I’ve been quiet on this site for a while, in large part because I’ve retired my weekly column at 365gay.com, which has since announced that it’s going to shut down. (I’ll resist the temptation to commit the post hoc fallacy.) Meanwhile I have been working on the book Debating Same-Sex Marriage for Oxford University Press, in which I argue against Maggie Gallagher; we’ve made progress and expect it to appear in Spring/Summer 2012. And I’ll be doing my usual Fall Speaking Tour, so if you’re near one of the venues, come listen, ask questions, applaud, cheer, heckle, or whatever.
Politics & Public Opinion
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Mission Creep
From the Washington Blade:
LGBT advocates praised the initiatives President Obama set forth in his jobs speech Thursday night — even though his address made no direct reference to the lack of federal job protections for LGBT people. . . .
Obama campaigned on passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act — legislation that would bar such job bias against LGBT people in the public and private workforce — but the bill has languished for years and didn’t even see a committee vote in the last Congress when Democrats were in control of both the House and Senate. . . .
Despite the lack of any explicit mention, LGBT advocates praised the plan Obama unveiled on Thursday and said the policies would benefit all Americans — including LGBT people.
The mission is progressive big government. The goal is to enlist “LGBT people” as foot soldiers to (and funders of) the cause. Focusing on gay equality would be a distraction.
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Power (I’m Afraid) to the People
Leaders in the gay rights movement do us all a disservice — gay and straight alike — when they stir up passions over non-issues. Yesterday’s argument in California’s Supreme Court over standing in the Prop. 8 case is the latest example of whipping people into a needless frenzy that will ultimately feed cynicism.
The case was not about any gay rights issue. In the course of the proceedings over appealing the district court’s decision overturning Prop. 8, a fascinating and unique issue arose about whether the proponents of an initiative have standing in federal court to appeal it. This question came up because neither the Governor nor the state Attorney General chose to appeal, leaving the proponents as the only ones willing to carry the burden. However, under federal court rules, parties must have proper standing to bring the case to the court of appeal. The federal courts have very limited jurisdiction over cases, unlike state courts.
Normally, some part of a state’s government will defend a citizen-initiated law if necessary. But both the Governor and the Attorney General felt the court got it right, and declined. The proponents, therefore, stepped in. However, some cases have said initiative proponents don’t have standing in the federal courts. But no case dealt with the issue here, where there is no one to defend an initiative except the proponents.
There is a far more at stake in this case than just gay equality. In California, the courts have consistently ruled that the legislature — and the executive and the judiciary — have only derivative powers. Those powers do not come from God, but from the people, who are the ultimate source of all government. The Prop. 8 appeal brings that into the spotlight. If the government will not defend a law passed by the people using their superior legislative power, and the proponents of that law cannot, themselves, defend it, then, in fact, the government is superior to the people, and can veto their efforts.
It is, of course, convenient for those of us who believe strongly in equality, to have the appeal die for want of a champion. That is what made Ted Olson’s life so hard yesterday, as the justices hammered him about his theory. Olson is nothing less than a superstar, and watching him defend what is ultimately an indefensible position was a marvel. We cannot be grateful enough to have him on our side.
There are certainly some significant legal questions around the edges of what he was proposing, and it was a joy watching him try to tempt the judges with those. But Justice Carol Corrigan called him out for “nibbling” at these distractions. The real issue in this case is whether the government can nullify a vote of the people by denying them a voice in the federal courts. If this is a gay issue, it means that gay rights requires placing our complete and total trust in the government, now and forever. We’re fortunate in this case that our interests are aligned with those of California’s current politicians. I’m very skeptical about this as a permanent rule, though.
I have no doubt at all that Prop. 8 is a violation of the federal constitution, and that the district court’s ruling will finally be upheld. But the easy win will come at too great a cost. The corruption and overreach in California’s legislature in 1911 that led to the initiative is never far from my mind. Even when I agree with the political branches on the merits, as I do here, I think it is too dangerous to aggrandize the government at the expense of the people’s ultimate authority over government. While I think the majority vote was invalid under the federal constitution, I’d rather give that majority its voice in the courts now, and maintain for the future the ability to control the state government if that ever becomes necessary again.
