The Intensely Personal Struggle of "Coming Out"

The New York Times is running a lengthy piece entitled "Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet- 

And Why It Took Him Until He Was 33 to Come Out" that looks at the presidential candidates struggles with who he was and, at least based on the title, suggests he should perhaps have come out earlier.  As the title of this blog notes, I did not come out until mid-life - age 49 in fact - after basically 37 years of struggling with accepting I was really gay. Recently, the husband and I have met two nice, highly successful men who, like me did not make the decision to come out until around the age 50 mark. Like myself, both had married women and father children and it took decades for them to realize that their efforts at conforming to the heterosexual norm simply had not and was not working.  While "coming out" is supposedly easier nowadays, the reality is that there are still huge societal, religious, and family pressures to conform and be straight.  The result is that many of us engage in incredible - and self-delusional - mental and psychological gymnastics and contortions to avoid admitting the reality that we are gay and will always be gay no matter what we try to do about that reality.  In my case, it ultimately was a choice of coming out and dealing with it or suicide.  I ultimately did come to terms with it and found a comfort in my own skin that had eluded me most of my life, but I did have two suicide attempts along the way.  As long as there is not rank hypocrisy involved - think closeted anti-gay Republicans and closeted anti-gay religious charlatans - no one has the right to tell someone to come out or to criticize them for when they decide to come out.  Here are article highlights:

The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out — all while wondering when it might be safe for him to do so too.

Chris Pappas, who was two years ahead of Mr. Buttigieg at Harvard and is now a Democratic congressman from New Hampshire, said he arrived at college “pretty much convinced that I couldn’t have a career or pursue politics as an L.G.B.T. individual.” Jonathan Darman, who was one class ahead of Mr. Buttigieg, remembered how people often reacted to a politician’s coming out then: “It wasn’t a story of love but of acknowledging illicit desire.” And Amit Paley, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class, recalled that “it was still a time where vocalizing anti-gay sentiments was not only common, but I think pretty accepted.”

The thought that 15 years later someone they might have shared a dorm or sat in a lecture hall with would become the first serious openly gay candidate for president of the United States never crossed their minds. But no one would have found the possibility more implausible than the young man everyone on campus knew as Peter.

Mr. Buttigieg, now the mayor of South Bend, Ind., struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was “a career death sentence,” as he put it in his memoir.

Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

“Because I was wrestling with this, I’m not sure I fully processed the idea that it related to me,” he said in an interview.

More than most people his age — even more than most of the ambitious young men and women he competed against at Harvard — he possessed a remarkably strong drive for perfection. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar, work on a presidential campaign, join the military and be elected mayor all before he turned 30. After being deployed with the Navy to Afghanistan in 2014, he said he realized he could die having never been in love, and he resolved to change that. He finally came out in 2015, when he was 33.

Few experiences in his young adulthood were as formative in shaping his identity as the hypercompetitive environment he encountered at Harvard. Even liberal Cambridge, where meeting a gay student or professor would have been fairly unremarkable, did not always nurture the sense of confidence that he and many of his gay classmates felt they needed to be themselves. At times their surroundings seemed to do just the opposite. Mr. Buttigieg took a long and fraught path from life as an undergraduate who once had a girlfriend to a presidential candidate who travels the country with his husband in tow. While he was still in the closet, the country became a different place very quickly. And to understand Mr. Buttigieg’s journey is to understand the microgeneration in which he came of age. When members of the Harvard class of 2004 were juniors in high school, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man from Wyoming, was bludgeoned, tied to a fence post and left to die in a murder that shocked the nation’s conscience. By the time they shipped off to Cambridge, few would have any gay friends — at least ones who were open about it. And the idea of a man marrying another man, or a woman marrying another woman, seemed almost absurd. The closest thing gay men and lesbians had to marriage was a civil union, which in 2000 was legal in exactly one state: Vermont. 

