IGF CultureWatch

A word like "homophobia" should not be used lightly. Not all people - maybe not even a majority - who have qualms about the idea of homosexuality are actually afraid of lesbians and gay men. But for those people who truly do hold a deep and irrational terror about homosexuals, "homophobia" is the only word that will do. A recent episode of the ABC-TV reality series Wife Swap offers up Exhibit A.

For those who have not seen the show (and prior to this episode, I was among them), Wife Swap takes two families and has them "trade" wives for several days. At the end of the show, the families are restored, and they sit across a table from one another to discuss their experiences. On the Feb. 9, episode, a self-described "traditional Christian" family, the Gillespies, traded their mother, Kris, for Kristine, one half of a lesbian couple who are raising a daughter.

The traditional Kris is a tightly-wound woman who is a stay-at-home mom in a "millionaire suburb" in Texas. Her children are well-behaved, obey orders, make their beds and set the table for dinner each night with place mats and silverware in exactly the right places. The children are not allowed to see PG-rated films, and each member of the family has a personal Bible that they bring to the dinner table for nightly readings.

Kristine, in contast, has a laissez-faire liberal approach to parenting, letting her daughter watch PG-13 movies on the TV in her bedroom (forbidden in Kris's home). The front lawn is barely alive in her lower middle class Arizona home, and there's not a place mat to be found - which is probably okay, because paper plates don't go with place mats.

The differences among families are the show's very heart, but this episode revealed something much less superficial: real homophobia. The theme begins early. When Kris first gets the chance to rifle through her new home, she finds a book on defiant children, and sighs. Then she finds a book on lesbian parenting, her first indication that she's not in Texas anymore. She holds the two books up, and rhetorically asks if there might be a connection.

At the end of the show, when the families discuss what they have been through, Kris states, quite clearly and repeatedly, that she was worried the whole time that the lesbian now living in her home would try to molest her daughter. Kristine is devastated by this, and when she confronts Kris with how this is insulting, Kris says she was only trying to "protect" her family. Kris also goes a step further and says that, in her opinion, Kristine and her partner, Nicki, are "depraved."

This is a word she uses three times in the show, twice to Kristine and Nicki's faces. Very few people, when discussing homosexuals, will actually use such a word. It describes people who are monstrous, ungoverned, inhuman. This is the sort of abusive insult that only the most extreme will use, and seldom to the face of someone they purport to be describing. Kris's multiple use of it on the show, directly to Kristine and her partner, was stunning.

While the lesbian moms - and even the Christian kids - admit to being a bit changed by the experience, Kris is adamant that all this experience did was reaffirm how happy she is with her own life and her own husband. The underlying appeal of shows like this (including the current run of makeover shows, and even the A-list reality shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race) is in the balance of transformation and reaffirmation - how something dramatically out of the ordinary can both change us and prompt greater appreciation.

But Kris was not about to be changed. Her fear and loathing of homosexuals is a constant - an important constant - in her life, and nothing, not even experience, will change that. Kris is literally afraid of homosexuals in the most blatant and unabashed way. Her fear that Kristine would molest Kris's daughter had no basis in fact or reality - something quite obvious to anyone watching Kristine interact with Kris's family. That fear arises solely from notions that Kris holds about what homosexual people are like.

People like Kris cannot be changed or persuaded. In fact, she actually demonstrates a certain amount of pride in her feelings of fear. Even if Kristine did not actually molest - or intend to molest - her daughter, Kris's fear of this remains justified in her mind, a feeling not only appropriate, but necessary. To her, the problem is people who lack her fear of such depraved individuals.

The Wife Swap producers may not have intended this message. Indeed, their focus seems to have been on extreme opposites, playing up, for example, the Gillepsies's Christian beliefs while editing out any mention of the fact that Kristine and Nicki are also Christians who attend church weekly. But the show was a rare display to mainstream America of what real homophobia looks like. And it is something that should inspire real fear.

The depravity Kris sees is nowhere in evidence. It is an understood depravity, not something arising in fact. It is a definitional state, it can not be forgiven, can not be washed away, can not be overcome by any amount of goodness, ordinary humanity, decency, or anything else.

Open lesbians and gay men have changed lives and minds. But some minds will be forever closed. What a shame for them.

