A Great Debate

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Can gay-marriage proponents and religious conservatives strike a bargain? David Blankenhorn and I proposed federal civil unions with a religious opt-out last month in a New York Times article, and recently we got a chance to try it out at a Brookings Institution panel.

Representatives of the Human Rights Campaign and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations didn't sign on the dotted line (not that they were expected to). But neither did they slam the door. And the give-and-take over the meaning of civil rights and the limits of compromise was fascinating. Listen to an audio podcast or read a transcript here.

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Mainline Protestants Accept Gays

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This just in* from Pew: 56 percent of mainline Protestants think homosexuality should be accepted. That's Episcopalians/Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians. And here's a pleasant surprise: 40 percent of Baptists.

To be sure, evangelical acceptance remains low, at 26 percent. But the days of the cobra-mongoose relationship between Christianity and homosexuality are ending faster than even many of us appreciate.

* Actually, it's 2007 data. What would the numbers look like today?

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We’re in the Dictionary!

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The website WorldNetDaily has discovered that Merriam-Webster has changed the definition of the word "marriage" to include same-sex couples. They've posted a mournful video at the site, ending with a warning for people to "WAKE UP!"

WND is a little late to the party, since this change took place in 2003 - and followed by three years a similar change by Houghton-Mifflin in 2000.

But better late than never.

This is obviously a crushing event for the Christianists. As the culture has been changing on gay marriage, their only refuge in the civil society was the dictionary. Their own religious arguments are persuasive to them, but citations to the Book of Hebrews or Matthew (included in a 1913 dictionary definition) don't go a long way to persuade the non-religious - or even many American religious believers. The most recent Field Poll in California found that 31% of Protestants, 45% of Catholics and 63% of believers in some other religion support full marriage rights for same-sex couples. That's why the Prop. 8 proponents relied so heavily on appeals to the "definition of marriage," and "the meaning of marriage" in their ballot arguments. Definitions are - well, they're defined. We know what they are - just go to the dictionary. They're not just citing their Bibles, they've got another big book on their side as well.

The problem is that dictionaries are not static. Language follows the culture, and words are as dynamic as the populations who use them.
More important, the meaning of words as they are actually used is not subject to popular votes - it is subject to actual usage.

Neither of these dictionary definitions overrides the most common meaning of "marriage" as the union of a man and a woman. That would be absurd, and it would be counter to common sense. But it is equally absurd for a dictionary to blind itself to an emerging, and well-understood change that is happening in the culture. Even those who oppose same-sex marriage cannot deny what it is they are fighting over: marriage between two people of the same sex.

As the right has been fighting over the legal definition of marriage, they have been giving greater prominence to the alternate understanding that so many people are now adopting. Under the revised rules of equality the right is demanding, gays must fight for a majority to achieve marital equality - and we're only inches away. But dictionary definitions don't need majorities. If a significant number of people are, in fact, using a word with a new meaning, they have an obligation to include that meaning on the list of other meanings the word has.

Despite the harrowing cries of the right, that is all gays are asking - not to displace the heterosexual understanding of marriage, but to be included in it as we are: people whose sexual orientation is not heterosexual. And by the very fact of fighting this battle, our opponents made sure we'd get into the dictionary.

Thanks.

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Tax Dollars for Tyrants

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I recently excerpted the HIV/AIDS-related items from the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2008 (online at www.glaa.org). The grim survey ranges from Russia (where Moscow officials undermine prevention efforts by accusing foreign HIV/AIDS organizations of encouraging pedophilia, prostitution and drug use) to Burma and Cambodia (where sex trafficking victims are at risk for HIV/AIDS as well as physical and mental abuse). In Africa, AIDS orphans from Kenya to Swaziland resort to prostitution for survival, while adults from Burundi to Malawi rape children out of a belief that sex with virgins will cleanse them of HIV. These heartbreaking practices occur even in South Africa despite its modern economy.

One program to combat the global AIDS pandemic is the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). It was reauthorized last year at $48 billion, which pays for a lot of effective prevention and treatment - at least to the extent that the funds are not being channeled to anti-science and anti-gay religious zealots.

