Lawyers Lag and Limp to Leveling

Fifty years in the making, lawyers finally getting equality is the tale told in today's NYT by law prof. Dale Carpenter. He sketches how the profession and related courts moved from strong gay bashing to mild acceptance.

This is the phantasm that so haunts anti-gay/anti-marriage equality sorts.

A small group of equality-minded lawyers did exact what the queer haters feared the most. They relentlessly pointed out the cruelty, illogic and unfairness of harming and hating homosexuals. They worked like water on the stone to erode the absurd assertions that gay people where abnormal, inferior and deserving of only a sliver of the equality cake.

Life must be getting tougher for the hoary haters, including SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia. Like the current madness over the President's birth certificate, actual scientific findings prove to nearly everyone that homosexuals are born that way. Logic and the law increasingly are on the side of civil rights for LGBT folk.

Carpenter phrases some of this very kindly, as in "the legal profession was not in the vanguard of gay rights." Yet given a half century of steady work to, as the haters would have it, make people think homosexuality is normal, lawyers are finally, in the main, with the obvious. Some folk won't accept even the most obvious. The indoctrination and propaganda as they might call it, is simply showing and teaching. Some refuse to deal with it.

Well, gayness is normal, is innate, and is worthy of fairness.

Some folk may never get there and admit that. Unfortunately, this is another cultural area where Americans lag the rest of the industrialized world. We'll watch the old nasties die and take their emotionally based prejudice with them.