ELECTING OUR WAY TO CIVIL RIGHTS, OR NOT: Chris Crain

...Over the next weeks and months, we can expect and should welcome a debate within the Democratic Party, and among gay rights groups, about the best strategy to adopt in response to Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman's cynical ploy to divide and conquer.

Some will suggest, as they have on these pages this week, that the mistake was for gays to seek too much too soon, inflaming conservatives and costing Kerry his White House bid.

If Barney Frank and others of like mind actually think that gay couples marrying in San Francisco and New York caused this conservative backlash, then they are forgetting their history.

The gay marriage ballots that passed this week succeeded by roughly the same margin as they did in Hawaii, Alaska and California in the late 1990s. No sign of backlash there.

If conservatives were inflamed, it was the inevitable result of the Massachusetts court opinion. In fact, there's evidence that seeing these real-life couples marry on both coasts actually helped more Americans see that we seek no more from the institution of marriage than they do.

The same doom and gloom exit polls also show that a significant majority of voters--61 percent!--actually support either legal marriage or civil unions for gays.

THEREIN LIES THE future, and it is not in some disingenuous move to the middle, burying gay rights so that we hope no one notices. Or worse yet, repeating the embarrassing effort by congressional Democrats and our own gay rights groups to try desperately to change the subject whenever gay marriage comes up.

The future of our movement--and of the Democratic Party if it has the courage of its convictions--is to actually engage cultural conservatives on these issues and to make our case.

The only difference between civil unions and marriage is the word itself, or so we've been told, so let's focus our efforts on winning over the 35 percent of Americans who support civil unions so that they might join the 26 percent who back full marriage.

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posted by Eve at 11:19 PM | link

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