One thing no one seemed to peg him for was someone wrestling with being gay. He was so discreet that many of his friends and classmates said in interviews that they never would have guessed he was hiding anything until he told them. He left the testosterone-fueled campus sex banter to others. Hegel and de Tocqueville were more to his conversational tastes.

There was a small, close-knit social circle of L.G.B.T.Q. students. But they existed a world apart from Mr. Buttigieg’s Harvard.

“We were definitely on opposite ends of the gay spectrum — he was closeted and I was literally the campus drag queen, Miss Harvard 2002,” said William Lee Adams, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class and is now a broadcaster at the BBC World Service in London.

At the time, Mr. Adams said he was somewhat resentful of his peers who kept their identities hidden, having been bullied at school while he was growing up. Now, however, he is far more sympathetic because he better understands how personal it is to come out. “I felt a great sense of freedom at Harvard that I had never felt before because I could be out and not have food thrown at me,” he said. “Whereas Pete must have felt trapped, like he was in a straitjacket.” Mr. Flood, who wrote for The Crimson and knew Mr. Buttigieg as a friend, said that someone who worked so hard and thought so intensely about his future had to feel frustrated as he realized there was this immutable aspect of his life he was helpless to change.  “It’s like the one thing he couldn’t control about who he was and how he was going to present and how he was going to do all these things,” he said.

But when Mr. Buttigieg and his peers left college and started embarking on their professional lives, the country was changing in significant ways, jolting their sense of what it could mean to be openly gay and have a high-profile career. Many closeted people found their plight more difficult during the early years of social and legal change, as they wrestled with whether to finally open up after years of trying to maintain an impression of themselves that was false.

Mr. Paley, who was Mr. Buttigieg’s college classmate, remembers sitting in his dorm room in 2003 as a closeted junior and crying as he read Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down bans on intimacy between homosexuals on grounds that such laws were an affront to their dignity. “That helped me realize I can’t live my life this way,” he said of hiding his sexual orientation. It took Mr. Paley until the end of his senior year to fully come out, and he now serves as chief executive of the Trevor Project, an organization that works to advance the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

Once he [Buttigieg] came out, she said that being gay was never the first thing he wanted people to see when they met him — a veteran, Rhodes scholar, polyglot who was first elected mayor of South Bend when he was 29. “While it’s an important part of who he is, it’s not the only part,” she said. When he first ran for mayor in 2011 and won, he was closeted. A local gay rights group did not initially endorse him in that race, opting instead for a candidate with a more established track record on the issues. Mr. Buttigieg endured some awkward moments, like signing a city law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012. To not think about how the law directly affected him, he acknowledged, “took a little compartmentalization.”

His employees and constituents saw an eligible bachelor in their young mayor and wanted to set him up with their daughters. Some on his staff even joked about his old light green Ford Taurus as a “chick magnet.” He did not bother to correct them.

When he did come out in the summer of 2015, the forum he chose was an op-ed for The South Bend Tribune. “It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am,” he wrote.

He may have waited far longer than most young gay men today. But ever the overachiever, he made record time in setting a new bar. In less than four years he went from being single and closeted to being married and out as a gay candidate for president.

Anyone who has endured the coming out journey is, in my view, likely to have engaged in more introspection and thoughtful analysis of religion and societal issues than most straights will ever experience. For me, that is precisely the type of individual that we need in the White House - especially when contrasted  with the malignant narcissist who currently occupies that hallowed residence.

