IGF CultureWatch

Take a few minutes to visit a remarkable website, www.kamenypapers.org. Over a period spanning decades, Frank Kameny's courage and conviction probably did more for the cause of gay equality than any other single force in America. The Kameny project, led by Charles Francis and Bob Witeck, is working to safeguard his papers for posterity by archiving them at a major library. And what papers! This treasure trove of civil-rights source material spans 25 boxes of correspondence, legal documents, brochures, photos, memorabilia, even the original signs carried in the landmark Washington and Philadelphia pickets of 1965-68. The Kameny Project offers a taste of the riches online. (Check out the Congressman who writes Frank, "Please do not contaminate my mail with such filthy trash." All too typical.) Frank Kameny is very much alive and well, feisty as ever; let's hope this project to memorialize his legacy prospers.

Here's Dale Carpenter's take on Robert George. George seems to think that an argument against polygamy isn't "principled" unless it's his own argument, which turns out not to be an argument-just an assertion. Money quote:

Those of us who have been making a conservative case for gay marriage do so, fundamentally, because we believe in marriage. We do not want to see it harmed and we do not think that this reform means every proposed reform of marriage, including potentially harmful ones, must be accepted. Ironically, George and the Gang of 300 manifesto-writers agree that gay marriage means anything goes. I don't expect that George will hold to that position when gay marriage is actually recognized (indeed, he'll strongly resist the supposed slippery slope to polygamy then), but the damage he is doing now by making a tactical alliance with them and arguing the line cannot be held will not have been helpful.

More: Maggie Gallagher chimes in. Jonathan Rauch replies here.

In his reply to my post, for which I thank him, Robert George fairly notes that many of the family radicals who signed "Beyond Marriage" favor SSM. Of course they do. But so do nearly all left-wing and queer-theory academics and activists, which is what these folks are. (With the exception of Chai Feldblum and a few others, they have not played prominent roles in the same-sex marriage fight. I mean, Cornel West? Gimme a break.) The important distinction is that SSM is only part of what these folks favor, and the rest is what they really care about. As the title of their manifesto proclaims, they are looking beyond same-sex marriage: they favor SSM, not as an end in itself, but as a way-station toward a post-marriage society in which all concepts of family enjoy equal status and marriage is irrelevant.

There's no denying that they speak for a prominent element of the gay-rights movement (not the gay marriage movement; there's a difference). I worry about their influence, as I do about that of socialized-medicine advocates and anti-globalists and gender-abolishers and other members of the ultra-egalitarian left, but I don't think they'll prevail, even within the gay universe, most of which is neither radical nor "queer."

There's a legitimate argument here about whether the culture will interpret gay marriage as "anything goes" or as "marriage goes." Actually, some of both may happen, but I expect the dominant vector to be reaffirmation of marriage's privileged status as the family structure of choice. Parents asking their gay kids, "So, you guys going to get married?", plus the longstanding social preference for the unique commitment of marriage (as expressed, for example, in corporate benefits reserved for married couples), plus the fact that most marrying gay couples marry precisely because they see marriage as a unique commitment - all these, I expect, will lead the culture to read SSM as a return to the values of marriage, not a further flight from them. The wind brings positive straws from Massachusetts, where a number of employers are revoking domestic-partner benefits now that SSM is legal.

In any case, it's hardly fair to saddle homosexuals with the burden of exclusion from marriage in hopes of preventing heterosexual folly. If straights insist on trashing marriage, it's not gays' job to stop them. Question: how many American heterosexuals would give up their own marriages to (maybe) forfend polygamy? Who would even consider asking them to do so? I'm often saddened by otherwise compassionate conservatives' willingness to think of gay people, in the SSM debate, as pawns to be manipulated for some larger social good. They must forgive us for declining to think of ourselves that way.

Regarding polygamy...OK, let me see if I get this. Polygamy destabilizes societies, is inconsistent with liberal democracy, shows pronounced inegalitarian and misogynistic tendencies, is frivolous by comparison to SSM, has no logical connection to SSM, and indeed is logically antithetical to the principle of SSM properly understood (everyone should have the opportunity to marry)...these are not principled arguments? Whereas "one man plus one woman makes baby" is not just a principled barrier to polygamy, it is the only principled barrier?

