IGF CultureWatch

First published Summer 2004 in The Public Interest. Adapted from a talk given at the American Enterprise Institute, April 15, 2004.

The official topic of today's discussion is: "Should conservatives support same-sex marriage?" The unofficial subtitle, at least of my talk, is: "Everything I Know About Gay Marriage, I Learned at the American Enterprise Institute." Though I'm now at the Brookings Institution, my first think tank appointment was at AEI. It was here as a guest scholar that I learned so much from so many of the leading lights of conservatism, and I'd like to think that many of my arguments for gay marriage are, in fact, conservative arguments.

Too many people on the Right are panicking instead of thinking when it comes to same-sex marriage. The president of the United States, unfortunately, is someone I put in that category. But it seems to me that if you apply the kinds of principles that I first learned at AEI, and which folks like AEI's president Christopher DeMuth have done so much to advance over the last 20 years, I think you reach two conclusions, or at least I do. The first is that same-sex marriage is an idea that conservatives ought to support. The second is that even if you still reject gay marriage in principle, a national ban on same-sex marriage, which is what the president and many other conservatives are advocating nowadays, is a very unconservative approach.

Winning the Trifecta

My book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America is largely about why same-sex marriage is what I call the "trifecta of modern American social policy ": a win, a win, and a win - good for gays, good for communities around them (that is to say, the straight world), and, above all, good for the institution of marriage as a whole. If gay marriage is enacted, gay couples will get the legal protections of marriage, but that's hardly the most of it. They also get a more profound love, a destination for love that enriches their lives whether they ultimately get married or not - the knowledge that romantic attachment properly points toward something larger than itself.

They also get the enormous personal benefits that marriage alone conveys: Married people are healthier, happier, more prosperous, and more secure. They suffer from less incidence of drug addiction and criminal behavior. They even live longer. Those are things to which gay citizens ought to have access, and in all of these ways, gay Americans will benefit from integration into the culture of marriage.

The straight world gets another irreplaceable benefit: the stability that comes from knitting people into families. Indeed, that is what marriage uniquely does: It creates family. I have a cousin right now who is 60 years old, married, and suffering from cancer. Her husband is caring for her throughout the difficult experience of chemotherapy, not just physically but emotionally. Without her husband, I doubt she would be alive. There is simply no substitute for the love and care of a spouse. Even though my cousin's marriage is nonprocreative, I do not think anyone can reasonably say that society has no stake in their union. Since her husband is caring for her, the rest of society does not have to.

Above all, the institution of marriage itself is a likely beneficiary of same-sex marriage. This is an opportunity to bolster the ethic and the culture of marriage at a time when society has been abandoning these things. The fundamental principle for all Americans, straight or gay, ought to be that sex, love, and marriage go together, automatically. If you're a straight family with kids, and if a gay couple lives next door, you should want to see them upholding the ideal of marriage. That's good for your kids. (It's also good for their kids, if they have any.) At a time when heterosexuals are increasingly treating marriage as purely optional, this is a rare opportunity to arrest our slide down the slippery slope away from marriage and to recommit ourselves to marriage.

The problem today is not gay couples wanting to get married. That is not the threat to marriage. The threat to marriage is straight couples not wanting to get married or straight couples not staying married. Same-sex marriage is potentially a dramatic statement that marriage as such - not cohabitation, not partnership, not anything else - is the gold standard and the model to which all Americans should aspire. Everybody should be expected to make marriage their aim. That doesn't mean they necessarily have to marry, but that it is the noble and right thing to do.

Every Individual Counts

Here is an important point conservatives should be able to understand and, in fact, do understand in many other contexts: We live in a world of great uncertainty and unintended consequences. We lack a lot of information. The wisest person or committee in the world cannot get everything right and will often make unintended mistakes. How do we make policy in such an uncertain and often surprising world? Modern conservatism has developed some important principles for how to do so, and I'll discuss three of them.

The first principle is that individuals count. Conservatives often remind us never to lose sight of the individual. That doesn't mean you consider only individual welfare, but you must consider it, and you must reject a crude utilitarianism that simply sees individuals as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. Conservatives are generally the first to object to those collectivist policies that relegate individuals to the status of mere human bricks or timber. If you would not confiscate someone's income for the common good, for example, why confiscate their marriage? How many of you would give up your marriage to make someone else's family stronger? And if you're not married, how many of you would give up the opportunity to get married to make someone else's family stronger?

