The Legitimacy Lie

March was a heady month in the District of Columbia. The influx of same-sex couples at the marriage bureau boosted applications to six times their normal rate. Activists have cause to celebrate.

Opponents, however, vow to defeat every incumbent who supported the new law. Bishop Harry Jackson, Ward 5 advisory neighborhood commissioner Bob King, and the National Organization for Marriage have organized a political action committee for that purpose. Mayor Adrian Fenty and seven pro-equality Council members are up for election this year.

The new PAC will back same-sex marriage opponents like mayoral candidate Leo Alexander, who says, "I think it was arrogant on the mayor's part and the council, just 14 individuals deciding how 600,000 should live." This is not mere opposition. Alexander describes representative government as if it were villainy. On this issue, we are told, only a direct vote by the people is legitimate. The most vulnerable incumbent, Ward 5 Council member Harry Thomas, Jr., says, "I think people who push that message have a message of intolerance for other people's rights."

The cries of illegitimacy echo rhetoric at the national level. Unlike the 2000 election, in which George W. Bush won fewer popular votes than Al Gore and was installed after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the Florida vote recount, the 2008 election saw Barack Obama win 53 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. Yet Rush Limbaugh refers to the Obama "regime" as if there was a coup, and is reinforced by Sarah Palin's know-nothing mockery and Glenn Beck's deranged conspiracy mongering. Newt Gingrich calls the centrist Obama the most radical president ever.

The right wing is in court hoping to force a ballot measure in D.C. so they can use this Big Lie technique to overturn marriage equality. Polls suggest voters would uphold equality, but such a campaign would be expensive and rancorous. In fact, though, voters have spoken many times through their representatives. In 1979, the D.C. Council under Arrington Dixon prohibited ballot measures that would infringe people's rights. Congress has never challenged that prohibition, which is backed by local civil rights veterans like Lawrence Guyot and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who support equal protection for all the families in our city. No anti-gay candidate has won election here in decades.

Bishop Jackson and Commissioner King talk as if the resounding passage of the marriage-equality bill happened while voters weren't looking. In fact, our victory was won not by deception but by decades of working within the system and building relationships from the neighborhoods to city hall. We won despite endless fear-mongering from Jackson's coalition, thanks in part to the voices of 200 gay-affirming clergy. Those who continue to demonize us for political gain have badly underestimated both gay rights advocates and Washington voters.

Opponents had the opportunity to lobby on the marriage bill, testify against it during two days of hearings, and testify at several hearings before the Board of Elections and Ethics. Those registered to vote in D.C. (as many opponents are not) can also vote in this year's election.

The opposition's electoral threats face the inconvenient fact that the leading contenders for Mayor, Council Chair, and Democratic At-Large Council member all support marriage equality. Black gay Republicans Marc Morgan and Timothy Day are running in Wards 1 and 5, respectively. The anti-gay bench looks thin.

We nonetheless have work ahead of us to ensure that supportive incumbents are rewarded for doing the right thing. In races where our friends are running against each other, we have an embarrassment of riches that would make GLBT people in most jurisdictions envious. If, as many of us believe, our opponents are on the wrong side of both history and the D.C. electorate, we need to keep proving it at the polls.

‘Raw Sex’ and Rev. Evans

There was no suspense at the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics hearing on Jan. 27, which concerned the proposed referendum on the recently passed marriage-equality bill. Two similar ballot measures were already tossed out by the Board and the Superior Court. My fellow defenders of equality and I were there to testify again that D.C. law bars measures that put people's rights up to a popular vote, but first we had to listen to dozens of anti-gay witnesses.

The referendum proponents' attorneys were preparing the ground for an eventual appearance before the Court of Appeals, but most of their acolytes were just venting. Their indignation did little to conceal the desperation of people out of arguments but unwilling to concede.

One witness warned, "These are the End Times," which made me wonder why she wasn't off preparing for the Rapture. Another offered some peculiar numerology. Several called out biblical references as if they were casting spells. But the day's highlight was by Rev. Anthony Evans, one of the leading opponents of D.C. marriage equality.

Evans demanded of the Board members, "Are you homosexual? Are any of your family members or friends homosexuals? Do you have any hatred in your heart towards the church? Do you have any hatred in your heart towards clergy? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, then you should excuse yourself from these proceedings..."

