (see Poe’s Law). Still, I look forward to seeing what influence this motion picture exerts on Stephen Colbert and the creative staff at The Daily Show, Funny or Die and Saturday Night Live.
As always, the bigots are completely unaware for their own deeply tragic irony. One of the lines from their video lamenting the fact that they are no longer allowed to discriminate against gay people is, “No one should be looked down upon, no one should be suppressed or their views be suppressed.” Unless, of course, you’re a gay or lesbian or bisexual person, then you should be looked down upon, you should be told to keep your feelings to yourself, to hide your relationships, and most definitely not get any legal rights to visit your dying partner in the hospital or not be kicked out of your home by bigoted relatives when a partner becomes incapacitated. Then, of course, you should be suppressed, looked down upon, and told to stop complaining.
Soundly Awake made a nice and funny video assuring Catholic Vote that they’re not alone:
People claiming to speak for Catholics aren’t the only ones flipping out. Presidential hopeful (and Baptist minister) Mike Huckabee has doubled-down on his calls to “protect religious liberty” in an opinion piece for Fox News (which I will not directly link to it (here’s the Do Not Link link, if you don’t want to go to Fox News, If You Only News has a nice summary) where he vows to issue executive orders to protect hospitals, public schools, private business’ et cetera religious liberty to discriminate against gay people. Hospitals. Can’t you just feel the christian compassion?
Meanwhile Scott Walker, another clown with presidential aspirations, thinks that the reason we celebrate Independence Day is because we don’t want government. Except that’s completely wrong. Independence Day, and the Declaration of Independence, are about our right to form our own government. Which is a very different thing. His official campaign email also manages to mix up the 4th of July with Veteran’s Day and to make it all about america’s founding being about god. (Forgetting that important clause of the Treaty of Tripoli, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” which was initiated by George Washington near the end of his last term in office, signed by Secretary of State John Marshall, submitted to the Senate by newly elected President John Adams, ratified by said Senate in a unanimous vote in the 7th of June, 1897, and affirmed in a signing statement by John Adams).
But enough of these people who don’t know what Independence Day is all about. Please enjoy this, one of my favorite songs from the musical, 1776:
TheMetaPicture.com (Click to embiggen)My plan had been to wrap up most of the Hugo reviews with a couple more posts this week, since last week my blog was extra special über queer what with the final week before the Seattle Pride Parade and the marriage equality ruling. I failed to take into account how much the heat is sapping me of energy each day, among other interesting complications of the weekend. And then I saw this story: Orthodox Jews Can’t Protest Gay Pride Parade, Hire Mexicans Instead.
They hired people to protest for them.
It didn’t surprise me when the douche-iest presidential candidate, Donald Trump reportedly paid actors $50 to cheer for him at his 2016 announcement. (I especially liked one post I saw about this, someone photographed one of Trump’s employees collecting the “home made” signs and t-shirts from the actors afterward). But come on, if these are your sincerely held religious beliefs that us queers are evil or going to hell or luring other people into sin or whatever, you should have the stones to show up and protest. You don’t hire immigrant day laborers to be your poxies!
The Jewish groups outsourcing their hate got me searching for any more stories about protestors at the parade, and there were a few protests within some of the parades intended to remind us that there are still plenty of other civil rights battles left for the queer community. And there was a story of one protester at one of the smaller town parades yesterday who got his sign stolen by one of the parade marchers.
All the rightwing Christian sites had headlines yesterday about ‘thousands protesting gay pride parades’… except it was in Korea. They couldn’t come up with anything like that happening here.
Surveys show that at least 57% of Americans are in favor of gays marrying. And they also show that 63% think that gays should be legally allowed to marry (the discrepancy presumably meaning that about 6% of the population believing personally that gays oughtn’t marry, but that it shouldn’t be illegal for consenting adults to do it if they want to). Experience over the last decade has been that about a year after marriage equality becomes legal in a particular state, support for marriage equality jumps up by at least another 10%, with opposition shrinking. Lots of states have had marriage equality for a while, so the nationwide number probably isn’t going to jump that much, but it will jump.
