RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Canada to Allow Same-Sex Marriage

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Darknight613 said:
[we also have the oral law.

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No pun intended.

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the G-man said:

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Darknight613 said:
[we also have the oral law.

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No pun intended.

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Wednesday said:
I find it hard to believe that ...most blacks are "outraged" ...I've never even seen a poll of a turly REPRESENTATIVE number of black people on the subject. Even a poll of one thousand black Americans is not enough to tell you, definitively, how black Americans feel.

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Wednesday said:

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Dave the Wonder Boy said:

But as I posted documentation of, a majority of black Americans, and many black leaders, have vocally expressed their outrage at the comparison of black civil rights to the "gay marriage" push. Which black Americans themselves call a deceit, which they do not endorse.
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And I think black Americans are infinitely qualified to determine whether their own black civil rights movement is comparable to gay rights, and the push for gay marriage. As I quoted, blacks have voiced their outrage at the comparison of gay marriage to black rights.
And it is your denial of these facts that is ill-informed.

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I would love to know where you get this information.
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1) I find it hard to believe that you or anyone else can say that most blacks are "outraged" by the comparison. I, myself, have read articles that have quoted individual African-Americans on the subject, and I agree that some of them were outraged... very outraged, but I've also seen blacks who have spoken in favor of gay rights, and compared the struggle of gays to the ones we once faced. Also, I've never even seen a poll of a turly REPRESENTATIVE number of black people on the subject. Even a poll of one thousand black Americans is not enough to tell you, definitively, how black Americans feel.
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2) Today's "black leaders" are generally pathetic and unworthy of discussion, especially the ones that are in the media and have voiced opinions. A great number of them are attention-seekers and not much more.
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3) I also don't believe that most black people (or Americans in general) could tell you the real definition of civil rights. Being black does not make you an authority on civil rights; education does. I would venture that most people would equate civil rights with black suffrage. Their answers are uninformed.

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Dave the Wonder Boy said:

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Wingnut-EL said:
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The religious arguement also provides a convenient cover to those with truly bigoted beliefs. While I understand that many people actually believe their "God" condems homosexual behavior*, I think the real movers & shakers behind the anti-gay movement are simply using religion as a shield against charges of bigotry (i.e., claiming/pretending to be devout when it serves their purposes).
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* These true believers are a lessor problem IMO, because over time and through education they may change their belief on this issue, just as they have on slavery. I don't think they have any ulterior motive, they are just misguided. It's the ones who would harness a poweful force like religion (or nationalism, or patriotism for that matter) that are truly dangerous & scare me. They are people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals - Yes, Mr. Bush I'm talking about you & your craven ilk.
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Cheers!

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A new poll shows that a majority of black Americans oppose gay marriage.
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The poll results were released by the Pugh Research Center on November 18, 2003, the same day as the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage.
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It indicated that 60% of blacks oppose gay weddings.
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And further, 51% oppose gay civil unions as well.

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Further, many black leaders are furious that the gay rights movement is being compared to the black civil rights movement.
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When the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that gays have the Constitutional right to marry, the Massachusetts Supreme Court justices cited landmark repealing of laws that banned inter-racial marriage.
Which, again, made many black leaders furious.
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As reported by FOX News, Rev. Talbert Swan II, expressing his distaste for the comparison of gay marriage to the civil rights movement, said :
"Homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle. I could not choose the color of my skin."
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Mychael Massie, a conservative black columnist, and member of Project 21, a political alliance of conservative blacks, said in his column for WorldNetDaily:
"It is an outrage to align something as offensive as this with the struggle of a fallen man, a great man, such as Martin Luther King Jr."
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"The whole thing runs much deeper and more insidious than 'We just want to get married'.
They want to change the whole social order."

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Alvin Williams, President and CEO of Black America's Political Action Committee, said that
"The gay marriage issue looks like an equal rights issue at first glance. But it becomes a special rights issue after closer examination. Because it's about behavior, not ethnicity."
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So once again, arguments comparing this to civil rights is proven to be manipulative deceitful spin.
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The need for liberals to call any dissenters to their view on the issue "ignorant" just shows their own ignorance on display.
It is ignorant for you to feel a need to call others "ignorant". And an attempt to emotionally divert from the true issue.
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But regardless, a clear majority of black America disagrees with your posturing comparison.

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the G-man said:
Should you be slapping anything so vigorously on a thread about gay marriage?

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I walked right into this one, didn't I?

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March 18, 2004


THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Gay Republicans Spurred to Action

The president's support of a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage is stepping up their fundraising efforts to fight the proposal.

By Johanna Neuman, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — David Catania used to display a photograph on a side table in his office, in which President Bush, standing next to First Lady Laura Bush, spread his arms wide to embrace Catania on one side and his partner, Brian, on the other.

But last month when Bush endorsed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, Catania felt betrayed. "To enshrine us as second-class citizens is a deal breaker," he said. "My partner and I have been to Crawford. The president was so gracious to Brian and me. I don't believe in my heart for a minute this is something he wants to do."

Now, the photo lies face down in a bottom drawer, a symbol of the disconnect between a 36-year-old Republican councilman in the nation's capital and a conservative president juggling the demands of disparate constituencies, from conservative Christians who oppose gay marriage to moderates offended by intolerance.