A few days later, Evans sent me a link to an open letter he had written criticizing NAACP chairman Julian Bond for supporting marriage equality. "For the NAACP to take up this cause is an abomination and an affront for all African Americans who died for human and civil rights." Purporting to speak for 99 percent of black clergy, Evans wrote, "You have ignored our voice and have the audacity to suggest that two men having sex with one another is a legitimate civil rights issue."

Have you ever seen someone walk down the street talking, and you thought he was on the phone but then realized he was just talking to himself? Evans's ranting letter reminds me of that. He copied it to several prominent ministers around the country, including TD Jakes and the president of the National Baptist Convention - a gesture that appeared designed to exaggerate the reach and influence of Evans and his so-called National Black Church Initiative.

Evans declared that the issue of gay equality is theological, ignoring our constitutional separation of church and state. He accused Bond of prostituting himself and the NAACP "for a contribution from the white, gay community." Evans simply ignores the prominent participation by African Americans in every aspect of D.C.'s marriage equality effort, from canvassers to witnesses at legislative hearings to affirming clergy. Those facts are inconvenient to his effort to sow divisions by race and class.

Evans claimed to love his gay brothers and sisters, but called us "a small minority with a selfish end," and said our relationships are all about "raw sex," echoing a witness at a hearing last October who held up a copy of the children's book King & King and called it a sex book. It is no more a sex book than Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. The relentless effort to reduce gay people's love to sex illustrates the prejudice that we have had to overcome to reach this moment.

Evans wrote to Bond, "As you well know, we have more pressing issues to deal with such as education, health, the economy, unemployment, and foreclosure." But Evans is the one trying to divert churches' attention from those concerns in his obsession over gay sex.

Sunday morning, Evans told me via E-mail, "My word is the only word, Let the people vote!" So now he's a prophet. As Mark Levine, counsel for the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, pointed out at the hearing, the U.S. Constitution (Article IV, Section 4) specifies a republican form of government, not government by plebiscite. Evans can repeat his mantra all he likes, it will avail him nothing.

By demanding that the Board of Elections members establish their heterosexual credentials, Evans invited questions about his own. But never mind. Evans has displayed enough of himself already.

Aid laced with poison

Televangelist Pat Robertson's claim that the Haitian earthquake was divine retribution for a two-century-old pact with the devil, even as he purported to raise relief funds, suggests many offensive things: that Haitians should have accepted enslavement by the French; that any spirit invoked by a non-Christian religion must be the devil; that Robertson's approach to religion, which dismisses plate tectonics in favor of ascribing every misfortune to an angry god, is superior to Voodoo; and that by calling his personal demon Jesus, Robertson makes it so. It also suggests that the people of the African Diaspora are aided by the coercive missionary work of Robertson, whose best-known faith offering to Africa was his business dealing in "blood diamonds" with former Liberian President Charles Taylor, now being tried in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Unfortunately, Robertson has many fellow wolves in shepherd's clothing, and your taxes help subsidize their bloody mischief.

On Jan. 13, the Council for Global Equality and the Center for American Progress released the report, "How Ideology Trumped Science: Why PEPFAR [the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] has Failed to Meet its Potential," written by Scott Evertz, who directed the Office of National AIDS Policy during President George W. Bush's first term. Evertz describes how conservative ideology has hampered outreach to underserved populations; prevented a clear focus on men who have sex with men; excluded programs targeting prostitutes and injection drug users; and short-shrifted basic sex education, such as how to use condoms properly.

Uganda received over $280 million in PEPFAR funding in 2008. Ugandan leaders welcome this Western aid even as they denounce homosexuality as a Western import. In fact, ethnographic studies have found indigenous forms of homosexuality throughout Africa. What the colonial powers introduced was not homosexuality but the persecution of people for it. The existing Ugandan law criminalizing "carnal acts against the order of nature" stems not from anything African but from the old British penal code, long defunct in Britain, but still on the books in many former colonies.

The sponsor of the pending bill, Ugandan politician David Bahati, is a member of the well-connected American fundamentalist organization known as The Family. The inspiration to "clarify" the law on homosexuality came from American evangelicals Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, and Don Schmierer, who participated in a seminar last March in Kampala. Lively described gays as child molesters responsible for the Nazi death camps. He and his colleagues peddled "ex-gay" junk science. These men now pretend to be shocked by the proposed death penalty for HIV-positive gays who have sex.

Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, writes in the current issue of The Public Eye magazine, "Ironically enough, although American conservatives repeatedly accuse progressives of being imperialist, it is their dealings with Africa that are extremely imperialistic. Their flow of funds creates a form of clientelism, with the expectation that the recipients toe an ideological line."

Conservatives, however, do not currently control the U.S. government. In November, after gay conservative James Kirchick called on President Obama to withhold PEPFAR money to Uganda over the anti-gay bill, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, Ambassador Eric Goosby, refused to intervene. While acknowledging to Newsweek that criminalizing gay people would only "push the behavior underground," he said that withholding the funds "would do more harm than good." His role, he said, "is not to tell a country how to put forward their legislation. But I will engage them in conversation..."

Goosby failed to say how the administration will respond if science and sweet reason prove unpersuasive. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "We have to stand against any efforts to marginalize and criminalize and penalize members of the LGBT community worldwide," but specified no action.

In his Nobel lecture, President Obama declared, "Evil does exist in the world," and said negotiations are an insufficient response. He was justifying the use of force. The Uganda case, by contrast, demands only an end to American taxpayer-funded misinformation that hampers HIV prevention and enables the brutal scapegoating of gay people. We're waiting, Mr. President.

Street vs. Suite

Sunday's National Equality March (NEM) brought out tens of thousands (according to The Washington Post), including lots of dogs and children, with the simple purpose of demanding equality. It remains to be seen whether the rally, the AIDS vigil, and the flash protest against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) will be followed by productive action.

The march mixed the serious and the festive, with banners saying "Equal Justice Under Law" and "Teabaggers for Gay Rights." Placards ranged from "End the Harm from Religion-Based Bigotry and Prejudice" to "If Liza Can Marry Two Gay Men, Why Can't I Marry One?"

The messages at the rally at the U.S. Capitol were a hodgepodge. On one hand, there were strong speeches by Lt. Dan Choi and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond. On the other hand, Lady Gaga said, "This is the single most important moment of my career. And you know I love Judy Garland." (The Judy mythology refuses to die.) David Mixner spoke conspiratorially about "politicians in a back room." Urvashi Vaid described the four steps that are necessary to bring down the Patriarchy.

The NEM organizers refused to invite openly gay members of Congress to address the rally. At a news conference on Oct. 9, NEM co-director Robin McGehee said that politicians would only be welcome if they "would make a commitment over the next year to work towards legislation that would bring full federal equality." So Reps. Baldwin, Frank, and Polis are not committed to working for LGBT equality? One wonders how the organizers expect to influence Congress while overtly disdaining Barney Frank, one of its most powerful members.

The march's "no excuses" rhetoric contrasted with the cheers for President Obama at Saturday's Human Rights Campaign dinner. The President gave a fine speech, but broke no new ground-no increased pressure on Congress, no explicit statement opposing the ballot initiatives in Maine and Washington State, no stop-loss order ending discharges of gay and lesbian service members. It is easy to defend the President by noting that Congress must pass bills before he can sign them; but we need more bully in the bully pulpit. To be fair, though, for millions who watched the speech on CNN and C-SPAN, it was the first time they saw the President make such a strong statement for LGBT equality.

HRC President Joe Solmonese did his cause no good by saying last week in a letter to members, "[O]n January 19, 2017, I will...look back on many...victories that President Barack Obama made possible." While HRC probably has a detailed strategy for advancing our lengthy legislative agenda, the tone-deaf 2017 reference reinforces perceptions that HRC prioritizes Democratic Party interests over LGBT advocacy.

NEM leader Cleve Jones did no better when he denounced incrementalism as a failure mere days after the introduction in the D.C. Council of a marriage equality bill that enjoys overwhelming support and strong prospects resulting from a smart and thorough incremental strategy.

Early Sunday morning, the HRC building in D.C. was defaced with pink and black paint. Credit was claimed by Queers Against Assimilation, who told the LezGetReal blog, "HRC is run by a few wealthy elites who are in bed with corporate sponsors who proliferate militarism, heteronormativity, and capitalist exploitation." Blogger Michael Petrelis wrote approvingly of "this act of urban redecorating," which only bolstered a White House adviser who told NBC that the NEM protesters were leftist-fringe bloggers who "need to take off the pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely-divided country is complicated and difficult."

