Tim Cook and the End of Gay Rights as a Wedge Issue
It's official--the 1% doesn't care anymore. They opposed marriage equality while it could still motivate some of the 99% to vote for tax cuts for the rich, but we've seen at long last the expiration date.
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/26680-tim-cook-and-the-end-of-gay-rights-as-a-wedge-issue
On Thursday morning, the head of one of the world’s most admired companies, Tim Cook, of Apple, announced that he is gay. Although not entirely a surprise, Cook had guarded his privacy. As he put it in a piece for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now,” adding pointedly and poignantly, “So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.” Cook instantly became the most prominent openly gay C.E.O. in history.
Cook’s announcement is one of many signs that gay rights is no longer an automatic wedge issue in American culture and politics. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court declined to review appellate court rulings that overturned gay-marriage bans, a move that brought marriage equality to more than a dozen new states. The news has been almost all good (with some notable exceptions, such as the continuing discrimination in Africa and other parts of the world). But, historically, an intense news focus on gay rights and same-sex marriage has usually been followed by some sort of backlash, often felt during national elections. For example, in 2004, President George W. Bush won reëlection at least in part because his political operatives drew conservative voters to the polls in swing states by placing gay marriage on the ballot in the form of state constitutional amendments. Further back, President Bill Clinton, during his 1996 reëlection campaign, was so worried about being portrayed as favoring marriage rights for gays that he signed the Republican-sponsored Defense of Marriage Act. (I was an adviser to Clinton at the time.) That same year, his opponent, Senator Bob Dole, returned a contribution from a gay Republican group because he did not want to be seen as linked to its agenda. And, in 2008, then Senator Barack Obama walked back his previous support for marriage equality in order to run for President as a candidate opposed to gay marriage. It took him until May of 2012 to publicly say that he personally supported marriage equality, in an announcement whose timing was forced by Joe Biden. Even then, Obama was said to be taking a big risk.
Not this year. When I asked Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Democratic strategist and former senior congressional aide, where the issue of gay marriage was playing in this year’s midterm elections, he replied, “Frankly, nowhere.” Fred Sainz, the communications director for the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest gay-rights organization, answered the same question by saying, “Exactly the way we want it.”
Marc Solomon, the national campaign director of Freedom to Marry, said, “It’s been fascinating in that so much has happened on the marriage front, with almost no peep from electeds who are in tough races who oppose us.” (Solomon is the author of a forthcoming book called “Winning Marriage: The Inside Story of How Same-Sex Couples Took on the Politicians and Pundits—and Won.”)
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out of them Mooslimes--but it could just as easily be the godless Chinee or the Italians (they gave us Columbus Day, y'know!); I even remember the Portuguese were in for it in the 80s ("they're all rapists!"