A book finds same-sex couples produce perfectly healthy offspring. Is this the best argument for marriage equality? (Tracy Clark-Flory, “Gay marriage: Good for the kids?,” Salon, 9 Nov. 2009)
In Canada, some on the left are beginning to favor imagining "their" constituents as more everyday folk than components of an urban mosaic. That is, there's a switch to imagining them as hardworking, traditional-minded, unpresuming and humble -- and therefore deserving of employment, etc. -- away from imagining them as urban, artistic, complex, diverse. It's a move to the right, in my judgment -- toward the German volk, in fact -- by the less evolved in the left, by the newly devolving on the left. In British Columbia, for instance, Save our Rivers does great 'cause "they" portray their movement in a way Cdns are ripe to accept and therefore not question -- as good hearted, rural folk, that is -- whereas anti-Olympics does poorly 'cause the country is beginning to frown on the urban-seeming, anti-grandscale (non-conformist), and strange (how can you be against Olympics? –- are you against mountains and "Oh Canada," too?), and just one marble-tosser at horses’ feet is readily made use of to determine/characterize the whole essence of the movement.
My sense of the States -- with some in the gay community concerned about just who it is they helped elect in, with abortion funding likely to be left out of healthcare, for instance -- is that the cultural victory managed by the left, where those "they" aimed to protect/ empower they didn't show as different but equal, but as superior, mostly, which reigned for 30 or 40 years, worked to help / serve their "constituents," but is weakening too now. What I'm getting at is that 10 years ago a study like this would help the gay movement, because those who aimed to show the gay community differently -- as perverse -- would be obliterated by a united left, concerned not only to help but to link themselves to, to possess some of the manna of, those they protected/enshrined (think Robert Redford and native indians, for instance). Now, I think they have fewer friends, fewer really interested in backing them, and so if it isn't in fact now true that they raise "perfectly healthy offspring," someone can show them as just average, and the study could be used to set up the left as having offered a misrepresentation of their constituents, as having served up lies, not just now but likely for some time, and argue that the entire way the left has presented such groups as immigrants, homosexuals, artists, students, the unemployed / homeless, need be reassessed -- completely rethought. That is, studies like this could very likely lead to a decrease in rights, rather than to an increase, if there's a hint of dishonesty in them.
No more glowing reports. No more triumphalism. More acceptance that 30 years of concentrated corporate rule and social disintegration has made us all a bit fucked up.
Link: Gay marriage: Good for the kids?
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