== Farewell, all you old homophobes = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

California's extraordinary, newfound majority support for gay marriage? Thank the young

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/06/11/notes061108.DTL&nl=fix

It's a generational thing, you could say, grinning just a little as you do so.

It's because younger people today — those under, say, 45 or so — have been far more exposed to the gay "lifestyle" and to more fluid notions of gender and sexuality, to the idea of homosexuality as a common, nonthreatening, everyday, what's-the-big-deal shrug, and therefore, as a demographic, they/we understand that allowing gay people to wed doesn't actually mean our shaky notions of God and family and society will collapse like a priest's willpower at a Boy Scout jamboree.

This, I think, was perhaps the most fascinating tidbit of insight to emerge from the most recent poll of Californians where, for the first time in state history, a majority of those polled said they support the idea of gay marriage and/or oppose a new and vile push for a state constitutional amendment to ban it outright. And that majority consists, by and large, of the young.

It's an intriguing — if slightly morbid — thing to note, because on the flip side, the poll also found that most people over age 65 don't like the idea of gay marriage one little bit because, well, they usually can't exactly explain why, though it's not difficult to guess: It's what they were taught, what was implied, it's what their own parents passed on to them, as did their church, their culture, society as it was during their upbringing, and it was largely a narrow and repressed and sexually unaware period that finally, mercifully seems to be gasping its last. ...

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Familiarity breeds respect

or at least the attitude that hey, these folks aren't THAT different than me--what is the big deal?

When I was growing up, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder, and everyone was basically "in the closet". When a given population is hidden, it is much easier to teach folks to hate them. I find it fascinating that when I lived in a small town in Illinois that had a sizable black population that had been there since the founding of the town, there was no KKK activity, no racial hate groups. I now work in a town of similar size in Arkansas, and there is not one, but four KKK/hate groups in the area, and they are active and, at times, loud. The difference? There are maybe two or three blacks living in the entire county, and they are recent arrivals (most are attending a local junior college).

[MedleyMisty]

2. "It's what I was taught"

is no excuse. Sorry.