Sunday, May 22, 2011

A little good news: it's coming

I keep saying it - it's coming. It will come.

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.

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.
(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.)

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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