When can a OP-ED mentioning Glee, Rush Limbaugh & Elton John be meaningful?

[blogslut]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13rich.html?hp">When Frank Rich writes it:

Why would America’s right-wing radio king hire an openly gay entertainer to star at his wedding? And why would one of the world’s foremost AIDS activists sing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” for a gay-baiting provocateur who has trivialized AIDS and speculated that same-sex marriage could lead people to marry dogs? Sir Elton’s fee was reported to be a cool $1 million. Which goes to show that pop music and cash have the power to make even stranger bedfellows than politics.

~snip~

But there is a shadow over marriage in America just the same. The Gores and Limbaughs are free to marry, for better or for worse, and free to enjoy all the rights (and make all the mistakes) that marriage entails. Gay and lesbian couples are still fighting for those rights. That’s why the most significant marital event of June 2010 is the one taking place in San Francisco this Wednesday, when a Federal District Court judge is scheduled to hear the closing arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the landmark case challenging Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban. A verdict will soon follow, setting off an appeals process that is likely to land in the Supreme Court, possibly by the 2011-12 term.

~snip~

...But in the end the Prop 8 defenders mustered only two witnesses, just one of them a controversial culture warrior. That “expert” was David Blankenhorn, president of the so-called Institute for American Values. Blankenhorn holds no degree in such seemingly relevant fields as psychology, psychiatry or sociology. But his pretrial research did include reading a specious treatise by George Rekers, the antigay evangelist now notorious for his recent 10-day European trip with a young male companion procured from Rentboy.com. And Blankenhorn’s testimony relies on the same sweeping generalization as Rekers — that children raised by two biological parents are so advantaged that all alternatives should be shunned...

~snip~

The leading teenage characters in “Glee” have single parents (both widowed), absentee parents and, in one case, two gay dads. The teenagers suffer, struggle and occasionally triumph like any others, but along the way we see how families reconfigured by death, divorce and sexual orientation can be as loving, nurturing and, yes, as dysfunctional as any other. The landscape is recognizable as the country we actually live in. Even if family-values zealots do retain the ability to prevent America from watching the Prop 8 trial, we’re lucky that the era when they could banish a show like “Glee” from network television seems to have passed...

Read the whole piece here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13rich.html?hp