Author Archives: David Link

One Drop

by on

The Russian Orthodox Church is ready to ask the government to block Facebook throughout the entire country.  The reason? Facebook has added two icons to its marriage set, which users can  post on their page to identify their relationship status – a gay couple and a lesbian couple.

Demonstrating that reactionary churches worldwide share a similar uncontrolled overreaction when it comes to same-sex couples, church leaders want Facebook to “stop flirting with sodomites.”  They are clear about what they want:

“We demand only one thing: Facebook should be blocked in the entire country because it openly popularizes homosexuality among minors…”

It’s unlikely many Russian minors will be getting married, much less gay-married, but you can see where these folks are coming from.  Facebook is a private company, and it has a lot of appeal, both to young people and those of us who are young at heart.

I don’t know much about the demographics of the Russian Orthodox Church, so I can’t tell whether this is another religion engaging in culture envy.  But as with their American evangelical and middle eastern Muslim counterparts, the hysterical rhetoric of the church leaders is revealing.  The vast, vast number of Facebook users are not homosexual, and will not be using the gay marriage icon.  But the simple fact that it is available to the small minority that is homosexual is enough to taint the entire company, so much that it should be banned by the government.

This disproportion has characterized prejudice for a very long time.  It is the One Drop Rule for gay tolerance: Any group anywhere that even acknowledges the existence of gay couples (or even gay singles, I’d imagine) is completely tainted by the stigma of that acceptance.  No tolerance can be tolerated.

I’m fairly confident ordinary Russians will have the same response to these Church Ladies that Americans tend to have.

And it’s nice to know that it’s not just American religious extremists who hate the private sector.

8 Comments

The Sin

by on

I am unqualified to criticize the theology in Robert Gagnon’s hefty essay on the biblical errors in Alan Chambers’ leadership of Exodus International.  But what’s at stake here is pretty considerable, and more than just theological.  Chambers is president of Exodus, the group that assists Evangelical Christians with “same-sex attraction.”  Exodus had famously supported the notion that gays could change their sexual orientation, but Chambers – a gay man who is satisfactorily married to a woman, though he does not deny he continues to be sexually attracted to men – says now that he doubts such change in orientation is possible.

His change about change is important, as the sheer length of Gagnon’s critique (35 pages, with appendices) suggests, because it lets us see what Maggie Gallagher and the NOM Choir try so furiously to obscure: all that is left of the debate over homosexuality is the vestigial tail of a religious question about sin.

Gagnon starts out with religion (the entire first three pages are devoted to the writings of the Apostle Paul), but it’s soon clear he is quite exercised about the fact that Chambers may be removing Exodus from the political playing field.  Chambers’ comments have made “homosexualist” groups “smell blood in the water.”  They will take advantage of Chambers’ naïve attempt to be apolitical.

Religion vs. Politics is now the gold standard for discussing gay equality, and Gagnon’s invocations of that framework show how closely he has been listening to his brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t wear their theology on their sleeve.  Gagnon explicitly adopts Maggie Gallagher’s “they’re out to get us” mentality (perfected by Frank Schubert), charging that Chambers’ abdication threatens “foisting on us laws that will attenuate our own civil rights and coerce acceptance of homosexual unions in the civil sphere.”

That kind of talk, in an essay that purports to be almost exclusively about what proper theology has to say about the sin of homosexuality (and sin, in general) is telling.  Chambers’ comments about sexual orientation and change would not be all that consequential but for the fact that they undermine the entire religious foundation of the remaining phantoms about homosexuality.  Gagnon frets about “serial-unrepentant homosexual practice,” and sees acceptance of that as sending us all down the slippery slope to committed homosexual unions.  To Gagnon, this is a moral disaster in the making because it erodes the moral superiority that religious believers so love to lord over ignorant or vicious homosexualists:

. . . my main concern is that Alan’s comments to those living a homosexual life are ultimately unloving and ungracious. I don’t doubt that Alan intended his comments to “gay Christians” to be otherwise. Yet the actual result is to leave such persons deceived by giving them a message of “peace and security” when instead danger hangs over them (1 Thess 5:1-11). Who is gracious and loving? The parent that assures a child that crossing a busy intersection without looking both ways will produce no harm or the parent that does everything in his or her power to warn the child about the potential harm? Obviously the latter, for the warning is part of the makeup of a loving parent. In fact, state social services agencies count the former as abuse.