Why Americans’ Views Flipped on Gay Rights

June is Pride month - although Der Trumpenführer has banned embassies from flying the rainbow flag and ended important HIV research in deference to his knuckle dragging Christofascist base - and this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City which many view as the beginning of the struggle for gay rights in America.  Despite the efforts of the Trump/Pence regime and its Christofascist supporters to role back LGBT rights and re-stigmatize, the majority of Americans are not buying into the effort, especially the younger generations who are walking away form religion in no small part because the anti-gay agenda and daily hypocrisy of evangelical Christians and right wing Catholics.  A lengthy piece in the Washington Post looks at the rapid change in attitudes towards LGBT individuals and suggests that the fact that gays cross every demographic and region of the country and that sexual orientation is not immediately discernible may have been a driving factor in the speed of change.  The piece also points out the glaring lack of non-discrimination protections in many states (if Democrats win control of the Virginia General Assembly in November, this may finally change in Virginia) and that "conservative" - think hate-filled - religion remains at toxic evil - which hopefully will ease as older generations literally die off.  Here are article highlights:

Steve and Teri Augustine met, fell in love and got married in a conservative evangelical Christian community. They grew up believing homosexuality was a sin, and that the “gay agenda” was an attack on their values.

Then, six years ago, their son Peter — their youngest child who loved theater and his church youth group — returned home to Ellicott City, Md., from his freshman year of college and came out to his family as gay.

Teri asked her son not to tell anyone else, and drove herself to a mall parking lot to cry. Steve questioned his son’s faith, reciting Bible passages from Corinthians. The Augustines decided to put their son through a year of conversion therapy, determined to “set him straight.”

But after the therapy failed, something changed. Steve and Teri Augustine started meeting Peter’s friends and inviting other gay Christians to dinner. Two summers after Peter came out, the family stood on the sidelines of the Capital Pride parade wearing rainbow beads and shirts with the words “I’m sorry.” Teri now hosts a support group for Christian moms of LGBTQ children.

The transformation in the Augustine family parallels a shift in public opinion that social scientists say is unlike any other of our time.

As recently as 2004, polls showed that the majority of Americans — 60 percent — opposed same-sex marriage, while only 31 percent were in favor, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, those numbers are reversed : 61 percent support same-sex marriage, while 31 percent oppose it.

“You can’t find another issue where attitudes have shifted so rapidly,” said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who has studied public opinion of LGBT rights over the years.

What’s perhaps most surprising is that support for same-sex marriage has increased among nearly all demographic groups, across different generations, partisan lines and religious faiths. Even among the most resistant religious group, white evangelical Protestants like the Augustine family, support for same-sex marriage has grown from 11 percent in 2004 to 29 percent in 2019, according to Pew.

But while it’s clear that the gay rights movement managed to change people’s minds faster than any other civil rights movement in memory, it’s less clear why. How, in 15 years, did Americans’ views flip on such a charged social issue? And why haven’t other groups that have also publicly fought discrimination managed to change public opinion as quickly? The answer lies in human behavior and demographic realities, as well as a winning strategy by gay rights activists that capitalized on both.

In a study published earlier this year, Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University, investigated patterns of long-term changes in attitudes toward six social groups — the elderly, the disabled, the overweight, black people, people with darker skin tones and gay people — over a decade. . . . Between 2007 and 2016, Banaji found that explicit attitudes toward all groups became less biased. But implicit attitudes toward some groups stayed the same — including bias toward people with disabilities and the elderly. Implicit bias against people who are overweight actually became worse. Respondents became less biased in their attitudes toward race and skin tone.

But of all of the groups, implicit attitudes toward sexuality changed, by far, the fastest. . . . This relatively recent acceleration came after decades of struggle.

In 1978, almost a decade after Stonewall, gay rights activist Harvey Milk gave an impassioned plea: “Every gay person must come out.” In the decades that followed, more and more Americans started coming out to their loved ones, some galvanized by the pain of the AIDS epidemic.

Then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the growing visibility of gay people in popular culture began to trigger a major shift in attitudes, social scientists said. By then, comedian Ellen DeGeneres had come out as gay, the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” had taken off and Americans started seeing more examples of gay people in popular culture. Most of these characters and the most visible leaders at the helm of the movement were white people with the power and privilege to help LGBT rights reach the mainstream.

But there was something different about the gay and lesbian community, compared with other minority groups. They were in every socioeconomic and racial group, every generation, in small towns and big cities. Unlike other demographics, “sexuality is a dimension that is everywhere,” Banaji said. “It is not segregated.”

