IGF CultureWatch

Opponents of gay marriage often warn that gays want to destroy marriage. This is preposterous and alarmist. However, in a recent Washington Blade column, openly gay law professor Nancy Polikoff indeed argues for "abolishing the legal status of marriage for everyone." There are multiple problems with her radical proposal, which boil down to: it shouldn't happen, it ain't gonna happen, and it needlessly fuels the opposition to gay marriage.

Since the 1970s there's been an undercurrent of opposition to marriage on the gay left. Lesbian feminists have criticized its sexist roots, including long-discarded laws subordinating wives to husbands. Gay male sexual liberationists have seen it as stultifying, directing people into dreary traditional patterns of living.

When the idea of gay marriage caught on in the early 1990s, thanks in part to gay conservatives like Andrew Sullivan, these critics initially dismissed it as "assimilationist." We're not "just like straights," they like to say, and we don't want to be.

The argument for gay marriage depends, however, on the idea that gays are "just like straights" in every important respect. Gay couples are just as capable of love, commitment, mutual caretaking, and raising children.

Polikoff acknowledges that marriage confers important advantages to married couples in everything from health benefits to taxation. Gay couples, she agrees, should get these benefits.

But, Polikoff argues, everyone else should get them too. "A legal system that gives benefits to married couples but withholds those benefits from other types of relationships that help people flourish and fulfill critical social functions harms many people, both straight and gay," she writes. A man caring for his sick mother should be able to have her covered on his health insurance, for example. A woman should not lose her home to pay estate taxes when her cohabiting sister dies.

The main problem, according to Polikoff and other critics, is that marriage privileges some relationships over others. If gay marriage is allowed it will still favor married couples over unmarried couples and other relationships. Indeed, under Polikoff's argument, it's hard to see why legal recognition should be limited to couples. Why not recognize relationships of 3, 4, or more people?

There are good reasons to reject Polikoff's idea. The institution of marriage represents an enormous social investment, both in the couple and in the children they often raise. Every single one of the more than 1,000 marital benefits granted at the state and federal level costs us money, whether it's in the form of a Social Security death benefit or tax breaks on transfers of wealth between spouses.

There are many reasons we make that huge investment in marriage but not in other relationships. Marriage adds to social stability, including by curbing promiscuity. It furnishes caretakers to individuals who would otherwise rely on the state. Married people are healthier and wealthier than single people or unmarried cohabitants. Marriage affords a secure environment for children, who do better in married households. Even with today's high divorce rates, marital relationships are also more enduring, which makes our investment in them all the wiser.

Why do they last longer? Partly because of the benefits they get. But mostly, I think, because of the tremendous social support they receive. This support comes out of our history and tradition, not mere laws. The powerful social expectation of marriage becomes equally powerful encouragement and assistance from family and friends for the couple to stay together.

Marriage is important for the social affirmation it offers gay relationships, not just for the legal benefits. Contrary to what Polikoff suggests, not even a landmark Supreme Court decision like Lawrence v. Texas can offer that deep affirmation. No "civil union" or "domestic partnership" can offer it either.

By marrying, couples signal to society in a culturally and historically unique way the strength of their commitment. No other relationship can quite replicate that signal. Society understandably rewards the married couple's public commitment, but cannot be as confident about the durability or depth of other arrangements.

There is nothing inherently wrong with extending some benefits to other caring relationships. Maybe a son should be able to secure health benefits for his ailing mother. But every extension of benefits entails financial costs. Each of these proposed benefits should be weighed on its own merits, applied to those relationships that seem more than transient.

Polikoff probably assumes that abolishing marriage means everyone would get its goodies. At last, health care for all! Don't bet on it. The more likely outcome is that standard marital benefits would be eliminated or reduced to help pay for benefits accorded the newly recognized relationships. The social investment in former marriages would decrease, diminishing the return we all get from that bygone institution.

Marriage, with its culturally and historically rich meaning, and its critical role in children's upbringing, deserves its privileged position. There's just too much at stake to abolish it.

Because of its special place in our culture, and because of its reach far back into our history, marriage isn't going anywhere any time soon. So proposals to end marriage are a nice parlor game for academics, but nothing more.

In this case, though, the game has political consequences. Already a leading opponent of gay marriage, Stanley Kurtz, has cited Polikoff's and others' work as proof that gays are out to destroy marriage.

Polikoff and Kurtz are wrong. We aren't fighting for the right to marry only to see our marriages abolished.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS all reasonable people can agree on. First, Democrats are better than Republicans on gay issues. Much better. Even when you find a gay-friendly Republican, his Democrat opponent is almost always better. Wherever there's an anti-gay initiative brewing, Republicans are stirring it. And when something idiotic is said about gays, it almost always comes from a Republican mouth.

The second thing reasonable people can agree on is that we'd be much better off if none of the above were true.

The real question has always been, how do we get from here to there?

One side says we should cozy up to the GOP, work from the inside to undermine homohaters, dispel stereotypes through our open participation in the party, and reward small Republican nods to equality in order to encourage more such progress.

The other side says we should just beat the GOP into submission.

Into this old debate walks Rick Santorum, the third-highest ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate. Ruminating on the constitutionality of anti-gay sodomy laws, Santorum recently told the Associated Press, "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery."

Santorum quickly attempted to clarify these remarks, saying in a press release, "My discussion with The Associated Press was about the Supreme Court privacy case, [and] the constitutional right to privacy in general. ... My comments should not be misconstrued in any way as a statement on individual lifestyles."