Temperatures plummeted the night after the march, a reminder that sunny rallies cannot spare us the long winter of struggle to turn slogans into legislative victories. Support from cultural figures like Lady Gaga and the cast of Hair, while valuable in its own right, does not automatically translate into political success. Bills reach the floor of Congress one at a time. Passing them requires persistent engagement by people who know the process, the players, and the details of the issues. As in entertainment and sports, victory requires both passion and preparation.

The culture clash between the Joneses and the Solmoneses reflects a longstanding tension between liberationists and assimilationists, between "the streets and the suites." Some mutual respect is in order if we want to defeat the anti-gay right instead of one another.

2012, Not 2010

Equality California (EQCA) is not sitting back and waiting in the struggle to regain marriage equality in the Golden State. They are "ready and committed to fighting, persuading and working tirelessly - doing whatever it takes to win the right back as quickly as possible." The question for them, in a smart analysis and plan released last week, is when a return to the ballot will give the best chance for victory. Their conclusion: 2012, not 2010.

EQCA offers many reasons why a rematch in 2010 is problematic. Recent years have seen a stall in the movement by California voters toward marriage equality. Experienced political consultants strongly feel "that neither the data nor their intuition supports moving forward with an initiative to win marriage back in 2010." Among those who gave $50,000 or more for last year's fight, EQCA found that most top donors will sit out a 2010 campaign, or, if a measure reaches the ballot, "will participate at a much reduced level of funding."

The leading coalition partners in communities of color consider 15 months insufficient to build the cultural competency and trust required to change minds in those communities. LGBT family groups, noting the increased harassment faced by their school-age children in a heated campaign, argue that the costs of returning to the ballot would outweigh the benefits without a high confidence in victory.

$2 to 3 million would be needed just for a professional signature-gathering effort to gain ballot access. Experienced hands estimate that an affirmative campaign would cost between $30 million and $50 million - a tall order so soon after last year's loss - and the voter and funder fatigue from back-to-back losses would push the next try back at least four years. EQCA also points out the hardships being faced by social service organizations due to the economic downturn, and questions the ethics of spending tens of millions on a 2010 campaign that would be dicey at best.

EQCA has found that for most voters, marriage is more a cultural than a political issue, and changing minds is a lot easier outside the heat of a campaign. Pushing the deadline back to 2012 will give the best chance for California's 18,000 same-sex married couples to crystallize what is at stake, to connect with voters as only friends and family can, and to refute the wealth of misinformation.

The pro-equality numbers look 4 percent better in 2012 when you consider the higher turnout of young voters in a presidential election year, the young people who will join the voter rolls in the next 38 months, and the older people who will leave the voter rolls in the same period. That's without considering the effect of any efforts at persuasion.

EQCA lists many puzzle pieces that must be assembled for success: "field, messaging and media, coalition and leadership outreach, activating our base, work in people of color communities, activating the faith community, supporting the grassroots, campus organizing, voter registration and coordination across the state." Canvassers must be trained to listen as much as to convey the campaign message. EQCA is setting up a speaker's bureau and training speakers, and is working with other groups doing field work to coordinate scripts, voter targeting, and message testing. An innovative online campaign is needed for areas in the state without a field staff presence, since field offices are located where support for Prop 8 was strongest.

An additional 24 months will give equality advocates more time to plan, organize, fundraise, build the grassroots, integrate allied efforts, recruit new allies, and improve outreach to the people of color who comprise a majority of California's population.

Those who insist on returning to the ballot in 2010 should explain how EQCA's analysis is wrong, rather than merely serenade us with stirring rhetoric. Strategy is not a dirty word, and enthusiasm is not enough.

None of us with a stake in this fight wants to wait. Every day that I am separated from my own foreign partner is painful. Unfortunately, wanting is not having. There is a great deal of work remaining to overturn Prop. 8, not to mention the ballot fight looming this November in Maine, where our opponents hold a fundraising edge. Let us do the preparation needed to win a lasting victory in California, and not let our hearts rule our heads.

