IGF CultureWatch

First published on March 7, 2004, in The New York Times Magazine.

In endorsing the passage of a constitutional amendment that would restrict marriage to the union of men and women, President Bush established himself as the country's most prominent advocate of same-sex marriage.

To be more precise, he established himself as the most prominent advocate of the best arguments for gay marriage, even as he roundly rejected gay marriage itself. Consider the words that he spoke in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Feb. 24.

"The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution ... honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith." Correct. Marriage is indeed the bedrock of civilization. But why would the establishment of gay matrimony erode it? Would millions of straight spouses flock to divorce court if they knew that gay couples, too, could wed? Today, a third of all American children are born out of wedlock, with no help from homosexual weddings; would the example gays set by marrying make those children's parents less likely to tie the knot?

Children, parents, childless adults and marriage itself are all better off when society sends a clear and unequivocal message that sex, love and marriage go together. Same-sex marriage affirms that message. It says that whether you're gay or straight - or rich or poor, or religious or secular, or what have you - marriage is the ultimate commitment for all: the destination to which loving relationships naturally aspire.

"Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society." Correct again. And the commitment of gay partners to love and serve each other promotes precisely those same goals.

A solitary individual lives on the frontier of vulnerability. Marriage creates kin, someone whose first "job" is to look after you. Gay people, like straight people, become ill or exhausted or despairing and need the comfort and support that marriage uniquely provides. Marriage can strengthen and stabilize their relationships and thereby strengthen the communities of which they are a part. Just as the president says, society benefits when people, including gay people, are durably committed to love and serve one another.

And children? According to the 2000 census, 27 percent of households headed by same-sex couples contain children. How could any pro-family conservative claim that those children are better off with unmarried parents?

"Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society." By "roots," Bush had in mind marriage's traditional definition as male-female. But at least as deep as marriage's roots in gender are its roots in commitment. Marriage takes its ultimate meaning not from whom it excludes but from what it obliges: "To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part." For gay people to join other Americans in embracing that vow only strengthens "the good influence of society."

Yes, letting same-sex couples wed would in some sense redefine marriage. Until a decade ago, no Western society had ever embraced or, for the most part, even imagined same-sex marriage. But until recently, no Western society had ever understood, to the extent most Americans do today, that a small and more or less constant share of the population is homosexual by nature. Homosexuals aren't just misbehaving heterosexuals. Fooling straight people into marrying them is not an option. Barring them from the blessings of marriage is inhumane and unfair, even if that is a truth our grandparents did not understand.

So today's real choice is not whether to redefine marriage but how to do so: as a club only heterosexuals can join or as the noblest promise two people can make. To define marriage as discrimination would defend its boundaries by undermining its foundation.

"Government, by recognizing and protecting marriage, serves the interests of all." Correct yet again. A marriage license uniquely bestows many hundreds of entitlements and entanglements that publicly affirm the spouses' mutual responsibility and that provide them with the tools they need to care for each other. Far from being just a piece of paper, a marriage license both ratifies and fortifies a couple's bonds. And marriage, like voting and other core civic responsibilities, is strongest when universal. It best serves the interests of all when all are eligible and welcome to serve.

"Our government should respect every person and protect the institution of marriage. There is no contradiction between these responsibilities." Indeed, there is not. Allowing and expecting marriage for all Americans would show respect for the welfare and equality of all Americans, and it would protect the institution of marriage from the proliferation of alternatives (civil unions, domestic-partner benefits and socially approved cohabitation) that a continued ban on same-sex marriage will inevitably bring - is, in fact, bringing already.

The logic of Bush's speech points clearly toward marriage for all. It is this logic, the logic of marriage itself, that Bush and other proponents of a constitutional ban defy in their determination to exclude homosexuals.

"In all that lies ahead, let us match strong convictions with kindness and good will and decency." Amen. And let us have the courage to follow where our convictions and our compassion logically lead.

First published on March 6, 2004, in National Journal. Copyright © 2004, National Journal.

In a small Texas church in 1977, a young man named George W. Bush married a young woman named Laura Lane Welch. Their marriage changed them both. "She is the steel in his back," a reporter who knew them told CNN.com in 2001. "She is a civilizing influence on him."

A civilizing influence: If marriage's magic - for individuals, for couples, for communities, for countries - were to be reduced to a phrase, that would be it. If President Bush were asked what was the single most important day of his life, I imagine he might choose, not the day he was chosen president, nor the day his twin daughters were born, but the day he united his life with Laura Welch's. Marriage civilizes, comforts, nourishes. Possibly no man in the country knows this better than Bush.