The arrogance of such christianity is what drives many truer Christians mad.  Lesbians and gay men are not the only ones who have been so lovingly parented by christians who claimed to have only the best interest of fully adult “children” at heart.  This is the same brand of tender love that christian men were expected to exercise over their wives (and all women), and that christian whites had toward blacks.

But the toxic paternalism is not just for christians.  That reference to “state social services agencies” is another slip where Gagnon reveals that while his concern is religious in concept, he intends it to be civil in application.  His religious critique shows that his real interest is secular politics.

It’s certainly fair for religious people to participate fully in American politics.  But there is a disconnect between arguments believers find religiously persuasive and those that will change the minds of non adherents.  Sin, in particular, has always been a tricky notion in interfaith contests, and leaves nonbelievers cold.

But it’s not just in the political realm where Gagnon overestimates his own brand of expertise.  He acknowledges Chambers may be right that homosexual orientation might not be entirely changeable, but says even incremental changes could still be valuable:

It is not necessary that reparative therapy achieve complete transformation from “gay” to straight in order to be helpful. One or two shifts along the Kinsey spectrum or a change in intensity of homosexual impulses can be beneficial.

I don’t know what is known about how or whether sexual orientation can be changed, but I’m pretty confident that no one yet has studied whether something as inherently subjective as sexual attraction can be moved – or measured – fractionally.  In any case, I’m not persuaded that theological scholars are the ones best suited to be pronouncing on the prospect.

Gagnon’s primary point is that social acceptance of homosexuality “regularizes the sin.”  I can’t judge the merits of his theological case, but this is, in the end, only a theological case, and only one of those.  Other theologians obviously disagree, as do other non-theologically inclined Christians.

But that divide within Christianity itself, endangers the monopoly that the fundamentalist brands of christianity demand, and in their worst moments have tried to foist on the general public.  While Christian thinking has been all over the map on so many other issues, the more fundamentalist tribes have generally been able to hold the line on homosexual sin.  But for them, too, that line is fading, and Chambers exacerbates the problem.  If sexual attraction can’t be changed, and if homosexual attraction in particular can’t be stamped out or ignored, then the case for just accepting gay people within the civil law is not just strong, its opposite is inhumane.

This is the turning point for religion today.  The possibility that lifelong heterosexual marriage may not be exactly at the center of the moral universe is as threatening to Gagnon as the location of the earth itself was to Pope Urban VIII when Galileo was sentenced to prison.  Gagnon is fighting every bit as hard (with more limited resources) for the status quo.

Galileo and Copernicus did not eliminate the earth, they just noticed – and said — that it was located somewhere other than where the Vatican had always placed it. That’s a religious problem only if you are under the impression that earthly religious leaders are as inevitably correct in their scientific thinking as they are in their theology.  But the Bible isn’t an authority on everything, and sometimes people use the Bible’s words to make moral issues out of things that aren’t properly moral.  The earth is no less important because it circles a larger body, and heterosexual marriage is no less important because it is not in every human’s nature to be attracted to the opposite sex.  There is plenty of room in the universe for God, still, and morality — even sexual morality.  And maybe God approves when humans acknowledge their errors.

Chambers isn’t Galileo, just as Gagnon isn’t Pope Urban; but today’s evangelical Inquisition is every bit as vainglorious as its Catholic predecessor, every bit as contemptuous of unbelievers, and every bit as likely to expose the sin of its own excess of hubris.

