IGF CultureWatch

In recent weeks I have been traveling the country doing lectures and debates on gay marriage. The first was at Texas A&M University, a school I hadn't visited since 1992. At that time I was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, where we tended to view the "Aggies" as - well, a bit backward.

The rivalry between the schools has not abated, and "Aggie jokes" remain a popular pastime. For example:

Q: What's the difference between Aggie cheerleaders and sheep?

A: If you get lonely, you can always find good-looking sheep.

A&M was founded as an all-male military college, and it currently boasts the largest uniformed body of (now co-ed) students in the U.S. outside of service academies. Unsurprisingly, it is not known for being liberal or diverse. Indeed, its provincialism manifests itself in interesting ways. When being given directions to campus I was told - I am not making this up - "Turn left on Texas, right on George Bush, right on Houston."

Needless to say, I got lost, although I'm not sure whether that was because all the street names sounded the same or because I was distracted by hoards of handsome cadets in uniform (who very courteously gave me additional directions).

The day before my event, the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCTs), a student group, hosted "YCT's Big Fat Obnoxious Wedding" to protest gay awareness week. The flier for their event read:

"Free weddings…Homosexual, Polygamous, Bestial, Incestuous - or even marry yourself!"

In light of the Aggie jokes I knew, I found it ironic that these guys were encouraging incestuous and bestial marriage. Indeed, just a few weeks ago at the UT-A&M basketball game, one UT student dressed as a sheep and held up a sign that read "Baaah means No." (As their guest, however, I kept my amusement to myself.)

At the YCT wedding, one guy "married" his dog. Another married a poster of Reagan. A woman married her cell phone.

Now, I'm a liberal, but I draw the line at posters of Reagan. (Clinton, maybe, but never Reagan.)

The slippery-slope argument motivating the YCT event is not new. If we make one change in the definition of marriage, it says, what's to stop us from making any other change? I often call this argument the "PIB" argument (for Polygamy, Incest, and Bestiality - the most common examples), but it works equally well (or I should say, equally poorly) with cell phones, bicycles, and Reagan posters.

The PIB argument assumes that gays want the right to marry anyone (or thing) they love. But love is only part of the case for gay marriage. Marriage is a social institution: public recognition is part of its essence. (If it were not, then you could indeed marry whomever or whatever you happen to love.) Therefore, in considering whether marriage should be extended to same-sex relationships, we cannot simply ask whether same-sex partners love each other. We must ask whether recognizing that love in marriage is good for society.

I don't think the latter question is terribly difficult to answer. Committed gay relationships, like committed straight relationships, are typically a source of support and stability in people's lives. Happy, stable individuals make for a happy, stable society. That's one reason we recognize heterosexual marriage, even when the couple has no intention of having children and everyone knows it. We believe that marriage is good for people (at least for most), and we have a stake in the well being of those around us.

Contrast this with marrying cell-phones and farm animals, and the facetiousness of these suggestions is readily apparent. Everyone agrees that such "marriages" provide no social benefit, and so the question of whether to recognize them is off the table.

Which is precisely what I told my audience (including the front row, occupied by the YCTs) at A&M: The question before us is whether recognizing same-sex marriage would be good for society. We get no further toward answering that question by considering the merits of polygamous, incestuous, or bestial marriage (any of which can be heterosexual or homosexual), or by staging mock marriages to cell phones and bicycles.

That said, I found the Aggies to be a thoughtful and friendly bunch. I was especially surprised the next morning at breakfast, when I approached the cash register at the campus coffee shop and discovered that my meal had been surreptitiously paid for. I scanned the room, and a cadet I recognized from the previous night's audience smiled and nodded. I thank him and all the Aggies for their gracious hospitality.

In southern Texas when I was a kid in the 1970s, Catholics were the liberals. That went for both their lifestyle and their politics. They were the ones who could dance and drink, while we Southern Baptists were taught that those activities were sins or would lead to sins (I forget which). Sure, Catholics weren't supposed to use contraceptives, even within marriage, but that edict was disregarded.