And when “we” ultimately lose this case (I will not be surprised to see a 7-0 vote in favor of the proponents), I hope the anger is not directed at the courts. That is the risk of the fund-raising tactics that drive these non-issues — that the anger and fear our leaders are stirring up will be misdirected. The Prop. 8 case, itself, is our issue as lesbians and gay men. The standing case is our issue only to the extent we are citizens who have an interest in how much power we have granted to our government.
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The Archbishop’s Non-Argument
New York Archbishop Dolan’s recent rant about marriage shows just how bankrupt the other side’s case is.
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What Makes Parents “Real”
My thoughts on the significance of biological bonds, here.
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Friends and “Friends”
I think Andrew pretty much sums up the problem of choice. We choose our friends, but when it comes to love, the notion of choice is, at best, compromised and subsumed. Those who argue that homosexuality is a choice view us, and view our relationships, as friendships either perverted or at best gone wrong. We have often been called, even sometimes sympathetically, “friends” (Uncle Albert and his “friend” will be coming to dinner), but that was a nice way of avoiding the real subject. It kept the language of same-sex relationships in a closet of its own, a frame that helped everyone cope.
You don’t hear that kind of language from our supporters any more. Only our opponents are clinging to that outmoded notion of choice. They think the whole debate over same-sex relationships is about our choice of friends. They still can’t, or won’t, imagine that the flood of emotions and connections that they recognize as love can occur between two people of the same sex. I’m sure that a lot of them don’t even think it’s demeaning to our relationships to view them as falling within the kind of choices we make about our friends. They want us to have friends. They just refuse to believe that the powerful and mysterious forces they remember and/or experience with love can happen, for some people, with members of their own sex, and are every bit as gratifying and amazing — are, in fact, the same thing they know so well.
All we have been trying to do for the last half century or so (“All!”) is edge the public’s understanding of our relationships closer to what we actually feel and live. We have friends, sometimes lots of them. We choose them and treasure them. But when it comes to love, we aren’t the ones doing the choosing. Heterosexuals know that about themselves, and as Jonathan Rauch notes below, an emerging majority of them are coming to understand that we are sometimes lucky enough to be swept up in the same wonderful mystery.
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Are NPR and Maggie Gallagher Missing the Boat?
Andrew Sullivan is excerpting a fascinating debate he titles, “Embracing the Bias,” about the dilemma NPR faces over its surprising to no one tilt toward the left. One of the key bones of contention is whether NPR should just say outright, yes, we are sort of leftish, but unlike Fox News, we’ll own up to our bias and honestly try to be fair rather than just asserting it.
As much as I’d like to endorse that kind of full disclosure, it presupposes, as the lawyers say, a fact not in evidence. Lesbians and gay men should be more attuned than most to the fact that in a whole lot of cases, people don’t recognize their own bias. On the contrary, they can understand what others view as bias as some sort of natural order.
When Maggie Gallagher takes umbrage at being called a bigot or worse, she is sincerely expressing her view that the world she grew up in and understands is entirely neutral and correct. Her incredulity comes from the notion that such a uniform history of acknowledging heterosexual marriage holds no bias against homosexual couples.
And, speaking historically, she is not wrong. I don’t think the long, confounding and ongoing development of marriage came out of a bias against same-sex couples, it just came out of an ignorance of their existence. It took all of that history, culminating late in the 20th Century, for lesbians and gay men to fully assert their public presence, much less their need for the same legal recognition of their relationships that heterosexuals take for granted.
But just because there was no intent to discriminate against same-sex couples in, say, the 16th Century doesn’t mean that the effect of that unawareness isn’t discriminatory today. Gallagher has set herself up as the ambassador of that obliviousness. If history isn’t biased, how could she and her followers be? What is wrong with people?
What Gallagher can’t see (or won’t acknowledge) is what a gathering majority can no longer blind itself to. Lesbians and gay men do exist, do fall in love, do form relationships, do raise children. The law’s neglect of them is now clear to anyone who wants to see it.
