An endorsement of marriage equality by "Dear Abby" columnist Jeanne Phillips is a harbinger that the nation is, slowly, beginning to come around. That's why educating Americans by working through the state legislative process is, I believe, far more likely to lead to same-sex marriage than relying on liberal judges to force the issue (typically provoking a backlash that results in state constitutional amendments banning recognition of all gay partnerships).
“Dear Abby” for Gays Getting Married
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23 Comments for ““Dear Abby” for Gays Getting Married”
posted by Karen on
So even though it IS unconstitutional to deny us equal marriage rights, even though it is CLEARLY wrong and exactly the kind of tyranny of the majority that the judiciary is meant to protect us from, we should not be too uppity, because there’s a possibility that straights will “allow” us our rights someday of their own accord?
The whole point of rights is that we shouldn’t have to wait until it’s popular. We don’t need the consent of the mainstream. I shouldn’t have to wonder if I’ll ever be able to get legal recognition for my marriage in our lifetime.
And anything that is granted by the legislature without recognition of the underlying rights can easily be taken away when, say, a religious revival sweeps the nation and the bigots have a majority again.
posted by Karen on
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the country is slowly coming around. It’s a necessary part of the process and a testament to the power of the quiet activism of just living open lives. I doubt any of the straight people who attended my big gay wedding left with a *worse* opinion of gay marriage, knowwhaddimean?
I just disagree that this means we should back off the judiciary tack and pretend that it’s no big deal that our civil liberties are being violated.
posted by Brian on
“typically provoking a backlash” should read “which provoked a backlash”–and that backlash has subsided (see: Arizona rejecting the amendment). People are no longer talking about “if” gay people should have equal rights, they are talking about when and how.
I want every single American to understand and appreciate me for the person I am but I also want the government to live up to the promises the Constitution makes its citizens and the precedent justices have set. Both are important.
posted by Avee on
Arizona didn’t have a local court try to decree gay marriage from the bench – hence, no backlash and the education process could go forward. Sometimes when you trust citizens to do the right thing, rather than using government to force them, you end up with a better result.
posted by Randy on
Avee: “Sometimes when you trust citizens to do the right thing, rather than using government to force them, you end up with a better result.”
And sometimes they don’t. See Ohio, Virginia.
posted by Bobby on
So what? The APA also supports gay marriage, and the only people who give a damn about the APA are liberals.
Jeanne Phillips opinions will be ignored by her conservative readers. It’s not like she’s some kind of God and whatever she says people will agree with.
posted by Lori Heine on
In Arizona, the anti-gay amendment lost out because we framed the issue in a way in which even reasonable straight people could relate. The religious-right nuts aren’t just out to control gays’ lives; after us they’ll come after others. The amendment went down in flames because it attacked straights’ cohabitation rights as well as same-sex unions.
We don’t have to get everybody out there to feel our pain, or even to give a damn about us. We need to ask them some tough questions about the sort of society they want and about what kind of a country they want this (or don’t want it) to be. Dr. King won many whites to his side by getting them to think about these same questions.
America was founded by people who were tired of religious lunatics tyrannizing everybody. Once the sane majority realizes that the threat of this happening exists here, the lunatics will be soundly defeated.
posted by ColoradoPatriot on
bobby: “The APA also supports gay marriage, and the only people who give a damn about the APA are liberals.”
That might be the dumbest thing I’ve read all week. Please try harder.
posted by Fitz on
Re: The APA
Steven Nock, a sociologist at the University of Virginia who was asked to review several hundred studies as an expert witness for the Attorney General of Canada.
Nock concluded:
Through this analysis I draw my conclusions that?.
1) all of the articles I reviewed contained at least one fatal flaw of design or execution; and
2) not a single one of those studies was conducted according to general accepted standards of scientific research.
Design flaws researchers have found in these studies include very basic limitations:
a. No nationally representative sample.
b. Limited outcome measures. Many of the outcomes measured by the research are unrelated to standard measures of child well-being used by family sociologists
(perhaps because most of the researchers are developmental psychologists, not
sociologists).
c. Reliance on maternal reports. Many studies rely on a mother?s report of her
parenting skills and abilities, rather than objective measures of child outcomes
d. No long-term studies. All of the studies conducted to date focus on static or short term measures of child development. Few or none follow children of unisex parents to adulthood.*
* Nock Aff.
posted by Rhywun on
I agree with Karen. Clearly, certain parts of the country are coming around faster than others. How long must I wait for my hypothetical New York or New Jersey marriage to be valid in Arkansas or Oklahoma? Until those citizens deign to allow it? On occasion rights must be fought for; our country’s founders understood that. If they sat around and waited for England to allow us freedom… we’d be Canada 🙂
posted by Fitz on
But perhaps the most serious methodological critique of these studies, at least with reference to the family structure debate, is this:
?The vast majority of these studies compare single lesbian mothers to single heterosexual mothers.?