James Kirchick of The New Republic wrote on March 10, "The problems with PEPFAR were inherent in the 2003 legislation establishing the program." For example, a third of PEPFAR prevention funds were reserved for pushing abstinence until marriage. Kirchick writes, "Many organizations combating HIV - whether groups that worked with prostitutes, gays, or intravenous drug users - have been either neglected or explicitly prohibited from receiving U.S. money, while evangelical Christian organizations have had little problem accessing funds. In this way, while PEPFAR distributed drugs to millions of people living with the disease, the program undermined the global fight against HIV transmission."

Charles Francis, a disillusioned former Bush appointee to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, seeks a course correction from the new president and Congress. He wrote to me last week about the need to reverse the Bush legacy that includes alliances with violent homophobes like Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa and born-again Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza. The latter's ruling party organized a March 6 demonstration in Bujumbura in which thousands of people demanded the criminalization of homosexuality.

"Today," Francis writes, "we see this wave growing dangerously across the continent, from Senegal, where AIDS activists are now imprisoned, to Nigeria, where lawmakers want to jail gay people merely for living together, to Uganda, where three Americans recently held a public seminar on the 'Homosexual Agenda.' It is time to put a 'hold' on PEPFAR until Congress can demand the transparency and the necessary reform for this program."

African despots regularly charge their foreign critics with neocolonialism, and accuse dissidents at home of collaborating with them. In truth, Western nations have been known to use their economic strength to recolonize by other means. But past abuses by others do not justify these rulers' present abuses, and there can hardly be a more incoherent basis for policymaking than using post-colonial guilt to justify subsidizing oppressive regimes. Instead, we should heed brave activists like Christian Rumu, vice chairman of the Burundian gay rights group ARDHO, who called the March 6 demonstration "pure propaganda crafted for the 2010 elections."

I know a nurse who was born in Burundi and who lectured there last year on HIV prevention. He also has family in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he nearly lost a nephew a few years ago when his family took the sick child to a traditional healer instead of a doctor. After tentatively diagnosing a form of meningitis over the phone, my friend angrily ordered his family to take the boy to a hospital immediately. He called ahead and discussed treatment with the doctor, as a result of which the boy soon returned to health.

Alas, many similar children have no relative with medical training to look out for them. American foreign aid can help remedy this, but not if it is funneled through religious fanatics who exploit underdeveloped populations' resistance to modern science for the purpose of spreading their own willful ignorance and prejudice.

We cannot prevent American fundamentalists from promoting their dogma overseas; and we have to deal with the reality that religious-affiliated groups provide a large portion of overall health services in many countries. But our government must stand squarely on the side of science; direct funds to underserved high-risk populations, especially men who have sex with men; and resist bankrolling ideologically-driven misinformation that makes things worse.

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Sex and Distortion

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Sometimes we gay writers do such a good job cutting down one another that we scarcely need our enemies.

Consider a recent column in Bay Windows, a New England GLBT newspaper, where Jeff Epperly identifies me as a "gay conservative" who's a "a bit touched in the head when it comes to sexual issues."

Epperly's column analyzes "the tendency among right-wingers, gay or straight, that the louder they complain about that which offends their sexual sensibilities, the greater the chance that they are getting freaky with those same sexual acts in their personal life."

Apparently I'm one of those freaky right-wingers.

I don't know Epperly personally, although Bay Windows was one of the first papers to run my work, and Epperly was editor at the time. (I have great respect for the publication.) On what basis does he diagnose my supposed sexual neurosis?

Oddly, he bases it on a column in which I, too, discuss conservatives' obsession with sex.

In that column, I point out our opponents' tendency to reduce our sexual intimacy to its bare mechanics. Since they find those mechanics weird, they label our sex-and by extension, us-as disgusting, unnatural, perverse.

My response was to point out that when we reduce it to bare mechanics, it's not just gay sex that's weird, but ALL sex. (There's a reason people call it "doing the nasty.") But it's silly to think about sex merely in terms of mechanics.

I illustrated by way of an e-mail exchange with a closeted gay British 15-year-old, whose parents went off on a tirade about how disgusting it was for a man to stick his penis up another man's bum. (With stunning insensitivity, Epperly describes the youth as "equally obsessed with the alleged grossness of homosexual sex.")

