No Partisan Passes from Gill Guys

This Advocate article looks at efforts by the nonpartisan Gill Action Fund to elect fair-minded (read gay-friendly) officials beginning at the lowest levels and then supporting them throughout their careers, a strategy that has been used successfully by the religious right and, more generally, by the conservative GOPAC. Interestingly, the two leaders of this effort are Patrick Guerriero, a former leader of the Log Cabin Republicans, and Bill Smith, a former employee of Karl Rove.

These guys seem willing to play hardball for providing select candidates with financial support. That's a refreshing change from gay Democrats, whether at the Human Rights Campaign or elsewhere, and gay Republicans, who are primarily party activists looking to elect their party's candidates, and then expand their niche in the party as a reward for their service. That's fair enough (except when HRC pretends to be nonpartisan, when it clearly no longer is). But I'm glad to see efforts such as this one that don't put partisanship first.

Gays Remain Cheap Date for Obama

From The Advocate: "Sen. Obama reminded us this week that he believes marriage is between a man and a woman, something LGBT people might have easily forgotten over the course of the primary." Meanwhile, thousands of gay couples wed across California. And Obama still hasn't (that I could find) spoken out against the California anti-gay marriage amendment, despite the swooning endorsements and piles of cash he's receiving from smitten LGBT activists and their followers.

But, as former Reason magazine editor Virginia Postrel observed on her Dynamist blog, "If Obama comes out forcefully against the amendment-as he should-his African-American base in California and elsewhere won't like it."

More. Postrel also notes that "Blacks are overwhelmingly opposed to gay marriage and supportive of the [California] initiative, so much so that gay marriage supporters are essentially writing them off...," and that if, as widely expected, Obama turns out a hugh African-American vote in the Golden State, it will help pass the anti-gay marriage amendment. That's a point I've also made.

Furthermore. On June 25, Andrew Sullivan takes exception and says I'm wrong about Obama's position on the California amendment. But I think reader "avee" has hit the nail on the head about what's behind the confusion. He writes:

One or more commenters claim that Obama has spoken out against the amendment; neither blogger Steve nor I can find any such statement.

[Obama] has said that marriage is only between a man and a woman, and that state's should decide. He has also suggested that he doesn't have a problem with what's happening in CA. That double-talk does not amount to speaking out against the amendment....

UPDATE. On July 1, Obama finally issued a statement opposing the California anti-gay marriage amendment. Good. Now let's see how enthusiastically he speaks out against it (if at all) while on the campaign trail.

And yes, McCain is backing the admendment. Bad boy. But he's not getting all the campaign support, including voter registration/mobilization and mass solicitation of gay donations, being orchestrated by HRC and friends, is he? That's why Obama is being held to a higher standard, and why his long delay in coming out against the amendment was not acceptable.

Diversity…or Divergence?

We often hear from gay leaders of the diversity of the gay (or GLBT, or LGBTQ, etc.) community. Each June we have Pride Parade slogans like "Celebrate Diversity," or "Unity in Diversity" (or maybe it's the other way around). But no one ever explains exactly what our diversity consists in, nor why diversity is a good thing or why we should celebrate it, nor do they explain how this diversity can be forged into some sort of unity, nor what kind of unity or for what.

I suspect that our diversity, like our unity, is merely a linguistic construct, designed to mean anything people want it to. No doubt each of us is different from every other gay person. But celebrating a fact like that is like a slogan to "Celebrate Gravity." Nor are we any more diverse than the rest of America; we're just part of America's own diversity.

There is a fairly sophisticated philosophical argument for diversity connected with the (Karl) Popperian notion that "all life is problem solving." At its simplest, the argument is that the more perspectives you have on a problem, the better chance you have to discover solutions as problems come along. But I don't hear anything like that from gay spokespersons. I hear the claim that the fact of diversity is a good thing in itself.

Think for a moment of the ways in which we are different from one another, or, if you like, of the constituent groups in our community. We differ by sex, race, ethnicity, sexual tastes, age, and economic level. As more people have come out and our community has grown larger these various groups have become large enough for people to find ample stimulus and friendship within their own groups. Old-time gay bars in small towns were home to men and women, drags and leather men, and different races. So you would think that there is a centrifugal tendency in the community resulting from its growth.

But some of these differences are lessening. Once Latinos and other immigrants learn English, ethnicity has a fading significance except as an additional cultural heritage. Race, I think, is slowly fading as a differentiator. As "leather" diversifies, "leathermen" seem to be feeling less need for separate space. So there are some centripetal (if not exactly unifying) forces at work. On the other hand, as gays who came out when young live into their 60s and 70s, age may become an increasing differentiator. That is not clear yet.

