About a month ago a group of self-described "LGBT and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers" issued a manifesto titled "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage" in which they demanded legal "recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families" with "access to a flexible set of economic benefits and options regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender/gender identity, class, or citizenship status."
The signers consisted mostly of "no-names"--people you've never heard of--along with a couple of handfuls of known gay and lesbian (mostly lesbian) academics, activists, former activists, and hangers-on. Some of the signers are heterosexual; most seem to be long-term advocates of the post-Marxian socialist and deconstructionist left.
As witness: The manifesto avoids gay/lesbian issues but is replete with venerable left-wing demands--e.g., an end of funding of "militarism, policing, and prison construction." And it emphasizes "women's issues" such as more money for "decent housing, childcare, healthcare and reproductive services," etc.
All this is not so much beyond same-sex marriage, it is in a different universe entirely. All gay marriage proponents want is a change in one law to allow them equal treatment. Manifesto signers want free goodies for everybody, subsidized by taxpayers. In other words, this is nothing but the economic and cultural left's attempt to link itself to the gay marriage movement.
This little exercise in socio-economic splenetics would have sunk without a trace except that social conservatives publicized it widely as proving their contention that gay marriage was the first step in a scheme to undermine and destroy marriage. Polygamy is just around the corner, they shouted. And, they added triumphantly, the gay marriage movement has finally come out of the closet and admitted what its real goal is.
Oh, blarney! None of this has been secret, none of it is new from the far left and it offers no support to gay marriage. In fact, vigorous opposition to marriage--a "bourgeois" institution denounced by Marx as legalized prostitution--has long been a mainstay of the Marxian and feminist left. They have routinely denounced marriage, any marriage, as an oppressive "patriarchal" institution, although no one bothers to explain exactly what is patriarchal about the marriage of two men or two women.
For instance, manifesto signer Paula Ettelbrick has written and debated in opposition to marriage--and specifically gay marriage--for more than two decades. For her to sign a manifesto that indicates even openness to gay marriage, if only as a tactical feint, seems disingenuous. I suspect the same is true for many other signers. If I didn't know better I would think the signers were trying to disrupt and discredit the gay marriage movement. Come to think of it, I don't know better.
Despite this well-known background, right wing polemicists eagerly welcomed the manifesto as proof that gay marriage advocates were finally being candid about their "real" intention to destroy marriage. It is, in fact, an indication of the utter poverty of the argument against same-sex marriage that instead of arguing against it directly, the right wing has to immediately change the subject and point to other familial configurations as social dangers--polygamy, legalized incest, whatever.
Bluntly put, there are no cogent arguments against gay marriage. One of the most prolific opponents of gay marriage, Princeton professor Robert George, after repeatedly trying to develop and present just such arguments, has more or less admitted that. In a co-authored article with one Gerard Bradley, George states that male-female marriage has an "intrinsic value" that "cannot, strictly speaking, be demonstrated" and that "if the intrinsic value of (opposite sex) marriage ... is to be affirmed it has to be grasped in noninferential acts of understanding."
That is about as close to acknowledging defeat as you can get without explicitly saying so. What if George Wallace had said that the superiority of the white race could not be demonstrated but could be "grasped in noninferential acts of understanding"? Certainly there was a sizable constituency for just such a view, but undemonstrable "noninferential acts of understanding" are a poor basis for creating public policy in a secular civil society.
Then too, Robert George and his colleagues have never explained very well what it is about their own requirement of a male-female polarity for marriage that excludes polygamy. It is hard not to suspect that George keeps harping on polygamy as an imagined consequence of same-sex marriage to distract attention from the far more obvious opening to polygamy his own principle entails. I'm sure many fine polygamous Muslims would agree.
11 Comments for “New Attacks on Gay Marriage”
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
A good read. I like the comment in the pull quote (7th paragraph). I know some of the SSM organizers in Massachusetts were enraged by the Beyond Marriage manifesto when it came out. Their immediate reaction was that it was an attempt at sabotage. I didn’t put it that way in my own article that came out on August 3, but – especially given some of the signatories – it’s hard to believe that the document’s perfunctory claim of support for SSM is anything more than a doily to thinly veil their essential radicalism.
