IGF CultureWatch

Although some people would describe me as a fallen Catholic, they're wrong: I didn't fall; I leapt. Still, after John Paul II's death, I followed the papal candidates with an enthusiasm normally reserved for American Idol contestants. Eagerly I scrutinized their biographies on interactive websites, trying to guess who would be picked.

"Do you think it will be Ratzinger?" my friends asked.

"No way," I answered. "Too divisive."

"Habemus papam," came the announcement (which is Latin for, "He's changing into something white - hang on"). Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI.

I knew Ratzinger's name well. Back in the late 1980s when I was a philosophy and theology student at St. John's University (NY), I studied his "Letter to the Catholic Bishops on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons." There Ratzinger described homosexuality as "an objective disorder" towards "an intrinsic moral evil." Incidentally, at the time I was a candidate for the priesthood and had recently come out of the closet as a gay man.

The letter was not without its "pastoral" moments. Ratzinger (as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which enforces Church orthodoxy) wrote that "It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society."

But he followed this admirable admonition with a more equivocal one: "But...when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase."

In other words, when gays demand civil rights, we should expect people to beat them up. While Ratzinger's wording was more nuanced than many critics admit, it is hard not to detect a "blame the victim" element in it. Similar blame-shifting appeared in some of his comments on the priestly sex-abuse scandal.

But what worries me even more about Ratzinger/Benedict is the false dilemma he erects between fundamentalism and relativism. In a homily before the papal conclave, the soon-to-be pope stated:

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." Relativism is the view that truth is dependent on, or relative to, a person's or culture's perspective. Contra Ratzinger/Benedict, it need not have "as its highest goal one's own ego," since not everyone's perspective is egoistic.

Granted, relativism often results in moral wishy-washiness (to use the technical philosophical term). Relativists believe that any moral view is ultimately as good as any other. And that belief is not only false, it's pernicious, since it demotes moral commitments into matters of mere personal taste.

But the proper alternative to relativism is not fundamentalism, which closes itself off from the world and brooks no dissent. The proper alternative is a healthy - and thus humble - regard for truth.

Can truth tolerate dissent? Absolutely. Pope Benedict (along with the rest of us) would do well to recall the words of the philosopher John Stuart Mill on this point. In his 1859 classic On Liberty Mill argued that those who silence opinions - even false ones - rob the world of great gifts:

"If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

Mill understood that we should embrace diversity of opinion, not because there is no objective truth, but because history shows us to be imperfect in its pursuit. We should welcome other perspectives, not because we necessarily lack confidence in our own, but because a confident perspective need not fear dialogue.

Upon his election as pope, Benedict described himself as "a simple and humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord." It is hard to recognize humility in a man who insists that anyone who rejects his particular religious worldview must therefore endorse relativism and egoism. It is still harder to recognize it in someone who now claims to speak directly for God.

There are right ways and wrong ways, helpful ways and counterproductive ways, to win. In Connecticut, advocates for gay marriage won the right and helpful way by persuading state legislators to enact civil unions for same-sex couples. While Connecticut is in some respects exceptional, this has been a lesson in democratic politics that can and should be exported to other states. Several rules from that lesson follow.

Rule #1:
Advance through legislatures, not courts.

Connecticut becomes the first state in the country to recognize gay relationships in such an exhaustive fashion without being ordered to do so by a court. While religious opponents of gay marriage intend to challenge pro-civil-union state legislators in the 2006 election, I doubt that effort will succeed. Connecticut is a gay-friendly state dominated by liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans. Six of the 12 Republican state senators voted for the civil-union law and the Republican governor signed it. The response among the electorate has been muted.

Contrast that to the reaction when courts have forced gay marriage on states. In the 1990s, courts in Hawaii and Alaska ordered the recognition of gay marriage only to have the people in those states ban it by state constitutional amendment, a precedent that would soon be followed. Vermont enacted civil unions in 2000 under compulsion of a court order, which produced a toxic political upheaval. Civil unions survived, but no further progress toward gay marriage has been made there.

Massachusetts recognized gay marriages in 2004 only because the state's highest court ordered it. That led directly to consideration of a state constitutional amendment (still pending) and indirectly to the passage of state constitutional amendments in more than a dozen states last fall.

Until recently, California was advancing steadily and democratically toward gay marriage. From 1999 to 2003 the state legislature added annually to the benefits and responsibilities conferred on gay couples. By the beginning of this year, California's domestic partnerships offered gay couples legally much of what marriage offers. Those democratic gains for gay couples induced only a statewide yawn.

Recently, however, a state judge in San Francisco threatened that progress by declaring the state's marriage law unconstitutional. Unless the decision is reversed by the state's highest court, as I expect it will be, California too will face a possible referendum banning gay marriage. And that referendum might be broad enough to eliminate not just gay marriage, but much or all of the painstaking legislative progress already made.

Connecticut has so far followed a wiser path. However, even in Connecticut this progress is threatened by a pending lawsuit challenging the state's marriage laws. It might be fair to say that judicial victories have primed the legislative pump in Connecticut and elsewhere. Even so, more such judicial pump-priming just now will only fuel a backlash not just in Connecticut but further kindle the fire consuming gay-marriage advocates across the country.

There's something about representative democracy that makes even losers accept the legitimacy of the result. There's something about courts that makes losers want to dump tea in Boston Harbor.

Rule #2:
Incremental steps to gay marriage are necessary, but the steps can be large.

No state has yet authorized gay marriage by legislative action. That suggests that almost everywhere progress will have to be made piecemeal. In California, the legislative pace has been glacial in some years, lightning fast in others.