The first Santorum statement suggests, "Courts will be unable to distinguish between gays and others, like polygamists and adulterers." It is a slippery-slope argument that says, in effect, "We must refuse to make a sound decision today for fear of having to make a sensible distinction tomorrow."

Santorum's second statement implies, "I, however, am personally able to distinguish gays from these others."

Does Santorum really believe that he can make simple distinctions while judges trained in making them cannot? The law is not a completely foreign thing. The kinds of arguments you make to your friends are often made, in specialized language, to courts.

One could persuasively argue to a person of sound mind that gay sex in itself is not socially harmful and so can safely be protected as a "right" against the nosy preferences of other citizens. But polygamy, incest, and adultery are socially harmful and shouldn't be similarly protected as "rights." (That's not to say they should necessarily be criminalized.) Plural marriage in modern times in our country would be unstable and would leave many people without a potential partner to care for and civilize them. Incest threatens to sexualize family relations. Adultery undermines a state-sanctioned and -supported union. And so on. It's not as if judges, unlike normal people, can't understand these arguments.

There's just no excuse for what Santorum said.

So what's the GOP's excuse for him? Critics of the Republican Party have made much of the fact that he could say such things and keep his job. Democrats called it proof that Republicans are all bigots. Indeed, although a handful of prominent Republicans criticized Santorum, most Republican leaders offered at least tepid support. Through his spokesperson, President Bush belatedly called Santorum "inclusive."

Still, the GOP is improving, incrementally. It's noteworthy that no Republican leader (other than the execrable Tom DeLay) has endorsed the substance of Santorum's actual comments, as opposed to defending the man's political position. I suspect they privately think his comments were ill-advised but were loath to lose a second top Senate leader over casual remarks in the space of six months.

The White House has taken no public stand on the pending Supreme Court sodomy case, though it could have, and in earlier era would have. While Bush doesn't have the gay-rights zeal of a PFLAG parent, he's done some positive things, like hiring openly gay people and retaining an executive order banning anti-gay discrimination in federal employment. The only people critical of him for this within his party are religious conservatives. Bush needs their support to win re-election and he's doing about as much as he can on gay issues without completely alienating that political base.

So how does the Santorum controversy affect the old debate about strategy between gay Republicans and gay GOP-bashers? The fact is, not much, because it doesn't alter two basic truths.

Both sides ignore that what is moving the Republican Party in the right direction more than anything else is a culture that's evolving to accept gays. The pace may seem slow but the overall direction has been one way. We might be able to nudge the party a little faster through one method or another, but whatever we do the GOP can't forever stay mired in a discredited past and hope to win elections in the future.

The other thing both sides ignore is that there is room for both strategies. We needn't put all our eggs in one political basket. Those of us who generally favor less regulation, lower taxes, and a strong national defense should stay and work inside the GOP, despite these occasional troglodyte eruptions. Those gays who favor "social justice" and worldwide peace through marches should throw stones at the GOP, despite gradual improvements.

Some see these divergent strategies as evidence of "division" when we need "unity." I say it's smart politics.

THE BRIGHTEST MINDS of the religious right have spoken and that sound you hear is a collective intellectual thud. In 15 legal briefs filed in the Supreme Court recently, social-conservative groups supporting an anti-gay sodomy law rely on "facts" that are dubious and arguments that are anachronistic. Unable to come up with good reasons why the state should criminalize consensual sexual relations between two adults of the same sex, they've been reduced to scare-mongering about gay marriage.

The constitutional challenge arises in a case called Lawrence v. Texas, in which two men were arrested in a private home and convicted under a Texas law criminalizing oral and anal sex committed by same-sex couples, but not opposite-sex couples. A decision isn't expected until June, but the parties and their supporters have already filed their main briefs.

Texas' own brief, filed by the prosecuting county attorney's office, is relatively free of the anti-gay stereotypes and paranoia that mark its supporters' briefs. Texas argues primarily that its law is justified by states' traditional power to promote public morality, whatever the content of that morality. That's a contestable, but not necessarily anti-gay, legal basis for the law.

In brief after brief, the religious-conservative groups supporting the Texas law portray gay men as disease-ridden stalkers endangering public health. They obsess about the dangers of homosexual anal sex, including higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases among gay men (like HIV infections) than are seen among heterosexuals.

"Anal sodomy is an abusive act, i.e., a misuse of the organs involved," asserts the brief for the American Center for Law and Justice, as if it were 1955.

Several of the briefs, including the one filed by Concerned Women for America, rely on a recent Rolling Stone article about "bug-chasers," gay men who deliberately seek to become HIV-infected through unprotected anal sex. The fact that the article has been thoroughly discredited as inaccurate and sensationalized goes unmentioned.

A couple of the briefs, including one from a group of Christian physicians in Texas (upon whom the other briefs rely for evidence that gay sex poses a special health danger), even revive the specter of "gay bowel syndrome," a medical "diagnosis" last greeted without hilarity when bean-bag chairs were in vogue.

All this is said to offer a rational basis for Texas to criminalize homosexual sodomy but not heterosexual sodomy. There are three problems, aside from their exaggerated character, with using these sex-scare arguments to defend the Texas sodomy law.

One is that they deal only with the dangers supposedly presented by gay male sex. They largely ignore gay women. There is, for example, little evidence of HIV transmission between women. This is a serious omission in an argument supporting a statute that criminalizes both male-male and female-female sex.

