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Every campaign season the calls to jettison gays and set aside equal rights "just for now" become depressingly prevalent. People rightly see gay rights as an issue in which the right thing to do is electorally unpopular. Under the pretense of pragmatism, with much talk of committee seats and majority rule, people argue that politicians have no choice but to compromise--to say that they agree with something safe but half-hearted like civil unions, rather than something simple yet controversial like equal rights. The argument is often made that equal rights must be sacrificed, that politicians must support something vile (like opposing equal rights) or safe (like vague support for civil unions), because otherwise they will never be elected in their district/state.
What this truism of an argument fails to take into account is the myriad positions conservatives strongly hold that are extremely unpopular. Corporate welfare; support for outsourcing; massive tax cuts for the elite; rewriting the tax codes into a bacchanal for investors; free trade agreements unencumbered by labor or environmental regulations; the complete ceding of public regulatory power to the pharmaceutical companies--these are all extremely unpopular on the face of things. If polled on these issues, the populace at large would side overwhelmingly in favor of the Democratic positions. But notice that these issues aren't at the forefront of our political discourse. There isn't the same feverish focus on economic inequality as there is on the social/bedroom issues. Why? Because when they are the focus, conservatives lose every time on these economic issues.
Yet these unpopular stances, these fiscal policies in support of an extreme privileged minority, form the core of the conservative agenda. They aren't on the periphery--they are why conservatives have thousands of funded think-tanks, advocacy groups and armies of lobbyists. They are richly rewarded for these utterly unpopular stances. Yet the public debate is never focused on such issues--the public debate focuses on the bedroom, on the "throwaway" social issues. Of course they aren't throwaway--they are often about basic human rights, dignity, etc. which are by their nature extremely important. But they -are- throwaway to conservatives. Conservatives couldn't care less about gay marriage, but they know that it is a divisive issue that will pad out their ballot boxes. A small percentage of the population having rights that everyone else has doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things to the conservative leadership's mind, but a $10 billion profit for Exxon-Mobil matters, as do the untold profits of defense contractors, billions recovered from the poor and middle class and funneled into big pharma, environmental deregulation, etc. The conservatives inflate a social issue that is important but not among the -central- issues facing our country into a prominent position in our discourse solely to get votes. That's it. They want to fire up their base and net the most votes from the rest of our more quietly bigoted population.
This is why simply choosing a position on the issue once it is catapulted into prominence during an election year -does- seem like electoral suicide. Conservatives have carefully chosen the issue to pick the winning side and leave us to the losing side. What's right or wrong never enters into their calculation--they just want to claim the vote-rich territory and leave us the scraps. That the scraps include the right thing to do is irrelevant to them, though it is relevant to us. Their main goal is to push through their economic agenda--on these social issues they will simply stake out whatever position is electorally profitable and then shout about it until Democrats are forced to stake out their own positions. Since we're the only ones who have a concern about what the right thing to do is, we are at a disadvantage. But notice that the conservatives have their own issues on which their stances are not only immobile and unpopular, but also demonstrably wrong. While popular opinion will swing toward equal rights inevitably, never will popular opinion swing toward enriching the upper class at the expense of the lower.
So the answer isn't to flee from debate and stake out some mealy-mouthed position that's afraid of equal rights but unwilling to sell out part of the human race entirely. It's to catapult some of the conservatives' unpopular positions to the forefront of the debate, and by doing so combat the effect their divisive pandering has on our ballot boxes. The answer is never the "ends justifies the means" solution of selling out gays and other unpopular but worthy causes--the answer is to fight back. The answer is to force out the conservative agenda's most horrible and unpopular stances and focus the debate as much as possible on those. Equal rights for gays then would occupy its proper place--an important, necessary issue of our times, but not one that solely decides the election.
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