Epperly quotes from my response to the young man:

"In the abstract, of course it's weird (and from some perspectives, gross) to think of a man sticking his penis up another man's bum. But isn't all sex weird in the abstract? Sticking a penis in a vagina, which bleeds once a month? Sucking on a penis, something both straight women and gay men do? Pressing your mouth-which you use for eating-against another person's mouth, and touching tongues, and exchanging saliva (i.e. kissing)? Weird! Gross! (In the abstract, anyway.)"

Perhaps if I had stopped there, Epperly might have been justified in his conclusion: "I know this is simply a gay conservative's variation on the 'we're just like you' argument to heterosexuals, but somehow I think that 'our sex is as gross as yours' is not the most effective argument in the world. But it says a lot about the person delivering it."

But of course, I didn't stop there. Immediately thereafter-in a section that Epperly, tellingly, doesn't quote-I wrote:

"Sex makes no sense in the abstract. But then you have urges, and you eventually act on them, and what once seemed weird and gross becomes…wow.

"Our opponents recognize this in their own lives, but they can't envision it elsewhere. It's a profound failure of moral imagination-which is essential for empathy, which is at the foundation of the Golden Rule."

The Golden Rule is something Epperly might brush up on. Or the Principle of Charity.

The point of that column was that our opponents are using a double standard. For their sex, they see the deeper emotional picture. For our sex, they see only the mechanics. No wonder they find it weird.

Epperly seems so keen to peg me a "gay conservative" that he completely misses-or deliberately distorts-that point.

(Though perhaps I shouldn't write "keen to peg me," since that wording might just fuel his hypothesis about my sex obsession.)

I always find it funny when people label me a gay conservative. It's true that I write for the moderate-to-conservative Independent Gay Forum. And in some ways, given my work as "The Gay Moralist," the label is apt. But in many of the standard ways it's not.

I haven't voted Republican in two decades, except in a primary where the Democrat ran uncontested. I'm an avowed atheist. While I support marriage equality, I don't believe that marriage is for everyone, and in my column I've defended sexual pleasure for its own sake. I've also publicly supported affirmative action.

Of course, even if I were a hardcore gay conservative, I'd deserve a fair reading-just like anyone else.

As a columnist, I'm used to the occasional reader setting me up as a straw-man and then psychoanalyzing me on the basis of that straw-man. It comes with the territory.

But from a fellow writer-particularly one who shares my disdain for sexual small-mindedness and the distortions it engenders-I hope for better.

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Michael Steele in the Lion’s Den

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New GOP Party Chair Michael Steele says some interesting things-certainly not all bad-about his party and gays in his GQ interview. Some excerpts (the magazine left in the "ums" and used "gonna" for "going," which is not standard journalistic practice but serves to make Steele seem less articulate):

On gay marriage: "I have been, um, supportive of a lot of my friends who are gay in some of the core things that they believe are important to them....the ability to be able to share in the information of your partner, to have the ability to-particularly in times of crisis-to manage their affairs and to help them through that as others-you know, as family members or others-would be able to do. I just draw the line at the gay marriage....[F]rom my faith tradition and upbringing, I believe that marriage-that institution, the sanctity of it-is reserved for a man and a woman. That's just my view. And I'm not gonna jump up and down and beat people upside the head about it, and tell gays that they're wrong for wanting to aspire to that, and all of that craziness. That's why I believe that the states should have an opportunity to address that issue."

On a federal constitutional amendment: "I don't like mucking around with the Constitution.... I think that the states are the best laboratory, the best place for those decisions to be made, because they will then reflect the majority of the community in which the issue is raised. And that's exactly what a republic is all about."

On whether people choose to be gay, as the anti-gay right claims: "Oh, no. I don't think I've ever really subscribed to that view, that you can turn it on and off like a water tap. Um, you know, I think that there's a whole lot that goes into the makeup of an individual that, uh, you just can't simply say, oh, like, 'Tomorrow morning I'm gonna stop being gay.' It's like saying, 'Tomorrow morning I'm gonna stop being black.'"

