Limited blogging through next week due to a family health situation. But I wanted to note Jonathan Rowe's take on the latest calumny from anti-gay crank Paul Cameron and his admirers in Christian-right media.
Unrelatedly, more signs that the Human Rights Campaign has abandoned any pretense of being nonpartisan, with its membership in America Votes, a coalition of the left that mobilizes voters for a full range of big-government, take-your-money schemes.
In his reply to my post, for which I thank him, Robert George fairly notes that many of the family radicals who signed "Beyond Marriage" favor SSM. Of course they do. But so do nearly all left-wing and queer-theory academics and activists, which is what these folks are. (With the exception of Chai Feldblum and a few others, they have not played prominent roles in the same-sex marriage fight. I mean, Cornel West? Gimme a break.) The important distinction is that SSM is only part of what these folks favor, and the rest is what they really care about. As the title of their manifesto proclaims, they are looking beyond same-sex marriage: they favor SSM, not as an end in itself, but as a way-station toward a post-marriage society in which all concepts of family enjoy equal status and marriage is irrelevant.
There's no denying that they speak for a prominent element of the gay-rights movement (not the gay marriage movement; there's a difference). I worry about their influence, as I do about that of socialized-medicine advocates and anti-globalists and gender-abolishers and other members of the ultra-egalitarian left, but I don't think they'll prevail, even within the gay universe, most of which is neither radical nor "queer."
There's a legitimate argument here about whether the culture will interpret gay marriage as "anything goes" or as "marriage goes." Actually, some of both may happen, but I expect the dominant vector to be reaffirmation of marriage's privileged status as the family structure of choice. Parents asking their gay kids, "So, you guys going to get married?", plus the longstanding social preference for the unique commitment of marriage (as expressed, for example, in corporate benefits reserved for married couples), plus the fact that most marrying gay couples marry precisely because they see marriage as a unique commitment - all these, I expect, will lead the culture to read SSM as a return to the values of marriage, not a further flight from them. The wind brings positive straws from Massachusetts, where a number of employers are revoking domestic-partner benefits now that SSM is legal.
In any case, it's hardly fair to saddle homosexuals with the burden of exclusion from marriage in hopes of preventing heterosexual folly. If straights insist on trashing marriage, it's not gays' job to stop them. Question: how many American heterosexuals would give up their own marriages to (maybe) forfend polygamy? Who would even consider asking them to do so? I'm often saddened by otherwise compassionate conservatives' willingness to think of gay people, in the SSM debate, as pawns to be manipulated for some larger social good. They must forgive us for declining to think of ourselves that way.
Regarding polygamy...OK, let me see if I get this. Polygamy destabilizes societies, is inconsistent with liberal democracy, shows pronounced inegalitarian and misogynistic tendencies, is frivolous by comparison to SSM, has no logical connection to SSM, and indeed is logically antithetical to the principle of SSM properly understood (everyone should have the opportunity to marry)...these are not principled arguments? Whereas "one man plus one woman makes baby" is not just a principled barrier to polygamy, it is the only principled barrier?
The problem, which is immediately obvious, is that "one man plus one woman makes baby" is no kind of barrier to polygamy, either logical or practical. Logically, man-plus-woman-makes-baby is a biological fact, but one-plus-one-makes-marriage in no way follows from it. Men are perfectly happy to marry all the women they can make babies with, as they have been wont to do since the dawn of history. Given that most human cultures have been polygamous (and quite a few still are), and that presumably all of these cultures have been well aware that heterosexual couples make babies, it seems self-evident that the man-woman-baby argument has little or no deterrent effect on polygamy.
A point of honest disagreement with George is this: in my opinion, the reasons to oppose polygamy are instrumental, not metaphysical, and all the stronger for that. And they are the same reasons for favoring gay marriage. Society and (generally) individuals are better off when everyone can marry and most people do.
