This is encouraging but I am not sure I believe it.More than six in ten U.S. voters say they could support an openly gay candidate for president of the United States, according to a new nationwide poll from Zogby International.Or have we already had the first gay president? No, not Bush, read the link.
The poll, conducted for the Gay & Lesbian Leadership Institute, asked 1,089 likely voters if they would support an openly gay president, U.S. senator, vice president or cabinet-level secretary if they believed the individual was the most qualified person for the job. Sixty-five percent of survey participants indicated that they “strongly” or “somewhat” agree they could support the presidential candidate.
The language inside the cards is neutral, with no mention of wedding or marriage, making them also suitable for a commitment ceremony. Hallmark says the move is a response to consumer demand, not any political pressure.
"It's our goal to be as relevant as possible to as many people as we can," Hallmark spokeswoman Sarah Gronberg Kolell said.
Andrew Sullivan is celebrating the one year anniversary of his wedding. And, he's written about it here. Given the vote this November on CA prop. 8, the key paragraphs, for me anyway, are here:The premise used to be that homosexuality was an activity, that gays were people who chose to behave badly; or, if they weren’t choosing to behave badly, were nonetheless suffering from a form of sickness or, in the words of the Vatican, an “objective disorder.” And so the question of whether to permit the acts and activities of such disordered individuals was a legitimate area of legislation and regulation.
But when gays are seen as the same as straights—as individuals; as normal, well-adjusted, human individuals—the argument changes altogether. The question becomes a matter of how we treat a minority with an involuntary, defining characteristic along the lines of gender or race. And when a generation came of age that did not merely grasp this intellectually, but knew it from their own lives and friends and family members, then the logic for full equality became irresistible.
This transformation in understanding happened organically. It began with the sexual revolution in the 1970s, and then came crashing into countless previously unaware families, as their sons and uncles and fathers died in vast numbers from AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. It emerged as younger generations came out earlier and earlier, and as their peers came to see gay people as fellows and siblings, rather than as denizens of some distant and alien subculture. It happened as lesbian couples became parents and as gay soldiers challenged the discrimination against them. And it percolated up through the popular culture—from Will & Grace and Ellen to almost every reality show since The Real World.
What California’s court did, then, was not to recognize a new right to same-sex marriage. It was to acknowledge an emergent cultural consensus. And once that consensus had been accepted, the denial of the right to marry became, for many, a constitutional outrage. The right to marry, after all, is, as the court put it, “one of the basic, inalienable civil rights guaranteed to an individual.” Its denial was necessarily an outrage—and not merely an anomaly—because the right to marry has such deep and inalienable status in American constitutional law.
In the context of the resent shooting at the church in Knoxville, a former co-worker of Sean Hannity of Fox News has written an open letter to him reflecting the impact of rhetoric in leading to the shooting.“If the Left succeeds in gaining and retaining more power, the well-being of future generations will be at greater peril. I fear (our children) will inherit a nation that is less free and less secure than the nation we inherited from the last generation. It is therefore our job to stop them. Not just debate them, but defeat them.” — Sean Hannity
Dear Sean:
I found these words on page 11 of your book Let Freedom Ring. This book, and similar ones from your conservative colleagues Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage, was found in the home of a man who read those words, internalized those words, and then loaded his shotgun. He took 76 rounds of ammunition with him to a place of worship—a place where he knew he could do his job to stop and defeat some liberals. At the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jim Adkisson, a fan of yours, killed two people, wounded five others, and left an entire congregation and country shaken by his actions. Actions prompted, as he testified in his own written notes, by the ideas contained in your words.
I don’t know if you remember me, Sean, but I worked with you in Atlanta in the early 1990s, right as you got your big break with FOX News. I was an anchor and reporter (under the air name Candace Petersen) at WGST, your last low level stop before hitting the big time. I remember your last night on the air before you left for the big leagues. I approached you in your office, a cramped back room that I’m sure resembles a hovel compared to your FOX digs. I asked if you, during your last show, would tone down your rhetoric against gays and lesbians—stop demonizing our community for just one night. You refused. You explained to me, as if I were a child, that to do so would be to let your audience down. They expected you to go on the air and rant about how liberals, minorities, women and especially gays and lesbians were ruining our country. You simply had to oblige.
Even though you explained it simply, I still didn’t understand. Your Girl Friday—your most trusted assistant on your show was a young lesbian. She admired you, for some strange reason, and you two were close friends, lunching together, spending time together outside of work. You didn’t seem to have a problem with this particular lesbian. She wasn’t the one you kept blaming on the air for the downfall of democracy. No, you had two different lives then—one on the air, where you performed your outraged conservative act and one in real life, where you enjoyed your lesbian friend and seemed like a decent, sane fellow.
I don’t know if you’ve bought into your own shtick or not these days. If you truly believe half of what I could manage to read in your book (thank God the quote I found was in the early pages), I feel sorry for you. I don’t know how a person who obviously has no problem with homosexuality in their friends (or used to have no problem, anyway), can rant about how disgusting homosexuality is on pages 156 to 157. (Many thanks to your editors for the index.) I would call you a hypocrite, but if you’ve become a true believer, I guess the label no longer applies.
From Times Online comes this interesting bit of research. Religious people are more positive towards homosexual people than is claimed by conservative faith leaders, a report out today says.
According to academics at Leeds University, faith leaders are failing to reflect what the people in the pews really think about gays.
