IGF CultureWatch

What does it mean to be an American?

Some people seem to think it means wearing a flag pin. Or slapping a "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker on the family auto. Or singing "God Bless America." Or putting our hand over our hearts when the national anthem plays.

But these things have nothing to do with being an American at all. They are only rituals, expressions of blind patriotism. They are, I suppose, a sign of nominal respect, but really they are lip service. Anyone, after all, can wave the American flag, no matter what they believe.

No, to be an American is to cradle American values in our hearts - and the first of these is our bone-deep love of liberty.

We show this love not by proclaiming it or wearing it on our sleeve, but by acting in it's service - that is, by exercising our political rights. By voting, for example. Or running for office. Or speaking out to ensure that the state recognizes that we are all created with certain inalienable rights, and whether we are gay or straight, we should have access to them.

Not long ago, I visited Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell. The Liberty Bell was the abolitionist icon and it should be the gay icon, too. The bell hangs solidly now in a fragile glass room, overwhelming the visitors who solemnly stand beside it to have their pictures taken. It hasn't pealed since 1846, and yet the message it rings out is explosive.

"Proclaim liberty," it reads, "throughout all the land."

Liberty is a dangerous notion. It means that the poorest have as many rights as presidents; that someone doesn't need moral approval from the majority in order to be a full citizen. We are moved by the Liberty Bell, but it isn't because of its craftsmanship. No, we love the Liberty Bell because of the crack that divides the bronze without sundering it.

We love the bell for reminding us both that freedom is vulnerable and that divisions of opinion don't destroy it.

America is that bell. Solid, loud, divided in its unity. That very division, in fact, is what makes us American. Homogeneity is for dictatorships, theocracies, kingdoms. Diversity and division, not obedience and trust, is what ultimately gives strength and beauty to democracy.

Liberty means freedom, and we now understand that freedom is the ability to have full political agency, whether you're male or female, black or white, gay or straight. To be an American is to exercise this agency. To be a gay American is to remind others that there is nothing more American than fighting for our fundamental rights.

Unlike flag pins or car stickers, the Liberty Bell isn't a symbol about bowing to blind patriotism. It isn't about doing things the way they've always been done in order to convince someone (who?) that you're a good American.

The Liberty Bell shows us that to be a good American, in fact, is to keep liberty - not patriotism - in our hearts.

For gay citizens, this is especially important. No one needs to approve of us. Not the president, not the courts, not the legislature, not a majority of citizens. Approval is not what we're seeking. And the Liberty Bell isn't about that, isn't about moral approval. It's about the clear, deep tone of freedom.

What GLBTs are looking for is what is promised to every American - liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness.

I love how Independence Day follows Pride so closely each year. They seem to go together, Pride and Independence. America was won not because people bowed to the conservative majority - majorities are always conservative - but because they rebelled.

They didn't go along to get along. They took risks and fought for their rights as citizens and human beings.

This is what we do, too. Every day that LGBTs march for our rights, write our Congressional representatives, expose governmental hypocrisy on our blogs, talk to others about equality, is a day that we are taking a stand for liberty.

Pride shouldn't stop - doesn't stop - at the end of June. It continues into July, where the gay story becomes part of the American story.

Let's ring our bell. Fighting for equal rights is fighting for liberty. And in America, liberty rings for us all.

"What we have is a culture in which we no longer define ourselves according to our similarities but according to our differences. We are proud of our unique qualities and want everyone else to appreciate these traits, too. ... We also devalue commonality in favor of radical uniqueness. We are more interested in freedom of expression than in commitment to unity."

I ran across this quotation in evangelical authors George Barna and Mark Hatch's interesting book Boiling Point (Regal Books, 2001). The quotation might seem to have been more appropriate to my companion piece last week on "Diversity" except that diversity seems to be about different groupings. Barna and Hatch aren't talking about diversity. They are talking about individuality. Barna and Hatch see individuality as a cultural threat; I see it as an essential component of our culture.

When I was growing up, some people worried about the threat of "conformity"-of people taking their cue for what to believe and how to live from their friends and neighbors. People were said to be "other directed" rather than "inner directed." But at the same time, the whole goal of our educational system was to produce compliant, obedient citizens, thoroughly "adjusted"-that was a key term-young social units.

I will give just one example. When I was in eighth grade, our English class made a field trip to the nearby branch library. Then at our next class we broke into working groups and were told to sketch out a floor plan of the library and show where various types of books were. I was a frequent visitor to the library and knew it well. My group got the floor plan badly wrong, a fact I pointed out. I must have done so quite vociferously because after class the teacher called me up to her desk.

"Paul," she began. "The purpose of this exercise is to learn to work with groups of other people." "But they got the floor plan all wrong," I protested. "Go to the library. You'll see." "Paul," she replied, "that doesn't matter. The purpose is to learn how to work with other people." "But they're wrong," I insisted. "It doesn't matter," she repeated. Shaken, I had the feeling that I had just gained a valuable insight into the contemporary culture.

With that background, you can see why my suspicions are raised any time I hear calls for unity or solidarity or any similar goal. Calls for national unity, religious unity, racial unity, community unity often amount to nothing more than the demand that other people agree with the speaker and do things his (or her) way. It sounds like it means "Get with the program," "Follow the Party Line," suppress your doubts, don't express disagreement.

Each Pride season just as we hear ritualistic praise for "diversity" (referring to groups not individuals), we hear equally ritualistic calls for "unity." But it is never specified what we are supposed to be united about. Early in the gay movement, I think most people took the term to urge gays to work together for the elimination of prejudice and discrimination. In other words, they didn't want unity so much as they wanted to promote involvement and cooperation on specific tasks.

Nowadays, as the gay movement has achieved more of its goals and our opponents (I trust, I hope) are on the defensive, I am not so sure what unity is about, or how it is supposed to be demonstrated. We don't seem to be in agreement on goals: Most of us support gay marriage, whether we personally want to marry or not. But there are people who oppose gay marriage as, oh, you know, the usual claptrap about patriarchal institutions, as if that could apply to two men or two women.

But we also disagree about tactics. Many people, especially gay leaders, opposed California gay couples' filing suit to obtain marriage rights. Opponents said it was the wrong time, the wrong route, guaranteed to get slapped down by the court. And it may yet-by California voters this November. Opinion was legitimately divided. That's not a bad thing; it's a good thing.

We are not of one mind about whether drag queens are entertaining expressions of gay creativity or self-promoting parasites who serve to confirm heterosexuals' views of gay men as feminine. We are not unified on whether transgenders and transsexuals are part of the gay community-particularly if they are not homosexual.

Does the fact that we are all gay produce any real "unity"? Maybe on Gay Pride Day. But otherwise, I often think the only thing that unites us is the desire to have a good time.

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.

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.

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.