“A new poll indicates that majority of New Yorkers support the legalization of same-sex marriages.

Fifty-three percent of New Yorkers questioned in a Siena College Research Institute poll support a bill that would allow same-sex couples to wed, with 39 percent opposing the move.

The survey suggests that Democrats, independent and young voters, and women strongly support Senate passage. Republicans strongly oppose passage. Men, older voters, African-Americans, and Protestants are also opposed. The strongest support for the measure is found in New York City.”

First time I’ve seen a poll with over 50% support for marriage, but the national numbers have risen from the 1/3 in my original post to the 40’s
.
Interesting African-Americans and Protestants. I assume the Protestants reflect evangelicals and so do the African Americans. I wonder if this means Catholics aren’t as opposed?

Marriage is about a lot of things, sex included. However, most married couples, or for that matter most couples, spend more time eating and cooking than having sex for example. To base marriage, with all of its aspects and complexity, on gender alone seems strange. People are going to form couples for longer or shorter times in any case. Whether you’re pro- or anti- marriage itself, it seems to me that who people choose to love is their own business and for that matter their own natures.

I’m not aware of a movement to force anyone to accept anything, but of a shrill movement to deny rights to some people that are automatically granted to others.

I also haven’t heard of a movement to have anyone stand in a classroom and explain the mechanics of sex, homo or hetero, which aren’t actually much different. They’re both equally strange and disgusting to 3rd graders, fascinating to 7th graders and compelling to late adolescents. But where do you get the idea that there’s an agenda to put this in classrooms?

Swami: Again, we get it, you hate gay people for no reason. Old news. I’m sure you can find plenty of websites where your views will be welcomed.

Yep, that was actually one of the first things I noticed back when I found this site. Now that I looked at it, the site sidebar listed 17 creative authors, all lily white except for one Asian man and one black man who specializes in the urban hiphop scene. This doesn’t exactly scream “diversity”, at least in the usual sense of this word.

“It would be useful to actually READ Dr. Florida’s books before critiquing them.”

Oh, I have read them. However, reading them without giggling become much more difficult after Christian Lander’s hit site and book “Stuff White People Like” that sarcastically points out pretty much the same things that Dr. Florida argues in utter seriousness (Lander’s “white people” and Florida’s “creative class” turn out to be pretty much the same group), but is more explicit in honestly acknowledging them as status signals in intrawhite status competition that they really are.

“The massive blind spot that Florida and his fellow urban liberal “creatives” have about this issue probably stems from the fact that they don’t realize the full extent of their engagement in class and status competition over the white proles that they want to distance themselves from to appear “enlightened” and “smart”.”

Ilkka, we call them limousine liberals – Do as I say, not as I do.

I’m pretty much agnostic on the whole gay issue, but like my African-American friends I can’t bring myself to equate it with the Civil Rights movement.

It would be useful to actually READ Dr. Florida’s books before critiquing them.

A more cynical person might hypothesize that gay acceptance is merely a proxy, the same way that yacht ownership strongly correlates with wealth: gay acceptance is a sign of presence of fellow middle class SWPL professionals and the absense of poor minorities (who generally tend to be rather anti-gay), which makes it attractive to SWPL’s.

If I recall correctly (I don’t have the books at hand right now), in one of his books Dr. Florida actually uses, apparently without even realizing it himself, an explicit example of gentrification to argue his thesis that tolerance towards gay people is correlated with economic success. Drive out the poor minorities and replace them with upwardly mobile white middle class professionals, and that area suddenly gets wealthier… why, it must be all that gay creativity that the latter group brings in!

The massive blind spot that Florida and his fellow urban liberal “creatives” have about this issue probably stems from the fact that they don’t realize the full extent of their engagement in class and status competition over the white proles that they want to distance themselves from to appear “enlightened” and “smart”. Whenever they imagine someone who opposes gay marriage, they always think of some white prole who is fat and uneducated, owns several cars, goes to church every Sunday, flies a flag unironically in his suburban home etc. They never think of the opponents of gay marriage as being black, latino, or Muslim, and thus don’t realize what their enthusiastic arguments about the correlation between gay acceptance and economic success are really implying.

(As an educational exercise and illustration of this principle, see how long it takes you to find the word “black” or “latino” in Dr. Florida’s postings in this site. No googling allowed! Which is quite revealing, considering that the core of Dr. Florida’s social theses is the strong correlation between creativity and diversity.)

We could generalize this topic even further and ask what exactly is the real difference between “flight of the creative class” and the plain old “white flight”, but that would be a topic for a different post and comment.