That disagreement aside, I wish George would reconsider his strategy of pooh-poohing all the arguments against polygamy (and polyamory) that don't also militate against SSM - which is to say, virtually all the arguments against polygamy. Surely we could agree that this strategy does monogamy no favors. As SSM and gay partnerships gain acceptance, conservatives will be stuck with their own arguments that any change to the boundaries of marriage entails every change. It will be harder for the public, sensible though it is, to hold the line with conservatives insisting there is no line to hold. Sometimes I wonder if, like Col. Nicholson in "Bridge on the River Kwai," slippery-slope conservatives are forgetting what they're supposed to be defending. (Hint: not polygamy.)
As for polyamory, if by that George means group marriage, it might be different in some ways from polygamy, but it's analytically similar: frivolous, logically antithetical to SSM, and, to judge by the last several thousand years of experience, likely to devolve in the vast majority cases into polygamy. As for fending off formal recognition of non-marital polyamory (e.g., group cohabitation benefits), gay marriage is the surest method of preventing that.
In any case, it's well to remember that all this polygamy/polyamory talk amounts to changing the subject. Gay people are asking only for what straight people currently have: the opportunity to marry someone we choose (not anyone or everyone we choose). When straights get the right to marry two people, their mother, a dog, or a toaster, gay people will want the same opportunity. But not before.
"Less than a week after becoming the 170th member of Congress to affirm that his office does not discriminate in its employment practices based on 'sexual orientation or gender identity and expression,' U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., on Wednesday rescinded his signature on the diversity statement," gay.com reports.
Santorum's signature came after a meeting between the senator and GenderPAC volunteers, who got Santorum to pose for a picture with them (and just what must he have been thinking!). A copy of the senator's statement was faxed to GenderPAC on Aug. 1, and the signature was confirmed the next morning by Santorum's openly gay communications director, Robert Traynham.
But the next day, Santorum faxed GenderPAC a new statement that read in part, "To be clear, my office has not adopted the proposed 'diversity statement' nor the agenda of your organization. ... My name should no longer be reported as having adopted the 'diversity statement.' "
What happened? All too predictable criticism from Santorum's Christian right base, such as this missive from the Agape Press blog:
What does Rick Santorum have to gain by placing his John Hancock on this statement? ... why would Santorum sign a propaganda pledge that bestows legitimacy to a cause Santorum has long fought? Why bolster your opponents at a time when you have them on the ropes? Why let the enemy impose his will on you?
Thus even this obviously disingenuous political feint toward the center gets quashed by the Republican theocratic right.
The latest Pew Research Center poll of Americans' social attitudes found that 56 percent of adults oppose gay marriage while only 36 percent support it. However, 54 percent said they support same-sex civil unions and only 42 percent oppose them. The poll of more than 2,000 people also found that adults under 30 are more supportive of gay marriage than people over 30 and that Americans are less likely than a few years ago to think that someone's sexual orientation can be changed.
A few quick points:
Elaborations:
Point #1. To many people, especially but not exclusively religious people, marriage is not something that can be extended to homosexuals because the word "marriage" means heterosexual unions-a bride and groom, man and woman. To speak of "gay marriage" is self-contradictory as if we were to speak of a round square or cold fire. There isn't any argument for this, it is just the way the world is.
To them, it is as if someone claimed that gravity pulls "up." We all could answer: "No, that direction is called down. You just don't understand what the word 'up' means." Or if somone claimed that parallel lines meet, we could all reply, "No, calling them 'parallel' means that they do not meet. That is what 'parallel' means." So all our counter-examples about childless heterosexual unions or same-sex couples with children simply have no persuasive power. They are irrelevant. How to reach such people requires careful thought.
Point #2. The pro-gay trend will continue as more gays are open about their lives and as gays are visible in popular culture. You're thinking of Lance Bass. Yes, but think too of the syndicated comic trip "Zits." On July 25, teenager Jeremy pointed at fellow-student Billy's shoes and says "Billy, your shoes look so gay." Billy replies patiently, "I AM gay, Jeremy," to which Jeremy replies "I know. I didn't mean 'gay' as in 'homosexual,' I meant 'gay' as in 'lame.'" Then in a thought bubble the puzzled Jeremy adds, "Why do people always misinterpret what I say?"