For Catania and other gay Republicans, the issue of same-sex marriage — thrust center stage by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the mayor of San Francisco — has provoked an identity crisis. Conservative on fiscal and foreign policy, they are not natural Democrats. But they say they are wounded, feeling rejected by their own GOP family.

"I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach," said Mark Mead of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay organization. He said the arguments against gay marriage reminded him of the efforts to block interracial marriage more than 30 years ago, when he was growing up in Mississippi. "Those words of intolerance ring as hollow and untrue today as they did then," Mead said.

The raw emotion kicked up by the issue is affecting the presidential campaign in ways that no one anticipated. Ever since Bush endorsed a ban on same-sex unions, money has been pouring in to gay rights groups in record amounts.

The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which has recruited gay political candidates and raised money for them since 1991, reports a 200% increase in contributions to gay and lesbian candidates. The Log Cabin Republicans, which is fighting the ban, reports it is getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a week in donations.

"There is a huge energy created that I've never seen before," said Winnie Stachelberg, political director of the Human Rights Campaign, which promotes gay rights. "Will it translate into ground troops? It's a little too early to tell. But there is a kind of focused sense within the gay community on the election."Social conservatives also are energized by the issue. And experts on campaign finance say the Bush campaign is not in danger of feeling the pinch from disaffected gay donors because the campaign has already raised more than $143 million of its target of $170 million.

Still, proponents of same-sex unions are warning both parties that money from gay donors may dry up for candidates who side against them on the issue. It may go instead to fund efforts to defeat constitutional amendments at the national and state levels. Already, the Log Cabin Republicans have launched a television ad campaign against the proposed federal amendment, which is running in swing states and could color voter attitudes toward Bush.

"Fighting these constitutional amendments at the state and federal level is going to take financial clout," Dave DeCicco of the Victory Fund said. "Gay voters are targeting their contributions."

If this is war, Catania is an unexpected warrior. A rare Republican in the District of Columbia's Democrat-laden political establishment, he has made his reputation over the last seven years by bringing private sector values to city government, winning bipartisan approval of new approaches to drug rehabilitation and to attracting businesses to the city.

A tiger of a fundraiser, Catania has collected so much money for Bush's reelection — as much as $75,000 by his own estimate — that the campaign recently honored him and a dozen others with a private luncheon at the stately Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington and a private strategy briefing at Bush-Cheney headquarters in Virginia. He says he could have raised much more, drawing from his contacts as a lawyer in Washington's political and legal circles.

When the White House backed a constitutional amendment to protect heterosexual marriage, Catania was so angry that he flirted with the idea of becoming an independent. He hosted a fundraiser for a Democrat — Cheryl Rivers, a supporter of civil unions who is running for lieutenant governor in Vermont.

And he toyed with the idea of creating a website that would invite gays and like-minded allies to register their names and the amount of their contributions to the Bush-Cheney campaign and then seek a refund.

Now, he said, his anger has hardened into a plan of action. "I intend to remain in the party, but I will fight anyone who attempts to write discrimination into our Constitution," he said in an interview. He plans to go to the Republican Convention in New York as a member of the District of Columbia's delegation and of the party platform committee, not only to advocate gay rights but to trumpet GOP solutions to urban problems.

"I have carried my party's banner, I have fought for lower taxes, I have applied our principles to urban problems," he said. "There is not another gay Republican who has given more, with more to say."

A native of Kansas City, Mo., Catania was always a bit of a maverick. An only child, he was raised by his mother, who introduced him to GOP politics — and politicians. In high school, he was elected the state's "youth governor" — this while John Ashcroft, now U.S. attorney general, was the governor.

In college, Catania interned for a Republican, Sen. John C. Danforth of Missouri, and for a Democrat, then-professor Madeleine Albright, who became President Clinton's secretary of State. He remembers standing on the convention floor in New Orleans in 1988, listening to Ronald Reagan give his farewell address, thinking he was surrounded by family, the extended political family of Republicans.

He delayed starting law school to be with his mother while she was dying of ovarian cancer. He told his mother before she died that he was gay.

He also confided in a veteran political hand in Missouri politics. They were sitting in the operative's kitchen, late at night, sharing a drink, when he told her a friend of his had tried to commit suicide.

"Which of the two 'G's' was it?" she asked, "Grades or girls?"

"A third 'G,' " he replied. "He is gay."

Then Catania told his political mentor that he too was gay.

"Well," she said, "that takes care of the fourth 'G.' "

When he asked what that was, she replied, "You'll never be governor of Missouri."

When he returned to Washington to finish his schooling, he knew that she was right: A gay Republican had a limited future in Missouri, which the Victory Fund lists as one of 27 states without any openly gay office-holders. Catania clerked for two administrative law judges at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and then became an energy attorney for Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, one of Washington's top firms.

Then, in 1997, at the age of 29, a white Republican in a city of black Democrats, he decided to run for an at-large seat on the District of Columbia council.

Washington's political registration is 88% Democratic. The incumbent, Arrington Dixon, the former husband of the former mayor, was black, Democratic and a favorite with the gay community.

In the end, it wasn't even close — Catania won, 43% to 37%. "We caught them sleeping," he said. Catania won the gay vote and Dixon the black vote, but black turnout was low. Catania has twice won reelection easily.