One thing that helps overcome these various divisions is the fact of sexual attraction. That can exist on the basis of physical attractiveness (not the constituent group of the other person) but also on the appeal of differentness or exoticism. And in both cases, the appeal no doubt consists to some degree of the cultural meaning attached to the qualities of the other person. That is too individual to generalize about.

But gay men and lesbians do not have sexual attraction to draw them to one another. Or put playfully, all they have in common is their lack of (sexual) interest in each other. That's not quite true. They continue to work together, as they have since the beginning of the movement, for common political goals: marriage, military access, adoption and child custody rights. But as our political goals are gradually achieved there will be less reason to work together and get to know each other well enough to become friends, although there will continue to be links at our various social service agencies.

Within the GLBT acronym, the whole status of bisexuals is uncertain. Bisexuality seems far more common among women than men. No doubt there are a few lifelong bisexual men (Kinsey 2, 3, 4)-there are a few of everything-but they are rare. According to The New York Times, a recent research study found that "men who called themselves bisexuals were significantly more aroused by one gender, usually by men."

According to the same article, "heterosexual women physically don't seem to differentiate between genders in their sexual responses." As some women put it, they are attracted more to the person rather than the person's specific sex. Hence the ease of "bisexual chic"-among women, but not men. Consider too the women who remain with their partners even after the partner has gone through sexual reassignment surgery. Whereas if a man's wife became a transsexual man... ?

Market research firms count bisexual in a long term relationship with a person of the same sex as a member of the gay community, but not if they are in one with the opposite sex. We could also rate them on their degree of commitment to or identification with the gay community. Some may feel such a commitment, others may not. So bisexuals may or may not be members of our community.

Those Irresponsible Heteros

We just can't trust them with marriage.

My Wall Street Journal article making the case for gay marriage comes with rotating "sponsored links." So guess who's advertising? Along with "See Today's Mortgage Rates" and "AARP Auto Insurance" we have...

* Divorce Advice and Tips, from www.divorce360.com* Easy Online Divorce $299, from www.3stepdivorce.com

Why is heterosexual marriage even legal?

Gay Marriage Is Good for America

By order of its state Supreme Court, California began legally marrying same-sex couples this week. The first to be wed in San Francisco were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, pioneering gay-rights activists who have been a couple for more than 50 years.

More ceremonies will follow, at least until November, when gay marriage will go before California's voters. They should choose to keep it. To understand why, imagine your life without marriage. Meaning, not merely your life if you didn't happen to get married. What I am asking you to imagine is life without even the possibility of marriage.

Re-enter your childhood, but imagine your first crush, first kiss, first date and first sexual encounter, all bereft of any hope of marriage as a destination for your feelings. Re-enter your first serious relationship, but think about it knowing that marrying the person is out of the question.

Imagine that in the law's eyes you and your soul mate will never be more than acquaintances. And now add even more strangeness. Imagine coming of age into a whole community, a whole culture, without marriage and the bonds of mutuality and kinship that go with it.

What is this weird world like? It has more sex and less commitment than a world with marriage. It is a world of fragile families living on the shadowy outskirts of the law; a world marked by heightened fear of loneliness or abandonment in crisis or old age; a world in some respects not even civilized, because marriage is the foundation of civilization.

This was the world I grew up in. The AIDS quilt is its monument.

Few heterosexuals can imagine living in such an upside-down world, where love separates you from marriage instead of connecting you with it. Many don't bother to try. Instead, they say same-sex couples can get the equivalent of a marriage by going to a lawyer and drawing up paperwork - as if heterosexual couples would settle for anything of the sort.

Even a moment's reflection shows the fatuousness of "Let them eat contracts." No private transaction excuses you from testifying in court against your partner, or entitles you to Social Security survivor benefits, or authorizes joint tax filing, or secures U.S. residency for your partner if he or she is a foreigner. I could go on and on.

Marriage, remember, is not just a contract between two people. It is a contract that two people make, as a couple, with their community - which is why there is always a witness. Two people can't go into a room by themselves and come out legally married. The partners agree to take care of each other so the community doesn't have to. In exchange, the community deems them a family, binding them to each other and to society with a host of legal and social ties.

