IGF CultureWatch

It is admirable that Gov. Spitzer has once again declared his support for gay marriage, stating in a legislative memo released last week that legalizing gay unions would "only strengthen New York's families."

He's right on the merits. But here's how much political capital Spitzer should spend fighting for same-sex marriage: Zero.

I say this not as a disinterested observer, but as a gay man who would like to get married someday.

The governor has plenty of other vital issues on his plate - from cleaning up Albany to reviving the upstate economy. And even if he didn't, going to the barricades for gay marriage will probably hurt, not help, gay couples in the long run.

Sometimes politics gets in the way of idealism. And no matter how just the cause, all the facts in this case are arrayed against those who claim that now is the right time to ram a gay-marriage bill through the state Legislature.

First, there is just no way a gay marriage bill would pass. Not only do a substantial number of Assembly Democrats oppose the idea, but a series of statewide polls have found that a majority of New Yorkers do as well, with opposition in some Assembly districts running as high as 90 percent. Opposition increases in the Republican-controlled state Senate, which has already made clear its intention to kill any such bill.

Contrary to gay activists' suggestions, bigotry isn't what motivates all gay marriage opponents. Many are simply decent people who are just a little uneasy about redefining a central social institution. I think they're wrong - but we cannot win the argument by strong-arming them.

Just look at what happened in Massachusetts. In 2004, full same-sex marriage rights became legal in the Commonwealth via judicial fiat. That resulted in a huge national backlash. In the ensuing three years, most states have passed constitutional amendments banning not only gay marriage but in some instances other legal arrangements protecting gay couples. In this sense, gays in these more conservative states are paying the price for the full marriage rights that gays in Massachusetts now enjoy.

If Spitzer and his allies in the Assembly push forward with a gay marriage bill, will New York see a campaign for a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage? Most gays might scoff at the notion of such an amendment ever passing in this supposedly liberal bastion - but with polls indicating that a majority of New Yorkers oppose gay marriage, why take the risk when the chances of winning are zip and the chances of losing, and losing hard, are better than negligible?

For now, Spitzer's time and energy would be far better spent fighting a battle that can be won: getting meaningful civil unions for New York's gay couples. This would extend all the same critical rights to gays without risking the potential damage of an overreaching marriage bill. Let us not allow the perfect union to be the enemy of a good match.

That the governor has been so consistent and outspoken in his support for gay marriage is no small thing. In so doing, he is starting to make it politically acceptable for mainstream Democrats with national political aspirations to voice their support for marriage equality.

He is ahead of his time. But that's exactly the point.

Marriage is a conservative social institution. The best argument for gay marriage is rooted in a conservative idea that marriage itself is good because it is stabilizing.

There are, however, academics and political activists who support gay marriage for radical reasons: they hope it will destabilize many of the traditional sexual, relational, and familial values associated with marriage. For example, the late Professor Ellen Willis of NYU argued that gay marriage might "introduce an implicit revolt against the institution [of marriage] into its very heart, further promoting the democratization and secularization of personal and sexual life."

Opponents of gay marriage love to quote these pro-SSM radicals. In his new book, The Future of Marriage, David Blankenhorn writes that "people who have devoted much of their professional lives to attacking marriage as an institution almost always favor gay marriage." They support gay marriage, he observes, "precisely in the hope of dethroning once and for all the traditional 'conjugal institution.'"

Pro-SSM radicals are useful to opponents of gay marriage because what they say frightens people. Identifying some tangible harm from gay marriage has been the elusive Holy Grail of the anti-gay marriage movement. Now they can say, in effect, "See, even supporters of gay marriage admit they're destroying marriage with this reform. We've exposed their real agenda."

However, there are multiple problems with using pro-SSM radicals to show gay marriage will harm marriage.

First, pro-SSM radicals are surely a small minority of those supporting gay marriage, though they are over-represented in the op-eds of gay newspapers and in universities. I doubt most gay-marriage supporters have any desire to fight for access to a "dethroned" institution.

In fact, supporting gay marriage does not require one to be anti-marriage. One could both support gay marriage and believe that (1) marriage is not an outdated institution, (2) it is generally better for a committed couple to get married than to stay unmarried, (3) adultery should be discouraged, (4) it is better on average for children to be raised by two parents than by one, and within marriage than without, (5) divorce should be harder to obtain, and so on.

Second, a policy view is not necessarily bad because some of the people who support it also support bad things and see all these bad things as part of a grand project to do bad. Some opponents of gay marriage also oppose the use of contraceptives (even by married couples), would end all sex education in the schools, and would re-subordinate wives to their husbands. But it would be unfair to tar opponents of gay marriage with all of these causes, or to dismiss their arguments because opposing gay marriage might tend to advance them.

Third, regardless of what pro-SSM radicals hope gay marriage will do to undermine marriage, they may be mistaken. Gay marriage may end up disappointing them.

Conservative opponents of gay marriage ignore the large and complex debate on the left about whether gay marriage is really worthwhile and what effects it will likely have. While some marriage radicals support gay marriage because they think it will undermine marriage, others oppose it (or are uncomfortable with it) because they expect it will strengthen marriage and traditionalize gay life.