The strip is not only a wry critique of the popularity of "gay" as a generic put-down among students, it is remarkable for the casual way it introduces a gay character and lets Jeremy treat that fact as insignificant. It is a notable addition to the number of comic strips that have included gay characters such as "Doonesbury," "For Better or Worse" and "Brenda Starr." Things are changing: Less than twenty years ago the Tribune Syndicate forced the cancellation of a story line in "Winnie Winkle" in which Winnie's son Billy was to come out.
Point #3. The fraudulent "ex-gay" movement is simply the tail end of the century-long notion that homosexuality can be altered. Gay poet Edward Field's recent autobiography "The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag" (the reference is to gay writer Alfred Chester, not Field himself) reminded me of the enormous damage that error caused to gays who felt pressured in the 1940s, '50s and '60s to enter therapy to be heterosexualized. Martin Duberman's autobiography documents the same thing.
Therapy never worked-except to make gays unhappy, guilt-ridden, and sexually repressed. And it inhibited their assertion of legal and social equality. That is the real agenda of today's "ex-gay" programs. The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus once caustically observed, "Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it claims to be the cure." That statement is equally, especially true of the ex-gay movement. Incidentally, in case anyone (such as the New York Times) doubted Susan Sontag's lesbianism, Field discusses it at length.
Point #4. Although the Pew Research Center poll suggests a welcome increase in gay-supportive attitudes, that does not automatically or rapidly translate into legal or political progress. Referendums usually result in 5-10 percent lower support for gays than opinions surveys indicate. People lie to opinion pollsters, giving answers they think pollsters will approve and most "undecided" people are evading stating a negative opinion.
A more important factor, however, is that our opponents feel more intensely about gay issues than our heterosexual supporters. With a few honorable exceptions, for most of our supporters, gay equality is not a major motivating issue. Our opponents, whether motivated by religious doctrine, stereotypes or visceral distaste, are more likely to vote in elections, vote in primaries, and canvass among their friends and neighbors when gay issues are at issue.
This attack parody aimed at Joe Lieberman, "Joe and Dub's Fabulous Wedding," trots out a slew of anti-gay stereotypes to demean its target. Sample lyrics: "pansies up and down the aisle," "their Fairy Tale wedding," "afterwards there was dancing, possibly more prancing" - plus the Village People! It's featured at the Huffington Post, the same "progressive" site that showed Lieberman in blackface. (But hey, they can't be bigots; they're on the left!).
Here's hoping Lieberman, now running as an independent, and trounces Lamont in November.
Avee comments: "The oh-so-smug and morally superior left is quick to reach for anti-gay and even anti-black tropes (Condi Rice as Aunt Jemima)." Quite so.
From Ilya Shapiro at TCS Daily:
Lamont adviser Jesse Jackson said in an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times Monday that "A loss for Lieberman would be a win for progressives." Jackson went on to fault his party's putative Vice-President ... for "embracing key elements of the conservative agenda," including questioning certain excesses of affirmative action and supporting cuts in capital gains taxes that have ushered in a new class of investors.
Such arguments expose the nasty truth at the heart of the modern "Party of Jefferson": You have to embrace the entire Democratic catechism (abortion on demand, racial preferences, etc.) or risk banishment from this "party of inclusion."
And James Pinkerton writes, on "heretics" and "infidels":
Lieberman had not only to be defeated, but to be crushed and vilified. Which he was. Lieberman supporter Lanny Davis detailed in the pages of The Wall Street Journal all "the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle" that poured down on his candidate, including scurrilous anti-Semitism.... So far, at least, the "infidels" in this particular Demo-drama, aka the Republicans, can sit back and enjoy the heretic-burning show.
Meanwhile, the gay left's John Aravosis of blog America believes the imminent threat of mass murder by Islamofascists is just a great big pro-Republican, anti-Lamont conspiracy:
And isn't it queer that the emergency is declared within a day of Republican party leader Ken Mehlman launching an all-out offensive against Democrats following Joe Lieberman's loss in Connecticut, an offensive in which Mehlman, the White House and Republican operatives are claiming that Democrats no longer care about national security or the war on terror.
No, this is not a parody.
Virginians, who will vote this November on a constitutional amendment excluding any "unmarried individuals" from "union, partnership or other legal status similar to marriage," live with an untested 2004 law prohibiting "civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage."