When you add in the decades-long trend of support for any specific gay rights question increasing by about 2 percent a year, that 37% of the population sincerely and deeply opposed to it will just keep shrinking. I don’t know how tiny it will get, eventually. Will it be as infinitesimal as the percentage of people who think that women should have the right to vote taken away (estimated at less than two one-hundredths of a single percent)?
Maybe in a few generations. I think in the foreseeable future it’s going to drop down to about 22% and then hover there for a long time.
One may ask why is seems like all of the Republican presidential hopefuls went ballistically, foaming-at-the-mouth anti-gay starting on Friday when nearly two-thirds of Americans support marriage equality. The reason is that Republican primary voters are not at all representative of the country as a whole. Likely Republican primary voters oppose marriage equality at almost inverse rates of the population at large: 60% oppose, less than 30% support, and the rest are undecided.
Even the few Republican candidates who intend to try to sell themselves as moderates to the general electorate know that they have to get those hardcore haters to vote for them in the primaries in order to become the nominee. And let’s be frank, on most of the issues voters care about, all 16 or 17 or however many we’re officially up to now of the Republican candidates have extremely similar positions. Most of them have name recognition problems at this point in the campaign. The only way they can break out of the pack at this point is to latch onto something that some of those hardcore voters care deeply enough about to remember when the primaries actually roll around.
So despite the fact that a lot of the more mainstream Republican pundits and so forth were hoping that a Supreme Court win for the gays would finally take this issue away as a wedge issue that drives moderate voters to the Democrats, I don’t think they’re going to get their wish.
That’s the problem when you hitch your wagon to hate and anger.
Mat Staver is the head of the anti-gay Liberty Counsel, featured speaker at several Values Voter Summits over the years, a man who has gone to court many times defending laws that discriminate against gay people, and someone who as recently as June has testified to congress about why gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered people shouldn’t be included in anti-discrimination law, and has many times on his radio show praised laws in places like Russia and Uganda that criminalize gay people and even talking about gay people. For example, last year he was on another radio show, ranting about those Christians who have said that gay rights and marriage equality are losing battles. “To assume that you can go against the created order is hubris, it’s arrogance, it’s dangerous and it is not something in which we can simply say, ‘the battle’s over, we need to figure out how to coexist.’ There is no coexistence.”
“There is no coexistence.” If he insists that his side can’t co-exist with us, that’s another way of saying either we have to cease to exist or he does, right? And I’m pretty sure he isn’t suggesting that all true believers (his side) should commit mass suicide.
When Staver says “there is no coexistence” that means he’s ultimately willing to kill. The reason Staver’s organization encourages things like Uganda’s kill-the-gays laws, and talks up the rhetoric of how dangerous we are to society is because he believes we should not be allowed to exist. Which means killing us. Or at least, scaring us with a credible enough threat of death that we all go back into the closet.
It’s the same tactics used by the hate leaders who radicalized Dylann Roof into shooting nine innocent people in a church in Charleston: making members of the majority believe that a historically oppressed minority somehow has all the power. Roof told the lone adult survivor of his shooting, “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and overrunning our country.” In a country where white police officers gun down unarmed black children in the street without facing murder charges, he believes that black people are the ones threatening the existence of white people.
