IGF CultureWatch

Should California students learn that homosexual Californians have no flaws? A bill that just passed the state Senate could make that happen. Textbooks would have to treat lesbians and gay men with the same kid gloves the law now requires for members of other minorities. Equality demands many things, but not this.

The bill begins from a sound premise: that history classes should not be biased. California's schools went through a long period where students learned California and U.S. history without knowing about the contributions women or people of color had made to that progress. Up until 40 years ago, when the role of Native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos and others were brought up, they could be-and were-characterized in social studies classes in stereotypical and demeaning ways.

That's why, in 1965, California began the effort to make sure that our students' introduction to history was not also a course in Prejudice 101. If children are to learn repugnant stereotypes, they shouldn't get their information in school.

Much of the bias came from simple exclusion. Prejudice against certain groups made accomplishment much harder for them. But equality is a powerful motivator. As far back as 1913, the NAACP established its first branch in California. In 1918, four women were elected to the California Assembly. These, and many other documentable facts, were accomplishments precisely because they went against the overwhelming prejudices of their day. They are surely worth teaching to students. The rarity of such accomplishments, should not be used against them, and, in fact, demonstrates how steeply tilted the playing field was.

The 1965 changes to the Education Code served as a corrective, prohibiting biased curricula. But well-intentioned laws, like great civilizations, have their rise and fall. What began as an attempt to solve the problem of curriculum bias against minorities and women has evolved into its converse: a project to avoid anything that "reflects adversely" on them. That language is existing law. And whether related to lesbians and gay men, Latinos, women or anyone else, it is a license to whitewash.

Prejudice against Latinos should not cause Cesar Chavez to be left out of California history, but neither should it require that he be presented as a saint. Father Junipero Serra's shortcomings are part of his legacy, as are Leland Stanford's and Hiram Johnson's. Chavez should be treated no differently. Would it reflect adversely on women if Kathleen Brown's history-making run for Governor were described as a debacle? Possibly. But it's true.

These questions are hard enough when it's clear you are talking about a particular minority, but the discussion is even more complicated for homosexuality. It was not until the 1950s or so that American lesbians and gay men began to assert themselves publicly as homosexual. Remember, Oscar Wilde's famous trial for sodomy in England was premised on his defense that he was not a sodomite. Prior to 1950, it's extremely hard to know who was homosexual without resorting to exactly the sorts of stereotypes-rumors and gossip about bedmates, non-conforming gender behavior, cross-dressing-that the Education Code rightly condemns.

But for over a half century now, we have had people who comfortably identify themselves as gay. Moreover, it is now becoming clear that, whatever New York and San Francisco may think, the struggle for gay equality in this country had its genesis in California, and particularly in Los Angeles. Gay L.A., a major work of local history by Stuart Timmons and Lillian Federman, will be released later this year. It is the first book to fully document L.A.'s monumental contributions to the modern gay rights movement, and it will be a fine source for developing textbook material.

Knowing California's central role in the history of gay equality is one thing. But that's quite different from saying that students who learn the parts played by key figures like Harry Hay and Morris Kight should be prohibited from also knowing that those men could be a couple of very pissy queens. Should textbooks rely for their information about Hay and Kight or Harvey Milk solely from the gay community's hymnal?

Certainly, textbook authors should not go out of their way to find flaws. But neither should they have to avoid the obvious ones for the sake of not reflecting adversely upon someone's group. Even positive prejudice is still prejudice.

Many of the criticisms aimed at SB 1437 are due to the fact that it accepts the current statutory language as its starting point, and adds sexual orientation to the list. Sadly, the bill's author, Senator Sheila Kuehl, is being blamed for the existing law's excesses.

Minimizing bias is a respectable, even an essential goal for all education. That part of the law is important, and gays should be included in it. But steering textbooks away from "adverse" reflections on individuals because of race, gender, or any other group identity is a fool's errand, and bad history to boot.

All right, so the Republicans have had better years. But don't forget their secret weapon. Not an ABM, MIRV, or MX. An MPA: the Marriage Protection Amendment, precision-targeted on same-sex marriage and, through it, the Republican base.

The MPA would amend the U.S. Constitution to forbid gay couples to marry. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says he will bring the amendment up during the week of June 5. It has zero chance of passing by the required 67-vote majority, as Frist knows. In 2004, the amendment garnered only 48 Senate votes, and the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, figures it will get only about 52 votes this year.