As sociologist Charlotte Patterson, a leading researcher on gay and lesbian parenting, recently summed up,
?[M]ost studies have compared children in divorced lesbian mother-headed families with children in divorced heterosexual motherheaded families.?*
Most of the gay parenting literature thus compares children in some fatherless families to children in other fatherless family forms. The results may be relevant for some legal policy debates (such as custody disputes) but, in our opinion, they are not designed to shed light on family structure per se, and cannot credibly be used to contradict the current weight of social science: family structure matters, and the family structure that is most protective a child well-being is the intact, married biological family. Children do best when raised by their own married mother and father.
* Charlotte J. Patterson et al., 2000. ?Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents: Research, Law and Policy,? in Bette L. Bottoms et al., eds., Children and the Law: Social Science and Policy 10-11
see also Charlotte J. Patterson, 2000. ?Family Relationships of Lesbians and Gay Men,? Journal of Marriage and Family 62: 1052-1069.
posted by Jorge on
I was an Ann Landers reader. I remember she stated once something like gays absolutely have the same kind of recognition as marriage, but she wants it to be called something else. She was also good on a lot of the taboo issues by mixing common sense with research.
I think the point to be made here is that more dialogue, more civil discussion, is more valuable and more effective than trying to force change on people. And by the way, there has been plenty of “backlash” against both advice columnists on a lot of things. Reader disagreement is part of the act sometimes, and that’s also very important. They try to persuade people, they’re advice columnists. They don’t enforce an orthodoxy on people.
posted by Jorge on
(That should read that Ann Landers thought gays *should* absolutely have the same kind of recognition as marriage)
posted by Bobby on
“That might be the dumbest thing I’ve read all week. Please try harder.”
—Hey there circuit boy, put down the meth and try getting out of the getto for a while and see how the rest of America lives. You think just because the the APA agrees with gay marriage people are gonna support gay marriage? The APA also supports gun control, and most people don’t agree with that either.
Do you really think one advice columnist is gonna change the world? Give me a break, liberals are so out of touch with reality. They think all it takes to change the country is a couple of celebrities. Sure, end the war by going to a Bruce Springsteen concert, cure AIDS by donating to Bono’s charity. And join Al Gore in his Lear Jet as he fights against global warming.
People don’t watch celebrities because they want to be educated on politics, fuck no. They watch them for entertainment. Just like that stupid advice column is nothing more than entertainment.
It’s not enough to have celebrities on your side, you need normal people too! And the fact is that only liberals seem to like our kind. So basically, we’re fucked! So forget about gay rights and dedicate yourself to making money.
posted by Jorge on
Eh, Dear Abby is one of the big guns, so it matters a little. A lot of the really big–I’m gonna say social lifestyle names, people like Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters–have made it a point to include gays as equals and give gay issues a lot of airtime, even while not appearing overly progressive. In fact they’re quite conservative in a lot of ways. They present themselves as everyday people talking about everyday issues. Stephen Miller seems to think that Dear Abby supporting gay marriage is a symptom of everyday Americans already being liberalized on the issue.
Dear Abby may have a progressive streak, but if her position stands as a socially acceptable position to take (even if most people don’t agree with it right now), then that might show that some change has happened.
posted by Randy on
As Dan Savage has said about Ann Landers, the same can be said of Dear Abby. Her column is carried in many papers, including some very conservative ones. Her voice may be the only progressive voice in town. The fact that she supports us gives hope to gays in many small towns, and might open minds. she’s not generally viewed as a left wing looney (if she were, she would no longer be carried in so many mediums.)
What she says, in the long run, will do much to win us favor.
posted by kittynboi on
Bobby, do you know what normal people do? Normal people play video games. Go to movies on friday. Go to bars after work. Go pick up new comics on Wed. of pick up new DVDs on Tuesday. They get home from work wondering if their netflix stuff has arrived yet, and if someone recommends a film they add it to their que. They go out to eat on weekends or during the week and get takeout if they’re too tired to cook. Most of them have pets, hobbies, interests, aren’t overtly political, don’t live in the heartland, and inhabit either a city or an area surrounding one. They don’t get too worked up about what other people do unless something or someone prompts them too, usually by dishonest means.
The people YOU are referring to are anything but normal. You are the one who is mmore disconnected from normal people. Normal people aren’t right wing fearmongers or “moral values” GOP drones. Most normal people aren’t highly or even moderately religious, despite occasional posturing or trinkets of angels on their cubicle desks.
posted by Bobby on
“Eh, Dear Abby is one of the big guns, so it matters a little. A lot of the really big–I’m gonna say social lifestyle names, people like Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters”
—These people preach to the converted, and non-liberals take them with a grain of salt. Everyone knows broadcast ratings have been going down for years. How many people watch Oprah? 10,000,000? What’s 10 million in a nation of 300 million? Not even 10%.
