I must confess that I’m truly baffled by the level of support I’m seeing among my friends for presidential candidate Ron Paul. While the number of Paul fans in my circles is relatively small, he nonetheless enjoys the highest level of support from my LGBT-identified and equality-supporting friends out of all the non-LGBT friendly candidates. In addition, the Ron Paul supporters I know tend to be passionately, often blindly, devoted to their candidate, steamrolling over any criticisms of Paul no matter how legitimate and simply dismissing out of hand those they cannot outargue.

To many people, Ron Paul’s sound bites are very appealing: less government. Individual liberty. Legalization of marijuana and other drugs. (Yes, I think this has a lot to do with the support Paul receives, especially among young people and college students.) Unfortunately, it’s been my experience that most supporters of Ron Paul stop there and either don’t dig any further or ignore the digging done by others. This alarms me, because Ron Paul is very, very, VERY anti-gay.

On his best days, Ron Paul supports the so-called “states’ rights” position regarding marriage equality. On his worst, he has specifically bragged about his efforts to obstruct and attack LGBT people’s civil rights and gone out of his way to slander and mischaracterize LGBT people.

Setting aside the generally disturbing deployment of the “states’ rights” argument at all, given its shameful history as a justifier of slavery and Jim Crow laws in this country, I’d like to ask Mr. Paul (as well as those who profess to support both Ron Paul and LGBT equality) why LGBT couples should be the only Americans whose marriages are subject to the “states’ rights” standard. Why should only LGBT couples, but not straight couples, have to seek the approval of our state legislatures and/or citizenry in order to marry the person we love? Why should our marriages be the only ones that dissolve when we cross state lines? And why is this an acceptable state of affairs, especially given the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law to all American citizens?

Yeah, many of my Paul-supporting friends will say, but that’s just your opinion.

Which brings up another point: the difference between opinion and fact. Maybe it’s just me, but in this era of false equivalency memes, it appears as though this distinction is being increasingly overlooked. A fact is something that is empirically true and can be supported by evidence, while an opinion is a belief that may or may not be backed up with some type of evidence, usually taking the form of a subjective statement that can be emotionally based or result from a person’s individual interpretation of a fact.

FACT: Ron Paul’s presidential campaign issued a flyer that boasted about the candidate’s efforts to introduce legislation that would remove challenges to the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act from the federal court system.

FACT: Ron Paul’s Iowa state director is Mike Heath, a long-term Christian right activist who formerly served as the board chairman of an SPLC-certified anti-gay hate group known as “Americans for Truth About Homosexuality.”

FACT: Ron Paul has a long history of racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic comments.

FACT: As state above, Ron Paul supports the so-called “states’ rights” approach to marriage, but interestingly, only for LGBT couples.

FACT: Ron Paul said, “If I were in Congress in 1996, I would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which used Congress’ constitutional authority to define what official state documents other states have to recognize under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, to ensure that no state would be forced to recognize a same-sex marriage license issued in another state.”

FACT: Ron Paul opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by civilian, nonreligious employers.

Based on the above examples and so many others, there is no way one can honestly characterize Ron Paul as anything other than anti-gay. Of course LGBTs and supporters of LGBT equality, like all voters, can and should vote for whomever they choose. I am neither disputing that right nor attempting in any way to tell anyone how to vote. What I am saying, however, is that LGBT and pro-LGBT voters should at least acknowledge that a vote for a candidate like Ron Paul is a vote for someone who opposes their rights.

Out Magazine editor Aaron Hicklin discusses how much things have changed for the better in just the last few years.

The perception that marriage equality was a poisoned pink chalice persisted up to the 2008 election, when even Obama was careful to clarify that he wasn’t in favour of gay marriage…Yet in this year’s debates between the ragtag pack of Republican presidential nominees, the usual rhetoric denouncing gay marriage has been noticeably absent….

What changed in those few short years? In many ways the transformation of attitudes has been ongoing for decades, accelerated in large part by the impact of Aids, which reconfigured gay identity around community and relationships. In TV shows such as Glee and Modern Family, gays are no longer comic stooges or punchlines, their relationships treated with the same respect as those of their straight counterparts. … To young gay men and women today the idea that they will be able to marry and raise kids no longer sounds outlandish or controversial. It sounds axiomatic. …

…Looking back it’s clear that this dramatic metamorphosis, from poppers to paninis, represented a broader shift in gay culture, or – if you believe the commentator Andrew Sullivan – the “inexorable evolution” towards the end of gay culture itself. …When I became editor of Out, it seemed pertinent to ask what function a gay magazine would serve in a world that, if not yet post-gay, seemed to be heading that way.

…One of those small internet anecdotes that suddenly go viral came to my notice. It was a conversation between a mother and her six-year old son about the TV show Glee that had been posted on her Tumblr account, and it went like this:

‘”Mommy, Kurt and Blaine are boyfriends.”

“Yes, they are,” I affirm.

“They don’t like kissing girls. They just kiss boys.”

“That’s true.”

“Mommy, they are just like me.”

“That’s great, baby. You know I love you no matter what?”