"He is extremely smart, with a strong work ethic," said Alice Rivlin, the Brookings Institution economist who served on the board that directed the District of Columbia's finances in the late 1990s. "I've worked with him on taxes and economic development. Gay is not part of the persona he projects — this would be a departure."

Publicly challenging the Republican Party and the president he worked hard to elect is unquestionably new turf for Catania.

He cast his first vote for president in 1988, for the president's father, George H.W. Bush.

"Some gays will never forgive me for being Republican," he said. "Some social conservatives will never forgive me for being gay. And the only person you have to please is the one in the mirror."

During the baseball strike of 1994, Catania, a Kansas City Royals fan, was angry at the players. One of the judges he clerked for teased him, calling him "the only kid in America who sided with the owners."

Catania smiled. "A Republican," he said.

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From The Sacramento Bee:

Surveys taken around the nation and in California indicate that large percentages of African Americans disapprove of gay marriage and support a constitutional amendment banning such unions.

A national Gallup Poll last month found that more than half of African Americans favored a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

A Los Angeles Times exit poll showed higher percentages of African Americans than whites or Asian Americans voted for Proposition 22, the 2000 initiative that defined marriage in California as between a man and a woman.

And a Field Poll of California voters last month, taken after San Francisco began offering same-sex marriage certificates, suggested that African Americans resist gay marriage and endorse a constitutional amendment against it by wider margins than other ethnic groups.

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From Dave the Wonder Boy:

It indicated that 60% of blacks oppose gay weddings.
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And further, 51% oppose gay civil unions as well.

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From Wednesday:

2) Today's "black leaders" are generally pathetic and unworthy of discussion, especially the ones that are in the media and have voiced opinions. A great number of them are attention-seekers and not much more.

3) I also don't believe that most black people (or Americans in general) could tell you the real definition of civil rights. Being black does not make you an authority on civil rights; education does. I would venture that most people would equate civil rights with black suffrage. Their answers are uninformed.

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Selma to San Francisco?
Same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue.

BY SHELBY STEELE
Saturday, March 20, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

It is always both a little flattering and more than a little annoying to blacks when other groups glibly invoke the civil rights movement and all its iconic imagery to justify their agendas for social change. I will never forget, nor forgive, the feminist rallying cry of the early '70s: "Woman as nigger." Here upper-middle-class white women--out of what must have been an impenetrable conviction in their own innocence--made an entire race into a metaphor for wretchedness in order to steal its thunder.

And now gay marriage is everywhere being defined as a civil rights issue. In San Francisco, gay couples on the steps of city hall cast themselves as victims of bigotry who must now be given the "right" to legally marry in the name of "equality" and "social justice." In the media, these couples have been likened to the early civil rights heroes whose bravery against police dogs and water hoses pushed America into becoming a better country. "I don't want to be on the wrong side of history," a San Francisco radio host said about gay marriage. "Maybe we're looking at thousands of Rosa Parks over at city hall."

So, dressing gay marriage in a suit of civil rights has become the standard way of selling it to the broader public. Here is an extremely awkward issue having to do with the compatibility of homosexuality and the institution of marriage. But once this issue is buttoned into a suit of civil rights, neither homosexuality nor marriage need be discussed. Suddenly only equity and fairness matter. And this turns gay marriage into an ersatz civil rights struggle so that dissenters are seen as Neanderthals standing in the schoolhouse door, fighting off equality itself. Yet all this civil rights camouflage is, finally, a bait-and-switch: When you agree to support fairness, you end up supporting gay marriage.

But gay marriage is simply not a civil rights issue. It is not a struggle for freedom. It is a struggle of already free people for complete social acceptance and the sense of normalcy that follows thereof--a struggle for the eradication of the homosexual stigma. Marriage is a goal because, once open to gays, it would establish the fundamental innocuousness of homosexuality itself. Marriage can say like nothing else that sexual orientation is an utterly neutral human characteristic, like eye-color. Thus, it can go far in diffusing the homosexual stigma.

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In the gay marriage movement, marriage is more a means than an end, a weapon against stigma. That the movement talks very little about the actual institution of marriage suggests that it is driven more by this longing to normalize homosexuality itself than by something compelling in marriage. The happiness that one saw in the faces of the newly married in San Francisco seemed to come primarily from the achievement (if only illusory) of ordinariness. After all, many of them had lived together into old age. Love does not require marriage but, for gays, ordinariness does. And happiness for these couples was in the imprimatur of ordinariness.
But marriage is only one means to innocuousness. The civil rights framework is another. To say that gay marriage is a civil rights issue is to imply that homosexuality is the same sort of human difference as race. And even geneticists now accept that race is so superficial a human difference as to be nothing more than a "social construct." In other words, racial difference has been made officially innocuous in our culture, and its power to stigmatize has been greatly reduced. Evidence of this is seen in the steady, yet unremarked, rise in interracial marriage rates for all of our races. So if gay marriage, like race, is about civil rights, then homosexuality is a human difference every bit as innocuous. Thus, America should treat homosexuality like it treats race and give gays the "right" to marry as it once gave blacks the right to vote.

So gays benefit from the comparison to both race and civil rights, and this has provoked hostility and even outrage in black America. Black leaders as liberal as Jesse Jackson have distanced themselves from the gay marriage issue, and among black churches an actual movement against gay marriage is unfolding. There is a religious dimension to this, but more broadly there is a simple resentment at having blackness implicitly compared to homosexuality.