Steele has made his share of missteps as he tries to move his party in a somewhat broader direction. He's been criticized by the right for his moderation on some issues (he has said he's personally anti-abortion but it should remain an indivdiual choice), and for his criticism of Rush Limbaugh's bombast (about which he was forced to recant), while attacked from the left (and mocked, of course, on Saturday Night Live) for being a black Republican. Still, the level of vitriol directed at him from left and right indicates he may be trying to do something positive, at least on the social issues front.

(For a contrary, far more negative assessment, see James Kirchick's "Rusted Steele." For its part, the Log Cabin Republicans welcomed Steele's appointment but chided him for saying his party would not support federal recognition of civil unions.)

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Rusted Steele

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Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, was supposed to be a breath of fresh air for the moribund Grand Old Party. Not only has the first African-American leader of the GOP put a more diverse face on an organization that consists largely of older white men, but more substantively, his moderate conservatism was promised to be the saving grace of a party in desperate need of reform. Steele had been a member of the Republican Liberty Council, a group of socially moderate Republicans founded by former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman that tried to make pro-choice and pro-gay politicos feel more comfortable in the party. Steele was also unafraid to criticize the excesses of the GOP; when he ran for Maryland senator in 2006 he joked that the "R" in Republican was akin to a "scarlet letter."

In his campaign to become party chair, Steele ran as a moderate. Not long after he won a contentious leadership election that necessitated six ballots, Steele acknowledged that his ascension presented an "important opportunity" to reach out to pro-choice and pro-gay voters. But since taking the helm of the RNC in January, Steele has proven himself thus far to be a disappointment to those hoping that he would move the party towards the center, especially on issues of concern to gay voters.

First, there was Steele's well-publicized row with conservative talk radio king Rush Limbaugh. Attempting to neutralize a coordinated Democratic strategy of painting Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party, Steele referred to Limbaugh as occasionally "incendiary" and "ugly" in an interview with CNN's D.L. Hughley. It didn't matter that this remark was made in passing, or, for that matter, that it was true (even Limbaugh's army of unreflective "dittoheads" cannot deny it). The increasingly shrinking conservative movement will brook no criticism of its loudmouth standard-bearer, and essentially proved the Democratic analysis correct by rushing to Limbaugh's defense and pressuring Steele to prostrate himself at the host's feet, which he did posthaste.

But a more dispiriting example of Steele's captivity to outdated social conservative ideology was a little-noticed remark he made in an exchange with another right-wing talk radio host, Mike Gallagher, about a week before his spat with Limbaugh. Asked by Gallagher if he favored civil unions for gay couples, Steele responded:

"No, no no. What would we do that for? What are you, crazy? No. Why would we backslide on a core, founding value of this country. I mean, this isn't something that you just kind of like, 'Oh, well, today I feel, you know, loosey-goosey on marriage.' I mean, this is a foundational principle of this country. It is a foundational principle of organized society. It isn't something that, you know, in America we decided, 'Let's make it between a man and a woman; oh, well, now let's change our mind and make it between anyone and anyone.' "

No.

Never mind the callous way in which he treated the issue - certainly, the mere question of whether or not committed gay couples should continue to be legally discriminated against deserves a more measured response than an inquiry into whether the person posing it should have his head examined - Steele's reply was firmly out of step with the American electorate. A succession of recently conducted polls have found that over 60% of Americans support either civil unions or full marriage rights for gay couples. (Even George W. Bush, who led the effort to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, came out in support of civil unions in 2004 and expressed disagreement with the GOP platform.) Most analysts of social trends agree that this figure will increase significantly over time as older Americans with more conservative views on homosexuality die, while younger and more tolerant Americans begin voting in higher proportions, and general attitudes on homosexuality liberalize across the board.

So it is not the conservatives urging their movement to moderate itself on the defining civil rights issue of the day who are "crazy." Put aside the debate about the desirability of gay marriage; antigay politics will soon become anachronistic and a surefire electoral loser. Some, like the reform-minded former Bush speechwriter David Frum, have realized this fact and called for a softer approach to social issues, particularly gay marriage (full disclosure: I'm a contributor to Frum's website, NewMajority.com). But those conservatives willing to question their party's position on gay rights have been viciously attacked, and there's little indication that their views are influencing a critical mass of the Republican Party leadership.

