IGF CultureWatch

"The secular arguments against gay marriage, when they aren't just based on bigotry or custom, tend to be abstract in ways that don't find purchase in American political discourse. I say, 'Institutional support for reproduction,' you say, 'I love my boyfriend and I want to marry him.' Who wins that debate? You win that debate."

Ross Douthat is both right and wrong about who wins that debate. Yes, we win it in the long run. But to get to the long run you have to go through the short-term. And we definitely didn't win the debate in California -- or 29 other states.

What Douthat describes is the simple humanity of our appeal. We aren't asking for anything abstract at all. What is esoteric or obscure about connecting love and marriage? Who doesn't understand that? But look at the lengths our opponents go to to counter that simple truth.

So why do we lose debates, in the concrete form of very consequential (to us) elections? Because of what Douthat buries in a subordinate clause. What secular arguments against gay marriage are anything other than ". . . just based on bigotry or custom"? There are certainly arguments about children and religion, but they aren't arguments against gay marriage, they're arguments against homosexuality in the common world. The most vocal opponents of same-sex marriage find homosexuality an intrusion into a worldview that has no place for anything other than heterosexuality. That's a worldview that used to be all but universal, but it isn't any more. Marriage is the only respectable arena left where people can express their distaste for lesbians and gay men who don't have the good taste to pretend they are straight. The closet is closed for business; lesbians and gay men are on television and in government and business and sports; some of them live right there in the neighborhood and their children go to school and play soccer. All of that is done.

Marriage is the only part of the civil law where prejudice still has some hold, where ancient misunderstandings retain their bite. Every time someone has the conversation Douthat describes, we can win another voter or two. But if he has any doubt about how hard our task is (and has been for decades), he should ponder this thought, which he expressed to the Observer:

"Mr. Douthat indicated that he opposes gay marriage because of his religious beliefs, but that he does not like debating the issue in those terms. At one point he said that, sometimes, he feels like he should either change his mind, or simply resolve never to address the question in public."

How many lesbians or gay men can even imagine what a luxury it would be to be able to avoid addressing this question in public? As a heterosexual in good standing, Douthat has that option. But every heterosexual who exercises it casts a potent kind of vote in favor of the status quo, which works for them but not at all for us. Having all of those conversations, all of those debates, is no easy thing for us, or for heterosexuals. But we have no other tool to achieve the simple equality that we deserve.

(H/T Andrew)

So now it's official: Opponents of gay marriage in Maine do not just want to block gay marriage. They want to use the law to force all discussion of gay marriage out of the schools. In other words, they demand to turn the public schools into closets.

This was always implicit in the logic of their anti-SSM message, which is, as far as it goes, unassailable. 1) Legal gay marriage will make married gay couples more visible and grant them full legal equality. 2) Gay couples' heightened equality and visibility will increase the likelihood that gay marriage would be discussed in schools, even though marriage isn't in the Maine curriculum.

Of course, if gay marriage can be discussed despite not being in the curriculum, it can also be discussed despite not being legal in Maine. Its existence in Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Hampshire might come up in the classroom, for example. So the logical consequence is: 3) The only way to protect schoolchildren's ears from mention of SSM is to censor it.

Don't take my word for it. Here's what a "Yes on 1" official says:

Mutty said gay-marriage supporters had the chance to prohibit the teaching of same-sex marriage in schools when they drafted the legislation.

"They had ample opportunity to blunt our concerns by expressly prohibiting same-sex marriage from being discussed in public schools, but they did not do so," he said.

The Maine campaign, then, is not about preventing gay marriage. It's about preventing discussion of gay marriage. But why stop at "expressly prohibiting same-sex marriage from being discussed in public schools"? How about domestic partnerships? Why, isn't the very existence of homosexuality too controversial for children's ears? How about textbooks and-hey!-library books mentioning gay marriage or gay couples? Hadn't they better be banned?

I would thank Mr. Mutty for clarifying the underlying radicalism of his cause. Let's call him on it.

(Hat tip: KC Johnson.)

