Natural Allies

Like many progressives, I’m thoroughly dismayed by the passage of Proposition 8 and its ilk in this election. And I’ve spent the 10 days since talking with gay and straight friends about the best way to move forward now that the state-level legalization approach is beginning to feel like a giant game of Othello (four tiles flip white, then eight tiles flip black).

It’s understandable when you’re the butt of prejudice to feel like yours is the shortest straw: a lesbian reader at the NYTimes tells Judith Warner that homophobia is the last and only socially-acceptable prejudice in America today. As a young woman in the boys club of business journalism, I beg to differ: sexism is alive and well too. And if anyone doubts it, they need only look to the coverage of Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton in this campaign. Like their politics or not, there was an awful lot of gender-biased vitriol spewed at them, and no attempt by news organizations to apologize or correct the behavior. Put this together with Proposition 8 and you see that it’s sexuality itself that is the last acceptable fault line of prejudice. Read the rest of this entry »