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Barney Frank And "The Gay Agenda"

By blueness

Wingers often bruit about the phrase "the gay agenda," which, like a related phrase, "the gay lifestyle," they are usually careful not to precisely define. For when they do, we learn that such phrases most often reflect a silly and unreasoning fear among wingers that Nefarious Forces are plotting to somehow force them, the wingers, to engage in sodomy from dusk till dawn, then don chaps of leather and ride loud motorcycles in parades. Their wives, meanwhile, will be enticed by Sapphic sirens into a life of perpetual sexual ecstasy, causing them to abandon their children to gigantic Boy Scout camps, where they will be processed into replicas of the sect's founder and mastermind, Robert Baden-Powell.

Legislatively, however, there is these days something of "a gay agenda," and it is this which Congressmember Barney Frank addresses towards the end of a too-brief profile in the January 12 New Yorker.

Frank seems remarkably optimistic about the prospect for advances in gay rights in the upcoming Congress. I'm wondering whether people here share that optimism, and whether they believe this--recent defeats like California's Prop. 8 notwithstanding--to be reason for good cheer.
Frank tells writer Jeffrey Toobin the following:

"We're going to do three things in Congress[.] First, a hate-crimes bill--that shouldn't be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come."

Thoughts?

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on January 10, 2009 (boomark / email).