Gay couples now fear (with some justification, say some family-law attorneys) that their shared ownership of homes and businesses could be cast in doubt if a state court feels the underlying contracts too closely mimic the intent of marriage. So it's no surprise that gays are beginning to flee the Old Dominion, reports the Washington Post:
...even though it is more expensive to live in the District or Maryland, where taxes are higher than in Virginia. One former Virginian who moved to the District was shocked to face a $14,000 recordation tax on the purchase of a $650,000 condo; the same tax in Virginia would have been less than $1,000, Johnson said. The buyer proceeded with the sale anyway.
People are not solely motivated by economic ends (although they are more so than liberals will admit); nevertheless, Virginia has succeeded in making even the confiscatory, redistributionist mecca of D.C. appear to be a more rational economic choice for gay people.
More. The Outright Libertarians blog has words of warning using the example of Alabama, which wasted millions on a failed campaign to attract Silicon Valley firms. A first-hand description of one unsuccessful pitch:
The Alabama rep was furious. "You're saying we have to accept that lifestyle to get investment," he fumed. He didn't understand that not harassing or targeting gays is not "accepting a lifestyle," but rather following the dictates of the Bill of Rights.
He insisted that Intel, Apple, AMD, Hewlett-Packard and other companies could simply force their employees to move to Alabama - he wasn't aware that most of the top marketing, strategy, design, engineering and finance people at all of those companies have standing offers for employment at competitors which they could take at any time.
He then insisted that the companies could move their heterosexual-only employees to Alabama. Ignoring the absurdity of such a proposition (can you imagine the HR implications?), he didn't understand (or care to understand) that often, gay employees are the decision-makers in such a scenario and would never go for it.
Priceless.
From U.S. World & News Report, For Gays, New Math: Rethinking Tactics After a Series of Setbacks:
The losses may have been self-inflicted. ... Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force acknowledges, "Our legal strategies got ahead of our political strategies."
Gee, when I said that, some were quick to express their indigation.
More. Trying a different strategy in Colorado: a gay-supported constitutional ballot initiative to secure domestic partnership rights.
This New York Times piece by Jane Gross looks at gay man who marry women and have furtive relationships with men on the side:
They spend decades denying their sexual confusion to themselves and others. They generally limit their encounters with men to anonymous one-night stands and tell all manner of lies if their wives suspect.
What's interesting is that, as Gross points out:
…so-called "Brokeback" marriages have hardly disappeared, as many experts assumed they would, even in an age when gay couples, in certain parts of the country, live openly and raise children just like any family.
Internalized homophobia, guilt, and fear of life outside the culturally enshrined heterosexual norm are still potent forces.
Another article of interest, from the London Times, looks at sexual fluidity. Matther Parris argues that sexuality often doesn't fit neatly into the categories of "gay" and "straight":
I think a substantial preponderance of men are more heterosexual than homosexual, but scattered fairly evenly between 100 per cent and half-and-half; and that the smaller number who think of ourselves as gay are likewise quite evenly distributed along the spectrum from the halfway point.
That's seems a bit too fluid to me, and I think Kinsey was probably right that toward the ends of the spectrum sexual orientation is pretty well fixed and in no sense a "choice." Still, Parris may be right when he notes:
... we who call ourselves gay know well that most men who call themselves "bisexual" are more gay than straight, but afraid or unwilling to say so. But what we overlook is that for every gay posing as a bisexual, there are probably a dozen bisexuals posing as straight.
And in a better world, of course, all that posing wouldn't be necessary because (among consenting adults) who you love and how you build a life together just wouldn't make any difference.
For gay-marriage litigants, July was the cruelest month. Prior to the Washington Supreme Court decision in Andersen v. King County, there were two substantive state marriage decisions against them (New York and Connecticut), one quasi-substantive federal decision against them (the 8th Circuit, whose broad language went beyond the state constitutional ban at issue), and three procedural decisions against them upholding the propriety of ballot initiatives banning gay marriage (Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Georgia).
