March 25, 2015.
Regarding Doug Mainwaring’s article, “Same Sex Marriage: ‘Thoroughly Tiresome’ by Design,” in the March 20 issue of American Thinker:
There is so much wrong about this thinking that it is not worth answering. It is the old scientific problem of not being able to predict but to explain after discovery.
But people seriously interested in how our movement has been successful might want to know a little about the timeline. And it sure didn’t start with the writers of this book in the 1980s. (Maybe, like most academics, they were in an ivory tower.) I wonder how many people read the book — I did not. Where are these men today? What other books and resources has Mainwaring used?
But a few minor points.
First, psychology did not even think of trying to change the views of religion — in that time it used that religious thinking — check back at what psychiatrists testified in courts, think of how many people they said they could cure. They never did a single scientific research effort; they based their “answers” on religious nonsense — that is why we said our enemy included mostly Jewish psychiatrists. And why Dr. Evelyn Hooker’s research was not welcomed.
Fortunately, there are still many LGBT pioneers/activists who can testify to how little support they got from the media — ask the publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, et al. Take a look at what the “media” was saying about us until the ’90s. And this includes what were supposedly “liberal” and intellectual publications.
And the ACLU did not think we had a valid issue until about 1965. And did the writers miss Stonewall, 1969?
But that makes the point — by the ’80s we had already been successful. I wonder how the people interested in abortion think of the claim that that issue is settled.
The article writer is against same-sex marriage? Why? I have no interest in it but would not take the time to oppose it while other members of the community want it. And deserve it: either marriage benefits are for everyone or for no one. That is the American way. Equality of opportunity. But, like many preachers, I wonder why he is so concerned about this one issue? Is he active in other efforts to gain our civil rights?
Turn the issue of who is a victim around. Does he accept the religious nuts idea that they are victims if we gain equal rights? As they once said Black Americans made them — white people — when they sought marriage, including interracial marriage? Has he studied the real history “marriage?”
It is not hard — it is easy, to learn the history of the movement to gain civil rights for homosexual Americans.
The lasting effort began, as is well recorded, in 1950 (early/original Mattachine). It went public in January, 1953, with ONE magazine. The movement for homosexual rights started in Los Angeles; San Francisco joined, then other major cities with their own organizations and publications.
The nascent movement had no support from the media, academia, rich people, celebrities, liberals, religious groups — only a few brave middle class Americans.
By the mid 1960s, the dozen or so main groups joined to form a national effort (NACHO) and held the first coordinated public demonstration in 1966 — over the issue of homosexuals and the military. It was covered not by the local press but by an article by Peter Bart in The New York Times. Two local TV stations did send reporters to interview us — Tom Brokaw for NBC and Connie Chung for CBS — but both have for some reason forgotten this.
There had been a few TV talk shows and LIFE magazine had done a decent article in 1964, but not much media coverage was given to our efforts until 1969. By that time they needed us more than we needed them.
The media does not try to give citizens news until it is no longer news — no longer controversial — for they do not want to upset the advertisers.
But, that is an interesting point — it has been the free enterprisers and capitalists that have welcomed the community and given us support — not the politicians, governments (that should be treating all citizens equally), and certainly not the religious people who claim to love everyone.
Major corporations supported us long before the politicians, and the religious do-gooders have still not seen the light.
