Gay rights: Sad progress

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One delightful advantage of advancing age is enjoying the perspective of gradual change. And few changes are more gradual than the overcoming of social prejudice.

That glacial process often requires the advent of whole new generations. The progress that blacks have enjoyed, for example, limited as it is, has sprung less from the change in heart of older people than from their leaving the scene.

That is surely what is happening with homosexuality today. Here in Connecticut a recent poll found 53 percent favoring gay marriage. In 2005 that figure was only 42 percent. This shift does not reflect much detectable transformation within churches or social groups — just a lot of new blood. But that issue is muted here anyway because Connecticut, unlike California, has no provision for a divisive, petitioned referendum.

In some places though, even new blood isn’t enough to fuel progress. Arkansas just passed an initiative banning any couple, gay or straight, from adopting or fostering children if that couple is not legally married. But presumably, many of those needy kids were already the products of such legal marriages. Been there, done that. So, it is a bit hard to imagine how child welfare was foremost in voters’ minds as they blacklisted any other kind of couples from helping out.

What was foremost in their minds is not hard to divine. It’s called intolerance.

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California recently demonstrated that same all-too-human trait in its own emotional vote. The Mormon Church there was somehow stimulated by the marriage issue to spend big bucks reaching out to all those voters who might harbor some prejudicial bias in their hearts.

This crusade was plainly successful. And since there are not a multitude of Mormons in California, they must have struck a chord with others, too. That actually wasn’t hard. The famous flood of Latino immigrants into the state is overwhelmingly Catholic, and there is no need to guess where Rome stands on homosexuality.

Then there was the Barack Obama candidacy that drew out black voters in unprecedented numbers. Blacks are more churchgoing than whites, and often subscribe to a more fundamental view of the Bible (or at least that’s how others interpret it). That’s surely how they voted.

So did Florida and Arizona. All of which leaves America with two uncomfortably conflicting trends. One is the growing acceptance of gays among younger people in general. The other is the growing numbers of anti-gay voters within the Roman Catholic Church as immigrants continue to pour in from southern countries and to reproduce at traditional rates. Plus, in this recent election anyway, there was that surge of African American voters who not only don’t cotton to gays, but are annoyed to see gay issues mentioned even in the same breath as civil rights.

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And now, as you may have seen in the press, the next chapter of this saga is unfolding in Iowa. It’s the usual stuff. That Legislature, like many others, passed a law limiting marriage to a man and a woman. Few votes are risked by doing that in the Bible Belt. But Iowa’s constitution, again like most others, guarantees “equal protection� under the law. This gives its state supreme court the duty of figuring out what that means in practice. Few observers want to go out on a limb and predict what a progressive but God-fearing Midwestern place like Iowa will do.

Or what the court in California will do, for that matter. True, its constitution has now been amended, but does that new provision override other provisions that guarantee equal protection? This divisive tussle is not going away soon.

Neither will gay animosity toward the Mormons. That’s just not what this country really needs right now: another bitter fault line in our society.

Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn.

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