A new Gallup poll is out on whether Americans support — not marriage equality — but whether or not Americans view gay and lesbian relations to be moral, and whether or not they should be legal.  Guess what?  We win, at our highest levels ever, on both counts.  Check out these graphics:

Of course, it’s fairly pathetic that a full 40% of the country still thinks that gay relationships are “morally wrong,” considering the fact that there is zero evidence for that belief.*  We’ve got a ways to go.  But the fact that 64% now believes that our lives [and it is our lives, for god's sake**] should be legal should tell you something.  You see, there are always people in the middle who still have “two minds” on the subject.  Even if they’re “uncomfortable” with it, appeals to fairness, diversity and equality tell them that, regardless of their personal feelings on the subject, they shouldn’t try to take the fullness of life away from entire groups of people.

And again, look at those trend lines.  They are only and always going in our favor.  The one exception is in the first poll, where there is a pronounced dip in the 80′s.  And class, what happened in the 80′s, that it took a long time for the American public to get informed about?  Good job, children!

Anyway, the moral of the story [and the theme of this day, apparently] is that Maggie Gallagher, Brian Brown, Peter LaBarbera, Tony Perkins, and all others who fight to instill hatred for you and me day in, day out, every single day of their sad, forgotten lives, need to get real jobs.

Or get sugar daddies.  Whatever.  Perkins might like that.

[h/t Andy]

*Then again, large swaths of the American public believe lots of things with no basis in fact or evidence.

**Someone ostensibly close to me tried to tell me the other day that I work for a hate group, just of a different kind.  After picking my jaw up off the floor, I tried in vain to explain to these deaf ears that NO, your false equivalency is utter bullshit, as we seek to take nothing from those who hate us.  However, the theocratic, mindless bigots we fight against every day think they have a constitutional right to screw an entire minority group out of our own freedoms to live our lives with the same guarantees, privileges, rights and responsibilities as the rest of the population.  How anyone who is a sentient being can fail to see that is utterly beyond me.

Weekly Column

A couple of weeks ago I wrote, “The war over gay rights in America and other modern nations has been largely won. Too many people have come out of the closet and will never go back in for the clock to be turned back.”

This trend towards acceptance has only accelerated since my column and may have reached a tipping point. New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote about a new Gallup Poll that found, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. Also, for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.

Blow attributes these advancements to LGBT people coming out and the realization that it is primarily weirdoes and socially stunted hypocrites who are obsessed or threatened by homosexuality.

“Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality,” wrote Blow. “Many heterosexual men see this, and they don’t want to be associated with it. It’ like being antigay is becoming the old gay. Not cool.”

Blow is correct. Normal, healthy, functional heterosexuals do not become paranoid or fixated on homosexuals. It is primarily people with sexual hang-ups, extreme religious indoctrination or deep, dark secrets that are preoccupied and consumed by the sexual orientation of others.

Of course, this does not mean that all supporters of civil rights for LGBT people are comfortable with the idea of gay sex. The good news is they don’t have to be. While speaking across the nation I have found an easy way of diffusing this issue. I ask the crowd to look at people they assume are heterosexual in the audience. Then, I ask if they would want to see all of the people they stared at having sexual intercourse.

The answer is inevitably and resoundingly, “No”. Then, I simply make the point that there are many people, heterosexual and homosexual, they would not want to witness in bed. And, they never have to unless they elect to do so — making any objections in terms of the “ick” factor moot. As simple as this sounds, it works and audiences “get it.”

Adding momentum to the LGBT struggle for equality is a cute McDonald’ television commercial in France that dealt with a teenager who had not yet told his father he was gay. The message of the campaign is, “come as you are, just leave a little fatter.” Okay, I added the last part.

While such an ad is not likely to air in the United States anytime soon, it does not have to in order to have a positive impact. Thanks to the Internet and talk shows, millions of people will see the ad and associate the message with their beloved Golden Arches.

Speaking of the impact of social media, in Newsweek, Joshua Alston made the case that websites such as Facebook are accelerating the demise of the closet. He wrote about the, “painstaking labor that goes into being secretly gay in the age of information sharing.” His advice to a friend who was outed by a seemingly innocuous tweet: “if you want to be in the closet, you can’t be on Facebook and Twitter.”

Crucial to the sudden surge of success is the falling of ugly stereotypes, such as the old canard that LGBT people are a threat to children. This week, the research journal, Pediatrics, published a study by Nanette Gartrell, a professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco and Henry Bos, a behavioral scientist at University of Amsterdam. The article discussed a landmark study that measured the long-term affects on children who were raised by lesbian parents.

“We simply expected to find no difference in psychological adjustment between adolescents reared in lesbian families and the normative sample of age-matched controls,” says Gartrell. “I was surprised to find that on some measures we found higher levels of [psychological] competency and lower levels of behavioral problems. It wasn’t something I anticipated.”

Finally, The Human Rights Campaign reports that Kaiser Permanente updated its Patients’ Bill of Rights to fully protect LGBT patients and their families from discrimination. These changes make Kaiser Permanente the first large health network to have a fully inclusive non-discrimination policy for LGBT people.

Sure, full legal equality may take two decades and the battle against bigotry will last forever. But, there is no denying that the LGBT movement is on the move like never before. The homophobes are finally the minority and appearing more secluded and deluded by the day. It’ not time to crack open a bottle of champagne, but feel free to treat your self to a cold beer and appreciate the progress.

A new Gallup poll released Monday showed that while the number of Americans opposed to gay marriage continues to outnumber those in support of it, the number opposed has dropped to tie Gallup’s all-time low for the number.

According to the poll, which surveyed 1,029 adults May 3 – 6, 53% of Americans oppose gay marriage compared to 44% who support it. The 53% number is tied with 2007′s 53% for the lowest opposition to gay marriage among Americans that Gallup has recorded.

The recent numbers also represent a change from the numbers in 2009, when 57% of Americans voiced opposition to gay marriage compared to 40% who supported it.

The fact is, unless something dramatic happens – such as a theo-fascist – takeover of the U.S.m we have won this culture war. The polls keep climbing upward and the religious right has no strategy to reverse this trend.