> Historian George
> Chauncey - who wrote a wonderful book called Gay New York - has a new
> book
> just out called Why Marriage? about the forces shaping the gay marriage
> debate. In it he argues that as society gets more tolerant in some
> ways and
> gays make progress, those opposed to homosexuality get more militant,
> hence
> all these terrible state-level amendments. It provides a good counter
> to any
> straightforward narrative of progress or decline.
Isn't this true of a lot of prejudices? Racial prejudice works the same way -- as the society gets more racially tolerant, and the older forms of bigotry are more frowned on by most people, the bigots rush to issues where their bigotry can be seen as more "respectable," such as affirmative action, where it can be cloaked in the disguise of "fairness." Anti-semitism often works this way, too. A lot of the fashionable anti-intellectualism (not to mention the fashionable flaunting of Christianity) seen today is probably masked anti-semitism.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.