13 Comments

Privacy, Silence, Neutrality and Anderson Cooper

by on

I am as glad – and grateful – as anyone for Anderson Cooper’s non-coming-out coming out.  There are some lessons in this story worth talking about.

People who know Cooper seem to agree with him that he was not really in the closet except with respect to the general public.  That is a telling fact.  As the walls of the closet have come down on the private side of people’s lives, there is still that remaining door that can be opened or closed to the public.  The people we know on our side of the door – the private side – are far more likely today to know we are homosexual than they ever have been.  Cooper enjoyed that private side of the closet with his family and friends.

But Cooper is not like the rest of us (and not just in what he does for a black t-shirt).  For those of us without a public face, the need to come out or not to others – to decide whether to open that door — is a recurring issue; we are always meeting new people, and regularly face the problem of how much to reveal to whom, and in what circumstances.

People like Cooper who have a large public reputation have to deal with this a little differently.  Word spreads about the famous, particularly about something as personal and controversial (or at least pretty interesting) as homosexuality.  News of my homosexuality never hit Twitter; it never really achieved a threshold of being news.  For Cooper, opening that door once to a world that knows him as a personality pretty much brings him out in toto.  There will still be pockets of cluelessness, but for the most part, this is a one-time deal for someone of Cooper’s stature.

The Entertainment Weekly story that got this story moving makes the point that it’s possible for even celebrities today to come out without its being a big deal, and Cooper’s example contradicts that (in the short term, since it was kind of newsish) but reaffirms the larger point, having such a short shelf-life.  Writing this post all of two days after Andrew Sullivan broke the story already feels like I’m stretching it out.

But that’s where the political aspect of sexual orientation comes in.  For me, when it comes to sexual orientation and politics, I was born this way.  It has taken me a long time to accept that some people – a lot of people – are not born political, or at least don’t take to politics naturally.  I see a need for lesbians and gay men to take political action, but as people who are more activist than me can tell you, it’s always been an uphill battle.

Cooper reports on political stories, but as a journalist he should not be an activist.  As a gay man, that puts him in a difficult spot.

A lot of politically active lesbians and gay men resent celebrities who are privately lesbian or gay, but have not opened the public door.  We have an enormous public relations job to do, and need all the help we can get.  That is one of the things that animated the movement to out politicians and celebrities – the idea that they had an obligation to use their public face to help us all gain equality.  The worst of the worst were the ones who worked against legal equality, but the desire for even neutral or supportive public figures to come out – or be dragged out – came from the mathematical problem of being a minority in the first place.  We start out with numbers that are staggeringly against us in a democracy, and then have the additional problem of members of our group who won’t even admit they belong.

Cooper seems to have struggled with that.  He mentions “the unintended outcomes” of maintaining his privacy, and says he may have given the impression that he is trying to hide something that makes him uncomfortable, ashamed or afraid.  His coming out was intended to – and does — clarify any misimpressions.

But those misimpressions are, and always have been, a perfectly natural consequence of silence.  If about 95% of the population is heterosexual, and someone doesn’t positively identify as homosexual, is it unreasonable for people to assume that individual is straight?  The open discussion of homosexuality over the last quarter century or so changes the bet somewhat, since silence now looks more telling, when it isn’t downright implausible.  Yet many people still cling to the fig leaf of privacy as if it were without consequence.

In this impressive compilation of Cooper in the field, one quote stood out: “Journalists don’t like to become part of the story, but unfortunately they have been made part of the story. . . . “  That, I am afraid, is true of sexual orientation as well.  Our inequality is embedded in the status quo that recognizes only heterosexual relationships, and if we say or do nothing, we are part of a story that tolerates and accepts our second-class status.  We cannot get out of that story, or create a more appropriate status quo unless we act, unless we speak, unless we stand up as lesbians and gay men.

