IGF CultureWatch

From The American Conservative: Why the Right Can’t Win the Gay Marriage Fight, by Daniel McCarthy. He isn’t happy about it, but his essay pretty much conveys a recognition that the traditionalist right has lost the game.

McCarthy is wrong about many things. In particular, he thinks freewheeling promiscuity is the norm among gay male couples because only women can rein men in. He writes, “In practical terms, so far as checking promiscuity is concerned, marriage is superfluous for lesbians and not very effective for homosexual men. To the extent that marriage serves as a brake on promiscuity at all, this is owing to the sex differences of the spouses.” Which is a common trope on the right with a small measure of truth (men are more driven toward promiscuity than women) but doesn’t grasp that the dynamics of a stable male relationship require, in most cases, the acceptance of an ideal of fidelity if the relationship is going to last.

McCarthy does have an interesting observation:

But in the latter half of the 20th century two things steadily eroded the cultural and legal taboos against homosexuality. The first was that it had come to be seen as an innate desire about which individuals have little choice. The second was that as these strange new beings emerged from their hiding places they didn’t look so frightening—indeed, they looked a lot like everybody else. The great public-relations victory won by the gay-rights movement that hastened the advent of gay marriage was the shift in the 1990s away from a radical, anti-bourgeois image toward one more in keeping with societal norms, from the militancy of ACT-UP to the banality of “Will and Grace.”

The gay-marriage effort has been a cause as well as an effect in this change: while same-sex marriage is disturbing to many Americans, it is reassuring to others, suggesting as it does loyalty to a middle-class ideal. Those homosexuals who remember more radical days are often dismissive of bourgeois aspirations of the younger set. …

Religious right literalists can’t see what gay radicals do: that gay marriage really is a conservative idea.

More. Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper writes in a New York Times op-ed:

In an ironic twist, gay and lesbian Americans are among the strongest promoters of conservative family values today. … The legislative reforms sought by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans are not intended to secure special rights or tear down social institutions. We seek only the ability to build lives together for richer or poorer (without unjust taxation tilting the scale toward poverty), to care for our loved ones in sickness and in health (through equal access to health care and without suffering from a “domestic partner penalty”), and to be by our partner’s side until death (without the fear that the absence of a marriage license would add complications and heartache).