The Three-Fifths Compromise

When Will The Media Treat The LGBTQ Community As Equal To Everyone Else?

In 1787, as our Constitution was being drafted, the Three-Fifths Compromise was reached, forcing slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person.

Article 1 of the United States Constitution states,

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

In other words, there were “free persons,” and slaves. To calculate the number of representatives each state would have, our Founding Fathers came up with a formula: one slave equaled three-fifths of a person, or, to put it an other way, when counting people, it took almost 17 slaves to equal ten free people.

That was America two centuries ago. Seems like, when it comes to coverage by the media, the LGBTQ community is still there today.

On September 12, just one month ago, 60,000 to 70,000 people showed up for a Tea Party rally, AKA, Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project. There was great distortion about the number of people in attendance, but FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver writes,

“ABC News, citing the DC fire department, reported that between 60,000 and 70,000 people had attended the tea party rally at the Capitol.”

This past Sunday, 150,000 to 200,000 people showed up for the National Equality March, an event designed to remind our government that LGBTQs are people too.

Evidently, the mainstream media disagrees.

Coverage of the 9/12 event was non-stop, across all mainstream media outlets. Cable and broadcast TV, newspapers, and online media all devoted what felt like 24/7 coverage to a group of people who took six months to organize 60,000 people to make it to D.C. People a lot older and probably, overall, a lot more financially secure than the largely under-thirty crowd that flocked to the National Equality March on Sunday.

Coverage of the National Equality March, despite the fact that there were three times as many people at this Sunday’s March as there were “Teapartiers,” went all but unnoticed by much of the media.

CNN and FOX News (who is accused of co-sponsoring the Tea Party Movement) provided around-the-clock coverage of the 9/12 event. But neither CNN nor FOX sent any reporters to cover the march. A far different strategy than they used for the far-smaller crowd of Teapartiers.

CNN and FOX, along with the rest of the MSM, devoted little time or coverage to the National Equality March, despite the fact that there was a far-greater cross-section of America present, despite the fact that there were three times as many people in attendance, despite the fact that even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid publicly supported the March, and despite the fact that the President spoke at the HRC Annual Dinner the night before.

(In fairness, C-SPAN and CNN covered the President’s speech at the HRC Dinner, and did provide a small amount of coverage of the March. But by comparison to the Teaparty rallies, not even close.)

Jon Stewart weighed in last night. The Raw Story writes,

“You didn’t even send your own camera crew?” Stewart exhorted. “You have a Washington bureau. Tell them to go the window and point the camera down. Gay people aren’t vampires. They show up on camera.”

It bears noting, as author Alvin McEwen writes of those who attended the March,

They didn’t lie about attendance numbers,

They didn’t post any phony photographs,

These people who came to Washington yesterday was the true cross section of the country. They were mothers, fathers, and children who, while some may say that they had every reason to be rude and ugly (being denied your basic rights tends to bring the monster out in some people), came with reverence and respect.

So, Mainstream Media, my question to you is, how many gay folks does it take to equal one tea party protester?

Three? Five? Ten? At what point does quantity matter? At what point do you care more about civil rights than tax policy? At what point do you recognize the incredible inequity of our laws that are biased against an entire class of citizens? At what point do gays deserve equal treatment, under and by the law, and by the media?

At what point do gays stop being three-fifths of a person?