Are civil unions, as a political compromise, harmful to the cause of gay marriage? This is a question likely to confront many gay-rights activists in the coming years as a few states move toward legally recognizing gay relationships.

Just this past fall, Connecticut seemed poised to enact a civil-unions law giving gay couples all of the protections, benefits, and responsibilities of marriage under state law. But in January the state gay-marriage advocacy group, Love Makes a Family, began lobbying legislators to oppose the bill. Now legislators are uncertain whether it can pass. Since a gay-marriage bill has no chance of passing this session, the result is that gay couples may get nothing in the short-term.

On its website and in public statements, the Connecticut group has offered two plausible reasons for its all-or-nothing strategy. The first is that civil unions are not a stepping stone to marriage but a dead end. "Make no mistake, if we fight for civil unions, the marriage conversation will end just as it has in Vermont," says the group's president, Anne Stanback, in a statement posted on the organization's website. Stanback notes that Vermont "is the only place where we have an example of what civil union leads to - and it leads to civil union."

The dead-end argument is troubling. It's true that Vermont has made no progress toward gay marriage since its legislature created civil unions in 2000. Though a gay-marriage bill has been filed, it is going nowhere. Even gay advocates in the state seem content to stand pat.

But Vermont is a special case. The fight over civil unions there was a traumatic and divisive one, manifested in unusually bitter election campaigns, angry letters-to-the-editor, and nasty billboards. That should be no surprise: Vermont did not come to the issue incrementally or democratically. Instead, the state supreme court ordered the legislature to recognize gay unions and to do so quickly. The people had no opportunity to adjust themselves gradually to the idea, or to have their voices truly heard. The resulting wounds are deep, and will take long to heal.

Civil unions adopted legislatively in Connecticut, and elsewhere, would write a different and much better story. They would be adopted by a legislature acting on its own, not under court order. There is no reason to believe a civil-union law would have the politically paralyzing effect it has had in Vermont. Instead, adopting civil unions will add a strong weapon to the arsenal of arguments for gay marriage: "We've got the legal benefits, now why not marriage?"

The path of progress for the legislative recognition of gay relationships has been an incremental one, with no single step being a dead end. That has been true in California, where largely symbolic domestic partnerships first created five years ago have grown gradually into something approaching full marriage. It has also been true in foreign countries taking a legislative path, like Sweden and Norway, which enacted limited legal benefits for same-sex couples before moving to comprehensive registered partnerships. It was true in the Netherlands, which implemented domestic partnerships before moving to full marriage. There is little reason to believe that a democratic conversation about the rights of gay couples, once begun, will end with civil unions.

The second argument against civil unions as an intermediate step to marriage is that civil unions send the unacceptable message that gays are second-class citizens. Civil unions, says Stanback, are "a firm message that we are less deserving of dignity, respect, and rights than other citizens and taxpayers." Marriage, by contrast, "is a universally respected cultural, legal, and social institution," she notes. "Very, very few opposite-sex couples would trade their marriage for something called a civil union."

All of that is true and counsels against being satisfied, in the end, with anything short of marriage. But it is not an argument for an all-or-nothing strategy. While second-class citizenship (civil unions) is worse than first-class citizenship (marriage), it is far preferable to third-class citizenship (nothing), at least if we think that attaining second-class status will actually move us forward in the battle for first-class status.

A related and more serious concern is that creating alternative statuses like civil unions may entrench public attitudes hostile to gay marriage, leading to the feared dead end. In a forthcoming book, University of Minnesota sociology professor Kathleen Hull notes the danger that civil unions might "further normalize the treatment of gays and lesbians as a separate class of citizens." If civil unions could be expected to have this effect, they should be resisted while we wait for marriage.

The risk of entrenching gays' separate status through civil unions or other marriage-lite proposals, preventing all further progress, is real but probably not very large. The experience of California and of other countries, noted above, is against it. Gay couples and their families, having tasted legal legitimacy for the first time, are unlikely to be satisfied for long with anything less than full equality. Heterosexuals, having lived through the nonevent of recognizing gay relationships by something short of marriage, will begin to wonder what the fuss was about.

Compromise is the rule of politics. In what promises to be a decades-long struggle for gay marriage, a struggle still in its infancy, we'd do well to remember that. Civil unions are not where we want to be, but they're a lot better than where we are.