7 ms·

Gay people can get married in America, which was completely unthinkable a generation ago. 100% due to activists, many who risked their lives to make it happen.

ameister14 7y ago
Activists, yes - but not really through marching. Money, judicial challenges and coordinated political action to promote marriage equality as a goal were the key. The debate was reframed, messaging was crafted carefully and the groups organizing and paying for it all were extremely organized and cohesive. The Proteus fund and specifically the CMC did a heck of a lot here.
- ryanong 7y ago
  Marching is the first necessary step to get people organized. It is the lowest bar for starting to organize and to participate. It is where people can drum up support, awareness and donations.
  - jimbokun 7y ago
    Is this demonstrably, empirically true, or is it something you are just telling yourself because you desperately want it to be true?
    - mturmon 7y ago
      I listened to an hour-long podcast in which Chris Hayes interviewed Alicia Garza, who co-founded Black Lives Matter (BLM). They talked specifically about this question and since you're interested, perhaps it would be one place to go to hear informed organizers/activists discussing it. It aired on June 4. Besides BLM, one other recent place in which this question of "are demonstrations enough" comes up is, of course, Occupy. (In that case: no, demonstrations were not enough.) One thing I remember Garza saying is that the ability to organize a large, nationwide march on Washington showcases the scope and depth (down to the grassroots level) of a movement. If your movement isn't broad and organized, your nationwide march will not succeed. But that's a necessary condition for political action, not a sufficient condition. A movement can't let marches be the endpoint, and in the interview, Garza emphasized this. Clearly the organizers of the 1993 "March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation" (which I attended) did not view the march as an endpoint. Many of the roughly 600K (+/- 300K) people present had a lot at stake, including their jobs, at that time. The march was more of a focal point, a coming of age. A constituency made visible. But not an endpoint. For more: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/how-black-lives-matter-evolved https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/how-black-li...
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Other notable protests in the past 20-30 years, in the US and elsewhere: - Anti Iraq War movement (2003-4), mostly US. - Anti WTO movement (1999-2010) global (US, Canada, Japan, Europe). Eventually blended into / surpassed by the Occupy movement. - ACT UP: Gay rights / HIV/AIDS awareness. (1987 - 2000) Those are the major causes of which I'm aware. Of the set, ACT UP was arguably the most successful, and probably deserves much of the credit for mainstreaming gay / nonbinary gender culture. The WTO protests are more mixed, but put a damper on the Washington Concensus / Neoconservative Agenda movement. Global trade meetings are no longer casually-hosted affairs, and now tend to be in remote / secluded locations. The Iraq War protests were arguably the least effective, though massive in many cities. They simply disappeared off news coverage though. Clearly they didn't stop the war or lessen the catastrophic impacts of it, though they did help cement a strong political divide over it in the US. Whether or not more recent movements, particularly on the right, could be considered mass / popular uprisings is a fair question. I'd be inclined to say "no", but a case might be made for the Tea Party and alt-right movements.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
      I'll be the first one to sound the 'correlation is not causation' alarm over and over. After all, maybe the social issue is getting enough people to protest because society is already on the verge of change, rather than society changing because of the protests. Protesters may be getting the causation backwards. However, there's some evidence that protests are helpful in causing change. My favorite study to establish a directional causal link looks at policies enacted after protests, accounting for the effect weather has on protests. The weather is presumably random enough to not be related to where society is, and it affects protest turnout, which lets you connect protest turnout to policy change causally. It's not definitive, but yeah, there's decent evidence. I disagree with the other poster who is suggesting that marching is a necessary step for change, but it does seem to be a useful instrument for it.