The problem, which is immediately obvious, is that "one man plus one woman makes baby" is no kind of barrier to polygamy, either logical or practical. Logically, man-plus-woman-makes-baby is a biological fact, but one-plus-one-makes-marriage in no way follows from it. Men are perfectly happy to marry all the women they can make babies with, as they have been wont to do since the dawn of history. Given that most human cultures have been polygamous (and quite a few still are), and that presumably all of these cultures have been well aware that heterosexual couples make babies, it seems self-evident that the man-woman-baby argument has little or no deterrent effect on polygamy.

A point of honest disagreement with George is this: in my opinion, the reasons to oppose polygamy are instrumental, not metaphysical, and all the stronger for that. And they are the same reasons for favoring gay marriage. Society and (generally) individuals are better off when everyone can marry and most people do.

That disagreement aside, I wish George would reconsider his strategy of pooh-poohing all the arguments against polygamy (and polyamory) that don't also militate against SSM - which is to say, virtually all the arguments against polygamy. Surely we could agree that this strategy does monogamy no favors. As SSM and gay partnerships gain acceptance, conservatives will be stuck with their own arguments that any change to the boundaries of marriage entails every change. It will be harder for the public, sensible though it is, to hold the line with conservatives insisting there is no line to hold. Sometimes I wonder if, like Col. Nicholson in "Bridge on the River Kwai," slippery-slope conservatives are forgetting what they're supposed to be defending. (Hint: not polygamy.)

As for polyamory, if by that George means group marriage, it might be different in some ways from polygamy, but it's analytically similar: frivolous, logically antithetical to SSM, and, to judge by the last several thousand years of experience, likely to devolve in the vast majority cases into polygamy. As for fending off formal recognition of non-marital polyamory (e.g., group cohabitation benefits), gay marriage is the surest method of preventing that.

In any case, it's well to remember that all this polygamy/polyamory talk amounts to changing the subject. Gay people are asking only for what straight people currently have: the opportunity to marry someone we choose (not anyone or everyone we choose). When straights get the right to marry two people, their mother, a dog, or a toaster, gay people will want the same opportunity. But not before.

Robert George gloats that gay-marriage supporters, in this statement, have finally dropped the veil and blurted out what they really want: plural marriage and other forms of legal recognition for "committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner." Well, the statement is wrongheaded, and it's poorly drafted to boot (don't they mean more than two conjugal partners?), but George nonetheless gets it wrong.

First, there's nothing new here. Left-wing family radicals have been saying all this stuff for years. Second, what they're saying has no particular link to same-sex marriage. Few if any of the signers have been leaders of the gay-marriage movement. In fact, many of them (Judith Stacey and Michael Warner, for instance) have expressed ambivalence or outright hostility toward same-sex marriage. That's because, third, they're not particularly interested in including either plural relationships or same-sex couples in marriage; their agenda is to deinstitutionalize marriage by extending legal recognition to everything else-"conjugal" and otherwise. In other words, they don't want to put gays or polygamists on the marriage pedestal; they want to knock the pedestal over. They'd like to see a world where there'd be little legal or social difference between same-sex marriage and same-sex cohabitation.

Fourth, the likeliest way to get where these folks want to go is by not having gay marriage. The result, over time, will be to create and legitimize alternative family structures, including cohabitation benefits. Not by coincidence, "Beyond Marriage" folks are pointing to the recent string of judicial defeats for SSM as evidence that gay-rights supporters should "rethink and redirect" their energies away from marriage, and toward creating a host of marriage substitutes.

Finally, George claims that gay-marriage advocates "have made no serious effort to answer" the argument that there's no logical way to favor same-sex marriage and hold out against polygamy. On what planet? Here on earth, we have answered early and often-and we're still waiting for a substantive reply. If George wants to bone up, he can start here, here, here, here, and here (where he'll find a whole chapter on the subject).

From students Adam Jack Gomolin and Alex Halpern Levy, age 21 and 19 respectively, another sign of what today's Republican hostility toward homosexuality is sowing for the party tomorrow. Money quote:

The Republican Party has two options. First, if it continues with its present policies, it will watch its base crumble as elderly social conservatives are slowly replaced in the electorate by young social progressives. Second, a bold (and perhaps unlikely) move: the Republican Party can return to its small government roots. It can take gay marriage off the national agenda and allow individual states to legislate as they see fit. It can decide that the role of the government is not to tell people how to live their lives, and that the government that governs best dictates least. In this, the GOP must balance the base it has with the base it stands to gain.

These guys add up to six years less than my age. They're the future the GOP is mortgaging.