The civil rights movement argued that it was precisely the utter innocuousness of racial difference that made segregation an injustice. Racism was evil because it projected a profound difference where there was none--white supremacy, black inferiority--for the sole purpose of exploiting blacks. But there is a profound difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. In the former, sexual and romantic desire is focused on the same sex, in the latter on the opposite sex. Natural procreation is possible only for heterosexuals, a fact of nature that obligates their sexuality to no less a responsibility than the perpetuation of the species. Unlike racial difference, these two sexual orientations are profoundly--not innocuously--different. Racism projects a false difference in order to exploit. Homophobia is a reactive prejudice against a true and firm difference that already exists.

Institutions that arise to accommodate these two sexual orientations can never be exactly the same. Across time and cultures, marriage has been a heterosexual institution grounded in the procreative function and the responsibilities of parenthood--this more than in either love or adult fulfillment. Marriage is simply the arrangement by which humans perpetuate the species, whether or not they find fulfillment in it.

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The true problem with gay marriage is that it consigns gays to a life of mimicry and pathos. It shoehorns them into an institution that does not reflect the best possibilities of their own sexual orientation. Gay love is freed from the procreative burden. It has no natural function beyond adult fulfillment in love. If this is a disadvantage when children are desired, it is likely an advantage when they are not--which is more often the case. In any case, gays can never be more than pretenders to an institution so utterly grounded in procreation. And dressing gay marriage in a suit of civil rights only consigns gays to yet another kind of mimicry. Stigma, not segregation, is the problem gays face. But insisting on a civil rights framework only leads gays into protest. But will protest affect stigma? Is "gay lovers as niggers" convincing? Protest is trying to hit the baseball with the glove.
The problem with so much mimicry is that it keeps gays from evolving institutions and rituals that reflect the true nature of homosexuality. Assuming, as I do, that gays should have the option of civil unions that afford them the legal prerogatives of marriage, isn't it more important after that to allow quiet self-acceptance to lead the way to authentic institutions?

The stigmatization of homosexuals is wrong and makes no contribution to the moral health of our society. I was never worried for my children because they grew up knowing a gay couple that lived across the street, or because several family friends were gay. They learned early what we all know: that homosexuality is as permanent a feature of the human condition as heterosexuality. Nothing is gained in denying this. But neither should we deny that the two are inherently different. The gay marriage movement denies this difference in order to borrow "normalcy" from marriage. Thus, it is a movement born more of self-denial than self-acceptance, as if on some level it agrees with those who see gays as abnormal.

Mr. Steele, a fellow of the Hoover Institution, is author of "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America" (HarperCollins, 1998).

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Polls: Young Back Same-Sex Weddings More

Mon Mar 22, 3:54 PM ET


By MARTHA IRVINE, AP National Writer

CHICAGO - Blake Wilkinson was puzzled when he saw the young 20-something mixed among a group of graying anti-gay marriage protesters.

"It struck me — it just seemed she was out of place," says Wilkinson, a 22-year-old junior at DePaul University, who was standing on the opposite side of a downtown Chicago street to demand marriage licenses for same-sex couples from the county clerk.

As a young, gay man, Wilkinson is well aware that the majority of Americans are against giving same-sex couples the right to marry. "But generally, they're, well ..." he says pausing, "older."

Polls show there's some truth to Wilkinson's impression.

While the majority of Americans oppose legalizing same-sex marriage, people younger than 30 have consistently been more supportive of it than their elders.

For instance, a poll taken last month for the National Annenberg Election Survey at the University of Pennsylvania showed that just over half of people ages 18 to 29 would oppose a law in their states that would allow lesbians and gay men to marry a same-sex partner. That compares with 61 percent of 30- to 44-year-olds; two-thirds of 45- to 64-year-olds; and 81 percent of those 65 and older.

The poll also found that fewer than half of those younger than 30 supported a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Experts say the difference in attitudes can largely be tracked to young people's exposure to homosexuality in everyday life.

They grew up with gay activists protesting to get AIDS (news - web sites) patients access to the latest drugs — and as government officials debated the issue of "don't ask, don't tell" in the military. Celebrities such as Melissa Etheridge and Ellen DeGeneres came out, and many TV shows have incorporated gay characters and themes.

"Young people have a different idea of what is normal," says Frank Furstenberg, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist and senior research scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families.

It's a notion that concerns conservatives, some of whom are working to counter what they see as society's drift toward "normalizing" homosexuality. Meanwhile, the trend fascinates Furstenberg and other academics. They wonder what the world will be like for lesbian and gay couples a couple decades from now.

"These young people will one day become policy-makers, CEOs, religious leaders, parents and teachers," says Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker at San Francisco State University who studies gay, lesbian and bisexual youth and their families.

For now, the younger generation is clearly split.

Matt Haltzman, a high school freshman in Barrington, R.I., says he doesn't think gay activists "need to be creating laws or creating a big ordeal." He says he firmly believes what he's learned in his Jewish religion classes: "Marriage is between a man and a woman."

But other young people say that knowing someone who is gay or lesbian has caused them to rethink their views. "We should be promoting love, while it lasts — and preventing hate," says Tara Laskowski, a 26-year-old graduate student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Others wish politicians would turn their focus elsewhere.

