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Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
No. But they can all take a page from the gay rights movement. That is the template for how equality is achieved. In that instance, smart people targeted certain states, got laws passed, anticipated a SCOTUS challenge and framed the issue as one of basic human dignity. There was a tight, coherent argument: Gay people stand in an identical position to straight people, and deserve all the same rights in terms of ability to have a state sanctioned marriage. They had the science and law on their side, their advocacy was simple and compelling, and their strategy was shrewd.
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The gay rights movement certainly had its share of people who -- fairly -- accused the broader society of homophobia in a way that was not politically popular and turned off many people. You can only say there was a tight, coherent argument and a shrewd strategy by ignoring all of the other messy, incoherent, unshrewd stuff, of which there was a lot. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. When you talk about gay rights, you see it as a legal strategy, and don't really have a story of how hearts and minds were changed. (Hard to fault you for this, because it has been a stunning change over a short period of time, and I'm not sure anyone really predicted it or has explained it well.) With the lessons you draw from gay rights, it seems like you should be concluding that the battle for racial and gender equality is basically won, since post-Brown the Fourteenth Amendment has been understand in a way even stronger than what gays have won. Since that obviously isn't true, maybe you ought to think a little harder about what you've been saying.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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