Is Same-Sex Marriage a Civil Right?

The Video:
This video, titled “Is Gay Marriage a Civil Right? African-American and Latino Leaders Speak for Themselves," was produced by the National Organization for Marriage as part of an effort to counter the propaganda campaign to equate same-sex marriage with civil rights and the struggle for racial equality. 


  


The Response:
Here is a representative - representative in style and rhetoric as well as 'argument' - from the other side, posted by Scott Rose on the blog Pam's House Blend.  You can read the full post HERE.

For its gay-bashing hate video, NOM did not interview any African-American and Latino leaders who favor LGBT equality. 

You read that right; NOM has not posed the question “Is gay marriage a civil right?” in order to provide an objective answer to that question. It has posed the question in a hateful propagandistic attempt to rile African-American and Latino anti-gay bigots up against gay people, to fan, disgracefully, hostilities between the minorities. 

NOM and its supporters are scumbag anti-gay bigots. 

NOM’s Maggie Gallagher is a lying scumbag. NOM’s Robert George is a lying scumbag. 

NOM’s latest hate video lies about civil rights, and lies in implying that no African-American or Latino leader supports LGBT equality.

Compare the video with that response.  Which is hate-filled?  Who calls whom hateful names?  Where in all the propaganda for SSM do you find an objective examination of the question at hand or interviews with opponents of SSM, African-American, Latino, or white?  

A few supporters of SSM, like Andrew Sullivan, are willing to engage the argument in a serious way.  The overwhelmingly normative response, however, is to engage in precisely the vilification exemplified in Rose's post.  Princeton scholar and leading public intellectual, Robert P. George, has co-authored a serious and sustained argument, published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.  Rose's response is to avoid serious engagement with the argument and instead and absurdly to denounce both the article - as "anti-gay hate speech" - and the Princeton trustees for allowing Professor George to exercise his academic freedom.  Rose's treatment of Maggie Gallagher is no less despicable.  Again and again, in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, we see the attempt to criminalize rather than respond to the arguments of defenders of the institution of marriage as it has been understood for millennia and across cultures and religions.  The aim is to intimidate and silence, to threaten and drive from their jobs and careers those the pro-SSM advocates disagree with - all the while claiming that same-sex marriage will not affect the rest of society.