But the day the Washington court handed down its decision may turn out to be the hardest day of all. Andersen is the most careful, closely reasoned, and comprehensive judicial opinion to date rejecting constitutional claims to gay marriage. It is much better, as a matter of conventional legal analysis and craftsmanship, than the New York Court of Appeals decision in Hernandez v. Robles rejecting gay-marriage claims in early July.
Since the principles and arguments on this issue from state-to-state, and even in the federal courts, are not that different, the Washington decision will deserve close attention from other courts. Among the courts next to consider claims for gay marriage, the New Jersey Supreme Court in particular should grapple with, and respond to, Andersen if it intends to uphold a gay-marriage claim.
Andersen shows how legislative advances for gays are a double-edged sword in litigation over marriage. Some courts upholding gay-marriage or civil unions claims have cited legislative progress - eliminating sodomy laws, making adoptions more widely available, passing employment non-discrimination laws - as evidence that times and attitudes are changing and as support for the idea that the legislature has no very good reason to withhold this last bit of progress from them.
Andersen, by contrast, cites legislative progress as a reason to deny that anti-gay discrimination should be of special concern to judges. After all, reasoned the court, gays have made a lot of legislative progress. Thus, they don't need the protection of courts the way racial minorities do. Gays can fend for themselves in the political process, just as most interest groups do.
This is a dubious theory, since historical scholarship has shown that groups tend to get heightened judicial protection only after they've made legislative progress. And once they've gotten that judicial protection, they don't lose it simply because the legislature begins to take their concerns seriously.
Since the court saw no reason to strictly scrutinized the exclusion of gay couples from marriage, it was very easy to uphold the law. The law need only be "rationally related to a legitimate state interest." The court rightly describes this form of review as "extremely deferential" and granting the state "nearly limitless" power to make policy as it sees fit.
The state claimed that its desire to promote procreation and child welfare were good enough reasons under this "rational basis" standard to exclude gay couples from marriage. While they are very poor policy reasons to exclude gay couples - many heterosexual couples don't procreate, yet they can marry - the court concluded that these were minimally "rational" reasons for existing marriage law.
There is a bright spot for gay couples in the Andersen decision."We are acutely aware . . . that many day-to-day decisions that are routine for married couples are more complex, more agonizing, and more costly for same-sex couples," wrote the court. It then listed some of the numerous ways in which marriage law helps families to deal with various crises in life, including the death or incapacity of a partner, no matter whether the couple has children.
Lest you think these are just crocodile tears from a gutless court delivering gay couples to the tender mercies of the heartless legislature, the court continued: "But plaintiffs have affirmatively asked that we not consider any claim regarding statutory benefits and obligations separate from the status of marriage. We thus have no cause for considering whether denial of statutory rights and obligations to same-sex couples, apart from the status of marriage, violates the state or federal constitution." The court ended with a strong suggestion that "the legislature may want to reexamine the impact of the marriage laws on all citizens of this state."
To the state legislature, the message seems to be this: "Get moving on addressing the hardships faced by gay couples and their children, some of which we've listed for you. You don't have to give them marriage and maybe not even all of the rights of marriage, but something needs to be done. If you don't act, we might."
To gay-marriage litigants, the message seems to be this: "Go to the legislature and see what can be done about the sorts of problems you've identified and that we agree exist. If the legislature is unresponsive, come back to us not with a claim for the status of marriage, but with a remedial claim for the benefits and protections of marriage for your families."
My guess is that this twin message was necessary to get the five votes needed to uphold the state's marriage laws.
I've previously written that courts confronting gay-marriage claims may now see three choices: (1) order full marriage (Massachusetts); (2) deny the claims (New York); and (3) compromise on civil unions, with instructions to the legislature to decide on implementation (Vermont).
Choice #3 involves many complications and permutations, but it seems that the Washington court would like very much to give it a try. It's a sensible direction for litigants, legislatures, and courts.
On July 26, a few hundred leftist LGBT activists and allies issued a manifesto entitled "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships," stating they "hope to move beyond the narrow confines of marriage politics as they exist in the United States today." At over 3000 words, the document is far too radical, fails to focus on LGBT rights, is abysmally ill-timed, plays into the hands of the anti-gay right and reflects the old penchant of the gay left for building strategic bridges to nowhere.
