Cracks in the Republican Wall

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You've probably heard that Steve Schmidt, the Republican political consultant who managed John McCain's campaign, told Log Cabin Republicans Friday he's for gay marriage, and that the party as a whole needs to stop making opposition to SSM a litmus test. But that bald statement of the point doesn't convey the rare beauty of Schmidt's statement of Republican, and republican, ideals. Take a few minutes to read the whole speech.

Marc Ambinder doesn't think Schmidt will get anywhere. But here's another sign of a change in the climate: National Journal's poll of "insiders" (political professionals) finds that 59 percent of Dems say the party should support gay marriage. Meanwhile,

Exactly half of the 104 Republican Insiders who were surveyed said that their party should oppose gay marriage. Another 37 percent said they thought the party should avoid the issue, and 8 percent said the GOP should actually support gay marriage. The remainder also gave scattered volunteered responses like leave it up to the states, accept it, or that the party shouldn't care it. That's a pretty close divide between the Republican Insiders who say their party should oppose gay marriage compared to those who say avoid or support it.

In other words, support for SSM is no longer a political third rail for Dems...and Republicans are growing uncomfortable with their opposition.

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Sin City

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There's a telling section in the Iowa Supreme Court's opinion in Varnum v. Brien, that hasn't gotten as much attention as it should. The section is only about four pages long, but it says everything about the current state of the debate over gay marriage - and, in general, about gays in civil society.

After addressing the five key arguments against same-sex marriage, and explaining why they are not sufficient to justify state discrimination against same-sex couples, the court then reaches out to answer a sixth argument that the government had not made: religious opposition:

The belief that the "sanctity of marriage" would be undermined by the inclusion of gay and lesbian couples bears a striking conceptual resemblance to the expressed secular rationale for maintaining the tradition of marriage as a union between dual-gender couples, but better identifies the source of the opposition. Whether expressly or impliedly, much of society rejects same-sex marriage due to sincere, deeply ingrained- even fundamental-religious belief.

That is both exactly right and extremely important. Courts do not normally need to look at arguments no one has explicitly made, but this is an argument that does, indeed, better identify the source of the opposition to gay marriage. It explains why so many of us who argue about equal protection for gays wind up against our wills in discussions about theology.

Historically, homosexuality has faced three major barriers to acceptance: (1) it was a crime; (2) it was a sickness; and (3) it was a sin. In 1961, Illinois became the first state to decriminalize sodomy (both straight and gay), a movement that ended in 2003 with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas, overturning the last remaining sodomy laws in the U.S. And in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

That means the animating argument against homosexuality - and specifically gay marriage - remains a religious one: it is a sin.

The Iowa court acknowledged the importance of this to religious believers, but pointed out that this is not the only religious view. As evidenced by friend-of-the-court briefs in the case, many religions also "have strong religious views that yield the opposite conclusion."

No secular court can - or should - try to intervene in theological matters, one of the least controversial parts of the first amendment's religious protections. The court concluded the secular arguments are either circular, inconsistent, beside the point, or involve rules (such as procreation) that heterosexuals do not (and would not) impose on themselves. While religious arguments may be profoundly convincing to believers, civil society is made up of too many people with too many varied religious (and irreligious) beliefs for a court to have to take sides.

That makes arguments about homosexuality different from those surrounding abortion. Abortion, as a public policy matter, involves a sin that is also a well-recognized crime: murder. The issue is at what stage a fetus is a person for purposes of applying that secular rule.
But homosexuality - and gay marriage in particular -- no longer involves any secular crime. Nor is having a homosexual orientation any sort of disease that disables anyone from making voluntary, adult decisions that are lawful. Lacking either of those underpinnings, the public debate over homosexuality returns endlessly and exhaustingly to religion.

Whether or not we are a "Christian Nation," we are decidedly not a nation whose courts could conceivably resolve disputes among Christians about what is or is not sinful. Yet that is exactly the dispute that now exists, not only among Christians, but among Jews, Muslims and even religions that are not as focused on sin as Western religions tend to be.

This is a family squabble among those religions -- with some families more exercised about the subject than others. For their part, though, the courts continue to search for other reasons to justify civil discrimination, and increasingly are having a hard time of it.

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Marriage Turns a Corner

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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.

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Vermont’s Other Breakthrough

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Maggie Gallagher and I have found something to agree on! In its legislation adopting same-sex marriage, Vermont included some quite substantial opt-out clauses for religious organizations. These are not merely gestural, as David Bankof notes. Like Maggie, I see this as a potential landmark.