The more connections Americans made with gay or lesbian people, the more positive their attitudes toward them became — a trend social scientists call “the contact hypothesis.”

And families like the Augustines were forced to resolve an internal dilemma that social scientists call “cognitive dissonance.”

“When two beliefs come into conflict in our minds, our brains are not good at just holding the conflict. We have to resolve the conflict,” Banaji said. “You can disown your child or you can change your attitudes toward gay people.”

 After conversion therapy failed to change their son’s sexuality, Teri and Steve Augustine resolved to understand it. Teri asked her children to invite gay Christians they knew to their home.  Her daughter Bethany invited a gay colleague to come to dinner with his partner. Teri learned about the pain he endured when his church rejected him.

Then, during Peter’s junior year of college, his parents went to a Gay Christian Network conference, where they worshiped alongside hundreds of gay, lesbian and transgender Christians. “I grew up with a concept that those two words were mutually exclusive,” he said. He had already begun to believe that Peter could be both gay and Christian, “but Peter is only one person. I saw it in 1,500 people. . . . That was the closest thing I had to a lightbulb.”

What might be different about the gay community, Banaji speculated, is that even before a person came out, “love was in place.” A parent or a co-worker already knows and loves a gay person, and then discovers a person’s sexuality, which is often not obvious right away. “That, I think, is very different from something like age, or race, or body weight that just presents itself immediately upon seeing a person for the first time.”

But for much of the United States, the tipping point in the gay rights movement was something more obvious: marriage equality itself.

Before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, several states had already begun legally recognizing same-sex marriages. A 2015 study found that residents of states with a same-sex marriage policy had the greatest reduction of anti-gay attitudes, when compared with residents of states where same-sex marriage was illegal.

The institution of marriage put a stamp of legitimacy on same-sex couples that allowed straight ones to see them as a family unit, just like theirs, said Andrew Flores of American University, a co-author of the study.

Despite the rapid progress of the gay rights movement, members of the LGBTQ community continue to be targets of violence and hate crimes. The Trump administration has rolled back a number of transgender protections at the federal level and emboldened a conservative base pushing for religious liberty — a backlash that Haider-Markel says parallels the rise of anti-gay movements in the 1970s, such as singer Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign in Florida, and the Briggs Initiative, a ballot measure in California that would have mandated the firing of any teacher who was gay or pro-gay rights.

“Look at the fact that in many states, if a gay or lesbian couple gets married and has their marriage in the local newspaper, they might lose their jobs,” Haider-Markel said. “That’s not trivial.”

And attitudes about same-sex marriage have remained mostly frozen since 2017. “The positions are hardened,” Haider-Markel said. Statistically, once support for an issue reaches a majority like this one, movement toward 100 percent becomes much more difficult . . . In conservative evangelical circles like the Augustines’, the work of changing minds happens even more slowly.

As for the Augustines, the family left their old church, a conservative evangelical megachurch, for Emmanuel United Methodist Church in Laurel, Md., which calls itself “an affirming community of faith.”

After the service, Teri met with a group of about 10 mothers of LGBT children. Fanning themselves while sitting on floral-printed couches, they went around sharing their stories to a newcomer.

There was the mother whose father, grandfather and uncles were all conservative pastors, and whose daughter recently came out as gay, though none of the extended relatives know. There was the mother of a transgender son who lost touch with her parents after they told her, “If you don’t disown your child, we’ll disown you.”

 As I said, "conservative" religions remain a toxic evil that sow hate and division.