The false neutrality of silence is clear in this story about Jitters and Bliss Coffee.  The company claims to be neutral when it comes to marriage.  They say they don’t have a public position on the matter, and “respect the views of all their customers.”  To demonstrate that neutrality, they joined up with the National Organization for Marriage to offer NOM members a non-Starbuck’s coffee option, since Starbuck’s has taken a position supporting marriage equality.

That is the neutrality of the status quo, being nakedly manipulated to preserve itself.  Our silence, their silence, anyone’s silence is a vote for NOM, is a vote for the bias and prejudice that are woven into the fabric of current law.

In this politicized environment, privacy equals silence, and silence equals — well, not death anymore, but certainly some spiritual damage.  That was the unholy balance that Cooper upset.  Neutrality is a primary virtue of the journalistic profession, but when “neutrality” means “the status quo,” and if the status quo is, itself, biased, then neutrality is not neutral.  Anderson Cooper’s coming out helps expose that truth.

18 Comments

Super Chief

by on

Ari Ezra Waldman has an informative analysis of the Supreme Court’s health care decision at Towleroad, with his thoughts about how it might throw some light on what the court would – or should – do if it accepts one of the several pending gay marriage cases, including a challenge to DOMA that is now at the head of the list.

But by framing his comments in the addicting polarity of the political left and right, I think he misses the more important constitutional thinking that animates the health care case, and particularly the role of Chief Justice John Roberts.

From the political perspective, the bottom line of the case is that the left won the policy while the right won the law.  Democrats get the health care reforms they fought very hard for, but as Waldman notes, the most conservative Republicans got limits on two of Congress’s most expansive powers – powers that have had few limits up until this decision: the authority to pass laws under the Commerce Clause, and a limit on how far the Spending Power goes before it coerces individual states.  Neither is much of a constraint, given existing Supreme Court rulings, but the opinion does draw lines that many people thought might be nonexistent.

But Chief Justice Roberts confounded the politics.  This most political of all cases is not fitting into the proper political boxes.  And in his introduction to the opinion, Roberts does his best, not only with rhetoric, but with his bottom line, to steer the court through the political shoals:

Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

Our deference in matters of policy cannot, however, become abdication in matters of law. “The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written.” [citation] Our respect for Congress’s policy judgments thus can never extend so far as to disavow restraints on federal power that the constitution carefully constructed. “The peculiar circumstances of the moment may render a measure more or less wise, but cannot render it more or less constitutional.”

The difference between policy and constitutional law are famously hard to define, and frequently get lost entirely in political discussions.  The Chief Justice wants his court to keep a close focus on the apolitical constitution, and particularly the limits it places on legislative authority.  Congress violated two very important limits in this case, and the court called them on their transgressions.

But the court must be as respectful of the constitution’s structural framework as possible, and that means upholding another branch’s decisions if there is any constitutional authority to do so.  While there were political problems for Congress if they said the penalty for failure to buy health insurance is a tax, that is an entirely fair characterization of what they did, and they do have the power to levy taxes. Just because Congress didn’t rely on that clear power – for obvious political reasons – doesn’t mean that, absent any other constitutional authority, the court cannot uphold their action based on this obvious but politically risky power.  As the Chief implied, it’s not the court’s job to protect people from their politicians, or politicians from the people.

While that might seem to be a problem for the DOMA cases, I think it works the other way.  Waldman focuses on conventional equal protection analysis, which holds that while the court defers to Congress on economic legislation, it should not do so when politically unpopular groups are disadvantaged by legislation.  That is a fair argument that dates back to 1938, and the most famous footnote in judicial history.

But the DOMA cases are the flip side of the health care case.  The health care decision is based on the powers Congress has been granted, but DOMA is about the limits the constitution places on what can be passed, even with constitutional authority.

The Equal Protection Clause is one of the “restraints on federal power that the constitution carefully constructed,” which Roberts and the court are bound to respect.  Lesbians and gay men have slowly been convincing the country, and the courts, that there are political reasons for elected officials to violate it and disadvantage them under the law.