Maggie sees significance in the fact that the gay-marriage movement-which she regards as a juggernaut bearing down on her civil rights-"permitted" religious-liberty protections. I'd put it a bit differently: this kind of live-and-let-live arrangement, while imperfect, benefits both sides.

David Blankenhorn and I argue for tying religious-liberty protections to federal recognition of gay couples because it's a way to expand the comfort zone of both sides: gay couples and families get many of the protections they need, religious objectors get legally assured room to dissent. Vermont signals the political viability and real-world relevance of this approach.

It also, by the way, shows that legislatures can do politics better than courts. But we knew that.

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Maggie Gallagher’s Weather Report on Marriage

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Rod Dreher's interview with Maggie Gallagher is well worth your time. Like the marginalized tea partiers who will be complaining today, Gallagher is convinced she is under siege from forces that mean her no harm.

While she and Dreher repeatedly invoke "war" and "battle" imagery, the rest of us are having a civic debate about whether and how to treat same-sex couples equally under the law. That is a reasonable discussion to be having in light of longstanding constitutional protections and the rise, in recent decades, of an openly homosexual minority who have abandoned the historical shame that their sexual orientation was expected to require. They do not want to have to marry people of the opposite sex, and an increasing number of heterosexuals agree that they'd prefer not to have the culture encourage that sort of deception.

Gallagher says that "2/3 of Americans agree with us," but what is it they agree with her her about? That same-sex couples should have no legal rights as couples? That they should have some legal rights, but not marriage? They they should not be able to call themselves married?

Few in the National Organization for Marriage, and certainly neither Gallagher nor Dreher, get to that level of detail, but that's where the rest of us are now. For example, Gallagher cites the win in California. But what is it that her side won here? Our Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples are entitled to the equal protection of the law, as the constitution says, including all the rights, responsibilities and obligations that heterosexual married couples have. In approving Prop. 8, the voters said that same-sex relationships could not be called marriages. Nevertheless, they kept all of those rights, responsibilities and obligations intact under our existing domestic partnership law. This keeps some aspect of the stigma against same-sex couples in place by making the use of the word "marriage" a constitutional issue. But it does not change one aspect of California's laws that treat same-sex domestic partners the same as heterosexual married couples.

That is the victory that Gallagher and the National Organization for Marriage are claiming in California. And this is how she, and the right are losing not some war, but their credibility. Her criticism of some gay rights extremists who use words like "hate" and "bigot" is well taken, but ironic since she uses the same kind of rhetoric, untethered to any recognizable reality.

Her risible new video, with its ominous trope of a "gathering storm" is typical. No one except those who believe same-sex couples are entitled to no rights at all thinks that such melodrama is warranted. Same-sex couples with legal rights do not constitute a gathering storm - they are a spring shower.

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The Limits of Law

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In a unanimous ruling last week, the Iowa supreme court held, "Perhaps the ultimate disadvantage expressed in the testimony of the plaintiffs," challenging the state statute limiting marriage to one man and one woman, "is the inability to obtain for themselves and for their children the personal and public affirmation that accompanies marriage." While gay rights advocates are right to celebrate this landmark decision - a major victory given Iowa's place in the socially conservative American heartland - the court's sweeping claim here should give them pause.

Ever since same-sex marriage emerged on the national agenda, the most convincing point in its favor has been the argument that barring gays from marrying someone of the same gender violates the bedrock American constitutional principle of equality before the law. Equal Protection is not limited to the federal Constitution; this legal reasoning was paramount in bringing about pro-gay marriage decisions in Massachusetts, California, and Iowa, where supreme courts all ruled that statutes barring same-sex marriage violated state constitutional equal protection clauses. All of these courts recognized the discrimination inherent in preventing gay people from enjoying the same rights and privileges that the government bestows to heterosexuals.

Yet the Iowa court ruling, at least rhetorically, suggests another rationale for why gay marriage should be legalized: because without it, gay people are unable "to obtain for themselves and for their children the personal and public affirmation that accompanies marriage." In other words, without official government recognition of their romantic unions, gays cannot gain social acceptance. While it is an admirable aspiration on the part of the Iowa justices to correct this malady, it elides a distinction between what the law can and cannot accomplish.

In its decision, the court readily acknowledged the various legal abasements to which gays in Iowa are subjected, from the "inability to make many life and death decisions affecting their partner" to the "inability to share in their partners' state-provided health insurance, public-employee pension benefits, and many private-employer-provided benefits and protections." In addition to the bestowal of these benefits, the altering of public attitudes in a more "progressive" direction may be another positive side effect, but a court decision will not be the panacea for entrenched homophobia.