Life After Downton Abbey

"Lady Mary" who bears an great resemblance to my late sister

Enough of politics for the moment!  The husband and I are huge fans of Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece Theater series that ended earlier this year.  In fact, one of the items being debated is whether we do another trip to Paris (one of our wealthy widow travel mates from the 2015 trip wants to go back) or, instead go to Great Britain and see London and, of course, make a pilgrimage to Highclere Castle, where much of Downton Abbey was filmed.  The verdict is still out, but my vote s for Great Britain since the husband has never been.  Both our widowed friend and I have been - I traveled to London in my in-house counsel days and stayed at hotels where we'd never think to stay. But I digress from the subject of this post, a piece in Vanity Fair where Downton creator, Julian Fellowes has kindly looked into his Downton Abbey crystal ball and offered fans a glimpse into several characters’ futures.  Here are highlights:

This past March, Downton Abbey ended its television run with the Love Actually of series finales—a joyously light-hearted affair for most characters involved, especially the long-tortured Lady Edith, who closed out the show by finally locking down a man, a better title than her sister, and a cushy career. (Respect.) Since the finale aired, there have been rumors that the ensemble cast might re-unite for a big-screen spin-off. (God knows at least one butler would welcome the work.) But in the event that a spin-off film never happens, series creator Julian Fellowes has kindly looked into his Downton Abbey crystal ball and offered fans a glimpse into several characters’ futures.

Charitably, Fellowes shares the fate of Lady Mary, the snooty protagonist who closed out the series with a shock twist: she has a heart. The character demonstrated as much by re-uniting Lady Edith with Bertie, and then actually refraining from plundering their wedding day with news that she is expecting a second child. Well, in an interview with Deadline, Fellowes forecasts that Mary’s business acumen will help keep the Crawley estate afloat, now that she’s taken over the business reins from her bumbling father.

“My own belief is that Mary, whether you like her or dislike her, is a hard worker, and she’s practical,” Fellowes explains. “I think she will employ the kind of advice that she needs [to manage the estate]. She would probably have opened the house to the public in the 1960s, as so many of them did, and she’d have retreated to a wing, and maybe only occupied the whole house during the winters.” (Coincidentally, this is the same strategy Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, the son of the Earl of Shaftesbury, used to save his family’s estate—a story chronicled in a recent issue of Vanity Fair.)

As for the rest of the family and staff—Fellowes does not think they strayed far, and that future generations would still be inhabiting the same Yorkshire pile.

“My own belief is the Crawleys would still be there [in Downton Abbey], just as the Carnarvons are today [in the real Highclere Castle, where Downton was filmed],” says Fellowes. “George [Mary’s son] would have gone to the Second World War, and of course the fear is that he would be killed. We know that Mary is pregnant, so there’s going to be another child. As for the title, I don’t know where it would go beyond George, but let’s hope he gets through the war and has children of his own.”

Although Fellowes does not offer the fates of the other characters, he does offer up another great trivia note by revealing the inspiration behind Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess.

“One thing I very much enjoyed about Violet was that I had, in creating her, touched on an iconic figure of British families,” explains Fellowes. “There was a whole generation of women like Violet. My theory is that, when the men went off to war, the women had to keep the show on the road back home, and they did. As a result, during the 50s, 60s and 70s, there were these incredibly frightening matriarchs in all sorts of family situations, that everyone was half terrified of and half loved.”

“I modeled her on my grandfather’s older sister,” Fellowes continues. “And the thing about those women is that they were as tough on themselves as they were on everyone else, which is why you forgave them. They weren’t selfish in that way; they just had these incredibly high standards that everyone had to meet.”

Fellowes has previously said that he is keeping his fingers crossed for a film spin-off, so that audiences can re-unite with their beloved characters.

“I hope there will be a film,” Fellowes told IndieWire several months back. “I’d structure a narrative with lots of things happening, but we would need a kind of unity to make a feature, which is a challenge for me. 

There was much to like about the series and, as a British and Russian history major, I loved the historical detail that showed the societal transition from 1912 to 1926.  World War I set in motion so much more than just the crumbling of empires- i.e., Russian, Austro-Hungary, Ottoman - and monarchies.  Society went through its own revolution and made a stark change from the 19th century Edwardian society. 

