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06/17/2013
'Gays against gay marriage' = the new 'ex-gay'
Months back, I discovered that the National Organization For Marriage purchased a couple of domain names around the theme of "Gays Against Gay Marriage," so it's no surprise to see NOM's Comm Director tweeting something silly like this:
It's no surprise, but it's infinitely ridiculous.
For years the anti-gay crowd has been trying to convince us that our nation/world is simply teeming with so-called "ex-gays." Even though they can't show us more than a scant handful of paid spokespeople who make their living advocating for "ex-gay" "change," they claim that there are hundreds—thousands, hundreds of thousands!—of "converted" gays living among us. The joke's on us, they say.
Well now we have this new knee-slapper from Thomas, NOM's trusted Comm. guy. He is seriously saying that "the joke's on" those of us who believe that the vast majority of gay people actually support their own freedom to marry. Even though most of us actually swim in the waters of a reality in which 99% of gay people are supportive of their own personal freedoms, Thomas is telling us that we are all overlooking those countless many gays-against-equal-rights. We're the stooges, he implies.
Now, of course those of us who have been around this rodeo for any amount of time know exactly what Thomas is doing. The anti-LGBT crowd has a long history of trying to name reality. Since reality is so obviously against their mission, they have become ever-aggressive at trying to turn their "wish it were" into our collective truth. Whether its elections or legislative voters where our candidates or issues are said to be unsupportable (before ultimately winning), situational realities where they turn themselves and their discriminatory positions into the "victimized" ones, or demographic breakdowns where easily perceptible trend lines are called a lie, our opposition has been shocking in their generalized willingness to point their middle fingers at actuality. In doing so, they muddy the waters of this debate with noise and nonsense, turning an adult conversation about our society and its protections into some sort of anti-intellectual fairy tale.
At this point, it's not just the offense attached to their discriminatory goals—the mere fact that those of us who want to have the focused conversation have to dignify the other side's carefully concocted cock-and-bull fables comes with its own deep offenses.