So why bother? Consider Virginia, where in 2004 the Republican-controlled Legislature hit on the promising formula of passing both a whopping tax increase and a gratuitously vindictive anti-gay-marriage law. (The so-called Marriage Affirmation Act outlawed not only gay marriage and civil unions, but also private contracts between same-sex individuals seeking to replicate marital arrangements.) Lyndon Johnson once said, "Hell, give [a man] somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." The Virginia formula was in that vein: Knock the gays hard enough, and maybe conservatives wouldn't notice the tax hike.

In Virginia, the moral-values credit card seemed to have maxed out in 2005; Democrats held the governorship. Nationally, many conservative voters seem to have noticed that the same Republican politicians who are trotting out the marriage amendment have also spent up a storm, created the biggest new entitlement program since LBJ's Great Society, riddled the budget with earmarks, and approved unprecedented restraints on political activity.

Whatever its political merits, the MPA remains as unwise substantively as when it first came up in 2004. Since then, moreover, the case for its necessity has disintegrated.

The question posed by the marriage amendment is not just whether gay marriage is a good idea, but who should decide -- the states or the federal government? From its debut in 2001, the marriage amendment was misleadingly advertised as a restriction on activist courts. In truth, the amendment would strip the power to adopt same-sex marriage not only from judges but from all 50 states' legislators, governors, and electorates.

Defining and regulating marriage has been within states' purview since colonial times. (Utah was required to ban polygamy while it was still a federal territory. On the few occasions when the U.S. Supreme Court has intervened, it has curtailed states' powers to restrict marriage rights, not imposed a definition.)

Why should the federal government usurp the states' authority over marriage? Amendment supporters have insisted that gay marriage anywhere would soon spread everywhere. How, they demanded, could one state have a separate definition of marriage without creating chaos? Unless the federal government stepped in, they said, one or two states would impose same-sex marriage on all the rest.

Actually, states have defined marriage differently for most of the country's history. Until the 1960s, mixed-race marriages were recognized in some states but not others. That each state is entitled to regulate marriage in accord with its public policy views is established legal precedent; otherwise Maryland, say, could start marrying 10-year-olds and every other state would be obliged to go along -- an absurdity. Moreover, in 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which explicitly relieved the states of any obligation to recognize other states' same-sex marriages.

Federal-amendment proponents have claimed that the Supreme Court might strike down DOMA. That argument, already weak on the law (DOMA is almost certainly constitutional), is even weaker now that President Bush's two Supreme Court appointments, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, have solidified the Court's conservative majority. Would-be amenders are now reduced to claiming that the Constitution should be revised to pre-empt a hypothetical ruling by a future Supreme Court. On this prophylactic theory of constitutional jurisprudence, it is hard to imagine what amendment might not be in order.

So far, DOMA has stood up. The country's most liberal federal appeals court, the California-based 9th Circuit, saw off a challenge to DOMA just this month. Meanwhile, for more than two years Massachusetts has been marrying same-sex couples, including couples who travel and move outside the state. Spot the chaos? The wholesale legal confusion?

In fact, what is most remarkable about Massachusetts's gay-marriage experiment is how little legal confusion and inconvenience it has caused. As evidence that a state-by-state approach is unworkable, proponents of a federal amendment can point to a messy Virginia child-custody case and -- well, not much else.

The social ramifications of gay marriage will take time to unfurl; but if rampant legal confusion were going to be the result of Massachusetts' gay marriages, it should have begun to appear by now.

Indeed, few defenders of a state-by-state approach would have dared predict that the Massachusetts experiment would create as few legal tangles as it has. That the states can go their separate ways on gay marriage is no longer a prediction; it is a fact.

MPA supporters note that a court, and not the people, ordered gay marriage in Massachusetts. That is true but not relevant. Congress has no more business overriding state courts than it does overriding state legislatures. If a state fears that its courts will order gay marriage, it can change its constitution, which is exactly what 18 states have already done and what as many as nine more will do in November. More than half the states have statutorily banned gay marriage. A handful of states -- California, New Jersey, New York, and Washington are possibilities -- might wind up with judicially imposed gay marriage; the large majority, it is now clear, will not.

In 2004, MPA advocates liked to say that pre-empting state legislatures and electorates was of no practical consequence, because only judges would support so alien a notion as same-sex marriage. That argument expired last September, when the California Legislature passed the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act, a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, but the question is no longer academic: How do MPA proponents, who claim to champion democratic decision-making, justify handcuffing the democratically elected Legislature of the largest state in the union?