  - hnuser77 7y ago
    Perhaps it's necessary but not sufficient: if you have zero lawyers, press, or government officials on your side, marching is a great way to get thrown in jail for "rioting" and have your reputation destroyed.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Yep it is a solid way to meet people who might also have an inside track to influencing the institutions of a given government. It also gets eyes on your cause when it's not right in the front of society at large. A lot of it is just to get otherwise ignorant people becoming aware and seeing the activists are just people like them trying to make a fair go of it.
- brudgers 7y ago
  The quilt spread across the National Mall was little but a march on Washington.
  - ameister14 7y ago
    Which quilt? I agree, but I'm not certain what your point is.
    - brudgers 7y ago
      The NAMES Project Quilt.
username90 7y ago
Gay marriage was also prevented in America for hundreds of years 100% due to activists. There is no money for or against gay marriage, it was always only activists on both sides so it isn't a good example of a class war.
- Miner49er 7y ago
  I'm not so sure, gay rights intersects with the class war in at least a couple of ways: - Dividing the working class on the issue of gay rights is an effective way for the elites to get the working class to ignore the class war. - Control of reproduction offers some control over labor.
  - LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
    Gays where used for centurys as a third "power" pillar, forced into by relgion, which is basically a instituionalized thread and protection guarantea, in trade for contract insurrance. The reason gay rights became possible, was because the state took over contract social security (to be competitive agaisnt socialism) and what is basically a new , partially more liberal, church formed (the rainbow movement). If the main benefactors of the third power pillar (woman) would not have found social security outside of marriage, the gay freedom movement would have failed. Tl, Dr; Slaves they where, slaves they are. But for a good cause.
  - sujNansnam 7y ago
    Can you elaborate on the second point? I don’t understand how banning gay marriage controls reproduction.
war1025 7y ago
Gay people are distributed throughout the various ranks of American society. No one really gives a care at a broad level about the rights of a poor gay person. What actually brought about the change was that due entirely to the fact that people in power had relatives that were gay, or were gay themselves. And these people turned the wheels of society toward making it accepted.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  >What actually brought about the change was that due entirely to the fact that people in power had relatives that were gay, or were gay themselves. The people in power had gay relatives or were gay themselves a century ago and yet nothing changed without activism.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    A century ago those people were in the closet so nobody knew and those that did didn't say anything. People had to come out in order for their acceptance to be possible. It's really easy to justify not caring when the group you don't care about seems other. When they're people you know it's much harder to justify not caring.
buboard 7y ago
The gilettes jaunes are on the streets, nobody cares to make them cultural icons. Gays had very visible and generally disproportionate (compared to population) media coverage of their rights. Was it really 100% due to activists on the street, or very influential but high profile gay people who helped build one of the few successful rights movements of our times?
- chongli 7y ago
  high profile gay people When I read this the first person I thought of was Alan Turing [1]. His was the fate of high profile gay people until the grassroots movement sprang from the Stonewall riots [1]. It was these activists who took the first steps to even make it possible for a high profile gay person to come out in public. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
  - pyuser583 7y ago
