So Which Is It?

On the one hand, Andrew Sullivan is citing this American Family Institute poll.

In the meantime, the Times/CBS poll tells a different story:

Attitudes on the subject seemed to be linked to how people view marriage itself. A majority of respondents, 53 percent, said marriage is largely a religious matter. Seventy-one percent of those people opposed gay marriage. Similarly, 33 percent of respondents said marriage is largely a legal matter and a majority of those people, 55 percent, said they support gay marriage.

The most positive feelings toward gay people were registered among respondents younger 30, and among those who knew gay people.

The nationwide poll said that 55 percent of respondents favored an amendment to the constitution that would allow marriage only between a man and a woman, while 40 percent opposed the idea.

Medved, citing the same poll on his show yesterday, noted that opposition to homosexuality itself seems to be on the rise.

Why is this? At a time when social attitudes about so many things - sex, sexual orientation, gender roles, race relations, religion and many other traditional breaking points in American life - are liberalizing or libertinizing, why are attitudes toward homosexual marriage, reform of obsolescent sodomy laws and other key "gay" issues taking hits?

I'm no expert, but I'd suspect it's for a lot of the same reasons that feminism has taken such a whack in the last decade.

"Identity feminism" - the victim-mongering, hyper-academic, bitter cousin of the "equity feminism" that drove the grandmothers of so many current feminists - has alienated a big swathe of society over the last few decades, including many of the younger women that have been opting for a more nuanced, equity-based feminism in place of the vitriolic man-hatred of their bitter aunts. Why? Because "identity feminism" went beyond challenging an unjust status-quo - something most Americans eventually will get behind - and sought to become a power, in and of itself.

I think the gay movement has made, I think, many of the same mistakes that the Identity Feminists and the likes of Jesse Jackson did - going beyond the initial focus on ending inequity and bigotry (which are thoroughly admirable), and moving on to trying to re-mold society at large in an image they found acceptable (which is not).

And just as the feminists alienated many would-be supporters by trying to re-mold institutions like marriage and life itself to fit their agenda (and, in the case of public education, succeeding!), gays have gone beyond the fight against bigotry to attack institutions to which most of society is positively attaced - the Boy Scouts, and the traditional religious notion of marriage.

Huge mistake. While there is a thin film of people who will hate gays no matter what they do, the attack on the religious conception of marriage has alienated an awful lot of people who are, in many ways, very sympathetic to the gay movement's other agendas.

As a result, we have the surreal dichotomy; homosexuals and homosexuality are becoming more accepted (can you imaging "Queer Eye" or 30 years ago? Or the current state, where gay tastes serve as the social barometer of hipness?), while the reconstructionist agenda of the gay movement, if this Times/CBS polls is accurate, is seeing its support erode. It's the same dichotomy that the feminists and Afro-Americans have seen - women and african-americans are more equal than ever before, while Germaine Greer and Jesse Jackson's fortunes are at a bit of a nadir.

Posted by Mitch at December 23, 2003 07:01 AM