Today’s awesome person

Well what do you want from Romney? After all, he does belong to a religion that is essentially the Scientology of Christianity.

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No, I don’t this this issue will ever go away, sadly. That old man was awesome, and he’s right, but there will ALWAYS be a sizable chunk of people who don’t like homosexuals and want to deny them rights. It will ALWAYS be that way, and it will make the civil rights act look like a blip.

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I want to buy that fellow a beer.

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I disagree with most of the above comments, which seem to indicate that there is something unique about the issue of homosexuality and how American culture is coping with it.

This analysis fails to understand Republican political strategy at the most fundamental level. Gay persons are just the penultimate* in a long line of scape-goating and hate-mongering. From women and blacks, to communists, to gays, to immigrants, to muslims, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Spending time thinking of how THEY think about gays misses the point and gets stuck to their trap. And then each battle has to be fought individually.

Reject intolerance at an a priori level and fight the battle once.

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Well put, highlyverbal. (One minor quibble: I think you meant something other than penultimate — that means the next to the last in a series. Something tells me the GOP isn’t going to stop demonizing people after their next target after Teh Gayz.)

I’d also like to add:
* I thought Mr. Garon did a great job of speaking to Romney in a thoughtful, respectful way, even though the guy was basically saying “You don’t deserve constitutional rights.” Kudos to him for keeping his cool, and then letting some of that frustration show to the reporters — he should be mad, but it was nice of him not to just unload on Romney (which would have ruined a very touching moment).
* Really, Romney? When the Constitution was written, marriage was between a man and a woman? Yes, assuming they were both white. Anything else from the original Constitution that we wanted changed? Ah yes, here are a couple.

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A couple years ago I first heard the “Gays aren’t being denied their constitutional rights because they’re totally free to get married to someone of the opposite sex” argument. I think it was from Orson Scott Card, who’s stupid and insane even by the standards of the reactionaries currently haunting the American political establishment, so I didn’t pay it much mind, but now it’s surfaced as the go-to talking point for right wingers who oppose gay marriage.

What I’d like to know is, do they honestly imagine that this argument works on anyone who doesn’t already want gays to go away forever and stop making them feel funny in their pants? I guess the point is to win back the people who are inclined to dislike gays but see the glaring inequality and injustice in forbidding gays from marrying with a tissue-thin, vaguely logical-sounding argument (“You are technically correct. The best kind of correct!”) But I honestly can’t imagine anyone with a brain finding this argument to be anything more than the slimy, weaselly bit of self-justification that it is.

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What jsr said. “You do realize that the constitution likely would have counted our current president as 3/5 of a man, and wouldn’t have given him the right to vote either way?”

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No wonder these a-holes don’t want gays to serve in the military; now they have to explain to our veterans that they don’t deserve basic civil rights.

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