I hope, then, that it was with some measure of agony that, on February 24, he called for the Constitution to be amended to define marriage as a union of a man and a woman. At that moment, the occupant of the office once held by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln declared that millions of Americans should be forever denied what is, after freedom itself, the greatest blessing of civic life: the opportunity to marry the person you love.

Now, I am not to be trusted in this matter. I am gay, coupled, and an advocate of same-sex marriage, thus condemned to view Bush's announcement through a scrim of disappointment and anger. Still, when I do my best to set my bias aside, and with the benefit of more than a week's cooling off, it seems to me that Bush's announcement amounted to a failure of moral and political vision, of empathy and imagination, that is symptomatic of a larger decline of his presidency.

Bush is no bigot. He is said to treat his gay acquaintances with kindness, and he is in good company in opposing same-sex marriage. A robust majority of the public is against gay marriage, as are most leading Democrats and 3,000 years of Western tradition. To tar everyone who rejects the idea as bigoted is to smear millions of Americans who wish their gay fellow-citizens no ill.

Bush, however, not only rejects gay marriage. He also opposes (though would not federally ban) civil union, as the nonmarital legal recognition of gay unions is often called. In his view, gay couples should have no formal legal status or protection of any kind.

More: In the course of his speech, as indeed in the course of his presidency, the word "gay" or "homosexual" did not pass his lips. He had nothing to say about the people to whom he would deny the irreplaceable blessings of marriage, and nothing to say specifically to them. It was as if a politician, a century ago, had announced his support for an amendment that would forever ban women from voting in any election on U.S. soil, and had done so in a speech carefully crafted to avoid mentioning women or even using a feminine pronoun. The message of Bush's omission, intended or otherwise, must surely be: Gay Americans are of no interest or concern to this president. Gay couples are invisible.

Perhaps Bush is morally myopic, a Mr. Magoo who sees gay people only when he physically collides with them. More likely, he takes the view that homosexuality is a personal and private idiosyncrasy, indeed a sin, of which public policy should take no formal notice. Gay couples, in this view, should feel free to draw up private contracts and wills of whatever sort they please, but they should go unnoticed by law and public policy.

Surely, if he stopped to think about it, Bush would realize that marriage conveys a host of benefits that no interpersonal contract can provide. He must be aware that only marriage can protect spouses from having to testify against one another under oath. (How, I wonder, would Bush feel knowing his wife could be subpoenaed as a witness against him by the next Kenneth Starr?) He must be aware that a bequest to a legally "unrelated" beneficiary is easily challenged by greedy or vindictive relatives. He must be aware that marriage is no mere legal contract between two individuals; it is a promise that spouses make not just to each other but to their community and in their community's eyes.

When I gave a speech a few months ago, I was surprised to find my host not in attendance. When I asked why, I learned he was at home taking care of his dying male partner. Bush, apparently, sees neither nobility nor public benefit in this union. Apparently he sees no union at all. Just individuals doing their thing. Nothing to bother himself about.

There is another Bush, the one who grappled with the ethics of stem-cell research in 2001, the one who in that case delivered a national address exquisitely weighing the moral claims of well and sick and born and unborn.

Contrast that with the cool five minutes or so he gave same-sex marriage, the studied omission of any concern for the moral claims or welfare of 10 million or more gay Americans, and the refusal to offer them civil unions or any other consolation for their disenfranchisement. However intended, his performance was the most callous by an important American public official since the days of segregation.

The failure of moral imagination was exceeded, if that was possible, by the failure of political imagination. At his best, Bush in the past has shown an unusual facility for finding new ways out of old boxes. Refusing to choose between unacceptable alternatives, he shifts the paradigm instead. After September 11, he recognized right away that long-standing American policy for the Arab world was obsolete. In the Middle East, when told he had to accept unending conflict or bestow a state upon the likes of Yasir Arafat, he chose neither, instead linking Palestinian statehood to Palestinian democratization. It was this Bush who promised, for a while, the most creative and generative presidency since the days of FDR and Truman - so much so, that I called him "the accidental radical" in these pages.

But then there is the Bush who shruggingly signed an expensive and reactionary farm bill, a much more expensive if not quite so reactionary Medicare expansion, a command-and-control campaign finance law straight from the 1970s. There is the Bush who in January proposed, despite burgeoning deficits, an increase for the National Endowment for the Arts, a pleasant frivolity that sprays a mist of federal subsidy into a torrent of private funding for the arts and entertainment. And now the gay-marriage ban.

Americans haven't made up their minds about gay marriage and don't want to be rushed, either by liberal courts or by conservative Constitution-amenders. Most Americans, including many conservatives, believe the matter should be settled at a deliberate pace by the several states. The U.S. Supreme Court is unlikely to impose one state's gay marriages on the whole country, but if Bush wanted to be sure, he might have proposed an amendment saying, for instance, "Nothing in this Constitution requires any state or the federal government to recognize anything other than the union of one man and one woman as a marriage." In that or some other way, he might have transcended the all-or-nothing choice presented to him by religious conservatives. He might thereby have poured water on the fires of the culture war.