At bottom, what many MPA proponents want to forestall is not judicially enacted gay marriage; it is gay marriage, period. They say that an institution as fundamental as marriage needs a uniform definition: a single moral template for the whole country.

That argument would seem more compelling if marriage were more important than human life. Many of the same conservatives who want the federal government, not the states, to settle gay marriage also want the states, not the federal government, to settle abortion. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., for example, supports the MPA, but he would like to see Roe v. Wade "reinterpreted" so that states would decide the fate of abortion. Although the 2004 Republican platform calls for a "human life amendment to the Constitution," you will look in vain for any such amendment on the Senate floor.

Two questions for anti-gay-marriage, anti-abortion Republicans: If states can be allowed to go their own way in defining human life, why not allow them to go their own way in defining marriage? Where constitutional amendments are concerned, why is preventing gay couples from marrying so much more urgent than preventing unborn children from being killed?

It is precisely because marriage is so important, and because it is the subject of such profound moral disagreement, that a one-size-fits-all federal solution is the wrong approach. California and Texas, Massachusetts and Oklahoma take very different views of same-sex marriage. By localizing the most intractable moral issues, federalism prevents national culture wars.

In 2006, that argument is no longer hypothetical. Federalism is working. As the public sees that states are coping competently and that no one state will decide for all the rest, the atmosphere of panic over gay marriage has mercifully subsided, providing the time and calm that the issue needs.

The national Republican leadership's bid to upset this emerging equilibrium is demagoguery, which is sad. Conservative politicians' betrayal of federalist principles to distract attention from their broken promises is cynicism, which is sadder. And none of this is surprising -- which is saddest of all.

Each Memorial Day weekend, Chicago's gay community welcomes thousands of leathermen and women from around the world for the International Mr. Leather contest and its related activities-bar events, leather exhibits, parties, and dissolute behavior at the host hotel. The visitors amble around downtown sightseeing and entertaining the natives, enliven our gay neighborhoods, and fill our bars with good-looking gay men on the prowl.

Although Sunday's IML contest is the main excuse for this temporary mass migration to Chicago, the weekend functions mainly as a "gathering of the tribe"-a chance to visit old friends from around the country, live in leather for a long weekend and have a quick vacation in a major entertainment destination.

Much of Chicago's gay community gets into the spirit of IML: Bars that are not normally leather bars have special events, some of the stores along North Halsted Street emphasize any leather-related merchandise they sell, and one Halsted Street art gallery is even holding a "Leather and Metal Night" featuring metal jewelry on bare-chested models.

No doubt the most popular feature of IML is the Leather Market, which serves as the social and commercial center of the weekend. The Market hosts more than 100 leather-related businesses competing with one another to tempt leathermen with their latest products-clothing, accessories, dungeon equipment, toys, films, etc. As a friend remarked, the Leather Market is "where leathermen engage in capitalist acts with consenting adults."

Until I started interviewing people for articles in the IML Program Guide, I had not fully appreciated how competitive the leather business is. I asked several vendors what they were offering that was new this year and was surprised at how many had new products, new styles they planned to feature.

Most vendors were delighted to talk about their products and the style trends they observed, but a couple, acutely aware of the competition, were wary of divulging much information in advance. "You're not going to publish this before IML are you?" one asked. "Just a couple of weeks," I promised him, "and think of the free publicity."

If some bright young economics student wanted to do a dissertation on gay entrepreneurship-and there still is no serious research on the subject-he or she would do well to study leather businesses as a microcosm of gay business. Any study would explore some of the following:

Each of the businesses tries to think of new products, styles, materials, colors that might catch the eye of leatherfolk. New styles? There are now at least 30 variations on leather harnesses, with multiple straps, chains, buckles, snaps and O-rings. New products? My favorite example is one company's easy-access "Grope Me Overalls." New materials? More clothing is made of various kinds of rubber and now something called "Corbura" (ask the vendor).

And color is everywhere this year. It used to be that you chose leather the way you chose a model T Ford: You could have any color you wanted so long as it was black. But now there are stripes and accents of red, green, blue, yellow, maroon. Old-time leathermen would be aghast. Or envious.

Once one company is seen as having a success with any of these, others quickly produce their own slightly different version. So each business feels a constant pressure to come up with something new each year. And the consumer benefits by having more choices, more styles to choose among and, usually, different prices.