To think otherwise risks complacency. The vast amount of effort that has already been poured into passing hate-crimes and antidiscrimination statutes is evidence of the proclivity to assume that laws are enough to change popularly held attitudes. A person harboring so much ingrained homophobic animus that he would physically attack a gay person is unlikely to be persuaded from doing so because of a law imposing stiffer penalties on such assault. While an employment nondiscrimination ordinance banning sexual-orientation bias as cause for termination will no doubt protect some gays from being fired, it is not as if the existence of such a regulation will make homophobic employers more enlightened in their attitudes. Likewise, newly legal gay marriage in Iowa won't help the closeted teenager in Des Moines whose parents will throw him out of the house if he tells them he's gay. Alleviating these dire situations is far harder than passing a law or winning a strategic legal victory.

None of this should be construed as an argument against the Iowa court's decision, which I applaud. But, at the same time, I worry that by investing so much energy in winning court decisions and not working to win marriage equality through popularly elected legislatures, the gay rights movement is shunting aside the harder - but no less important - work of convincing the American people that there is nothing unhealthy, morally wrong, or threatening about homosexuality.

Social conservatives worry that court decisions like the ones in Massachusetts, California, and Iowa will lead to greater cultural acceptance of homosexuality, and in the end, they have a right to be anxious. As the Civil Rights Act of 1965 played a role in altering the way Americans think about race, the Iowa supreme court's decision will change the way Iowans view their fellow gay citizens, at least over time. But legal decisions written by a handful of lawyers form only a part of the struggle for the hearts and minds of the public. It wasn't lawyers and legislators who won the struggle for black equality, but rather the moral suasion, physical sacrifice, and humility of the everyday participants in the African-American civil rights movement that convinced Americans of the immorality and intolerability of the racial status quo.

Disputing the notion that marriage should remain heterosexuals-only because that's the way it's always been, the Iowa justices wrote that such reasoning can "allow discrimination to become acceptable as tradition and helps to explain how discrimination can exist for such a long time." The Iowa supreme court put a chink in the armor of the deeply ensconced antigay animus that bedevils so much of this country. Reveling in this victory, however, gays should not expect court decisions to be a substitute for the widespread social acceptance that we have sought for so long but have yet to achieve.

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New Kid on the Block

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Don't know if a new group called GOProud, subject of a nice Wall Street Journal "Mainstreet" column by William McGurn, will have staying power. But any additional effort to challenge the Democratic Party's string-pulling of LGBT political activism (which resulted last year in funneling gay dollars, staff resources and volunteer legwork to the Obama campaign, rather than to defeating the four successful anti-gay state initiatives) is certainly A-OK in my book.

More. You can learn more about GOProud at their website, where their mission is described as to "promote the power of individuals, limit government's reach, enable economic growth through free market principles, and strengthen America's position in the world."

It would be great to see them organize visible gay contingents at future "tea party" protests and otherwise build alliances with the libertarian right.

More on tea parties. Steve Chapman writes at reason.com:

The scale of the federal response to the crises has come as a frightening surprise to many Americans, who suspect the cure will be worse, and less transitory, than the disease.

And I suspect they're right.

Of course, the concerns of their liberal critics can't be ignored; after all, it is true that to the extent that there are leaders of these protests, many of them don't even have Ivy League degrees (if you can imagine). And worse, I've heard that among the protesters are many (and I'm not making this up), dangerous VETERANS!

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Rick Rolls (Stephanopoulos)

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Pastor Rick Warren wasn't able to appear on This Week this week. Like many people, I want him to engage in the debate over same-sex marriage, and hoped George Stephanopoulos would have asked him some pointed questions about his views on the subject.
But I was also prepared to be disappointed - not in Warren, but in Stephanopoulos.

Stephanopoulos, like Larry King and others, has shown he is more interested in the conventional gotcha school of journalism than in actually asking - and getting answers to - real questions. And like spectators at a monster truck rally, too many people love to revel in the demolition. That's why so many are mesmerized by the flap over Warren comparing homosexuality to incest and pedophilia. That is certainly what I would have expected Stephanopoulos to press Warren on.

But that's not a real question. For the record, here are the kinds of questions I think journalists - and lesbians and gay men - should be asking Warren - questions he should be answering:

(1) Do you acknowledge that other religions, some of them Christian, accept gay marriage, and find support for that conclusion in the Bible?

(2) I understand that you believe the Bible says marriage is only between one man and one woman; but the discussion we are having is not a Biblical or theological one; it is a civic one. Do you have non-theological reasons for imposing a secular rule that prohibits same-sex couples from having the same legal rights (irrespective of their religious beliefs, if any) granted by the state when heterosexual couples take those legal rights for granted?

