Gay people can get married in America, which was completely unthinkable a generation ago. 100% due to activists, many who risked their lives to make it happen.
When I read this the first person I thought of was Alan Turing [1]. His was the fate of high profile gay people until the grassroots movement sprang from the Stonewall riots [1]. It was these activists who took the first steps to even make it possible for a high profile gay person to come out in public.
In order for Alan Turing to be charged with “gross indecency”, he had to go the police himself, inform them he was gay (without being asked or prompted), and affirm it in a statement signed under penalty of perjury.
The only reason he did that was because he was so accustomed to people not caring, he didn’t think he was in any danger.
Being privileged has its privileges.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_i...
(I'm aware of wikipedia fallibility but I'm on mobile and will generally trust in the citations for this particular individual)
He was comfortable reporting one of his lovers to the police because he was used to people looking the other way.
Obviously, one of the many downsides to criminalizing harmless behavior is that it places people outside the protection of the law.
Okay, 90 percent activists on the street, 10 percent insiders (who generally only stepped in after the 90 percent had already laid their bodies on the tracks, and accomplished the hard part).
Reason i m asking is thay certain countries had 0% activism and it all changed thanks to culture and osmosis. The fact that audiences were prepared for the changes was huge
Who got into a Tardis and went back and organized the Stonewall riots, ACT UP and the Mattachine Society. Yeah, OK.
What actually brought about the change was that due entirely to the fact that people in power had relatives that were gay, or were gay themselves. And these people turned the wheels of society toward making it accepted.
The people in power had gay relatives or were gay themselves a century ago and yet nothing changed without activism.
People had to come out in order for their acceptance to be possible. It's really easy to justify not caring when the group you don't care about seems other. When they're people you know it's much harder to justify not caring.
Besides BLM, one other recent place in which this question of "are demonstrations enough" comes up is, of course, Occupy. (In that case: no, demonstrations were not enough.)
One thing I remember Garza saying is that the ability to organize a large, nationwide march on Washington showcases the scope and depth (down to the grassroots level) of a movement. If your movement isn't broad and organized, your nationwide march will not succeed.
But that's a necessary condition for political action, not a sufficient condition. A movement can't let marches be the endpoint, and in the interview, Garza emphasized this.
Clearly the organizers of the 1993 "March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation" (which I attended) did not view the march as an endpoint. Many of the roughly 600K (+/- 300K) people present had a lot at stake, including their jobs, at that time. The march was more of a focal point, a coming of age. A constituency made visible. But not an endpoint.
For more: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/how-black-li...
- Anti Iraq War movement (2003-4), mostly US.
- Anti WTO movement (1999-2010) global (US, Canada, Japan, Europe). Eventually blended into / surpassed by the Occupy movement.
- ACT UP: Gay rights / HIV/AIDS awareness. (1987 - 2000)
Those are the major causes of which I'm aware.
Of the set, ACT UP was arguably the most successful, and probably deserves much of the credit for mainstreaming gay / nonbinary gender culture.
The WTO protests are more mixed, but put a damper on the Washington Concensus / Neoconservative Agenda movement. Global trade meetings are no longer casually-hosted affairs, and now tend to be in remote / secluded locations.
The Iraq War protests were arguably the least effective, though massive in many cities. They simply disappeared off news coverage though. Clearly they didn't stop the war or lessen the catastrophic impacts of it, though they did help cement a strong political divide over it in the US.
Whether or not more recent movements, particularly on the right, could be considered mass / popular uprisings is a fair question. I'd be inclined to say "no", but a case might be made for the Tea Party and alt-right movements.
My favorite study to establish a directional causal link looks at policies enacted after protests, accounting for the effect weather has on protests. The weather is presumably random enough to not be related to where society is, and it affects protest turnout, which lets you connect protest turnout to policy change causally. It's not definitive, but yeah, there's decent evidence.
I disagree with the other poster who is suggesting that marching is a necessary step for change, but it does seem to be a useful instrument for it.
- Dividing the working class on the issue of gay rights is an effective way for the elites to get the working class to ignore the class war.
- Control of reproduction offers some control over labor.
It seems like social issues are front and center more than ever at the moment. I think economics can largely explain the divide, but it's interesting for the author to talk at length about the top 10% and leave this out -- as if the top 10% is filled with Econs who vote solely on what they think is best for them economically, and not based on how they feel about social issues.
I think the reason the current climate feels so "divided" is because it's more of a social divide than before.
I think it's easier when it's just a class war. But this is a human rights war. When your basic rights feel threatened, it gives you a little more skin in the game.
Federal recognition of gay marriage eventually occurred in America due to a gay widow who took the government to court over a $300k inheritance tax bill on her wife's estate [1]. Of course the changing cultural attitudes towards LGBT people is overwhelmingly due to grassroots activism, but this shouldn't be overlooked.
For LGBT rights, money has played a factor. If wealthy, upper-class Americans did not also suffer from anti-LGBT laws, I'm not sure we would have made the same progress. There are also financial incentives for LGBT acceptance [2]. A more cynical view might be that acceptance of gay marriage was accelerated due to increasing anti-capitalist sentiments within the LGBT community in the 20th century [3]. The continued oppression of gay people might have led to uprisings far worse than Stonewall. Legislative acceptance of LGBT rights has weakened the link between LGBT activism and anti-capitalist ideologies, to the point that nowadays gay pride parades are turning into a parade of adverts for corporations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_money
[3] https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-roots-of-gay-liberation-a...
Federal judges care little about mass opinion, but a great deal about elite opinion.
Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with feminism, and everything to do with the positions of the American Medical Association, the Mayo Clinic (formerly represented by Blackmun), and academic researchers at elite universities.
Not a terribly important distinction if you’re pro-gay rights or pro-choice.
But give credit where credit is due.
If a politician is straight, what does two gay persons marrying have to do with him? It’s thus a brownie point issue, same goes with pot.
Once it start affecting their bottom line, i.e. there’s money involved, watch them and the media skirt around the issue carefully.