Don’t miss this week’s offering on the FAIR radio program CounterSpin (11/21/08):
The victory of Proposition 8 in California has, at least for the moment, put the brakes on gay marriage in that state. The post-election recriminations are flying, but the main story we’re hearing is that black voters turned out in droves–to support Barack Obama, and to defeat gay marriage rights. Is that narrative correct? We’ll ask journalist Kai Wright.
And:
According to the New York Times, Newsweek and NPR, for Barack Obama to keep his promise to close the Guantanamo detention camp will be next to impossible, extremely complicated and easier said than done. You could get the idea that some journalists would like to put off resolving the problems created by a Bush policy to isolate detainees and totally deprive them of rights. We’ll discuss Guantanamo, Obama’s promise and the media with journalist Andy Worthington, the author of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.
Also check out FAIR’s archives by subject: Race and Racism, Homophobia and Civil Liberties.
Hey, I was listening to your November 21st CounterSpin podcast, and heard you scratching your heads over how it lost. What I think happened was, the anti-gay side talked about children. They repeated the lie that homosexuality is a threat to your children – and the gays wanted none of it. Whenever the issue of children would come up, gays would dismiss it. “Marriage has nothing to do with children,” said Dan Savage on a CNN debate. Mr. Savage probably thought, “If I can get them to not talk about chlidren I’ll have won the debate.”
But it doesn’t really work that way. There are more ways than just outright talking about children to get people to think about children, and the anti-gay side knows this. Words like “family” “marriage” are so closely related to children in our brains, they can act as almost substitutes, or code-words if you want to use today’s political jargon.
So there really is no way to avoid the subject. Protecting children is the strongest human instinct. Whoever “owns” that real estate in people’s brain will win them over. Yet the gays did not pre-emptively make this a central part of their campaign. They focused on gay adults’ rights, which is all very nice, but pales in comparison to importance when the issue of children’s protection is raised. They only talked about children defensively. After an attack ad came out, they would respond, but their ad would only reinforce the phrase. So they never really got that frame going with their argument.
And the argument that got left out, that could fill that “real estate,” that I believe really could turn the debate around, is the harm, the actual mental and physical harm resulting from parents who teach their kids that homosexuality is simply a behavior that needs to be overcome. Studies and testimonies show this to be incredibly harmful to gay children. Gays with negative feelings about their sexual identity have higher rates of depression, suicide, and tend to have less healthy sex lives. This is a serious problem.
For whatever reason the gays decided to ignore that this time around, they cannot afford to next time. Children will always be used by the other side and gays will have a harder battle if they do not talk about how they are also for protecting children.
I’d like to make one more point. The protecting-children argument is likely more effective in parents. I think, in addition to the progressive nature of history, this explains not only the gap between old and young on gay marriage (because the old are more likely to have kids) but it could explain the high levels in the evangelical and black community, because of their high teen pregnancy rates making a larger percentage of their voters parents. I do, however, understand that the polls on blacks is at best flimsy and might hide the real picture. This theory might be the real picture.
I’ve written to Gallup polls with this theory, they haven’t written me back yet. I was hoping for a study to be done on this, to see if winning over parents is perhaps the best strategy for the gay rights movement. Maybe you guys at FAIR could look into this, or contact someone you know.
I read Kai Wright’s solid piece at The Root, and recommend others do, as well.
As is too rare these days, or any days, she doesn’t take sides, but excoriates both blacks and white gays for their prejudiced blind spots.
I think part of the problem is a sense of betrayal based on an expectation that oppressed peoples somehow are endowed with empathy for others similarly discriminated against.
The homophobia of many blacks, and the racism of many white gays, put the lie to that. Why should we be surprised that such hate and fear exists?
Isn’t the aim of the power structure to divide and conquer … to play to our worst instincts to keep us from uniting against it?
We’re all pieces of shit to one degree or another, and we have to resist our inhuman (or all too human) urges and find our common humanity.
The stakes have always been high … but the clock’s ticking faster than ever. We may already be doomed … but we certainly are if our better angels are never let out of the closet.
I also wanted to piggyback on youngcynic’s remarks about children.
Weeks ago, I felt that the No on 8 campaign was wrong-headed … as it kept the faces and voices of the community off of its ads.
I believed that you had to have folks talking about what marriage means to them and what losing it would mean to them. I thought they were playing into the hands of the fagbashers by not showing the community … implying there was some sort of shame attached to being queer.
And not talking about kids followed that same fearful strategy. The “experts” contended that straights would be scared off by showing queers as they are, in all their diversity, including as parents.
I hope to hell the lesson’s been learned, but I’m afraid the “leadership” will simply take it that they didn’t execute the strategy well enough … not that it was deeply flawed to begin with.
Maybe it’s time the whole undemocratic model of “leadership” was scrapped?