A second flaw is that the public-health argument deals primarily with the supposedly elevated dangers of anal, not oral, sex. There is, for example, scant evidence of HIV transmission through oral sex. Yet both anal and oral are criminalized by the Texas law.

The third and most serious legal flaw with the public-health argument is that there is no evidence (and the briefs offer none) that sodomy laws in general, or the Texas law in particular, have any effect whatsoever on general STD or HIV transmission rates. One reason for this is that such laws - because they are almost never enforced - do not deter gay sex.

It's revealing that the brief for Texas, in defense of its own law, places no reliance on the public-health arguments of its supporters. Further, the state's brief admirably concedes that the law is unlikely to discourage gays from actually having sex. This undercuts the arguments of those supporting the state who contend the law is needed to prevent calamitous consequences.

For a law to be constitutional under even minimal standards, it must be (1) rationally related (2) to a legitimate state purpose. While protecting public health is a legitimate state purpose, there is no evidence that the Texas sodomy law bears any relationship (rational or otherwise) to that purpose.

Perhaps recognizing the weaknesses of these hysterical public-health arguments, the religious-conservative briefs warn the Court that the real danger of striking down sodomy laws is where it might lead.

Let consenting gay adults have sex in the privacy of their homes, they say, and the next thing you know we'll have legalized prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, child pornography, incest, and pedophilia. (Texas law already allows adultery and bestiality, so strike those from the slippery slope.) Each of these is distinguishable from consensual same-sex sodomy between adults in terms of the actual harm they cause and/or a lack of true consent involved in the acts, but they aren't really the focus of social conservatives' concern.

The real fear, which dominates these briefs (though, again, conspicuously not the Texas brief itself), is that we're headed for same-sex marriage. According to one typical line of reasoning: "To accept the argument [against the Texas sodomy law] is to overthrow the legal institution of marriage as exclusively a union between one man and one woman."

Huh? Little explanation is given for this non sequitur; the briefs read almost like early draft arguments against an expected future challenge to the marriage laws, not a present challenge to sodomy laws. If I gave any of my first-year law students the task of writing an opinion holding sodomy laws unconstitutional but leaving marriage laws intact, I'm confident every one of them could do it.

The religious right is losing the cultural, political, and legal battle over gay equality. The increasing desperation of their arguments proves it.

AS A NATIVE TEXAN, I know good and well why Texas has an anti-gay sodomy law - the one now being challenged in the Supreme Court. It's not because the state wants to protect the grand traditions of our moral heritage passed down from millennia of human experience and teaching, as Texas is now claiming before the Supreme Court.

That's just window-dressing for the real reason. It's an attempt to make the law look respectable, to divert attention away from what's really going on in Texas and in other states that have anti-gay sodomy laws.

No, the real reason legislators keep their anti-gay sodomy laws is simple: they just hate "queers." They have a sodomy law criminalizing gay people to express that gut reaction. But passing laws to express hatred against a group of people is unconstitutional.

How do we know the Texas law is an expression of hatred?

Here are five reasons we know the Texas sodomy law is infected with unconstitutional "animus" - simple spite against a group of people. (Disclosure: The discussion below is based on a Supreme Court brief I helped write for the Republican Unity Coalition urging the Texas law be held unconstitutional.)

First, sodomy laws historically prohibited anal (and later oral) sex for both heterosexual and homosexual couples. Traditional morality, which objected to all non-procreative sex, condemned sodomy for all persons regardless of the sex of their partners. No state had any objection to homosexual conduct as a category unto itself until 1969 when Kansas became the first state to adopt a law targeted solely at gays. The Texas anti-sodomy law itself applied to both heterosexual and homosexual sex until the law was changed to target only gays in 1973.

Texas thus offers a novel moral regime whereby conduct once condemned is now legally acceptable, but only for the political majority, while the identical conduct is prohibited only for the political minority. By taking the uniform historical prohibitions on sodomy and abolishing them for all but the small political minority of gay couples, Texas betrays an animus toward gay couples rather than a concern for preserving "traditional" morality.

Second, in the recent past, objections to homosexuality have been based on a variety of now-discredited harm-based concerns thought to justify repression. For example, those seeking to restrict or punish gays have variously asserted that homosexuality is a sickness, that it is chosen or changeable, and that it could be discouraged or stamped out by repressive laws. Gays also were tarred as child molesters.

These and other myths have been debunked. Indeed, even Texas no longer pretends that there is any material harm to homosexual conduct or that its law can alter the incidence of homosexuality, but instead asserts only a moral interest conveniently immune from empirical falsification. The collapse of excuse after excuse for discriminating against gays and the recent manufacture of a novel, selective, and non-falsifiable "moral" claim indicates a lingering animus likely born of the old substantive libels against gays.

Third, even as it targeted gay sex alone for the first time in 1973, Texas also legalized bestiality. A Texan may have sex in private with an animal or an opposite-sex partner he met ten minutes ago, and the law will take no heed. But let a Texan have sex with even a committed same-sex human partner, and the criminal law cries foul. Whatever morality Texas purports to protect with that regime, it is not traditional sexual morality.

The message sent by the patchwork of Texas sex laws is that gay citizens are less worthy of a life of physical intimacy than are animals and those who molest them. If that is not an expression of animus against a class of persons, nothing is.

Fourth, like other states, Texas rarely prosecutes people for actual violation of its sodomy law. This suggests the state has a minor concern at best with the conduct at issue. The primary practical use of the statute seems to be to justify discrimination against gays in unrelated contexts, like employment or marriage.

