Between Frank Rich's op-ed column in the Sunday New York Times on "unprincipled gay-baiting as a full-fledged political movement" and Mark Morford's last week at San Francisco Chronicle with reminiscences about his hypocritical scout master, the Spokane Mayor Jim West, we get a suddenly focused picture of the gay-baiting and exploitation of homophobia underpinning the anti-judiciary movement aflame in this country. On the one year anniversary of legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts, add the Boston Globe's survey on just who is opposed to gay marriage: Americans older than 65, Republicans, Protestants, regular churchgoers and Southerners. Among young people, only about a third are opposed, compared to about half of those age 50-64 and 64 percent of those older than 65. This is an ugly anti-homosexual period that should die out as Generations X and Y take over but not before this form of McCarthyism does longterm damage to our judicial branch.
Rich's description:
"..even as it has ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay, unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement. It's a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-"activist" judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they're for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that "Advise and Consent" so powerfully extols.
Today's judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn't homosexuality per se that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the courts. That's a sham. These people have been attacking gay people since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, characterizes the religious right's anti-gay campaign as a 30-year war, dating back to the late 1970's.."
Post a Comment