In Slate, Dan Pashman wonders if the general lack of a public outcry over the legalization of gay marriage is indicative of a lack of outrage or the slip in importance of those who are outraged:
As more states legalize same sex-marriage, the lack of outrage is striking. Forget the Armageddon we were promised. There’s hardly even been a press conference. It would appear that gay marriage is just not that big a deal anymore and that the Christian right—long the main source of opposition—isn’t either. Both are scenarios I find encouraging, but I question whether the nation’s collective shrug can be fully explained by the natural ebb and flow of politics and social mores. What if neither the Christian right nor the issue of gay marriage was ever as central in American politics as the media or the far right would have had us believe?
There was a time when an inflammatory remark from one of the leaders of the religious right would spark a media feeding frenzy. (Remember when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed 9/11 on gay people?) If you count New Hampshire, where a bill is awaiting the governor’s signature, since the beginning of April four states (the other three are Iowa, Maine, and Vermont) have legalized gay marriage. Predictably, speaking on the Christian Broadcasting Network, Robertson reacted to Maine’s legalization of gay marriage with an old chestnut: “What about bestiality and ultimately what about child molestation and pedophilia? How can we criminalize these things and at the same time have constitutional amendments allowing same-sex marriage among homosexuals? Mark my words, this is just the beginning of a long downward slide in relation to all the things that we consider to be abhorrent.”
Yet nobody seemed to notice Robertson’s comments.
Read the full article here.