Posted on 06/19/2003 9:18:40 PM PDT by TLBSHOW
Time to face facts: Gays gain victory
The gays have won. The problem is no one will admit it.
The biggest and latest news is that Canada is poised to legalize same-sex marriage. But the signs of the gay victory have been all around for us for years.
The sitcom "Will and Grace" features openly gay characters who joke about their sex lives in ways that little more than a decade ago would have sparked complaints if uttered by heterosexuals, let alone homosexuals. Showtime's "Queer as Folk" depicts random gay sex in precisely the same trivial terms that HBO's "Sex in the City" depicts random heterosexual sex, which is to say with an air of unbridled celebration.
For the popular culture this signals the final stage of mainstreaming homosexuality. After repeated protests from gay groups in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hollywood stopped casting gays and lesbians as villains (think of "No Way Out" and "Basic Instinct"). By the end of the '90s, gays could be found all over movies and TV, but they were depicted as virtuous celibates. In movies like "Sling Blade," "My Best Friend's Wedding" and that execrable drek by Madonna "The Next Best Thing," gays were cast as the only decent and honorable white men around.
My favorite example was the gay character from the Fox nighttime soap, "Melrose Place," which ran for most of the 1990s. Every straight character in the show was having sex at the drop of a hat. Except, for the gay guy, Matt Fielding, played by Doug Savant.
Almost every episode featured the gay pretty boy lecturing his straight friends about their reckless promiscuity or bailing them out from their dysfunctional relationships while he remained as chaste as Greg Brady on "The Brady Bunch."
But the gay victory doesn't just manifest itself in the popular culture. The mainstream media has collectively decided to mainstream gays. The New York Times runs gay "marriage" announcements alongside straight ones in its wedding notices section (aka "the chick sports pages").
On Father's Day, CNN "Sunday Night" ran a long interview with the Asian-American gay actor B.D. Wong about his book Following Foo, which chronicles his efforts as a gay parent. Never raising a hint of controversy, let alone objection, to the issue of gay adoption, the interviewer closed the discussion by noting how much better off the world would be if all fathers were like Wong.
That may or may not be true, but such a comment would be unimaginable in a world where gays were on the defensive.
Indeed, at the same time as all of this, it is all but impossible to say a negative word about gays in public settings (unless you're gay yourself). For example, in March, when Senator Rick Santorum echoed almost verbatim the language of a Supreme Court decision in an interview with an AP reporter, he was widely denounced as a "bigot" and "homophobe."
Earlier this month, Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly tried to cancel a scheduled Gay Pride Month celebration at the Department of Justice for lesbian and gay employees. He failed. Despite pressure from social conservative activists, DOJ reversed course in the face of protests from gay groups and a sympathetic media (and, probably, pressure from the White House).
When the most famous and powerful member of the Religious Right in the U.S. government can't stop a gay pride event in his own office building, held by his own employees, you know that social conservatives are losing this fight.
And now Canada is moving rapidly to legalize gay marriage from coast to coast above the 49th parallel. Gay activists, liberal legal scholars and sympathetic journalists (i.e. 95 percent of the media) say this will have huge repercussions in the United States for, among other reasons, American gays will marry in Canada and come home with an extra argument for why the U.S. government should honor their marriages.
There may be some wishful thinking in this analysis, but when so many elites offer wishful thinking it often translates into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's certainly true that Great Britain is not that far behind Canada on the issue of gay marriage, and the developments in Canada only promise to expedite that process.
In short, it's a global trend and, like it or not, the traditionalists have lost. This isn't a value judgment, it's simply dispassionate analysis. Many conservatives refuse to accept this fact. But refusing to acknowledge a fact doesn't make it any less real.
The challenge for social conservatives, it seems to me, is to make the best of what they consider a bad situation. But that would require making some painful capitulations -intellectual, moral, philosophical and financial. It would also require gay activists to understand that they've won and that the best course of action for them would be magnanimity in victory. Unfortunately, this is all unlikely since both camps are in denial about how far gays have come.
Prove homosexuality isn’t a behavioral disorder? I dare you.
rather than stew in hatred,
Objection isn’t “hatred”, why do you Liberaltarians think discrimination of a behavior is wrong…I’ll bet you’d discriminate against consensual incest…are you a hypocrite? Yep!
"What the hell do I care?"
Because and you’re an uncaring person who thinks society is meaningless and lives in the irrelevant Liberaltarian vacuum of selfishness? Did I win?
Homosexuality contravenes the Natural Law. I don't care how many protest marches you have, how many banners you make, how many television shows you produce, it is fundamentally against Nature. And you can only rebel against Nature for so long before the inevitable regression to the mean.
