It’s always wild seeing rappers come out against homophobia. I’ve got more than my share of songs I can’t really enjoy like I once did.
But it’s good to see, and I can’t even say I live outside of it. I can remember coming out of Baltimore and viewing every interaction with someone who was gay with a kind of smug derision. It’s the closest I’ve come to a kind of deep, unstated pride in ignorance—not so much a violent hostility, but a meanness based almost entirely on not understanding. And frankly not even believing there was anything worth understanding.
When I write with some curiosity about the racist mind, this is really place I’m pulling from. I know how easy it is to believe that people have nothing to contribute, and to hold that belief not out of evidence of their lives, but out of ignorance of them. Still it’s one thing for people to tell you why that’s wrong—and that’s important. But it’s only philosophy. For the facts, I needed real world contact with actual people. I could not simply be told that “diversity is good.” I had to see it.
It was a really nice day in New York yesterday. I took my wife and son out for brunch, then roamed a bit with Kenyatta. We ended up in West Village and I was suddenly struck by how thankful I was to gay America. There is probably a more agile way to say that. But the fact is this. You can’t really do my job, and live where I have lived, and live how I lived and not deal with the LGBT world. I would go so far as to say that if you are a writer with aspiration, homophobia is bad for business.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only writer/editor that I specifically pay attention to these days.
He’s fantastic. Thanks for reading!
![What Straight Allies Need to Understand About Gay Marriage and States’ Rights
Too many people whose marriages are not up for debate have been griping that President Obama’s announcement was too little, too late. He’s endorsing federalism, argued Adam Serwer in Mother Jones. He’s championing state’s rights, complained left-of-center blogger Digby: “This is the essence of retrograde, reactionary politics and there’s a long history of these ‘sovereign’ states exercising their ‘rights’ to deny minorities their freedom.” Even House Assistant Minority Leader Jim Clyburn was upset with the president’s approach. “I depart from the president on the state-by-state approach. If you consider this to be a civil right, and I do, I don’t think civil rights ought to be left up to a state-by-state approach,” he said Monday.
Such critics of Obama are wrong. They are wrong about what the administration has done and said, wrong on the politics of gay marriage, and — most important — they are wrong on the law.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m411mtP0xJ1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![This Week, Obama Helped Traditional Marriage and North Carolina Hurt It
This week, voters in North Carolina, where same-sex marriage was already prohibited, passed a constitutional amendment against the practice, while President Obama, who wields no direct power over state marriage laws, finally affirmed that he favors full marriage rights for gays and lesbians.These were both symbolic moves. Social conservatives assert that North Carolinians were standing up for traditional marriage while Obama was betraying it, an analysis that they earnestly believe. But there’s something they don’t understand.Gays in North Carolina and everywhere else in the United States are never returning to the closet. Gay couples are going to be on television sitcoms, in movies, and dining at downtown restaurants on Saturday nights. Kids are going to have gay friends in school, and they’re going to have straight friends with gay parents. As older people die and kids grow into teens and adults, acceptance of gays as normal is only going to increase. The question that remains is how these gay couples are going to live. When they live together or raise children together, are they going to marry?
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3tbl6RWJg1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![Robert Wright on Gay Marriage, Barack Obama, and Andrew Sullivan
I was at the New Republic in 1989 when Andrew Sullivan published his pathbreaking cover story “The Case for Gay Marriage.” There are two things about the experience that may be hard to convey to people younger than 25, maybe even 30:
1) What a radical idea this seemed like at the time. I’m not sure I’d ever heard anyone mention gay marriage, and I’d certainly never seen a written defense of it.
2) How important a single magazine could be in pre-internet days. Mike Kinsley, who for my money is the most amazing editor of his generation, had during the 1980s made the New Republic the magazine in Washington.
The combination of these two things was potent. When you take an off-the-charts idea and unveil it on the most prominent stage in Washington, it gets people talking. Yesterday, when President Obama embraced gay marriage, this was a kind of culmination of the conversation that Andrew, more than any other person, started.
Read more. [Image: The New Republic]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3t8t56kQf1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![Why Do We Care What Obama Thinks About Gay Marriage?
President Obama can order the assassination of an American citizen but he cannot order the performance of a same-sex marriage. The problem isn’t his lack of power in the second case but his appropriation of power in the first. Yet his equivocation about marriage may matter in November at least a little; stating a position for or against it could matter a lot; his assassination authority will likely matter not at all. Make war, not love. The targeted assassination of citizens merely suspected of terrorism enjoys popular support (a 79 percent approval rating), while same sex marriage passionately divides us, generating heated controversies that the president hesitates to touch. It’s an ugly portrait of post-9/11 America: More people are concerned with restricting their neighbor’s right to marry than the president’s power to kill. It’s no wonder his position on marriage is “evolving;” so is the position of the public. Besides, if Obama declared for or against gay marriage, his declaration would have symbolic, not legal value. His administration has already exercised the primary legal power it possesses in this debate by declining to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal recognition and federal benefits to same sex couples married under state law. DOMA is now subject to a strong 14th Amendment challenge involving a defense of states’ rights, not an invocation of federal, much less presidential, power.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3rjjui68T1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![The Case for Gay Acceptance in the Catholic Church
The Catholic Church’s attitude towards homosexuality is at odds with its tradition of tolerance and understanding. The actual practice of the Church is true to this tradition. What other institution separates men and women and encourages them to live together in monasteries and convents where they can develop deep relationships with those who share their kind of love?
The fight for the dignity of the LGBT community is a fight for the soul of today’s Church. Some conservatives see the hierarchy’s current, traditional teaching on sex as the Church’s defining position. They don’t really like to talk about, or even be reminded of, the Church’s teachings on immigration, or protection of the environment, or the greed that produces financial meltdowns, all of which they would find distastefully liberal.
For them there is only one issue — sex, or pelvic politics as some call it. The Pope himself pointed this out on in visit to Mexico, where he said that “not a few Catholics have a certain schizophrenia with regard to individual and public morality…. In public life they follow paths that don’t respond to the great values necessary for the foundation of a just society.”
If we wish to change the Church, we must first convey our views in language, images, and theology that reach people where they are. And secondly, we should make it clear that disagreement with the hierarchy is a critical part of our history.
Read more. [Image: rococohobo/Flickr]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1m208FKWn1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