    Do you seriously believe that upper class gays/lesbians and lower class gays/lesbians was the same? In order for Alan Turing to be charged with “gross indecency”, he had to go the police himself, inform them he was gay (without being asked or prompted), and affirm it in a statement signed under penalty of perjury. The only reason he did that was because he was so accustomed to people not caring, he didn’t think he was in any danger. Being privileged has its privileges.
    - katet 7y ago
      I just had to look up that claim, and it seems that Turing admitted a homosexual relationship during a police investigation about his house being burgled, seeing as that relationship was with the accused burglar. That's slightly different to the implication that he walked into a police station of his own free will and promptly signed his own castration order. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_indecency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_i... (I'm aware of wikipedia fallibility but I'm on mobile and will generally trust in the citations for this particular individual)
larnmar 7y ago
The elites have always tolerated homosexuality while the masses have always been creeped out by it. This particular change just looks like another case of the elites getting their way at the expense of the masses.
mayniac 7y ago
100% isn't quite right. I think the parent comment applies to gay marriage as well. Federal recognition of gay marriage eventually occurred in America due to a gay widow who took the government to court over a $300k inheritance tax bill on her wife's estate [1]. Of course the changing cultural attitudes towards LGBT people is overwhelmingly due to grassroots activism, but this shouldn't be overlooked. For LGBT rights, money has played a factor. If wealthy, upper-class Americans did not also suffer from anti-LGBT laws, I'm not sure we would have made the same progress. There are also financial incentives for LGBT acceptance [2]. A more cynical view might be that acceptance of gay marriage was accelerated due to increasing anti-capitalist sentiments within the LGBT community in the 20th century [3]. The continued oppression of gay people might have led to uprisings far worse than Stonewall. Legislative acceptance of LGBT rights has weakened the link between LGBT activism and anti-capitalist ideologies, to the point that nowadays gay pride parades are turning into a parade of adverts for corporations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_money [3] https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-roots-of-gay-liberation-are-being-overlooked https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-roots-of-gay-liberation-a...
Aperocky 7y ago
I think a good litmus test for a political issue to gain brownie points on is this: Does it affect the politician, themselves? If a politician is straight, what does two gay persons marrying have to do with him? It’s thus a brownie point issue, same goes with pot. Once it start affecting their bottom line, i.e. there’s money involved, watch them and the media skirt around the issue carefully.
- gurumeditations 7y ago
  That’s ignorant. There was and still is for Republicans a very high cost for supporting romantic equality.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
It's interesting (and sad to me) how popular this article is on here when it exclusively describes our current political climate in terms of economics. It seems like social issues are front and center more than ever at the moment. I think economics can largely explain the divide, but it's interesting for the author to talk at length about the top 10% and leave this out -- as if the top 10% is filled with Econs who vote solely on what they think is best for them economically, and not based on how they feel about social issues. I think the reason the current climate feels so "divided" is because it's more of a social divide than before. I think it's easier when it's just a class war. But this is a human rights war. When your basic rights feel threatened, it gives you a little more skin in the game.
pyuser583 7y ago
Federal judges, not activists. Federal judges care little about mass opinion, but a great deal about elite opinion. Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with feminism, and everything to do with the positions of the American Medical Association, the Mayo Clinic (formerly represented by Blackmun), and academic researchers at elite universities. Not a terribly important distinction if you’re pro-gay rights or pro-choice. But give credit where credit is due.

