IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared Sept. 12, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

IT SEEMS APPROPRIATE during September, if not long before, to begin preparing for October's observance of Gay and Lesbian History Month.

The idea for a Gay History Month was first proposed back in 1994 as a way to increase gays' and lesbians' appreciation for their own history and a way of making clearer to our friends and fellow citizens the contributions gays and lesbians have made to Western Civilization and the common culture we all value.

The idea quickly drew the attention of a small group of advocates who promoted the idea and wrangled endorsements from major gay organizations such as the Human Right Campaign, Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Later that first year they even obtained two or three "official" proclamations from sympathetic political officials.

Eventually October was selected at the best month for Gay and Lesbian History Month because a) it would not conflict with the more celebratory gay pride events of June, b) two months were better than one, c) it would not conflict with any other prominent celebration, and d) October was during the school year and it was anticipated that colleges and universities would be centers of activity on gay history.

The idea of Gay and Lesbian History Month has several obvious advantages:

• It can help provide a sense of pride for young and closeted gays and offer models of courage, creativity and achievement for young gays to emulate.
• It is a way to promote gay visibility without being partisan or seeking any government guarantees or protective rights.
• The objects of interest are safely in the past so the project is one of teaching and learning about facts rather than promoting or threatening anyone's values.
• It is a way of talking about gays and lesbians without talking directly about anyone's sex life. It focuses instead on the accomplishments of gays and lesbians as people who led full, rounded, and interesting lives.
• Perhaps most obviously, it is a way to make clear to skeptical heterosexuals that far from being a threat to Western Civilization, gays and lesbians made some of the greatest contributions to that civilization.

In short, when you sing a song, listen to a symphony, view a painting, attend a church, read a novel or poem or see a play, they may well have been written, composed, painted, or designed by a homosexual. Homophobes do not want people to know this; that is why everyone must.

One of my most vivid memories is of the day when the father of a gay son burst into a meeting of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and blurted out in a loud and excited tone "Did you know Michelangelo was gay?!"

Discovering that fact seemed to open up a whole new perspective for him on what being gay might mean and how he should think about his son. We could think of it as "gay pride for straights."

There will be controversy, of course, over whether some people were gay or not or when and whether people acted on their same-sex desires. But where there is controversy there is talk, and where there is talk there is awareness, so controversy is not a bad thing.

Absent any public declarations, it will be a matter of looking at people's letters and diaries, family records, the recollections of friends, court proceedings, contemporary gossip, and then weighing the evidence. Where information is currently insufficient, libraries, dusty archives and old trunks in family attics may eventually provide further material.

For example, whether Ravel was gay or Eleanor Roosevelt was lesbian may be uncertain, but Tchaikovsky's homosexuality is not in doubt, nor Michelangelo's, nor Edna St. Vincent Millay's youthful lesbian affairs. Prof. Wayne Dynes's comprehensive and judicious "Encyclopedia of Homosexuality" is a valuable resource on these questions.

Of course, the "famous gays" approach is not all there is to gay and lesbian history. A second area of interest is the question of how gays and lesbians lived in earlier times: How they found one another, how they socialized, how they organized their lives, what kinds of prejudice they encountered and how they protected themselves.

In the last few years, a number of books have appeared about gays in ancient Athens and Rome, several cities in Renaissance Italy, turn of the century Moscow and St. Petersburg, New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The similarities to our own lives are often as surprising as the differences.

And finally, of course, after nearly 50 years of organized advocacy we ourselves now have a history of our own as a social movement, as a developing community and a quasi-ethnic group. There are several good books on the history of the gay community, its institutional growth, and its changing cultural practices.

The information is there for people who want to know more about our past and share it with their friends. Make October count.

Originally appeared in the Sept. 6, 2001, issue of Update (San Diego).

LAST MONTH, Reuters reported on the growing speculation that Britain's Prince Charles would, at long last, be permitted to marry his longtime lover, Mrs. Camilla Parker-Bowles. The story, making its way round Fleet Street, is that Queen Elizabeth has "grudgingly" accepted that the couple should be free to wed, perhaps after next year's Golden Jubilee celebrating her 50-year reign.