Where do new ideas come from? Almost anywhere. There is no general rule for creativity but recognizing a good idea when you see it is the key to successful entrepreneurship. A business owner may suddenly think, Why has no one ever tried this? Or he may get an idea from some European style (motocross racing) or non-Western culture (a leather kimono). Or he may recall something from history (a leather three-cornered pirate hat). Maybe a patron asks for something to be customized for him, his friends like it, and the vendor decides to try it as a product line. Or he will adapt an idea from the mainstream fashion industry.

How do new leather businesses get started in the first place? Lots of different ways, it seems, which is why we need a serious study. But many are the result of "budding": Someone works for a leather business for a while then leaves to start his own business. Or someone from a parallel business such as mainstream fashion or design decides to apply his knowledge and skills to leather products. Or the owner of a totally unrelated business decides to start a sideline of leather products "just for fun" and it takes off.

Developing better information about these things could increase our understanding of niche markets in the wider economic system.

Ever since Howard Dean went on Pat Robertson's "700 Club" to proclaim (inaccurately) that the Democratic Party platform calls for "marriage between a man and a woman," the party chair has received a chorus of condemnation from gay rights groups and even gay Democrats.

Patrick Guerriero, the Log Cabin Republicans president, was predictably caustic, quipping that, "Howard Dean puts his foot in his mouth so often that he should open a pedicure wing in the DNC."

That was actually charitable, given that Dean's pronouncement on Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network wasn't another of his famous gaffes; he's said the same thing too many times after being told it misrepresents the party's official stance, which is to leave the issue to the states to resolve.

Dean's deliberate misstatement was the latest in a series of disses that ought to convince even the most ardent gay partisan that the Democrats, tasting a return to power after six years on the outs, aren't about to let gay rights stand in the way.

Dean is clearly betting that gay Americans are so disgusted with six years of Republican-controlled Washington that he can afford to anger a few activists while moving the party to the political center. The strategy isn't new; Republicans have been doing it with the Christian conservatives since the Reagan years.

But Dean is miscalculating for two important reasons: First and foremost, gay Americans are fighting for their own civil rights, unlike their counterparts on the right, who are pushing to limit someone else's freedoms. One reason America's history reflects progress by minorities despite hostility from the majority is that the minorities are far more motivated than their foes, not to mention the "mushy middle" that doesn't feel strongly one way or the other.

Second, by treating gay civil rights like just another "special interest" to be alternatively pandered to or ignored, Dean and the Dems only contribute to their party's worst image problem: that of a do-nothing party without clear positions, principles or a plan.

You can forgive Howard Dean for thinking he can get away with it. After all, the nation's richest gay political group has long been willing to play lapdog to the Democratic Party, even after Dean's repeated disses.

It is a central article of faith at the Human Rights Campaign that the success of the gay rights movement is inexorably linked to the success of the Democratic Party, and herein lies the single biggest internal obstacle to equality for gay Americans.

There's no question, of course, that Democrats in general, and almost always in particular, are better on gay rights than their Republican counterparts. And gay rights legislation no doubt stands a greater likelihood of passage if Democrats control Congress -- though history suggests otherwise.

But that doesn't mean that gay rights leaders should sacrifice the movement at the altar of the Democratic Party, and continue crafting their message off the DNC's transparently political talking points.

Yet that's what we see, time and time again, especially at HRC, whose leader Joe Solmonese came from Emily's List, a partisan Democrat group.

True, HRC issued an angry press release after Dean's "700 Club" dalliance, slamming his "serious lack of leadership" on the issue of gay marriage. So why, days later, was Solmonese once again following him?

On Tuesday afternoon, Dean's DNC issued a press release taking to task Bill Frist, the Senate GOP Leader, for ignoring First Lady Laura Bush's recent advice about not using gay marriage "as a campaign tool." Frist and the Republicans don't need to be engaged on the issue of gay marriage, the press release argues, because they're really just trying to change the subject from their own political problems.

(Typical of the Democrats' stealth defense of gays, the primary target audience for the DNC statement was apparently gays. The release isn't posted on the DNC website.)

Still, despite Dean's "serious lack of leadership" on gay marriage, Solmonese and HRC were quick to play follower. Just one hour after the DNC press release went out, HRC issued its "Amen, sister!" reply.

Titled "Senator Frist Pushing a Campaign Strategy Opposed by First Lady Laura Bush," the HRC press release hits all the same talking points, accusing Frist of not taking Laura Bush's sage advice.

