BY JAMES NIMMO
Thanks to a Yahoo group correspondent [remember Yahoo groups?] I’ve found this wonderful time capsule video of a debate from 1974, sponsored by WGBH, Boston’s splendid public radio and television service. Titled The Advocates it’s a stylized courtroom setting with two questioners and four respondents. This episode on the Open Vault page of the WGBH website examines the pros and cons of same gender marriage, though the terms used at that time were homosexual and heterosexual – the words equal, gay, lesbian, and straight are never used.
It takes a couple of minutes to adjust to the “H” words and the abundance of hair on the men and sole woman who appear in the program. What struck me was the similarity of the negativity directed at what we now call marriage equality – nothing has been learned by our gender supremacist enemies during the intervening 40 years except that in 2014 they voice their disagreement with our civil right to marriage in a much uglier tone – the patina of patronizing paternalism is now gone, the veneer of respect has been corroded by the acid of bile.
The anti-advocate claims he doesn’t want to discriminate against “homosexuals” in regards to housing, employment, or the right to associate in private, but marriage is exclusively for heterosexual couples in order to insure the survival of the race.
The pro-advocate does a splendid job at drilling holes in these anti-arguments, full of holes as they are already. You’ll recognize many of these themes since they were used during California’s Prop 8 trial.
Our enemies now and in 1974 are so concerned with intercourse and reproduction that they reduce all people, gay or straight, to no more than breeding stock, so dense are the blinders they wear, with one anti-witness discussing the use of tax “bounties” to ensure that only reproducing couples are allowed marriage.
Is this truly how some straight people think of themselves? Is this all their human sensitivity can develop for others? If so, then thank God [who, by the way, is never mentioned] for gay people!
It seems to me some straight men and women – the more thoughtful of our enemies who were/are few in number both in 1974 and now – are afraid that the liberalization of sexual mores will force them, against their will, to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that fuels their vehemence towards gay people as well as their own self-serving sophistry and possibly their own closeted gay orientation, while the great majority keep banging their heads against the brick wall of their fearful ignorance.
– James Nimmo lives in Oklahoma City and is a frequent contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
