It really doesn't, and this part is bullshit: "it may say something about what you really believe though."
If I'm a gay guy fighting for marriage equality, my lack of efforts to fight for marriage issues affecting straight people does not "say something about what [I] really believe" about whether gays and straights are equal.
It's an utterly bullshit argument. Women are pretty much the only group where people say "well if you believe men and women are equal, why don't you fight for mens' rights?" Nobody says that to gays fighting for marriage equality, or blacks fighting for racial equality. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say it harkens to sexist notions. Men are expected to watch out for #1, but women are expected to be motherly and crap and care about the welfare of everyone.
>Women are pretty much the only group where people say "well if you believe men and women are equal, why don't you fight for mens' rights?" Nobody says that to gays fighting for marriage equality, or blacks fighting for racial equality.
What? You get pretty much the same argument against affirmative action. "If you care about black children in poverty then what about white children in poverty" etc., and all the (in many cases quite sensible) arguments that aid should be based on need rather than race.
People might say "if you care about black children in poverty then what about white children in poverty" but people almost never say that to black people. It's always a statement of policy in general terms, not a targeted criticism to black proponents of a policy.
In other words, people might think that we as a society need to care about poor white kids as much as poor black kids, but nonetheless black people generally don't need to make excuses about caring more about black children than white children. Nobody accuses them of secretly thinking that blacks are better for doing so.
The difference is that men's issues and women's issues are really tightly intertwined. You cannot put pressure on men not to have work-life balance and not to be the one looking after the kids without also pushing women into becoming the main carer for them, and likewise you can't lift that load from women without some way for the men to pick up the slack.
Sadly, what generally happens is that once activists for women's rights have categorised something as a men's issue, they stop caring about it. So you get articles like this one which never question the underlying assumption that women are the ones that need to compromise their careers in order to raise a family, and that men have no interest in doing so. The article talks about women being locked out of positions of power because of this - if we could change things and make it just as normal for men to put their career goals aside to raise kids, that'd have huge implications, but that's a men's issue and hence ignored.
If I'm a gay guy fighting for marriage equality, my lack of efforts to fight for marriage issues affecting straight people does not "say something about what [I] really believe" about whether gays and straights are equal.
It's an utterly bullshit argument. Women are pretty much the only group where people say "well if you believe men and women are equal, why don't you fight for mens' rights?" Nobody says that to gays fighting for marriage equality, or blacks fighting for racial equality. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say it harkens to sexist notions. Men are expected to watch out for #1, but women are expected to be motherly and crap and care about the welfare of everyone.