While Focus on the Family (FOTF) is still working hard to mislead women away from having abortions and mislead young people into bullying their LGBT peers, Jim Daly, FOTF’s CEO and President, admitted this week that they’ve “lost” on same-sex marriage:

WORLD MAGAZINE: We’re winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage?

DALY: We’re losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings: 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don’t know if that’s going to change with a little more age—demographers would say probably not. We’ve probably lost that. I don’t want to be extremist here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture.

Both World and Daly are presumably using “we” to speak on behalf of all evangelical Christians, but perhaps they should be more careful in doing so. Besides the fact that the latest Gallup poll shows “they” might not even have the momentum on abortion that they think they do, FOTF is struggling with marriage across all age groups as well. A new poll from HRC/Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research shows that people who identify as Christian overwhelmingly support LGBT equality, regardless of age:

Despite the concession, Daly still attacks same-sex families with a comparison to polygamy:

DALY: We’ve got to look at what God is doing in all of this. Have we done such a poor job with marriage, is He so upset with our mishandling of it in the Christian community, along with our lust of the flesh as a nation, that He is handing us over to this polygamy and same-sex situation in order to, perhaps, drive the Christian community, the remnant, into saying, “OK, there’s not-fault divorce in our church”?

Because polygamy has nothing to do with same-sex marriage and there is no wide-spread push for it, no polling is available to defend or reject Daly’s claim. The mere fact that he thinks polygamy is in any way relevant to the discussion shows just how out of touch he continues to be. It seems Focus on the Family is going to keep focusing on the discrimination anyway.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo — who has come under criticism from some LGBT advocates for not personally doing more to legalize same-sex marriage in the state — has just released a new video likening the fight for marriage quality to the struggle for civil rights and women’s suffrage and calling on New Yorkers to pressure their elected representatives to vote “yes” on marriage:

CUOMO: Same-sex couples are denied rights that other New Yorkers take for granted. Same-sex couples are denied over 1,000 federal and 700 state rights that are afforded to millions of others. Rights as basic as being able to visit the person you love in the emergency room, the opportunity to love and care for one another, the freedom to express their life-long commitment and the basic dignity of having that relationship recognized by the state they call home. This is a matter of fairness and equality. It is not a question of religion or culture, but a question of legal rights and government policy….Marriage equality is the next chapter in our civil rights story.

Watch it:

As the Wall Street Journal’s Jacob Gershman notes, Cuomo is also stepping up his personal lobbying, holding “private talks—in person and on the phone—with Republicans and Democrats in the Senate who represent the crucial swing votes for passage.”

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Republican state Sen. James Alesi — who voted against marriage in 2009 — “appeared at a major upstate dinner held by the state’s biggest gay-rights group” signaling that he may consider changing his vote on this time around. “Having Alesi there was seen as an important development since the dinner was all about marriage equality,” a prominent Democrat and gay-rights activist told The New York Post.

Supporters seemed to have made an agreement not to move ahead with marriage equality until Senate votes are secured, however. If the vote were held today, the measure would likely fall approximately six votes short of passage.

For decades, opponents of equality have used one tactic more than any other to scare voters away from supporting justice for LGBT Americans: children. Riding on the decades-old implications that all gay people are pedophiles, that young people can be “recruited” into a same-sex orientation, and the “ick” factor of anal sex, today’s ads, campaigns, and talking points similarly threaten that “homosexuality will be taught in schools.” In recent years, groups like the National Organization for Marriage often can’t be bothered to generate new commercials, recycling the same content from year to year, like this TV ad currently running in New York that is the same exact ad they used two years ago:

Viewers, of course, are expected to ignore the fact that all the threats made in the ad are verifiably untrue.

The truth is that young people (even elementary school students) are quite capable of understanding that some men love men and some women love women without even learning a thing about sex. The documentary It’s Elementary demonstrated this fifteen years ago. The California Senate has passed a bill called the FAIR Education Act, which would require schools to include LGBT history, culture, and visibility in curricula. Some schools are already offering popular “gay studies” courses that even go further in talking about LGBT issues. Research shows that schools that actually talk about how and why anti-gay bullying is bad are safer for LGBT youth than schools that don’t. The inclusion of LGBT identities in schools is not a threat to young people; it’s a threat to their parents who would prefer they oppose LGBT equality.