It is easy enough for the court to hold elected officials responsible to the voters when they try to avoid facing up to a political reality like raising taxes.  But it will obviously be harder for the court to put itself in the public’s crosshairs.  But when it comes to the Bill of Rights, that is where the constitution places the court, for good or ill.  Sometimes the constitution puts the elected branches on the political hotseat, and sometimes it puts the court there.

That is why it is fair to hold the Chief Justice to the apt quotation from his great predecessor, Chief Justice John Marshall.  “The peculiar circumstances of the moment may render a measure more or less wise, but cannot render it more or less constitutional.”  When a same-sex marriage case does make it to the highest court, Roberts’ hardest decision will be whether he believes the court that bears his name is stable enough to apply the same apolitical view of constitutional interpretation to itself that he has applied to Congress.

The health care opinion is a remarkably stabilizing decision.  The Chief Justice managed both the politics and the law well.  I think it is a hopeful sign.

 

10 Comments

Doing It

by on

Mark Regnerus gets props for being candid about his new study on parenting, but doesn’t seem to understand what he’s actually being candid about.

The study is another attempt to compare the effects on children of same-sex parents and opposite-sex parents — well, kind of.  Regnerus just asked adults if, as children, either of their parents had ever had a same-sex relationship, and if so, whether they’d lived with that parent during that period.  That approach obviously has some real problems, as John Corvino so aptly argues at TNR.

In describing the methodology of his research, Regnerus says, “I realize that one same-sex relationship does not a lesbian make, necessarily. But our research team was less concerned with the complicated politics of sexual identity than with same-sex behavior.”

I can’t think of a statement that more clearly reveals the chasm between the way the extreme right views sexual orientation and the way most everyone else does today.  Not knowing much about Regnerus, I have no idea what his political proclivities might be; all I can say is that his statement incorporates a view of homosexuality that is widely accepted only among the political and religious right today.

No one would argue that heterosexuality is synonymous with sexual behavior — or at least no one would who expected to be taken seriously.  Sexual orientation — gay or straight — involves sexual behavior, but also an enormous spectrum of other factors, psychological, emotional, relational and both public and private.  I doubt many heterosexual couples would stand for having their sexual behavior isolated and then used as the measure against their parenting skills.

But Regnerus is happy to do that for homosexuals.  He thinks it will actually be helpful to society to compare people who have engaged in homosexual behavior and had some experience parenting (for as little as four months), with heterosexual parents who have married and devoted a lifetime to raising children.

That is a comparison that is simply untenable.  When many of the children he surveyed were growing up, of course, homosexuality was more widely stigmatized as sexual behavior — or, more accurately, sexual misbehavior, since it could also be criminalized.  That view of homosexuality as conduct rather than as something more integrated into a human character is something most of the culture has moved on from.  But the right continues its obsessive focus on sex, to the exclusion of anything else.  And Regnerus places that view of homosexuality at the very heart of his study.

In addition, Regnerus makes the same mistake that Dr. Robert Spitzer made in his early study of homosexuality, and has both regretted and apologized for: taking the word of people about their experiences, without any further delving.

It would be good to hear Regnerus respond to both of these criticisms.  I don’t think either one has a responsible answer.  Whatever his study shows, it does not answer the question that the right poses: whether there is any scientific proof that the children of stable homosexual couples do any better or worse than the children of stable heterosexual couples.

0 Comments

Hello!

by on

The LA Times asks this morning why Neil Patrick Harris can’t host everything, and I have to agree.  He did another great job at the Tonys last night.

It wasn’t a great Broadway season (they had to take their opening number, from last year’s hit, “The Book of Mormon”),  and the Tonys aren’t exactly at the heart of American culture, but NPH has charm and talent, honed in television work, and solid appeal to television audiences.

