IGF CultureWatch

First published March 16, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

During a recent series of reports on widespread drug use at gay circuit parties, Chicago's WBBM-AM news interviewed a man at the party who told him the reason gay men use drugs:

"I think there's a lot of insecurities in the gay community. That's why there's a lot of drug use and stuff like that. I think they use that to feel more comfortable with who they are. You know, it's hard to be accepted as gay people in America as it is, so this is something to sort of cut the edge."

That view seems to be common. Berkeley psychologist Walter Odets similarly explained to the Chicago Tribune that gay men use crystal meth as "a terrific self-esteem enhancer" because "we have a widely depressed [gay] community living in the midst of a deadly epidemic and a society that's still, for the most part, unapproving."

That reasoning seems plausible. But think back. Where have we heard this explanation before?

Back in the 1970s, when sociologists (doing their research at gay bars) purported to find high rates of alcohol consumption among gays and lesbians, the rationale immediately offered was that we lived in a homophobic society and the pressures of societal hostility and the tensions of having to remain in the closet led gays and lesbians to seek relief in the anodyne, pain-deadening effects of alcohol.

Then during the 1980s, as AIDS irrupted into the gay male community, when some gay men continued to have sex with a large number of partners, the explanation was that gay men lived in a hostile society that devalued their lives, so it was not surprising that they sought personal validation by proving to themselves that they could attract lots of sexual partners.

Even today, when some gay men continue to engage in unprotected sex, you occasionally hear that, well, unprotected sex is more "intimate," and after all as an oppressed minority gay men are just trying to find ways to compensate for social opprobrium, feel better about themselves, etc., etc.

Oddly, no one seems willing to say out loud that frequent drug use, unprotected sex, or heavy drinking can be enjoyable and that is the main reason people engage in them. They hardly need social hostility or internal discomfort to find them fun, pleasurable, gratifying and ego-enhancing.

But no, there seems almost no enjoyable but risk-laden activity gays and lesbians might engage in that someone does not try to explain as the result of societal hostility or compensation for internal discomfort about being gay.

But if you think about it very long, that social-psychological explanation begins to seem pretty tired and threadbare and look less like a reason than an excuse, a rationalization, an alibi, for not just one but several reasons.

For one thing, it is no longer 1970 or 1980. It has been more than 35 years since Stonewall and more than 30 years since homosexuality was de-pathologized by the psychology and counseling establishments. Institutional and societal homophobia have abated significantly, so if they were the cause of imprudent behavior, that behavior should have decreased proportionally rather than continued, much less increased.

Then too, this supposedly homophobia-induced behavior is being noticed most prominently not in Alabama or Oklahoma, which really are homophobic, but in the gay enclaves of our most tolerant, urbane, blue state cities - New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. Some of the very people whose behavior is attributed to oppression even live and work in the gay enclave and hardly ever encounter societal hostility at all.

No doubt many of us felt, or at least were aware of, opprobrium toward gays when we were growing up - from our families, at school or from our churches. But people are not helpless victims of their childhood. We expect people to acquire a certain amount of self-knowledge and self-understanding as they mature, to come to terms with and get over the pains of childhood. That is part of what "growing up" means.

Furthermore, blaming homophobia fails to account for why most gays and lesbians, no less sensitive and subject to the same social pressures, now as well as during childhood, do not feel the need to engage to any great extent in these enjoyable but risk-laden activities. Somehow the majority of us manage to get along largely without them.

The social opprobrium model fails for all these reasons. But most of all it fails because it is too heavily influenced by an outdated behavioralist stimulus-response model of how humans function: Put in influence X, and generate behavior Y.

But people do not function that way; they are not machines. People have free will and personal agency. Talking as if they do not, as if they are in the grip of social influences they cannot resist is exactly the wrong message to send to them. We need to remind them of their ability to control their own lives. We effectuate their capacity for self-determination by reminding them that they have it, not by offering spurious reasons why they do not.

On March 14, a San Francisco County judge ruled that a state law banning same-sex marriage violates the California constitution. His ruling comes a month after a Manhattan trial court judge determined that there is no ban on same-sex marriage under current New York State law. Enforcement of both decisions has been suspended, pending appeal; even so, these bicoastal cases have given advocates of same-sex marriage great reason to cheer.

These cases also bring cause for concern, as they are part of a strategy that same-sex marriage advocates across the U.S. have embraced wholly, quickly and without much regard for its negative consequences. The strategy is litigation; the goal is a U.S. Supreme Court edict making equal access to marriage the law of the land.

At first blush, such a decision may seem appealing, due to its finality and far-reaching scope. Even if a majority of the Supremes would jump the broom for same-sex marriage on some distant day, the very way such litigation is pursued creates a series of political problems in the here and now. Presumably, these difficulties would fall away on that glorious day when equality for gay and lesbian Americans is handed down from on high. The question that must be asked is whether the damage in the meantime can be so easily reversed - even more so if that glorious day never comes to pass.

The litigation strategy would seem to bear the fullest fruit when the lawsuits are filed in cities like New York and San Francisco - the bluest epicenters of very blue states. Local judges in Kansas or Indiana would be far less inclined to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. At the same time, this strategy of focusing on liberal bastions sets up same-sex marriage advocates for a major backlash in more conservative states. When "judicial activism" takes root in the big coastal cities, state legislators in heartland capitals like Topeka and Indianapolis follow suit with state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. Indeed, Kansas and Indiana are among states that have renewed efforts to pass such amendments in recent weeks.

Perhaps this dynamic can be written off as Newton's third law of American politics: A legal action in the blue states yields and equal and opposite legislative action in the red states. Many on the left view this dynamic and say, so what? If gay couples want to get married, they're better off moving to states like Massachusetts, California or New York, where things are much more progressive, anyway. What self-respecting gay person would ever want to set foot in a state like Kansas, where they've made such a name for themselves fighting the radical theory of evolution?