Last November, according to exit polling, 27% of self-identified gay voters chose McCain over Obama (the actual number of gays who voted GOP was probably far higher, given that many presumably did not out themselves to pollsters). In a dismal year for Republicans, gays were the only group whose support for the Republican nominee rose from its 2004 level. There was good reason for this increase considering the fact that McCain courageously opposed the FMA, was the first Republican presidential nominee to grant an interview with a gay news outlet, and seemed more amenable than his predecessors on other gay issues. Yet in exchange for this support, gays now see a Republican Party chairman who, while promising a bigger tent, has just shrunk it. The decline of the GOP as a national party continues apace.

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A Loud Silence on Adultery

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Some defenders of traditional marriage claim that gay marriage jeopardizes husbands and wives. It's as if when two Massachusetts men wed, they exchange 24-karat-gold crowbars, all the better to pry straight couples apart.

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has said that same-sex marriage "threatens my marriage. It threatens all marriages." Mixed-sex-matrimony guru Maggie Gallagher wrote last June 20, "If the word 'marriage' can be redefined as a civil rights imperative, why balk at lesser ideas like 'monogamy' or 'fidelity'?"

But as outspoken as these and other social conservatives are about Allen and Steve's clear and present danger to Adam and Eve, they have held their peace about an enterprise that profits from adultery.

AshleyMadison.com calls itself a "dating site specifically designed to help married people cheat on their spouses." Its slogan is "Life's short, have an affair." Its previous tag line was "When Monogamy Becomes Monotony." It boasts 3.5 million registered users, among whom some 400,000 active members each pay up to $249 quarterly.

"Sign up today and if you don't have an Affair to Remember," the website promises, "we'll give you your money back. Guaranteed." Participants post photographs and profiles and seek other husbands and wives itching for extra-marital copulation, "till death do us part" be damned.

"We made tens of millions of dollars" last year, company president Noel Biderman says from its Toronto base. "We are very profitable and successful."

Surely AshleyMadison.com has enough shame to conduct its shady business in the shadows. Wrong! AshleyMadison.com advertises on CNN, ESPN, NBC, and even the conservative-leaning Fox News Channel.

Its current TV ad features a lady in a restaurant whose monstrous dinner companion yaps into his cell phone, hushes her when she tries to talk, ogles another woman, and eventually says, "Happy anniversary, honey," before sauntering alone out the door. This disenchanted wife eyes a sympathetic gentleman on a barstool and smiles alluringly at him. Who knows what happens next?

"AshleyMadison.com," says the female announcer. "When divorce is not an option."

This woman clearly is dolorific. Her boorish husband deserves to have his cell phone pulverized with the chef's rolling pin.

If this ad discouraged spousal self-absorption, it would be a home run. Ditto if it promoted marriage counseling, or suggested that everyone exercise extreme caution before picking a spouse. But something completely different is for sale.

Even a business this depraved should remain free to operate. But it should be ridiculed, humiliated, and shunned. Viewers should ask TV networks that broadcast this website's ads if they are proud to share in the spoils of infidelity.

Social conservatives should stop theorizing about gay marriage's supposed danger to straight matrimony and instead denounce this insidious assault on that institution.

Even if same-sex marriage undermined conventional marriage, this would be by unintended consequence, not deliberate broadside. Straight-marriage advocates' obsession with gay marriage versus their quietude about AshleyMadison.com is like declaring a War on Toasters that might malfunction and ignite, but ignoring arsonists who toss lit flares around Malibu during a Santa Ana wind.

According to the Nexis database, key gay-marriage foes are mum about AshleyMadison.com.

Over the last six months, for example, Rick Santorum appeared in 22 stories that mention "gay marriage," but in zero citing AshleyMadison.com. Maggie Gallagher materialized in 41 gay-marriage stories and zero on AshleyMadison.com. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's numbers are 276-0, respectively. For Focus on the Family, the score is 389-0. The phrase "same-sex marriage" yielded 24 hits for Santorum, 52 for Gallagher, 256 for Romney, and 449 for Focus. All of the above were absent from the 67 Nexis-archived stories on AshleyMadison.com between September 5, 2008, and March 5, 2009.