This is a fantastically fruitful bargain. Marriage makes you, on average, healthier, happier and wealthier. If you are a couple raising kids, marrying is likely to make them healthier, happier and wealthier, too. Marriage is our first and best line of defense against financial, medical and emotional meltdown. It provides domesticity and a safe harbor for sex. It stabilizes communities by formalizing responsibilities and creating kin networks. And its absence can be calamitous, whether in inner cities or gay ghettos.

In 2008, denying gay Americans the opportunity to marry is not only inhumane, it is unsustainable. History has turned a corner: Gay couples - including gay parents - live openly and for the most part comfortably in mainstream life. This will not change, ever.

Because parents want happy children, communities want responsible neighbors, employers want productive workers, and governments want smaller welfare caseloads, society has a powerful interest in recognizing and supporting same-sex couples. It will either fold them into marriage or create alternatives to marriage, such as publicly recognized and subsidized cohabitation. Conservatives often say same-sex marriage should be prohibited because it does not exemplify the ideal form of family. They should consider how much less ideal an example gay couples will set by building families and raising children out of wedlock.

Nowadays, even opponents of same-sex marriage generally concede it would be good for gay people. What they worry about are the possible secondary effects it could have as it ramifies through law and society. What if gay marriage becomes a vehicle for polygamists who want to marry multiple partners, egalitarians who want to radically rewrite family law, or secularists who want to suppress religious objections to homosexuality?

Space doesn't permit me to treat those and other objections in detail, beyond noting that same-sex marriage no more leads logically to polygamy than giving women one vote leads to giving men two; that gay marriage requires only few and modest changes to existing family law; and that the Constitution provides robust protections for religious freedom.

I'll also note, in passing, that these arguments conscript homosexuals into marriagelessness in order to stop heterosexuals from making bad decisions, a deal to which we gay folks say, "Thanks, but no thanks." We wonder how many heterosexuals would give up their own marriage, or for that matter their own divorce, to discourage other people from making poor policy choices. Any volunteers?

Honest advocacy requires acknowledging that same-sex marriage is a significant social change and, as such, is not risk-free. I believe the risks are modest, manageable, and likely to be outweighed by the benefits. Still, it's wise to guard against unintended consequences by trying gay marriage in one or two states and seeing what happens, which is exactly what the country is doing.

By the same token, however, honest opposition requires acknowledging that there are risks and unforeseen consequences on both sides of the equation. Some of the unforeseen consequences of allowing same-sex marriage will be good, not bad. And barring gay marriage is risky in its own right.

America needs more marriages, not fewer, and the best way to encourage marriage is to encourage marriage, which is what society does by bringing gay couples inside the tent. A good way to discourage marriage, on the other hand, is to tarnish it as discriminatory in the minds of millions of young Americans. Conservatives who object to redefining marriage risk redefining it themselves, as a civil-rights violation.

There are two ways to see the legal marriage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. One is as the start of something radical: an experiment that jeopardizes millennia of accumulated social patrimony. The other is as the end of something radical: an experiment in which gay people were told that they could have all the sex and love they could find, but they could not even think about marriage. If I take the second view, it is on the conservative - in fact, traditional - grounds that gay souls and straight society are healthiest when sex, love and marriage all walk in step.

California’s High-Stakes Gamble

Will this summer of love lead to the winter of our discontent?

The finale to the California Supreme Court's decision recognizing a right to gay marriage isn't yet written. This November, California voters will decide whether to amend the state constitution by adding this language to it: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

They will decide whether the recent state supreme court decision is remembered mainly as a historic victory that hastened equality under the law or as an act of judicial arrogance and impatience that inflamed voters and stopped or even reversed years of democratic progress toward the recognition of gay relationships.

One way or another, Californians were going to have to vote on gay marriage no matter what the court did. The court held that voters had already banned gay marriages performed both inside and outside the state. In California, an initiative-passed statute could only be repealed by another initiative. However laudable the state legislature's intentions in twice passing gay-marriage bills, such marriages could not have become legal without a vote of the people.

Moreover, it's also clear that whatever the state supreme court decided, the proposed amendment was going to be on the ballot in November anyway. The signatures necessary to put the amendment on the ballot were already gathered by the time the court acted.

In terms of what happens in November, therefore, the main effect of the court's decision has been to change the context in which the vote will occur. By judicial decree, Californians will see thousands of gay couples actually getting married for almost five months before they vote. Those marriages will be real, not hypothetical.

The question is, what effect will this reality have on voters? On the one hand, whatever they think of gay marriage, some voters may feel that it would be unfair to strip existing married couples of their rights. Voters may also be reassured by seeing that nothing bad happens when gay couples wed.