One quick reaction to two key court decisions, one in federal court, the other in Connecticut state court: Both are good news if you think there should be room in the gay-marriage debate for centrism and compromise.

Many (not all!) conservatives insist that a U.S. constitutional amendment is needed to stop federal judges from ordering gay marriage. They raised a hue and cry about an eccentric lower-court decision holding that Nebraska's ban on SSM and other gay unions violated the U.S. constitution. Well, a federal appeals court (the 8th Circuit) has decisively overturned that ruling. The appeals court didn't rule on whether the Nebraska law or gay marriage is a good idea. It just said that the law could be defended as rational (a super-low standard), so federal courts should defer to the state and butt out.

Good. Good for gays, and also good for the country. If the federal appeals court had barged in and overturned the state's ban, that would have given immeasurable impetus to the drive to amend the U.S. constitution. It would also have nationalized the gay-marriage debate, which belongs in the states, where gradually gay marriage can win converts. Maybe that's why the Alliance for Marriage was so grudging in its statement about the 8th Circuit decision.

The decision does pose a question for conservatives who believe, as conservatives should (and as AFM does not), that when it is not necessary to amend the Constitution, it is necessary not to amend the Constitution. With the appeals court having firmly butted out (and the U.S. Supreme Court 99.999% certain to let the decision stand), what's the excuse for an amendment whose supporters claim their goal is to stop judges from ramming gay marriage down the whole country's throat? If that's the problem, wouldn't a real conservative say, "Let's leave the constitution alone until there's some faint sign of need to change it"?

Meanwhile, the Connecticut court ruled against gay couples who said that the state constitution requires marriage-not just civil unions, which the state provides and which are like marriage in all but name. Make no mistake, I prefer marriage to civil unions. But many hard-core opponents of SSM would like nothing better than for courts to take away the civil-union compromise, because if it's a choice between all or nothing, "nothing" will usually win.

I bow to no one in my advocacy of gay marriage, but in a democracy, we have no choice but to persuade the public. That debate is going to take time. By keeping the issue at the state level and holding the door open to civil unions, these two court decisions promote compromise and deliberation over polarization and panic. The center is holding. Amen to that.

Here's how to handle Bill O'Reilly, while explaining to conservative America--on Fox, no less--that gay marriage hasn't harmed straight marriage in Scandinavia. Object lesson comes courtesy of Bill Eskridge and Darren Spedale and, of course, their new book on gay marriage in Europe.

Just in time for the Senate debate on the newly retitled Marriage Protection Amendment (Marriage Prevention Amendment would be more like it), here's a major new book on Scandinavia's experience with same-sex unions. In Gay Marriage: For Better or Worse? What We've Learned from the Evidence, Bill Eskridge and Darren Spedale say this:

[O]ur data for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden demonstrate that the trend toward cohabitation and away from marriage slowed down rather than speeded up after enactment of those countries' registered partnership statutes... The Scandinavia-bashing public voices like Santorum, Bork, and Kurtz is a most one-sided, and incorrect, reading of what is going on in these countries.

The book is packed with data and looks to be an important contribution. It's in stock at Amazon.com.

From a pro-life point of view, America is murdering on the order of a million unborn children every year--infanticide to the tune of about 47 million since 1973. Gay marriage, on the other hand, seems unlikely to result in the death of anyone. Even if it's immoral and socially harmful, as many opponents believe, it doesn't victimize anyone, much less kill them. So it was eye-opening when Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, told Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard that gay marriage has "reached the same plane as the right to life issue" among Republican voters.

Unfortunately, he's probably right. Religious conservatives seem to be as outraged by men marrying men as they are about men murdering children. Even if Perkins isn't implying moral equivalence (it's not exactly clear), the very fact that these two issues are "coequal" as political priorities suggests that conservatives have either lost all sense of moral proportion or aren't all that serious about abortion being murder.

In fact, the two issues aren't "coequal" where legislative action is concerned: Conservatives are actively pushing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but they've shelved their drive for a constitutional ban on abortion. Though that may make sense as a purely political decision, it's morally unintelligible--especially given that neither amendment can pass right now. As a symbolic gesture, it's worth trying to ban same-sex matrimony that exists in only one state, but not industrial-scale mass murder all around the country?

I understand that some people of good conscience oppose gay marriage on moral grounds, and that's fine. But someday social conservatives will look back on their panicky response to gay marriage as an occasion when they let hysteria get the better of them.