My main email account has been at Yahoo for years. My very first one ever was either Prodigy or Juno. There was the MSN one for a while, and I may still have an active email account with AOL that I never used other than for the AIM. I do have a gmail account, but I really only use it because I like it better for sending pictures from my phone.
None of that's really the point other than the Yahoo part which is the email address I use for my daily electronic correspondence, and because I have then to visit Yahoo I sometimes catch myself having to read one of the stories featured on the front page.
Today's story was about a poll Yahoo was taking that showed Americans are equally split in their opinions as to whether or not I should be allowed to marry a man, though thankfully they didn't have a poll on how long it would take me to meet one worth marrying. That would have been depressing.
Though the story itself isn't depressing, and the poll numbers do basically tell us what we likely know, it's not disheartening to read that we get closer to equality over time. Toward the end of the article it even mentions the age gap in difference of opinion in older versus younger generations, and that's a testament to how far we have come in that so many people are coming out younger, and their straight friends remain friends and eventually become allies.
But the article does leave me a little underwhelmed.
I may have mentioned that I don't really like the term "gay marriage." So it should be no surprise that the use of that term throughout the article was irritating. Then the third paragraph begins with the line, The battle for what pro gay-marriage activists call "marriage equality" . . . And yes, they do use scare quotes around what the writer must assume is not a real thing, and they're letting us know that it's the activists, the loud ones that get in your face that want to use this term.
They mention DADT and almost mention Margaret Witt, a flight nurse in the Air Force who was discharged/fired because of DADT. While the article is correct in suggesting that the discharge was unconstitutional, and they mention that a judge has ruled that she should be reinstated because of that, but I think it bears repeating that the judge ruled that Margaret Witt should be given her job back because of constitution issues as well as because her discharge hurt unit morale as well as their ability to function properly.
Further into the article about their poll they mention reader comments showing the divide between how people view marriage equality. In an effort, one assume, to be balanced they include a comment from an anti who points out that the world will be destroyed because all the families will stop being families. I really feel that, at this point in the conversation, when all you can offer is a soundbite then maybe your voice is no longer valid, so I can't believe this sort of shit is still included in the story. It's an argument that's easily disproven as several countries around the world allow openly gay people to serve in the military and don't tell you who you can marry, and the world seems to be spinning and orbiting as much as ever.
They end somewhere around "marriage is a religious ceremony" which is the antis trying to make us believe that churches will have to marry gays, another thing that they say that just isn't true, but the article doesn't seem to point out that churches already have the ability to pick and choose who they will or won't marry.
It just seems lazy to me I guess. Maybe I expect more than just a telling of the story, but I have to remember most of my gay news comes from actual gay people writing about them in blogs devoted to gay news and opinion. Not only do I get my gay news quicker, but I get it picked apart by gay people. For this same reason maybe I expect a little activism when I read a story like this, and perhaps I shouldn't or should consider the source before reading to save myself the stress.
The thing is that I would like for people to write stories that involve calling people out when they say things that are untrue or to at least do some research and find out if what they are saying is either a misunderstanding or a parroting of that guy on the radio or just a blatant lie. And maybe if the news would start to treat gay people as people instead of always having to be gay as well as nearly people we could move this damn bus even quicker.
