IGF CultureWatch

The tragic opera of former congressman Mark Foley is the revenge of don't ask, don't tell.

Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned Friday after e-mails and instant messages between him and several teenage congressional pages surfaced. The Republican leadership knew that at least one page had gotten e-mails where Foley admired the body of one of the page's friends, and asked the page for a picture of himself, e-mails the page naturally found sick and a bit creepy.

Republican leaders responded to the potential political problem by telling Foley to knock it off. With respect to the larger issue, though, there was no asking or telling. The boy's own revulsion at the obviously inappropriate attention was ignored, not only by Foley's partisan fellows, but by some news outlets that also had seen the e-mails.

If this has a familiar ring, look in the Catholic Church for the bell. Republican leadership was acting like the Catholic hierarchy, which played shell games with men accused of sexually abusing children. And there's a good reason for the similarity. The inability to deal straightforwardly with gay people leads to other kinds of truth-avoidance when things go south. But that's what comes from not wanting to know something, and going out of your way to remain ignorant.

We've come a long way since homosexuals had two basic options: the closet or jail. But a good portion of the electorate, most of them Republican, still seems to long for the good old days when we didn't have to think about ``those people." Both Libertarians and, generally, the Democratic Party have withdrawn their official support for the closet over time. States, too, are seeing what a losing battle this is, and allowing homosexuals to live their lives in conformity with, rather than opposition to, the law.

But that leaves Republicans and the religious right trying to live a 1950s lie in the new millennium. As Foley prepared in 2003 to run for the Senate, newspapers in Florida and elsewhere published stories about his homosexuality. But you'd never hear any of his colleagues saying such a thing. And Foley himself refused to discuss the issue, until his lawyer acknowledged Wednesday that the former congressman is indeed gay.

Being in the closet is hard to pull off without help, and for years Foley was eagerly abetted by his Republican brethren, whose willful blindness is at the heart of the current tragedy. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, majority leader John Boehner, and others in the House leadership are still under the impression that the closet, like Tinkerbell, will continue to live as long as we all believe. And believe, they do -- against all the evidence.

But the number of people who believe in the closet is declining day by day and generation by generation. Hastert and the rest of his cronies are their own victims. The political turmoil they caused for themselves is only just.

But their failure to acknowledge the obvious reality has other victims as well: the boys whom Foley apparently pursued. Some of the messages show some tolerance of Foley's advances, but not much more. This was no one's ``Summer of '42." The healthy disgust in one boy's use of the word ``sick" repeated 13 times seems about right.

But what can one expect from denying grown men -- and women -- a normal, adult sex life? Whether the denial of adult intimacy comes from religious conviction or the ordinary urge toward conformity, people who run away from their sexuality nearly always have to answer to nature somehow. For people who fear abiding and mutual love, the trust and confusion of the young is a godsend. Add to that the perquisites of power, and a degenerate is born.

Fortunately for the arc of justice, the closet ultimately works against itself. Foley's case and the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal are the last screams of the dinosaurs. It took the dinosaurs a long time to finally die off, or evolve into creatures that could continue to survive, and the same will be true of the closet's final supporters. But they will look more and more ridiculous each time that they take pride in holding up the ruins of this particular antiquity while tending to the wounded when the building again collapses.

Like the Catholic Church, the Republican Party in Washington guarantees its own future calamities in its enduring and steadfast habit of pretending that, unlike heterosexuality, homosexuality can be either denied or suppressed.

Not long ago I was cleaning out some old files and ran across one labeled "Homophobia--Internalized." Into it I had stuffed articles that purported to analyze why gay men engaged in such risky harmful activities as heavy drinking, crystal meth use, and unprotected receptive anal sex.

After a good deal of tut-tutting about the irrationality of putting oneself at risk for physical and mental deterioration and sometimes death, the articles often suggested that the explanation was "internalized homophobia" a supposed hatred of oneself as homosexual.