“I know…” I could hear him rolling his eyes at me.”‘

I find myself thinking about that conversation a lot, and how much it would have meant to me growing up to have role models that offered a template for what I might expect from life. And what it might have meant for the straight kids around me to see homosexuality not as something strange and peculiar, but as something familiar and equal. That six-year-old boy might grow up to be gay, or he might grow up to be straight. Either way, he will hopefully grow up without ever thinking it necessary to emphasise the distinction. Then we can truly talk about post-gay.

There are gay conservatives.  I know this.  When I have the sense of humor for it, I try to read their words and figure out where they’re coming from, and how they got there.  There is a common, oft-repeated complaint among gay conservative bloggers and pundits [all three of them] that the Big Gay Left constantly carries water for other liberal causes.  They assume that this is something that happens without forethought, which is always strange to me, because liberalism and LGBT equality go hand in hand.

Indeed, it’s actually conservatism, with its competing strains — disproven economic theory meant to serve Wall Street and Wall Street only vs. libertarianism which hates Wall Street; making the government so small that you can drown it in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist so famously said vs. a social conservatism that hates democracy and seeks to use the government to damage the lives of LGBT people and women from coast to coast, and so forth — that is anything but an aligned movement.  Liberalism?  Not so much.

Amanda Marcotte highlights this in a larger post about John Edwards’ troubles, lamenting just how sucky it is that Edwards has turned out to be such a giant ass in his personal life, as his presidential campaign was one of the few in recent history which actually tied together all the different arms of liberalism into one defining philosophy, and who explained it in terms that made sense to the average voter.  And it really is one defining philosophy. She outlines the three major arms of liberalism and starts to connect the dots:

1) Economic justice. This is labor movements, anti-poverty initiatives, fair taxation, health care reform, social services, government that is functional, etc. Anything that helps secure the middle class, bolsters the economy, and lifts people out of poverty.

2) Social justice. Feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, anti-colonialism, things like that—anything that divides people against each other on the basis of identity hierarchies.

3) Environmentalism and rationalism. Preserving the planet, promoting science, basically using the now to work towards a better tomorrow.

Obviously, a smart person sees how these are interrelated and that you really fail at anti-racism if you don’t think about poverty and that you’re not a good environmentalist if economic justice isn’t part of your worldview, and you’re not an effective feminist if you treat science like it’s a lark.

They really all do go together. I’d add that you’re not really going to understand the gay rights struggle if you aren’t a rationalist who believes in science, and you’re not going to understand the need for marriage equality fully if you don’t understand the real economic results of policies that serve the whole population well — as opposed to just those at the top. This seems like a good time to point out that gay conservatives tend to be upper-middle class white men, or those who dream of one day being so, and are willing to overlook where they actually are in service of who they might be, maybe one day, if things go well for them. And Amanda’s right — there are a million other intersection points between those three arms.

One thing I’ve been encouraged by over the past year has been that, more and more every day, Truth Wins Out readers are coming from more and more diverse areas out of the greater liberal spectrum. Surely there is a huge case to be made for why moderates and conservatives should also support equality for LGBT people, as there is really no philosophy aside from theocracy that it doesn’t fit into. But for those who wonder why educated gay rights activists also tend to support the rest of the planks of liberalism as well, well, now you know why.

Sarah Posner reports on the findings of Southern Illinois University sociologist Darren Sherkat, who has compiled the General Social Survey results over the last couple of decades on public support for marriage equality. I’ll let her set it up for you:

Sherkat tells me:

There are no other scientific surveys which have asked questions about same sex marriage over a long period of time. The only other remaining scientific general population surveys are the National Election Surveys, and I don’t think they ever asked a question about that (or if they did it was only in the 2008 version). I can’t stress this enough.

In other words, the GSS is the only survey that shows these trends over time, using face-to-face surveys of respondents (as opposed to telephone polls).

And here’s what support for marriage equality looks like, from 1988 to the present day:

Stunning.

Sarah also addresses the notion that young Conservative Christians are becoming more tolerant. Apparently that is not the case, but it IS true that the younger generations in general are much more tolerant of LGBT equality. That can only mean one thing, and it’s something we already knew: the wingnut churches are driving their young away in droves. Anecdotally, I graduated from a small-ish private Christian school and grew up in a fairly conservative area, and I can think of very few people from that time who still attend church on a regular basis. Surely, there are some who do, but the overwhelming feeling I get is that many stay tangentially involved in church, perhaps when they’re with their extended families, but otherwise, it’s not that big of a deal in their lives. Moreover, I know others who are still very much Christian, but who shun the conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist labels like the plague. I’ve even heard the term “recovering Fundamentalist” thrown around in my age group.

I only point this out because wingnuts are likely to try to scapegoat gays and feminism and the lib’rul culture or whatever else for the fact that their young just don’t buy what they’re selling the way they used to. The fact of the matter is that they did it to themselves, when they made the decision to dig their heels in and refuse to assimilate into modern culture. It’s increasingly difficult to keep young people in churches that teach young earth creationism when the internet is full of actual science. It’s increasingly difficult to keep them hating gay people, and thus worshipping at the altar of Fundamentalism, when their college roommate is gay and they realize that their parents and pastors have been lying to them all these years.