(3) The equal protection clauses of both state and federal constitutions are in place to protect minorities from being subject to different rules than the majority applies to itself. Is it so important to treat homosexual couples differently that they should be exempted from legal equal protection?

(4) If same-sex couples are entitled to some equality for their relationships, would you support laws granting them similar rights, but not calling those relationships marriage? Why or why not?

(5) Would you accept openly same-sex couples into your congregation? Would this depend on whether they were married or not? Explain your reasoning.

Journalists (and, to be fair, their audiences) who focus on distractions like Warren's comments on incest and pedophilia (which he did make, and which he has since backed away from), or his statement that he had not campaigned in favor of Prop. 8 (after having made a video expressly telling people, at least three times, that they should vote for it) too easily allow religious leaders to avoid answering these questions. Religious leaders obviously want to have a discussion about religious belief because they will win that argument every time - no journalist can talk a pastor out of the belief that the Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman, if that is what the pastor believes.

Here, Warren and others have chosen to engage in the secular discussion outside of their church, and that is a good thing to my mind. But the secular discussion includes churches and religions that fully support same-sex marriage (and have signed on to legal briefs in courts from California to Vermont), churches and religions that oppose same-sex marriage, and churches and religions that remain neutral in the debate. What we want to know from Warren is which of these positions - in the secular debate - he thinks his church should take - and if he has any reasons for that which a non-adherent to his religious views could accept.

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What Vermont Means

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New York Post columnist Kyle Smith writes:

News stories about the Vermont decision implicitly recognize that this one really counts, by emphasizing the fact that this is the first state to approve gay marriage through a legislature rather than impose it from the bench.... Vermont has made the change the proper way, and it ought to be congratulated.

Those who chafe at the decision - and the passage of Prop. 8 in California, which Obama carried by 24 points, suggests that the opposition is hardly limited to Republicans - should reexamine their arguments.

Smith goes on to note that opponents of letting gays wed like to claim that same-sex marriage violates their religious freedom, which apparently is premised on living in a society where government consigns gay people to second-class status. (This video from the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is devoted to this point.) But as Smith remarks:

Christians are surrendering nothing. They remain free to disapprove of homosexuality.... They also remain free to move to a country that enforces religious views....

Conservatives who are in favor of more children being born into and raised by two-parent families, social mechanisms to limit promiscuity, decentralized political decision-making and the supremacy of lawmakers rather than judges in non-Constitutional matters have much to cheer in Vermont. Gay-marriage opponents should ask themselves whether their reasoning is something else in disguise.

Making a conservative, pro-family argument isn't going to sway all social conservatives, but it will eventually convince many who are not bigots, and who don't wish to see themselves as such.

And there's another lesson: domestic partnerships and/or civil unions can be stepping stones to full marriage equality, allowing states to grow comfortable with the notion. Those who argue that it must be full marriage equality now or nothing - no compromise! - have been proven wrong.

But that's not to say full equality doesn't remain the goal, and we should keep our eyes on the prize. With four states won (Iowa and Vermont joining Massachusetts and Connecticut) it's right to press congressional Democrats and the Obama administration to modify the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act to allow federal recognition of same-sex marriages in states where they exists - and to do so before the GOP retakes seats in the House and the Senate in 2010.

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Quitters Don’t Win, but Winners Quit

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Just in time for spring wedding season, gay marriage activists are celebrating a triumphant few weeks. Last Tuesday, the Vermont legislature effectively legalized same-sex unions in that state. Days earlier, the Iowa Supreme Court had ruled that a statute barring gay marriage was unconstitutional. And here in the nation's capital, the D.C. Council voted unanimously to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.

But amid all the history being made, one gay rights organization did something really historic: It announced that it would shut its doors at the end of the year, because its mission was complete.

Formed in 1999 to lobby for the right of gay couples to adopt children in Connecticut, Love Makes a Family was the lead organization advocating for same-sex marriage in that state. It successfully lobbied lawmakers to pass a civil unions bill in 2005, but fell short of achieving its ultimate goal until last October, when the state supreme court ruled that the Connecticut constitution endows same-sex couples with the right to marry.

"Mission accomplished" is one of the most difficult things to say when your organization depends on working toward a cause, but Love Makes a Family did it. And other gay groups may soon need to follow suit. If the gay community truly wants to achieve equality, it will have to overcome a victim mindset that is slowly becoming obsolete.

