IGF CultureWatch

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.

Those who argue that same-sex parenting "deprives" a child of its mother or father sometimes ask, "How would you feel if your mother or father were taken away?"

My answer to that question is, of course, "I'd feel terrible." But that fact scarcely settles the matter.

I'd feel terrible if anyone close to me were taken away. But that presupposes that the person "taken away" is already a part of my life. It doesn't follow that their not being present in the first place would "deprive" me.

My grandparents were all an important part of my life, but suppose they had all died before I was born. Would anyone have accused my parents of "depriving" me of grandparents, simply by bringing me into existence? Of course not.

I grant that the cases are not exactly parallel. If my grandparents had died before I was born, my parents could hardly be held responsible for their absence (barring matricide or patricide).

By contrast, the lesbian who visits a sperm bank-just like straight women who visit sperm banks-may consciously intend to raise a child in its biological father's absence, and thus has some responsibility for that absence (as does the father).

It is this fact that bothers our opponents. In their view, the lesbian and others in this (hypothetical but common) case are conspiring to deprive the child of its biological father. If we care to answer their concerns, we need to address this case.

Before doing so, however, it is worth pointing out several things. First, the objection doesn't touch those who become parents by adoption. In such cases, opponents might still object that the lesbian is depriving the child of SOME father. But they can't coherently claim that she is depriving it of ITS OWN father-and that is the objection I wish to focus on here. (Presumably, its own father is no longer in the picture-hence the adoption.)

Second, the objection applies equally to heterosexual women who seek anonymous sperm donors. Most people who use sperm banks are heterosexual, and most gays and lesbians never use sperm banks. So this is not an objection to gay parenting or gay marriage per se.

Third, and related, when applied to same-sex marriage the objection involves a blatant non-sequitur. It is one thing to argue against anonymous sperm donation. It is quite another to use that argument to oppose marriage for gays and lesbians. For even if one accepts the "no sperm banks" argument, it seems unfair to punish those gays and lesbians who do not use them. It is also unfair to punish those children whose parents did use them: such children exist, after all, and forbidding marriage to their parents (i.e. the ones that care for them) makes their lives less stable.

With these caveats in mind, we can return to the question at hand: is the lesbian (or for that matter, the straight woman) who uses an anonymous sperm donor "depriving" the child of its biological father?

The problem with answering this question is that the word "depriving" is so loaded that any response is likely to have unintended (and unpalatable) side effects. Answer "yes," and you insult the many good mothers who have used anonymous sperm donors and have provided wonderful lives for their resulting children. You also potentially hurt the children, by suggesting to them that they lead "deprived" lives.

Answer "no," and you seem to ignore the research that says that children do better, on average, with their own biological parents than in other family forms. You also suggest that there's nothing special about growing up with one's own biological father.

I for one wouldn't want to make the latter claim. That's partly because I am moved by the firsthand stories of people who have grown up not knowing one or more of their biological parents and feel a genuine sense of loss as a result. Their longing is real and should not be lightly dismissed.

But it's also because I myself feel that there's something special about the biological bond I have with my parents. The fact that I am literally flesh of their flesh moves me, for reasons that go beyond sentimentality.

The question is whether we can acknowledge this significance without casting aspersions on those whose parent-child bonds are non-biological.

I think we can. To say that the biological bond is special is not to say that it's the only significant bond, or that those who lack it are deprived of something necessary (much less sufficient) for a strong and healthy parent-child relationship.

More to the point, to say that the biological bond is special is hardly justification for "depriving" an entire group of people of the opportunity to marry.

American Idol is a show everyone watches - young, old, from Red States and Blue. It is a throwback, almost, to the days of television when families would gather around a television set and watch enriching programming together.

And one of its big draws these days is a lesbian.

The New York Times pointed out last weekend that Ellen DeGeneres "finds a way to remind audiences of her sexual status on almost every episode of 'American Idol.'"

It continues: "More than in any other of her ventures, Ms. DeGeneres's performace on America's favorite television show suggests how hard she works to seem effortlessly funny and how determined she is to be openly but unthreateningly gay."

She brings it up gently, making jokes and bright-eyed allusions, mentioning her wife Portia, talking about her suits and short, tousled hair.

And America loves it.

Ellen is America's sweetheart of the moment, funny, down to earth, a pretty, sparkly woman whom everyone can relate to. And the extraordinary thing is that her gayness doesn't get in the way of that or hide it - instead, she makes being gay seem to be the absolutely normal thing that it is.

And an icon of Gay Normal is important. All too often - still - anti-gay conservatives point to people on the edges of our community as being representative of all gays and lesbians. They take images from Pride Parades and television and gay circuit parties and try to paint us as social outliers who are strange and frightening (or inappropriate and silly) and thus a danger to mainstream marriage, work and family.

Those who lie on our edges - Adam Lambert, say, or Johnny Weir, or any of the Dykes on Bikes - are important to us and are part of our community. They help us define our LGBT culture as one that celebrates fiercely individual personalities who nonetheless come together for common causes and celebrations. We need them and we love them and we celebrate their outrageousness.

