(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

In a Washington Post column headlined “Silence Is Golden on Gay Issues,” my longtime colleague and friend Jonathan Capehart heralds it as “a great thing” that gay issues weren’t discussed in the presidential debates this year. The Human Rights Campaign’s Fred Sainz agrees, telling Capehart, “What we’re seeing is proof positive that gay issues aren’t the wedge they used to be and furthermore, the public has moved on.”

Really? Though LGBT rights now have the support of a big majority of Democrats and independents, they’re far from a non-issue for the vast majority of Republicans, who oppose same-sex marriage, and certainly for the evangelical base of the GOP, which helped keep Rick Santorum competitive during the primaries.

The only reason these issues weren’t discussed in the debates is that the moderators — members of the media — didn’t ask about them. And far from being a “great thing,” right now that helps Mitt Romney, who is racing to the center and would rather not talk about how he’s in favor of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would make gays second-class citizens, or about how he signed a pledge from the National Organization for Marriage vowing to appoint federal judges who would rule against gay marriage.

Read the rest at HuffPo here.