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07/21/2015
By the time you read this headline, we'll be ten more seconds beyond stagnant anti-gay 'culture wars'
Since it's summer vacation time, perhaps you've found yourself at a theme park. And at said theme park, perhaps you've found yourself sitting on some sort of tram watching the tableaus of an attraction play outside your moving window. When your car stops and the tour guide is engaging you and your fellow passengers in the show, you might have observations or opinions or debates with your fellow riders or whatever else about the subject matter in front of you. You paid for your ticket; you're immersed in this world. Perhaps it's even one of those 4-D type deals that manages to temporarily lessen your comfort with something that's wet or foul smelling. If it's a good ride, you'll feel enough of an involved party to form and share your reactions. If it's a bad ride, you might just snark at it.
But good or bad, your car soon moves on. When it does, you take the experience and lessons and memories and possibly even nausea with you, but you too move on to the next adventure. Others will follow behind and have their own run-ins with the past, but they too will move on soon enough. And so on and so forth, day after day and season after season. After all, the cars only run in one direction.
And this is what the militant, dogged, increasingly desperate anti-LGBT activists don't realize. They are now a frozen-in-time scene from a much larger human experience, and the vast majority of us—including many of the "us" who flirted with their positions at one time or even currently—are all zooming right past to what comes next.
Yes, right now, pro-discrimination organizations like The Family Leader can get mainstream Republican candidates to join their little summit. Yes, right now people like Ryan Anderson can find an audience for a book insisting that the marriage debate isn't really over. Yes, right now a number of anti-gay conservatives can find a niche media outlet willing to entertain their views. Yes, right now far-right politicians like Kansas governor Sam Brownback can even sign executive (dis)orders that enshrine discrimination. They can even still use marriage and related fear mongering to drive up some electoral support. The conservative movement has been building up its infrastructure for years; that doesn't just disappear overnight.
But all of this is happening in a stagnant swamp. These ideas—their ideas—are old, musty, failed ones. Their conversations are part of a previous generation's "culture war." It's not only that their policy ideas are notions that will either go nowhere or will ultimately be overturned. It's more than that. The ideas themselves, with stopping marriage equality chief among them, are now historical remnants. The notions are themselves dated, with archivists already boxing them up for planned museums and future university study. Their ways, once politically viable and menacing, are now regressive scripts for ever-repeating animatronic characters to act out within an unchanging diorama.
And there is simply no way to upgrade them for a new generation. It's not just that their policy ideas are broken; it's much deeper than that. The very notions that they are pushing (e.g. the "right" to overturn minority rights via majority tyranny, the "right" to exalt discriminatory faith views against LGBT people against civil policies and inclusive faith views, the "right" to limit people's lives in unfair ways simply because of who they are) are false values and flawed notions that the changing tide is sweeping off the table of consideration. It's not like the consensus—the majority of the public, young people, corporate America, the media, universities, intellectuals, power brokers from all walks of life—is saying "Rework this whole lesser-than status thing and we'll see if we can hash out a deal." We are saying to those who made discrimination their bag: "You're drunk with intolerance; go home."
If that sounds dismissive of me, then good. Because it is. Unapologetically so. Proudly so.
With every passing minute, the right (as in correct) side of the debate is distancing itself from a non-moving, non-compromising, non-evolving attempt to justify patently unjust discrimination. A movement that was once a great nuisance in the lives of millions of Americans is now becoming a fading curiosity, at best. By autumn, more so. By next year, even more so. By the time the 2016 election is over (and particularly if it goes one certain direction), I think we'll all be shocked by how much the 21st century gay rights battles seem more like documentary footage than the brutal thing that we all lived.
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