Paula Ettelbrick, in a very influential and widely quoted essay two decades ago, argued that marriage is "antithetical to my liberation as a lesbian," would lead to "increased sexual oppression" of unmarried gays, and would "mainstream" gay life and culture. "If the laws change tomorrow and lesbians and gay men were allowed to marry," she wondered, "where would we find the incentive to continue the progressive movement we have started that is pushing for societal and legal recognition of all kinds of family relationships?"

Since then, many other activists and intellectuals have written a stream of books, articles, and essays expressing similar assimilation anxiety and other concerns about gay marriage. Rutgers Professor Michael Warner has argued that gay marriage would "reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage" and thus be "regressive."

Here's gay writer Michael Bronski: "The simple fact remains that the fight for marriage equality is at its essence not a progressive fight, but rather a deeply conservative one that seeks to maintain the social norm of the two-partnered relationship - with or without children - as more valuable than any other relational configuration."

These anti-SSM radicals, as we might loosely call them (some don't actually oppose gay marriage), are worried that gay marriage will enhance the primacy of marriage, cut off support for alternatives like domestic partnerships and civil unions, de-radicalize gay culture, gut the movement for sexual liberation, and reinforce recent conservative trends in family law.

If those things happened, conservatives would cheer. But these anti-SSM radicals aren't useful to anti-SSM conservatives, so what they say is ignored.

The point is not to argue that any of these radical writers are correct that gay marriage will have the effects on marriage they predict. Activists on both sides of the issue tend to exaggerate the likely effect of adding at most three percent to existing marriages in the country. Gay marriage may have a big (and conservatizing) effect on gay families, but it is unlikely to change marriage itself. Heterosexuals simply don't model their relationships on what homosexuals do.

The point is that both support for and opposition to gay marriage spring from a variety of complex ideas, experiences, emotions, and motives. The debate will not be resolved by dueling quotes from marriage radicals.

Last month, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force sent out a press release decrying the Supreme Court's decision in the consolidated cases of Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood and Gonzales v. Carhart. The Task Force said that the decision, which bans a particularly grisly form of terminating a fetus whose head is mostly outside the womb, was "draconian" and that the court had made itself the "tool of the anti-choice movement."

That was hardly the first time the Task Force had spoken out on issues at best tangential to the gay community. In addition to stating policy positions on abortion, the Task Force has decried the war in Iraq, supported racial preferences and opposed social security privatization and welfare reform.

In other words, it has again demonstrated that it is a garden-variety leftist organization masquerading as a gay civil rights group; it only represents the interests of gay people who also happen to be ideologically committed members of the furthest reaches of the political left.

I believe abortion should be, as President Clinton said, "safe, legal and rare." But just because one supports the right of women to have the control over their bodies that abortion laws seek to protect does not mean that gay people, ipso facto, believe that the gay rights movement - which has plenty of significant legal battles of its own to win - ought to take a position on abortion.

The strongest case that the Task Force has is that the legal reasoning used to erode abortion laws is the same as that used to harm gays; that is, a "strict constructionist" view of the Constitution that does not recognize any constitutional right to privacy.

In terms of choosing judges, this may be the rule in practice, but it is hardly a principle that opposition to abortion laws translates into opposition to gay rights; there are, after all, plenty of gays who oppose abortion. Moreover, there is a much stronger constitutional basis for the protection of the rights of consenting adults (in gay rights cases) than the right to take a potential life.

Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned state sodomy laws, rarely mentioned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and did so only in passing. In that case, Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, found that "the Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual."

Abortion, reasonable people ought to be able to agree, raises more complicated questions regarding "intrusions" in the "personal and private" lives of individuals, namely, the potentiality of human life. It is for this reason that Kennedy himself, no slouch when it comes to the Constitution and hardly a right-wing reactionary, was able to write the majority opinions in both the pro-gay Lawrence and pro-life Gonzales v. Carhart cases without sounding intellectually inconsistent.

And as if it merited mentioning: abortion is biologically a heterosexual issue. Noting this fact does not make gays who oppose abortion selfish, it merely emphasizes further that abortion is, in its essence, something with which heterosexual women and their partners struggle. The only way in which abortion could ever be tied to gay political concerns is in the rare case when a surrogate or lesbian mother decides, for whatever reason, to abort the fetus that she agreed to carry prior to insemination.

But these instances are morally incomparable with the cases of most heterosexual women who choose to undergo abortions because of an unplanned pregnancy. As the gay columnist and law professor Dale Carpenter has written, "'Oops babies' are simply not a phenomenon common to gay life."

New pre-natal technology will pose interesting questions for gay activists who believe that abortion rights ought to be hewn to the fight for gay equality. For years, gay activists - backed by scientific discoveries - have claimed the existence of a gay gene. In the near future, if this gene is to be found and isolated, what will the Task Force say about those potential parents who wish to abort their gay gene-carrying fetus, just as a woman bearing a fetus with a cleft palate or Down's Syndrome is able to do?

Because of legal abortion, in the not-too-distant future, there may be a vast culling of potential gay lives simply because of the fact that those lives will be gay.

To win equality nationally, the gay rights movement will have to convince many people of the justness of its cause. A lot of those people are religious, live in the middle and southern parts of the United States and fervently oppose abortion. How does taking a position on the most divisive cultural issue of the past three decades advance the cause of gay rights?