What does this bit of British gossip have to do with us? On a superficial level, not much. But I find in the tangled tale of the frustrated prince who, against all convention, yearns to marry his mistress, a (gasp!) divorced woman, a reflection of our larger, and more important, struggle for the right to marry the partners we share our lives with. Both the predicament of the prince, and the fight being waged by gays and lesbians to wed, point toward a common cultural shift. And that is society's realization that allowing a mindless regard for "tradition" to stand in the way of happiness is not, after all, a good thing.

Readers above a certain age will realize just what a departure this would be for Britain and its royals. Was it really a mere half century ago that Princess Margaret, the queen's younger and more rebellious sister, yearned to marry a divorced man, and was told, in no uncertain terms (and by Elizabeth herself, it is said) "No"? She went on to a loveless, but respectable, union that ended, wouldn't you know it, in divorce - making her a bit of an outcast herself.

And a bit earlier still, King Edward, the Duke of Windsor to be, was famously forced to renounce his throne in order "to marry the woman I love," Mrs. Wallis Simpson, also a divorcee.

What has happened in the meantime, of course, has been a sea change in the way we think about divorce. With each of Elizabeth's children save one divorced themselves, it just doesn't seem right to bar poor Charles, the royal heir (divorced and widowed), from remarrying.

According to the Reuters article, which quotes Britain's Spectator magazine, royal courtiers have been "in despair about the religious, legal, and constitutional difficulties of a marriage between Prince Charles and Mrs. Parker-Bowles." Religion is an obstacle due to the royal family's links to the Church of England, of which Charles is due one day to become supreme governor and "protector of the faith." The Anglican Church, despite the break with Roman Catholicism - that business with Henry VIII and his six (count 'em, six) wives, who kept losing their heads - doesn't consider divorce to be, well, "respectable."

In Charles' case, carrying out a long-term clandestine affair with a divorcee could be countenanced, but taking it public and demanding that society recognize and celebrate his "nontraditional" relationship was asking too much. Just like religious conservatives in the good old U.S. of A. would rather see gays living secretive, even promiscuous lives than allow us to marry. The view that it's better to sin secretly (oh, like everyone doesn't know) than to live honestly could apply to both. Hypocrisy triumphant.

But, said the Reuters article, more recently these same royal courtiers who were aghast at the thought of a Charles-Camilla union have become aware that "it is both cruel and absurd that the prince and Mrs. Parker-Bowles should be forced to contemplate old age deprived of the benefits and comfort of marriage." And, as noted earlier, the queen is said to have come around, slowly, to accept this as well.

At the risk of belaboring the comparison, the same, of course, could be said of gays and lesbians who are breaking down society's resistance to our coupledoms.

And here's another parallel - the prince and his consort have been waging an ongoing campaign for acceptance by slowly but steadily "going public" with their affection for one another. No, I don't mean the purloined tapes of phone calls during the past unpleasantness with the late Princess of Wales, in which Charles was caught pining to be a "pair of knickers" on his lady love. No, I mean something far more prosaic. This past June, Charles and Camilla sealed their relationship with their first public kiss. That sensational kiss, Reuters noted, "was heralded by royal-watchers as a milestone," and "underlined Prince Charles' determination that Mrs. Parker-Bowles be publicly accepted as his partner."

Not exactly a "kiss in," but still a calculated move to use a heretofore shocking public display of affection with the clear message of "we're here, we're dear, get used to it."

Reuters continues, "in what has been seen as a carefully orchestrated campaign by Prince Charles' aides, the couple has gradually increased the frequency and profile of engagements they attend together." No going back in the closet for these two.

Eventually, the walls of resistance began to crumble. For we are informed, at the end of the Reuters report, that "Mrs. Parker-Bowles met Queen Elizabeth for the first time last year at a birthday party for former King Constantine of Greece," who is some sort of distant cousin to the British royals.

So there you have it. Even the queen is caving, and letting the notorious divorcee/mistress attend her party out in the open for all to see. Symbolically speaking, Camilla is now becoming part of the family. Just like the first time the folks accepted your lover when you brought him to cousin Ralph's birthday bash? Well, kind of.

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." Straight from the First Amendment, those may be the most important words in the English language for gay Americans. It might be a good idea for some yahoo politicians around the country to read them. I have in mind two politicos in particular, the Governor of South Dakota and the mayor of Oklahoma City, who'd apparently prefer a First Amendment that doesn't apply to homosexuals. They're both fully prepared to sacrifice sound public policy rather than let gays enjoy free speech.

