gay rights - the new civil rights struggle?

More of this kind of twaddle here

Not necessarily...but remember, we're not dealing with questions of, say, voting access, separated 'but equal' facilities and the like. Unlike racism's ability to act 'on sight' as it were, homophobia and its projections and fears deals with a perceived 'enemy' that in fact is impossible to identify just by looking at someone. The need for outlandish stereotypes and extreme condemnation makes sense in this regard because a certain mental picture needs to be kept strong, and so the bogeymen are 'recruiters' and equations of gay=pedophile and so forth (and, as Leon notes, there's the whole issue of 'choice' as opposed to an intrinsic identity, which a racist does not deny but then turns into something vile). Not that, as Drew Daniel noted elsewhere and to make a randomly specific parallel, people might not watch a Gay Pride parade or something and get jealous because everyone seems to be having a good time.

Yeah, that was poorly phrased -- I meant the more fundamentalist christian elements fo the gop.

...which in turn links to the idea of 'sin' which appears to be an instrumental justification of homophobia.

x - post

(just a thought really)

So I think it's close to how (racially) mixed marriage was perceived before 1990.

..(I just reread all that .. sorry if it's offensive, I was trying to get in the mind of a redneck..)

It may actually go beyond "elitist Liberal elitism." I mean, how can you rationally engage the deductions of such arguments when the premise = as a person who loves people of your own sex, you're not a citizen but this THING, a squirmy rainbow-colored muscley child-molesting THING.

Some people may find it tiresome to have to continually justify their humanity. Just a thought.

OTM. Demonstrations and outrage have been tempered by this very thing: sheer, pre-abortive fatigue.

I'm not so sure. 60% of voters according to exit polls thought that gays should either be able to legally marry or engage in civil unions. I think the marriage thing is very particularly worded to be a "threat" (just like the "teaching homosexuality in schools" is.) Although given the attitudes in some of those red states, it's hard to say.

"So lots of pundits, including you, have been attributing Bush's success nationally to his having excited the base over the gay marriage issue. In particular, the strategy of using the ballot initiatives in 11 states, thereby dragging religious conservatives to the polls to vote against marriage and at the same time check the box next to Bush, is regarded as having been particularly effective.

That is, of course, fiction. Bush improved his share of the popular vote by 3.2% from 2000 to 2004 (47.9 in 2000, 51.1 in 2004). Now how did he do in the states which had anti-marriage ballot initiatives?

Arkansas +3.0%
Georgia +3.3%
Kentucky +3.1%
Michigan +1.8%
Mississippi +2.2%
Montana +0.7%
North Dakota +2.2%
Ohio +1.0%
Oklahoma +5.3%
Oregon +0.8%
Utah +4.2%

Only in two states (Utah and Oklahoma) did he gain a significantly higher vote share than he did nationwide. Maybe comparing to the national popular vote is misleading, so let's compare each of those states to a neighboring, politically-similar state which did not have an anti-marriage initiative on the ballot:

Missouri +2.9 (AR +3.0)
Florida +3.4 (GA +3.3)
Tennessee +5.7 (KY +3.1)
Wisconsin +1.5 (MI +1.8)
Alabama +6.0 (MS +2.2)
Idaho +1.2 (MT +0.7)
South Dakota -0.4 (ND +2.2)
Pennsylvania +2.0 (OH +1.0)
Texas +1.8 (OK +5.3)
Washington +1.2 (OR +0.8)
Wyoming +1.2 (UT +4.2)

Again, not much. In only 3 cases (UT-WY, ND-SD, and OK-TX) did Bush improve a lot more in a state with an anti-marriage initiative than he did in the state with which it was paired. And, in the case of North Dakota, the hotly contested Senate race in South Dakota may have skewed things a bit; a better comparison might be Nebraska, where Bush was +3.0% better in 2004 than in 2000, a better improvement than what he got in North Dakota.
That leaves two states, Oklahoma and Utah, which had an anti-marriage initiative on the ballot and in which Bush's vote share improved more both relative to the nation as a whole and relative to the neighboring state selected.
It is certainly possible that the fact that the Bush administration raised the issue to the level to which did led to increased turnout among religious conservatives nationwide, which then resulted in Bush's overall improved vote share over his 2000 performance. However, one would also expect that this vote share improvement would have been particularly high in states in which the marriage issue was particularly relevant. On the contrary, there is no evidence that suggests that the strategy of putting the anti-marriage initiatives on the ballot in several states did anything to improve Bush's performance in those states."

When I was a kid, we had to figure out how on our own.