Has the Moral Battle over Homosexuality Been Won?
Has the moral battle over homosexuality been won?
Yes, says Linda Hirshman in her new book, Victory – The Triumphant Gay Revolution. She presents the idea that 2011 was the year of moral triumph of the LGBT movement. So is it true that we have passed the tipping point and now the leverage has taken over and the slide is unstoppable?
Slate columnist Nathaniel Frank writes:
Proclaiming 2011 the year of triumph for the gay rights movement, Hirshman is onto something, and in many ways she is. That was the year when more than one-half the country told pollsters for the first time that they supported the rights of gays to marry, and—perhaps more importantly—that same-sex relations are “morally acceptable.” It was the year the military finally allowed openly gay Americans to be warriors, after two centuries of stigma and exclusion. It was a year when the Justice Department declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, and when a new law in New York state doubled the number of people living in a jurisdiction where gays could wed.
He notes,
In the epilogue of Linda Hirshman’s breezily written history Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, one of her interview subjects asks her, “Do you really think you ought to call it Victory?” After all, only six states allow gay people to marry, while 30 have constitutional amendments barring it, and the federal government refuses to recognize any same-sex marriage or to pass a long-stalled nondiscrimination law. On top of legal inequality, LGBT Americans are disproportionately prone to attempting suicide, to being bullied and assaulted, and to struggling with depression and anxiety. Transgender Americans face even greater challenges in securing both equal rights and equal dignity.
So, did they win the moral battle? Here is what we know for sure about those who call good evil and evil good, “The Lord will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart. And you shall grope at noonday, as a blind man gropes in darkness; you shall not prosper in your ways; you shall be only oppressed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you” (Deut. 28:28-29). This is the current state of the LGBT community.