Instead he chose gasoline. If extremism means opting for the most extreme alternative available, Bush is objectively an extremist. The most important portion of his February 24 announcement was this sentence: "Furthermore, even if the Defense of Marriage Act is upheld, the law does not protect marriage within any state or city." Translation: Preventing federal courts from pre-empting the states is not enough. On not a single square inch of U.S. territory can even one same-sex marriage ever be allowed, even if all the people in the relevant jurisdiction want it and even if no other jurisdiction would be required to accept it. In a country with a three-century tradition that wisely leaves domestic law to states and localities, Bush's proposed amendment amounts to ruthless totalism: scorched earth.

Bush is by temperament no extremist, especially on cultural issues; and when he thinks his way through a problem and knows his own mind, he is unafraid of activists who demand their way or the highway. What remains is to guess that Bush caved in to extremism on same-sex marriage because he failed to engage. Increasingly he seems to make conventional choices within a political environment that he accepts as a given. The gay-marriage failure is the latest in a series of decisions suggesting political senescence.

What a pity if the imagination that once characterized Bush at his best is sputtering out, giving way to the politics of palliation and placation. What a shame to see the accidental radical become an accidental reactionary.

Copyright © 2004 National Journal. Reproduction in whole or in part requires prior written permission.

First published March 5, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

I cannot say for sure that the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which now has President George W. Bush's approval and support, will not pass.

People with more political expertise than I think that with the opposition of liberal Democrats and pro-federalism Republicans it will not obtain the two-thirds vote needed to pass Congress. Others think legislatures in at least 15 or 16 states will be unwilling to yield yet another state power to the federal government - and only 13 are needed.

But because the outcome is uncertain this is the ideal opportunity for us to make our arguments for same-sex marriage as clearly and as often as we can. Never before have we had the public and the media paying so much attention to our arguments and our personal stories demonstrating the desire and need for gay marriage.

Nevertheless, while fighting a constitutional ban is vitally important now, it is encouraging to realize that in the long run anti-gay zealots are fighting a losing war and whether or not the amendment passes, same-sex marriage will eventually be legal. That assessment is based on consideration of the slow but relentless economic and social pressures that underlie politics and public opinion. They include:

• Young people's support. Since 1997 the annual survey of college freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has shown an increasing majority of 18 year olds favoring "legal marital status" for gays and lesbians. Other surveys show the same thing. Where young people are today, society as a whole will be in 10 or 20 years, because they will be society. Given this trend Bush will probably be the last anti-gay U.S. president, just as George Wallace the last overtly segregationist governor.
• Women in business and politics. Women are already a majority of students in college and law school and an increasing percentage in business schools. Every survey shows far more support among women for same-sex marriage, so as these women become more influential in business, law and politics, they bring their gay-friendly attitudes, countering the aggressive prissiness about gays common in older heterosexual men for whom hostility to gays is a key component of their male identity and male self-presentation.
• More religious ceremonies. FMA or no, more and more individual churches will find ways to offer same-sex blessing ceremonies, union ceremonies and even wedding ceremonies. Responding to heartfelt pleas from gay couples, more ministers, rabbis and priests will offer blessings and marriage ceremonies as a pastoral obligation and an ecclesiastical statement of conscience, even in religious sects that do not authorize such ceremonies.
• Employee partner benefit. More and more corporations, large and small, will feel the pressure to grant same-sex partner benefits and then add more extensive benefits over time in order to compete for and retain skilled gay employees. That too will help legitimize gay partnerships and pave the way for gay marriage. In the United States, where business leads, politicians will follow eventually - reluctantly, perhaps, but inevitably.
• Gay couples' visibility. The 2000 census data reporting that at least 600,000 gay and lesbian couples consider themselves partners gave a boost to the pressure for gay marriage. The number is a vast undercount by a factor of five or more, of course, but it was more than most heterosexuals would have expected and gave at least minimal quantitative evidence for existing gay coupledom. In the next census that figure will double and in 2020 double again.
• The wedding industry. In a Feb. 29 New York Times column Frank Rich made the interesting point that several businesses have an interest in supporting gay marriage. As more heterosexual couples have low key civil ceremonies or simply live together, the sizable travel and wedding industries - wedding planners, florists, photographers, musicians - and perhaps others will support gay marriage as a valuable source of replacement income.
• Federalism. A little noted advantage of federalism is that it forces states to compete with one another in areas such as taxation, business climate and quality of life considerations. States that establish gay partnerships or civil unions will have an advantage both in luring gays who are deciding where to take their job skills and in promoting a state's social openness to businesses deciding where to establish a new plant or office. Then as people become accustomed to gay unions, pressure will build to turn those civil unions into what they really are - marriages.
• Foreign influence. A few nations and two provinces of Canada have legalized gay marriage or its close equivalent. Several others grant significant legal and economic rights to same-sex couples, arrangements that will be added to over time and eventually be turned into marriage. The experience of other countries can show skeptics that gay marriage is nothing to fear, undermining dire warnings that gay marriage will harm society.

