The Vote.

The vote against cloture (that is, voting not to allow a Senate floor vote) was 49 to 48 with 3 abstaining or absent. Paul Varnell argues it would have been better if Democrats and moderate Republicans had allowed a floor vote, where opposition to the amendment would have been greater. But keeping the vote on "procedural grounds" allows some to say they didn't actually vote against the amendment while in fact voting against the amendment. And thus the issue goes away for the time being, with limited political capital spent.

The Wall Street Journal makes some good points in today's editorial opposing the amendment. I don't buy their criticism that Lawrence, in abolishing sodomy laws (which the Journal editors favored getting rid of) used language that was too sweeping and thus encouraged state judges to mandate same-sex marriage. But the editors are on the mark when they write of the marriage amendment:

The Founders left such thorny social issues to the states precisely to allow the democratic give and take that can reach a rough consensus, as well as adjust as social mores change....

As for liberals, they might consider that their best chance to change minds is through open state debate, not coercive courts. Polls show Americans are becoming more comfortable with civil unions and other gay rights. In fact, the best thing gay activists could do for themselves at the federal level would be to support repeal of the death tax, since under current law gay couples often lack inheritance rights. That would accomplish more than anything that will emerge from this week's political spectacle over amending the Constitution.

But such thinking outside the lib-left box remains unlikely given the current crop of gay leaders.

More. David Boaz suggests that the amendment's supporters are being disingenuous in claming they did better this time than in 2004. He also writes:

Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter voted for cloture in 2004, though he would have voted against the amendment itself; this year he voted against cloture and quoted two Cato publications in his Senate speech. Judd Gregg [also] joined his New Hampshire colleague John Sununu in voting for federalism over centralism.

He concludes, "Given that younger voters are much more supportive of same-sex marriage than older voters, it seems unlikely that support for an amendment will grow in future years."

That Amendment Again

Like that proverbial bad penny, the administration-backed Marriage Protection Amendment to exclude gay and lesbian couples from the protections of marriage is back with us.

I write prior to the scheduled debate during the week of June 5th, but there seems general agreement that the vote for cloture will receive not more than 52 or 53 votes, well short of the 60 votes required and far short of the 67 votes required for passage of the amendment itself.

There is also general agreement that GOP leaders who are pushing the amendment know their effort will fail and are going through this charade prior to the 2006 congressional elections to placate restive social conservatives who believe the Administration is not paying enough attention to their concerns-as if any administration could.

Not that those voters would vote for a Democrat, but they might stay at home and not vote, giving Democrats a comparative advantage. So the amendment functions as an Incumbent Protection Amendment for conservative Republicans.

I for one would like to see the amendment come to a vote since its defeat would be a convincing political victory for gays. Equally, it would be good to get senators on record about the amendment itself instead of the surrogate issue of cloture so we know who our friends are and who is just mouthing support when convenient.

But Democrats are dead set against allowing a vote on the amendment. They want the issue to go away. Above all, they want to avoid having to vote against constitutionally barring gays from marriage because that would expose vulnerable Democrats to Republican charges of coddling homosexuals. So the vote against cloture is a Democratic Incumbent Protection ploy.

For the same reason, only one senate Democrat, Sen. Ted Kennedy, spoke in favor of gay marriage in 2004. Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold is reportedly willing to support gay marriage this time around, and that is excellent news, but the rest of the Democrats are trotting out any reason they can think of to oppose the amendment other than the notion that gays should actually be able to marry.

They say: We do not want to alter a sacred national document; marriage should be left to the states; Congress has more pressing issues to worry about; this is a harmfully divisive issue; or this is just a GOP sop to the religious right-anything but supporting gay marriage itself. That's sad.

But the shameful thing is that our supposed gay advocacy group Human Rights Campaign does no better. HRC president Joe Salmonese said, "The president should stop threatening to put discrimination in our Constitution and use valuable airtime as an opportunity to lay out an agenda to address the challenges facing our country. President Bush is pandering to far-right extremists and making divisive, discriminatory politics his priority."

True enough, but do you see anything actually pro-gay in this? Instead of using this unprecedented media opportunity to advance good arguments for gay marriage to skeptical but open-minded Americans, instead of explaining why gay marriage is-as writer Jonathan Rauch argues-"good for gays, good for straights, and good for America," Solmonese merely parrots Democratic excuses.

Nothing could make clearer that the HRC is more interested in providing cover for Democrats than in promoting gay equality. Salmonese cannot even bring himself to call the amendment a Marriage Exclusion Amendment or a Marriage Prohibition Amendment, although either might be a useful rhetorical counter thrust.

