Re. the marriage equality battle: Do we understand what it means when we say we know it's going to be a tough battle?

"I don't think there is any evidence of a national backlash against gay marriage. It should be borne in mind that gay marriage is still opposed by a small majority or large plurality of Americans. But there's not really any evidence that the numbers are getting worse; instead, they appear to be v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y getting better."

-- Nate Silver, in a fivethirtyeight.com post yesterday, "Maine Revisited: Is There a Backlash Against Same-Sex Marriage?"

by Ken

It hasn't been a happy time of late in the struggle for marriage equality, with this series of electoral defeats seemingly capped by this week's comedy of errors in the New York State Senate. At the same time, I think it's important to remember:

(a) Just how far we've come. Go back just a few years, and who would have imagined that the issue would even be on the table, let alone drawing something like half the vote in places where it's been put to a vote?

(b) And that we've always known that the die-hard opponents of basic rights for LGBT folk, seeing that history is squarely against them as more and more Americans sensibly cease caring about their fellow Americans' sexual orientation, and feeling themselves under siege, fighting as if for their lives for their deeply cherished bigotry, would throw every resource they could muster at the fight.

I can't believe there's anyone involved in the struggle who has been factually unaware of this, or that the homophobe community has incredibly supporters at its disposal. Which makes me wonder, what the heck did people think teh pushback was going to look like?

We might not, perhaps, have expected that, the Catholic and Mormon churches, normally such bitter enemies, would jointly inject themselves so blatantly and unapologetically in the political process. But did anyone really expect them to sit idly by on the sidelines? Surely nothing could have been more predictable than the rise of an aggressively funded outfit like the so-called National Organization for Marriage. They're doing what they feel they have to do. We have to continue doing what we know we have to.

Let me make clear that I'm not advocating any particular position or strategy for the fight ahead. I'm just pointing out that what NOM and its funders and allies have accomplished isn't unexpected and shouldn't be taken as more than a stage in the fight. We have to study what they're doing, and figure out how to combat it, but again, the point -- in the grand scheme -- isn't that they're winning, it's that they know they're losing, and unless they can make so much noise as to trample the growing sense of Americans of good will, they're going to lose. Not without a great fight on our part, of course.

MAYBE NOW SENATOR DUANE WILL BE WILLING TO
NAME THE SENATE CONFIDANTS WHO BETRAYED HIM?

I know the marriage-equality forces are reeling from this week's 38-24 vote in the New York State Senate against the proposed marriage-equality bill. Goodness knows, NOM is having a field day celebrating the victory. And even now it doesn't seems as if anyone, possibly including the bill's chief Senate sponsor and manager, Manhattan Sen. Thomas Duane, knows how we got from his pre-vote confidence that he had "yes" commitements from enough senators, both Democrats and Republicans, to pass the bill, to the actual tally.

In reality the defeat wasn't nearly as bad as the the 38-24 vote suggests. It's quite understandable that any Republicans who were prepared to vote yes went scurrying for cover when the roll call revealed how many of the officially undeclared Democrats were voting no. Given the present suicidally extreme climate in their party, and the all too vivid recent example made of their Assembly colleague Dede Scozzafava in her bid for the NY-23 congressional seat, and with NOM and all the other loons poised to fund primary challengers, they would have been nuts to stick with the sunk ship.

But the fact that eight Democratic senators voted no was appalling. At the same time, this was less about support for LGBT civil rights than the sorry state of the NYS Senate, which we've talked about all too frequently. The so-called Democratic "majority" isn't much of one, having no experience of running the Senate. Remember, most of these people were elected when Senate Democrats appeared to be a permanent minority, and had basically no role in its operation except to show up in order to keep their modest perks flowing. The Senate "majority" is also essentially leaderless. Of course there are some perfectly honorable, competent people among the 32 Senate Democrats, but an awful lot of them see themselves as basically "independent contractors," open for business on a wide range of issues. It's sort of a political swap shop.

Before the vote, and even in the immediate aftermath, Senator Duane was refusing to reveal the names of the senators who had made private commitments to him to vote yes. He explained that these were given "in confidence." Now that a whole bunch of senators have apparently betrayed those confidences, I'm wondering whether the senator might feel ethically free to name at least the Democats who, in his telling, lied to him.

THE ARGUMENT SPLITTING THE LGBT COMMUNITY

Certainly a factor that has to be considered is the basic-rights needs of people who live in what we might call blood-red states, where average voters haven't yet grasped that their opinion really has no legitimate bearing on which citizens are entitled to the fundamental rights that are supposed to belong to everyone in this country.

There is a rising tide of sentiment in the LGBT community that the marriage battle has been a diversion from, and even a cause of active harm, in their struggle for basic legal rights like freedom from employment and housing discrimination, medical-visitation and other next-of-king rights, inheritance and other legal rights, and so on. People who can be denied or thrown out of their homes, or be denied or fired from jobs, for being LGBT, have more urgent priorities than marriage equality, and in those blood-red states have actually suffered additional discrimination as fear of "the gays" has prompted legislators and law-enforcement officials to buttress the hostility of the forces of law to their basic rights.

I do believe it's true, as many engaged in the marriage-equality struggle argue, that to a significant extent the visibility of that struggle has assumed and promoted a wider acceptance of rights universality. That said, it certainly seems that there are states in which there is little hope of wining those basic rights on the political level, and the most realistic hope is federal civil rights action, the obvious starting point being ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, now struggling for a foothold in both houses of Congress.

People are arguing whether it's realistically possible to continue to fight on both fronts, and noting that the ENDA fight, for one, doesn't seem to be getting an awful lot of push, so easily is it wiped out of consciousness by each marriage-equality setback. Again, I'm not saying I have the answers, but I do know that those concerns can't be relaxed.

Considering all the progress that's been made in the public understanding that LGBT people aren't intrinsically better or worse than any other people, isn't it appalling that in the year 2009 so many people are forced to live in terror of losing their jobs or their homes if they lose control of their dark "secret"? Is this situation really acceptable to most Americans? There's a job to be done there.

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