Maggie Gallagher, the president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, has written as follows: "Will same-sex marriage strengthen or weaken marriage as a social institution? If the answer is that it will weaken marriage at all, we should not do it" (emphasis added). What's missing in this calculus are the enormous benefits that marriage can bring to 10 or 15 million homosexual Americans who are now locked out of the culture of marriage, which makes individuals happier, wealthier, and more secure in life. Being deprived of marriage, or even the prospect of marriage, is thus a severe hardship for gays.

Now, it is true that we must balance social costs against individual benefits. I don't deny that for a moment. That's why we have, for example, securities laws. People will do things that are good for themselves but bad for society. What I am arguing is that Gallagher's way of looking at the problem, which is all too common among conservatives on this one issue, cannot be the correct (or truly conservative) approach. It cannot be right to say that all of the good that is accomplished for 10 to 15 million gay people doesn't count against any harm incurred by society. That, it seems to me, is not recognizing the value of gay lives. It's sacrificing their rights and interests for a collective good.

It's the Outcome, Stupid

The second conservative principle I learned at AEI is respect for market forces. How many times have I heard conservatives criticize liberals for mistaking the intention for the deed? Conservatives rightly remind us that tighter regulation of campaign finance, gun ownership, or energy prices does not stop social change. Rather, it distorts the channels through which change runs, often causing adverse unintended consequences. Just saying that you want to make something scarcer, for example, doesn't make regulating or banning it the right answer.

Exactly the same thing applies to same-sex marriage, though here the forces at issue are social market forces - arrangements that people are making in their personal lives, in their social lives. These forces can be managed - and should be managed - by society, but they cannot simply be stopped. The fact is that same-sex unions, of one sort or another, are here for good. They're not simply going to disappear. Societal recognition of some kind will increasingly follow these committed relationships. Given these new social facts, American society has a strong interest in recognizing the nobility of the commitment these couples are making. And marriage is the best institution we have to accomplish that.

The ban on gay marriage favored by many conservatives won't stop societal recognition from flowing to these couples eventually. What it will do is shut marriage out of a new social market. It will effectively convey that this new market, this new demand for recognition, can have anything except marriage. And, of course, if that demand cannot be met by marriage, it will be met by something else.

Blocking Change Is Dangerous, Too

This leads me to the third principle I learned at the American Enterprise Institute, which is the importance of managing risk rationally. Suppose it is argued, as many on the Left do, that welfare reform or education and Medicare vouchers are terrible and dangerous policy ideas - so dangerous in fact that they should never, ever be tried, even on the smallest scale. The extreme opposition of liberals to such sensible reforms is akin to the "precautionary principle" favored by some environmentalists, which opposes any change that is not proven in advance to be safe. Well, the precautionary principle turns out not to be conservative at all. It is, in fact, radical, because it looks only at the risks of change and not at the risks of blocking change, which are often greater. We should keep this in mind when thinking about the pros and cons of same-sex marriage.

There is a significant downside potential of denying same-sex marriage, something the American conservative movement has not fully recognized. The first kind of risk - which is actually closer to a certainty than a mere risk - lies in creating and subsidizing alternatives to marriage: "civil unions," as they're called, or various forms of "domestic partnerships." Absent gay marriage, these various forms of nonmarriages will become legally and socially sanctioned in the years ahead. They will offer halfway houses between marriage and nonmarriage, which will, in many cases, depending on how they're designed, offer the benefits of marriage without the responsibilities, the rights without the obligations.

Politics in a democratic society being what it is, many of these nonmarriage arrangements will be open to heterosexuals over time if not immediately. In fact, the majority of domestic partnership programs already in place in this country - under the auspices of corporations and state and local governments - are already open to opposite-sex couples. Often, opposite-sex couples are the majority to take advantage of them. And even if these alternatives to marriage were not eventually made available to heterosexuals, their very existence would validate the impression that marriage is just one relationship life style among many others. Such alternative arrangements will inevitably erode the special status that marriage still enjoys.

So perhaps, as is often argued by some conservatives, the only choice is to reject even such halfway houses to marriage as civil unions - no gay marriage, no civil unions, no nothing. This would be even worse, because it would mean that the vessel into which gay commitment will flow will be cohabitation. Every gay couple will become a potential advertisement for the possibilities of life outside of marriage. Over time, judges, legislators and society as a whole will accommodate gay couples by conferring marriage rights and social recognition upon cohabitants. And, of course, there is nothing that can prevent straight people from cohabiting as well.