Clearly, straight-marriage fans fret about what two men wearing wedding bands might do to a man and woman with rings on their fingers. Whether this concern is scientific or superstitious, surely they must acknowledge that seeing Bob and Steve together in a porch swing is trivial compared to Adam philandering with his new AshleyMadison.com adulteress as Eve waits at home, watches dinner grow cold, and wonders why on Earth he's so late.

Conversely, if Adam caught Eve cavorting on the kitchen counter with her new AshleyMadison.com buddy, that would not be a blow for marriage.

AshleyMadison.com is a genuine threat to traditional matrimony. That's where self-styled defenders of that institution should aim their fire.

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Do Married Gays Cause Single Moms?

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As part of an interesting exchange with Deroy Murdock, who wonders why social conservatives fuss so much more about gay marriage than about websites that openly facilitate adultery, Maggie Gallagher sez:

...in the last five years, unmarried childearing has resumed its inexorable rise. 38 percent of all babies are born out of wedlock, which implies probably more than half of women who become mothers for the first time do so while not married. Is it mere coincidence that this resurgence in illegitimacy happened during the five years in which gay marriage has become (not thanks to me or my choice) the most prominent marriage issue in America - and the one marriage idea endorsed by the tastemakers to the young in particular?

From the National Marriage Project's latest (February 2009) "State of Our Unions" report, here's the trend in out-of-wedlock childbearing, 1960-2006.

Can you spot the effect of same-sex marriage?

Incidentally, "State of Our Unions" is an invaluable annual publication, which deserves more attention. If you look through the charts linked above, you'll find a mixed picture where the health of marriage is concerned. One trend, however, stands out as really dramatic since 2000, and that's the huge rise in heterosexual cohabitation.

As Figure 13 shows, the number of unmarried cohabiting opposite-sex couples living with one or more children has increased 60 percent since 2000 (!). Also up, though only mildly, is the percentage of high-school seniors saying that having a child without being married is "experimenting with a worthwhile lifestyle or not affecting anyone else" (Figure 17).

The two best ways I can think of to encourage cohabitation's emergence as the cultural equal of marriage are to (1) tarnish marriage as discriminatory in the minds of the young, which is what excluding gay couples from marriage is doing, and (2) turn same-sex couples who have kids into walking advertisements for out-of-wedlock parenthood, which is what excluding gay parents from marriage is doing.

More... A foretaste of what will happen if marriage is defined as that form of union which excludes gays: in California, two college students are launching an initiative effort to end marriage discrimination by ending civil marriage, replacing it with civil partnerships for all couples.

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The Pretenders

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The Long Beach Press Telegram reports that the closet is still alive.

OK, that's not the headline, but clearly, as Mickey Kaus says, it's the undernews. If you're a married same-sex couple, the 2010 Census will put its hands over its face and pretend you're not there. To be fair, we've made a little progress since 1950; you can at least tell the world you're partners, though you'll have to check the "unmarried partners" box.

But there is still this one wall of the closet that hasn't yet toppled. We kicked down the closet door in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and then public support helped dismantle most of what was left.

I suppose that remaining wall gives some people comfort. While the rest of us are living our lives out in the world, there are still those who cower behind that standing panel, pretending there's a closet on the other side. I'm tempted to say, Mr. Bush, tear down this wall. Mr. Benedict, too, and Mr. Perkins and - come to think of it, an awful lot of Misters, including the inventor of the modern rule the Census is relying on, Mr. Clinton.

But there's really no need to say anything. There's no closet left for us to go back into. The recent California Field Poll shows that only about 19% of Californians would vote for same-sex couples to have no rights under the law - a number that's fallen from its previous low of 27% back in 2006. The 48% who say they would vote to give us full marriage rights isn't a majority, but full marriage is now within reach. Homosexuality is an issue lesbians and gay men stopped pretending about a long time ago, and the majority of heterosexuals now realize the pretending was getting tiresome. The federal government can continue its fictionalizing, but isn't that the sort of thing we wanted to abandon when we elected Obama president?

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