Kittynboi, the people you describe, the ones that don’t get worked up over anything, they rarely vote. Face it, it’s the radicals (from the left and right) and a few moderates that vote. Non-voters don’t matter. That’s why politicians don’t even bother with the 18 to 25 crowd.
“don’t live in the heartland,”
—How bigoted of you, so to you the space between New York and Los Angeles is just empty space. A wasteland.
“Most normal people aren’t highly or even moderately religious, despite occasional posturing or trinkets of angels on their cubicle desks.”
—-Actually, America is one of the most religious countries in the world. Here 80% of the people go to Church, in Europe it’s like 50%, maybe less. Here 95% of people believe in God, in Europe it’s like 70%.
posted by kittynboi on
Yeah, and the non voters are the few that remotely resemble any concept of “normal”. People in this country might SAY they’re religious, and usually believe in something or other, but we are far from one of the most religious countries in the world, since most of these people are very laid back about religion. How many Catholics are just the fish on fridays, mass at xmas types?
The same applies to protestants. Many people go through the motions, and have some level of belief that comforts them, but they’re far from the inward looking zealots and monsters that you praise and hold so dear.
Notions of blasphemy, apostasy, heresy, and those sort of things are all but dead in the west, including this country. Few people sincerely advocate theocracy, and those who do are maniacs. Other people might favor some vague form of religion in government, but usually haven’t given it much thought, and aren’t terribly committed to the idea in any case, to say nothing of how it would be unlikely that it would resemble the bloodbath the religious right dreams of.
So, no Bobby. The people you admire and worship aren’t normal. They’re inward looking religious zealots who have distanced themselves from many essential aspects of being human and being part of a civilized society.
posted by Bobby on
Look Kit, the Catholic Church no longer requires people to eat fish on Fridays. Don’t forget the II Vatican Council changed a lot of things about the church, such as the latin mass.
While America is not a theocracy, the state doesn’t go after homophobic preachers like they do in Canada, England and Sweeden.
“Other people might favor some vague form of religion in government,”
—Actually, there’s a ton of religion in government. Starting from “In God We Trust” on our currency, to the National Day of Prayer, to oaths that mention the word “God” be it for trial or just to take office, to the fact that Christmas is a federally recognized holiday and even our pledge of allegiance has the word God in it. In fact, while the French president may not say “God bless France,” all our presidents have said “God bless America” at the end of their speeches.
“The people you admire and worship aren’t normal.”
—If being normal means supporting higher fuel taxes, carbon taxes, banning homeschooling, putting cameras on every corner and banning college students from expressing hateful opinions (unless those opinions are against conservatives), then I’d rather not be normal.
It was Marx that said “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And you can bet people like Hillary and Al Gore have the best of intentions.
posted by Brian Miller on
The fact that she supports us gives hope to gays in many small towns, and might open minds.
Why is it that people who talk darkly about how awful gay life is in small towns tend to be out gay guys in big coastal cities’ urban gay ghettos, writing for gay publications?
The popular characterization of gay life outside of the Castro or Christopher Street as hell on earth is entirely without basis. If you look at the Advocate’s 10 best places for gay people to live, many small towns (such as Missoula, Montana) rank significantly higher than the “sanctuaries” such as my present home of San Francisco. And small wonder.
Perhaps what we in the historic “ghettos” need are more small town gay people to talk frankly about their own concerns as grass roots gay people, rather than have almighty self-appointed “gay leaders” bestow causes on their behalf as benevolent dictators of the “movement.”
Of course, if that happens, the ENDA thing will take a back seat to marriage equality, adoption equality, and other real everyday concerns — which is bad for the professional gay lobbyists and their continued employment as lackeys of the Democratic Party.
Oh well. Small town living is affordable — perhaps the professional homos amongst us should consider Missoula over Dupont Circle the day that equality under the law is achieved and a gay lobby is no longer needed.
posted by ColoradoPatriot on
bobby: “It was Marx that said “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.””
Sorry, you are wrong again bobby. It was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who came up with that quote. Sloppy sloppy sloppy (and wrong)…as usual.
posted by George on
I totally agree with this post. Right now we’re at a “tipping” point” in opening hearts and minds about the freedom to marry. It will still take a lot of hard work, and a lot of conversations with the people in our lives, but I do think advice columnists like Jeanne Phillips act as a sort of social barometer. Otherwise they wouldn’t enjoy such vast readership!
Right now we need to focus on convincing “undecided” Americans. Check out the Let California Ring campaign. They propose we change the way we talk to people about the freedom to marry, appealing to their best instincts, and putting them directly in the shoes of LGBT people. http://www.LetCaliforniaRing.org