WHAT DO GAY CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE IN? Can one support equality for gays and at the same time remain faithful to conservatism? Or does embracing one mean abandoning the other?
What follows is an incomplete and simplified attempt to respond to these questions. Religious issues, for example, are omitted, though for many people they are an important part of conservative philosophy. The conservatism described is my own, but it leans much on classic conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke, T.S. Eliot, and Russell Kirk.
First and foremost, conservatism respects tradition and history. It prefers stability to change, continuity to experiment, the tried to the untried. Conservatives recognize the occasional need for reform, of course, for that is one means of a society's preservation. But we approach change with pessimism, caution, and a great deal of humility.
We see society more as a tree than as a machine. It is organic, developing slowly over centuries. The generation that thinks it can wholly remake society according to some preconceived design soon adorns the Hotel de Ville with human heads on pikes, or dots the land with gulags, or encircles the concentration camp with barbed wire.
How does a commitment to tradition square with a belief in gay equality? America's political tradition is centered on the protection of individual liberty and autonomy. This country, at its best, has welcomed those who do not conform to others' judgments about what they should be. The political and religious misfits, the poor, the unwelcome, came here because America promised they would be judged on their own merits.
Yet despite the nation's principled stand on liberty and equality, it also has a legacy of homophobia, just as it once enshrined racism and sexism in its laws. Gay conservatives are dissatisfied with present practices regarding homosexuals - on everything from marriage to the military - precisely because, laid beside the nation's higher tradition of respect for individuality, these anti-gay practices are found wanting.
When principle and higher traditions collide with particular practices, the latter must give way. In his "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" and other writings and speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed not to fashionable third-world nostrums, but to distinctly American notions concerning liberty and equality under law. His rhetoric drew from Jefferson and Lincoln, not Marx or Castro. We see America as he saw it: a great nation that has fallen short of its own noble promise.
Second, conservatives cultivate a profound distrust of government, both because of the encroachments it makes on liberty and because of the unintended mischief it can do. Limited government is our constitutional design. The state's first and primary obligation is to preserve order and protect the physical security and property of the citizenry. Beyond these tasks, conservatives are wary of government involvement.
Government has been no friend of gays, intruding on gay lives with its sodomy laws and so much more. Among other things, it reinforces prejudice through its refusal to recognize gay relationships. It has often done a poor job of protecting our physical security from gay-bashers, either because it did not care or because it implicitly endorsed the beatings.
Crime, as a threat to physical security and property, must be unsentimentally suppressed. According to a recent study, gays live disproportionately in large cities. That's also where crime is most prevalent. Crime is therefore of particular concern to gays. Put more police in the streets, more criminals in jail for a longer time, make punishment surer and swifter, and - gasp - crime goes down.
Third, property rights are at the core of the conservative's vision of a just society. Private property provides a haven into which the citizen can retreat from the coercive and expropriative hand of government, as well as from the irrational prejudices and actions of other citizens. Property rights are therefore both a bulwark against despotism and a haven of privacy.
Gays are well served by a strong system of property rights. Camp Sister Spirit, a privately owned gay women's retreat in Ovett, Miss., was threatened a few years ago by the breakdown of respect for property rights and the reluctance of local authorities to preserve those rights in the face of anti-gay prejudice. The retreat's owners would have fared much better much sooner if the citizens of Ovett had known their property laws from their burning crosses.
Finally, gay conservatives do not recoil from "values" or morality, as the gay left so often seems to do. The learned wisdom of human experience as reflected by widely held moral principles is not lightly to be discarded. Love, courage, thrift, honesty, respect for life, generosity, duty, and many other virtues our parents taught us are powerful instruments for good.
But we gay conservatives have set ourselves on a course to strike intolerance of gays from any respectable enumeration of values worth preserving. Like other generations before us, we have discovered how far removed hatred is from the core of our heritage.
So there it is: respect for the nation's highest traditions, distrust of government encroachments and power, high regard for private property, and adherence to the moral values that make a society good as well as wealthy. All of these broad principles of conservatism are entirely consistent with - and, indeed, should result in - an unapologetic commitment to full civil rights for gay Americans.