Kassandra Barber
WGST 202 T/Th 9:30
Professor Currans
Blog Topic: Gay, Lesbian
and Bisexual Rights Movement.
Article Review #2
Perella, Andrea M.L. Brown, Steven D. Kay, Barry J.
"Voting Behaviour among the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered
Electorate." Canadian
Journal of Political Science 45.1
(2012): 89-117. Print.
I am
reviewing the article titled “Voting Behaviour among the Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, and Transgendered Electorate”.
This article was written by multiple authors whose names are Andrea M.L.
Perella, Steven D. Brown, and Barry J. Kay. The authors which focus on LGBT people
they tend to side with and why. This
article is about the GLBT community of Canada.
This article compares a lot of its data to the data that the United
States.
One of
the most interesting facts that I discovered while reading this article was
that Canada does not refer to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender
community as the LGBT community as the United States does, but as the GLBT
community instead. The first topic they discuss is that the GLBT community has
focused on in the aspect of political research which mostly included equal
rights, identity, as well as how the GLBT movement has progressed throughout
history (Parella, Brown, Barry 90). This
section goes on to point out that the GLBT community in Canada is extremely
understudied. It’s very hard to gather
data on the community without having a national comparison. Canada mostly uses data that the United States
has gathered to base theirs off of. An
interesting point that this section makes is that the United States LGBT
community is mostly Democrat (Parella, Brown, Barry 91). Some say it’s because of the advancement of
human rights fight that the democrats have pushed for. It’s also clear that Democrats are much more understanding
of the GLBT community as a whole. This
section then goes on to break the discussion down into males and females and
how they tend to vote right or left. Why
does this happen? It’s because males and females are raised with different values,
as well as a different way to think and act.
In the
next section of the article the authors discuss what makes the GLBT community
stand out. Or in other words, that makes
them a community so to speak. This is
not addressing the fact that obviously, being a member of the community means
that one is either, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Transgender. This is discussing what makes the majority of
the community side with the left. Before
diving right into the details, one must understand that most of the GLBT community
of Canada lives in urban areas with slightly lower incomes (Parella, Brown,
Barry 100). To support their idea that
most of the community is democrat the authors test different areas of Canada
with non-weighted data (Parella, Brown, Barry 100). Afterward they include variables such as income
but divide them into certain denominations instead of having the persons give
the exact amount. This is important
because it shows the correlation between the lifestyle of the GLBT and the
income they make as well as their education.
This proves that most of the GLBT lives in urban areas with slightly
lower incomes.
In the
conclusion of this article the authors discuss how the GLBT community has
become such an important factor in the political world. It continues to stand that the group is
fighting for their rights the respect
that they deserve as human beings. As stated before the group is severely
understudied. The article goes on to
mention again that the GLBT community does have a distinctive voting pattern (Parella,
Brown, Barry 110). It states that same
sex marriage and equal rights play an extremely important role in which side
GLBT tends to lean to.
This
article related to my topic because I am looking into the rights movement of
the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual community. It’s not difficult to see how this
article relates and differs from my first article I chose to review. My first article review was about how the
Obama Administration was addressing and dealing with some of the issues the
LGBT community is dealing with in the United States. In this article the authors compare a lot of
their data to that of the United States and how they have dealt with these
issues. It goes into the actual detail
of voting and which political party that the GLBT community tends to side with
and why that’s the case. Both articles
make it clear that the community and the movement are not receiving the
attention they really need to be able to solve issues or figure out any type of
answers. I was aware that in the United
States most of the LGBT communities were democrat merely because this party
clearly supports the community. Both of the articles I have chosen to review
thus far have shown that fighting for Gay, Bisexual, and Lesbian rights is not
just a major movement in the United States but all over the world and right
next door to the US in Canada. Both
articles confirm that there is a liberal side (democrats for the US, Left side
for Canada) that show more support for the communities and the fight for their
movement. After reading this article I
am now aware that it’s not just the LBGT community in the United States that
sides this way but the GLBT community in Canada was well. While countries have different views on most
laws or a different way of handling them it seems like the communities and
actions taken are very similar in both countries. Both countries still seem to have a strong
sense of homophobia, which I was also unaware of until reading this article .In
conclusion I learned that both countries are very similar as far as the LGBT or
GLBT communities go.
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