Gay marriage will happen. The Federal Marriage Amendment is simply a delaying tactic by religious zealots who never heard the story of King Canute.

George W. Bush's decision to support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is a betrayal of our history as a nation and of our principles as a republic. It is an attack on gay families and on our very status as citizens in this country. I will not be voting to re-elect the president.

It is one thing to oppose gay marriage. Every major candidate for president opposes it, as do most politicians in both parties. Recognizing the union of same-sex couples is a significant change to the institution. We are right to approach such changes slowly and cautiously.

But supporting a constitutional amendment on the subject is another matter entirely. The Federal Marriage Amendment, introduced in both the House and the Senate, would prevent even state legislatures from recognizing gay marriages. It is an attempt to cut off debate before the people have a chance to think seriously about the issue.

An amendment would relegate gay Americans to permanent second-class status, something we have never amended the Constitution to do to any group of people. Next to the Constitution's majestic words mandating that government may not "deny to any person...the equal protection of the laws" would be a cheap taunt, "except for queers."

Though the president has no formal role in the constitutional amendment process, the prestige of his office makes his voice critical. If an amendment banning gay marriage actually passes, Bush will have done more harm to gay people than any president in our history.

In his February 24 announcement, Bush said we need a constitutional amendment to prevent activist judges and lawless public officials from imposing gay marriages on the whole country. That's nonsense. No federal court has imposed gay marriage on the country and none is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. We have never amended the Constitution to deal with hypothetical future court decisions.

Notably, though, Bush also suggested an amendment is needed to prevent a state from defining marriage as it sees fit. To reach this conclusion, he must repudiate two centuries of American history and the principles of the GOP respecting the power of the states.

Why abandon our history and tradition? Because, in Bush's words, marriage "promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society." He never bothered to explain how gay marriage threatens either of these things.

Marriage is "the most enduring human institution," he said. That's fine. Propose an amendment banning no-fault divorce and we can talk. But that would offend many of his traditional-values buddies who've had multiple divorces, none of them caused by gays.

Every time he says or does something anti-gay, Bush reminds us to treat people with "dignity and respect." Since he cannot even bring himself to use the word "gay" in public, that's an empty banality. Please don't patronize me by saying you respect my dignity while you're claiming I threaten Western civilization by loving another person.

I've repeatedly defended President Bush in this space. I've pointed out that, despite predictions to the contrary, he has hired many openly gay people to work in his administration. He has also left in place Clinton-era executive orders forbidding anti-gay discrimination in federal employment. These were precedent-setting moves for a Republican.

I'm also closer to Bush than to the Democrats on many non-gay issues. On defense and foreign policy, he has rightly taken the fight to the enemy more aggressively than a Democrat would. On economic policy, though he's been a profligate spender and an inconsistent defender of free trade, he's better than a Democrat would be on both counts.

Does my opposition to Bush make me a single-issue voter? Perhaps. But there are some issues of transcendent importance. They go to the core of our equal citizenship in this society. They outweigh many other considerations. When a president attacks your life and your family on national television and says we ought to write that attack for all time into the country's fundamental law, he has crossed a line that makes it impossible to support him with integrity.

George W. Bush is not the president of any country I recognize or want to be any part of. He is the president of some other country, one that believes the commitment of two people to one another is a threat to everyone else.

The country I love is better than that. It is a country that will defeat this vicious federal amendment and make its way, by fits and starts, over time and through debate, to a better understanding of gay life. It will climb out of the ignorance that produces the fear that fuels the call for an amendment.

Perhaps Bush doesn't actually believe an amendment is necessary and is only supporting one to satisfy religious conservatives. If so, that's even worse since he can't even claim sincerity as a defense. It's a new low in anti-gay political opportunism.

I've been a Republican since I could spell the word. At 13, I stuffed envelopes and made phone calls for Ronald Reagan. At 17, I formed a Republican group in my high school. In law school, I co-founded a conservative debating society. I've been a GOP precinct chairman and been a delegate to two state Republican conventions. I've attended three national conventions.

I remain a Republican and still believe something properly called conservatism can be squared with equality for gay Americans. But you can count me out this November.