Similarly, in a country where:
1500 queer children are bullied into committing suicide every year,
where thousands of queer children are thrown out onto the streets by so-called Christian parents whose religious leaders have told them they have to show tough love,
where the authorities don’t investigate those parents for child neglect,
where the numbers of homicides of LGBT people have climbed to record highs,
where more than half of hate-motivated murder victims are trans people of color,
where state legislators are rushing to enact religious-belief based “right to discriminate” laws,
where in most states it is perfectly legal for employers to fire someone simply because they think the person might be gay (and where landlords can evict gay tenants or refuse to rent to them, et cetera),
where queer people are 2.4 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than jews, and 2.6 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than muslims,
where the number of hate crimes against all groups except lesbian, gays, trans, and bi people is going down while all categories of anti-queer hate crimes remain the some or are rising,
where the overwhelming majority of elected officials at the federal, state, and local level are Christian (far out of proportion to their percentage of the population),
where state and federal tax dollars are funneled into “faith-based” charity organizations that are often allowed to discriminate in how they administer those tax-funded activities,
where religious schools are often supported by tax dollars diverted from public schools,
where high school kids are threatened with expulsion for wearing “Gay OK” t-shirts to school after a bunch of Christian bullies beat a gay classmate (but the bullies weren’t punished),
where a public school teacher responding to an incident of anti-gay bullying read a book about acceptance to his class, then was forced to resign for “promoting homosexuality,”
where Christian organizations rally and raise money to combat anti-bullying policies unless said policies include exemptions that allow their kids to bully gay kids in the name of their faith,
…Christians are claiming that queers are persecuting them.
Seriously? Not being able to bully, discriminate against, and torment their gay neighbors is oppression?
It’s impossible at this time of year to avoid all the memes and heartfelt testimonials and emotionally manipulative articles about dads. Which is great for people who have wonderful dads and are happy to be reminded about how great a good father can be. It’s not so great for people who are grieving the loss of a father they loved. And it’s not so great for those of us who had terrible fathers.
I was lucky enough to have two incredible, wonderful, and loving grandfathers as well as an incorrigible (but still loving) great-grandfather who were all three very involved in my life throughout my formative years. And one of those wonderful grandfathers, my mom’s father, was her adoptive father. Not being her biological father didn’t diminish one iota the love he gave my mom and her sister (and me and the other grandkids). He did everything a dad was supposed to do and more.
Similarly, my great-grandfather was my grandma’s biological father, but he was also a step-dad to grandma’s oldest two brothers. Great-grandma was a 28-year-old widow with two young boys when she met and fell in love with great-grandpa (who, I should point out was only a 16-year-old farm hand). But even though he wasn’t that much older than those two kids, he did his best to be as good a father to them as he was to the other kids that he and great-grandma had together.
So I get more than a little angry when people (or stories or movies or TV shows) imply (or sometimes come right out and say) that step-parents or adoptive parents aren’t a kid’s “real parents.”
Which is why I want to share this little story (and angry op-ed) posted by Dan Savage earlier in the week: Brian Brown Suggests Terry and I Stole Our Son from His Biological Parents. Brian Brown is the head of the odious anti-gay National Organization for Marriage. Dan Savage is a national syndicated sex advice columnist and gay activist. But Dan and his husband, Terry, adopted their son as part of an open adoption years ago, and have raised that child while allowing (and encouraging him) to keep in contact with the biological mother who was a homeless street kid when she got pregnant. As Dan points out, there are far more orphaned children who need families in this country than there are straight couples looking to adopt. When you exclude unmarried people or lesbian/gay couples or other “non-traditional” families from the adoption process, the choice you are making is to leave those children with no parents at all.
It isn’t a choice of straight parents vs queer parents, or a mommy-and-daddy vs a single parent. It’s a choice of these so-called non-traditional parents or no parents. And note about the fact that not one but two traditional couples turned down the baby before Dan and Terry’s adoption paperwork was completed. So, the only people who deprived that kid of a “traditional” family of genitally-opposite parents were straight people.
I’m not a parent. I’ve never had kids and never adopted. But if I were a parent, and Brian Brown had come into my house and told me that he thought my child should be forcibly taken away from me just because I’m gay, I would have said a whole lot worse than what Terry said.
I know how easy it is to obsess over a horrific story like this. But the nine people who were murdered in a hateful act of racist terrorism in a historic church this week deserve to be remembered. And we can’t solve problems like racism if we don’t confront the problem.