Most of the conservatives who leapt to claim that “our” true motive (as if the gay community is monolithically left-wing) had been revealed, surely know better. Those who have been arguing with Jon Rauch and Evan Wolfson must have noticed the absence of those names on the list. Which only goes to show the dishonesty and unscrupulousness of those who are treating the Beyond Marriage authors as the vanguard of the same-sex marriage movement. Since I can remember, the right wing has treated “gay” and “far left” as synonymous. Of course, one of the main reasons for IGF’s existence is to refute that. But more than dishonest and unscrupulous, the ploy of equating the manifesto writers with the SSM activists shows the political and intellectual desperation of our adversaries on the right. They keep throwing chaff in the air in hopes that we will exhaust our arsenal firing at it, so they can then move in for the kill. But chaff is all they have.
I really do love my Patrick, and he loves me, and our desire to seal that love in marriage is an essentially conservative act. That’s what really scares them.
posted by Mark on
The recurring theme that I hear from anti-gay and anti-gay marriage conservatives is that those who advocate same sex marriage have the “hidden agenda” to destroy marriage, destroy the church, destroy belief, and oh, let’s throw in banning apple pie. There seems to be great skepticism that two people may just be in love and want to “seal that love in marriage” as Richard Rosendall points out. Somehow, the gay left, the gay right, and the gay centrists have got to get on the same page and start speaking to the nay-sayers about what the “real” agenda is.
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Mark, the problem with your suggestion is that there is not a single “real” agenda in the gay community. I am always willing to talk to people, but the profound philosophical differences that many of us have with the gay left make it unlikely that we will get on the same page, as you put it.
I don’t think such differences are fatal to our cause. Factions within the black civil rights movement were notoriously at one another’s throats. Thurgood Marshall was scornful of Martin Luther King, Jr. to his (Marshall’s) dying day. Adam Clayton Powell blackmailed King in 1960 with a threat to circulate a claim that King had a homosexual affair with Bayard Rustin if King did not cancel a planned protest at the Democratic National Convention and dissociate himself from Rustin. There were real and strong differences over goals and strategy. The gay movement is no different. I think we should eagerly abandon all of our efforts sooner than insist on a unity that we do not and cannot have. Our differences are not superficial ones. The first gay rally that I attended was the 1979 March on Washington, and I remember a woman handing me a flyer from a group called Feminists Against Pornography (or Women Against Pornography, I cannot quite recall) as I passed by the Washington Monument. They were claiming that all porn was degrading to women, which was clearly false since most gay male porn had no women at all. It did not occur to me at the time that I needed to seek unity with those people; I considered them nuts and went on my way. The Beyond Marriage signatories, or at least some of them, may pose a more serious threat at this point than those old feminazis, but in any case their goals are different from mine, and in fundamentally incompatible. They can go their way, and I’ll go mine, except for the rare occasion when we find common cause. I think that documents like the manifesto render the gay left increasingly irrelevant. In the past, calls for unity have usually meant that people like Varnell and me should shut up – which we are disinclined to do.
posted by Mark on
Thanks for that response, Richard. I agree completely…I just didn’t explain myself very well. Finding such harmony in the “gay community” would first have to assume that there is “one” gay community. In fact, there are multitudes. My point is that sometime, an effort needs to be made to shoo all the boogeymen out of most conservative church philosophy. I’m sure there are those among gay people who have an axe to grind against religion, and even against the institution of marriage, but I dont’ have any reason to believee that such sentiment is any more prevalent in the gay “community” than it is in the straight “community.” There seems to be a growing paranoia among church leaders–especially evangelicals–that it isn’t really about marriage at all: it’s about destroying religious freedom and the institution of marriage. I think it’s a particularly narrow and paranoid viewpoint, but I don’t hear anyone taking on this argument. Perhaps to do so sounds defensive and as though justification is needed for a belief in equal rights, and perhaps there is not and never will be any measure that will satisfy the religious right, but it just seems to me that someone ought to be saying, “we don’t want to take away any of your rights at all. We just want to share in them with the dignity and respect that you have taken for granted for lo, these many years.” Thanks for your dialogue. It’s helpful to vent a bit.