I am beginning to think of him and his counterpart in hosting ability, Ellen Degeneres, as the Mormon missionaries of the gay rights  movement.  Both of them are clean-cut, attractive without being distant or glamorous, and have a presence that wears well over time.  And when they ring the doorbells of Americans, they are usually welcome.

The good will they have built up is their own, but it can’t help but resonate positively for the rest of us as the culture moves toward equality.  I’m glad we have both of them.

3 Comments

Easy

by on

I seem to have gotten past my schaudenfreude over politicians who torture themselves responding to simple questions about whether they support same-sex marriage.  Watching Jeb Bush squirm at Charlie Roses’s straightforward inquiry (at about the 50 minute mark of this video), I found myself feeling some real sympathy for him.

I think it’s because Jeb appears to want to give the simple, right answer.  He’s smart, very well respected in his state, and knows how to answer even the hardest questions.  Watch him field Rose’s very first one about whether Jeb will be Mitt Romney’s running mate.  That is a tough question, but watch how easy it is to give a clear answer, if you have one.

Contrast that ease to what happens to Jeb when Rose gets around to same-sex marriage.  Jeb’s detours, platitudes, bromides and banality not only don’t answer the question, they don’t even seem to convince Jeb himself.

That, I think (and hope) is the tragedy of politicians of good faith.  They know they are giving the wrong answer and hate themselves for it.  Can Jeb Bush really believe that when he says same-sex marriage is a “diversion,” he is not insulting every lesbian and gay man, to whom marriage is not some triviality or stratagem, but a central fact of their daily life?

That is how a politician can view the issue — in tactical terms.  More important, it is a luxury that only heterosexuals have, to view same-sex marriage as not that important.  How nice that must be, to see an issue that is so important to the lives of others, and not have to worry about it because it doesn’t much affect you.

But that is the problem all minorities potentially face in a democracy.  Empathy is not feeling sorry for someone (that’s sympathy), it is the ability to actually see the world through someone else’s eyes.  The equal protection clause doesn’t guarantee majorities will have empathy but it does assure that the laws cannot allow this luxury of the majority to prevail.

I don’t know why I think Jeb is smart enough to understand that he is only feigning this kind of ignorance and entitlement.  It’s very possible I’m wrong and he really is that ignorant and entitled.  But in this interview, he really did strike me as troubled by the words coming out of his own mouth.

Worse for him, after watching how much easier it is now for the President to answer this simple question with a simple answer, I think (and again, hope) Jeb knows that his own political  life would be so much easier if he, too, could give the easy and right response.

8 Comments

WWJE

by on

No political movement can put a hold on its most extreme members, a truth that Christians right now are having to face.  Pastor Charles Worley and his followers in the Providence Road Baptist Church are trying so hard to save lesbians and gay men from hell that they want to put them in pens and execute them; destroy the gays to save the gays.

And boxer/politician Manny Pacquaio got caught in the weeds when he told a reporter that the Law of God instructs him to oppose same-sex marriage.  The reporter included the quote from the Bible most famously associated with opposition to homosexual activity, the one from Leviticus, and Pacquaio backed off a bit, retreating to more favorable Bible verses, and hiding what for all the world looks like homophobia behind the usual religious-tinged vagaries.

The reporter certainly went further than Pacquaio had, but if that verse from the Bible is a surprise to Pacquiao, or anyone, that would be news.  As the King James Version translates,”If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.”  That is the Word of God in a pretty authoritative text.  Is Pacquaio saying he both agrees with and disagrees with the Word of God?

That is the question Christians like Pacquiao ought to be asked squarely.  If the second part of the verse is incorrect (“shall surely be put to death”), isn’t it possible that the first part might be susceptible to rethinking as well?

Rev. Worley is comfortable with his dogmatism.  Both parts of the verse are inerrant, and damn the consequences in the modern world for those who stand up.  Same thing for shellfish, I imagine.

So whether the reporter made a journalistic error or not, he got to a true question that professing Christians today need to confront: Who Would Jesus Execute?

