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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLGBT Is the Real Moral Majority - By Michael Tomasky
Michael TomaskyEvangelicals could learn to ape the success of their ideological opponents, notably the LGBT community. But when you think your orders come from God, evolution can be tough.
So now that Mike Huckabee has thrown in, we have three or arguably four Republican candidates elbowing one another to win the collective heart of the evangelical right. In addition to Huck, theres Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and maybe Rand Paul, whose links to the constituency are more tenuous but who clearly is in there pitching.
What they all understand, of course, is that the evangelical presence looms large in the Iowa caucuses, and its quite possible that only one of them is going to get out of the state alive. So by that measure, the Christian right still wields considerable political power in this country. But outside the realm of the Republican presidential primary processand maybe soon within itthe religious right is losing wattage fast, and I can report to you happily that the movement has only itself to blame.
Heres a fascinating little politico-cultural data point that may have blown past you this week and would have me were it not for Rod Dreher at The American Conservative: A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows that more Americans say they feel enthusiastic about or comfortable with an openly gay or lesbian presidential candidate than an openly evangelical Christian one. Yep. Three out of five, or 61 percent, said theyd welcome a gay candidate, while just 52 percent would say the same of an evangelical.
The comparison is instructive, because if you contrast these two movements and their relative political success in recent years, you see a very clear distinction that should (and does) make Republicans nervous. You see why the LGBT movement is winning and why religious conservatives are losingand further, why evangelicals, the foot soldiers of the religious right, probably cant do anything about it without in effect ceasing to be evangelicals (at least of the stripe theyve been for 30-plus years).
When I was a young journalist in New York, I witnessed and to some extent covered the rise of the post-AIDS gay and lesbian movement, as it was then known. I remember the rise of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. ACT UP got in peoples faces, and certainly to some extent understandably so. But there were the occasional militant actions that lost potential supportersthe kiss-ins at St. Patricks Cathedral, notably, and even on one occasion I recall the desecration of the Host by one protestor within the Cathedral itself on a Sunday morning. That one lost even me, as well as a lot of people more important than I am.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/08/what-evangelicals-can-learn-from-the-gay-rights-fight.html
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)those of the later times. The changes in tactics and methods involved both the evolution of the movement's thinking and the actual progress on the movement's goals. When it was street actions on Wall St and St Pat's and such, the message was 'Emergency, Wake the fuck up, Silence = Death'. Once the country finally, at last, paid some attention to what was happening not just to the LGBT community but to the entire world, it was no longer necessary to shout 'Emergency'.
For 7 years, Ronald Reagan said nothing at all as nearly 30,000 Americans died. If the author was offended by the tactics used to call attention to that genocidal negligence well I really do not care at all. Silent America deserved to be offended, it did not deserve to call anything it was doing sacred or holy.
The tactics of ACT UP worked. The tactics of ACT UP were only employed out of a lack of options, Reagan was a stone cold bigot. If we had not pissed off straight Americans, they would never have forced Ronnie to act. They would have continued to simply let us all die.