After the thrill of the October ruling in Connecticut, Love Makes a Family executive director Anne Stanback said that she and her staff took stock of where the organization stood: They conducted surveys, focus groups and interviews with supporters and donors. No one really knew where to go from there. "There was no clear consensus about what our mission should be," she says. So she and her colleagues decided to shift course, writing in an open letter released April 1: "We have accomplished our mission, and now we want to conclude our work on a high note." The organization's political action committee will continue to raise funds and support candidates, but as of Dec. 31, Love Makes a Family's lobbying and educational divisions will become inoperative.

Contrast the decision of Love Makes a Family with that of MassEquality, a Massachusetts organization that won equal marriage rights through a state supreme court decision in 2003. It fought off successive attempts to repeal that ruling, a battle that ended conclusively in 2007 when legislators blocked an effort to put a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the ballot. Massachusetts' gay citizens are now equal under state law in every way, which would seem to undermine the organization's eponymous raison d'etre. Yet MassEquality continues to operate and raises money that could be directed to gay rights organizations fighting more pressing battles in other parts of the country. Today, its agenda has less to do with supporting gay rights than it does with lobbying the state government to pour more money into pre-existing, already generously funded programs such as anti-bullying measures, senior services and others.

Once the goals of an organization with a specific mission are achieved, as Love Makes a Family's were last October, it should relish its victory, cease operations and move on. This is the sign of communal maturity. The continued operation of a gay rights organization in the state that was the first to institute marriage equality and that has the most progressive gay rights laws in the country reflects a sense of eternal victimhood.

Of course, gay rights are not just about the right to adopt children or the right to marry. There remain the ongoing campaigns to end the military's discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell" policy and to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would make it illegal to fire someone on the grounds of sexual orientation. But given the overwhelming support for these moves among younger Americans, these victories are not far off, and gay rights organizations should start facing the prospect that in the near future, their missions will be superfluous.

This is a realization that comes easier to younger gays like me (I'm 25) than to older ones. For people who grew up in a time when being open about one's homosexuality could result in being fired or thrown into prison, it's harder to move out of a mindset that sees the plight of gay people as one of perpetual struggle. This attitude is all the more pronounced in those who hold leadership positions in the gay rights movement, as their life's work depends upon the notion that we are always and everywhere oppressed.

It's in the culture of any institution to justify its existence. This is especially so with civil rights groups, which thrive on a sense of persecution, real or perceived. Take the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, for instance. GLAAD was established in the mid-1980s, when, as its Web site correctly states, "representations of lesbians and gay men tended to fall into one of two categories: defamatory or non-existent." The situation today, however, is dramatically improved, as gays have essentially won the fight over popular culture. Countless television shows and movies feature positive portrayals of gay characters, and it's a career faux pas for people in the entertainment industry to say anything that could be remotely construed as hostile to gays (see what happened to superagent Michael Ovitz when he alleged that a "gay mafia" ran Hollywood).

Rather than rest on its laurels, however, GLAAD raises millions of dollars from media companies and wealthy donors to subsidize a bloated national staff. Its work seems to consist of little more than issuing hypersensitive press releases complaining about purportedly anti-gay content in television commercials and throwing extravagant parties to honor straight celebrities for talking about their gay friends. Far from demonstrating the increasing political power of the gay community and the acceptance it has won, GLAAD is the epitome of neediness and vulnerability.

Gay civil rights groups have a tendency to minimize victories and exaggerate threats. When President Obama chose the Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, those groups complained loudly. Although Warren had campaigned in favor of Proposition 8, the California measure banning same-sex marriage, the decision to include him in a purely ceremonial position signaled no change in administration policy on gay rights. Nevertheless, his mere reading of a two-minute prayer drove gay organizations apoplectic. After all, bogeymen like Warren help with fundraising appeals.

Of course, the passage of Proposition 8 last fall highlights the fact that the struggle today remains real and that love only makes a family within clearly defined state borders. There is still important work to be done nationwide, and none of this is to downplay the daily efforts put forth by gay organizations in socially conservative parts of the country. But if the ultimate goal of the movement is to achieve equality for homosexuals, then those leading it should appropriately acknowledge progress along the way. That means accepting victory when it's achieved, rather than trumping up opposition at every opportunity.

When I asked Stanback how Connecticut's gay community reacted to Love Makes a Family's announcement, she said that the response had been overwhelmingly positive but was also characterized by sadness. "There was a sense of community," she says. "It was exciting to be a part of a movement."

It's understandable that a civil rights organization's decision to shut down would induce nostalgia for struggles gone by. But the underlying reason for the move represents a step forward. Arriving days before Iowa and Vermont legalized gay marriage, it points to the day, hard as it may be to imagine now, when civil rights groups will no longer be necessary.

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