ameister14 7y ago

Activists, yes - but not really through marching. Money, judicial challenges and coordinated political action to promote marriage equality as a goal were the key. The debate was reframed, messaging was crafted carefully and the groups organizing and paying for it all were extremely organized and cohesive. The Proteus fund and specifically the CMC did a heck of a lot here.

ryanong 7y ago
Marching is the first necessary step to get people organized. It is the lowest bar for starting to organize and to participate. It is where people can drum up support, awareness and donations.
- jimbokun 7y ago
  Is this demonstrably, empirically true, or is it something you are just telling yourself because you desperately want it to be true?
  - mturmon 7y ago
    I listened to an hour-long podcast in which Chris Hayes interviewed Alicia Garza, who co-founded Black Lives Matter (BLM). They talked specifically about this question and since you're interested, perhaps it would be one place to go to hear informed organizers/activists discussing it. It aired on June 4. Besides BLM, one other recent place in which this question of "are demonstrations enough" comes up is, of course, Occupy. (In that case: no, demonstrations were not enough.) One thing I remember Garza saying is that the ability to organize a large, nationwide march on Washington showcases the scope and depth (down to the grassroots level) of a movement. If your movement isn't broad and organized, your nationwide march will not succeed. But that's a necessary condition for political action, not a sufficient condition. A movement can't let marches be the endpoint, and in the interview, Garza emphasized this. Clearly the organizers of the 1993 "March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation" (which I attended) did not view the march as an endpoint. Many of the roughly 600K (+/- 300K) people present had a lot at stake, including their jobs, at that time. The march was more of a focal point, a coming of age. A constituency made visible. But not an endpoint. For more: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/how-black-lives-matter-evolved https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/how-black-li...
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Other notable protests in the past 20-30 years, in the US and elsewhere: - Anti Iraq War movement (2003-4), mostly US. - Anti WTO movement (1999-2010) global (US, Canada, Japan, Europe). Eventually blended into / surpassed by the Occupy movement. - ACT UP: Gay rights / HIV/AIDS awareness. (1987 - 2000) Those are the major causes of which I'm aware. Of the set, ACT UP was arguably the most successful, and probably deserves much of the credit for mainstreaming gay / nonbinary gender culture. The WTO protests are more mixed, but put a damper on the Washington Concensus / Neoconservative Agenda movement. Global trade meetings are no longer casually-hosted affairs, and now tend to be in remote / secluded locations. The Iraq War protests were arguably the least effective, though massive in many cities. They simply disappeared off news coverage though. Clearly they didn't stop the war or lessen the catastrophic impacts of it, though they did help cement a strong political divide over it in the US. Whether or not more recent movements, particularly on the right, could be considered mass / popular uprisings is a fair question. I'd be inclined to say "no", but a case might be made for the Tea Party and alt-right movements.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    I'll be the first one to sound the 'correlation is not causation' alarm over and over. After all, maybe the social issue is getting enough people to protest because society is already on the verge of change, rather than society changing because of the protests. Protesters may be getting the causation backwards. However, there's some evidence that protests are helpful in causing change. My favorite study to establish a directional causal link looks at policies enacted after protests, accounting for the effect weather has on protests. The weather is presumably random enough to not be related to where society is, and it affects protest turnout, which lets you connect protest turnout to policy change causally. It's not definitive, but yeah, there's decent evidence. I disagree with the other poster who is suggesting that marching is a necessary step for change, but it does seem to be a useful instrument for it.
- hnuser77 7y ago
  Perhaps it's necessary but not sufficient: if you have zero lawyers, press, or government officials on your side, marching is a great way to get thrown in jail for "rioting" and have your reputation destroyed.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Yep it is a solid way to meet people who might also have an inside track to influencing the institutions of a given government. It also gets eyes on your cause when it's not right in the front of society at large. A lot of it is just to get otherwise ignorant people becoming aware and seeing the activists are just people like them trying to make a fair go of it.
brudgers 7y ago
The quilt spread across the National Mall was little but a march on Washington.
- ameister14 7y ago
  Which quilt? I agree, but I'm not certain what your point is.
  - brudgers 7y ago
    The NAMES Project Quilt.

username90 7y ago

Gay marriage was also prevented in America for hundreds of years 100% due to activists. There is no money for or against gay marriage, it was always only activists on both sides so it isn't a good example of a class war.

Miner49er 7y ago
I'm not so sure, gay rights intersects with the class war in at least a couple of ways: - Dividing the working class on the issue of gay rights is an effective way for the elites to get the working class to ignore the class war. - Control of reproduction offers some control over labor.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  Gays where used for centurys as a third "power" pillar, forced into by relgion, which is basically a instituionalized thread and protection guarantea, in trade for contract insurrance. The reason gay rights became possible, was because the state took over contract social security (to be competitive agaisnt socialism) and what is basically a new , partially more liberal, church formed (the rainbow movement). If the main benefactors of the third power pillar (woman) would not have found social security outside of marriage, the gay freedom movement would have failed. Tl, Dr; Slaves they where, slaves they are. But for a good cause.
- sujNansnam 7y ago
  Can you elaborate on the second point? I don’t understand how banning gay marriage controls reproduction.

war1025 7y ago

Gay people are distributed throughout the various ranks of American society. No one really gives a care at a broad level about the rights of a poor gay person. What actually brought about the change was that due entirely to the fact that people in power had relatives that were gay, or were gay themselves. And these people turned the wheels of society toward making it accepted.

alasdair_ 7y ago
>What actually brought about the change was that due entirely to the fact that people in power had relatives that were gay, or were gay themselves. The people in power had gay relatives or were gay themselves a century ago and yet nothing changed without activism.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  A century ago those people were in the closet so nobody knew and those that did didn't say anything. People had to come out in order for their acceptance to be possible. It's really easy to justify not caring when the group you don't care about seems other. When they're people you know it's much harder to justify not caring.