America's Toxic Masculinity

America suffers from more violence than other developed nations, especially gun violence due to America's ridiculous gun laws that serve to maximize gun manufacturer profits under the guise of 2nd Amendment liberties.   But, as a piece in the Los Angeles Times argues, the main underlying source of violence in America is men - or at lease those who cling to the most toxic aspects of what is deemed to be acceptable masculinity.   If we want to reduce violence, many, any men could stand to undergo some feminization.  Until America recognizes that the so-called "macho male" is a toxic danger and steps are taken to change the cultural dynamic, things likely will not improve for the batter.  Here are column excerpts:

In the wake of the Orlando, Fla., shooting, some conservative politicians called for the use of the term “radical Islam” to label the violent movement with which Omar Mateen identified himself. In the wake of the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, many called for a review of violence by law enforcement against black Americans.And after Dallas, some piled on the Black Lives Matter movement, suggesting that the gunman was spurred to murder because he’d made reference to the group. Others use the term “black-on-black violence” to refer to the killings of poor black Americans in their communities, playing into what author Ta-Nehisi Coates has labeled “the enduring myth of black criminality.”

What we don’t talk about is how the greatest predictor of violence isn’t religion, occupation or race. It’s gender.

In the United States, 98% of those who commit mass shootings are male; 98% of the officers who have shot and killed civilians are male; 90% of those who commit homicide by any means are male; and 80% of those arrested for all violent crimes — murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault — are male.

If women are less likely to kill strangers, could increasing the number of women on the police force reduce officer-involved killings? A 2002 study by the National Center for Women and Policing shows that, although women comprise 12.7% of sworn police personnel in urban centers, only 5% of citizen complaints for excessive force involve female police officers. The average male officer is two to three times more likely to be named in an excessive force complaint.

It’s a significantly under-studied area — which is why it’s so crucial to talk about the role men play in America’s epidemic of violence. We need serious, current research in order to understand why male police officers are more violent in their interactions with citizens and how the culture of policing can be changed.

There are myriad theories as to why men are nearly 50 times more likely to commit murder than women. Some neuroscientists say testosterone is directly connected to aggression and competition, attitudes that are correlated with violence. . . . . Some psychotherapists have argued that men are raised to suppress vulnerable emotions, which leads them to become overwhelmed and express pain physically rather than verbally. 

[I]f physicality alone, rather than brain chemistry or socialization, were the reason that men kill at a much higher rate than women, then we would expect guns to be a leveling technology. The statistics, however, do not bear this out. From 1980 to 2014, the gender gap in gun ownership closed by 17%. Yet the rates at which men and women kill have remained relatively stable.

Lobbyists Quietly Advise GOP to Shif on Gay Marriage

Just as Republican politicians continue to take positions that are contrary to majority public opinion on issues such as immigration reform, infrastructure spending in their quest to utterly prostitute themselves to the angry whites who make up the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the GOP, so too are they defying the changing majority view on gay marriage.   The ultimate outcome as Hispanics, gays, non-religious extremists and their supporters flee the GOP is that the party is likely destined for permanent minority status at the national level and, at best will become a regional party concentrated in the backward regions of the South. The Hill looks at the efforts of lobbyist to counsel the GOP to dump its opposition to gay marriage and, more or less, kick the Christofasists to the curb.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans on K Street are helping members of their party shift their stance on gay rights issues.

Kathryn Lehman, a top GOP lobbyist and partner at Holland & Knight, carries a list of 40 to 50 Republican offices in the House and Senate she visits on behalf of Freedom to Marry, a group that backs same-sex marriage.

“The issue is losing its toxicity, from a Republican perspective,” she said, mentioning that the list was a fraction of that size when she first took on Freedom to Marry as a client in 2011.

Lehman, who helped to write the Defense of Marriage Act while working on Capitol Hill, is among a small group of lobbyists and organizations that are leveraging their conservative credentials to try to sway Republican lawmakers on gay marriage, transgender rights and the creation of a federal nondiscrimination policy.