Where I grew up, Catholics were mostly Mexican-American; Mexican-Americans voted for Democrats; and Democrats were liberals. Their church opposed the death penalty and just about every use of military force. They emphasized helping the poor. For us Southern Baptists, poverty only showed that capitalism was working properly by punishing the indolent.

If I had thought much about gay issues back then, Catholics would have seemed liberal on this too. In its treatment of the topic "Homosexuality," the New Catholic Encyclopedia, published in 1967, was downright enlightened for its time. Catholicism recognized homosexuality as an orientation, a "proclivity" that "develops gradually over many years as a result of complex influences not under the control of the potential homosexual."

Southern Baptists, to this day, see in homosexuality not an unchosen "orientation" but only a wicked and vile choice by lustful sinners.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia, reflecting church teaching, debunked several then-dominant myths about homosexuals. "There is no evidence that [the homosexual's] sexual drive, in itself, is more intense than that of heterosexuals," it declared. The homosexual "is rarely an alcoholic or a threat to immature children."

It criticized "harsh and vengeful religious writings" against gays and urged a pastoral counseling approach characterized by "compassionate leniency."

I don't want to paint too bright a picture. Catholicism continued to regard homosexual acts as "a grave transgression of the divine will" and "a sterile love of self, disguised in apparent love for another." The only solution for the homosexual was life-long chastity.

Still, all of this was much more tolerant than anything my religion taught. Southern Baptists may have invented the slogan, "Love the sinner, hate the sin," but most often they seem to despise both. (Actually, we had a youth minister who molested boys in his charge; his slogan must have been, "Hate the sinner, love the sin.") By comparison to my church, Catholicism seemed rational, literate, and civilized. It was receptive to new learning about homosexuality. On the eve of John Paul II's papacy, in 1978, there was reason for hope.

At the end of his reign, that hope is all but gone. The reactionary wing of the Catholic Church has gotten stronger. A new Catholic traditionalist movement in the United States, for example, focuses much of its energy on blaming gays for the Catholic priest scandal and on fighting equality for gay people. Politically, Catholic traditionalists are aligning themselves with my old Southern Baptists and with other conservative Christian sects to form a Religio-Republican complex.

By word and deed, the Pope aided this regression. Under John Paul II's guidance, the Catholic Church backed away somewhat from its previous view that homosexual orientation was morally blameless. The Vatican's Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI], claimed that even the homosexual "inclination" came close to "an intrinsic moral evil."

In 1986, with John Paul II's approval, a tenured professor at Catholic University was barred from teaching theology because of his belief that homosexual acts within a loving relationship could "in a certain sense be objectively morally acceptable." That same year the archbishop of Seattle was stripped of his authority on gay issues after he allowed Dignity, a gay Catholic group, to hold Mass in his cathedral. The Vatican tried to have a World Pride festival barred from Rome in 2000, the year of the church's Grand Jubilee.

While the Pope was rightly praised for reaching out to other religious faiths, his ecumenism had its limits. Last year he warned that the selection of the openly gay Gene Robinson as a bishop of the American Episcopal Church would create "new and serious difficulties ... on the path to unity."

On AIDS, the Pope sometimes had kind words, saying "God loves you all, without distinction," to AIDS patients during a trip to San Francisco in 1987. But he steadfastly opposed practical efforts to stop the spread of the disease, including safe-sex education and all use of condoms.

On the subject of gay marriage, John Paul II was especially harsh. In 1994, he called it "a serious threat to the future of the family and society itself." Catholic politicians who disagreed were "gravely immoral." In a book released in February, he denounced gay marriage as "perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man."

The Pope is the most powerful single religious leader in the world. Because he influenced the beliefs and practices of hundreds of millions of people, he did more harm to the rights and equality of gay people than any other person.

So all of the hagiographic tributes to John Paul II - claiming that he helped free Eastern Europe from Soviet domination, that he had "rock star" charisma - fell flat to me. I was deeply alienated from the mourning throngs I saw on television. The only thing that could make me miss him is the fear that his successor might be even worse.

Last December, a longtime political strategist legally married his partner of 40 years in the state of Massachusetts. On April 9, their marriage was the subject of a news story in The New York Times. Since when does a five-month-old wedding count as news in the paper of record? Apparently, when the political strategist, Arthur Finkelstein, is a Republican, and the partner he lawfully wed is a man.

