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On Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:57:14 -0500, "4943 Dead, 76 since 1/20/09" <...@finestplanet.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/opinion/19Rich.html
Op-Ed Columinst
The Bigots’ Last Hurrah
[Zeppnote: time saving tip: the article at NYT links to both the ad, and
the Colbert parody, which includes the original ad in its entirety. No
point in viewing it twice. It doesn't improve with age.]
By FRANK RICH
Published: April 18, 2009
WHAT would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic “The
Village of the Damned” with the Broadway staple “A Chorus Line”? You
don’t need to use your imagination. It’s there waiting for you on YouTube
under the title “Gathering Storm”: a 60-second ad presenting
homosexuality as a national threat second only to terrorism.
The actors are supposedly Not Gay. They stand in choral formation before
a backdrop of menacing clouds and cheesy lightning effects. “The winds
are strong,” says a white man to the accompaniment of ominous music. “And
I am afraid,” a young black woman chimes in. “Those advocates want to
change the way I live,” says a white woman. But just when all seems lost,
the sun breaks through and a smiling black man announces that “a rainbow
coalition” is “coming together in love” to save America from the
apocalypse of same-sex marriage. It’s the swiftest rescue of Western
civilization since the heyday of the ambiguously gay duo Batman and Robin.
Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly,
an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with
countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some
10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which
lightning from “the homo storm” strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him
gay. A “New Jersey pastor” whose church has been “turned into an
Abercrombie & Fitch” declares that he likes gay people, “but only as
hilarious best friends in TV and movies.”
Yet easy to mock as “Gathering Storm” may be, it nonetheless bookmarks a
historic turning point in the demise of America’s anti-gay movement.
What gives the ad its symbolic significance is not just that it’s idiotic
but that its release was the only loud protest anywhere in America to the
news that same-sex marriage had been legalized in Iowa and Vermont. If it
advances any message, it’s mainly that homophobic activism is ever more
depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead.
“Gathering Storm” was produced and broadcast — for a claimed $1.5 million
— by an outfit called the National Organization for Marriage. This
“national organization,” formed in 2007, is a fund-raising and propaganda-
spewing Web site fronted by the right-wing Princeton University professor
Robert George and the columnist Maggie Gallagher, who was famously caught
receiving taxpayers’ money to promote Bush administration “marriage
initiatives.” Until last month, half of the six board members (including
George) had some past or present affiliation with Princeton’s James
Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. (One of them, the
son of one of the 12 apostles in the Mormon church hierarchy, recently
stepped down.)
Even the anti-Obama “tea parties” flogged by Fox News last week had wider
genuine grass-roots support than this so-called national organization.
Beyond Princeton, most straight citizens merely shrugged as gay families
celebrated in Iowa and Vermont. There was no mass backlash. At ABC and
CBS, the Vermont headlines didn’t even make the evening news.
On the right, the restrained response was striking. Fox barely mentioned
the subject; its rising-star demagogue, Glenn Beck, while still
dismissing same-sex marriage, went so far as to “celebrate what happened
in Vermont” because “instead of the courts making a decision, the people
did.” Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the self-help media star once notorious for
portraying homosexuality as “a biological error” and a gateway to
pedophilia, told CNN’s Larry King that she now views committed gay
relationships as “a beautiful thing and a healthy thing.” In The New York
Post, the invariably witty and invariably conservative writer Kyle Smith
demolished a Maggie Gallagher screed published in National Review and
wondered whether her errant arguments against gay equality were
“something else in disguise.”
More startling still was the abrupt about-face of the Rev. Rick Warren,
the hugely popular megachurch leader whose endorsement last year of
Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban, had roiled his
appearance at the Obama inaugural. Warren also dropped in on Larry King
to declare that he had “never” been and “never will be” an “anti-gay-
marriage activist.” This was an unmistakable slap at the National
Organization for Marriage, which lavished far more money on Proposition 8
than even James Dobson’s Focus on the Family.
The Obamas’ dog had longer legs on cable than the news from Iowa and
Vermont. CNN’s weekly press critique, “Reliable Sources,” inquired why.
The gay blogger John Aravosis suggested that many Americans are more
worried about their mortgages than their neighbors’ private lives.
Besides, Aravosis said, there are “only so many news stories you can do
showing guys in tuxes.”