Are we going to go through this every two years? It seems so, at least for a while. Conservative Republicans say that even if the amendment fails to pass this time, efforts to promote it now can build momentum for eventual passage. But they are surely whistling past the graveyard of soon-to-be-defunct political initiatives.

Polls over the last two decades show a continuing rise in tolerance for and acceptance of gays. Polls also show a slow decline in support for a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage. If present trends continue, Americans will eventually come to see gay marriage as acceptable. So If Republicans cannot pass the amendment now, their chances in the future seem increasingly bleak.

The American people have come far in the last half-century-from criminalized homosexual activity in every state to supporting openly gay people in the military and seriously arguing about gay marriage. Our job is to make sure that progress continues by explaining the case for marriage whenever we have the opportunity to parents, relatives, friends, and when possible in the public square, steadily, calmly and without rancor.

No Heroes.

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

A sad day for a sinking presidency. This anti-federalist amendment which would ban states from recognizing not only same-sex marriage but also "the legal incidents thereof" (i.e., civil unions and probably even domestic partnerships) is going nowhere, which is the good news. But the response of even those Democrats and moderate Republicans voting against it-i.e., suggesting the topic itself is unworthy of debate-is also indefensible. What a display of gay political impotence all round, and a missed opportunity to make a positive case for the principle of equality (or even something closer to equality, such as civil unions).

First AIDS. Then Marriage

We feared for our lives; we prayed for a remedy. What none of us in the gay world imagined, when word of a mysterious affliction surfaced 25 years ago, was what proved to be the epidemic's most important moral legacy: AIDS transformed the gay-marriage movement from implausible to inevitable.

In May 1970, two men applied for a marriage license in Minnesota and then filed suit after being refused. The gay world hardly noticed. "Support for marriage was a distinctly minority position in the gay and lesbian movement," wrote the historian George Chauncey. "After an initial flurry of activity, marriage virtually disappeared as a goal of the movement."

Marriage, after all, hardly seemed relevant. The master narrative for gay life was: come out, leave home, gorge at the banquet of sexual liberation. Gay men celebrated their image as sexual rebels; straight America was happy to consign them to that role. After 1981, the master narrative changed from ubiquitous sex to ubiquitous death. Death became, as the writer Andrew Sullivan noted at the height of the epidemic, not just an event in gay America but "an environment." For the stricken there were lesions, chills, wasting, death; for friends and lovers, there was grief compounded by despair.

But there was also an epidemic of care giving. Lovers, friends and AIDS "buddies" were spooning food, emptying bedpans, holding wracked bodies through the night. They were assuming the burdens of marriage at its hardest. They were also showing that no relative, government program or charity is as dependable or consoling as a dedicated partner.

Yet gay partners were strangers to each other in the law's eyes. They were ineligible for spousal health insurance that they desperately needed; they were often barred from hospital rooms, locked out of homes they had shared for years, even shut out of the country if they were foreign citizens. Their love went unmentioned at funerals; their bequests were challenged and ignored. Heterosexual couples solved all those problems with a $30 marriage license. Gay couples couldn't solve them at any price.

Though few said so (no one wanted to be callous, not with people dying), many also knew that the culture of promiscuity and alienation was a culture of death. In 1981, I was 21 and terrified of coming out. I feared disease and discrimination, but even more I feared the cultural isolation and anomie of the gay ghetto. If being gay meant rejecting mainstream values, having disconnected sex and then dying, I wanted no part of it.

To me, the idea of same-sex marriage sounded like the Coast Guard's hail to a castaway. It promised a new narrative: of commitment, of connectedness, of a community bound by stories of love, not death. For many gay people, the logic of marriage became as compelling as it had once been contemptible.

The public changed, too. Support for legal same-sex relations reached its nadir in the second half of the 1980's, according to Gallup polling, but the 1990's brought a surprise. The share of the public saying consensual same-sex relations should be legal rebounded and then became a majority, as did the percentage saying homosexuality "should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle."

Watching gays become family to each other, the public saw nobility. AIDS reminded the country that a good marriage is the best public-health measure known to man. "Gay marriage," so recently an oxymoron, began to make sense.

Yes, the idea of same-sex marriage predated AIDS. But would gay America have internalized as deeply the need for marriage if it had not first internalized H.I.V.? Would straight America have been as willing to consider gay marriage if not for AIDS? Impossible. In gay cultural history, marriage is to AIDS much as Israel is to the Holocaust in Jewish cultural history. It offers a safer shore, a better life, and a promise: never again.