While incremental legislative steps toward gay marriage are often necessary, they can sometimes and in some places be very large. By recognizing civil unions, Connecticut has taken a huge leap to gay marriage. It will now be easier, in just a few years, to argue that granting Connecticut's gay civil unions the legal and social dignity of "marriage" poses no threat to society.

In this respect, however, the Connecticut model has limited application. Polls showed that 56 percent of the state's residents already favored civil unions. That level of support may be present or quickly obtainable in most of the northeastern states. Beyond those core states, any legislative progress will have to be much slower. For example, Illinois should probably be on the slow track.

Rule #3:
Compromise.

Reform movements need both idealists and pragmatists. Without idealists, the pragmatists have no idea where to go. Without pragmatists, idealists have no idea how to get there. The early years of the gay marriage struggle have necessarily been dominated by idealists, people who thought the revolutionary thought that gay couples should be allowed to marry. Now that this idea has been implanted in the political culture, and has awakened a fierce resistance, it's time for a season of pragmatism.

Pragmatism means compromise. If we stamp our feet and demand marriage, and nothing less, we will get nothing. That was initially the stand taken by Love Makes A Family, the Connecticut group supporting marriage equality. The group opposed civil unions as "separate but equal" and a "dead end" that would never lead to gay marriage. Yet the state legislature was unready for gay marriage, and even getting civil unions required a reaffirmation of the principle that marriage is for "one man and one woman."

After universal criticism in gay circles, Love Makes a Family pragmatically ended its opposition to civil unions. The legislation then passed. Now even the group's president admits that civil unions are not a dead end, but part of a "conversation about marriage equality [that] will continue."

First published April 27, 2005, in a slightly different form, in the Chicago Free Press.

On April 21, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon's general counsel had proposed that the military decriminalize consensual sodomy by redefining "sodomy" as sodomy "committed by force" or with a person under age 16. Currently "sodomy" is defined as any "unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex."

Prompted by the premature disclosure and no doubt fearful of initial congressional reaction, the Pentagon went into protective reaction mode. The very next day a Pentagon spokesman assured a waiting world that consensual sodomy would continue to be a crime, saying it violated "good order and discipline."

But the Pentagon's rationale for existing policy seems more unsustainable than ever. The Supreme Court's Lawrence decision striking down state sodomy laws drew on the Constitution's guarantees of liberty and equality. And the military cannot expect traditional "judicial deference" to insulate it forever from the Constitution. The Pentagon memo alluded to this when it said the proposed revision would "conform more closely to other federal laws and regulations."

What needs to be emphasized even more is that the idea that oral and anal sex are "unnatural" is not a scientific concept, but a religious - specifically Catholic - concept dependent on the doctrine that sex must always have reproductive potential and therefore must always involve only a penis and vagina. To say nothing of other religions, even for Protestants nothing in the bible prohibits heterosexual sodomy. So the ban on sodomy violates religious liberty.

And in fact many heterosexual couples, married and unmarried, engage in sodomy. In a large 1988 survey by the National Opinion Research Center, more than three quarters of American men said they had at some time received oral sex, and nearly 30 percent of white men and about 20 percent of African-American men said they received oral sex during their most recent sexual encounter. So a lot more oral sex ("unnatural carnal copulation") is committed by heterosexuals than homosexuals.

Yet although the military criminalizes consensual heterosexual sodomy as well as homosexual sodomy, the military never discharges heterosexuals for engaging in it. Nor is there any evidence that the military actually believes consensual heterosexual sodomy violates "good order and discipline." How could it do that? So the military does not take its own rationale seriously.

Removing the ban on consensual sodomy would not in itself allow gay men and women to serve openly in the military. In passing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in 1993, Congress also stipulated that homosexuals may not serve. But removing the ban on consensual sodomy would remove any rationale for excluding gays and lesbians except "animus" which the Supreme Court's Romer decision said lacked legal merit.

Turning then from reasons why the ban is bad to reasons why including gays and lesbians would be good for gays and good for the military:

The option of military service would be good for gays and lesbians because joining the military has long been a way for young people to escape an unpleasant home life or repressive small town environment. Few have more potential need for that option than young gays beginning to be aware of their sexuality.

In addition, military service offers an additional career path for all young gays as well as an opportunity to learn skills useful later in the civilian job market. And to a civilian employer military service implies an ability to understand and follow instructions, an ability to work with others, and a degree of stability and personal responsibility, all valuable traits in any young job-applicant.

Finally, military service certifies gays and lesbians as morally equal citizens, willing to contribute to their country and supportive of its fundamental values. Nothing could more effectively undermine religious right propaganda that gays and gay equality would harm America - which is why they oppose gays serving openly in the military: It would show that they are mistaken - or lying.

Gays in the military would be good for the military because it would enable the military to carry out its mission better. Allowing gays and lesbians to serve would enlarge the pool of potential recruits at the very time the military is complaining about its inability to obtain sufficient new personnel.

In addition, allowing open gays would enable the military to retain personnel with valuable skills who are discovered to be gay. The recent discharge of a several gay men who were learning Arabic at a linguistics school is only the most obvious example.

The ban is so irrational that military recruiters do not even pay attention to it. One young gay man told me that when he told the military recruiter he was gay, the recruiter replied, "I didn't hear anything you just said," and promptly signed him up. So ending the ban would end an increasingly obvious example of military hypocrisy.

Finally, while there are necessarily differences between civilian and military life, it is never desirably for a military to become too far detached from the values of the society it defends. A prominent rationale once offered for the draft was that it helped prevent just that separation. Allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would help reduce a distance that has grown since the abolition of the draft in the early 1970s.