The infrequency of the direct enforcement of the law against specific conduct combined with its invocation to deny gays equal treatment in areas unrelated to the prohibited conduct reflect animus toward gays as a class rather than a moral disapproval for specific sexual practices.

Fifth, the broad and harsh consequences of the law, combined with the fact that these consequences fall solely on gay people, suggest animus. If he obeys the sodomy law, the gay citizen, and the gay citizen alone, must forever forego a life of intimacy. However, if he disobeys the law, the gay citizen flouts the criminal code and must live with the knowledge and fear that, in the eyes of the state, he is but an as-yet-undiscovered criminal.

And, if convicted of disobeying the law, he then faces a daunting series of obstacles throughout his life. He must, for example, reveal his conviction on applications for public and private employment. Evidence of his criminal conviction may be used against him in a child custody dispute. In some places he must register as a sex offender. The list goes on.

Sweeping and fundamental are the consequences of this law to gay persons and to gay persons alone. If it is not a tool to deny gays a life of physical affection with another human being, it is a sword hanging over our heads threatening us with discrimination in obtaining life's necessities.

While morality has its place in law, hatred has none.

Ten years ago this fall, Colorado voters narrowly approved an amendment to the state constitution repealing all existing civil rights protections for gays in the state and prohibiting them in the future. The passage of Amendment 2, as it was known, was hailed as a great victory for social conservatives and augured more such efforts in states around the country that promised to roll back the momentum for gay equality. Today, the unintentional result of Amendment 2 is that gay equality is on stronger ground than ever before.

Social conservatives in Colorado in the early 1990s, like social conservatives across the country, feared the rise of gay rights and the piecemeal erosion of what they view as "traditional family values." In Denver, Boulder, and Aspen, gay equality advocates had succeeded in getting their cities to adopt ordinances protecting gays from discrimination in areas like employment, housing, and public accommodations. State universities and some state agencies had taken similar steps to forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation. Social conservatives believe these measures signal approval of what they consider a dangerous and immoral lifestyle.

As long as decisions about these matters were made at the local level in Colorado, gay advocates could successfully marshal their political clout in relatively tolerant urban, affluent, and university-dominated areas. In these areas, gays have not only been present in disproportionately high numbers, but have been more politically organized and are more apt to live openly. Therefore, more citizens in these areas have been familiar with actual gay people and are less likely to believe hysterical claims about them. The opposite has been true in smaller towns and rural areas, where citizens are less personally familiar with gay people.

The political strategy for antigay social conservatives was thus simple: take the issue of "gay rights" out of the hands of local communities (where, ironically, conservatives generally believe policy decisions should be made) and put them in the hands of voters statewide. This would dilute the political power of gays and of people familiar with gays by overwhelming them with votes from socially conservative voters unfamiliar with gays.

On the eve of the election, supporters of Amendment 2 distributed 800,000 flyers asserting, among other things, "homosexuals commit between one-third and one-half of all recorded child molestations." These claims were false but they successfully diverted attention from the issues of job and housing discrimination that were at the heart of Amendment 2 and the laws it repealed.

Amendment 2 passed by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. Buoyed by this victory, social conservatives started anti-gay rights drives in more than a dozen other states.

But then something happened. Gays across Colorado and the nation mobilized politically in response to Amendment 2. Legal advocates sued to stop its implementation.

At the national level, the successes for gay equality since Amendment 2 are well known. The number of states protecting gays from discrimination has doubled, from six to twelve. The number of businesses protecting gay employees from discrimination has risen exponentially. More and more employers extend health and other benefits to same-sex domestic partners. Unprecedented numbers of gay characters have flooded TV screens and movie theaters. On and on it goes.

The legal challenge to Amendment 2 resulted in the most gay-positive decision yet from the U.S. Supreme Court, Romer v. Evans, which held that the measure unconstitutionally denied gays the equal protection of the laws. Though the long-term legal significance of Romer remains to be seen, at the very least it halted similar statewide initiatives across the country.

More telling is what happened in Colorado itself. Gays in every part of the state, stunned by what they saw as a personal rebuke from their fellow citizens, came out of the closet for the first time and got politically active.

A recent article in The Denver Post recounted political developments in Colorado in the ten years after the passage of Amendment 2. According to the article, gay activism was most intense in Colorado Springs, the home of antigay organizing in the state. A new gay-rights group, Ground Zero, began within a month. At the group's first press conference several people walked in with bags over their heads, removed them, and declared publicly for the first time they were gay.

An accountant placed a picture of her lover on her desk at work. A car salesman wore a gay pride ribbon on his lapel as he greeted customers. When his co-workers at a construction firm began telling antigay jokes, one previously closeted employee announced: "If you want to talk that trash you better say it to my face, because you are talking about me too."

The leader of the Amendment 2 effort ran for mayor of Colorado Springs and lost to a moderate, who immediately announced a policy of "zero tolerance" for discrimination against city employees. The city even passed its own ordinance banning discrimination against gays, an unthinkable event before the fight over Amendment 2.

A local high school ran an article about the experience of gay students. When social conservatives demanded the school board ban such articles, the board refused.

"In the long run, we didn't achieve our goal," Kevin Tebedo, one of the drafters of Amendment 2, recently told the Post. "As a result of that, nationwide, it was a boon for the homosexual political lobby."

