« Must be Pagan then... | Main | Bargain of the Day: velvet Jesus »
In today's Grauniad, Gary Younge examines the politics of homophobia in the US and how the influence of religious fundamentalists (or 'Christianists', to use a recently-coined term) in the Republican party is keeping them completely out of touch with mainstream opinion.
Moreover, the ramifications of scapegoating lesbians and gays would go way beyond the actual gay voters - who according to the gay advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign, comprise just 5% of the electorate. A Republican party that is mean to a few is widely regarded as having the potential to be mean to the many. The issue of sexual orientation may not be as explosive a touchstone as race, but a homophobic campaign would attract few new voters and repel many - particularly among moderates, women and the young. The issue of gay marriage is incredibly divisive. Polls show that while most Americans (51%) are against it, more than a third - a large proportion of whom are women - support it.
The response to last weekend's lingering televised kiss between Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, two gay winners of the Tony awards, also suggests political culture is lagging way behind popular culture.I love this man,said Shaiman.We're not allowed to get married in this world ... But I'd like to declare, in front of all these people, I love you and I'd like to live with you the rest of my life.The audience cheered. Of the 8 million viewers there were just 10 phone calls and 68 emails containing negative feedback.
Gay is the new black - The Guardian, 16th June 2003.
Posted in
Love Thy Neighbour
at 10:15. Last modified on September 28 2006 at 23:43.
Permalink to this entry | View blog reactions
Comments
1: Posted by: Larry Lurex | June 16, 2003 4:47 PM
I know it isn't much, but they could get married in (I think) Denmark, or even in London http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1525205.stm
Although under English law it would not be a legal marriage, as the article points out, it would be useful for legal disputes and the like.
2: Posted by: Feòrag | June 16, 2003 5:26 PM
There are legal same-sex marriages in the Netherlands and Belgium, and Canada is likely to follow suit soon. Most of Europe has civil partnerships, and Scotland is due to get them in 2004.
Evangelism, witnessing and similar activitites go by one name here—, and is no different from spam for viagra, penis enlargement products and pornography. We do not take advertising. If you want to advertise your imaginary friend, please spend your own money on your own web space to do so. Any attempts to use the comments section for advertisements will be deleted, and the perpetrator barred, unless they are particularly stupid, in which case I reserve the right to pinch an idea from Teresa Nielsen Hayden and delete all the vowels.
This is not a contacts site. If you are looking for help regarding a particular path, I suggest The Witches' Voice, which does operate a contacts service.
Allowed HTML:
a href, b, br, p, strong, em, ol, ul, li, blockquote, q, pre. If your name has accents in it, things will work better if you use the XHTML entities for those letters. The same applies if you are using a word processor to compose your comment, then copying and pasting the text—either turn off curly quotes and avoid using em-dashes, or edit your comment after pasting to get rid of them. Garbled comments usually get deleted.