buboard 7y ago

The gilettes jaunes are on the streets, nobody cares to make them cultural icons. Gays had very visible and generally disproportionate (compared to population) media coverage of their rights. Was it really 100% due to activists on the street, or very influential but high profile gay people who helped build one of the few successful rights movements of our times?

chongli 7y ago
high profile gay people When I read this the first person I thought of was Alan Turing [1]. His was the fate of high profile gay people until the grassroots movement sprang from the Stonewall riots [1]. It was these activists who took the first steps to even make it possible for a high profile gay person to come out in public. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
- pyuser583 7y ago
  Do you seriously believe that upper class gays/lesbians and lower class gays/lesbians was the same? In order for Alan Turing to be charged with “gross indecency”, he had to go the police himself, inform them he was gay (without being asked or prompted), and affirm it in a statement signed under penalty of perjury. The only reason he did that was because he was so accustomed to people not caring, he didn’t think he was in any danger. Being privileged has its privileges.
  - katet 7y ago
    I just had to look up that claim, and it seems that Turing admitted a homosexual relationship during a police investigation about his house being burgled, seeing as that relationship was with the accused burglar. That's slightly different to the implication that he walked into a police station of his own free will and promptly signed his own castration order. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_indecency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_i... (I'm aware of wikipedia fallibility but I'm on mobile and will generally trust in the citations for this particular individual)

larnmar 7y ago

The elites have always tolerated homosexuality while the masses have always been creeped out by it. This particular change just looks like another case of the elites getting their way at the expense of the masses.

mayniac 7y ago

100% isn't quite right. I think the parent comment applies to gay marriage as well. Federal recognition of gay marriage eventually occurred in America due to a gay widow who took the government to court over a $300k inheritance tax bill on her wife's estate [1]. Of course the changing cultural attitudes towards LGBT people is overwhelmingly due to grassroots activism, but this shouldn't be overlooked. For LGBT rights, money has played a factor. If wealthy, upper-class Americans did not also suffer from anti-LGBT laws, I'm not sure we would have made the same progress. There are also financial incentives for LGBT acceptance [2]. A more cynical view might be that acceptance of gay marriage was accelerated due to increasing anti-capitalist sentiments within the LGBT community in the 20th century [3]. The continued oppression of gay people might have led to uprisings far worse than Stonewall. Legislative acceptance of LGBT rights has weakened the link between LGBT activism and anti-capitalist ideologies, to the point that nowadays gay pride parades are turning into a parade of adverts for corporations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_money [3] https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-roots-of-gay-liberation-are-being-overlooked https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-roots-of-gay-liberation-a...

Aperocky 7y ago

I think a good litmus test for a political issue to gain brownie points on is this: Does it affect the politician, themselves? If a politician is straight, what does two gay persons marrying have to do with him? It’s thus a brownie point issue, same goes with pot. Once it start affecting their bottom line, i.e. there’s money involved, watch them and the media skirt around the issue carefully.

gurumeditations 7y ago
That’s ignorant. There was and still is for Republicans a very high cost for supporting romantic equality.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

It's interesting (and sad to me) how popular this article is on here when it exclusively describes our current political climate in terms of economics. It seems like social issues are front and center more than ever at the moment. I think economics can largely explain the divide, but it's interesting for the author to talk at length about the top 10% and leave this out -- as if the top 10% is filled with Econs who vote solely on what they think is best for them economically, and not based on how they feel about social issues. I think the reason the current climate feels so "divided" is because it's more of a social divide than before. I think it's easier when it's just a class war. But this is a human rights war. When your basic rights feel threatened, it gives you a little more skin in the game.

pyuser583 7y ago

Federal judges, not activists. Federal judges care little about mass opinion, but a great deal about elite opinion. Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with feminism, and everything to do with the positions of the American Medical Association, the Mayo Clinic (formerly represented by Blackmun), and academic researchers at elite universities. Not a terribly important distinction if you’re pro-gay rights or pro-choice. But give credit where credit is due.