But those who keep their blinkers on do, in fact, begin to look biased, look like they really don’t want to see something that is right in front of their eyes. Perhaps that isn’t really bigotry or hate, but it looks so willful, so harsh, so mean.
Maybe it is always hard for us to recognize our own biases, too easy to mistake them for justice when, in fact, their injustice is only still coming into view. It would be so nice if Gallagher and NPR and everyone could stand back from their deeply held beliefs and examine them fully. But history proves that’s hard.
On a lot of subjects, now, we don’t know what bias is. How can we expect people to admit something we don’t have agreement on the boundaries of? If NPR doesn’t see their bias as bias, they can do no more about it than Gallagher can, and will be missing many of the same cultural shifts that are happening right under their nose.
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Gays and Monogamy
Will same-sex marriage undermine norms of fidelity? My thoughts, here.
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Real Political Action at CPAC
‘We’re not trying to … sneak the left’s agenda into the conservative movement.”
Those are the words of GOProud’s Christopher Barron in explaining why the very, very conservative Andrew Breitbart, as well as Grover Norquist, Ann Coulter and others have given genuine support to a group of openly gay Republicans. Chris Geidner’s first rate and exquisitely fair reporting for Metro Weekly gives both the left and the right — and the really far right — room to make their points. GOProud obviously isn’t everyone’s cup of Darjeeling, but they are not the enemy of the gay movement. The only ones who need to worry about them are those Republicans who want to purge the party of any open homosexuals.
The heart of GOProud’s position is this:
“The problem is that the gay left has decided what qualifies as pro-gay and what qualifies as anti-gay, and a whole bunch of the stuff that they think qualifies as pro-gay, I don’t think has anything to do with being pro-gay,” says Barron. ”And, a whole bunch of stuff that they think is anti-gay, I don’t think is anti-gay at all.”
This is clearly anathema to the gay left, which has too frequently tarred anyone who questions any proposal they put forth as acting in bad faith. But it also teases out the problem Log Cabin has had among Republicans. In order to get along with the leadership of the gay left — which is pretty much the leadership of the gay rights movement thus far — LCR has supported laws that purport to help lesbians and gay men, from ENDA to hate crimes laws to anti-bullying bills. These proposals run counter to the genuinely conservative impulses of a strong (and I think the best) conservative philosophy espoused by Republicans. Government power necessarily relies on politics, and in a culture war, those politics can get corrosive when they’re not outright dangerous. In a vibrant democracy political power is dynamic; as its contours shift, the changes can intensify cultural divisions rather than resolving them.
Democrats tend to believe government has an extraordinary ability to solve, or at least ease, problems, and we Dems can minimize the consequences those power shifts cause, usually by pretending they will not occur. LCR was no liberal bastion, but they developed decent working relationships with the Democratic problem solvers.
That coalition had some success in enacting hate crimes laws, AIDS programs and other accomplishments. DADT would not have been repealed without LCR’s help, particularly in the form of their lawsuit against the federal government. But DADT, like DOMA, is different in kind from ENDA and its legislative brethren. ENDA asks the government to help ease discrimination; DADT and DOMA are, themselves, discrimination by the government that purports to be neutral with respect to all citizens.
GOProud can be disingenuous, and that’s clear when it comes to marriage. Barron says his group opposes DOMA, but on grounds of federalism, not equality. The implication is that the constitution’s guarantee of equality does not apply to homosexuality. That’s something I certainly don’t agree with, but it would be a good question to put to GOProud.
In any event, the tawdry accusations that GOProud is anti-gay or even self-hating are hard to make stick to Barron and Jimmy LaSalvia, his partner in crime. No one can accuse them of being closeted or lacking in political interest. They have a vision of what is and is not a proper role for government that is respectable and (at least what we’ve been able to see of it) fairly consistent. It is not the Democrats’ vision of government, but why should it be? Their opposition to hate crimes laws and ENDA and other social tinkering by the federal government is not an attempt to disguise some other political motives, nor are they giving cover to people whose revulsion derives from a fundamental opposition to homosexuals.
GOProud proves that there is no necessary connection between conservatism and homophobia, an assumption that has been the foundation of the religious right’s incursion into the Republican party. GOProud is short-circuiting it, and the sparks are flying.
