Customer Reviews

Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights

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I am a student government senator at a small community college and we have been given the task of rewriting our discrimination policy. This will be a fight but I am glad to know that our library thought enough of students input to order this great book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in not only this cause but others. The ideas can be put to use on so many other issues.

This book provides mostly sensible advice about how to promote gay rights without unnecessarily provoking opponents, and sometimes (but not consistently) without requiring unusual effort on the part of gay rights supporters. Many of the ideas in the book can be applied to other causes that mainly require changing public opinion.

They occasionally go overboard and suggest fighting privileges that don't exist. For instance, they mention favorably advice that heterosexuals boycott marriage until it's available for all. It might make sense to ask heterosexuals to not have their marriages legally recognized (although I doubt the effectiveness of such a strategy). But the suggestion that wedding ceremonies be boycotted as long as gays are excluded from them is silly - wedding ceremonies are very much available to gays today.

Their Fair Employment Mark, under which employers would volunteer to enable employees sue them if they discriminate, would be a great idea under a sufficiently fair legal system. But it's unclear why an employer would consider the U.S. legal system sufficiently fair to agree to this.

I'm giving this book to all my straight friends and relatives, and I'm going to give it as a wedding present to straight people getting married. There are just so many ideas in this book, from radical to relaxed.

I'm a straight person with a serious privilege failure - my wife can't get a visa, so I am an exile. I absolutely sympathize with the fact that this is normal for gay people. But I would nevertheless take up that privilege in a heartbeat, if I could.

The question of privilege is not, do you enjoy privileges which others are denied. If that were true, we should all live life like illegal immigrants or west-bank Palestinians. The question is, are your privileges things that should not or could not be granted to all. The racist country club is the prototypical example: the ability to hang out without those other people around is a stupid privilege on the face of it, and is rightly rejected by all moral people.

There is nothing wrong with most of the contractual, tax, and immigration advantages of marriage, EXCEPT that they are not extended to all people (including homosexuals) equally. So there is no moral benefit to renouncing these privileges. Much much better would be to take them, figure out how much they are worth (in money, time, happiness, unity with extended family, whatever), and then devote some significant fraction of that worth to the cause of extending these rights to all. (And again, I say significant fraction, not all, because these benefits are not evil, they should be enjoyed as well as shared.) So you'd donate money and time; have some uncomfortable conversations with your cousins; and so on. This would be far more effective than just not getting married.

I haven't even finished every word but am sartled, amazed even more involved (if possible)! I am now in the"privalaged" world and cannot live without working to insure that ALL families get an "even playing field". The extent of marriage discrimination is appalling! What can be realized by the privalaged (hetro marrieds and singles)and what can be acted upon to alter the inequality is here in this book/manual and I recommed that everyone read it!