Besides the lapdog posture, HRC's willingness to do Dean's Dems' bidding causes lasting harm to the gay rights movement.

Rather than actually defend gay families and make the case for gay marriage, HRC is stuck in a three-year strategy of arguing that the American people don't -- and shouldn't! -- care about marriage equality for gay couples.

"Voters want candidates focused on soaring gas prices, a health care crisis and national security," Solmonese says in the release, "not putting discrimination in the United States Constitution."

What sort of gay rights strategy is it, when the attention of Americans is focused on our issues, to argue that our rights aren't important, and refuse to engage our opponents in the debate over our equality?

Sure it makes political sense for Dean and the DNC to issue press releases, delivered only to us, defending us, and then have the party's senators respond to conservative attacks on our families by arguing that the issue isn't as important as rising gas prices. But what self-respecting gay rights group would echo that argument?

Can anyone imagine Martin Luther King Jr., responding to an attempt to rollback the gains of the Civil Rights Movement by arguing that the issue shouldn't be debated because rising gas prices are more important?

Worst of all, HRC's lapdog strategy reeks of lacking confidence in the arguments for our own equality.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, approximately 36,000 same-sex couples are living in America where one partner is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident and the other is a foreign national. Thousands more of these binational couples had to emigrate to keep their families together. My own lover is a refugee from Africa currently living in Europe, and even with a sponsorship letter, he cannot obtain as much as a tourist visa.

I met Patrick five years ago during an overseas trip. As our love grew in the months and years that followed, he has survived a murder attempt by his family, lengthy struggles over his papers and asylum applications, unemployment and international wandering. Somehow, despite all of that, we have also known great joy. To the U.S. Government, however, our love is either invisible or a threat to homeland security.

The plight of many similar couples is documented in a report released on May 2 by Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality entitled Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial, and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under U.S. Law. Nearly 200 pages, it is available online at immigrationequality.org and hrw.org/reports/2006/us0506/, and documents a broad range of cases, including these:

After a Colombian gay rights activist writes to a guerilla group urging it to end its anti-gay violence, he receives death threats and a savage beating. His American partner helps him get a training visa to the U.S., after which they begin the lengthy, expensive process of filing an asylum claim. After doctors document the Colombian's injuries from the beating, he is interviewed by a clearly hostile official, and weeks later receives a written "Notice of Intent to Deny" in which the word "faggot" is used without quotation marks. The decision is overturned on appeal.

A North Carolina woman's Hungarian partner is forced to leave the country with the children both have raised. A male-to-female transgender is detained for months, housed with male prisoners, denied medication or outside contact and taunted by fellow prisoners with Buju Banton's murderously homophobic song, "Boom Bye Bye."

Even when couples successfully navigate the system, such as by juggling tourist and student and work visas, every plane trip risks deportation or detention. For example, an American woman's Danish partner of nearly 18 years is detained twice while entering the U.S. to visit her. "They asked me why I was going to school, what I was doing there, if I could prove it, why I had left the states, why I was coming back … I was bombarded with questions."

The footnotes accompanying these stories are filled with phrases like "names changed at their request," "requested anonymity," and "last name withheld at his request," in order to protect the security of the interviewees. All this unavoidable secrecy is chilling in itself.

As the report shows, the recent irrational furor over immigrants is nothing new, any more than the stoking of sexual fears. In 1896, one congressman said that immigration needed to be limited "to preserve the human blood and manhood of the American character by the exclusion of depraved human beings." In 1952, during the "red scare" period, the McCarran-Walter Act barred "aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, epilepsy or mental defect," and Congress made clear that this included homosexuals. The gay immigration ban was not lifted until 1990. A misguided and counterproductive ban on HIV-positive immigrants was passed in 1993 amid similar nativist hysteria, and was signed into law by President Clinton. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) effectively excluded gay couples as families for immigration purposes.

To help end the discrimination against binational gay families, Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality make several recommendations, including repeal of DOMA and the HIV immigration ban, and passage of the Uniting American Families Act. This bill, introduced by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), would add "permanent partner" to the classes of family members who can sponsor a foreign national for immigration to America.

We can learn from South Africa. Its Constitutional Court, in a decision last year affirming equal marriage rights, wrote, "What is at stake is not simply a question of removing an injustice experienced by a particular section of the community. At issue is a need to affirm the very character of our society as one based on tolerance and mutual respect."

