Come Senators, Congressman, Please Heed The Call
The political landscape is shifting. Perhaps slowly, but the numbers don’t lie.
The first elected official who ever made the case to me for legalizing gay marriage — and maybe the last, come to think of it — was Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota…
His libertarian philosophy extended to social issues, on which Ventura, who counted gay men among his closest aides and friends, said government had no business intruding.
As the governor told me then, he didn’t care what the gay couple next door were doing in the privacy of their home, including hanging up a marriage certificate, just as he didn’t think anyone should pester him about keeping a gun in his nightstand.
From last week’s NYT Magazine article “Queer Developments”, by Matt Bai. Same source, the percentage of respondents, by age, who agree that not allowing same-sex couples to marry is discrimination, by age:
18-34 year olds 60%
35-54 year olds 45%
55 and older 38%
To explain the statistically significant difference in results by age, Bai hypothesizes:
The gist of the disagreement now isn’t partisan or theological as much as it is generational.
Unlike their parents, younger Americans and those now transitioning into middle age have had openly gay friends and colleagues all their lives, and they understand homosexuality to be a form of biological happenstance rather than of emotional disturbance.
They’re less inclined to restrict the personal decisions of gay Americans.
On the second paragraph, I agree and disagree. First the agreement: people who know and interact daily with openly gay co-workers, neighbors, roommates, friends, and, not in the least, family members soon discover the truth: a person’s sexual orientation is irrelevant. To anything and everything, unless perhaps you want to date them and are yourself of the opposite sex persuasion.
They can be your best friends or be jerks, brilliant or dim, trustworthy or dishonest… in other words, “they” as a group are… just like everyone else. They are human. Their sexuality is irrelevant. (I’m assuming in part you don’t spend any time considering your straight friends’ sex lives. If you’re a pervert, or some sort of deviant unable to stop fixating on what everyone you come into contact with does in the bedroom, you may as well stop reading this post.)
Back to Bai’s point: humans fear the unknown. When gays were forced by society into the closet, some people never realized they worked and lived along side homosexuals. Folks were then able to convince themselves, incorrectly, that everyone they knew was straight. This situation kicked in the “us vs. them” gene, and allowed them to assume that gay people were “others”. “They” were different, and therefore to be feared and condemned, ridiculed and scapegoated.
So Bai is correct that, in part, the shifting opinion polls and differences in attitudes between young and old are in great part due to one simple fact: the younger you are, the more likely you are to “know gay people”.
As far as the second part of his statement, his biological happenstance/emotional disturbance dichotomy isn’t completely off base either. Certainly the gay-friendly among us don’t believe that being born homosexual is some sort of psychological problem. (While psychiatrists are still feeling political and social pressure when it comes to the upcoming 2012 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I believe homosexuality has been removed from that mix.)
But I propose that the real answer lies in part I: Gen Y, for all its faults, more than previous generations, doesn’t even consider why gays are gay, they just don’t care. It doesn’t matter. End of story.
And to politicians wishing to stir up the basest of human emotions, willing to pit one fine American against another, for the sake of playing to an ever shrinking base – a base that is literally dying off? Bob Dylan said it first: the times they are a-changin.
