When I read Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture in the NYTimes yesterday, I didn’t notice it was by out gay reporter Adam Nagourney. That changes nothing, really. Except maybe that his experience makes him more attuned to the topic:
The conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay issues reflect a broader paradox: even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents.
It is reflected in the surge of gay men and lesbians on television and in public office, and in polls measuring a steady rise in support for gay rights measures. Despite approval in California of a ballot measure banning same-sex marriage, it has been authorized in six states.
Yet if the culture is moving on, national politics is not, or at least not as rapidly. Mr. Obama has yet to fulfill a campaign promise to repeal the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The prospects that Congress will ever send him a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters: Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, sent a letter to clerics in his state arguing that it would be destructive to “faith, families and freedom.”
Memeorandum has discussion. If you missed my post last week, ‘No Single LGBT Rights Leader’ a Feature, Not a Bug, in response to this NYTimes piece, it is right on point:
…the single most important way the lgbt rights movement differs from the black and feminist movements is that lgbt people can choose to stay invisible.
Once society wanted its lgbt citizens to stay invisible. Once the culture enforced invisibility on lgbt people. But so long as lgbt people were invisible, they could only be a hidden menace.
The choice to come out and declare one’s sexual orientation as a cultural identity was a prerequisite to progress. That lgbt people have made so much progress is a tribute to each and every individual who made that declaration to their family, friends and professional community.
Today the culture no longer wants its lesbian and gay citizens to be invisible. LGBT characters on television and in the movies, in politics and community life, along with those who are our friends, neighbors and colleagues, are clear evidence of this.
The culture, in this instance, is ahead of the courts. It is the foes of that cultural acceptance who have deftly used the courts and the law to hold old norms — norms that are no longer culturally relevant — in place.
Political rights are coming soon. LGBT people know it. The foes of that political acceptance know it too.