The Confusing Gay Landscape - NYTimes.com A day of dissonance: on the front page of The Times today, there's a story that asserts - with the utmost accuracy, based on my own television viewing - that networks are presenting more and more shows with prominent gay characters and prominent gay themes, to a noteworthy absence of outrage and protest. I discussed one of these shows, ABC's "Happy Endings," in a blog post not long ago. And yet on the newspaper's national pages, there's a report on the voting in North Carolina on Tuesday on a proposed change to that state's constitution that bans not only same-sex marriage but also civil partnerships for same-sex couples. It passed by a margin of more than 20 points. The bitter partisan divide in this country over so many other matters extends to Americans" attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexuals, and these tandem stories in The Times reflect that. There's a world of people - and it encompasses the majority of those who create television programs - who simply don't understand and simply can't abide discrimination against gay men and lesbians, which is what the marriage laws in most states amount to. A reminder: I'm talking about civil marriage, not what happens in churches, which marriage-equality laws leave alone. But the two Times stories also perhaps reflect something discussed in a very interesting online column today by my colleague Ross Douthat: the possibility that the middle or center of this issue is people who tilt toward full acceptance of gays and lesbians and want to see themselves as OK with same-sex marriages but often balk, in the end, at anything that feels like a government edict about how they should feel and what their values should be. For them, I'd wager, TV programming is one thing, and marriage-equality laws are quite another. What happened in North Carolina also speaks to the significant regional differences I flagged in my most recent column, which explained President Obama's political reservations in regard to marriage equality. He's no doubt looking not only at national polling and at national trends, but also at the reality in states that are less progressive on this issue, states whose electoral votes he'd love to have. I wonder something else about North Carolina as well. Is it still the case, as it has seemed to be over the last decade, that the passions or at least the numbers of the people willing to organize and agitate against anything that smacks of a blessing of homosexuality eclipse those of more enlightened folks? Put another way, does the gay opposition remain more maniacally exercised and devoted than the gay cause? That's not meant as any slight to the increasingly creative, indisputably smart and often tireless advocates working for marriage equality. It's more of a summons to the many, many, many people who support marriage equality but haven't really raised their voices or nudged the resisters around them to get off the fence or beaten a path to the polls. The marriage-equality effort faces potent and determined resistance, and I'm reminded of this daily by my inbox. I'll leave you with two representative emails I received just yesterday. From one reader, who apparently sees marriage equality as some recruitment scheme: "North Carolina is right in not trying to legalize this perversion. If everyone tomorrow becomes gay, our species would be doomed in 50 years. And from another, with its spelling and capitalization left as is: "True Christians can not vote for bozo (obama) and his side kick clarabell (biden). . . It is wrong to attempt to normalize the very dangerous mental disorder of homosexuality. This particular email went on for more than a dozen densely packed paragraphs, referencing everything from psychiatry to the child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and never referring to the president as anything but a clown. It's from this sort of circus that fairness and justice must somehow be wrung.