The First Amendment created gay America. For advocates of gay legal and social equality there has been no more reliable and important constitutional text. The freedoms it guarantees - including the freedoms of speech and association - have protected gay cultural and political institutions from state regulation designed to impose a contrary vision of the good life. Gay organizations, bars, newspapers, radio programs, television shows - all these would be swept away in the absence of a strong First Amendment.

Evenhanded and detached from passions to an unusual degree for a jurisprudence, the First Amendment sheltered gays even when most of the country thought we were not just immoral, but also sick and dangerous. In an era of almost unrelenting hostility, law professor William Eskridge has written, the First Amendment supplied "an appealing normative argument in both the political and judicial arenas." The shelter afforded by the First Amendment allowed gays to organize for the purpose of accumulating and applying political power, a precondition for the effective exercise of other important liberties.

In its protection of the rights of those accused of crime, the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause is the First Amendment's only serious constitutional competitor for pride of place in assisting gay-equality advocates. The criminal procedure protections it guarantees have been powerful weapons against state prosecutions of gay people for a variety of criminal offenses, including the violation of sodomy laws.

Yet even these protections did not significantly reduce arrest rates of gay people for consensual sexual crimes until gay political power forced police departments to consider our interests. The development of gay political power, however, has depended in the first instance on the liberty of gays to organize in groups free of state regulation impinging on their internal affairs, including the content of their message and the composition of their membership.

This freedom, in turn, depends on a strong and principled First Amendment committed to protecting unpopular opinions and speech by individuals or groups the state disdains. Government generally cannot discriminate against a person or group based on the content of their message.

Somebody better tell that to South Dakota. As do many states, South Dakota has an adopt-a-highway program that allows private groups to clean up a stretch of road in exchange for a public sign touting the group's contribution to beautification. Hundreds of groups participate.

The state rejected an application from the Sioux City Gay and Lesbian Coalition, however, saying the state does not allow official roadside signs for "advocacy groups." That is news to groups like the College Republicans, the Yankton County Democrats, the Wheat Growers Association, and the Animal Rights Advocates of South Dakota who have adopted stretches of highway and had their groups' names enshrined on the state's roads. It's not that the state forbids participation by advocacy groups; the state forbids participation by advocacy groups whose message it does not like. This the First Amendment, with its requirement of government content-neutrality, does not permit.

Faced with a likely lawsuit based on the First Amendment, Gov. William Janklow at first threatened to cancel the entire program rather than let the gay coalition participate. In the end, he "compromised" by allowing the gay coalition to participate but ordering the state to take down every group's roadside sign. The loss of this public recognition will eliminate a significant incentive for groups to get involved.

Another chop-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face move recently came from Oklahoma City. There, the city took down banners on city utility poles heralding the annual gay pride parade, sponsored by the Cimarron Alliance Foundation. The controversial banners displayed a rainbow flame over the name of the group. The city said the banners were inappropriate because of their (here's that word again) "advocacy." Yet the city had no problem allowing other religious and social advocacy groups, like an anti-drug organization, to pay to have their own banners placed on city utility poles.

Under threat of a lawsuit charging a violation of the First Amendment, the city relented and allowed the gay pride banners to reappear this year. Mayor Kirk Humphreys just couldn't understand why. "We are not talking about free speech here," he opined. "We are talking about paid advertising." He said the city was free to pick and choose the messages that appear on public property, just like private companies can choose the messages that appear on their property.

He is doubly wrong. First, advertising is a form of free speech. Second, when it comes to rights guaranteed by the constitution, government is emphatically not like private companies. The Constitution is a constraint on the state, not on private groups.

Now the city proposes to ban almost all advocacy on city property rather than let gay groups' messages appear in the future. Whether the new policy will stand up in court is a large question. What's certain is that, once again, the First Amendment has frustrated an attempt to single us out for silencing.

Originally appeared August 29, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

IN HER THOUGHT-PROVOKING new book "Money, Myths, and Change," economist Lee Badgett expresses serious doubt that gays and lesbians constitute a distinguishable "gay market" with different consumption patterns from those of heterosexuals.

At most she allows that readers of gay newspapers, typical of newspaper readers generally, might have higher incomes and that gay men, particularly couples without children, might be a promising target market for upscale products.

