Gays may have the fastest of all civil rights movements

[WillParkinson]

SAN FRANCISCO — In 1958, the Gallup Poll asked Americans whether they approved or disapproved of marriage between blacks and whites. The response was overwhelming: 94% were opposed, a sentiment that held for decades. It took nearly 40 years until a majority of those surveyed said marriage between people of different skin colors was acceptable.

By contrast, attitudes toward gays and lesbians have changed so much in just the last 10 years that, as Gallup reported last week, "half or more now agree that being gay is morally acceptable, that gay relations ought to be legal and that gay or lesbian couples should have the right to legally marry." (In 1996, when Gallup first asked about legalizing same-sex marriage, 68% of Americans were opposed.)

Politically, President Obama felt it safe enough recently to abandon his studied ambiguity and endorse same-sex marriage amid a tough reelection campaign. Days later, a top Republican pollster, Jan van Lohuizen, issued a warning to his party, suggesting opponents were on the wrong side of the issue. Support has grown, he wrote in a strategy memo, "at an accelerated rate with no sign of slowing down."

If, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice, then it's arguably moving faster and bending quicker in the direction of gay rights than any civil rights movement before.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gay-rights-movement-20120521,0,5637291.story

[Fearless]

1. The Internet Age does speed things up nicely.

[closeupready]

4. I think the internet is a HUGE part of GLBT advances.

In part because the MSM really wanted us to disappear, and they controlled the public arena/public discussion. The internet atomized that power, consequences of which are still unfolding.

[Fearless]

7. Agreed!

[Politicalboi]

2. The gays were mostly

Invisible for centuries. IMO the reason for acceptance is that even the most "straight" couple can produce a gay child. And the internetS helped too.

[MNBrewer]

5. It's entirely about coming out. Internet is a small portion of it.

Once people decided that "gay pride" was something worth pursuing, everything changed.

[GeorgeGist]

3. Please. Stop the Stupidity

Gays were invented before white people.

[FreeState]

6. Stopped reading at the point of gays are affluent

Last edited Tue May 22, 2012, 01:37 AM - Edit history (1)

This article is a prime example of an author that knows nothing but writes like he/she knows it all even though several of the premises are easily disproven.

http://www.bilerico.com/2009/03/the_end_of_gay_affluence_lgb_people_more.php

The notion that gay people are disproportionately wealthy represents one of the most common and pernicious myths surrounding the LGBT community. The stereotype is so widespread that it even found its way into US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in the 1996 Romer v. Evans case that overturned an anti-gay initiative in Colorado.

A new study on gay poverty [pdf] that I co-authored with colleagues from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst and Boston) and the Williams Institute (UCLA), released today in a Capitol Hill briefing, shows just how wrong Justice Scalia was. It turns out that lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals (LGB) are actually more likely than heterosexuals to be living in poverty. Further, one in five children being raised by same-sex couples in the United States lives in poverty, giving further insight into the legal and economics difficulties LGB parents face.

We used three different population-based (meaning findings can be generalized to the population) and publicly-funded data sources: the 2000 Census, the 2002 National Survey on Family Growth (NSFG), and the 2005 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). Analyses from all three surveys confirm that large numbers of LGB men and women are living in poverty, perhaps as many as a quarter of lesbian/bisexual women and one in seven gay/bisexual men. We also find that lesbian/bisexual women are more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to receive public assistance.

Our study shows that African American LGB people especially those raising children, face even more serious economic challenges. Their sexual orientation and racial/ethnic identities combine to put them at even greater risk of poverty than either black married couples or white gay/lesbian couples. The same is true for LGB people living in rural areas.

[Initech]

8. I think a lot of it had to do with Bush 43.

And how people really saw the ugly side in the way the asshole Christian fundamentalists were running things and the flat out hate that was coming from the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I'm glad that's beginning to turn around. In 10 years we'll wonder why this was ever an issue.

[Iggo]

9. Good!