<font size=4>“Conservative” Majority Meets Apparently
Nonpartisan Minority<font size=3>
In a fairly straightforward story detailing how public opinion is galvanizing against what proponents call "gay marriage," <font size=4>New York Times reporters Katharine Seelye and Janet Elder typically identify the "religious right" Traditional Values Coalition and the "conservative" Concerned Women for America and then, on the libertine left, they describe the Human Rights Campaign as only a "gay rights group." This is an old pattern of highlighting the “religious right” and presenting gay groups as utterly nonpartisan and nonideological – just reasonable advocates for overdue fairness and equality.<font size=3>
But it must be difficult for the Times to acknowledge that the “conservative” side of this debate is comfortably in the majority, while those nonpartisan advocates for fairness are a much smaller group, as they noted: “Support for a constitutional amendment [protecting marriage] extends across a wide swath of the public and includes a majority of people traditionally viewed as supportive of gay rights, including Democrats, women and people who live on the East Coast.”
There weren’t liberal politicians or law professors, either. Seelye and Elder described Howard Dean’s signing of a law legalizing same-sex “civil unions” in Vermont merely as “an action that Republicans have already used to portray him as too liberal for mainstream America.”
<font size=4>They also quoted liberal law professor Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas without a label as he proclaimed, "The idea is for Bush to throw red meat to the Republican right, secure in the knowledge that this is not going to go anywhere," he said. "If it did go anywhere, it would tear the Republican Party apart." They did not note that Professor Levinson is leftish enough to write legal articles for the Village Voice.<font size=3>
To read the Seelye-Elder piece in full, click here.
timeswatch.org |