"First, I want to feel that when I graduate next year, I will be able to find a decent, good-paying job," says Gabe LeDonne, a junior at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He's been discussing such issues in a nonpartisan, campaign 2004 focus group and says same-sex marriage was among the easiest matters to agree upon.

"The group didn't see much difference between this and the discrimination of blacks through the 1960s in the name of 'separate but equal,'" the 22-year-old says.

Those against same-sex marriage, however, think such young people are making a mistake.

"They are buying into it at higher rates than older generations, many of whom are married and understand from experience why it's important to have a mother and a father," says 25-year-old Scott Davis (news - external web site), youth director for Exodus International, a Florida-based group that promotes "freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ."

Michele Ammons, spokeswoman for the Christian Coalition, finds hope in the fact that some younger generations, particularly teens, are showing an interest in more conservative religious values. She points to the fact that many are flocking to see the Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ."

"I think this is a very smart generation that is going back to traditional values because so many of them haven't had that," she says.

Yet Anne Ledford, a student at Centre College in Danville, Ky., says it was her "very conservative" church upbringing that prompted her to accept the idea of marriage for same-sex couples.

"It's ironic now because my family does not, in any way, condone gays or gay marriage," the 22-year-old senior says. "Yet it was my parents and their church that taught me to love people different than me."

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April 11, 2004


THE TIMES POLL

Acceptance of Gays Rises Among New Generation

But a slim majority of Americans still oppose adoptions by same-sex couples and favor a constitutional ban on homosexual marriage.

By Elizabeth Mehren, Times Staff Writer


Gays and lesbians have experienced a dramatic rise in acceptance over the last two decades, according to a Los Angeles Times poll.

Almost seven in 10 Americans know someone who is gay or lesbian and say they would not be troubled if their elementary school-age child had a homosexual teacher. Six in 10 say they are sympathetic to the gay community, displaying an increasing inclination to view same-sex issues through a prism of societal accommodation rather than moral condemnation.



On questions ranging from job discrimination to role models to whether homosexuality is morally wrong, responses indicate that as gays and lesbians have become more open, heterosexuals in return have become more open toward them. A key exception is same-sex marriage — supported by only one in four.

The change has come within one generation. In two Times Polls in the mid-1980s and other data from the same era, the level of sympathy toward gays and lesbians was half what it is today.

"The stigma of being gay is disappearing," said Gary Gates, a demographer at the Urban Institute in Washington. "This is a huge change. Gay people in general are feeling more comfortable in society — and society is feeling more comfortable with gay people."

The fact that 69% of those polled by The Times said they know a gay or lesbian — up from 46% in 1985 — is particularly significant, Gates said. "Being gay is no longer an abstraction. It's my friend, my neighbor, my brother, my office-mate."

The Times poll showed that women tended to be slightly more sympathetic toward gays and lesbians than men, and the survey affirmed a polarization that puts liberals and conservatives at opposite ends of a broad spectrum.

The poll also found a profound gulf in attitudes between older and younger Americans. Compared with those over 65, respondents between 18 and 29 were so much more favorably disposed toward gays and lesbians that, Gates said, over time, "many of these issues are simply not going to be issues any longer."

But resistance remains in some areas.

A slight majority opposed adoption by same-sex couples.

And 72% opposed same-sex marriage — an issue that has driven the subject of homosexual rights to the forefront as Massachusetts, because of a state Supreme Judicial Court ruling, prepares to allow gays and lesbians to marry next month.

The issue also prompted President Bush to support a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to a union between a man and a woman. The poll found 51% supported such an amendment. An overwhelming 69% of conservatives voiced support and 70% of liberals were in opposition.

Yet the nationwide survey showed that regardless of their own feelings on the subject, 59% of respondents believe legal recognition of marriage for same-sex couples is inevitable.

Among those in the 18-to-29 age group, 71% said legal recognition of same-sex marriage is inevitable. These young Americans were more than four times as likely to support same-sex marriage as those over 65, the poll found.

"When we were young[er], the world was changing and we didn't have a problem with that. We thought it was fine. If someone was gay, that was fine too," said poll respondent Christine Claesgens, 25.

Claesgens, a waitress in Portland, Ore., predicted that when she is 65, same-sex marriage "might still be an interesting topic. But I don't think it will be a problem."

The Times Poll, supervised by polling director Susan Pinkus, surveyed 1,616 adults nationwide March 27-30. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The poll produced a variety of strong responses that reflect expanding acceptance of gays and lesbians:

• 61% say a homosexual would make a good role model for a child.

• 72% favor laws to protect homosexuals from job discrimination and 74% favor laws to protect gays and lesbians from housing discrimination.

• 62% say gays and lesbians should get the same civil rights protections as women and minorities.

• 70% say the military should not discharge gays or lesbians.

• 62% say their community accepts gays and lesbians.

• 65% say they can accept gays and lesbians living together.

But John P. DeCecco, editor of a quarterly publication in San Francisco called the Journal of Homosexuality, characterized the growing tolerance as "an uneasy acceptance."

Heterosexuals remain "very sensitive as to whether their friends and colleagues are gay," said DeCecco, a 79-year-old professor emeritus at San Francisco State University who for decades taught classes on sexuality.