Badgett seems to think that a distinguishable gay market would have to reflect "fundamentally" (her word) different product interests, a claim she later modifies to a more reasonable "stronger preferences for certain products or certain product characteristics." Let's see.

There is little robust evidence about the consumer behavior of all gays and lesbians. That research has not been done and may be impossible. It seems more useful to start with what we can observe, the paradigm case of urban gay men, then see how generalizable that model might be.

The most obvious sociological characteristics of urban gay men is that they are preponderantly childless and somewhat more likely than heterosexuals to be single.

Lacking children, they have more disposable income especially when coupled but even when single. And with fewer family obligations and constraints, they will have more time as well as money to spend on personal development, recreation and entertainment.

Since they are disproportionately single (or between relationships), they are more likely to be in the market for a partner/date/trick, to meet friends and socialize in public, to patronize commercial entertainment offerings, and try to enhance their appeal to potential partners.

It is worth noticing that many partnered gay men continue their earlier socializing habits as partners simply because they have the time, find it convenient, can afford to, and see it as enjoyable.

Taken together, these suggest that urban gay men would be somewhat more likely to go out to bars and clubs on weekends, buy more alcohol, and see more movies, plays and concerts.

For at-home recreation they would have reason to buy more popular and classical CDs, more videos (including commercial porn), more computer-related products, more non-business related books.

They would likely have greater interest in fashionable leisure wear, body maintenance from gym memberships to workout supplements, personal health and grooming products, cosmetic surgery, and so forth.

Gay men seem to travel recreationally more, and not just on extended vacations. They may travel to visit an out-of-town partner they know or met on the Internet. Gays in smaller cities travel to larger cities on holiday weekends to explore the turf, look for partners, or escape a socially constricted environment.

Are urban gay men distinctively brand loyal? With greater disposable income they can afford higher quality brands rather than lower, brands with prestige or cachet, or brands with certain masculine or fashion associations, perhaps to impress themselves as much as other people.

Timberland work boots, Levi 501s, Marlboro cigarettes, and Absolut vodka are venerable examples. More current ones might include Calvin Klein and Body Body clothing, and anything with DKNY on it.

Other brand loyalties seems more evanescent, driven by enclave fad or "pack behavior," in a way best described by French sociologist Gabriel Tarde's "laws of social imitation." That would explain the popularity bubbles of Kenneth Cole clothing, Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts and 2(x)ist underwear.

The task for any marketer is to break into the market, create product differentiation, generate a reputation, cachet or fad, then retain a portion of that clientele when the next fad or quality competition comes along. Advertising can play a role there.

One change we can expect in the future is the slow aging of the "gay market" as gays who came out in the 70s and 80s are staying out, and AIDS does not claim the lives of so many men in their late 30s and 40s. This has noticeably begun to happen already.

With age, gay men's income will increase and their tastes and product needs will gradually shift. There will be a greater demand for real estate and for retirement and financial planning. They will develop more cultivated tastes in music and recreation, seek more interesting vacation destinations, and become more concerned with health maintenance.

They will likely prefer more impressive automobiles and better restaurants, do more home entertaining, drink more wine and less beer. The percentage of smokers will decline: After 30, more people stop smoking than start.

Currently gay men outside urban areas are probably influenced by urban gay consumer behavior only partially and selectively. But that influence is likely to increase as coming out, travel, Internet communication, and gay visibility all increase.

Lesbians, however, seem to diverge considerably from gay men in being more coupled, having more children, earning less money, not being so concentrated in an enclave, and having different interests and socializing patterns. So we lack an adequate understanding of the "lesbian market" or their differentiable consumer behavior.

Originally appeared August 22, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

THE CLAIM is often made that gays and lesbians suffer employment discrimination. One way to demonstrate this beyond anecdotal reports might be to show that gays and lesbians have lower income levels than similarly situated heterosexuals.

Yet we also like to claim that gays and lesbians represent an economically upscale market with ample disposable income to buy a range of recreational and leisure products, arguing that companies should compete for our business and advertise in our publications.

While these claims are not exactly contradictory, they certainly point in opposite direction and raise a host of questions about discrimination in employment and family benefits, gay people's incomes, gay and lesbian consumer behavior and the nature and extent of the "gay market."

Answering some of these questions is the aim of a new book "Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay men" (University of Chicago Press, 2001), by University of Massachusetts economics professor Lee Badgett..