Queerty’s Dan Villareal tried to make this point last week in a post called, “Can We Please Just Start Admitting That We Do Actually Want To Indoctrinate Kids?” In it, he offers — in Queerty’s traditionally off-color fashion — that LGBT activists should not try to counter the threats made in these ads, but instead own the fact that visibility and awareness are important aspects of social justice. Yes, young people should learn that same-sex families are a part of our culture. More importantly, same-sex families might very well be a part of those young people’s lives — now or in the future. Conversely, Tennessee’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill is the perfect example of how opponents of LGBT equality are very much trying to prevent any education about the diversity of our society. And Villareal’s post so pushed Tony Perkins’ buttons that the virulently anti-gay Family Research Council responded with a flabbergasted, “SEE?”, using the opportunity to push their lie-ridden “Homosexuality in Your Child’s School” (PDF) fear-mongering propaganda.

Ultimately, media visibility for the LGBT community has far surpassed legal equality, so young people are exposed to all kinds of same-sex families and LGBT political debates as it is. Even this week, the New York Times is showcasing the coming out stories of teenagers. In the end, if young people are “confused” (as the below 2009 NOM ad from New Hampshire suggested), it’s only because opponents of equality have taken every step possible to prevent them from accessing a proper education about the world around them:

On a Saturday, the Minnesota House added an amendment to next year’s ballot that will ask voters to define marriage as the union of a man and woman, sparking “a nasty, expensive campaign that could be second only to President Obama’s re-election bid as the dominant issue of the 2012 political season.”

Minnesota law already outlaws same-sex unions, but supporters of the measure argue that a constitutional amendment is necessary to prevent the courts from overturning it. They’re insisting that Minnesotians should be able to vote on the definition of marriage and that the gay community shouldn’t personalize the coming fight to permanently deny them marriage benefits:

Tom Prichard, president of the Minnesota Family Council, which successfully lobbied to put the issue in front of voters, said Sunday that “our goal is to not make it personal. I think we can have a respectful discussion and conversation on the importance of marriage in our state, where there’s widespread support that the best environment to raise children is with a loving mother and father.”

While it’s difficult to see how one can cast the (much discredited) argument that gay people are unfit parents as a “respectful discussion” that is not “personal,” it’s even harder to accept that argument from the Minnesota Family Council — an organization that has spent years likening homosexuality to “incest, adultery, bestiality, or pedophilia.” For instance, this “Informed Answers to Gay Rights Arguments” pamphlet (PDF) from the Minnesota Family Council website argues that “Some homosexuals, especially lesbians, consciously choose a homosexual lifestyle as part of a political agenda,” warning that “The homosexual population includes a disproportionate number of pedophiles.” Ironically, the pamphlet — which is used by the organization to deny gay couples the right to marry — also notes, “The norm of homosexuality is promiscuity. It is rare that even ‘monogamous’ gay couples do not supplement their relationships with other gay partners.”

Meanwhile, the group’s argument that voters should have the right to define marriage — or take away the right to marry from gay people — is also problematic. As Equality Matters’ Carlos Maza explained last week, marriage referendums reflect the views of well financed interests who use fear and discredited information (see pamphlet above) to sway the vote — not local constituents. As law professor Paula Abrams wrote in 2008:

One can readily conclude that lawmaking by initiative, the manifestation of unchecked majority will, carries a high risk of producing bad laws. The “bad law” risk posed by the initiative is not simply that of generic poor policy. The absence of the deliberative process can leave the voters with profoundly inaccurate information. False information may be an unintended byproduct of the public campaign, or it may be deliberately disseminated for political advantage. Deliberate dissemination of false information can be a particularly potent and harmful strategy to agitate the majority against minority groups. Immune from legislative or executive review, initiative campaigns may rely on appeals to voter prejudice. [Oregon Law Review, Vol. 87, 1025, emphasis added, 2008]