I stick by my limited gratitude to the White House for its oblique but helpful statement about state referenda on gay equality, and specifically (kind of) marriage.

But I'm nobody's fool. President Obama is, today, headed to New Jersey to help out Jon Corzine in a very hotly contested race that could go either way. It's not a national race, or a national issue. It's just the sort of thing polticians do in cases where their considerable presence can help in very close elections.

I wouldn't ask the President to actually speak in person in Maine (even if it's just a little further up the East Coast from New Jersey) or Washington (clear out here in the West Coast). But both of these races are at least as close as the NJ governor's race, and in one sense there's more at stake. Jon Corzine's race is of interest mostly to Jon Corzine and, indirectly, to the Democratic Party -- but only indirectly. If we lose the extremely close elections in Maine and Washington, after having lost in California, it will energize the right wing across the country more than anything else I can imagine.

On many other issues, the White House has been able to manage the right wing attacks. But not on gay equality. He has told us what we want to hear (kind of) but a speech to HRC is very different from a statement directly to voters in Maine and/or Washington. Again, he's given us a tool to use to counter the damage his existing words caused, and that's good. But the new polls are showing these races neck-and-neck, and getting people to the polls will be the deciding factor. As I've argued, the 3% or so of us who are homosexual will certainly go to the polls in those states, as will a certain number of supportive heterosexuals. But an awful lot of them don't have enough of a direct interest in the ballot initiatives to drive them to vote. Our lives and equality are at stake, but not theirs.

That is a message the President can make to voters better than we ever could. It is the one extra thing we need most from him.

Andrew thinks the Pope's merger talks with anti-gay Anglicans are "almost baldly political." I'd go with "dangerous."

First, this takes the Vatican's prior acceptance of married clergy from other denominations one giant step further then the church has ever gone; the Pope is actively recruiting now. I'm not sure how he'll deal with any Anglican female clergy members, though I'm not clear how many ultra-conservative Anglicans would have gone down that road. But setting that aside, this new welcome mat to a denomination that has never had a rule requiring celibate clergy exposes the church's fundamental cynicism on this archaic and harmful doctrine.

But the most interesting question for me is whether these hybrid Catholics will be more or less observant of rules like the contraception ban -- even for married couples -- than existing Catholics are. This is where the moral rubber meets the road. If the Vatican really means it when it says sex that is not open to procreation is a sin, even within heterosexual marriage, actively opening the church to denominations that aren't so morally punctilious seems to be an admission that the principle, if not the Pope, has no clothes. Does he expect Anglicans to give up contraception?

No one could reasonably think that. Even Catholics don't follow this absurd urging from the unmarried clergy. This is about -- it is only about -- filling the ranks with more explicitly homophobic members. Conservative Anglicans have lived with both married and female clergy for decades now. They have lived with reproductive choice, and never even had to think about a ban on contraception. It is gay equality that they cannot accept.

The Vatican is certainly welcome to these new believers, if that's what they can be called. But like the Republican party before it, the church will soon learn how hard it is to deal with people you are encouraging to exercise, and take pride in, their unchecked prejudice.

I feel I have to apologize to Maine for what they're going through. Not the election itself, which is something Karl Rove's strategy of anti-gay state constitutional amendments guarantees other states, too, will have to face. Maine's voters could be the first to affirm equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, but they won't be the last by any means.

No, I ought to apologize because the politics of California's education system has now infected a perfectly innocent state. When the anti-marriage side hired California's Schubert Flint Public Affairs to handle the Yes on Question 1 campaign, they inadvertently guaranteed that our unusual education politics would come as part of the deal.

As he did in California, Frank Schubert can't stop trying to scare people with horror stories about how grade-school kids will learn about gay marriage. That question arose naturally in California, where our state Education Code does, in fact, mention the teaching of marriage and family life. We've been fighting battles over this for so long now that we take it for granted. When Schubert brought up public schools here, no one batted an eye. Of course some people would be worried about what schools would be teaching kids about marriage. We've been fighting battles like that since sex education first came up in the 1960s.