But we need our Ellen DeGenereses and Dan Chois (and now Ricky Martins and someday Anderson Coopers), too. We need public figures who seem like the best friend that you wish lived next door, people who are safely sexy, people you can trust to watch your dog, people who you'd welcome to meet your kids and your folks and your elderly Aunt Martha.

Ellen works hard for us. As the Times says, her private life is "served up as an affirmation of gay marriage set in a Harlequin romance frame." And she brings her life "with her on America's most conventional reality show."

She makes gay marriage and gay rights seem easy to take - and not just easy, but almost as if they are a fait accompli. Ellen had a beautiful wedding and the many pictures and videos of a beloved Gay Normal icon getting hitched surely made marriage equality easier for middle America to imagine.

They can picture being at a wedding of a gay couple now. Which means that they are slowly being won over to our side.

America loves Ellen. Her daytime talk show may collect the gigantic Oprah Winfrey audience once Oprah moves on at some point next year. (The Times says she is the best bet to inherit "Oprah's mantle as talk show queen.") Her gentle jokes and self-deprecating bits have made her the most amusing judge to watch on American Idol.

Ellen has hosted the Emmys and Oscars, won 12 Emmys herself, and convinced then-candidate Barack Obama to dance on her talk show.

She is happy and successful and famous and - normal.

She is what middle America wants to be.

The contest for best singer might still be going on over at Fox, but America has already crowned it's next American Idol - and it's Ellen DeGeneres.

They don't drive Subarus, wear comfortable shoes, or listen to folk music. But are the female pair-bonding albatross discussed in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine lesbians?

Despite its provocative title, the essay "Can Animals Be Gay?" is one of the more thoughtful and nuanced treatments to have appeared in a while. It achieves this largely by ignoring the title-question and instead focusing on what scientific research into animal behavior does-and more to the point, doesn't-tell us about humans.

These are the facts: Lindsay C. Young, a biologist studying a Laysan albatross colony in Kaena Point, Hawaii, discovered in the course of her doctoral research that a third of the nesting pairs there were actually female-female. Albatross typically pair off monogamously, copulate, and then collaboratively incubate the resulting single egg each year. Scientists who have observed nesting pairs generally assume-falsely, it turns out-that they are all male-female. (Albatross are difficult to sex by sight.) So Young and two colleagues published a paper explaining their surprising findings. From the Times essay:

"It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young's colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years - as far back as the biologists' data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody's nose for what you might call 'straight' couples."

Like most scientists, Young and her colleagues were careful merely to share their observations, rather than to draw moral or political conclusions. But that didn't stop folks from both sides of the gay-rights debate from drawing foolish inferences and alternately either praising or attacking her research.

Gay-rights opponents derided the work as agenda-driven propaganda. Gay-rights advocates, by contrast, saw it as new evidence for the "naturalness" of homosexuality and even as providing a justification for marriage equality.

The simple truth that both sides overlook is this: Research about animals tells us what other animals' behavior is; it does not tell us what human behavior morally ought to be.

Notice the two key distinctions here. First, although humans are animals, they are not the same as other animals. That doesn't mean that studying other animals can't help us learn more about humans, often by suggesting hypotheses worth testing in humans. But species behave differently, and what's true of albatross, or bonobos, or fruit flies frequently isn't true of humans.

Second, there's the distinction between the descriptive and the normative; between what is and what ought to be. The fact that animals (including human animals) do something does not entail that we morally SHOULD do it.

Which means that all of the empirical research in the world, as interesting and important and valuable as it is, won't settle any moral disputes for us-at least not by itself.

I say "at least not by itself" because there are indirect ways in which this research may be relevant. Young's findings, for example, provide a nice illustration of heterosexist bias among previous scientists, and there are more general moral lessons to be gleaned when we uncover bias.

Moreover, such research can undermine the premises of bad arguments used by the other side. ("Animals don't even do that, therefore it's obviously wrong.") However, it's worth noting that the arguments would be bad even if they were not based on false premises, since they still involve invalid inferences. ("Animals don't cook their food either. What follows?")

There's also the undeniable fact that, whatever their logical flaws, these arguments have emotional resonance. As the Times essay notes:

"What animals do - what's perceived to be 'natural' - seems to carry a strange moral potency: it's out there, irrefutably, as either a validation or a denunciation of our own behavior, depending on how you happen to feel about homosexuality and about nature."

But that's just the point: the conclusion depends on "how you happen to feel." The feelings are doing the work, not the logic.

When bad arguments are used in the service of good aims, what should we do?

Suppose Young's study makes a parent less inclined to kick a gay child out of the house, because the parent (illogically) reads the study as proof that human homosexuality is "natural." This sort of thing happens all the time, and I'm hardly inclined to call up the parent and point out his or her logical lapse.

There are, however, long-range consequences to such laxity. The same logical sloppiness that motivates this particular parent to do the right thing helps others to rationalize discrimination. Repeat after me: what other animals do is one thing; what humans morally ought to do is another. Only when we distinguish those questions can we make a sound case for equality.