Anyway, we’re winning, is the point. The sharp rise in support shown on the graph is evidence of the tipping point Wayne and I have talked about a lot over the past year. There just comes a certain point where there is too much correct information out there, too much education, for people to keep their fingers in their ears any longer. It will only get better.

I know, what a general post title. But I just can’t muster anything more interesting about the fact that that a “Terri Schiavo memorial concert” will be happening in Indianapolis in order to spread awareness about the “sanctity of life.”

“We’re holding this concert to do just that,” he said, “but not only to remember Terri, but to remind people that there’s tens of thousands other persons like my sister living with brain injuries today that need to be protected.”

Yes, there are tens of thousands of braindead vegetables out there, far beyond the point of a medical recovery even being possible, and we need to make sure we keep them plugged in, squandering the resources and, indeed, the lives of their loved ones in order to “protect the sanctity of life.”

It’s so strange and grotesque that they call themselves “pro-life.”

Amanda Marcotte was right yesterday when she wrote this:

In this contrast, you really begin to see the perversity of calling the anti-choice movement “pro-life”—it’ an oxymoron. They’re motivated, on a base level, by a hatred of life. Or, life as most of us define it, when we use phrases like “what I want to do with my life”, “living my life”, “life is good”, and pretty much every other use of “life” outside of anti-choice propaganda. Life, for most people, is about being in this world. It’ about enjoying food, enjoying sex, having goals, making plans, creating relationships, loving each other, developing beliefs, thinking thoughts, learning, enjoying a good night’ rest, listening to music, enjoying drama, enjoying quiet, kicking your feet up and petting the cat, diving into your work, making a difference, helping others, selfishly hiding away and doing for yourself, falling in love, grieving a loss, the thrill of winning, the sorrow of losing, the ambiguities of the human spirit, the bright light of reason, the joy of discovery, the curiosity inspired by mystery, a walk in the park, a Christmas with family, a loud concert, a good book.

But when anti-choicers speak reverently of “life”, they don’t mean this. They imagine things that are technically alive, but have no relationship to this word—Terri Schiavo laying in bed with no brain to speak of, a mindless fetus, a fertilized egg, a stem cell. They relate to these beings, who are not really living, and scrounge up nothing but anger and hatred at those of us who are perceived as actually living in the impure, disgusting, life-having world with connections to family and friends, brainy intellectual engagement with reality and of course, dirty, filthy, despicable sex. The impure wetness of real life disturbs them. They dwell endlessly on the medically disgusting aspects of abortion—aspects that exist in all medical procedures—because their minds are enraptured by hatred of the perceived filthiness of human bodies and life. The world with all its squirming, actually living life—it’ bothersome. Better to dwell on the imagined peace of the fetus, the immoveable quiet of a person in a vegetative state. Someone who is recognizably human but not really living—the purest, simplest, least disgusting way of being. Purity is always under threat, from fluoride to uncontrolled sexuality.

Yeah, read that whole piece.

Why am I writing about this on an LGBT blog? Well, for one, because we’re dealing with the exact same group of patriarchal Religious Right goons who seek to keep us from living our lives. Because it’s the same exact fight. To borrow from Amanda again,

…these two fights—for reproductive rights and gay rights—are the same fight. It’ about the right of people who aren’t straight men to have a sexuality without punishment or shame. We’re the ones who deserve the label “pro-life”, because we support the right for gays and women to survive and to thrive—to live. And make no mistake, we’re all up against a patriarchal right that is sadistic and violent.

Yep. The joke about anti-choice groups being “pro-life” right up until the moment of birth is clearly true. They “support life” right up to the point that they can no longer control it, project their insecurities and shame onto it, etc.

Sick people.

UPDATE BELOW

From his blog:

As a straight man I really have nothing to gain by standing up for equal rights for Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual, and/or my Transgender friends. Except for the fact that I have many friends who are still subjected to hurtful comments by a society that hasn’t yet embraced fully the nature of… nature.

Supporting a limiting system of rules for specific people to follow is prejudice. It’ the Antithesis of Christ Consciousness and (like smoking) it’ Soooo last century.

Allowing love to freely flourish will only enhance the life experience – For All.

Toward the end, he makes a salient point about how important it is for those who aren’t directly affected by this issue of civil rights and justice to plug in and speak up:

I understand many people who stumble onto this blog are already dialed in and ready to transform the world. Much of my community is too. But there are some who still don’t care one way or the other about the ways of being in the world. Thereby, it’ up to us to share our positive outlook on our favorite issues.

That’s the key, really. The more that we can encourage our friends and families to make like a Diane Savino and speak, the closer we’ll be to a place where LGBT equality is a foregone conclusion and the voices of hatred are not silenced (because this is the United States, of course), but are so marginalized as to be rendered irrelevant.

Read the whole thing.

In other news, I had a love affair with this Jason Mraz song a few years ago, so I think I’ll post it.

UPDATE: Egad, most of the comments over there are pro-equality and pro-humanity, but there are a few backwards fools in there. I’m trying to set them straight as long as I have patience, but any of you who want to go lay the smack down, be my guest.