Catwoman.....you are perfectly entitled to your opinion. About anything. But if your viewpoint is to see gay rights and equality for gays, including the very basic right to enjoy the benefits of marriage the same as any other citizen, as something that gays are being manipulated into by "the left" for their own political reasons, you are going to find yourself in an ever decreasing minority. The country has moved on, just as it moved on in the question of civil rights for African-Americans.
I am old enough to have traveled in the south when there were "colored" bathrooms and water fountains. My own mother thought she was VERY enlightened because when they were home alone, she sat in the kitchen and had lunch with the maid. My grandmother called black people "darkies", and my very religious uncle pitched a fit when a black couple showed up to sit in HIS church.
Those were VERY common attitudes among whites in those days. Honestly, when I was young, I don't even remember QUESTIONING that the black people couldn't use the public swimming pool, and I was in junior high when schools were integrated after Brown vs. the Board of Education, although in the case in our school, it meant only that two very frightened young black girls came to our school, and when I talked to them in the lunchroom, I was ostracized by my other friends.
TIMES CHANGE......and they don't change evenly, or at a pace where the people who ARE in the privileged group think is appropriate or in line with their beliefs and views. And sometimes those people would like to pretend that the desire for change, and the push toward politicizing that change, which is necessary for it to happen, is something that some group (on the opposite political side of the abyss) is manipulating people who would otherwise be satisfied with the status quo, for their own reasons.
As Kib says.......this is fast becoming a moot point, especially with young people. Attitudes about gays and lesbians are almost polar opposites in the under 35 as opposed to the over 50 demographics. Demographics, if nothing else, will turn the old ideas of how gays should live, and what they should be "satisfied" to have on its head.
The attitudes displayed by the Christian fundamentalist right about gays are fast becoming obsolete. As is the long used refrain "but the Bible agrees with ME", when used to discriminate, just as it was used to support slavery, Jim Crow laws and all the other ways that a dominant group found to discriminate against others. Sorry.....that's just how it is.
edited to add: Gregg is correct.....you are to be commended for hanging in there on this discussion when you find yourself in such a minority. It's hard to be the person that many other are disagreeing with......I've found myself in that situation more than once, and it's not fun.
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