Making Politics Work

The authors of the Dallas Principles, a proposed set of core values for achieving LGBT equality, have been criticized for their invitation-only meeting at a Dallas airport hotel in May, but I am not terribly concerned about that. I have seen the endless wrangling that resulted from scrupulously all-inclusive processes to draft the lists of demands for past marches on Washington. They were little more than navel-gazing exercises. My own problem with the Dallas Principles is that they shortchange proven activist methods, substituting an ultimatum.

My colleague Bob Summersgill, architect of the incremental strategy that has brought Washington, D.C. to the brink of civil marriage equality, faults the Principles' "No Delays, No Excuses" message for disrespecting activists around the country who have made gains through persistent and informed engagement with lawmakers and government executives. He points out that the Dallas document's give-us-everything-right-now tone is at odds with the long, painstaking efforts that are needed to win support from many politicians. Winning equality takes a lot of work, and there are no shortcuts.

Summersgill also strongly criticizes the Fourth Principle, "Religious beliefs are not a basis upon which to affirm or deny civil rights." As he notes, rejecting faith as a basis for advocacy ignores the deep religious roots of the civil rights movement and gratuitously insults a significant portion of the population, gay believers included. It makes no political sense to concede the entire religious sphere to our adversaries. In D.C., the marriage-equality cause was recently aided by more than 100 gay-affirming ministers who issued a joint statement of support.

The one-size-fits-all approach suggested by the Dallas Principles is counterproductive. In many states, the groundwork for marriage equality is far from being sufficiently laid, yet there is much useful work to do there. LGBT voters and their allies would be shooting themselves in the foot if they denied support to a good-but-imperfect candidate when the alternative was worse.

As a member of a nonpartisan advocacy group, I agree with the Fifth Principle, "The establishment and guardianship of full civil rights is a non-partisan issue." The fact that Democrats have a much better record of support for our issues doesn't mean we should be satisfied, especially given that the party increased its majorities in Congress and statehouses by recruiting more conservative candidates. If we want better choices, we have to recruit better candidates from every party-including LGBT candidates. The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund is one such effort.

The Dallas Principles reflect a wider impatience with politicians. Impatience is a strength if it propels productive action, but not if it leads to a flight from reality. If politicians are unresponsive, we need to redouble our search for ways to reach them-not denigrate activists who take a different approach, as when the epithet "careerist" was hurled at people who attended the June 29 White House reception marking the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. I can understand criticism of a particular organization or staffer, but not insults against professional activists generally. Our adversaries have well-funded, professional operations, and intramural sniping will not help us compete.

Many in Congress underestimate their constituents, who are ahead of them on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and other gay issues. Helping these politicians catch up requires more than threats and boycotts; it requires plenty of individualized attention. Think of it as a marriage that you want to succeed. If you are looking to be unimpressed, you're bound to succeed; but it would be better to focus on how to replicate our successes.

Frederick Douglass famously said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." I would amend that to say we gain power by asserting it, by summoning it within ourselves rather than viewing it as an external commodity to be obtained from others. When patrons at a gay bar in 1969 decided to stand their ground in the face of yet another police raid, it was an expression of power.

We have come a long way since then. Now we must step up in every city and congressional district and press for policy after policy in the disciplined, concerted way that confident and influential groups do. Every forward step prepares the way for the next. We do not need a loyalty oath or ultimatum. We need more people in more places doing more of the things that got us this far.

Putting Anger to Work

Gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny was in the White House on June 17 to attend the signing of the Presidential Memorandum on benefits for the same-sex partners of federal employees. While he was waiting, he made some inquiries as to whether the President knew in advance about the now-notorious Department of Justice brief in the Smelt v. United States case challenging the Defense of Marriage Act. The answer from a gay staffer was no - Obama was furious when he learned of the brief.

That does not get the President and his staff - including senior folk at DOJ - off the hook. Even conceding that the President has to defend the law on the books despite favoring its repeal, the DOJ brief goes beyond the call of duty with illogical and insulting arguments. There is a claim that DOMA is not discriminatory because a gay person can marry someone of the opposite sex, and a claim that federal neutrality on state law requires it not to recognize same-sex marriages, whereas in fact the federal practice is to recognize state choices.