But "there is less rejection on that basis than there has been in the past," he said. "They would not make that the only basis for rejection."

The tenuous nature of the new tolerance is reflected by the angst over same-sex marriage, DeCecco said. In The Times poll, 24% of respondents said gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry. Another 38% said gays and lesbians should be allowed to form civil unions but not marry, and 34% said same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry or form civil unions.

Among those who approved of same-sex marriage, the age gap was pronounced — as was the extreme discrepancy in views between self-described liberals and conservatives.

Within the 18-to-29 age group, 44% supported same-sex marriage — against 10% of those 65 and older. Among liberals, slightly more than half endorsed marriage for gays and lesbians. For conservatives, the figure was 7%.

Poll respondent James F. McNamara, 73, said he was resigned to the idea that "some kind of union will happen" for gays and lesbians.

"But I hope it's not called marriage," said McNamara, a retired computer programmer in Connecticut. "I just think marriage per se should be between a man and a woman, and it is basically for creating a family — for sexual intercourse — and for raising a family."

Far from acceptance, the notion among many Americans that the legalization of same-sex unions is unavoidable shows that "most people just feel there is nothing they can do about it," said Jan LaRue, chief counsel in Washington for Concerned Women for America, an advocacy organization that seeks to bring a Christian perspective to public policy.

"People recognize that we are facing judicial activists, such as in Massachusetts, and renegade mayors and public officials, such as we have seen in San Francisco, Oregon and New York," LaRue said. "And despite whatever it means to be sympathetic to the gay community, the vast majority do not want their children to live in that lifestyle."

In The Times poll, 60% said they would be upset if their child were gay or lesbian — down from 73% in a national poll in June 2000. In a 1983 poll, the figure was 90%.

About a third in this latest survey said homosexuality is something people are born with, while 14% said it was something that develops because of the way people are raised, and 35% called it a lifestyle preference. Twenty years ago, 16% said gays were born that way.

The Times poll also showed that slightly more than half the respondents believe homosexual orientation can be changed in just a few cases, or never. Just over a third said homosexual orientation could be changed some or most of the time. Forty-nine percent of conservatives, however, and 43% of non-Catholic Christians said homosexual orientation could be changed in most or some cases.

Nearly three in five of those surveyed said same-sex relationships are "against God's will."

In the Chicago suburb of Aurora, poll participant Mel Rauch, 38, called being gay or lesbian "a life choice, instead of a lifestyle. I feel it is not something you are born with and I think it is improper behavior."

Rauch, an engineer, said he has warned his three children that if they "turned homosexual," he would disinherit them — "because if my child was to choose that lifestyle, basically my bloodline would end with that child and not continue on. Why give him an inheritance that he is just going to have to give to the state someday?"

Asked about the causes of homosexuality, poll respondent Kathleen Halbrook said: "I don't understand it, really. I don't know if it's something they picked up because they wanted to do it, or what."

Halbrook, 80, lives near Memphis, Tenn., and has a family that includes 22 great-grandchildren.

She said she did not know what she would say to a child "with that problem," homosexuality.

"There are enough complications in life without that," she said. "But if someone is like that, what could you do about it?"

The Times poll found 52% oppose adoption by same-sex couples. In a national survey from 1992, 63% said gays and lesbians should not be allowed to adopt children. But support for adoption by same-sex couples rose to 40% in the current poll, up from 23% in the earlier poll.

In the 18-to-29 age group, 54% said they favored adoption by same-sex couples, while 70% of those over 65 opposed it. Sixty-five percent of liberals and 56% of Catholics said they favored same-sex adoptions. But 73% of conservatives and 63% of non-Catholic Christians opposed such adoptions.

Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents said watching gay and lesbian characters on television has not changed their feelings toward homosexuals. Slightly more than half said gay and lesbian issues received too much attention in the media, and more than seven in 10 said they had closely followed the recent debates about same-sex marriage.

Older people were much more likely to say they would not watch television programs with homosexual characters.

Frances Kata, 74, said she was annoyed by the news onslaught, as well as the appearance of homosexual characters on TV shows like "Will & Grace." Kata, a poll respondent who lives near Philadelphia, said the attention generated by gays and lesbians was disproportionate to their numbers.

"And they are practically committing anarchy with what they are doing. It is just not peaceful, these people going and blatantly getting married, all this nonsense," said Kata, who sold real estate before retiring.

The poll showed that people are five times as likely to say that knowing a gay or lesbian person has made a positive change in their attitude as compared to those who say it has a negative effect.

Knowing a gay or lesbian person also made respondents less likely to be upset about having a homosexual child. They also were less worried about letting their children spend time in households where a gay or lesbian resided, and less concerned about permitting their children to read books featuring gay or lesbian characters.

Familiarity also has broken down political barriers. Almost six in 10 respondents in The Times poll said they would be willing to vote for a gay or lesbian candidate.

"It all boils down to a single premise: that it is far harder to hate and discriminate against someone you know than someone you don't know," said Cheryl Jacques, president of the nation's largest gay and lesbian advocacy organization, the Human Rights Campaign in Washington. "And more and more people, as this poll shows, know gay people in their family, in their community and in their workplace."

"This has helped people to understand that the majority of gay and lesbian people, many raising children — like my family — are pretty darned normal," said Jacques, who lives with her female partner and their two young sons.