I’m not a theologian or any sort of religious scholar.  All I know is the Bible I actually read (OK, parts of the Bible).  I remember Jesus saying in Matthew 5 that there are some parts of the Old Testament that could use remaining, like taking an eye for an eye.  My reasons for believing in a Christianity that accepts lesbians and gay men is based on that sort of thing, and the sermons in the churches (mostly Episcopalian after the Catholics made it clear they had no room for me and my sort) I have gone to as an adult.  I know there are plenty of Christians who find the death penalty for anyone, much less lesbians and gay men, not very Jesus-like, and I assume they have the theological chops to defend that position.

But most Christians aren’t theologians.  Pacquaio is among them, it seems.  Perhaps he should attend Pastor Worley’s church, and see what the consequences of believing the literal Word of God, as it actually appears in the Bible, look like.  Does he think Jesus wants gay people killed?  If not, which parts of the Bible does he think it’s fair to minimize or absolve?

19 Comments

Grown Men Cry

by on

Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald seem to be having a lover’s spat over the President’s vocal but personal support of marriage equality.  Andrew gushed, and Glenn cringed at the gushing.  On its own, this isn’t much, but it is based on a fundamental difference between gays on the left and the rest of us.

Glenn claims his objection isn’t to Andrew’s emotionalism, but I don’t think that holds water.  Anyone who thinks Andrew Sullivan is someone who would or could twist his deeply held views to “glorify whatever the leader does at any given moment” is not paying enough attention to Andrew.  In fact, it’s that “any given moment” that undermines Greenwald’s premise.  This was one specific moment, one particular issue, and is hardly typical of Andrew’s thinking, writing or person.  Lacking the proper leadership deference over time and across issues and leaders, all that is left of Greenwald’s criticism is Andrew’s emotional style at the President’s statement.

Andrew wasn’t alone in going over the top.  Jon Rauch is equally effusive about this given moment, and I’m with both of them.

Greenwald is hardly an opponent of marriage equality.  I think the exhilaration is less extreme on the left because of the different way they view government and sexual orientation.

Andrew, Jon and the members of IGF tend to have a narrow view of government’s role.  Specifically with respect to sexual orientation, the government should not have laws on the books that actively, positively discriminate based on sexual orientation.  Sodomy laws were the sine qua non of that kind of legal rule, placing us literally outside the law, making us criminals.  Dale Carpenter’s excellent book, Flagrant Conduct, describes the fall of those laws in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas.  Sodomy laws (and the related array of sexual misconduct laws) discriminated against us as individuals, and specifically discouraged and in many cases punished even the simple act of claiming a gay identity in public.  Military discrimination used those laws as the premise for active, legal discrimination against lesbians and gay men, and those laws, too, are now history.

That leaves marriage as the only place in the law where lesbians and gay men are explicitly excluded.  Now that the law cannot make us criminals, the job is to unwind the tangle that prohibits our relationships from being fully and equally recognized.

Those who have spent a lifetime trying to end that last vestige of positive legal discrimination cannot be faulted for losing it when a President of the United States, for the first time, tells the nation that he agrees with their argument.  No law has been changed yet, and as we just saw in North Carolina, the work is still substantial.  But as a national matter, today we can envision as a reality the last days of government discrimination.

The left expects more of government.  In addition to not discriminating itself, the left believes government should also act to prohibit others from discriminating, and should do a lot more as well.  Marriage equality is not an end in itself, it is one more piece of the larger puzzle.  That can be seen pretty plainly in the manifesto, Beyond Same-Sex Marriage.

In that sort of context, full marriage equality isn’t going to solve very much, since there will still be poor and elderly and sick people, and there will still be individual discrimination against lesbians and gay men in particular that should be stamped out with governmental imprimatur and enforcement.

