Put this in your pipe and smoke it, Brian Brown.

(h/t Joe Sudbay)

UPDATE:  SO this came across my Twitter feed and it didn’t even occur to me to look at the date.  This poll came out last year!  That being said, it’s there.  We’ve been talking about the tipping point a lot the past couple of weeks, and really, it’s an ongoing process.  These years, themselves, are the tipping point.  So we’re going to have a poll here that looks good, one there where we’re under by a couple of points, and then, in the next couple of years, it’s going to break off in our direction for good.  The rest of the post stands.

A new ABC News/Washington Poll has been released was released last year, and something has changed:

Take gay marriage, legal in Massachusetts, Connecticut and now Iowa, with Vermont coming aboard in September. At its low, in 2004, just 32 percent of Americans favored gay marriage, with 62 percent opposed. Now 49 percent support it, vs. 46 percent opposed – the first time in ABC/Post polls that supporters have outnumbered opponents.

More than half, moreover – 53 percent – say a gay marriage held legally in another state should be recognized as legal in their own state.

The surprise is that the shift has occurred across ideological groups. While conservatives are least apt to favor gay marriage, they’ve gone from 10 percent support in 2004 to 19 percent in 2006 and 30 percent now – overall a 20-point, threefold increase, alongside a 13-point gain among liberals and 14 points among moderates. (Politically, support for gay marriage has risen sharply among Democrats and independents alike, while far more slightly among Republicans.)

The tide has turned.  There is no reasonable indication that these numbers won’t continue to rise and rise.  Maggie Gallagher and everyone who thinks like her has lost.  Last night, Argentina welcomed marriage equality.  Today, a DC Court of Appeals told Harry Jackson and Tony Perkins to shove off in their quest to put minority rights up to a vote.  And now we have our first poll with a majority of Americans expressing support for full marriage equality for LGBT citizens.  (The bigots are having a really bad day!)

The fight, of course, is not over.  The professional anti-gay set will get more extreme in their rhetoric over the coming years, and there’s a possibility that they’ll incite violence from the lowest common denominators of our society.  But the war is, essentially, won.  Now we just have to stay engaged as it plays out to its conclusion.  The crazy thing is that it’ll be done without one fundamentalist losing her rights to be as bigoted as she wants.

(h/t David Badash)

Argentina has just passed the United States in terms of equal rights for its citizens, becoming the first Latin American nation to have full marriage equality.  They told their radical religious clerics (Catholic bishops) to take a hike, and they got it done for all their citizens.

“What an unelected, activist country!”, Maggie Gallagher might have just said as she pounded her paws on the table.

In order to express His displeasure with this decision, the Lord plans to fire an asteroid in the general direction of Argentina, but it will miss and land in the ocean somewhere, because His throwing arm just isn’t what it used to be.

Timothy Kincaid points out that Argentina is now the tenth nation in the world with full equality.  None hit by asteroids, you see:

2001 Netherlands
2003 Belgium
2005 Spain
2005 Canada
2006 South Africa
2008 Norway
2009 Sweden
2010 Portugal
2010 Iceland
2010 Argentina

Anyway, CONGRATULATIONS, Argentina!

UPDATE: Joe’s post is more updated now, with links to news sources and whatnot, so go there.  Also, if you’re on Twitter, you would probably enjoy watching Joe gloat in NOM/Maggie Gallagher’s Twitter-face.

Today seems to be the day for the government telling “marriage protecting” groups to shove it:

The ethics commission today rejected a request from the National Organization for Marriage to end an investigation of the group’s finances.

The group, which was the biggest contributor to the successful Yes on 1 campaign to repeal the state’s same-sex marriage law, argued in a letter to the commission that it did not have the legal power to conduct an investigation.

But on a 4-0 vote this morning, the commission rejected that argument.

“It seems to me if this was such a compelling issue for them they would have brought it earlier,” said Commission Chairman Walter McKee. “I have no doubt this will be appealed to Superior Court.”

They’re going for broke here, obviously. As Joe Sudbay said, Brian Brown and Maggie Gallagher obviously have something major to hide.

Can you imagine what it’s like to live in a place without wingnuts?

(Reuters) – Iceland, the only country in the world to have an openly gay head of state, passed a law on Friday allowing same-sex partners to get married in a vote which met with no political resistance.

The Althingi parliament voted 49 to zero to change the wording of marriage legislation to include matrimony between “man and man, woman and woman,” in addition to unions between men and women.

Iceland, a socially tolerant island nation of about 320,000 people, became the first country to elect an openly gay head of state in 2009 when Social Democrat Johanna Sigurdardottir became prime minister after being nominated by her party.

