Re: your post #72
You must be extremely desperate to make whatever point it is you're trying to make because:
A. albeit the quote you've cited may come from The Citizen's Editorial page but, it's highly out of context.
B. the quote you've cited doesn't come from an actual "Editorial" as your "ed." would have us believe but, rather from a signed opinion piece by someone on its Editorial Board (e.g. I've posted numerous articles on FR by Lorne Gunter who happens to sit on the National Post's Board but have never portrayed them to be "Editorials" when they plainly were not.)
C. this opinion piece (copied below) cites numerous alleged societal attitudinal shifts with respect to homosexuality based upon AMERICAN RESEARCH and/or SOURCES !!! ... so, again, what's your point with respect to Canadians alone vis-a-vis the gay agenda ?!?!
How gay became OK
Leonard Stern, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, June 10, 2006
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised to let parliamentarians vote this fall on whether to reopen the same-sex marriage debate. Yet social acceptance of homosexuality is growing so fast that the fall might be too late for opponents of gay marriage.
We tend to think that, barring a transformative event, cultural shifts move glacier-like. In fact, attitudinal change can happen quickly. A population can in one generation reject a whole set of inherited prejudices. (The reverse is also true: we can in short order adopt a whole set of prejudices that our fathers never knew.)
Every few years, since at least the early 1970s, the National Opinion Research Centre at the University of Chicago has surveyed Americans on how they feel about sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex. Up until the 1990s, a solid three quarters of Americans said homosexual relations were always wrong. In 1987 the number who felt that way peaked at 80 per cent.
Then the numbers started dropping, dramatically. By 2004, only 58 per cent of Americans were prepared to say that sex between two men or two women was always wrong. In 2002, the number was even lower, at 55 per cent.
By the end of this decade it's probable that a majority of Americans, despite belonging to one of the most religiously Christian nations in the industrialized West, will no longer believe that homosexuality is inherently harmful.
Some social conservatives, disoriented by this development, will take it as proof of a growing sexual immorality. That won't hold, however. The same University of Chicago data show that Americans today, though more tolerant of homosexuality, are less tolerant of adultery. In 1973, 70 per cent of respondents said it was always wrong for a married person to have sex with someone other than his or her spouse. In 2004, that number had expanded to a healthy 80 per cent.
If acceptance of homosexuality were synonymous with loose sexual mores, there'd have been a commensurate endorsement of adultery -- and instead just the opposite has obtained. Nor is there an increasing acceptance of, say, premarital sex. For the past quarter century or so the number of Americans who say sex before marriage is wrong has remained stable.
All these data are in a report released last month by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. Canadian numbers are harder to come by, but what data there are indicate similar trends. While many straight people may find the idea of gay sex personally unappealing, fewer and fewer believe it is criminal or immoral -- which is why opinion surveys consistently show that very few Canadians or Americans support discrimination against homosexuals.
A Leger Marketing survey in 2001 found that more than three quarters of Canadians believe gays and lesbians should have the same rights as heterosexuals. That's a big majority, and considering the trajectory of public opinion, it would likely be even bigger if the survey were repeated today. Just last month in the U.S., a Gallup poll found that 89 per cent of respondents believed homosexuals should have equal rights in terms of job opportunities.
I see two main reasons for this huge attitudinal shift. First, a growing body of research suggests that sexual orientation is part of our hardwiring, like skin colour. The biological dimension makes it harder to label gays and lesbians as deviants who have made perverted lifestyle choices.
Second, the gay rights movement gave homosexuals the confidence to come out, the result of which is that straight people discovered their own colleagues, friends and even family members were gay. Homosexuals and homosexuality were demystified. It turned out that gays and lesbians -- among them politicians, lawyers, teachers, parents -- were not predatory weirdos but completely ordinary people.
As the American Enterprise Institute report puts it, "Solid majorities are comfortable being around people who are gay." Again, this is a new development. In the 1970s most people supported banning gay teachers from elementary schools. Flash forward to a 2004 Los Angeles Times poll, in which nearly 70 per cent of respondents said they wouldn't care if their child's teacher were gay. As well, a CNN/Time survey found that most people today would see a gay doctor or vote for a gay politician.
True, there remain some holdouts -- a minority who still think homosexuals are by definition deviant, their behaviour immoral and their claims for social equality unpersuasive. But here's the rub: Most of these holdouts are rural folk or people older than 60. The data are clear on that. Very soon, resistance to gay marriage will be concentrated in seniors' residences and on disappearing farms.
I suspect Mr. Harper is personally reconciled to the inevitability of gay marriage but feels compelled to hold a vote to appease parts of his political base. So let them have their vote. It'll be their last stand.
Leonard Stern is the Citizen's editorial pages editor. E-mail: lstern@thecitizen.canwest.com
© The Ottawa Citizen 2006
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