gay marriage and civil rights

[BarbaraGordon]

This author argues that it's not accurate to compare the so-called gay-rights movement to the twentieth-century movement for racial equality; he suggests that it's more accurately depicted as an extension of the feminist movement and a reflection of society's reluctance to shed traditional assumptions about gender roles.

http://www.slate.com/id/2204661

[Archaea]

Seattle read the article.

Note:

After all, many opponents of same-sex marriage don't oppose gay rights across the board. In California, same-sex couples enjoy significant civil rights protections and legal status as domestic partners, and voters have shown no interest in changing that. National polls show that overwhelming majorities support employment-based gay rights, including equal access to careers in the military, and same-sex civil unions. It's only when it comes to marriage—the word, with its religious as well as civic connotations—that pro-gay sentiment dwindles: Recent polls show that only 30 percent to 36 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. It's this finding, of course, that the results of last week's elections echo.
The sharp differences in the polling numbers, depending on whether the question is marriage as opposed to almost any other gay rights issue, suggest that opposition to same-sex marriage isn't simply the 21st century's form of racism. After all, whites who opposed racial miscegenation in the Jim Crow South didn't support other civil rights for blacks or civil unions for mixed-race couples. In fact anti-miscegenation laws worked hand-in-glove with laws prohibiting sex outside of marriage and intimate cohabitation of unmarried adults to effectively outlaw interracial intimacy altogether. When Mildred Loving, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white, successfully challenged Virginia's law barring interracial marriage, they were not just fighting for social acceptance and hospital visitation rights. They were fighting a jail sentence, suspended on the condition that they leave the Virginia and never return together: effective banishment from the state. Anti-miscegenation laws were designed to prevent intimate racial mixing of any kind; by contrast, many of the people who voted to ban same-sex marriage are apparently supportive of same-sex intimacy—provided you don't call it marriage.