I’m dubious about government’s competence to do that; that is why I’m not of the left.  But that’s also why I’m overjoyed right now.  For the first time in my life, the President has said publicly that he supports marriage equality, understands why we want and need it, and is willing to defend his (and our) position. I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually live to see that, and in my opinion, that is the beginning of the end of our struggle.  And it’s icing on the cake that Mitt Romney is sweating bullets, and wants to keep himself as far from having to defend his sort-of position in public as his handlers can manage.

However we get to marriage equality, I’m going to view that as the end of the line.  I don’t want the government discriminating against me, and once it doesn’t, my activist days will be over.  Andrew and Jon and Greenwald can speak for themselves, of course, but right now I’m going to go have a good cry.

23 Comments

Mitt v. Maggie

by on

The magnitude of the challenge Mitt Romney faces on marriage can be seen, not in the looniest of gay marriage opponents, or the most depraved, (though as I argued, he is now stuck with these folks).  No, the hard part will be dealing with the Maggie Gallaghers.

Gallagher has become a master of disguising her disapproval of homosexuality in general — so good she even seems to have convinced herself she’s fair minded.

But look at her defense of marriage, either in its condensed version, or for the brave hearts, its fuller explanation in an argument with John Corvino.  Her bottom line is that marriage is a key “governing idea” that cannot be changed without inevitable erosion of its core.  That core idea, again and again and again, is the importance of a mother and a father to children.  That’s a limited idea, and a pretty uninformed view of government, law and society, but it’s one Gallagher is committed to and not afraid to man the battlements on.

Romney, however, kicked the props out from under her yesterday when he said that same-sex couples have a “right” (his exact word) to adopt children, as they did in Massachusetts under his governorship.  It wasn’t long before he had to shake the Etch-a-Sketch and try to argue that he doesn’t believe gay adoption is actually a right; he was just acknowledging the reality in 49 states.

But if 49 states (Florida is the exception) allow same-sex couples (some of them legally married) to adopt children, then what governing idea is Gallagher talking about preserving?

That is the hole in the heart of Gallagher’s argument and it is the flaw that is eroding the anti-equality side every day.  Nobody has to deny the importance of marriage for children to also accept that children need and must have some kind of responsible parenting, whether it is the ideal or something less.  No one has ever argued that if children can’t have ideal parents, they shouldn’t have any.  That’s such a ridiculous notion that even Gallagher won’t take it up.  But if we believe (and our laws support) children having less than ideal parents, than isn’t that our “governing idea?”

People who believe in absolutist arguments (we can’t ever change the governing idea of marriage as between a man and a woman) run the risk of focusing so firmly on the heavens that they trip on the sidewalk.  What’s happening today isn’t that people are rejecting the importance of marriage for children, they are just accepting that many good things are not perfect things.

More than that, they are understanding that homosexuals are not made of stone.  Whether they have children or not, same-sex couples see childless heterosexual couples, including those who have raised children that no longer live with them, and make the perfectly reasonable claim that the relationship of marriage extends beyond a contract to have and raise children.

As heterosexuals stop to think about that, they see and even feel its fundamental truth.  They are not rejecting their own ideas about marriage, they are simply embracing homosexuals into the real world they know, as imperfect equals.  They see that Gallagher’s governing idea has never been a mandate for them, and if the law accepts their departures from the archetype, why shouldn’t it make room for homosexuals as well?

That is the bottom line that this GOP memo reminds the party of.

Gallagher can’t let go of her dogmas and verities, but she’s not running for public office; she has the luxury to be as philosophical as she likes.  In contrast, Romney is running for President, not Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.  As a whole, Americans are realists, and while there will always be some room for moral authoritarians, that’s not a style that has served American leaders well.

Obama hip-checked Romney into the absolutists, and as the adoption episode shows, Romney is going to have a hell of a time getting back on his feet.   Whatever political instincts he has toward fairness cannot survive the melodramatic abstractions of the religious fervor he has to manage among his base.

32 Comments