How awesome.

Let’s listen to a little Bj??rk now.

(h/t Gawker)

That’s gotta twist the knife for social conservatives.

Not only does she express support for equality, but she even acknowledges the actuarial elephant in the room: the major remaining steam in the movement to deny LGBT people equal rights is among the elderly and soon-to-be elderly. Younger voters, on both sides of the aisle, are just fine with equality. In fact, they think it’s dandy.

(Towleroad)

Aside from the story of the day, about George Rekers, the NARTH board member, co-founder of the Family Research Council, and BFF of James Dobson, using his lunch money to purchase a male escort to “lift his luggage” (that is what she said), two blog posts struck me as impressive today.

The first is from Lindsay Beyerstein, on the subject of “bigotry” and the labelling of anti-gay marriage activists as such. It was inspired by a minor controversy which erupted when the fantastic Dave Wiegel, who covers the various lairs, sweatshops and basement sex dungeons of the conservative world for the Washington Post, tweeted the following:

“I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots. In 20 years, no one will admit they were a part of that.”

Agreed. As you can imagine, though, anti-gay wingnuts were apoplectic over the suggestion that they’re nothing more than bigots. But that’s what they are, for the most part. They hide behind religious language, but at the root of that is pure bias and yes, bigotry. Lindsay explains:

Absolutely! Opposing gay marriage is the moral equivalent of supporting anti-miscegenation laws.

By definition, bigots are people with unshakable baseless prejudices. There is absolutely no reason, besides blind prejudice, to deny same sex couples the right to civil marriage.

You can use religious language to express your belief that gays and lesbians are disgusting second class citizens unworthy of rights that heterosexuals take for granted, but it doesn’t make your position any less bigoted. Logically, there is no reason to put same-sex relationships on a lesser legal footing than opposite sex unions, unless you think there’s something wrong with them.

You can insist you don’t wish gay people any harm. Perhaps not. But there were lots of pro-segregationists who didn’t wish ill upon black people, but still didn’t want to drink out of the same fountains. They too were bigots.

You can point out that discrimination against gays and lesbians is a longstanding tradition, but that doesn’t excuse your bigotry. If anything, it makes it worse. It was one thing to fear what the expansion of gay rights might do when gays and lesbians had no rights. Today we’re decades into gay liberation and none of the dire predictions have come true. For example, children raised by same-sex parents are at least as healthy and well-adjusted as those raised by opposite sex parents–and no more likely to identify self identify as gay.

I think we actually do our movement a disservice when we shy away from calling a spade a bigot, out of some (in my opinion) misguided effort to find “common ground.” This is actually not a conversation between two equally valid sides. There is the side that believes in liberty and equality, and there is the side which wishes to use its religious convictions and asinine, entirely incorrect version of history as an excuse to take rights, freedoms, and responsibilities away from people they’ve never met. They have a right to the opinions, but we have a responsibility to call those beliefs what they are. Any deference to the fact that many of them don’t think they’re being bigoted is simply counterproductive.

Later in her post, Lindsay alludes to the fact that our media has gotten so pathetically lazy, looking as it does for false equivalence in every story, as a possible cause for certain people’s fear of using accurate terminology to describe the people who fight to make our lives worse:

The idea that the word “bigot” should be off-limits to proponents of tolerance is absurd. That would mean that any attribution of bigotry is logically self-defeating. Surely, even Lewis would acknowledge that there are some people out there who deserve the label. Is it unacceptably intolerant to describe the KKK as a bigoted organization? Maybe the language of corporate journalism is so debased that it’s only acceptable to say that “some civil rights groups allege that the KKK is bigoted.”

Indeed.

That brings us to the second post I saw today that I loved, from Simon Sheppard, the self-described “cranky old fag” at Carnal Nation. In his piece, he addresses the weirdness that inevitably occurs when people attempt to debate things as vital as civil rights on the platform of religious faith. We go through this here a lot — some of our writers and commenters are people of deep religious faith, while others, like me, stand proudly among the ranks of the godless. This leads to the employment of very different tactics when one of our fundamentalist chew toys comes along and stinks up the comments section, with the believers arguing on the basis of religious faith, while we godless take the Fundamentalists to the natural dead-ends of their arguments by simply saying “prove it.” Sheppard’s piece really encapsulates why I believe that, regardless of whether any of us does or doesn’t have religious faith, arguing about civil rights in religious terms is a losing game. He starts out by deconstructing the problems with the argument, common among religious people, that “God made me gay”:

The impulse to stake that claim is understandable. If being queer isn’t a choice, then we deserve equal rights, right? And if we’re an intended part of some divine creation, then GLBT rights even has a heavenly imprimatur, like not eating meat on Fridays.