BelieveOutLoud.Com (Click to embiggen)Yesterday’s Friday Links included the story of Nick and Sarah Jensen, two Australians whose “sincerely-held religious belief in the sanctity of marriage” is so strong, that they have publicly vowed to divorce if Australia legalizes equal marriage for gays and lesbians. There have been a lot of reactions. Queerty reports that locals of have reacted (on the website of the local newspaper which published the Jensen’s op-ed piece) such things as, “This is seriously the dumbest thing I’ve read in quite some time,” and “Talk about ignorant white trash attempting to guilt others,” and “You are brave to write an article and publish something like this…. This still doesn’t change the fact that you are deluded bigots.”
But the best reaction has been this: Straight couple told their gay marriage ‘protest divorce’ is actually illegal. Australian family law requires that a couple prove their marriage is irretrievably broken before granting a divorce. They must live completely apart for a full year before the divorce is granted, and must both swear that they do not intend to cohabitate in the future. Which is what they have also sworn they will do.
While this argument makes no logical sense, it’s hardly the first time the bigots have made this kind of argument. Rachel Maddow, following up on the story of Rev. Franklin Graham publicly moving his ministry’s money from one bank that advocates for equal rights to gays to another bank that advocates for equal rights for gays. Rachel explains why the fuzzy logic isn’t just a laughing matter: Anti-gay laws lose argument, win votes anyway.
The logic isn’t just fuzzy, it’s completely bonkers. The reason it’s bonkers is because it all boils down to obstinate emotional distaste. Emotional reactions are inherently non-rational. And In these cases the obstinancy is as much a product of both the type of emotion (“ewwww, icky!”) as it is about how deeply ingrained the notion is to their sense of self. It’s like the woman a year-and-a-half ago who wrote the op-ed claiming that gay marriage ruined her marriage. Except the story she told was how she and her husband had married young, then her very closeted husband had come out of the closet, they separated, and finally divorced.
There were lots of big logical flaws in her story. Their marriage was doomed before they started, but not because of gay marriage. Their marriage was doomed because of the insidious and relentless societal homophobia that had driven her husband from the time he was a young boy to hide who he truly was and pretend to be straight. Gay marriage had not come to her state when he came out. In fact, her state had passed (by an incredibly wide margin) a ban on gay marriage about the time that it happened. Here belief that he had confirmed to her definition of a good, upstanding “christian” man when they married until he was transformed by the acceptance of gays by society was complete hogwash. Closeted people put forward a desperate façade that is doubly-tragic because for most of the time the closeted person is deceiving themselves at least as profoundly as they are deceiving other people.
Her story also, it turned out, contained a lot of factual lies. She claimed that her husband and his boyfriend had sole custody of their two small children, and that all of her rights had been trumped in court by the judge insisting that the gay couple’s civil rights overrode her religious beliefs. When the paper that published the op-ed got around the fact-checking it (but only after other people, including the ex-husband, wrote in to complain) it was found that she had primary custody of the children, and her ex had regular visiting rights. Records indicated that she had refused to let the father see the children after he started living with his boyfriend, and that the court had told her she couldn’t deny him visitation rights.
Frankly, it was a surprise that the court allowed him to keep the visitation rights under those circumstances, because usually judges in such conservative states go the other way—insisting that the gay parent only visit the children without their new partner, and are only allowed to have the children stay with them if the new partner is not present. Which is why that part of the editorial was transparently false to most everyone who read it.
Did she exaggerate because she thought it would make her case more sympathetic? Perhaps. I think it’s more of a bit of self-deception. In order to cling to her non-rational notions of how the world in general and her life in particular should be, she has to perceive any recognition of her ex as anything other than an evil monstrous sinful being as a complete defeat of her rights.
