[Vision2020] Lessons in Fearmongering

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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November 5, 2012
Lessons in Fearmongering By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

SEATTLE

The nation’s vigilant theocrats figured us out. We can’t slip anything past
them. It’s not the right to marry that we’re after — to make the same
commitment that our straight peers are automatically able to, even if
they’re thrice divorced, tipsy and standing before an Elvis impersonator in
Vegas. It’s the nation’s young. We’re out to recruit the next generation,
plump up our ranks and pave the way to a gay utopia in which the Tony
Awards get higher Nielsen ratings than the Super Bowl and we all dance at
the inauguration of President Ellen DeGeneres.

Please. If you think we have time for such elaborate stratagems, you
underestimate how many hours we put in at the gym. Besides which, I prefer
football to “Footloose,” and I can round up plenty of other gay men who are
with me on that, along with lesbians more loyal to “The View” than to
“Ellen.”

On this Election Day, citizens in four states are weighing in on same-sex
marriage. Minnesotans are deciding whether to ban it in their Constitution,
but here in Washington and in Maine and Maryland as well, the issue is
whether to permit it, and a majority of “yes” votes would mark the first
time that a state has done so by popular referendum.

That milestone seems within reach, and horrified opponents have responded
with their favorite and nastiest scare tactic, the insinuation that
America’s children are about to be corrupted. This fearmongering worked
four years ago in California, where voters rejected same-sex marriage after
the repeated broadcast of a
commercial<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PgjcgqFYP4>in which an
adorable little girl exultantly informs her aghast mother that
in school that day, she learned that princes could marry princes and that
she could marry a princess. A stern-looking man then sweeps in to warn
viewers that they will be saying O.K. to such ostensible brainwashing if
they let gay couples say “I do.”

The analogous commercial<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MER3qEaQlkY&feature=plcp>this
year spotlights David and Tonia Parker, who insist that after
Massachusetts began to allow same-sex marriage in 2004, their son and other
children were forced to learn about homosexual relationships in school.
While it’s true that some schools mentioned same-sex couples in diversity
discussions, it wasn’t mandated by the state or connected to the advent of
same-sex marriage, and the referendums this Election Day say nothing at all
about curriculums. Moreover, a federal court that heard a lawsuit by the
Parkers rightly determined that a cursory reference to gay couples in
classrooms “does not constitute ‘indoctrination,’ ” as the Parkers had
claimed.

David Parker is just a textbook homophobe in the garb of a humbly concerned
parent. He has likened homosexuality to alcoholism and equated teachers who
mention it to sexual predators using foul language in the park.

He and his ilk love to link gay rights with sexual predation. An ad used in
Florida <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91BqQCmpzug> in 2009 shows a blond
girl in a pink T-shirt entering a playground restroom; seconds later, a man
in a baseball cap and sunglasses follows her in. The commercial then claims
that the Gainesville City Commission made this legal, presumably by
including transgendered people in an anti-discrimination ordinance that
covered public accommodations.

As for anti-gay crusaders’ fixation with indoctrination, I’d like them to
explain how so many of us turned out gay or lesbian despite having straight
parents and, in my day, being exposed to movies, TV shows and Top 40 songs
that portrayed an almost exclusively heterosexual world.

I’d also like them to meet Jeff DeGroot, 27, a law student here who has
been giving public speeches in support of the Washington referendum. He
grew up in Oregon with two mothers — “the most wonderful parents in the
world,” he told me — who went to all his hockey games, nagged him about his
homework and have now been together for 38 years. They were even married to
each other briefly after a county clerk in Oregon began to grant same-sex
marriage licenses in 2004. The Oregon Supreme Court nullified those
weddings the following year, devastating them, he said.

Surely, I remarked, his upbringing had made him homosexual.

He laughed. “My girlfriend would have something to say about that,” he
said.

You are who you are. And that’s all that Jeff and I and others who endorse
same-sex marriage want anyone to be.

I have 11 nieces and nephews, the oldest of whom is 16, and do you know how
many times I’ve discussed my sexual orientation with her? Zero. She knows
I’m gay, knows my partner — and that’s that. Instead we talk about the New
York Giants, whom she roots for, and the Denver Broncos, my team.

The Broncos won on Sunday. I’ve decided to treat that as an omen that at
least one of the same-sex marriage referendums will succeed, and that
unjustified fears and an unjustifiable inequality are in retreat.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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