A second important downside risk to be considered is that nondiscrimination, for better or worse, has become a sacred principle in American public life. It has become part of the nation's civic religion. By banning gay marriage outright - saying not here, not anywhere, not ever - marriage as such may come to be viewed in the public's mind as a discriminatory institution. It once seemed farfetched to say that men would shun elite clubs that discriminated against women, and thus a lot of clubs continued to discriminate against women. Well, of course, nowadays, men-only clubs are rare. They're increasingly marginal in society, and most men wouldn't join one. This is the last thing we would want to see happen to the institution of marriage. Just recently, Benton County, Oregon, stopped issuing marriage licenses, on the grounds that it wanted no part of a discriminatory institution. Over time, as the national consensus moves toward equality for homosexuals, there is a serious risk that marriage will be stigmatized and marginalized if it is legally demarcated as a discriminatory institution.

A Truly Conservative Solution

So what's a truly conservative approach to the social challenge of gay marriage? We're fortunate that we live in a country that is ideally suited to tackle this kind of problem. In the United States, with its federalist system, marriage traditionally falls within the boundaries of state law. It seems clear that the conservative solution to this issue is to try same-sex marriage in a state or a couple of states that are ready to have it. Let's find out how it works, and see what happens. It is unlikely that the world will end. In fact, the experiment may prove successful and spread for that reason. By taking the federalist approach, the public will get a real sense of what it is doing - without, importantly, imposing a single policy on the whole country.

Same-sex marriage should be viewed as an opportunity to shore up the institution of marriage. Flatly banning it cannot possibly be the conservative answer. Thus it is regrettable that, on the issue of gay marriage, some of my conservative friends sound very much like the National Education Association on the subject of school vouchers - unwilling to concede any need for any change, averting their eyes from the plight of the unserved and the misserved, asserting that reform can entail only hazards and no benefits, insisting that even one experiment anywhere ever is one too many, and unwilling to offer alternatives other than wishing the whole issue would go away. My challenge to conservatives today is to stop making gay marriage the exception to their conservative principles.

Will gay marriage produce more homosexuals? For many who oppose gay marriage, the prospect that it will lead more people to homosexuality is a powerful (if often unstated) reason to oppose it. They need not fear: gay marriage is unlikely to have that effect, though it will probably make it seem as if there are more homosexuals. But even if gay marriage did have the effect of increasing the number of homosexuals in the population, that would not be reason by itself to oppose gay marriage.

Gay marriage will likely affect public attitudes about homosexuality. Gays will be seen in stable, committed, long-term relationships. Those relationships will enjoy as much respect as the law can provide because they will be accorded rights, privileges, and protections equal to heterosexual marriages. They will be called marriages, both in the law and in our culture. This will provide a language of ritual in which to speak about gay relationships that is familiar to straight Americans. Gay couples will no longer be "partners," but spouses or husbands or wives. Gay couples will have engagements, weddings, and honeymoons. These words will be used, for the first time, without winks and nods, without knowing exaggeration.

We can expect, therefore, that over time gay marriage will have the effect of softening opposition to homosexuality in general. It will help alleviate some of the stigma that attaches to homosexuality.

That is not the only, or even the primary, reason to support gay marriage. The better reasons to support it are:

• to encourage long-term coupling among gay men and women,
• to reduce the individual and social miseries often associated with being single,
• to protect existing gay couples from significant legal and social disadvantage, and
• to support the children raised in gay families.

But reducing the hatred of homosexuals will certainly be a welcome consequence of recognizing gay marriages.

For some, however, this positive byproduct of gay marriage carries a significant risk. Gay marriage, in this view, will be a subsidy for homosexuality. And everyone knows that when you subsidize something you get more of it. Similarly, stigma is now part of the cost of homosexuality. Reduce the cost of something and you get more demand for it. Presto, more homosexuals.

Everything we have learned about human sexual orientation in the past half century confounds this seemingly logical conclusion. Human sexual orientation appears to be both unchosen and unchangeable. Whether it is biologically or genetically determined, or simply set at a very young age, sexual orientation does not respond to social influences designed to lead it in a different direction. Efforts to "treat" or to "convert" homosexuals have a long history of failure and no reliable evidence of success.

Further, we have no good evidence for the existence of "waverers," people whose sexual orientation is on the line between homosexuality and heterosexuality and who may be led in one direction or the other by social and personal influences. Homosexuals are not created by seduction, recruitment, or propaganda.

As conservative legal scholar and federal judge Richard Posner has concluded, homosexuality appears "to be no more common in tolerant than in repressive societies." For example, there is no evidence that the relative acceptance of homosexuality in the Netherlands and Belgium, both of which recognize gay marriage, has caused an increase in the number of homosexuals.

So gay marriage will not likely increase the number of homosexuals; it will, however, increase levels of happiness among existing homosexuals. How could that be a bad thing?