Organizations like Log Cabin Republicans and Project Right Side are also pushing Republicans by providing data about changes in public opinion and, like lobbyists, offering lawmakers and their offices a “safe space” to talk about the challenges facing LGBT individuals.

In addition, Project Right Side, founded by former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, makes the case for how gay rights align with conservative principles.

“We’re also trying to protect a party that we care a lot about. There has been societal change. Any political party that ignores societal change does so at its own peril,” said Mehlman, now the global head of public affairs at investment banking firm KKR, told The Hill.

“As conservatives, we don’t have to ignore it. There is a strong conservative argument for safe schools, for civil marriage, merit-based decisions at work.”

Despite the opposition of religious conservatives, advocates are convinced the tide is turning in their favor.

“I have had meetings with some of the most rock-ribbed social conservatives in Washington,” said Gregory Angelo, the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. “A lot of them see the writing on the wall, they see the direction the country is headed.”

A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this year showed that more than 60 percent of Republicans under the age of 30 support gay marriage; 43 percent of those aged 30–49 were in favor.

“I believe that this is the civil rights movement of our generation,” said Thorsen, whose sister recently married her longtime partner, “and I’m proud that I’m on the right side of this, and I’m proud that I can tell my grandchildren that I was there when it mattered.”

U.S. Military Endorses Same-Sex Marriage

In addition to defending America, the U.S. military historically has been in the forefront of leading societal change be it racial integration, increased opportunities for women and now the embrace of same sex marriage.  Recent announcements by the Pentagon will have the Christofascists howling because they will allow same sex married couples to receive the same benefits as married heterosexual couples even if they are stationed in anti-gay states like Virginia.  Like big business, the military recognizes that across the board benefits for same sex couples is a plus for recruitment and retention.   A piece in Slate looks at soon to be implemented policies that will help solidify the acceptance of gay marriage over time.  Maggie Gallagher, Tony Perkins and other hate merchants will be surrounded by sheets of flying spittle.  Here are article highlights:

Today, the Pentagon has announced that it will grant the exact rights and benefits to married same-sex couples that it does to married straight couples, including housing and healthcare, a vast expansion of its previously announced plans to extend only meager perks to gay couples. Even more surprisingly, the military will offer a 10-day leave to gay couples stationed in a non-marriage state to travel to the 13 states plus Washington, D.C., to be legally wed.

Make no mistake: This is huge news, the biggest military-related LGBT victory since the repeal of Don’t Ask Don't Tell. Arguably, by the letter of U.S. v. Windsor, the Supreme Court’s decision striking down DOMA, the Pentagon is compelled to provide benefits to already-married same-sex spouses. But the marriage furlough is another matter altogether. To allow gay couples to leave the homophobic states in which they are stationed to gain equal rights—to encourage it, actually, by tethering it to a holiday—is a bold endorsement of marriage equality by the military.

And that endorsement will have broad repercussions throughout society. The DADT repeal has already improved the military by fostering better peer bonding and leadership among both gay and straight troops. But what’s less frequently discussed is its effect on society overall. Gay rights group targeted DADT because the military stood as the last bastion of entrenched, mainstream homophobia. Once gays could serve openly in the military, they believed, the noxious stereotype of gay people as hyper-sexed wimps would fall, as would many soldiers’ knee-jerk homophobia.
There’s no way to prove a direct causation between DADT repeal and the astounding spike in support for gay rights. But the successful drive to allow openly gay service members is indubitably a crucial pillar of the broader edifice the gay rights coalition has been building. Today’s policy announcement proves that no American institution is too reactionary to adjust to the changing climate of equality—that, in fact, such institutions can learn to take a leading role in the fight. And those decisions will reverberate throughout every tier of society for years to come.

Make no mistake, this new policy is a huge defeat for the Christofascists.