Some day America will recognize this, and will extend its longstanding policy favoring family reunification to encompass same-sex couples. But the thousands of us who are affected cannot put our lives on hold indefinitely while waiting for the light to dawn. We must summon the fortitude to carry on. Even for those whose relationships last, a great price is paid in isolation and anguish in addition to the plane tickets, phone bills and legal fees.

I dislike having to politicize the most cherished relationship of my life. I wish I could just marry Patrick and have him come live with me as he wants to do. But others who know us only as demonized abstractions have come between us, and I will not be bullied into submission. For me the stories in Family, Unvalued are not only depressing and infuriating but also inspiring. But whether our stories are comforting or discomforting, we must keep telling them and supporting groups like Human Rights Watch and Immigration Equality - and electing more politicians who defend equal immigration rights - until our homes and families are whole.

Last week Pope Benedict spoke out against gay marriage and civil unions. "Only the rock of total and irrevocable love between a man and a woman is capable of being the foundation of building a society that becomes a home for all mankind," the pope declared, speaking at a conference on marriage and the family on May 11. He added that marriage was between a man and a woman "who are open to the transmission of life and thus cooperate with God in the generation of new human beings."

The Catholic Church's opposition to homosexuality has never been mainly about the bible. This fact is to its credit: taken literally and as a whole, the bible is an unreliable moral guide; taken critically, it fails to provide good grounds for a blanket condemnation of homosexuality.

Instead, the Church's main arguments against homosexuality have been rooted in "natural law," and specifically the premise that sex must be open to procreation. Thus, all deliberately non-procreative sex is sin.

Consider for a moment the implications of this premise. Contraception is an obvious no-no, given the Church's position. So is masturbation. These facts are enough to make hypocrites of many Catholics who condemn homosexuality "because the Church says it's wrong."

Also, forbidden, though far less often discussed, is orgasmic non-coital sex between married heterosexual partners, such as oral sex, masturbation of one's spouse, or anal sex. (Such acts are permitted as foreplay, but never on their own.) Official Catholic doctrine permits no exceptions here. Imagine the case of a man injured in such a way that he can no longer pursue coital sex, but still enjoys performing oral sex on his wife for the intimacy it achieves between them. It would seem permissible (perhaps even selfless and admirable) for him to engage in such sex, but the Church says no.

Thus far, at least the Church is consistent in its views. (Stubborn, perhaps--even foolish--but consistent.) But there's one implication of the "openness to procreation" premise that the Church refuses to acknowledge. If sex must be open to procreation, then it should be wrong for sterile (or postmenopausal) heterosexual married partners to have sex. Imagine a woman whose ovaries and uterus have been removed for medical reasons. Clearly, her sexual acts will never be "open to the transmission of life" in any morally meaningful way. But the Church declines to condemn such acts.

Why the apparent inconsistency? Catholic natural law theorists answer that such acts can still be of "the reproductive kind." But it is difficult to make sense of this claim, except as a lame attempt to deny unpalatable conclusions that clearly follow from the Church's position. If a sexual act cannot result in procreation and the couple knows it, then how is the act "of the reproductive kind"? Political scientist Andrew Koppelman expresses the problem well. In his book The Gay Rights Question in Contemporary American Law, he writes:

"A sterile person's genitals are no more suitable for generation than an unloaded gun is suitable for shooting....Contingencies of deception and fright aside, all objects that are not loaded guns are morally equivalent in this context: it is not more wrong, and certainly not closer to homicide, to point a gun known to be unloaded at someone and pull the trigger than it is to point one's finger and say 'bang!' And if the two acts have the same moral character in this context, why is the same not equally true of, on the one hand, vaginal intercourse between a heterosexual couple who know they cannot reproduce, and on the other, oral or anal sex between any couple? Just as, in the case of the gun, neither act is more homicidal than the other, so in the sexual cases, neither act is more reproductive than the other" (pp. 87-88).

I once presented this argument before a university audience, and one conservative Catholic student told me that I was ignoring the possibility of miracles. I told him that if he's going to invoke miracles, then why can't I get pregnant? He responded--I'm not making this up--"But that's impossible!" Apparently, God's miraculous power is limited by conservative comfort-levels.

Italy is clearly on the brink of recognizing same-sex unions. Anticipating this, the pope declared that "it has become urgent to avoid confusion between [marriage] and other types of unions which are based on a love that is weak." If only the pope could see the weakness of his own stance.