It's also news when a former president of the United States casts aspersions on the character of said gay Republican. The April 12 New York Times ran a story in the New York/Region section with the headline "Clinton Says Gay Opponent of His Wife May Be 'Self-Loathing.'" During a news conference on Monday, Mr. Clinton was asked if he was angry about Mr. Finkelstein's plans to raise $10 million for a political action committee, Stop Her Now. Mr. Finkelstein, you see, intends for Stop Her Now to do to the junior senator from New York in 2006 what Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did to the junior senator from Massachusetts in 2004.

Not surprisingly, President Clinton found a curious way of defending his wife's honor. He commented that the anti-Hillary campaign made him "sad," and referred to the Times article on Finkelstein's own same-sex marriage and the GOP's campaigning against same-sex marriage last fall. Then there was this insight:

"I thought, one of two things. Either this guy believes his party is not serious and is totally Machiavellian in its position, or you know, as David Brock said in his great book Blinded by the Right, there's some sort of self-loathing or something. I was more sad for him."

David Brock, you may remember, was the conservative author of such 1990s bestsellers as The Real Anita Hill and The Seduction of Hillary Rodham - both tomes reveling in lurid personal details of liberal women loathed by conservatives - before renouncing his conservative politics and coming out as gay in Blinded by the Right. Brock's own story is a classic conversion narrative; by accepting the truth of his gay identity, he saw the light and cast off his nefarious, self-loathing conservative ways.

By invoking Brock, Clinton means to suggest that Finkelstein can only be a true supporter of his party if he somehow hates himself for his sexuality. If he works through this "self-loathing," Clinton implies, then the consultant might also open his eyes.

Clinton's comments are disgusting but hardly shocking. He was never a consistent proponent of husbandly virtue. He also hasn't been a consistent supporter of gay and lesbian Americans. Sure, he says he feels our pain, and he did appoint a handful of A-gays to prestigious positions. But he also signed into law the most explicitly anti-gay legislation in the history of our federal government: the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in 1993 and the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Did President Clinton sell gays down the river because he was "totally Machiavellian" or because he was filled with "some sort" of loathing?

Perhaps this choice is as unfair to President Clinton as the one he posed to Mr. Finkelstein. Even so, Clinton's comments reflect the significant role that fear and loathing have played in recent political matters involving gays. For the GOP last fall, anxiety about court-forced gay marriage proved an essential get-out-the-vote tool. Direct mail flyers sent by the Republican National Committee into states like Arkansas and West Virginia - states won twice by President Clinton - featured a Bible marked with the word "BANNED" and two men looking lovingly at each other marked with the word "APPROVED"; the flyer suggested this is what Democrats would impose if they regained power in Washington.

On the one hand, it's hard to see how a self-respecting gay person could support a party that deployed such hateful, untruthful campaign tactics. On the other hand, it's easy to see why 23 percent of gay and lesbian Americans voted to re-elect President Bush when the alternative was John Kerry, who last showed courage on a boat in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Since Kerry was one of 12 senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, no one honestly thought that he didn't support same-sex marriage in his heart. His official position was meant to neutralize the issue by opposing the Federal Marriage Amendment, supporting civil unions in principle but insisting that the decision is up to the people of each state.

For Kerry's gay supporters, this position was an anti-Atkins diet, all carbs and no protein. He fed them empty calories of moral support while avoiding the red meat of political risk. The Senate lacked the vote to pass the constitutional amendment, and virtually every gay rights group was advocating for marriage, not civil unions, which would thus fail to materialize. For many nonpartisan gays, choosing between Kerry and Bush on gay issues was like choosing between heartburn and diarrhea: both were tough to stomach.

For both parties, loathing of the other trumps the self-interest of gays in policies regarding their lives and liberties. But then that is, after all, the point of joining a political party. Since President Bush endorsed the FMA last year, it's become commonplace to castigate gay Republicans for sharing a big tent with the likes of Alan Keyes and Sen. Rick Santorum - or, at the very least, question their self-image as Clinton did.