But, but, but…

(…)

First off, it shouldn’t matter why some of us have turned out queer: We should have our fucking rights regardless. After all, religion isn’t an inborn characteristic, but it’s a protected class anyway. Sorry, Pope, but your flock has chosen a Catholic lifestyle, so they don’t deserve civil rights. Nope, Miss Benedict wouldn’t go for that at all. But somehow, we’re all tangled up in debates about genetics and psychology and stuff, when we should just be insisting on our right to be different, even if it’s by choice.

Take a moment to write down the phrase “Miss Benedict,” because you’ll want to drop it in conversation. I know I already have.

The point, though, is that it doesn’t matter whether or not a person believes that God made him/her gay. Not for the conversation that we’re having anyway. That might be a great conversation between two religious believers, where no one is actively working to take away the rights of the other. Note, though, that he’s not saying that it is a choice (I know how our Fundamentalist readers intentionally misread things). He’s saying that it’s simply irrelevant to the argument. And indeed, Sheppard argues that by debating civil rights for LGBT people in religious terms, we’re giving in to our opponents’ premises:

[F]aith is, by definition, impervious to evidence and logic. So by arguing on religious grounds, we’re basically ceding the ground to our foes.

“God made me gay, and He loves me just the way I am.”

“No, He didn’t and He doesn’t and He wants you to change.”

“Prove it.”

“No, you prove it.”

And there the matter sits. Theological standoff.

In other words, when liberal believers argue with conservative believers, they both put themselves in the situation I described above, when we atheists shut down the fundamentalists by saying “prove it” so fast their heads spin. And that’s not a good place to be! Understand, though, that I’m not touching the subject of whether or not religious faith is reasonable or beneficial or anything like that. This is about tactics. And since liberal religious believers do indeed tend to have a better grasp of reality and logic than conservatives do, it’s good to consider which lines of reasoning are the best.

Fundamentalist religious believers will always believe they “won” the argument with liberal religious believers, simply because they’ve had it drilled so deeply into their skulls that they’re the only ones who take their faith seriously. It seems to me that, religious faith or no, those who care about justice, fairness, equality and love would do better to argue more like the atheists.

Later on in the piece, Sheppard describes exactly what tends to happen when religious people knock heads over LGBT equality:

Believers on our side will nod; antigay churchers will point out what grumpy old Saint Paul said; and we nonbelievers (the vast majority of whom are, incidentally, not antigay) will just think Whatever.

You might, of course, point out that the apparently antigay garbage in the Good Book is the leftovers of a benighted, unscientific age, and mistranslated to boot, but that would bring the rest of the Testaments into question, leaving you somewhat adrift, belief-wise. You might point out that, for whatever reason, there have always been gay humans, bonobos, walruses, and rams. You might even try the scientific method, citing research by the bucketful.

But ultimately, none of that is going to make a whole lot of difference to holy-roller homophobes. Because belief doesn’t care about rational debate. The best response to “God Hates Fags” is not “God Loves Fags.” It’s “This Is A Fucking Secular State, You Inbred Morons.”

Amen!

The point is, when it comes to any argument about our civil rights, we have to be clear about where the Religious Right can shove their religious arguments. They are that irrelevant in the secular United States of America.

Now, you may be saying, “But if we’re both Christians, and just see things differently, maybe I can teach the bigot something!” Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. But I’m going to suggest something here: If you are a Christian who believes in full equality for women, men, all races, LGBT people, etc., then you do not share a religious faith with bigots like Maggie Gallagher, Tony Perkins, Peter LaBarbera, or any of the rest of the horde of Fundamentalist Christians who waste their precious lives trying to hurt families they’ve never met. Your faith might share a name with theirs, but that’s where the similarities end.

The quicker we all realize this — that the Supreme Court didn’t strike down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving because they believed that’s what God wanted, but that there was no rational reason under our Constitution to deny loving couples the right to marry because they were of different races, just as there is no rational reason to deny loving couples the right to marry because they’re the same gender — the quicker we’ll be done fighting for our full equality.

People of faith who support full equality are being attacked in the same way people of no faith are being attacked, by a group of people who believe they have the right to lord their religious beliefs over the rest of the population.

Well, as those two posts explained, those who would fight against equal rights for LGBT Americans are bigots, and this is a secular state.

You inbred morons.

“We’ve tried the carrot. Now it’s time for the stick.”

Oh SNAP, Cynthia Nixon is not happy about New York lawmakers betraying the gay citizens of New York and leaving us as second class citizens in the state. I really love the low-grade seethe she’s got going on this message.