But the fit is awkward in Maine. As anyone can see in this press conference by the Speaker of the Maine House, and its former Attorney General, education in Maine is a local affair, and state law has nothing to say about teaching marriage. The current state Attorney General was unambiguous about that fundamental fact, and seems flabbergasted that the idea would even occur to anyone.

Schubert is not one to worry about the reality-based world, though. If scaring parents worked politically in California, he'll give it a whirl in Maine, too.

But the No on 1 campaign hasn't let itself get bamboozled. Schubert may not understand Maine - or need to -- but people who actually live there, and get elected there, and teach there, do. And all of them know that when it comes to marriage, Maine's schools are subject to powerful and sensible local control, with no directives from the state.

This is a senseless argument, and a cruel tactic, and Maine's voters are only suffering through it because it worked for Schubert in California. Well, Maine ain't California, and I wish the state's voters well in making sure Schubert learns that lesson.

(H/T to Pam's House Blend)

It looks like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is ready to declare outright war on whatever believers still inhabit the pews. Their pastoral letter on marriage will be debated formally next month, but a preview is available. I've long since left the Catholic church (I can only take so much), but even if I were a heterosexual whose interests the church purports to protect, I think this would be the final straw for me.

The church is nothing if not consistent on sex (bad in general, good if it's "ordered" toward procreation), but this time out the Bishops seem comfortable squarely placing heterosexual couples who use contraception in the same moral position as same-sex couples. In fact, this letter may be the first time I've heard church officials explicitly employ the same language about married couples using birth control as they use about homosexuality. The letter describes contraception as an "intrinsically evil action." That's very close to the language they use about homosexuality. In fact, I think we're only "intrinsically disordered," without the "evil." The National Catholic Reporter (which is independent of the church) cites surveys showing 96% of married American Catholics use birth control, which is "within a margin of error of complete unanimity."

Is the American church ready to show American heterosexuals the same level of condescension they have previously reserved for us? That's up to them, of course. And I could be wrong about this, since I'm no expert on Catholic theology.

The condescension and theological arrogance of writing -- and thinking -- like this may be the biggest problem the church faces. Pastoral letters and other pronouncements from the Vatican seem to make a conscious effort to come from a world that Catholic believers don't live in, or maybe even recognize. As the bishops pontificate (you should pardon the word) in plummy grandiloquence about "the language of the body" and the "unitive" nature of marriage, you can almost feel the defensiveness from this famously unmarried and theoretically celibate clergy. Be sure to check out the part of the letter where the bishops explain why the Bible's description of Eve as a "helpmate" to Adam not only doesn't mean she was intended to be his inferior, but take their paternalistic case of nerves one step further to argue that the Bible also uses the original word translated as "helpmate" ("ezer") to describe God, himself. You can almost hear them cheering on Catholic women with a hearty but very self-conscious, "You go, girl!"

While the bishops and the Vatican indulge themselves in their pomposity, American Catholics continue their lives in the reality-based world. In addition to those who use contraception (i.e. pretty much everyone), 45% of American Catholics support same-sex marriage - in fact, Catholics have the highest support of any denomination; a full 62% of them support civil unions.

Ironically, that's probably a tribute to the church, itself, which has a history of social involvement, justice and intellectual engagement. Those things have taken a backseat to foolish and pedantic imagined consistencies on sex these days, but perhaps believers are willing to forgive even this and hope that it, too, will pass.

The pastoral letter will probably not change any minds. But then, it's not really intended to. That, in fact, may be the biggest problem my former church faces.

I'd like to speak up in favor of the White House statement on the two anti-gay referenda. It is easy to be cynical about the statement, and there is certainly no shortage of evidence to support cynicism. But it will help.

Here is the statement:


"The President has long opposed divisive and discriminatory efforts to deny rights and benefits to same-sex couples, and as he said at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, he believes 'strongly in stopping laws designed to take rights away.' Also at the dinner, he said he supports, 'ensuring that committed gay couples have the same rights and responsibilities afforded to any married couple in this country.'"