Colorado gay activists agree. As one told the Post, "We know now that we have allies and can defend ourselves. Amendment 2 created a gay community. It is the best thing that ever happened to us."

Another such defeat and we shall overcome.

NEAR THE FRONT of the pride parade in Minneapolis this year marched a stern-faced woman dressed in leather-dominatrix regalia leading around by spiked chain and whip a person (sex undetermined) hunched over and disguised as a four-legged beast, probably a horse. Similar displays - which are less about "being yourself" than about simply being seen - assaulted the senses in parades around the country. I ask you, must we continue to put ourselves through this every year?

For the most part, the annual pride parades are a dreary procession of the ordinary: businesses, politicians, gay professionals, and social service organizations wanting money. Where they are not dreary, however, the parades seem calculated to offend the very folk we must win over.

In the 1970s, the parades served the important purpose of giving gays a sense of community and identity necessary to organize in a time when there were no positive images of gays in the mass media, when most states had sodomy laws, and when homosexuality was still officially listed as a mental disorder. In the 1980s, they helped rally us against AIDS. Always characterized by an in-your-face outrageousness, the parades nevertheless had some offsetting value.

But in the age of Will & Grace, when even Republicans are coming around, the parades are an anachronism, perpetuated more out of habit and nostalgia than necessity.

There is an inverse relationship between the degree of weirdness in a city's pride parade and the genuine need for that parade. In the big cities, where the parades are the most outlandish, they serve the least useful purpose. New York, San Francisco, Washington, Houston, and other large American cities are dotted with gay bars, restaurants, and book stores. They have gay bowling leagues and choruses and political groups and civil rights ordinances. A parade designed to foster awareness and community in these cities is an expensive and time-consuming redundancy.

Maybe, you say, the big-city parades benefit people in the surrounding suburbs and small towns. The gay Chicagoan may not need a parade to feel proud but the closeted guy from Peoria needs the Chicago parade to have just one day a year to commune with other gay people. There's surely some benefit to that.

Yes, but at what cost? If our concern is truly to give hope to the gay people who live in the hinterlands, the pride parades may do more harm than good. Simulated sex acts, near-naked men gyrating to music, and bare-breasted women don't play well in Peoria. And like it or not when the local nightly news there turns to gay pride, that's what plays.

That can't be good for the social environment in which gay Peorians must live and work. It hardens anti-gay attitudes, frightening Americans with what they imagine a gay-friendly future would look like. As a result, parents come down harder on any hint of homosexuality in their children. It doesn't matter that these images are unrepresentative of gay life; to Americans who live nowhere near a gay coffee shop, that's what gay means.

And unfortunately it's what gay comes to mean to youths wrestling with their own feelings of same-sex attraction. As a teenager growing up in southern Texas, I saw footage of S&M leather fetishists in the San Francisco parade. If that's gay, I thought, I must not be gay.

Gay youth around the country are forced into the closet by these parades, either because of the backlash they suffer in their communities or because of their own alienation from the public image of gayness thus created.

So there is a large hidden human cost to these displays. It's awfully selfish for us in big cities to have this fabulous annual party at their expense.

What's the alternative? We'll never get the media to stop focusing on the sensational. That's not because the media are uniformly homophobic; it's because they're profit-driven, profits are determined by audience size, and audiences prefer outrageous to dreary. It doesn't matter how many contingents of gay-suburbanite couples proudly brandish their joint mortgage statements, the TV stations will still feature the square-dancing drag queens.

It's also not an option to exclude weirdness from the parades. First of all, we could never agree on what's weird. Second, even if we could, people would scream censorship. Third, parade organizers tend to be so drenched in the easy rhetoric of inclusion and diversity they could never be trusted to make sensible judgments about such things.

The answer is to end the parades, at least in the big cities, where the weirdness of them is at a maximum and the need for them is at a minimum.

We should replace them with park festivals featuring civil rights and other groups with booths, food, and live concerts. That would make the annual pride celebrations fun and informative while minimizing the incentive for counterproductive media spectacles. Something like this already happens in most cities at the end of the parade. Let's skip the parade and go straight to the festival.

The parades themselves could justifiably go on in medium- and small-sized cities where they now flourish. Parades in these places tend to reflect the values and tastes of local communities, which can actually help the gay people who live there.

And no, this is not a proposal to "hide" the marginalized. Hey, if you want to walk around dressed as a farm animal, go for it.

But don't ask us to have a parade for you.

TOWARD THE MIDDLE of his thin new book, The Attack Queers, Richard Goldstein unintentionally reveals what rouses the self-described "queers" among us from bed in the morning. Goldstein, a columnist for the Village Voice, recounts the "elation" he felt at having marched in the 1994 New York St. Patrick's Day Parade with a small group of Irish gays. "We strode past a million people shrieking epithets," he writes of the "frenzied" crowd that greeted the gay contingent. "It was a terrifying spectacle, but utterly exhilarating." Styled as a critique of the gay right, the book reveals far more about the nostalgia for alienation and danger that captivates the queer left.

En route from flawed premises to paranoid conclusion, Goldstein's thesis is this: An insidious alliance between the liberal media and the gay right (the "attack queers" of the title) is undermining the historic commitment of the queer community to liberationist culture and politics.

What's the evidence of this improbable collaboration between the liberal media and "homocons"? Mostly that Andrew Sullivan gets to write columns for the New York Times Magazine and queer leftists don't. It never occurs to Goldstein that the reason for this might be that Sullivan is a better and more original essayist than, say, Michelangelo Signorile. But Sullivan has now been banned from the Times, making the alliance about as durable as the Soviet-German pact of 1939.

