Word: gays
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Conventional wisdom tells us that the absence of Will & Grace—or Will & Will—from this presidential election is a good sign for gays and lesbians. During the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, the Republican Party used gay and lesbian issues to stir up their base. They used the breakdown of the traditional family as a rallying point around which millions of voters were mobilized. Timothy P. McCarthy ’93, a lecturer on History and Literature and Public Policy and a member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Task Force, put it best...
...can’t say that I am elated by the silence that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues have received during this long and hard-fought race—a race so often touted for breaking glass ceilings. I can’t help but worry that this silence is the product of apathy among progressives in the fight to end homophobia rather than a sea change in America’s opinion of LGBT people and their “lifestyles...
...country’s acceptance of LGBT people has changed remarkably, of course, in the past generation, but the recent killing of a gay 14-year-old in Los Angeles by his classmate is just another reminder of how much work remains. If the “ceiling” that still confronts LGBT people in this country—“don’t ask, don’t tell,” marriage prohibitions, and homophobia in general—is going to be broken, silence will not be the tool that does...
...Bill Clinton, who Toni Morrison could have also called the “first gay president” because of his outreach to LGBT people in 1992, stepped away from his campaign promise to undo “don’t ask, don’t tell” as soon as he became president-elect in the face of a wave of opposition that startled him. Would a sitting Democratic president risk mobilizing the Right in 2012 by stepping out on a limb for LGBT rights...
...attention paid to racism and the punishments doled out to racists, comparing other types of persecution to racism elicits uproar. Other marginalized groups, such as homosexuals or obese people, identify their causes with the civil rights struggle to gain legitimacy. But Ford cautions against comparing something like gay marriage to miscegenation. Yes, it grabs people’s attention, and it may even silence opponents, but ultimately the comparison serves to undermine everyone’s struggle for greater rights and acceptance. The playing of the race card dilutes the next hand’s potency; racism becomes a nebulous...