Gay legal commentator Dale Carpenter writes, "Of most interest is what the DOJ has to say about the due process and equal protection claims, rejecting just about every single variation of an argument that gay-rights scholars and litigants have made over the past 30 years."

DOJ officials will reportedly meet this week with LGBT advocates to discuss the DOMA-related cases. That is fortunate, since DOJ is due in a few days to file a brief in Gill v. OPM, the lawsuit by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. This is a challenge to DOMA Section 3, dealing with federal discrimination, and legal experts consider it stronger than the broader Smelt case. We will know by the administration's brief in Gill whether it has learned any lessons.

Reality-based activism requires a recognition that political friendships are never perfect, and we do not get everything we want at once. We must continue to press on multiple fronts, neither leaving the lobbying to a few people in Washington nor placing all of our hopes in litigation - especially considering the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court. The tide of history is with us, but we must be part of it, not wait for it to wash over us.

In my experience, politicians are more receptive when you give them credit, however small, in addition to criticism. As Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart noted, we cannot afford to be blinded by rage. To the question, "What has Obama done for me lately?" the answer is: in addition to the Presidential Memorandum, Obama last week called on Congress to repeal DOMA; endorsed the Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act; and ordered the U.S. Census Bureau to release data on same-sex married couples in the 2010 census.

Obama should also issue a stop-loss order blocking further forcible discharges of gay servicemembers until "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is repealed, and should order the Department of Health and Human Services to speed up regulatory changes to end the HIV immigration ban. But our friends in Congress need to grow a spine. As a friend suggested, the Democratic congressional leadership's "primary goal is preserving their majority, not figuring out the best way to get DOMA repealed."

That is where grassroots pressure comes in. The boycott of a June 25 gay DNC fundraiser in Washington should be followed by a nationwide effort to contact every U.S. senator and representative, urging repeal of DOMA.

Obama's leadership is needed, but he is not a magician and he needs our help. Hurling not just criticism but cries of betrayal after 150 days in office is foolish. Barney Frank urges us to learn from the National Rifle Association, and despite our community's smaller numbers, I agree. NRA relentlessly works the halls of power rather than holding rallies on the Mall to talk to itself while members of Congress are out of town.

Anger is counterproductive if it is used to justify withdrawing from politics instead of doing smarter organizing. As Harvey Fierstein said after the 2004 election (in which the supposedly pro-gay Democratic nominee endorsed anti-gay state initiatives), we need to put our anger to work - on the inside, on the outside, and throughout the country. Don't leave the task for others.

Lost Shepherds

"Every single person who voted for this, they're gone," shouted Rev. Anthony Evans, associate pastor of D.C.'s Mount Zion Baptist Church, into a news camera. We were standing in the hallway after the D.C. Council voted 12-1 to give final approval to a measure recognizing same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions. Evans and several other anti-gay ministers, led by Bishop Harry Jackson of Hope Christian Church in Maryland, were outraged, and Evans vowed to defeat all 12 legislators who supported equality.

I asked, "What track record do you have to back up your threats?" He ignored me and talked of asking Congress to overturn the Council's action. He also referred to a bill pending in Congress that would give D.C. a full voting member in the House of Representatives, and promised to get an amendment that would force the District to choose between gay rights and voting rights.

Seeking congressional intervention when you lose in the D.C. Council is what D.C. Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton calls "getting a second bite at the apple." She rightly sees it as a betrayal of D.C. self-determination, and those who attempt it earn her wrath.

I have heard Rev. Evans' threats before. In 2003, he called me to accuse the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), on which I serve as political vice president, of blocking a federal abstinence-only HIV-education grant for D.C. that he wanted. GLAA was opposing the federal program because it treated abstinence as the only answer rather than part of comprehensive sex education that included information on using condoms and contraception to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.

In that 2003 phone call, Rev. Evans said that he could not approve of homosexuality because he believed in the Bible, but that he considered me his brother in Christ. He suggested a breakfast meeting to work out a compromise. I said I would be happy to meet, but I didn't feel respected by someone who insisted that I abstain from sex until marriage yet opposed my right to marry.

