Full marriage equality will come, full legal equality for LGBT people will come. A time will come when overt bigotry will be no more acceptable here than overt racism is now.
A majority of Americans say in a new poll that same-sex marriage should be legalized, marking the first time for such support since Gallup began tracking the issue in 2004.(The necessary adjective "overt" in connection with bigotry, especially considering all the dog-whistling going on with the die-hard birthers, is also why I said full "legal" equality rather than full equality. But don't harsh my buzz.)
Support for gay marriage jumped nine percentage points to 53%, largely due to an increase from independents and Democrats, the Gallup survey showed. ...
The new Gallup Poll showed 69% of Democrats and 59% of independents now support same-sex marriage, both double-digit increases from last year's survey. Nearly 3 in 10 Republicans, or 28%, support gay marriage -- the same showing as last year.
Of course, there's still crap like the "don't say gay" bill that has passed the Tennessee Senate - which provoked this brilliant rejoinder from George Takei (Thanks, Daisy!) - but even those are starting to feel like desperate attempts to hold back the tide. Meanwhile, there are more and more occasions like this one from February, where a high school in Minnesota tried to prevent a lesbian couple who were both elected to a "royalty court" for a school pep rally from entering together - only to back down in the face of a suit and then witness the student body cheering as the couple entered.
As Martin Luther King was fond of saying, paraphrasing the early-19th century minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Sometimes the arc is hard to perceive - Parker himself said "My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve." - but, damn it all and despite all my fears and pessimism and
failing hope, it is there.
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