(h/t The New Civil Rights Movement)

You’ve seen the video, now go check ‘em out on the Facebook and the Twitter Machine.

They usually don’t pick it up. Watch this video of a kid wrapping his head around the concept that the two guys he’s talking to are married…to each other!

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville adds, “Congratulations, kid. You’ve now got a more sophisticated understanding of marriage equality than about a third of the adult populace of the United States.”

She also helpfully provides the transcript, because, you know, even cute kids are hard to understand sometimes:

Text onscreen: Thanksgiving.

[Calen, a little boy, is standing in a bathroom next to a sink, looking up into the camera.]

Calen: A husband’s a boy.

Adult male voice from behind camera: Right.

Calen: A wife is a girl and a husband’s a boy. Then you two are husbands! [He hold up two fingers on both hands.] Wifes are girls; husbands are boys.

Voice from behind camera: Right.

Second adult male voice, from next to camera: That’s right. So, if you’re a boy‚Äî

Calen: You’ll be a husband.

Second Voice: Right.

First Voice: Yeah, we’re both husbands.

Calen: [puts his head in his hand] You’re both husbands?

Second Voice: Is that confusing—

Calen: You married each other?! That’s funny! [slaps hand to head]

Second Voice: That’s funny, right?

Calen: Yeah. [looks thoughtful] I usually see husbands and wives, but this is the VERY FIRST TIME I saw husbands and husbands! [grins excitedly]

[The two men laugh; Second Voice peers around and grins into camera.]

Calen: So funny. [edit] So that means you LOVE EACH OTHER!

First Voice: Yeah.

Calen: Yeah. Yeah, they’re much alike. You’re much alike. Hey, I’m going to play ping-pong now.

First Voice: Okay.

[Camera follows Calen out into the hallway; he turns back and looks at the two men.]

Calen: You can play if you want to.

Text onscreen: You’re much alike.

Just one more example that shows that, for the Religious Right, their war is long lost. It’s just a matter of time and demographics.

(h/t my friend Reha)

Last week, when Washington DC started issuing marriage licenses, the Washington Post printed the picture at the right, of Jeremy Ames and Taka Ariga, happily kissing as they went for their license, on the front page. For non-sadsack wingnuts, it was no big deal, but of course, the knuckledraggers of our society always show themselves at times like these. Here’s a bit of what WaPo ombudsman Andy Anderson had to deal with:

A few of the readers have engaged in rants, often with anti-gay slurs. One called me to complain about “promoting a faggot lifestyle.” Another complained about the photo in an e-mail to the two Post reporters who wrote Thursday’ story about the licenses: “That kind of stuff makes normal people want to throw up. People have kids who are being exposed to this crap. I will be glad when your rag goes out of business. Real men marry women.”

(…)

Wrote Lee Miller of Columbia: “I would appreciate it if your cover pictures would not be so disturbing where my kids can see it easily on the kitchen table… please don’t shove this “Gay” business in our face. This is something that should have shown up on an inside page or two (without the picture).”

In comments to the ombudsman’ call-in line (202.334.7582), one reader said, “the picture of two guys kissing makes me cringe.” Another called it “ridiculous,” adding: “Put it on page 10 or page four, put it in the paper, but I do not like it right there where I can’t avoid looking at it.”

Many threatened to cancel their Post subscriptions, and more than two dozen did.

Ah don’ lahke seein’ dem faggot men kissy-kissy in mah mornin’ paper, ah’llbedamned!

So, quite rightly, the ombudsman ended his piece by insulting those readers’ for their ignorance and irrational fear:

News photos capture reality. And the prominent display reflects the historic significance of what was occurring. The recent D.C. Council decision to approve same-sex marriage was the culmination of a decades-long gay rights fight for equality. Same-sex marriage is now legal in the District. The photo of Ames and Ariga kissing simply showed joy that would be exhibited by any couple planning to wed — especially a couple who previously had been denied the legal right to marry.

There was a time, after court-ordered integration, when readers complained about front-page photos of blacks mixing with whites. Today, photo images of same-sex couples capture the same reality of societal change.

Ombudsman burn!

Jim Newell at Wonkette picks out the one error in Anderson’s argument, though:

Ha ha, who says these same complainers ever accepted the black/white photographs? ASK “EM ABOUT THOSE, IN 2010.

Touch?©, Jim. You probably should also click that clicky to read Jim’s summary of this same article. I would quote it, but I don’t think I can do that at a dot org, you know?

(Photo credit: Bill O’Leary, The Washington Post)