On the other hand, seeing gay couples actually marry may anger some voters. The sight of two men or two women kissing, no matter how joyous the occasion to those involved, is still shocking to a lot of people. They may vote "yes" as a way to stave off what they see as growing decadence and immorality. Five months just isn't a lot of time to normalize what people have spent their entire lives believing is abnormal.

Other voters will be angry at what they see as judicial activism and vote "yes" as a way to rebuke the courts.

It's impossible to predict now what the net political effect of all these gay nuptials will be. But it is possible to say what the stakes are.

If Californians reject the amendment, it will be the first time voters anywhere in the world will have approved gay marriage. They will have done so where the issue is squarely presented. They will have done so in a state inhabited by almost 40 million people, a state whose influence on the nation's culture and law is even larger than its share of the population. Vermont could be ignored. Massachusetts could be legally quarantined. But California can be neither disregarded nor isolated.

In future years, gay couples from across the country will be able to go to California - not to some foreign country - to have their relationships sanctioned. This alone will put enormous pressure on other states to move ahead and to do so more quickly than they otherwise would have. The federal government, too, will face increased political pressure to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed in a state.

We'll have an ongoing experiment that's larger and more significant than any other to prove that gay marriage makes a lot of families happier and causes nobody any harm. The impact will be huge.

That's one possible outcome. Here's another.

If the amendment passes, the result will set back the gay-marriage movement in the state by many years, perhaps a decade or more. While the amendment would be challenged as unconstitutional, such a challenge would face dim prospects. Anti-gay marriage amendments have now passed in 27 states and not one them has been held unconstitutional.

The amendment would be the final word on gay marriage in California - that is, until the voters themselves, in a future referendum, decide to repeal it. In the meantime, the California Supreme Court could not come to the rescue. The state legislature would be powerless to undo the amendment. The governor would be impotent to help.

And getting California voters to reverse their decision in some future election would not be easy. It would require a massive and costly effort to gather enough valid signatures from voters in the state to get the issue put back on the ballot. Next, there would be the enormous task of persuading voters to reverse themselves. Many of them, suffering from initiative fatigue, will vote against repeal simply on the ground that, "We've already voted on this."

If passed in November, I think the amendment would eventually be repealed. But that "eventually" could be a very long time indeed.

The stakes for the cause of gay marriage are higher than they have ever been. We are headed for a momentous battle in a full-scale culture war on the most strategic terrain in the country.

Patience, Please

Let's say you and your partner live in D.C. and are thinking of trading in your domestic partnership for a California wedding. Your heart says: Marry while you can. If it's good enough for Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, it's good enough for you.

If you've done your homework, your head might say: But you'll have trouble getting a divorce if it doesn't work out, because the state has a residency requirement for that; and California is a community property state. Besides, there is no telling when your marriage will be recognized back home, where the city's congressional overlords are bipartisan in their opposition to marriage equality.

But you're in love, and there's been enough waiting. Del and Phyllis have waited more than fifty years. Many couples arranging trips to the coast this summer are in longstanding, well-tested relationships. When you marry, your love is its own authority, your mutual commitment no one else's to give. If you have that with someone, you are already married in the truest sense of the word. What you seek in California is to make it legal.

And there's the rub. How will you get your marriage recognized in D.C.? If Mayor Adrian Fenty and his attorney general are not ready to defy Congress, will you go to court? D.C. judges are appointed by the president, not the mayor, and D.C. courts ruled against same-sex marriage in the 1990s.

In a recent interview, one reporter essentially asked Fenty why the city did not act now based on optimistic predictions about the November elections. Fenty wisely avoided putting the cart before the horse.

Last week, a coalition of leading marriage equality advocates including Lambda Legal, Freedom to Marry, ACLU, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders and the Equality Federation said in a joint statement, "Pushing the federal government before we have a critical mass of states recognizing same-sex relationships or suing in states where the courts aren't ready is likely to get us bad rulings. Bad rulings will make it much more difficult for us to win marriage, and will certainly make it take much longer."

Same-sex couples have already lost cases in Arizona, Indiana, Washington State, New York, and Maryland. In 2005, a gay couple provoked threats from Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) by trying to get their Massachusetts marriage recognized in D.C. As I said at the time, taking a damn-the-consequences approach is the political equivalent of sailing down the Potomac on a flaming barge. It would be one thing if such decisions affected only the couples making them, but those who press ill-advised cases are taking the rest of us with them.