As the polls attest, the majority of Americans who support civil unions
for gay couples has been steadily growing. Younger voters are fine with
marriage. Generational changeover will seal the deal. Crunching all the
numbers, the poll maven Nate Silver sees same-sex marriage achieving
majority support “at some point in the 2010s.”
Iowa and Vermont were the tipping point because they struck down the
right’s two major arguments against marriage equality. The unanimous
ruling of the seven-member Iowa Supreme Court proved that the issue is
not merely a bicoastal fad. The decision, written by Mark Cady, a
Republican appointee, was particularly articulate in explaining that a
state’s legalization of same-sex marriage has no effect on marriage as
practiced by religions. “The only difference,” the judge wrote, is that
“civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more
complete understanding of equal protection of the law.”
Some opponents grumbled anyway, reviving their perennial complaint,
dating back to Brown v. Board of Education, about activist judges. But
the judiciary has long played a leading role in sticking up for the civil
rights of minorities so they’re not held hostage to a majority vote. Even
if the judiciary-overreach argument had merit, it was still moot in
Vermont, where the State Legislature, not a court, voted to make same-sex
marriage legal and then voted to override the Republican governor’s veto.
As the case against equal rights for gay families gets harder and harder
to argue on any nonreligious or legal grounds, no wonder so many
conservatives are dropping the cause. And if Fox News and Rick Warren
won’t lead the charge on same-sex marriage, who on the national stage
will take their place? The only enthusiastic contenders seem to be
Republicans contemplating presidential runs in 2012. As Rich Tafel, the
former president of the gay Log Cabin Republicans, pointed out to me last
week, what Iowa giveth to the Democrats, Iowa taketh away from his own
party. As the first stop in the primary process, the Iowa caucuses
provided a crucial boost to Barack Obama’s victorious and inclusive
Democratic campaign in 2008. But on the G.O.P. side, the caucuses tilt
toward the exclusionary hard right.
In 2008, 60 percent of Iowa’s Republican caucus voters were evangelical
Christians. Mike Huckabee won. That’s the hurdle facing the party’s
contenders in 2012, which is why Romney, Palin and Gingrich are now all
more vehement anti-same-sex-marriage activists than Rick Warren. Palin
even broke with John McCain on the issue during their campaign,
supporting the federal marriage amendment that he rejects. This month,
even as the father of Palin’s out-of-wedlock grandson challenged her own
family values and veracity, she nominated as Alaskan attorney general a
man who has called gay people “degenerates.” Such homophobia didn’t even
play in Alaska — the State Legislature voted the nominee down — and will
doom Republicans like Palin in national elections.
One G.O.P. politician who understands this is the McCain-Palin 2008
campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, who on Friday urged his party to join
him in endorsing same-sex marriage. Another is Jon Huntsman Jr., the
governor of Utah, who in February endorsed civil unions for gay couples,
a position seemingly indistinguishable from Obama’s. Huntsman is not some
left-coast Hollywood Republican. He’s a Mormon presiding over what Gallup
ranks as the reddest state in the country.
“We must embrace all citizens as equals,” Huntsman told me in an
interview last week. “I’ve always stood tall on this.” Has he been hurt
by his position? Not remotely. “A lot of people gave the issue more
scrutiny after it became the topic of the week,” he said, and started to
see it “in human terms.” Letters, calls, polls and conversations with
voters around the state all confirmed to him that opinion has “shifted
quite substantially” toward his point of view. Huntsman’s approval rating
now stands at 84 percent.
He believes that social issues should not be a priority for Republicans
in any case during an economic crisis. He also is an outspoken foe of the
“nativist language” that has marked the G.O.P. of late. Huntsman doesn’t
share “the view of some” that “the party was created in 1980.” He yearns
for it to reclaim Lincoln’s faith in “individual dignity.”
As marital equality haltingly but inexorably spreads state by state for
gay Americans in the years to come, Utah will hardly be in the lead to
follow Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont. But the fact that it
too is taking its first steps down that road is extraordinary. It is
justice, not a storm, that is gathering. Only those who have spread the
poisons of bigotry and fear have any reason to be afraid.
--
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the
entrails of the last priest.” -Dennis Diderot Pay your taxes so the
rich don't have to. Atheist #2211
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