"Our household runs on Cheerios and bedtimes and choosing schools and reading books at home together," she said.

Jacques said she could easily envision a world where her two boys, Timmy and Tommy, would not have to explain a household with two mothers.

"Absolutely, and I don't think it will take that long," she said. "I think the resistance to [gay] marriage is going to turn around very quickly. By and large, the vast majority of Americans do not think twice about an interracial couple or a mixed-religious couple — things that to our parents' generation were taboo. There will be a whole generation that will not think twice about the moms next door."

Poll respondent Rodney Lawrence, 23, an insurance worker in central Illinois, said he had several gay friends. He said he viewed stigmatizing homosexuals as "just like being prejudiced. People that are prejudiced, they look at someone of another race as a lower value — and that is how some people see gays and lesbians."

Besides, Lawrence said, "When it comes down to love, it's just about what a person feels in their heart. And no one else really has a say in what you feel in your heart."


The complete Poll

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May 13, 2004

OBITUARIES
David Reimer, 38; After Botched Surgery, He Was Raised as a Girl in Gender Experiment

By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer

David Reimer, the Canadian man raised as a girl for most of the first 14 years of his life in a highly touted medical experiment that seemed to resolve the debate over the cultural and biological determinants of gender, has died at 38. He committed suicide May 4 in his hometown of Winnipeg, Canada.

At 8 months of age, Reimer became the unwitting subject of "sex reassignment," a treatment method embraced by his parents after his penis was all but obliterated during a botched circumcision. The American doctor whose advice they sought recommended that their son be castrated, given hormone treatments and raised as a girl. The physician, Dr. John Money, supervised the case for several years and eventually wrote a paper declaring the success of the gender conversion.

Known as the "John/Joan" case, it was widely publicized and gave credence to arguments presented in the 1970s by feminists and others that humans are sexually neutral at birth and that sex roles are largely the product of social conditioning.

But, in fact, the gender conversion was far from successful. Money's experiment was a disaster for Reimer that created psychological scars he ultimately could not overcome.

Reimer's story was told in the 2000 book "As Nature Made Him," by journalist John Colapinto. Reimer said he cooperated with Colapinto in the hope that other children could be spared the miseries he experienced.

Reimer was born on Aug. 22, 1965, 12 minutes before his identical twin brother. His working-class parents named him Bruce and his brother Brian. Both babies were healthy and developed normally until they were seven months old, when they were discovered to have a condition called phimosis, a defect in the foreskin of the penis that makes urination difficult.

The Reimers were told that the problem was easily remedied with circumcision. During the procedure at the hospital, a doctor who did not usually perform such operations was assigned to the Reimer babies. She chose to use an electric cautery machine with a sharp cutting needle to sever the foreskin.

But something went terribly awry. Exactly where the error lay — in the machine, or in the user — was never determined. What quickly became clear was that baby Bruce had been irreparably maimed.

(The doctors decided not to try the operation on his brother Brian, whose phimosis later disappeared without treatment.)

The Reimers were distraught. Told that phallic reconstruction was a crude option that would never result in a fully functioning organ, they were without hope until one Sunday evening after the twins' first birthday when they happened to tune in to an interview with Money on a television talk show. He was describing his successes at Johns Hopkins University in changing the sex of babies born with incomplete or ambiguous genitalia.

He said that through surgeries and hormone treatments he could turn a child into whichever sex seemed most appropriate, and that such reassignments were resulting in happy, healthy children.



Money, a Harvard-educated native of New Zealand, had already established a reputation as one of the world's leading sex researchers, known for his brilliance and his arrogance. He was credited with coining the term "gender identity" to describe a person's innate sense of maleness or femaleness.

The Reimers went to see Money, who with unwavering confidence told them that raising Bruce as a girl was the best course, and that they should never say a word to the child about ever having been a boy.

About six weeks before his second birthday, Bruce became Brenda on an operating table at Johns Hopkins. After bringing the toddler home, the Reimers began dressing her like a girl and giving her dolls.

She was, on the surface, an appealing little girl, with round cheeks, curly locks and large, brown eyes. But Brenda rebelled at her imposed identity from the start. She tried to rip off the first dress that her mother sewed for her. When she saw her father shaving, she wanted a razor, too. She favored toy guns and trucks over sewing machines and Barbies. When she fought with her brother, it was clear that she was the stronger of the two. "I recognized Brenda as my sister," Brian was quoted as saying in the Colapinto book. "But she never, ever acted the part."

Money continued to perform annual checkups on Brenda, and despite the signs that Brenda was rejecting her feminized self, Money insisted that continuing on the path to womanhood was the proper course for her.

In 1972, when Brenda was 7, Money touted his success with her gender conversion in a speech to the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., and in the book, "Man & Woman, Boy & Girl," released the same day. The scientists in attendance recognized the significance of the case as readily as Money had years earlier. Because Brenda had an identical male twin, they offered the perfect test of the theory that gender is learned, not inborn.

Money already was the darling of radical feminists such as Kate Millett, who in her bestselling "Sexual Politics" two years earlier had cited Money's writings from the 1950s as proof that "psychosexual personality is therefore postnatal and learned."