Gay Marriage in Europe

Just in time for the Senate debate on the newly retitled Marriage Protection Amendment (Marriage Prevention Amendment would be more like it), here's a major new book on Scandinavia's experience with same-sex unions. In Gay Marriage: For Better or Worse? What We've Learned from the Evidence, Bill Eskridge and Darren Spedale say this:

[O]ur data for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden demonstrate that the trend toward cohabitation and away from marriage slowed down rather than speeded up after enactment of those countries' registered partnership statutes... The Scandinavia-bashing public voices like Santorum, Bork, and Kurtz is a most one-sided, and incorrect, reading of what is going on in these countries.

The book is packed with data and looks to be an important contribution. It's in stock at Amazon.com.

Marriage-Go-Round.

As President Bush prepares to kow-tow to the social/religious right with a Rose Garden endorsement of the federal "marriage protection" amendment, banning all states from either legislatively or judicially recognizing same-sex unions, let's note more online evidence that it's not only the gay left that opposes the amendment.

Walter Olson chimes in at the excellent Overlawyered.com, citing James Q. Wilson, about as impressive a policy intellectual as the right has to offer, who came out against the amendment in March.

And the libertarian Cato Institute has published IGF contributing author Dale Carpenter's critique of the amendment.

More. The Right Side of the Rainbow blog has an interesting take on nonsense from both sides.

Still more. On Saturday, President Bush used his weekly radio broadcast to call for passage of the amendment. While the Democrats typically use their weekly radio response time to address the same issue as Bush, this week they instead talked about the war in Iraq. That about sums it up, doesn't it?

Moral Hysteria on the Right

From a pro-life point of view, America is murdering on the order of a million unborn children every year--infanticide to the tune of about 47 million since 1973. Gay marriage, on the other hand, seems unlikely to result in the death of anyone. Even if it's immoral and socially harmful, as many opponents believe, it doesn't victimize anyone, much less kill them. So it was eye-opening when Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, told Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard that gay marriage has "reached the same plane as the right to life issue" among Republican voters.

Unfortunately, he's probably right. Religious conservatives seem to be as outraged by men marrying men as they are about men murdering children. Even if Perkins isn't implying moral equivalence (it's not exactly clear), the very fact that these two issues are "coequal" as political priorities suggests that conservatives have either lost all sense of moral proportion or aren't all that serious about abortion being murder.

In fact, the two issues aren't "coequal" where legislative action is concerned: Conservatives are actively pushing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but they've shelved their drive for a constitutional ban on abortion. Though that may make sense as a purely political decision, it's morally unintelligible--especially given that neither amendment can pass right now. As a symbolic gesture, it's worth trying to ban same-sex matrimony that exists in only one state, but not industrial-scale mass murder all around the country?

I understand that some people of good conscience oppose gay marriage on moral grounds, and that's fine. But someday social conservatives will look back on their panicky response to gay marriage as an occasion when they let hysteria get the better of them.

Telling Our Stories

Thirteen years ago as the gays in the military fiasco that led to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was roiling the country then-President Bill Clinton urged gays and lesbians to "Tell your stories" in an effort to sway popular sentiment in their direction.

The advice came far too late to be of any practical use on the military issue, but it was important advice for the long term and we fail to act on it at our peril.

Each year as the Gay Pride parade comes around, gays take to the streets in our big cities carrying signs and chanting slogans about "Gay Pride," "Gay and Proud," etc. I suppose those are good polemical slogans to direct to closeted gays and lesbians to let them know that it is possible to be a proud, self-confident gay person. There are still a lot of gays in the closet.

But I suspect the notion of "gay and proud" has about zero effect on most heterosexuals, a substantial portion of whom are either reflexively antagonistic to gays or undecided about them. There is no logical connection between the fact that a person is proud and the idea that he or she deserves respect or equal freedom. No husband surfing TV channels and happening upon a film clip of a Gay Pride parade is going to turn to his wife and say, "Oh look, Martha, gays are proud now. We should let them have equal rights."

"National Coming Out Day" represented a different approach: A specific occasion on which gays might come out to friends, relatives, whoever. No doubt that is useful. It lets people know that they know gay people and opinion surveys do shows that knowing two or more gay people does correlate with a more positive attitude toward gays.

But I suspect this is true primarily if the respondent already knows, likes and respects the person coming out. If the person coming out is unlikeable or viewed with distaste, coming out might have little impact. It might even increase anti-gay feelings. We have all run into gays and lesbians we want nothing to do with and hope they have the decency to stay in the closet.