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Actually, a great many marriage advocates have repeatedly stressed that we are talking about civil marriage, and that no church or synagogue or mosque would be compelled to conduct any marriage. The reason the right wing keeps framing it apocalyptically is that it is good for organizing and fundraising and getting their congregations to the polls. Many of us have also pointed out that the people responsible for the problems in heterosexual marriages are the heterosexuals involved in them. This isn’t just about an honest disagreement; in crusading against our equal marriage rights, our most dedicated adversaries have engaged in a staggering amount of dishonesty. At this point, what we need to say to them is, “Calm down and look at the evidence. For starters, the Bible Belt has a much higher divorce rate than Massachusetts.”
posted by Fitz on
This inter- left fight over marriage is more telling than Paul Varnell realizes. As he attempts to distance himself from his co patriots and intellectual brethren.
Of coarse the gay community is not monolithic, nor is the ss?m? movement. This said, one can hardly blame the social conservatives from taking their opposition seriously. We have had 40 years of attacks by feminists and sexual liberationists on the family as archaic & oppressive. When Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his report on the state of the black family he was called racist. When Vice-President Dan Quayle criticized Hollywood for glamorizing single motherhood he was called a bigot. When contemporary social conservatives attempt to counter ss?m? advocates they are also dismissed as bigots.
I?m sure Mr. Varnell and his ilk have serious disagreements with the arguments voiced in Beyond Marriage. That?s hardly the point. The point would be (to barrow a clich
posted by Fitz on
To return to the topic at hand, I found these two posts to be indicative of the cultural lefts range of ambivalence to out right hostility to the institution of marriage to be indicative of what we are dealing with.
http://feministing.com/archives/005595.html#comments
http://www.alternet.org/story/40327/
The idea that a few disparate ss ?m? advocates are going to overcome the bulk of the academic and political left and ?save? marriage while re-defining it seems ludicrous to me. I?m afraid the sentiments of Beyond Marriage are about as middle of the road as you will find (considering its lack of outright hostility twoard tradtional marriage – but advocation for expanded definitions)
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Fitz, I wonder what you think you accomplish by persistently scare-quoting the “M” in SSM. Whether you like it or not, civil marriage (as distinct from religious marriage) includes same-sex couples in Massachusetts and in the countries of Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain, which are soon to be joined by South Africa. So increasingly it’s not “so-called ‘marriage,'” but marriage, period.
That aside, it is odd for you to say that Paul Varnell’s disagreement with the Beyond Marriage authors is “hardly the point,” since disagreeing with gay leftists is a principal reason for the existence of IGF. Your pose of seeing little difference between IGF authors and the signatories of the Beyond Marriage manifesto shows that you miss the entire point of this website. We are of course well aware that right-wing homophobes routinely call any and every gay voice “radical” or “far left” regardless of where that voice actually falls on the political spectrum. But defining us all as radicals regardless of the evidence is a way of avoiding the discussion rather than joining it.
Any reasonable person reading the Beyond Marriage manifesto on one side, and Paul Varnell’s and my own response to it, along with Jon Rauch’s book on gay marriage, on the other side, will have no difficulty seeing the sharp differences between the two sides, both of them gay. Actually, I take that back. One side (ours) is gay, the other side generally prefers the term “queer.”
My desire to seal my love for my partner Patrick in legal marriage is inherently conservative, and all of your obfuscations to the contrary will not change that enduring truth.
posted by Fitz on
“Fitz, I wonder what you think you accomplish by persistently scare-quoting the “M” in SSM.”
Its important to me to maintain the integrity of language. If you cant define it you cant defend it. This is precisely a battle for the cultural and legal definition of a institution. You may find it distracting but it is indeed necessary to maintain the very distinctions that go to the heart of the debate.
“Your pose of seeing little difference between IGF authors and the signatories of the Beyond Marriage manifesto shows that you miss the entire point of this website. We are of course well aware that right-wing homophobes routinely call any and every gay voice “radical” or “far left” regardless of where that voice actually falls on the political spectrum. But defining us all as radicals regardless of the evidence is a way of avoiding the discussion rather than joining it.”
Perhaps my “scare quotes” got your dander up and allowed you to miss the obvious point I was making above.
as evidenced by quotes such as “the tail won?t waive the dog”
and
“The idea that a few disparate ss ?m? advocates are going to overcome the bulk of the academic and political left and ?save? marriage while re-defining it seems ludicrous to me.”
posted by Audrey on
Fitz, are you gay. It’s okay if you?re not, I?m not either.
posted by Jeff on
Just wanted to say hi and nice job on your website.