There's a much simpler explanation that Clinton has missed: Gays can be accomplished political hacks. Loyalty to the party can trump loyalty to one's identity group. Party unity gave Republicans a working majority under their big tent. This development no doubt confounds national Democrats like Clinton, who have long believed that your identity is your politics. It's time for Democrats to see the light.

First published April 6, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Catholics around the world are mourning the death of Pope John Paul II, the man who headed their church for more than a quarter of a century. But if we were reviewing John Paul's long reign as a performance on the world stage, we would have to give him "mixed" reviews.

The surprise election of a Polish pope and the quiet support the church hierarchy in Poland gave anti-communist dissidents helped overthrow the communist government there and then in the rest of Eastern Europe. And those eventually led to the evaporation of the Soviet Union itself. Although the pope's contribution was not paramount, his moral support was important at a time when the outcome was far from certain.

But those of us who are gay or lesbian can hardly join in mourning John Paul's death. Through his doctrinal statements, his public exhortations, his ecclesiastical appointments and his intrusion into political controversies John Paul did his utmost to retard and reverse the movement for gay and lesbian equality.

In a technical sense, John Paul was a reactionary pope, seeking to reassert with renewed vigor traditional Catholic doctrines and their social policy effluvia against all efforts to rethink or reformulate core church teachings.

His outlook was decisively shaped by having spent much of his adult, clerical life in Poland under the domination of communism, a system which he - like the communists themselves - seemed to view as the fullest expression of post-Renaissance, modern philosophy. His response was to set himself firmly against virtually every expression of the Enlightenment and push back against it at every moment.

He was less interested in bringing political and economic freedom to Eastern Europe than in restoring Catholic dominance. He rejected the autonomy of civil society and promoted the legal imposition of Catholic social doctrine. He did not believe free speech and press were basic human rights, but conditional "privileges" that must not be "abused" by attacking his church.

He rejected the separation of church and state: When governments threatened to reduce subsidies and privileges long granted to the church, he said the church was being persecuted. He rejected artificial birth control even to prevent HIV transmission: Better a woman and her baby become infected than block conception. While he managed to say - 400 years after the fact - that the persecution of Galileo was a mistake, he refused to say evolution was a fact, admitting only that it was "more than a theory."

He dismissed without argument the idea of female priests, apparently believing his God would transubstantiate only for male celebrants. He promoted a prominence for Mary unknown since the Middle Ages and came close to promulgating the novel doctrine that she was "co-redemptress of the human race." He was dissuaded at the last moment.

But it was in opposing legal and social equality for gays that the pope and the bishops he commanded showed the most zeal. Around the world the Catholic hierarchy regularly opposed the repeal of sodomy laws, opposed gay non-discrimination laws and opposed government recognition of gay civil marriage and civil unions.

In European and Latin American nations where civil unions have been proposed, Catholic prelates vigorously opposed them as a threat to the family and the social structure. When governments proposed non-discrimination laws or hate crimes laws, Catholic officials claimed their religious freedom was being threatened. When Spain's social democratic government proposed a gay marriage law, the Vatican summoned the Spanish ambassador to make clear the church's adamantine opposition.

In 1986 the pope authorized a formal Vatican statement declaring that homosexuality was not a "neutral" condition, but "a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." Even more remarkably, the document went out of its way to observe that it was "understandable" if the advocacy of gay rights generated an increase in violence directed against gays.

When the international gay celebration World Pride 2000 was planned for Rome, the Vatican maneuvered furiously to prevent it, saying it was offensive to a city held sacred by the world's Christians. When the event was held anyway, the pope deplored its presence and repeated that homosexuality is "an objective disorder" and harmful to the family, the basis of society.

Although the Pope apologized, after a fashion, for the Catholic Church's millennia of persecution of Jews, and apologized to Africans for the role the church had in slavery, such as having owned some, the pope never apologized for or even acknowledged the persecution, torture and judicial murder of gays during the Inquisition as well as during other social purity crusades fostered by the church. It was as if those never happened.

John Paul II was the last medieval pope. Until the next one.