Moreover, to sustain this dubious thesis would require a basic understanding of the "gay right." But it's apparent that Goldstein's understanding is limited to a few provocative passages from Sullivan's work (with a little Camille Paglia and Norah Vincent thrown in for gender equity).

Important authors of the gay right go unnoticed. There are only passing nods to Bruce Bawer's seminal book A Place at the Table, of which Goldstein seems to have read only the title. There is no mention of Jonathan Rauch, a senior writer for the National Journal and a regular contributor to The Atlantic. Many more such omissions mar the book.

Even Goldstein's treatment of Sullivan is superficial. There are so many references to Sullivan's "monster" pecs and glutes, as opposed to his actual ideas, that one wonders whether Goldstein's interest in him goes beyond the ideological.

Goldstein also appears oblivious to the well known differences on the political right between conservatives and libertarians. He sees a monolith where there is schism and subtlety.

Not surprisingly, when Goldstein attempts to describe the gay right he falls back on hackneyed caricatures. So he asserts in myriad ways that the gay right "deeply fear[s] difference" and that it thinks there is only one correct way to be gay.

Very nearly the opposite is true. As ideological dissenters from orthodoxy, often maligned for that difference, gay conservatives and libertarians are keenly aware of the value of diversity and of tolerance for difference.

But when queer leftists speak of diversity they do not mean the ideological kind. They mean something very prescriptive about the way gay life is to be lived. They sneer at the deepest aspiration of most gay people for normal lives, lives characterized by acceptance from family and community.

Any affirmation of that impulse is seen by the queer left as a surrender of our alien selves to the dominant culture and as somehow threatening to those who are not, and may never be, accepted.

When challenged to identify what makes gay people fundamentally different from straight people, liberationists tend to offer a short and ambiguous list. Goldstein seems to think it resides in a gay "sensibility" revealed in gay fiction writing. This sensibility comprises "a distinct aesthetic, socially acute and earnestly romantic, albeit laced with irony." Or try this formulation: gays have a "certain temperament, a sensitivity to the complexities of desire, a perspective on society."

If these platitudes mean anything, and it's unclear they do, they reveal an impoverished appreciation for life as lived outside the small circle of writers who produce trendy works like Angels in America.

If there is a distinct gay sensibility, it's unlikely to have come from pleasant parlor readings of Whitman and Proust. It's more likely to have been generated by the constant fear of police raids on gay bars, the snooping of the FBI on early gay organizations, the threat of prosecution for intimacies in one's own home, the separation from the important social recognition marriage offers. That is, it's likely to have come from the government action the dreaded gay right is most concerned to eliminate forever from our lives.

Romanticizing alienation from the norm is the nostalgia of the queer left. Consider the way Goldstein describes the recent efforts of Greenwich Village residents trying to make their neighborhood safer and to protect the value of their property by reducing the presence of drug dealing and public sex. "This has nothing to do with gayness," one lesbian resident told the media. But Goldstein disagrees: "It has everything to do with gayness as it once was, and little to do with what it's becoming."

Here we have real irony. Criticizing gay conservatives, Goldstein ends by calling for a return to "tradition": "the tradition [of 'queer humanism'] that has always held gay people together," "the tradition that consoled us in oppression." He wants us to be progressive by regressing, recapturing some imagined solidarity forged by a brutality it is our aim to end. He wants the frenzied million shrieking at him, as they once did, exhilarating him.

GIVE CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE, opponents of gay equality can be creative in desperation. Lately, they have been finding ingenious ways to use the Catholic priest scandal to criticize the entire gay civil rights project. The essence of their argument is that gays are incurably promiscuous, that this promiscuity is a kind of moral disease, and that it threatens to lay low every traditional institution it infects.

Stanley Kurtz, writing recently in the influential conservative magazine National Review, has applied this argument to same-sex marriage. The argument must be rebutted, and it can be.

Kurtz, a writer of considerable intelligence and subtlety, has specialized in arguing against the conservative case for gay marriage. That case has rested in part on a prediction (and a hope) that gay marriage would reduce gay promiscuity. This would improve the lives of gays and benefit society by, for example, increasing social stability and reducing the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Let's call it the "domestication effect."

Using the crisis in the Catholic Church as an example, Kurtz questions the likelihood of a domestication effect. Kurtz argues that gays go into the priesthood promising to meet the strictures of the institution (celibacy), perhaps sincerely believing they will, but soon fall prey to their profligacy. Similarly, in Kurtz' view, gays would go into marriage promising to meet the strictures of the institution (fidelity), perhaps sincerely believing they will, but would soon fall prey to their profligacy. If gay priests can't keep their vows of celibacy, it's unlikely gay spouses will keep their vows of monogamy.

In fact, Kurtz argues, it's worse than that: "The priesthood scandal is a stunningly clear case in which the opening of an institution to large numbers of homosexuals, far from strengthening norms of sexual restraint, has instead resulted in the conscious and successful subversion of the norms themselves." That is, gays will not only fail to benefit from marriage, they will hurt it. As a conservative who believes traditional institutions like marriage are valuable, I take this charge very seriously.

There are many ways to respond to Kurtz's analogy. One would be to question the comparison of an institution that allows some sexual outlet to participants (marriage) to another that completely forbids it (the Catholic priesthood). Human nature may simply be better equipped to deal with restricted sexual access than with none at all.