How could that not be a good thing?
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Brothers and Sisters
Alabama and Florida have new Governors who are actively catering to the Christians in their states. Alabama’s Robert Bentley explicitly appealed to his fellow “brothers and sisters” in Christ, unaware that this could be taken badly by anyone who is not in the family. He was subsequently informed that Alabama does, in fact, have a smattering of non Southern Baptists, and did his best to apologize for any hurt feelings.
Governor Rick Scott in Florida is using his government position to further Christianity in the more traditional way – behind the scenes. His new Secretary of the Department of Children and Families is David Wilkins, who also serves as Finance Chairman for Florida Baptist Children’s Homes, which describes itself as an “organization dedicated to providing Christ-centered services to children and families. . .” That’s hardly surprising for a Baptist organization. Wilkins test will come when he has to deal with citizens who are not seeking Christ-centered services.
This certainly doesn’t bode well for same-sex couples in Florida. Gov. Scott has said that adoption should be limited to married couples, using the traditional formulation to exclude homosexuals without saying so. This goes against a state appellate court ruling, which overturned Florida’s unique-in-the-nation rule prohibiting adoption (but not foster parenting) by anyone who is homosexual, and against simple arithmetic, with the number of children needing adoption, on one side of the equation, and the number of married couples willing to adopt, on the other.
These new governors will be pushing the limits of the distinction between Christians and “Christianists,” the term Andrew Sullivan coined to describe Christians who go beyond believing in and acting on their faith, and attempt to impose it on believers and nonbelievers alike through civil law.
They may want to exercise some caution. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects religion from state coercion, but it does something else as well: it protects religions from one another. That’s not necessarily a constitutional matter, but it’s at least as important. You don’t have to search very hard to come up with examples of religions that hold government power in various nations and leverage their power to disadvantage people of other religions.
But that’s nothing compared to the leverage religious believers have over different sects of their own religion. Just because Shiites and Sunnis are both Islamic doesn’t mean they have the same view of religion, or of the state. In fact, divisions within religions may be more intractable and emotionally held than broader religious differences. Henry VIII didn’t fight Rome in order to start a Jewish sect; he felt he was every bit as much a Christian as the corrupt boys on the continent, possibly more so.
Religion can be a special case of epistemic closure. Belief is so personal and interior that it’s easy to lose perspective, or fail to appreciate that others believe very, very different things at their very core, not only about obvious politicized issues, but about God’s grace, itself, and God’s own identity.
And that’s not just true across religions, but within individual sects. Governor Bentley’s Southern Baptist brothers and sisters belong to one of many dozens of Baptist denominations that aren’t always in complete harmony. There are enough Presbyterian denominations that Wikipedia has to alphabetize them.
And individual believers are even more varied. It’s easy to forget that Al Sharpton is a Baptist minister, and that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Warren Beatty are all Baptists as well. Catholics are fairly unique in having a single, institutional voice to guide them – one which is widely ignored by actual, practicing Catholics in so many particulars, high among them gay marriage.
The First Amendment is a reminder that a government which can not command religious belief has to be cautious of religious reasoning, itself, which inevitably leads to so many different, but firmly held conclusions. Gov. Bentley’s religious belief is clearly not something he holds lightly, but even in Alabama, it shouldn’t be surprising that in the civil arena, its assertion by the state’s leading political figure is viewed in political terms. Gov. Scott can certainly rely on a large cohort of religious believers who oppose any legal recognition of same-sex couples, but he is not the Minister of Florida, he is its governor.
And homosexual citizens are among his constituents. Religions have the power to deny membership to anyone they wish, but states are different. Christianist governors (and other powerful religious politicians) can’t ignore or exclude lesbians and gay men from the society; they can only use power to rig their rights. And as the non-religious reasons for doing so collapse under ordinary scrutiny, the religious motivations are exposed not only to secular review, but examination by other competing religions and religious thinkers as well.
Those religious debates have both enlightened and inflamed centuries of human progress. But they have not combined well with secular government. The First Amendment has stood as an excellent guardrail between our nation and a noxious religious nihilism. Its wisdom is still evident.