In an op-ed for the New York Times, Charles Blow says he finds results from a new Gallup poll on Americans’ views about the morality of homosexuality to be “stunning”:
1. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. (You have to love the fact that they still use the word “relations.” So quaint.)
2. Also for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.
3. This new alignment is being led by a dramatic change in attitudes among younger men, but older men’s perceptions also have eclipsed older women’s. While women’s views have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 49 who perceived these “relations” as morally acceptable rose by 48 percent, and among men over 50, it rose by 26 percent.
I warned you: stunning.
In 2001, Gallup found that 40 percent held the view that gay people were morally fit. The number dropped to 38 percent the next year, but reached 44 percent in 2006 and has risen steadily ever since.
Experts suggest that the dramatic change in attitude, especially among men, may be explained by the “contact hypothesis,” which proposes that because so many gays are “out,” including high-profile sports figures and entertainers, a tipping point has been reached, and now non-gays are simply more comfortable with the presence of gay people.
Maybe this explains why, just last weekend, an old espouser of gay hatred like Rush Limbaugh hired Elton John, one of the best-known gay men on the planet, to sing at his fourth wedding. (On the other hand, it’s just as likely that Rush’s new wife made him hire Sir Elton.)
Another theory is that in the wake of the involuntary de-closeting of so many rabid gay-haters — Rev. Ted Haggard, Dr. George “Rentboy” Rekers, Sen. Larry “Wide Stance” Craig and the rest — people who talk trash about gays are increasingly viewed with suspicion. As Wayne Besen at Truth Wins Out put it:
Normal, healthy, functional heterosexuals do not become paranoid or fixated on homosexuals. It is primarily people with sexual hang-ups, extreme religious indoctrination or deep, dark secrets that are preoccupied and consumed by the sexual orientation of others.
Or, with apologies to Shakespeare, “the homophobe doth protest too much.”
It’s also likely that exposure to happy, healthy gay people on one hand and lying, closeted homophobes on the other may be prompting straight people to apply critical thinking to anti-gay activists’ arguments against gay rights.
For example, people who have gay coworkers or friends will probably find themselves rethinking the notion that homosexuality is a choice. Upon introspection, rational people are likely to realize that if they themselves did not choose to be straight — and that they are incapable of choosing to be gay — then it follows that other people don’t choose to be gay, and gay people can’t choose to be straight.
It’s also hard to square the logic of denying civil rights to gays because the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, when religious hardliners never advocate denying the civil rights of adulterers, for example, even though adultery is considered such a grievous sin that it is condemned twice in the Ten Commandments and many other times in the Scriptures, while, by comparison, homosexuality is barely mentioned.
Of course, the Gallup poll also shows that gay hatred is still alive and well in some quarters. Just 30 percent of Republicans find gays to be “morally acceptable,” compared with 50 percent of independents and 52 percent of Democrats. By ideology, just 28 percent of conservatives say homosexuals are morally fit, versus 50 percent of moderates and 74 percent of liberals. And by religious identification, 36 percent of Protestants say homosexuality is morally tolerable, while 46 percent of Catholics, 77 percent of non-Christians and 74 percent of those with no religious affiliation agree.