The report Love Thy Neighbour, commissioned by the gay rights lobby group Stonewall, says that Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Christian believers are “significantly more moderate” in their views on homosexuality than is often alleged on their behalf.
From Turkey, this is a sad story. Read it all for a full story but here's a couple of bits.Ahmet Yildiz, 26, a physics student who represented his country at an international gay gathering in San Francisco last year, was shot leaving a cafe near the Bosphorus strait this week. Fatally wounded, the student tried to flee the attackers in his car, but lost control, crashed at the side of the road and died shortly afterwards in hospital. His friends believe Mr Yildiz was the victim of the country's first gay honour killing."He fell victim to a war between old mentalities and growing civil liberties," says Sedef Cakmak, a friend and a member of the gay rights lobby group Lambda. "I feel helpless: we are trying to raise awareness of gay rights in this country, but the more visible we become, the more we open ourselves up to this sort of attack."
"From the day I met him, I never heard Ahmet have a friendly conversation with his parents," one close friend and near neighbour recounted. "They would argue constantly, mostly about where he was, who he was with, what he was doing."
The family pressure increased, the friend explained. "They wanted him to go back home, see a doctor who could cure him, and get married." Shortly after coming out this year, Mr Yildiz went to a prosecutor to complain that he was receiving death threats. The case was dropped. Five months later, he was dead. The police are now investigating his murder. For gay rights groups, the student's inability to get protection was a typical by-product of the indifference, if not hostility, with which a broad swathe of Turkish society views homosexuality. The military, for example, sees it as an "illness". Men applying for an exemption to obligatory military service on grounds of homosexuality must provide proof – either in the form of an anal examination, or photographs.
Here's another bit of good news on the equal rights for gays front. Poll results in tomorrow's Washington Post.Public attitudes about gays in the military have shifted dramatically since President Bill Clinton unveiled what became his administration's "don't ask, don't tell" policy 15 years ago today.
Seventy-five percent of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll said gay people who are open about their sexual orientation should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military, up from 62 percent in early 2001 and 44 percent in 1993.
Fifty-seven percent of white evangelical Protestants now support allowing openly gay service members in the military
The emails have been coming in all day. My favourite begins: "Dear sodomite supporter, you are nothing but a dirty sodomite-loving ugly stain of a man who is a disgrace to humanity." It ends "Burn in hell, Mr K." Well, thank you for that, Mr K. I have had a fair number of letters and emails from people who think like you. One suggested that I ought to be executed at Tyburn. Another graphically described the details of fisting.
My crime had been to offer the Bishop of New Hampshire a pulpit to preach the word of God. I usually have the emotional hide of a rhino, but even I was upset by the unpleasantness of the reaction, hiding my hurt in a few too many vodkas at lunchtime. How on earth does Gene Robinson cope with the disgusting abuse to which he is subjected most days – the protester who interrupted his sermon in my church on Sunday being a pretty mild example? Day after day, buckets of spiritual shit are thrown at him, sometimes by fellow bishops, and he just keeps going.
Spending some time with him over the last few days, I have discovered how he does it. He is the real deal. He is a believer. Responding to attacks that he had a "homosexual agenda", he insisted: "Here and now, in St Mary's Church, Putney, I want to reveal to you the homosexual agenda. The homosexual agenda is: Jesus." He went on to preach a fiery, almost revivalist, sermon, calling on Anglicans to take Jesus into their heart and to allow Him to cast out their fear.
What makes this person so interesting is that he has lost any sense that he is able to support himself spiritually through his own effort alone. His recognition of his "failure" to cope is precisely his strength. The theology is pure Luther: only when you recognise that you are unable to make yourself acceptable to God under your own steam can you collapse back upon God as the sole source of salvation. Later in the sermon, he described going from a meeting of the US House of Bishops to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and being relieved that, at this second meeting, he could at last speak about God.
Forget what you think you know about Gene Robinson – his is Gospel Christianity of a very traditional kind. This is what Christianity looks like once it has got over its obsession with respectability.
Today, the momentum favors same-sex marriage. Polls show that the electorate has become more used to the idea of same-sex marriage; women in particular see it as stabilizing for society, not destabilizing.That's good news and is certainly what I see.
And, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, homosexuals are marrying at a fast pace. That means it is gay-marriage advocates who are defending the status quo, while traditional-marriage advocates must upset it. At the least, for many voters, the idea of voting against what is already legal could create confusion, and confusion often yields a "no" vote.
And then there's the matter of timing. Proposition 8's supporters should have put their remedial measure on a primary ballot years ago. Failing that, they should have started early enough to gather sufficient signatures to qualify the measure for last month's primary ballot, not the Nov. 4 general election ballot. That's because with no statewide offices contested, and coming after the high-turnout presidential primary, the June 3 primary was guaranteed to be a low-turnout affair (i.e., older, more socially conservative voters).
On top of that, while no one could have known precisely when the Supreme Court would rule on gay marriage, as it turned out, the May 15 decision also would have energized the traditional-marriage voters who, before the first same-sex marriage licenses were issued June 15, could have stopped the whole megillah by voting for Proposition 8 on June 3.
Putting Proposition 8 on a high-turnout November presidential election ballot is dumb. Trying to pass it once same-sex marriages have become a legal, daily occurrence throughout the state is dumber. And now, if Californians vote it down, conservatives can't blame judicial tyranny for imposing same-sex marriage on the unhappy masses.
Will Californians now vote to render those marriages invalid? I don't think so.