Enhancements to D.C's domestic partnership law already give registered partners nearly all the legal protections of marriage that a state can grant. We are blocked at the federal level by the Defense of Marriage Act. Even Del and Phyllis will get none of the federal benefits of marriage such as joint tax filing or Social Security.

Still, it will not do to say, as some do, "What's in a word?" The answer is: Everything. In New Jersey, a special commission reported in February that civil unions create a "second-class status." To cite one example, self-insured companies are regulated by federal, rather than state, law, and many refuse to provide health insurance to civilly-unionized partners. By the way, isn't it awkward talking about civil unions? Marriage requires no explanation, and thus has a built-in advantage over any alternative.

It is precisely because the fight for marriage equality is so important that we should wage it smartly and responsibly, which means working together. As last week's joint statement said, "We need to choose the courts and legislatures where we have the best chance of winning." In the meantime, all of us should be telling our stories and making our case to help move public opinion and lay the groundwork for future victories.

Until we get a federal version of the California ruling, married same-sex couples traveling from state to state will be in a legal no-man's-land. It is a profound injustice that will take more than rash actions to defeat. Let's stop demanding shortcuts and cooperate in the slow and steady work of making real and lasting change. Right now we have an initiative to defeat in California, to preserve the victory there.

Gay White Racism Strikes Again

Not all LGBT Americans are celebrating the newly gained freedom to marry in California, it seems. Writing over at The Advocte, IGF contributing author James Kirchick takes aim at a particularly insipid example of politically correct victimization posturing, the claim that "racist" white gays are forcing marriage on same-gender loving African Americans.

Gay Rights v. Religious Liberty? Pt. II

I'd like to add to what Jonathan has written below, on allowing religious people "conscientious-objector status" when it comes to requiring actions that affirm the equality of same-sex unions.

Almost all gay people, I'd say, want to be treated equally by the government, with the same rights and responsibilities as all citizens. That includes the right to marry (even if they choose not to marrry) and, for most, the right to serve in the military (even if they would choose not to do so).

Some gay people, however, don't merely want equal treatment by the state. They want to use the state against those who, based on deeply felt religious belief, do not want to offer their services to same-sex marriage or civil union ceremonies, as Jonathan describes below.

That's called progressivism, but others would say it's engaging in a legal vendetta against those who hold religious convictions that run counter to the principles of gay equality.

Another example that has garnered much publicity is from Canada, where an anti-gay pastor is appealing his conviction for writing a letter to a local paper that was found to defame gay people (who were compared to pedophiles and drug dealers), and thus to have contributed to a climate that fosters anti-gay violence.

The U.S. religious right is having a field day with this action in Alberta, charging that it's a reason to oppose measures such as the proposed federal Employee Non-Discrimination Act. And that, in turn, has led some supporters of gay nondiscrimination to defend the Alberta ruling, holding that speech that incites ill will should be banned.

But that is indeed a slippery slope, and one that runs counter to the right to express unpopular, and indeed ugly, opinions - a principle once defended by liberals.

More. Dale Carpenter, writing over at The Volokh Conspiracy, shares his thoughts on religious liberty and same-sex marriage. Excerpt:

Religious freedom is a first and founding principle of this country. I think religious accommodation to private persons and organizations should be generously provided, even where not required by the Constitution. At the very least, accommodation should be made where it can be offered without harming the protected class. For that reason, I think an exemption should have been offered in several of the cases cited in the NPR report....

While I'd be generous about accommodating the religious objections of private persons, I am very wary of introducing a system of exemption for public officers serving the public with taxpayers' money.

Gay Rights v. Religious Liberty?

Today NPR had an interesting, and ominous, story on how antidiscrimination law is (so far) trumping religious objections to gay marriage. For instance, when a Methodist organization in New Jersey refused to let its property be used for a lesbian wedding, a civil-rights commission revoked a tax break for the site. Next stop: state court.

I hope the Methodists win, though better still if this complaint had never been brought. Gay-rights advocates will be badly burned politically-and the Madisonian in me thinks we'll deserve to be burned-if we use antidiscrimination law as a bulldozer against attempts by religious people to disassociate themselves from same-sex marriage. "It's the law, get used to it" is an unwise and insensitive approach. We can do 95% of what we want to do while letting religious people maintain conscientious-objector status. The other 5% percent is not worth the contention and fury it will cause.

As for using the law to force Christian photographers to shoot gay weddings (also covered in the NPR piece)-James Madison must be spinning in his grave. Freedom of religious conscience is the founding American freedom. For Pete's sake, live and let live.