"Self-hating homosexual" was also used by gay leftists to describe gays who support conservative politicians and could equally have been used by moderate gays to refer to far-left gays whose main goal was to push gays into working for "the worldwide socialist revolution" (remember that?). Both, of course could have retorted that they supported gay equality but there were other political goals they valued more.

But "internalized homophobia" is a little too pat, too readily invoked, too all-encompassing. What disadvantageous or harmful behavior could it not purport to explain? I have to say, too, I don't think I have ever met a real instance of internalized homophobia. I think it is a label that doesn't refer to anything real--like "the ether" or "phlogiston."

I know of gay men who wished they were not gay. They say being heterosexual would make their life easier. They wish they could marry and sire children, or please their parents, or please their god. But none of them hate his whole self. Sadly, a few gay men do kill themselves, but they seldom if ever engage in typical "risk behaviors" as a way to do it gradually. They do it and get it over with.

It seems to me that people engage in so-called "risk-behaviors" for a simple reason: They are enjoyable; they feel good now. It is only in the long run that most risky behavior turns out to be harmful. And the further off the future, the more the consequences are discounted in our calculations about whether to do something enjoyable in the here and now.

Consider too that some heterosexual men also regularly engage in risk behavior. They use crystal meth and heroin, they drink heavily, they have sex with girl friends without a condom (risking unwanted paternity or the costs of an abortion). They parachute jump, race automobiles on city streets, get into fights. All these entail risk but the potential costs are uncertain or somewhere off in the future--and the pleasures are in the present, some of them very intense pleasures. No one diagnoses them with "internalized heterophobia" or calls them "self-hating heterosexuals." Instead, people look for other reasons for their behavior: they are fun, they are exciting, they provide an adrenaline rush, they are totally absorbing.

Show me an instance in which gay men engage in behavior with potentially harmful consequences but no benefit in terms of present pleasure or cessation of physical or emotional pain, an instance that cannot be found among heterosexual men, then I will reconsider "internalized homophobia."

At this point we could wonder whether explaining gay men's behavior with an easy and dismissive "internalized homophobia," without carefully examining the specific reasons or motivations of individual men involved is itself a kind of de facto homophobia. No doubt many of these people in the so-called "helping professions" would deny that emphatically. But failing to treat gay men the same way they would treat similarly situated heterosexual men amounts to heterosexism at least.

But instead of just condemning writers who fall back too easily on "internalized homophobia," it would be helpful to have a more satisfactory alternative explanatory model. "Time preference"--the relative weight anyone gives to present costs or benefits (pleasures) versus longer term costs or benefits--provides a clearer explanation. But time preference is part of the tool kit of economists while homophobia is in the tool kit of sociologists and psychologists and the disciplines seldom talk to each other.

The issue of "time preference" is particularly important in assessing gay men's behavior. Most heterosexual men marry and eventually produce dependent children. Because they now have other people who depend on them they have a greater incentive to think about the longer term. Not coincidentally, it is young single males who most engage in high risk behavior.

Since gays are denied marriage or civil unions, society fails to provide them with this incentive to develop a similar long-term perspective. In significant ways, most gay men remain single males all their lives. And because they do not have access to the ceremonies and other markers that bolster an internalized sense of socially certified adulthood (marriage, the birth of children), they remain in some sense young. This may have good effects as in preserving the free play of youthful creativity, but it also fails to promote that lengthening of a person's time preference which would discourage these much discussed risk-behaviors.

Not long ago, hundreds of progressive academics and activists issued a manifesto calling for health care and jobs for all, universal peace, an end to hunger, and the equal recognition of all relations among sentient creatures. Robert George, a prominent natural-law professor at Princeton who opposes gay marriage, took this rather stale document as fresh proof that gay marriage will lead to polygamy.

George understands the radical argument for gay marriage. It claims, as he notes, that "love makes a family" and that making any legal distinctions among people who love each other is unjustified. George concludes that this love-makes-a-family ideology "is central to any principled argument" for same-sex marriage.

