Oh thank you SO much! Believe it or don’t, I’m actually a fair hand at computer geekiness type stuff, but coding just escapes me!
That doesn’t really make any sense. If a person cares what a gay person may or may not do, they have to care who is or isn’t gay. Otherwise, how do they know if a given person is or is not allowed to do something?
I didn’t say that, either. I don’t think attitudes about homosexuality are a simple binary. I do think that, ultimately, opposition to gay marriage is rooted in an attitude that gay people are, if not bad, at least not quite as good as straight people. I think this is inescapably implicit in the concept that marriage needs to be “protected” from gay people, which is very much a mainstream attitude - it is, in fact, the *majority *attitude in this country. A necessary component of the belief that marriage needs protection from gays is that gays themselves are some manner of threat, in a way that does not apply to heterosexuals. And, roping this back around to the topic at hand, if gay people are a threat, then it becomes necessary for that threat to be identified. An individual who opposes gay marriage may not want to know personally if someone is gay: it is, after all, much easier to deprive someone of their rights if you don’t have to look them in the face while you do it. But they are very invested in making sure that someone is keeping track of who is gay and preventing them from getting married.
It is not a goal of the gay marriage movement to legislate that everyone use the phrase “marriage” in casual conversation. The goal is simply to ensure that we are treated equally under the law.
Yes, I know, which is what makes arguments that gay marriage must be banned to preserve the meaning of the word so pitifully hilarious. The literal definition of the word changed twenty years ago, if not earlier. The battle now is to bring the legal definition in line with the dictionary.
Yes, that was the express purpose of the law. No relationship in Texas may convey the rights associated with marriage, except for marriage itself, which is reserved for heterosexual couples. And Texas is not the only state to have passed such a stringent ban on gay rights.
There are a lot of problems with civil unions as a concept. Chief among them is that, so long as gays and straights are covered by separate laws governing legal regulation of their relationships, gays are uniquely vulnerable. If we are both covered by the same law, then it becomes, if not impossible, then at least vastly more difficult to craft a law that strips gays of legal rights without similarly stripping them from straights. If the institutions are kept separate, then it becomes possible to pass a law saying, “Civil unions are not eligible for X, Y, and Z” without affecting marriage in anyway.
There are a lot of other objections, from portability, to ensuring equality in implementation, to the cost involved in rewriting laws to cover both institutions, to a simple matter of principle that holds being treated as second class, even in the most minor way, is antithetical to a free and liberal society. But the above is, in my opinion, the strongest and most damning.
Which is not to say that gays, in general, are flatly opposed to civil unions. In a large portion of this country (such as Texas), the ability to enter into civil unions would be a great step up for gays in that region. What is not acceptable is the idea of civil unions as a permanent solution to the marriage debate. There is only one solution that will end this: equality. Anything short of that is a temporary solution, at best.
Again, I don’t think that opposition to gay rights necessitates overt hostility towards gays. But I do think it is a manifestation of an “us versus them” attitude, and a need to assert a hierarchy that puts the “us” (in this case, heterosexuals) above the “them” (which would be the gays).
Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far, but yes, gays want to get married for all the same reasons straights do - good reasons and bad reasons alike. And the concept of marriage - not just the legalities, but the traditions and implications and emotions that are tied up in that term - are just as important to gays as they are to straights, and for all the same reasons.
In the long term? No.
It’s no trouble at all. In fact, this exchange is precisely why I give a fuck that Meredith Baxter is gay. Because if she hadn’t come out, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And we’re not the only people in this nation who are talking about this because of her announcement. The unique problem of the gay rights movement is invisibility. When blacks were fighting for their rights, the one thing they didn’t have to do was struggle to show that they existed in this society. For gay rights to succeed, people need to know that we’re here, and that’s why it does matter when a celebrity comes out like this. Because it’s someone that millions of people know and recognize. And that’s important not just to those who might vote against our rights. It’s also important to those who might be one of us, but are too scared or in denial to admit it. For every ten housewives who sees the woman they know from all those Lifetime movies and thinks, “Maybe those gays aren’t so different from me after all,” there’s one housewife who sees her and thinks, “Maybe it’s okay for me to come out, too.”
And that may be the most important thing of all.
If the water coming out of the ‘for coloreds’ fountain is as good as the water out of the ‘whites only’ fountain, should it be acceptable to blacks?
Are you old enough to remember when Rock Hudson announced he had AIDS? The reaction was way beyond “how 'bout that.”
I’m not sure, and by all means correct me if I’m wrong, but I think in those days (1985), the term “coming out” hadn’t been coined because the concept didn’t exist. What I am sure about is that in those days, AIDS was very often the only reason anyone found out (or found out for sure) that someone was gay. And Hudson’s case was particular, because he’d had this iconic macho image at the peak of his career, and the few rumors attached to him at that time had long been forgotten by the '80s.
So he didn’t “come out” as such. He had to announce his illness, and the admission of his sexual preference followed from that. It was a tremendous shock to most people, and not made any easier by his appearance when he made the announcement. (He literally had months to live. And again, in those days, there was almost nothing they could do about AIDS. Patrick Swayze in his final days was the picture of health compared to an '80s-era AIDS victim.) So it was definitely not “how 'bout that.” It was “How could he have kept that big a secret all those years?!”