I accused Rev. Evans of being selective in his use of biblical passages, and mentioned the pro-slavery references in Paul's Epistles. He acknowledged this but said that clergy are uniquely empowered by God with interpreting Scripture. (In fact, since Martin Luther translated the Bible into a common tongue, there is a strong Reform tradition that literate, reasoning folk are equally empowered as the clergy.) I said I did not need his permission to think for myself, and that he was free to preach as he liked but was not entitled to a subsidy from taxpayers. He threatened to set the gay movement back 10 years. On a more conciliatory note, he said that he didn't think gay people should be put to death. I said that was generous but inconsistent with his scriptural literalism.

Rev. Evans and his allies say they are defending the family. As it happens, on the Saturday after our legislative victory, I am going through a connect-the-dots book with 5-year-old Sam, the son of my friends Alan and Will. Papa Alan is in Fort Worth, Texas, and I offered to baby-sit for a couple of hours so Daddy Will, who has just finished nurturing Sam back to health from a fever and ear infection, could unwind at the gym. Sam opens a pop-up book and challenges me to find various sea creatures in it. He confesses that he studied it earlier so he could point them out faster.

The presence of a child changes a home. This child and these parents have enriched each other's lives beyond measure. Rev. Evans refuses to see the harm he does to children like Sam by denying their parents legal protections. But for the moment I am content as Sam pages through The New Yorker and asks me to read him the cartoon captions.

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal." Real love requires understanding. But let the angry ministers make their noise. Others, including gay-affirming ministers, will make a better noise, and the next generation will benefit from their efforts.

The phone rings. I let Sam answer, and he hears a familiar voice. We pack up his things, and in the elevator he pushes L for lobby. Daddy is waiting.

Marriage Turns a Corner

I listened to my boyfriend Patrick on the overseas call as he tried to wrap his French-African voice around the unfamiliar word, "Iowa."

The gay community has passed a great turning point in our struggle. The realization came to me sometime between April 7, when I watched a YouTube video of Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal refusing to help overturn the Iowa Supreme Court decision, and April 8, when I read reactions to the legislative victories in Vermont and Washington, D.C. A cultural shift was happening before my eyes, and something I had been saying for years suddenly hit me viscerally: We're going to win. It's really going to happen.

If you don't believe me, listen to the tone of desperation on the far right. The "Gathering Storm" television ad by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) has become an instant camp classic with its zombie actors posing as people harmed by same-sex marriage. Audition footage obtained by the Human Rights Campaign shows obviously untrained actors in front of a green screen struggling to read the Teleprompter. When I saw one of the actors refer to "a rainbow collision [sic] of people of every creed," I thought she was talking about the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Creating Change Conference. The ad quickly spawned a Weather Girls remix. To top it off, NOM President Maggie Gallagher announced a nationwide initiative called "2 Million for Marriage" with the chatroom acronym 2M4M.

Some on the right are all but conceding defeat. Conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote on April 7, "The battle over gay marriage is on the way to being lost." As usual, he portrayed marriage equality activists as seeking to destroy America. He bitterly rehashed several familiar arguments: denying the civil realm altogether by asserting that marriage "was God's idea, not government's"; claiming that allowing gays to marry means anything goes, so polygamy is next; and treating courts as inherently illegitimate, as if they were not part of "the foundations of our nation" that he purports to defend. At least Thomas was honest enough to rebuke marriage-equality opponents for not being similarly exercised about the heterosexual divorce rate.

On April 10, I was a guest on Mark Thompson's "Make It Plain" public affairs program on Sirius & XM satellite radio. He began by reporting that Morality in Media had issued a statement suggesting that same-sex marriage leads to mass murder. I said they must not be doing it right.

One listener demanded to know how Thompson, as an ordained minister, could support same-sex marriage. He replied by distinguishing between civil and religious law, and noted that John Payton, President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (which filed an amicus brief against California's Prop. 8), had made a strong equal protection case for the pro-gay position. Thompson's unscientific poll of his listeners went 80 percent for marriage equality.

On April 7, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the Iowa ruling "outrageously wrong." His prediction of a "major movement" against what he termed "judicial arrogance" sounded like whistling past the graveyard, and his claim of support for traditional marriage served mainly as a reminder that he is working on his third.

Also on April 7, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins responded to the Vermont and D.C. votes by saying, "Same-sex 'marriage' is a movement driven by wealthy homosexual activists and a liberal elite determined to destroy not only the institution of marriage, but democracy as well." Blogger Andrew Sullivan tartly replied, "I had no idea that overwhelming votes in two legislative chambers was an attempt to destroy democracy."

