I'm back. I admit I'm a lazy-ass blogger. Moving on...
In today's paper there's a piece in the Op Ed pages titled "Over there, gays get less respect" by Charles Lane of the Washington Post. He argues that gays actually have it better here in the United States compared to Europe, and cited Sarkozy's France, Italy and Latvia as examples of European countries where gays get less respect. (Too bad for all those gays who were planning building settlements on the outskirts of Riga and turning it into gay Mecca.)
The subtext of the article is that gays should quit complaining already, since they actually have it pretty good, and that Europe isn't all it's cracked up to be. Too bad the foundation of Lane's argument is more rickety than...a person with rickets (sorry, I'm out of practice). He cherry picks the countries in Europe that are behind on gay rights and extrapolates it to all of Europe, while ignoring all the countries in Europe that give gays rights. Gay adoption is legal in Spain, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, and gay individuals can adopt in most of Europe except for Latvia, Lithuania and Italy. Gay marriage is legal in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and...what's that country between France and Italy...? oh, that's right SPAIN. And civil unions are legal in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Switzerland, the UK and...could it be...FRANCE?
Well, I'll be.
That's still better than the majority of the United States.
What frustrates me about articles like these is that they ignore certain facts in order to make the claim that they want to make. An argument like this wouldn't hold up in a high school debate tournament, so why is it in the Washington Post?
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