Yet another response would be to note that Kurtz's argument has no apparent application to gay women, who can't even become Catholic priests.

But I want to attack Kurtz's conclusion that gay men will somehow destabilize marriage. First, let's make a concession to Kurtz for the sake of argument: suppose the magnitude of the domestication effect is indeed very small. We can doubt gay male promiscuity is simply an artifact of repressive laws that will wither away when those laws are gone. Of course, we cannot know for sure because no other regime has been available to gay men. But even if we concede that many gay men will not be changed much by marriage, will gay male marriage change marriage?

Surely even Kurtz would agree that at least some gay male couples in marriage would remain monogamous, just as many gay priests have remained celibate. And surely at least some, however small, domestication effect would take hold. This domestication effect will provide at least small benefits to gay men and to society, benefits that all principled conservatives should welcome. In a cost-benefits analysis, that's a point for gay marriage.

Then what's the cost? Though Kurtz never explicitly spells it out, he appears to fear that straight couples will see gay spouses living it up sexually and do the same (that is, to a greater degree than they already do).

But this genuinely conservative nightmare sounds fanciful to me for two reasons. First, women will always be present in straight marriages and women will for the most part demand fidelity, as they always have. That won't change because they hear a few married gay men have open arrangements.

Second, even assuming gay men are uncontrollably promiscuous and that access to the social support marriage provides will not change that, it borders on paranoia to think they will manage to subvert marriage itself.

To see why, let's do some math. Conservative critics of gay equality like to say that homosexuals are no more than three percent of the population. I'd bet gays will get married at a lower rate than the general population, so gay married couples will likely represent less than three percent of all marriages.

Gay male married couples will be even rarer at first. The experience of Vermont civil unions shows that twice as many lesbian couples as gay male couples get hitched. Two-thirds of homosexual unions would probably be female pairings, which will be largely sexually closed (perhaps more so than straight couples).

The potentially problematic gay couples - the gay men - will represent perhaps one percent of all marriages. Some of them will manage to be faithful all or most of the time, so the truly troublesome unfaithful gay male couples will represent less than one percent of all marriages.

These paltry numbers will undermine the institution of marriage? Undermine it more than the large percentage of married people who already acknowledge in studies they have been unfaithful? To state the proposition is to refute it. Perhaps gay conservatives have more faith in the institution of marriage than its traditionalist defenders do.

HE CAME CLOSER than any other openly gay person in modern history to leading an entire country. He was smart, articulate, and charismatic as he defended gay equality against all enemies. In a just world, history would put him on a par with other courageous gay trailblazers like Harvey Milk.

But chances are you never heard of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (pronounced "For-town") until he was recently assassinated, if then. And chances are what you heard was slanted and defamatory.

Fortuyn, 54, was running as the leader of his own party in Dutch parliamentary elections held on May 15. If his party had captured a sufficient number of seats he could have been the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands, the only country in the world that recognizes full-fledged gay marriage. But as he left a radio interview on May 6 he was shot dead.

Fortuyn was controversial. In a country with an extremely generous social welfare system, he argued for cutbacks in the bureaucracy. He wanted reforms in bloated and inefficient public services for education and health care. He criticized Dutch environmental policy as feel-good politics and as having "no more substance." He emphasized the need for law-and-order in a country that has the second-highest homicide rate in Western Europe.

At the same time, Fortuyn supported his country's tolerant social policies on matters like euthanasia, abortion, prostitution, and drug use. He made no apologies for being a gay man, nor, in the Netherlands, did he have to.

But Fortuyn also wanted to hold the line on immigration and for this he was demonized by legions of the politically correct. He worried that his country's liberal democratic values were under attack from an influx of immigrants, a disproportionate number of which have come from repressive and undemocratic Islamic countries.

Islamic clergy in the Netherlands have ridiculed homosexuals as "lower than pigs." Their attitudes toward the role and rights of women have been no less retrograde.

Fortuyn responded by calling Islam a "backward culture" in its attitude toward gays and women. "How can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut?" he asked.

Candid remarks like that caused a stir. Fortuyn was denounced by political elites as an "extreme right-winger" and a racist. Just a day before his assassination, a writer for the New York Times accused him of "modernized fascism." These labels were ceaselessly applied to him by media in the U.S. and Europe even after he was dead. (By contrast, his assassin was described in the media as "an animal rights campaigner" and was remembered by friends in the Times as "a gentle and kind nature lover." Like many extreme environmental and "animal-rights" activists, the assassin apparently loved everything in nature except people.)

Was Fortuyn a racist? Hardly. He bitterly rejected comparisons between himself and the continent's true neo-fascist and racist, France's Jean-Marie Le Pen. As his successor for party leadership, Fortuyn chose a black immigrant from the Cape Verde Islands. Another party candidate is Moroccan-born.

As for his criticism of Islam, anti-gay views should not be exempt from criticism just because they spring from religious faith. Islam is backward when it comes to matters like basic human dignity for gay people. So are other religions, including many Christian sects. But it's worth noting there is not one predominantly Christian country in the world where homosexual acts are still punishable by death, as they are in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia.

In his concerns about the ultimate impact of immigration on his country's institutions, Fortuyn probably exaggerated. The Netherlands already has among the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe, rejecting two of every three would-be immigrants. The American experience has been that wave after wave of immigrants, initially feared as having hostile values and alien religions, have enriched our country. As an American, I say open the floodgates to people who want to come here.

