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What Marriage Is For→
Margaret Talbot looks at the arguments challenging the constitutionality of same-sex-marriage bans that will go before the Supreme Court in March: “Maybe love’s not all you need in a definition of marriage, but it’s got to be in there somewhere…” http://nyr.kr/XR0WC8
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Obama’s Gay-Rights To-Do List: Eight Big Ideas
Gay-rights advocates worry that because they have been so successful over these past four years, they might be hard-pressed to come up with an equally bold and ambitious agenda for the second Obama term. Luckily, they have some ideas for the President…
- Richard Socarides. Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/V4syCW
Photograph by Emily Berl/The New York Times/Redux.
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Out Loud: Gay Culture and Assimilation→
In this week’s issue, Alex Ross reflects on the gay community’s extraordinary political progress in recent decades. For The New Yorker Out Loud, Ross and Hilton Als talk with Sasha Weiss about what increasing assimilation means for gay culture. Also, George Saunders confesses his love for Ayn Rand. Click-through to listen now.
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From Harvey Milk to Prop 8, in this week’s issue Alex Ross traces the history of the gay-rights movement, interlacing the movement’s milestones with his own memories and experiences as a gay man in America. Ross writes, “I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States… Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind.” But, he writes, “Today, gay people of a certain age may feel as though they had stepped out of a lavender time machine…. Gay rights have made such rapid progress that there is an urge to look back and assess what has happened.”
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"The Constitution either does or does not guarantee the rights of gay people to marry—and the opinions of voters has nothing to do with resolving that question. The whole point of judicial review is to protect minority groups from having their rights violated by the whims of the majority. In theory, the work of the courts and the will of the voters operate on entirely separate tracks.
The real world, however, works very differently…"— In today’s Daily Comment, Jeffrey Toobin looks at whether same-sex marriage can win in the states and at the Supreme Court. Continue reading. -
Deciding Marriage
In today’s Daily Comment, Jeffrey Toobin writes about the Supreme Court, same-sex marriage cases, and defensive voting: http://nyr.kr/Sw2UW0
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L.G.B.T. in Charlotte: Obama's Unambivalent Supporters→
Amy Davidson on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered caucus meeting at the Democratic National Convention, and gays and lesbians within the Democratic Party: http://nyr.kr/PH68WJ
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“It was the birthday party for Stonewall, not the birth the year before, that gave rise to the triumphant gay revolution”: http://nyr.kr/L8gITl
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A Sunday morning cartoon. For more: http://nyr.kr/KwizX3
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This Sunday, as every fourth Sunday in June, the streets of New York will fill with prideful marchers celebrating Pride Month. There will be similar marches, too, in cities around the country. Sunday marks the forty-third year since the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar called Stonewall that supposedly started the modern gay revolution. The myth is that a few hundred angry people acted out in lower Manhattan, and the world changed. Maybe that’s where Occupy Wall Street got the idea that this is how it’s done.
It’s the wrong lesson… Their achievement is a field guide to how to make a social movement, and also offers insight into why Occupy is failing.
What Stonewall got right, and Occupy got wrong: http://nyr.kr/L8gITl
