Prop. 8 ads' invisible gays

These days, it's pretty hard to walk the streets of a California city without seeing same-sex couples -- shopping, strolling, holding hands, sometimes accompanied by children. What used to be called, self-consciously, "public displays of affection" are now merely public displays of ordinary family life. For gay folks, then, it is all the more stinging an irony that the one place where same-sex couples are invisible is in the advertising war over Proposition 8.

By Jonathan Rauch

October 26, 2008