Serafine666 wrote:It is always a pleasure to read that some city somewhere chose to look passed a person's irrelevant characteristics and elect them to a position of responsibility. At the same time... what point is there in digging out the party hats and fireworks every time that a gay person is supported for public office or what not? Harvey Milk was a pretty awesome guy but he died years ago and the era he was a part of--where it was a genuine surprise that homosexuality wasn't a deal-breaker for the majority--has passed us by. Gay people have long been in the movies and in fact been widely liked by audiences; Ellen Degeneres, Rosie O'Donnell, and Andrew Sullivan are openly gay opinion-makers that are taken seriously. Whatever his previous scandals, politicians like Barney Frank have been a serious force in national politics for many years. It's great that people are no longer as prejudiced as they once were but... the wheel isn't being reinvented every time a homosexual person is treated equally and it sort of seems to diminish previous progress to continually treat every occasion as a show-stopping event that must be cried from every rooftop.
It took you an entire rambling paragraph to state that the election of a homosexual isn't really breaking news because homosexuals have a more prominent place in current society and have been elected before.
The reason why it is considered news worthy is:
1. While it is Houston, it is also Texas. An election of a homosexual
there is news worthy. An election of a homosexual in a Scandinavian country would be a non event, whereas an election of a homosexual in a state with a significant amount of religious homophobic retards is newsworthy.
2. Despite your rambling waffle about homosexuals being elected and being more prominent, people are far less likely to vote for a homosexual than an ordinary person. This is a
poll from 2007 where
43% of people indicated that they would not vote for a homosexual. The only group to do worse are atheists at 53%. I suspect these figures would be even worse just for the state of Texas, being a religiously conservative state. The fact that this individual managed to overcome this prejudice and stigma is what makes it so newsworthy.
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