GAY TRUTH

Same sex marriage has become the issue of our time. Michael Kinsley summed the situation nicely: “You may be in favor of raising taxes on the rich, increasing support for the poor, nurturing the planet, and repealing Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act , but if you don’t support gay marriage, you’re out of the club.” How did this come to pass? There’s no easy answer, which is not surprising. Same sex marriage is the issue because lots of different interests, concerns, and trends converge on it. The first thing to say is that the gay rights movement has been largely an upper middle class project. Thurgood Marshall attended Lincoln University, an all-black college in southeastern Pennsylvania, and then Howard University Law School . Gay activist Larry Kramer went to Yale. Judge Vaughn Walker went to Stanford Law School . I have little doubt that the first gay Supreme Court Justice will be a graduate of either Yale or Harvard Law Schools. There are many reasons why the gay rights ...

Image via CrunchBase How is this law going to hurt your marriage? That is the jeer hurled at opponents of New York ’s new same-sex marriage law. As the Boston Globe put it memorably some time ago, same-sex marriage will “no more undermine traditional marriage than sailing undermines swimming”. Indeed, many supporters of traditional marriage don't know how to respond. Fortunately, however, at least three answers were quickly presented in the  New York Times . The Times supported the law and praised as “a powerful and principled choice” when it was passed. Since it is New York’s newspaper of record and the flagship of American progressive thinking, there can be little doubt that the ideas promoted in its pages will someday emerge as real options. The first was  an op-ed piece by Katherine M. Franke , a Columbia University law professor. On the day before the bill passed, she confessed that she really didn’t want to marry her long-time lesbian partner anyway.  Wh...