The answer, of course, is that there are gay and lesbian couples living at this very moment in Kansas, Indiana and all the other states, even those that voted for President Bush by double-digit margins. In fact, some 23 percent of gay and lesbian voters cast their ballot for W. this time around. Thus, it's vital to remember that marriage is not a partisan issue - it's a matter of the humanity and dignity of Americans of every political stripe in every state.

If litigation in some states leads to equality in marriage, resulting in legislation in other states that makes that same equality much more difficult to achieve, isn't it worth it? In practice, this is a false choice, because litigation is far from the only option. For all the flurry of anti-marriage legislation, there have been very few attempts to enact state recognition of same-sex relationships through the legislative process. Beefed-up domestic partnerships have gone into effect in California, and Connecticut is about to enact civil unions both passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, rather than signed by the judiciary.

I admit, these civil unions are not exactly the same as marriage; the states enacting them have strived to make them separate but equal. This is not the ideal, but it's darn close and historically impressive, especially considering that states could arrest gay people for having consensual sex in private until two years ago. If the only impediment to state recognition is the word marriage, why not work to pass civil unions now and save full marriage for the next generation?

Because there is a third element to achieving marriage equality: education. For all of the furor over gay marriage and moral values in last year's election, I remain surprised by how little time and energy advocates for same-sex marriage spent making their case to the public. When they got their moment in the spotlight, too often such advocates wasted precious airtime. They could have demonstrated how same-sex couples currently function and thrive in communities in every state, and why their relationships are worthy of recognition. Instead, they lambasted President Bush for changing the subject from the war in Iraq to gay marriage. Unsurprisingly, this strategy failed miserably.

True social change means changing hearts and minds. Laws will have to change as well, but solid and lasting equality will come when revisions to the law are backed by the will of the people. When new laws are imposed from on high, there is no guarantee that the mass of citizens will follow suit.

The place to start is not a court of law, but the court of public opinion. And the process should not be a struggle. There are still a lot of Americans who don't know a gay person very well - or don't know they know one. It is a grave moral and political error to confuse the uncertainty of such people - even when underpinned by fear - as a kind of hate. The better avenue is one of openness and dialogue that starts with the people next door. That's something no court can hand down.

First published March 9, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Belligerent and strident Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has an inexplicable reputation for judicial brilliance. What seems insufficiently noticed, however, is Scalia's recent passage from a masked religious advocacy to overt support for intruding religion into people's lives.

During the March 2 oral argument of constitutional challenges to government displays of the Ten Commandments, Scalia observed that the commandments were "a symbol of the fact that government derives its authority from God." A little later he added that display of the commandments sends the message that "Our laws come from God."

Now this view of American government is offered entirely without evidence and not only deeply dangerous to republican government but at every point demonstrably false.

Scalia's claim is dangerous because based on what we can learn from ancient religious texts, gods typically give commands, offer no reasons for their commands, require unquestioning obedience, brook no argument or dissent and tend to destroy those who disobey. If governmental authority comes directly from a god, governments have no reason to follow any other practice.

In theory, any such government is obligated to obey the god's will. It is exactly this theory that underlies fundamentalist Muslim hostility to democracy - that democracy is non-Islamic because it is rule by the people instead of by Allah. But of course it is the government itself or officially approved religious authorities who determine what God's will is.

Scalia's view that government derives its authority from God seems indistinguishable from the medieval doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. But modern governments, even monarchies, long ago abandoned that claim, no prominent American statesman - and no Supreme Court justice - has ever asserted it, and the founders of the United States rejected it in the strongest terms.

The very Preamble to the U.S. Constitution makes it clear that the American government obtains its authority not from any god but from the people themselves: "We the People of the United States," it says, "do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." That is, the people form the government and grant it powers. Nowhere does the Constitution mention God.

The theory behind this - what we might call "the metaphysics of republican government" - is set out in the Declaration of Independence. There, Thomas Jefferson and the 55 other signers explain that "all Men ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" and that the governments they institute derive "their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed."

In short, the idea is that the Creator gives unalienable rights to human beings, who in turn grant to a government only enough power to protect their rights. The government receives nothing at all from God - no authority, no rights, no powers.

If someone tried to cavil that the Declaration was technically not a government document, we can point out that both the Ninth and Tenth Amendments make clear that the people themselves have primary possession of rights and powers, even of the ones they transfer to the government.

The Ninth Amendment says, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Note the word "retained" - that is, the people had the rights in the first place before they formed a government.

The Tenth Amendment adds, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people." Note the word "delegated." The government's authority is derived from the people - and in the U.S. context, pre-existing state governments - not from God.

Unfortunately for Scalia, even if governments did obtain authority from God, the Ten Commandments would not be a reliable basis for our laws.

For one thing, societies long before and in total ignorance of the Ten Commandments had highly developed law codes that prohibited stealing, adultery and the murder of fellow citizens. Those are fundamental requirements for any society and hardly depend for their discovery or enforcement on the authority of anyone's particular god.

Second, most governments - including ours - reject the idea of enforcing through law many of the Biblical God's commandments - for example, those that prohibit work on the Sabbath or the creation of graven images, and the parts that refer complacently to slavery (commandments 4 and 10).

Third, contrary to the fundamentalists' view, many biblical scholars point out that if the Israelites had just escaped slavery in Egypt and were wandering in the desert, they would hardly have had slaves of their own, nor houses nor cities with gates, yet all those are referred to in the commandments. That indicates that the commandments were not given at Mt. Sinai but formulated later by scribes for a more developed society and back-dated by being inserted into the Exodus to give them more authority.

So Scalia's view is ignorant, false, tendentious, authoritarian and literally un-American.