That's wrong. While George understands the most open-ended argument for gay marriage, it does not appear that he has taken the time to understand more careful, restrained, and conservative arguments for gay marriage, like those advanced by Jonathan Rauch, Andrew Sullivan, me, and others. I won't repeat the substance of these arguments here, but suffice it to say they do not easily lend themselves to support for polygamy; they certainly involve more than saying simply, "love makes a family."

George complains that we have not made what he calls "principled" arguments about why the recognition of same-sex marriages does not entail the recognition of polygamous ones. Instead, we have made what he calls "pragmatic" and "prudential" arguments, emphasizing differences between SSM and polygamy in terms of their respective histories, expected effects on society and marriage, and predicted benefits to the people involved.

When you read modern natural-law writings about marriage, you find that by "principle" something like this is meant: "Marriage must be between a man and a woman because only they can procreate; as for sterile male-female couples, they are included because they can have sex of a reproductive kind." Sex "of a reproductive kind" is sex that involves a penis and a vagina, even if it can produce no more babies than could a male and a male or a female and a female. The conclusion of the argument is embedded in the "principle" and then offered as if it's an argument.

In his scholarship, George has asserted that male-female marriage, and only male-female marriage, has an "intrinsic value" that "cannot, strictly speaking, be demonstrated." Its value "must be grasped in noninferential acts of understanding." This "noninferential understanding" that "cannot be demonstrated" is unavailable to some people, argue modern natural-law theorists. Another natural-law writer, Professor Gerard V. Bradley, adds that, "In the end, one either understands that spousal genital intercourse has a special significance as instantiating a basic, non-instrumental value, or something blocks that understanding and one does not perceive correctly."

This amounts to saying: "Same-sex 'marriage' is not marriage because only male-female marriage can be marriage. Trust me." The modern natural-law argument against same-sex marriage at bottom thus appears to rest on revelation of some pre-cognition reality to the initiate and only to the initiate. This seems to me very close to saying that marriage just is the union of one man and one woman and cannot, no matter the arguments, be defined any other way.

But advocates of a logical slide to polygamy need to show the necessary "principle" uniting the causes of same-sex marriage and other unions, like polygamous ones. Yes, you can imagine such a principle ("love makes a family") and even find support for it in slogans and in the writings of some academics and activists who say they favor gay marriage but also favor many other reforms. The manifesto that has George so excited actually says very little about polygamy, but prominently calls for an end to "militarism," and repeatedly for a wide range of government social-welfare measures. Must gay-marriage advocates who didn't sign the manifesto produce position papers and principles against state-controlled universal health care, too? Same-sex marriage is no more necessarily tied to polygamy than it is to all of these other proposals.

And when it comes to crafting public policy, why don't pragmatic and prudential considerations count as serious arguments? If same-sex marriage will benefit the individuals involved, any children they're raising, and their communities, all without plausibly harming marriage, does this not matter as against a claim that a conclusory principle stands in the way?

If polygamous/polyamorous marriage raises a host of different questions about harm, practical administration, and about historical experience, none of which depend necessarily on how we've resolved the debate about gay marriage, why must gay-marriage advocates definitively address it?

The way we frame the debate about gay marriage matters not just for the ultimate outcome, but for the shape and attributes of that outcome. Those of us who have been making a conservative case for gay marriage do so, fundamentally, because we believe in marriage. We do not want to see it harmed and we do not think that this reform means every proposed reform of marriage, including potentially harmful ones, must be accepted.

Ironically, George and the manifesto-signers agree that gay marriage means anything goes. I don't expect that George and other conservative opponents of gay marriage will hold to that position when gay marriage is actually recognized (indeed, they'll strongly resist the supposed slippery slope to polygamy then), but the damage they are doing now by making a tactical alliance with marriage radicals and arguing the line cannot be held will not have been helpful.