But if I were Dutch I might see immigration differently. A small nation of 16 million people, the Netherlands is already the second most densely populated country in the world. Almost 10 percent of the country's population is non-European, the highest rate in Western Europe. Rotterdam, the country's second-largest city, is now 45 percent foreign-born. Unlike Americans, the Dutch have a long history, culture, and language uniquely their own. Those things are surely worth preserving.

The most important thing Fortuyn did for gays, however, was simply to stand his own independent ground against vicious criticism. He proved a gay person could support free markets, individual liberty, a rollback in government bureaucracy, and tough anti-crime measures. He identified with the problems of hard-working, middle-class citizens. What's more, it appeared they increasingly identified with him.

Fortuyn refused to be shoved into a particular politics because of his sexual orientation. He defied standard expectations about what gays should think and say, and so made room for the rest of us to do likewise. It's not surprising the media was unable to compose a coherent or truthful sentence about him, unaccustomed as they are to seeing a gay person think for himself.

Some people are ennobled by their untimely deaths; when they are gone, we suddenly realize how much promise was lost. James Dean was not a great actor, but he might have been. John Kennedy was not a great president, but he could have been. Pim Fortuyn was not given the chance to show that a homosexual could be entrusted with the stewardship of his nation's most precious values, but he should have been.

Every movement struggles with the desire for the ideal and the need for the practical. A column I recently wrote addressed the fallacies in the argument that the gay civil rights movement must include protection for gender identity in gay civil rights laws because gays "owe" transgender activists some debt for drag queens' participation in Stonewall. I made three points:

1. the importance of Stonewall has been exaggerated;
2. the importance of drag queens to Stonewall has been exaggerated; and
3. even if I am wrong about #1 and #2, that doesn't mean we must include transgenders in gay civil rights laws, since there are numerous considerations of practical politics here.

Most replies to that column, as usually happens when one writes critically about the "T" in "GLBT," consisted of name-calling. Many responses called the column "transphobic" or "elitist" because it would "leave some people behind," as if every law doesn't do that in some fashion.

There were, however, a couple of rational responses that challenged me on substantive grounds. These responses argued that there is a close connection between gay and transgender issues that ought not be ignored by gay civil rights laws. These responses raise important issues.

There are two separable questions when it comes to inclusion of gender identity in gay civil rights laws. First, is inclusion warranted as a matter of principle? Second, if it is warranted as a matter of principle, is it sensible as a matter of practical politics?

On the first question, I am not convinced that gay and transgender issues are so connected that principle dictates they be dealt with together in all legislation. The standard argument from principle seems to be that gay issues are a subset of all gender issues because gays, by having same-sex mates, transgress traditional gender/sex boundaries.

There are many things to say about this argument, but let's focus on one basic point. Since the beginning of the gay civil rights movement, there have been people trying to claim the cause is really about something other than homosexuality. For some 1960s and 1970s activists, it was really about ending an unjust capitalist system, or supporting movements for national liberation, or ending racism, or eliminating poverty. For many (especially male) activists, it was really about sexual liberation generally, as if we were fighting for the right to fornicate in the streets or with children.

I distrust claims that gay civil rights is really about something else (like poverty or gender). To me, such arguments seem like another way of erasing gay lives and concerns by subsuming them to some other cause favored by the advocate.

Such arguments are also reductionist: they reduce the gay experience to one aspect of life. Take the issue of our supposed "gender transgression." Many gay people see themselves in gender-conforming terms and seek gender-conforming traits in their mates. Is this in itself wrong? I don't think so, any more than it's wrong to prefer tall lovers to short ones or brown-haired ones to blondes. Does having a same-sex mate transgress traditional gender expectations? Of course, but this singular act of rebellion does not make a gender revolution of the type transgender activists seek.

On the second, practical issue, even if I were convinced that as a matter of principle gay and transgender issues are linked, I would still hesitate before adding "gender identity" to gay civil rights legislation.

As a legislator, I might personally support protecting transgenders from much private discrimination. But unfortunately, very few of my fellow legislators (in most places) would share my view. I could, of course, take the time and effort to explain it to them, but that period of education might add years to the final passage of my gay civil rights law. In the meantime, gay people will continue to face discrimination.

Not every law has to address every problem. Progress means that you get what you can while you can get it. Then, when you can get more, you do so. Progress comes by degrees, not (usually) by revolutions. The black civil rights movement did not fight to protect people from age discrimination. Was that ageist?

In almost every jurisdiction in the country where both gays and transgenders are protected, the protection for gays preceded the protection of transgenders by many years. This gap allowed people an opportunity to see that the world didn't end by protecting gays and that taking the additional incremental step of protecting transgenders also wouldn't cause it to end. This pace may be unsatisfying but it's preferable to waiting for a perfectly inclusive law that may never come.

I suppose one could respond that there is a very practical concern for gays involved here: if gender expression is not protected by law some gays will face discrimination for their gender presentation (butch women, effeminate men) rather than for their sexual orientation (gay) and yet will not be protected by the law.

This scenario is theoretically possible, but is not very likely. Almost any gay person subjected to discrimination for being gender variant will have been subjected to explicitly anti-gay abuse and thus will have some legal recourse under a law that protects sexual orientation but excludes gender identity. I certainly would not hold up the passage of a gay civil rights law to reach extraordinary cases.

We need to begin a reasoned, substantive, open discussion of these issues. The inclusiveness of "GLBT" might make us feel good, but it shouldn't become a talismanic barrier to progress.