The reason most people have been ignoring this fundamental reality for the last thirty or so years was that the mainstream media had permanent control of the microphone and pushed this agenda foursquare, and thereby short-circuited the inborn aversion that most have to this behavior. They can no longer enforce this orthodoxy, and therefore the media culture will begin to more accurately track the natural distaste for this behavior. Media such as talk radio, the internet and the emerging cable news media take their ideas from the bottom-up; they do not project them from the top-down. It will be impossible to stop a public airing of people's distate for this behavior in the new media, nor will it be possible to flog people who object to this perversion with the tolerance stick. It's only a matter of time.
That also raises a point here that NRO raised itself a few weeks back, and that is the issue of 'metropolitan conservatism'. I read something on NRO's "The Corner" by Goldberg about a week ago about how his father never had a driver's license because he always used NYC public transit. This is typical of big-city living, of course. A lot of my friends who live in Chicago proper don't have cars. But this underscores, I think, a very real split not only in the conservative movement, but really in the country. I grew up in semi-rural Nebraska and was driving when I was 14. I was shooting a .22 when I was 10 or so. Even though I now live on the outskirts of a large city (Chicago), I'm pretty much 110% red-state in outlook. The social structure of the town I grew up in was heavily traditionalist Catholic/conservative Lutheran, and there were all kinds of unspoken cultural rules you had to abide by. Everyone more or less new everone else, there was a defined community, and so on. In big cities, it's completely the opposite. Living is somewhat impersonal, people are far more brusque, and tolerance of deviant behaviors is really not an option. So many freaks and deviants live in major cities that you really can't avoid them, so you learn to deal with them or at least ignore them. Of course, one of the reasons that there are so many deviants living in large cities (no, not everyone who lives in a large city is a deviant, of course) is that they leave places like my hometown as soon as they can to escape the informal cultural norming.
So, even though I'm about the same age as Goldberg and vote for the same people and hold much of the same politics, people like he and I will never have the same perspective on social issues. The middle and south of this country will never accept gay marriage. People who are ambivalent about the abortion issue will get hot over this in ways that may exceed the abortion debate. Acceptance of homosexuality is far from a fait accompli. And because the left-wing media no longer has the power to shoe-horn it into the public consciousness unopposed, the idea that the game's over and that's that I think is overstating it.
declaring gay pride, and none from the Attorney General. Thus, Ashcroft’s office had ruled that the event could not take place at the Department. Justice ...
According to another article, Justice stated that the gay group would have to pay a rental fee for using the Great Hall at DOJ.
After weeks of controversy, gay employees in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) decided to relocate their annual awards event, rejecting what they call the department's offer of "second class status."
Directors of the employee group, known as DOJ Pride, issued a statement on Wednesday, saying that the event will take place in the Russell Senate Building rather than the DOJ's Great Hall, where the event was held last year.
After being told by the Attorney General's Office earlier this month that the group could not hold its annual Pride month event in the department's Great Hall, the DOJ reversed itself last week and said the group could meet there, only without the department's sponsorship.
The offer meant that DOJ Pride would have to pay a rental fee of $1,000 and other costs to use the Great Hall -- a condition not required of other employee groups, DOJ Pride said
Libertarians do not think.
You are wrong on the rest of your analysis. Cultural issues are not dead. You are the same kind of person that would have said in 1973 that the abortion debate was settled. It is not. Nor is this issue. Social conservatives will eventually win all of these issues. It's just a matter of time.
If there is no revolution, all we can expect is a grinding and ratcheting up of tyranny.
Better get used to tyranny.
Sheep rarely start revolutions.
The crap that pours out of this moronic idiot's mouth is the mantra of the New Republican party.
1. The Left is too well entrenched in the media and academia.
2. Using their power and influence, they have convinced a majority of the population to accept 'concept a.'
3. Therefore, we are wasting out time to even try to fight 'concept a.'
I would hope that any intelligent third grader would understand how abysmally stupid this whipped cur Conservatism is. The obvious retort is that what we need to do is persuade more people to the truth of why we oppose 'concept a.' Now how does a rational person do that? Why first of all, you stop listening to the 'whipped curs,' and begin by explaining to others why 'concept a' is a bad idea. You don't just roll over and play dead, you explain your own vision; your own understanding. Instead of shutting up about 'concept a,' you confront what you consider the obvious errors of those supporting it.
People for Centuries understood that this particular "concept a" was a bad idea, a very bad idea; and every reason they ever had for believing that this 'concept a' was a bad idea, is still part of our arsenal!
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
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