Dear Abby supports gay marriage

Advice columnist Jeanne Phillips—aka Abigail Van Buren—announced her support for gay marriage this week. "I believe if two people want to commit to each other, God bless ’em,” she told The Associated Press. Phillips—who took over the Dear Abby column from her mother, Pauline—is scheduled to accept the first-ever “Straight for Equality” award from Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays next week.

This is the kind of news that makes you feel warm all over, said Brian Juergens on the AfterElton.com blog. “While Abby will likely never write a column devoted to gay issues,” at least she’s sending “a message of acceptance and respect" toward the gay community. And hopefully her message will spread more broadly—her column is syndicated in over 1400 newspapers, and its “folksy, old-fashioned” style seems to appeal to people “who might be considered more conservative readers.”

Dear Abby should start looking for a new career, said David R. Usher in MensNewsDaily.com, because now her “street cred is irrevocably in the red.” She used to provide “generally wise insight and suggestions” but now she’s “fallen off the wagon and down the bellybutton of Socratic narcissism.” She supports gay marriage just “because a few scientists pushing feminist agenda issued a meaningless report suggesting that genetics causes homosexuality.” If you follow that logic, “anything the heart wants is now acceptable, even if it kills people, leads to child sexual abuse, destroys America, or establishes tragic vast socioeconomic inequalities between man and women.”

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