That’s part of what’s happening with the couple in Australia. They are so squicked out by the very notion that gay people exist, let alone that people might actually treat their loving relationships as socially acceptable, that it feels like an attack on them. Even though letting people you don’t know marry has absolutely no effect on you and your relationship. Evangelical nutcases like Franklin Graham are so squicked out by the idea that a business would think that two women adopting an orphan might be something to celebrate, that it must somehow taint his money and therefore him to be associated with it. Never mind that the bank he moved to is at least as gay friendly as the one he left. Never mind that he announced his plan first on Facebook, which is one of the large corporations that joined the amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to rule in favor of marriage equality. And so on, and so on…
They’re too busy being disgusted and outraged to think at all, let alone (you should pardon the expression) think straight.
Just a year ago, many conservative pundits were pointing out that the number of states that had adopted marriage equality, and where a majority of the citizens of said states supported it, meant that there weren’t enough states left to ratify a constitutional amendment. Then we have polls released just this week that not only show that a majority of americans support marriage equality, but that a whopping 63% believe that marriage equality is a constitutional right and that the court should rule it so!
I have to point out that back in 1971, four years after a unanimous Supreme Court had struck down bans on interracial marriage, that a majority of americans disagreed with that decision. But no one even tried to pass a federal constitutional amendment to allow states to begin banning interracial marriage again. I don’t believe that anyone could make a credible run at an amendment to ban gay marriage now when a majority of americans support gay marriage.
I should point out, that while 63 percent said they thought the constitution protects the right, a “mere” 57% said they fully support it. Which means that about 6% are personally opposed to queers marrying each other, but also believe it should be legal. That isn’t a contradiction. Lots of us disapprove of things that we also don’t think should be illegal for other people to do if they really want.
The most interesting statistic on that, as always, is the demographic number. We’re used to, in these polls, seeing that young people are more supportive of gay rights than older people. So it is no surprise that roughly 73% of those under the age of 50 are in favor of marriage equality. But the surprise is that just over 52% of people aged 50 and older are also in favor. It’s almost evenly split, but for a long time it was a clear majority of older people who disapproved. Of course, some of that shift has been a simple matter of aging. People who were in their late 40s when polls were taken a few years ago, and were therefore at least slight more likely to be in favor of marriage equality, are now in the older cohort, and they’re brought their beliefs with them. But aging alone doesn’t account for the change. So in the last few years, some of those older people who previously opposed it or answered that they weren’t sure have changed their minds.
It’s that last piece, I know, that some of the haters hang onto. They remain convinced that somehow, if they just keep screaming about how horrible and icky gay people are, that they can start getting people to change their minds the other way.
I don’t think so. I continue to believe that our two best weapon are visibility and familiarity. The more people who know actual gay people—and specifically, the more they see their own relatives and the relatives of their friends not just be out, but stand in line for marriage licenses and have their weddings and so forth without the world coming crashing down—the more supportive they become.
The cliché is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I agree that the marriage equality genie is out and isn’t going back. More importantly, none of us queers are going to allow ourselves to be chased back into the closet.
As usual, there were a few big news stories of the week I didn’t include in Friday links, and a few that have had more developments that I didn’t see until after I set up the posts to publish. Because I put the Friday Links post together Thursday night, but also because I post a full version of the post to my old LiveJounal and Dreamwidth blogs and my Blogger site, none of which I’ve ever been able to fully automate, so I spend way longer putting them together than I probably ought to.
Anyway, my social media streams were flooded with a lot of Caitlyn Jenner stuff. Mostly people reacting to other people’s snark and derision, especially about her winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, Caitlyn Jenner at ESPY Awards: Accept People ‘for Who They Are’. The speech itself was awesome, with a lot of heart, and focused on the problems of trans kids: Caitlyn Jenner honors transgender boy with Macomb County ties during her ESPYs speech. But haters gotta hate. And I think all we can do when they do is shut them down, like Joey Vicente, a U.S. Army behavioral health specialist did in the post I’ve pictured here. Click it to embiggen and read it.
Font Folly 