The signatories are primarily from the liberationist wing of the LGBT movement. By contrast, those of us on the assimilationist side do not seek a revolution, we simply want equal rights. This dichotomy has existed since Harry Hay was expelled from the Mattachine Society in 1953. By long habit, the liberationists are using recent setbacks to portray us as a community under siege, as if we had not made astonishing progress and the polls were not shifting in our favor.
Some of the signatories, like Paula Ettelbrick, have long opposed the fight for equal marriage rights because they regard marriage as an oppressive patriarchal institution. Contrary to their static viewpoint, marriage and the rights of women have changed greatly over the past half-century, as reflected by landmark Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut, Eisenstadt v. Baird and Roe v. Wade.
The manifesto decries "corporate greed" while ignoring the fact that the corporate sector has outstripped the public sector in granting domestic partner benefits. Indeed, the sweeping socialist rhetoric made me want to break into a hearty rendition of "The Internationale." Somehow, the grim and bloody history of utopian schemes does not discourage the True Believers, who seek to liberate us all from the most successful economic system in the history of the world because of its flaws. This reminds me of the Quentin Crisp line, "Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper."
To show that their proposal "is neither utopian nor unrealistic," they point out that "in the United States, a strategy that links same-sex partner rights with a broader vision is beginning to influence some statewide campaigns to defeat same-sex marriage initiatives." The radical right does claim that same-sex marriage will lead to an explosion of polygamy and other unorthodox arrangements, but how in the world do we advance the gay-rights cause by letting our enemies frame the discussion?
The manifesto's all-inclusiveness reflects the longstanding liberationist opposition to focusing primarily on LGBT issues, because, they say, all oppressions are linked. No other minority group has been so apologetic about working for its own interests. The same liberationists who make a fetish of diversity (instead of simply dealing with it as many of us have learned to do) also habitually denigrate white men, which suggests they are inspired more by guilt or revenge than by egalitarianism.
The manifesto touts a long list of issues, including health care, housing, Social Security, disaster recovery assistance, unemployment insurance and welfare assistance. How is all of this the special province of the gay community? Taking on every non-gay-specific issue only makes us a bigger target for our adversaries. Marriage equality and the incremental steps toward it will pose enough of a challenge for the next couple of decades.
Society is continually changing, though not all at once. Those who regard marriage as oppressive treat it as monolithic and unchanging, which ironically is precisely how our adversaries on the religious right see it.
On the contrary, allowing same-sex couples to marry is just one more reform enhancing a foundational institution of society. The liberationists object to the special status accorded marriage, citing (for example) the needs of poor non-traditional families, which are "disproportionately people of color and single-parent families headed by women." Not only do the manifesto writers show no interest in examining which taxpayer-funded solutions have worked and which have not, they treat the high number of broken homes in the black community as a mere lifestyle choice instead of a tragedy.
Another theme of the document is gender nonconformity. As someone who has worked in practical ways for transgender rights for many years, I see no need to spin all of society around every variation in order to defend diversity. Efforts by Queer Theorists to redefine "sex" and "gender" have obscured more than enlightened. While gender roles vary significantly from culture to culture, the division of the sexes into male and female is a result of biology, not a social construct. The fact that a small number of people fall between the two stools, and deserve protection, does not change this basic duality in our genetic makeup. The notion that tolerance requires abolishing our biologically derived categories is, well, perverse.
Unlike the manifesto writers, I do not consider myself part of a "queer" community, and I have no intention of accepting "gender queer" as a serious category. Mind you, I am a longtime gay rights activist; the average American voter will be even less receptive to the permanent revolution implied by these counterculturists who emphasize differences rather than common values, victimhood rather than inner strength, and entitlement rather than responsibility. Demanding equal legal status for every conceivable type of relationship, including polyamory, is a strategy for permanent outsider status.
The rallying cry about leaving no one behind brings to mind the overcrowded, un-seaworthy boats in which so many Cuban refugees have drowned. Flying the false flag of liberation, the authors of the Beyond Marriage manifesto would have us all climb aboard a ship of fools.
