Anderson Cooper, the first openly gay man to host a presidential debate, was the target of homophobic slurs like: “stay in your place, you faggot”. At other times in history similar things have been said of women or Afro-Americans, or other minorities.
In a debate recently in Australia about same-sex marriage, one conservative commentator remarked that the abundance of LGBTIQ speakers was tokenism, drummed up for the occasion. Clearly, such people, when they are hetero women, might speak of the disparity between men and women in our society, but they have no idea of the impact on LGBTIQ people of our absence normally from the cultural landscape.
What followed was the bizarre argument that children born in same-sex unions missed a crucial genetic or upbringing element; this commentator then went on to insist that same sex unions should not be called “marriages”; that neologisms be created for the situations, like “gayrages”; a truly twisted mentality. The wrenching of logic made me feel that allowing same sex couples to marry and have children denied hetero their exclusivity, that something was being taken from them that was theirs.
The result politically in Australia seems to suggest that same sex union will be on the back burner, for some time to come.