Andrew may be right that the President is not putting his weight behind us in either Maine or Washington, but the politics of this issue is not so straightforward. This one's a bank shot.

Obama is not going to support gay marriage yet. End of sentence. There is no rational or moral reason for his position, and he knows enough not to even try to offer one. It's an assertion without a foundation, and one that more than half of all Americans continue to believe.

But we have two very close elections to worry about now. One is in Maine with California's Frank Schubert at the helm again trying to terrify voters about gay marriage. Schubert is as savvy and dangerous a political flack as exists, and he'll use anything to win - including Obama's on the record statement to Rick Warren expressing his personal belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Obama is not going to take back his statement to Warren. But when the White House says, in an official statement, that Obama believes "strongly" in stopping laws "designed to take rights away" (as Maine's referendum is), our side is no longer defenseless when and if Schubert tries to use the President's words against us.

It is not perfect, and it is not what we need most. But it is more than the nothing Obama gave us in California.

And it is a little more than that in Washington State. A contemporaneous statement of his support for our equal rights will go a long way to help us approve Referendum 71. While the opposition is doing everything it can to make that election, too, about same-sex marriage, it is not. Washington's legislature has been working incrementally to make domestic partnership there more equal to marriage, and passed a law that does exactly what the President said - and now says again - that he supports. Again, it is not perfect, and it is not what we need most. But it is not nothing, and our side will be able to use the President's words, dated this month.

I fully understand and share the frustration of people who want more from the President. The nation has changed since Bill Clinton was in the White House. But we can't forget the fundamental lesson from the 1990s: When it comes to gay rights, it's not the principle that is most potent, it's the backlash. Clinton did not want to sign either DADT or DOMA (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). In both of those cases, he was dealing with incendiary reactions to pro-gay statements. And both were compromises to proposals that would have been worse: a complete ban on gays in the military and a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage.

The nation has moved a lot on DADT and civil unions. But it hasn't moved enough yet on marriage, where 53% of Americans still haven't come around. They will. I, too, would like to see Obama lead the nation into its best instincts on this issue rather than follow its worst.

But if we can win in both Maine and Washington, I think we will have turned a corner. Obama's statement does help us some in both states, and we should use it for all it's worth.

With all due respect to Barney Frank, enough with the NRA comparisons.

In defending his dismissive remarks of the National Equality March, Frank has said we should follow the example of the most effective lobbying group in the country - the National Rifle Association - and do our lobbying work at the district level. The NRA doesn't hold marches, and, according to Frank, we shouldn't waste our time either.

Barney's wrong. First, this obscures the fact that lesbians and gay men are a very small minority. U.S. gun ownership runs between 21.6% and 50%. Every one of those people has a very direct interest in gun laws. You can't fairly compare their numbers to the 3-5% of gays and lesbians in the country. While we have an ever-increasing number of supporters who are willing to vote for our equality, their interest is indirect: justice and fairness for their friends and family, and maybe even in general. That is a tribute to them and to generations of lesbians and gay men who took the risks of coming out to try and persuade them.

What Frank assumes is that, like NRA members, our supporters would also have the single-minded dedication we do, in every congressional district in the nation, to put unified and unceasing pressure on members of congress.

There are places in the country where that might happen. But that's the second reason the NRA analogy is wrong. Those people overwhelmingly live in places were we already have the congressional support we need. It is exactly in the places where we need the help that we would have the fewest straight supporters to do what the NRA does.

That is the paradox of being, not just a minority, but an extremely small minority in a democratic nation. No one but us actually experiences the day-to-day effects of discrimination, and because we are all part of the larger public, it is hard to get our unique but intense problem onto the national agenda for a sustained period of time. A national march does that for a day or two, but already the media has moved on to - what are for them - more important issues to the public at large.

When our problems are national in scope (as they are with DADT and DOMA) we have to do things nationally to call attention to the problem. Barney Frank's prescription presupposes support in places where we need it the most and have the hardest time getting it.

It's enough to make reasonable non gun-owners mad enough to go out and join the NRA.