By helping to reduce the stigma of homosexuality, gay marriage will also increase the proportion of homosexuals who are open and honest about their sexual orientation. That's because the potential costs of being out - like losing a job, alienating family members and friends, and risking hate violence - will be less likely. So after gay marriage is recognized, it may well seem there are more homosexuals than before.

Perhaps, however, even if gay marriage does not increase the number of homosexuals it will increase the amount of homosexual sexual activity. Again, this would count as a significant cost of gay marriage to many who oppose it.

Would gay marriage lead to an increase in homosexual sexual activity? It is hard to say. On the one hand, we could conjecture that the stigma-reducing effect of gay marriage may lead to more homosexual experimentation, and at a younger age, by homosexuals and even by heterosexuals.

On the other hand, gay marriage may reduce homosexual activity in other ways. As I have argued, gay marriage would not be a subsidy for homosexuality in general because sexual orientation is immune to a system of rewards and punishments. But gay marriage will be a subsidy for homosexual monogamy. And everyone knows that when you subsidize something you get more of it.

So the overall effect of gay marriage may be neither a net gain nor a net loss in homosexual activity.

All of this discussion is predicated on the assumption that there is something bad about homosexuality; otherwise, there would be nothing to fear from an increase in the number of homosexuals or homosexual activity.

And the judgment that homosexuality is somehow bad rests, in turn, on essentially religious grounds. Try as they might to resist this characterization of their position, religion is what opponents of gay marriage must ultimately base their case upon.

First published on April 14, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Universities used to be storehouses of knowledge. That may still be true. But lately they seem to have become storehouses of facile ideologies and ponderous rhetoric. Take this announcement about a recent university conference, "The Media Queered":

"Since the 1960s, queer people have become increasingly visible in the media. Queer identities in community life and politics may rely in the 21st century on the prevailing media landscape. The paradoxes of visibility are many: spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping, diminishing isolation at the cost of activism, trading assimilation for equality, converting radicalism into a market niche. A day-long symposium will explore visibility and its discontents."

None of this seems very coherent. To the extent it is coherent it seems simply wrong.

To be sure, gays and lesbians have become ever more visible in the media - television, newspapers, films - the last 35 years. This is a good thing. It has helped promote familiarity and comfort with gays. But it is bizarre to think "our community life and politics" will be limited to (or by) what is presented in the media.

It can hardly limit our community life because we see real live gays and lesbians around us every day with a wide variety of identities and ways of living. And after all, the very limited range of gay identities the media presented early on - a simpering Liberace, a bitter, sarcastic Paul Lynde - did not limit the wide range of personalities or identities actual gays and lesbians developed.

In fact, it was growing awareness of the wide range of real gays and lesbians that forced (or permitted) the media to expand beyond the limited identities (or stereotypes) they initially presented. We can expect that expansion to continue - as the media offer an ever-wider range of gay people.

And media visibility can hardly limit our politics because as more and more gays come out, other people's perception of gays will increasingly be based on their familiarity with and observations of actual gays they come in contact with and not be limited to the gay identities presented in the media.

All this should be obvious. But, typically, the academic deconstructionists or so-called "critical theorists" make two errors here. They get cause and effect exactly reversed, and they assume that representations of the world ("the text") are more important, more influential, than the world itself.

To use their own language, they "mistake the ontological priority" and they wrongly "prioritize the text" - perhaps because academics exist to some extent apart from the world and "texts" (representations) are what they know how to study. Or often not even texts but theories about texts.

Paradoxes - about anything - are big in "critical theory." They supposedly demonstrate that there are paradoxes or contradictions somehow inherent in the structure of the real world. But contradictions don't exist in the structure of reality. The world just is.

The supposed paradoxes or contradictions are the result of confusions or inadequacies in people's theories or concepts about the world. Quantum mechanics has not been reconciled with general relativity, but physicists don't say the universe contains contradictions. They know the problem is with their theories.

You would think this increasing media visibility and public acceptance of gays would be welcomed. In fact, it could hardly be puzzling or exhibit "contradictions" except to people who assumed that American society was bad and feared the acceptance of gays and lesbians because that might reduce their sense of alienation from society. Consider:

• "Spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping." This is not paradoxical, it is simply wrong. The old presentations of Liberace or the gay character who committed suicide or died of AIDS - or complete lesbian invisibility - those were the harmful stereotypes. But the implication of The L Word that lesbians might actually be attractive? How awful! How oppressive! Or the fascist stereotype on Queer Eye that gay men might have style or a sense of humor? Oh, the horror, the horror.
• "Diminishing isolation at the cost of activism." So we should preserve isolation in order to preserve activism? But what has all our activism been for if not to diminish the legal, social, psychological, and spiritual isolation gays and lesbians once faced. Nor need acceptance inhibit activism. This supposed "paradox" is based on a complete misunderstanding of human psychology.
• "Trading assimilation for equality." Deconstructionist writing is generally turgid, but this is uncommonly opaque. In any case, the tacit assumption here is false. There is no trade-off between acceptance and equality. The full social and legal inclusion of gays in society what equality means. Nor are gays likely to lose any inherent gay qualities in the process - if they are genuinely inherent and not merely artifacts of forced inequality.
• "Converting radicalism into a market niche." Again activism and commerce are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive. The two realms are synergistic. In fact much of recent gay progress has been in the corporate and economic realm. Only someone with an uninformed, knee-jerk hostility to capitalism and business could resent this progress.

First published on April 7, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Few artists before the present era have left so clear a record of their homosexuality as Michelangelo.

The great 16th century Italian sculptor, painter and poet - styled "Il Divino" by his contemporaries - is best known to us now for a famous Pieta, his 15-foot statue of David, and frescoes in Rome's Sistine Chapel depicting scenes from Genesis and "The Last Judgment."

We could even describe the statue of the naked David with its curiously large hands, and the chapel's "Creation of Adam" with its languorous Adam reaching out toward God, as "Michelangelo's Greatest Hits."

The best place to start, though, is an early (1503-4) painting of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus. While the holy family are at the center, in the background are five young men, four of them naked, obviously more interested in one another than in the holy family. One seems to be trying to pull the cloak off the youth still wearing one. They serve no obvious purpose in the painting and seem to be there because Michelangelo wanted them there.

Mary gazes up soulfully at Jesus' face but reaches out toward his genitals. It was common in Renaissance paintings to emphasize the infant Jesus' genitals by pointing to them or placing them at the center of a painting in order to assert Jesus' full humanity - and maleness - but here Mary seems about to grasp them. It was not Michelangelo's last depiction of female attention to male genitalia.

The enormous frescoes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-12) depict scenes from the Old Testament. But between the paintings at junctures in the ceiling are some 20 well-muscled naked young men, each carefully individuated. They play no role in the biblical scenes and seem off in their own worlds - bored, scowling, joking or gesturing playfully - although one man noticing the Creation of Adam seems surprised and one glancing back at the Flood behind him looks alarmed.

The Temptation scene is particularly interesting not only for its hunky, mature Adam and decidedly female serpent, but because Eve is placed sitting in front of a standing, naked Adam, her face inches away from his crotch, just turning away momentarily to take the fruit from the serpent as if she had been interrupted while doing something else.

Two decades later, Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint "The Last Judgment" above the altar. There are an enormous number of characters surrounding a quite healthy and heavily muscled Jesus. The saved, the condemned and various demons all have physiques that would do credit to the best of today's steroid-enhanced bodybuilders.

Here the risen St. Sebastian is no willowy, agonized martyr but an extremely handsome, well-muscled youth holding in his hand the arrows that killed him. Here too St. Catherine looks over her shoulder toward the crotch of an originally naked St. Blasius, one of several elements that contemporaries found obscene and "fit for a bordello." Two male figures hugging each other toward the upper right remain unidentified.

Michelangelo never married and was never linked romantically with any woman. To the contrary, his poems and letters contain expressions of fervent affection for young men such as Cecchino de Bracci, Febo di Poggio and especially the young nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri.

The one woman Michelangelo befriended - after he was 60 - was the widow Vittoria Colona, something of a spiritual friend, and no one will be surprised to read that she had a "severe, masculine face." In one of his poems, Michelangelo described her as "a man in a woman."

Without doubt, the great love of his life was the vibrantly handsome Tommaso Cavalieri, whom he met in 1532 when he was 57 and Tommaso 23. Michelangelo wrote love letters and ardent love poems to him and in 1533 sent him a series of erotic drawings, the most famous of which depicts Zeus disguised as an eagle abducting a young Ganymede. In Michelangelo's drawing, the eagle presses its body tightly against the back of the smiling, pliant Ganymede.

Michelangelo's poems to Cavalieri were extravagant. "Your name nourishes my heart and soul filing each with such sweetness ... If my eyes had their share of you, only think how happy I would be." In another he wishes his hairy skin to be made into a breastplate for Tommaso and "Were I two slippers he could own and use as base to his majestic weight, I would enjoy two snowy feet at least."

Michelangelo was born out of his time. He would have been far happier in fifth century Athens. But he must have felt that if the Greeks could portray their gods and heroes as handsome musclemen, Christianity could too. He did not completely persuade his contemporaries, nor ours, but it is a tribute to his art that he came so close.