Now his "success" was written up in Time magazine, which, in reporting on his speech, wrote that Money's research provided "strong support for a major contention of women's liberationists: that conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior can be altered." In other words, nurture had trumped nature.

The Reimer case quickly was written into textbooks on pediatrics, psychiatry and sexuality as evidence that anatomy was not destiny, that sexual identity was far more malleable than anyone had thought possible. Money's claims provided powerful support for those seeking medical or social remedies for gender-based ills.

What went unreported until decades later, however, was that Money's experiment actually proved the opposite — the immutability of one's inborn sense of gender.

Money stopped commenting publicly on the case in 1980 and never acknowledged that the experiment was anything but a glowing success. Dr. Milton Diamond, a sexologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, had long been suspicious of Money's claims. He was finally able to locate Reimer through a Canadian psychiatrist who had seen Reimer as a patient.

In an article published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in 1997, Diamond and the psychiatrist, Dr. H. Keith Sigmundson, showed how Brenda had steadily rejected her reassignment from male to female. In early adolescence, she refused to continue receiving the estrogen treatments that had helped her grow breasts. She stopped seeing Money. Finally, at 14, she refused to continue living as a girl.

When she confronted her father, he broke down in tears and told her what had happened shortly after her birth. Instead of being angry, Brenda was relieved. "For the first time everything made sense," the article by Diamond and Sigmundson quoted her as saying, "and I understood who and what I was."

She decided to reclaim the identity she was born with by taking male hormone shots and undergoing a double mastectomy and operations to build a penis with skin grafts. She changed her name to David, identifying with the Biblical David who fought Goliath. "It reminded me," David told Colapinto, "of courage."

David developed into a muscular, handsome young man. But the grueling surgeries spun him into periods of depression and twice caused him to attempt suicide. He spent months living alone in a cabin in the woods. At 22, he prayed to God for the first time in his life, begging for the chance to be a husband and father.

When he was 25, he married a woman and adopted her three children. Diamond reported that while the phallic reconstruction was only partially successful, David could have sexual intercourse and experience orgasm. He worked in a slaughterhouse and said he was happily adjusted to life as a man.

In interviews for Colapinto's book, however, he acknowledged a deep well of wrenching anger that would never go away.

"You can never escape the past," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000. "I had parts of my body cut away and thrown in a wastepaper basket. I've had my mind ripped away."

His life began to unravel with the suicide of his brother two years ago. Brian Reimer had been treated for schizophrenia and took his life by overdosing on drugs. David visited his brother's grave every day. He lost his job, separated from his wife and was deeply in debt after a failed investment.

He is survived by his wife, Jane; his parents, and his children.

Despite the hardships he experienced, he said he did not blame his parents for their decision to raise him as a girl. As he told Colapinto, "Mom and Dad wanted this to work so I'd be happy. That's every parent's dream for their child. But I couldn't be happy for my parents. I had to be happy for me. You can't be something that you're not. You have to be you."

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NORM MACDONALD: One time I was doing this thing in San Francisco, and they were all gay people in the audience, they told me, and so I figured I would--

DENNIS: In San Francisco? No!

NORM: So I figured I'd do stuff about gay people so that they could relate to it.

DENNIS: Yeah, to warm up.

NORM: Right

DENNIS: They love that.

NORM: And so I was talking about, 'cause I went to this gay pride parade, and I saw in it there were these...uh... old men and old ladies like with these signs that said "We are proud of our gay son." Y'know, And so I was saying, that's an odd thing to be proud of, y'know, because it's not an achievement, y'know? It's not like something you work all your life to be gay, or anything like that. And I just wondered... I just..I had a hard time believing that these fifty, sixty year old men are actually bragging, y'know, at work, like they're, "Hey, uh, Bill, y'know, my kid, oh my god, we're proud of him. Johnny he, uh, graduated from Harvard, y'know, the first in his class, you know what I mean? And now he's articling over at a law firm, and, uh, oh yeah, he loves cock! Y'know, this kid, he can't get enough cock! In his mouth his ass this kid's ...always... I got a...I got a picture of the boy here sucking another man's cock. I wanna show it to you." He can't be proud of that!

DENNIS: To watch the maturation of you as an artist, to realize it took you nine and a half minutes to get around to the sucking cock stuff. It's beautiful to see you comfortable in your own skin, Normy. Alright.

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whomod said:
BINGO!

I was going to wait until someone else got it before I replied.

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This guys life clearly shows that your sexual identity is something that you're born with. Something ingrained in you so well that you KNOW what you are regardless of outside circumstances and knowlege kept from you. So all this debate about "choosing" to be gay comes off sounding rather bogus.

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Animalman said:
The testes are the only thing that produce male hormones, though.

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Matter-eater Man said:
Pariah not sure what your reading into the article but I thought it essentially presented a case where a man was switched to female at a very young age. Even with all the right parts & raised as a female, he rejected the fake gender. It suggests to me that sexual gender is less choice but something deeper. Not quite the same thing as sexual orientation but I see many similarities. Nobody I know, woke up and decided they were going to be gay or straight. Sexual orientation seems to be just there.

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oldmanoakley said:
whatever happened to him anyway?

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Shouldn't you tell us, being from the future as you are?

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i actually know several people who are basing their November vote on this issue, rather than the war or the economy

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Animalman said:
Ambiguity is a politician's best weapon.

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