Then too, it is not actually clear that coming out changes other people's attitudes about gays. The surveys show a correlation, not causality. It seems equally possible, and perhaps more likely, that gays choose to come out to people whom they think will be receptive--who have already indicated in some way that they are generally open and tolerant.

So we are left with telling our stories. By "tell your stories," Clinton no doubt meant--and it is not his advice alone--explain to people how we gradually realized our homosexuality, the discomforts and hesitations we felt, the pain we felt from people's antagonism, our struggles for self-acceptance, how we conduct our lives now, and so forth.

The point of telling our stories is that it is the most effective possible counter to the idea--and it is not found solely on the religious right--that being gay is some sort of choice or willful indulgence. Logically it makes no sense to say that anyone chooses his sexual and emotional feelings; rather he discovers them, sometimes he is gripped by them, often to his own surprise. But if people thought logically about homosexuality, gays would have achieved equality long ago.

By telling our stories we can help people develop the kind of emotional connection that can lead to a degree of understanding about what we experienced. And by showing the fundamental humanness of our experience, we can reduce some of the mysterious otherness of homosexuality.

But it is not easy for most of us who have been out of the closet for a while to think back to an earlier period when we may have felt uncomfortable about ourselves, tried to suppress our feelings, worried about their implications for our future, and lied to others about our desires. It is often a painful period most of us would rather not recall. It is more comfortable to wear a button that says "Gay and Proud"--as if it were just that easy.

I suspect that recounting that period is particularly difficult for men. In our culture women are permitted, even encouraged, to talk about their feelings and emotions. Men are not. For men, to recount unhappiness, uncertainty and anxiety suggests weakness--a lack of self-confidence and self-control, in short a failure of male competence.

But it is a task that needs to be undertaken nonetheless, selectively, at the right time and under the right conditions. Fortunately, most people are happy to hear a salvation story, a triumph over adversity, a victory for integrity and a happy outcome. Told in that way, our stories can reflect well on us and help others relate to our struggles at the same time.

Those Anti-Gay Funeral Protests.

President Bush has signed a bill aimed at stopping anti-gay protestors from disrupting military funerals. Only in America, folks.

The AP reports that the measure specifically targets:

a Kansas church group that has staged protests at military funerals around the country. The group claimed the deaths symbolized God's anger at U.S. tolerance of homosexuals.

The protestors, of course, are the cult-like Westboro Baptist Church run by the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps.

Anti-gay marriage champion and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, according to the Baptist Press, said the bill would "preserve the dignity of military funerals" because families "should never have to be harassed by protestors of any stripe as they bury their fallen warriors."

I tend to agree, but the ACLU, in opposing similar state laws and the new federal bill, supports Phelp's right to desecrate private funerals for our fallen military men and women. (Yes, I realize that the ACLU is arguably more or less consistent on free speech, supporting Nazis marching through Jewish neighborhoods and all).

A quick look at some of the leftwing blogs like Daily Kos seems to indicate their readers are more anti-Phelps than anti-Bush on this one (must have been a tough call!). Also, the One Veteran's Voice blog has some interesting thoughts.

More. But blogger Rick Sincere thinks the measure gives Phelps just what he wanted, national attention.

Still more. The father of a Marine whose funeral was picketed is suing the Westboro gang, claiming "You don't have a right to interrupt someone's private funeral."

Putting Their Faith in Government.

In Strange Bedfellows: Evangelicals learn to love big government, a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Heather Wilhelm of Americans for Limited Government notes that a big change has occurred in what evangelicals-once reliably wary of big-government social engineering- lobby for these days. For instance, the National Association of Evangelicals (NEA) now favors:

more government regulation of health care, an expansion of welfare benefits, more protections for the environment and various efforts to correct "unfair socioeconomic systems."

If this sounds like it's simply embracing the liberal agenda, keep in mind that the NAE also (according to a statement on its website):

supports the President in his endeavor to protect the institutions of marriage and family as foundational to an orderly society. The NAE will continue to promote a traditional view of the convental relationship of marriage and gratefully welcomes the support and backing of the current administration

Or maybe it's no surprise that a demand for government intrusion in areas regarding "morals" has now been joined by a wider view that government can and should solve all problems.

Not all evangelicals embrace the NAE program (its alliances on issues such as global warming "may raise eyebrows of a few purists," Ms. Wilhelm says), but the fact that a large and growing segment is amenable to so much of the liberal social agenda, minus gay equality, may explain Howard Dean's pitch to Pat Robertson's audience.