As with the torrent of ever-more-implausible right-wing attacks on President Obama, the old lies, for all the bluster, are falling flat. Straight Americans are increasingly accepting the fact that gay folk really do exist, that we merely seek the same protections they take for granted, and that the threat we allegedly pose is chimerical.

"That is good," Patrick said simply when I called him with the news about Vermont and D.C. And so it was. A key part of any successful long-term struggle is keeping the faith. The burdens and the barriers we continue to face are great; but now we know more clearly than ever before that we are part of a winning cause. That knowledge is enough for this day.

Hoops and Heresy

I have been a bit conflicted lately. On one hand, I've been rooting for my Catholic alma mater, Villanova, in the NCAA men's basketball playoffs. On the other hand, I love the new condom wrappers featuring a picture of Pope Benedict XVI and the caption, "I said no!"

Pope Maledict, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was dubbed by gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny after being elevated to the Chair of Saint Peter, provoked consternation among HIV/AIDS workers last month by denouncing condoms during a visit to Africa. But he was just being himself. In 1986 he wrote that those who engage in homosexual activity "annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator's sexual design" and thereby "confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent."

It is not clear how the homosexual part of God's design annuls the heterosexual part, nor why gay lovemaking is any less giving than that of, say, an infertile straight couple. By contrast, Ratzinger for years protected the late Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ, who was accused of sexually abusing seminarians.

The Church's weak grasp of reality was evident in its recent excommunication of Brazilian doctors who performed an abortion on a 9-year-old girl who had been raped by her stepfather. Her mother was also excommunicated, but not the rapist. The girl had become pregnant with twins, and doctors judged her pelvis unable to support their gestation. When a Church spokesman said, "Life must always be protected," he wasn't thinking of the girl. As controversy grew, however, the excommunication was overruled by a conference of Brazilian bishops, and the Vatican criticized the case's initial handling.

Ah, but I was taught not to throw out the baby with the bathwater; indeed I know many reform-minded clergy, some even calling for openness to women's participation in the priesthood. Scripture also retains its value despite selective and tendentious reading by churchmen who use it more for control than reflection. One of my favorite passages is Deuteronomy 8:3, "Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord." A variation occurs in Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun when Beneatha's Nigerian suitor explains that his nickname for her, "Alaiyo," means "one for whom bread - food - is not enough."

We are creatures for whom bread is not enough. Our quest for meaning drives us to explore and innovate. In the process it makes heresy unavoidable. In a diverse society, one man's priest is another man's iconoclast.

On March 19, American University's Washington College of Law hosted a conference on marriage initiatives. One panelist was Helen Alvaré, a law professor from George Mason University and an advisor to Benedict's Pontifical Council for the Laity. She talked as if marriage-equality advocates sought to change an eternally unchanging institution. I pointed out that civil law already differs considerably from Church doctrine on marriage, and the marriage fight is about civil law. Unfortunately, despite Christ's admonition in Matthew 22:21 ("Render to Caesar that which is Caesar's, and to God that which is God's"), the Church habitually seeks to conflate church law and civil law, as in its opposition to decriminalizing homosexuality.

Despite the Church's pose of unchanging perfection, its early centuries actually saw popes who were the sons of popes, and priestly celibacy was not definitively imposed until 1139. As for the inviolate nature of the marriage institution, its limits were suggested by 18th Century French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais, whose Marriage of Figaro centers on Count Almaviva's intention to exercise "le droit du Seigneur," a tradition whereby a feudal lord was entitled to take the virginity of the women on his estate. Happily, the betrothed valet and chambermaid gain the help of the Countess in thwarting him. This lighthearted fiction hit close enough to home that it was banned for a time in the French court.

Frank Kameny believes that something old enough to be a tradition is old enough to be challenged. He said as much in 1978 during a gay rights debate I organized at Villanova. I honed my skills for intellectual challenge in my undergraduate years there. As the Wildcats prepare for the Final Four, I am glad that hoops get all the attention. If His Holiness knew what was going on in Villanova's science building, I am afraid he would rearrange his 15th Century vestments uncomfortably and cry, "Stop!"