Badgett's book seems to be the first serious book on the subject. But what makes it particularly valuable is a quality that often irritates the general reader. For instance, in Chapter 2, "The Economic Penalty for Being Gay," she concludes:

"Lesbian/bisexual women earn 11 percent more than heterosexual women. The difference is not statistically significant. ... Gay/bisexal men, however, ... earn 17 percent less than heterosexual men with the same education, race, location, and occupation."

That conclusion is interesting and has some value. But whatever its merit, readers will not get to it until they have read 15 pages that discuss methodology, explain the limitation of the available data, offer alternative interpretations of the evidence, and so forth.

Badgett's aim is to give readers not just a number but a sense of why some of the statistics we read and swallow whole are open to serious doubt, often the result of a series of questionable extrapolations, interpretations, even arbitrary definitions valid in some contexts but not others.

For instance, Badgett notes that other studies using some of the same data--including the biennial General Social Survey (GSS)--but using different categories for sexual orientation confirm lower earning for gay men but find statistically significant higher income for lesbian/bisexual women.

Why lesbians might earn more than heterosexual women is not clear. Badgett wonders if lesbians have more job experience or more commitment to the labor force. That gay men earn less than heterosexual males she takes as evidence of discrimination, a view worth examining another time.

One of Badgett's other interesting discussions is about the gay/lesbian market. Badgett is eager to dispute market research data showing that gays and lesbians have high household incomes and so represent an ideal consumer market.

For instance, a 1988 Simmons Marketing Research survey found that gay newspaper readers have household incomes more than 50 percent higher than heterosexual couples. But Badgett wonders if the figures are correct and suggests even if they are they may not be generalizable to all gays.

People responding to a mail-in survey, she speculates, may be more interested in surveys because of a higher level of education. That would make respondents a relatively high-income group compared with other readers of the same newspaper.

But, she agrees, "It is well known that ... readers of magazines and newspapers tend to be better educated and have higher incomes." So even if reader demographics are slightly skewed, they can indicate "some affluent lesbians and gay men who constitute an attractive potential market."

Then too, if gays and lesbians have fewer children, they would have more disposable income even if their gross incomes were no higher than heterosexuals'. The number of lesbians rearing children seems uncertain, but gay men clearly have far fewer children than heterosexual men.

"Gay male couples are much more likely to match the DINK ["double income, no kids"] model, with two incomes and fewer dependents," Badgett says. "If marketers are searching for consumers with high incomes who might have a high demand for upscale products, their most promising targets would be gay men."

In his 1996 study "American Gay" sociologist Stephen Murray cites several small surveys suggesting that a little less than 50 percent of gay men are partnered. But single gay men would be childless too and so might also have higher than average disposable income.

Badgett's book, of course is not the final word on any of these topics. Nor could it be: The information we have is far too sketchy. Many gays and lesbians are still in the closet and we have little way of learning about them.

Then too, the world is steadily changing--in levels of prejudice, in the number of people out of the closet, in the average age of the open gay population, in the structure of gay people's economic priorities. Data from just a decade ago already feels irrelevant.

And as more employers offer partnership (family) benefits and governments offer partnership registration, gays may (or may not) feel more incentives to become partnered, affecting their economic position, their residential preferences and their consumer behavior.

Originally appeared August 13, 2001, in the author's "TRB From Washington" column, The New Republic.

In the decade or so in which same-sex marriage has been a matter of public debate, several arguments against it have been abandoned. Some opponents initially claimed marriage was about children and so gays couldn't marry. But courts made the obvious point that childless heterosexuals can marry and so the comparison was moot. Others said a change in the definition of marriage would inexorably lead to legal polygamy. But homosexuals weren't asking for the right to marry anyone. They were asking for the right to marry someone. Still others worried that if one state granted such a right, the entire country would have to accept same-sex marriage. But legal scholars pointed out that marriage has not historically been one of those legal judgments that the "full faith and credit" clause of the U.S. Constitution says must be recognized in every state if they are valid in one state. [!?] And if there were any doubt, the Defense of Marriage Act, designed expressly to prohibit such a scenario, was passed by a Republican Congress and President Clinton in 1996.

None of this stopped the Vermont Supreme Court, legislature, and governor from establishing "civil unions," the euphemism for gay marriage in the Ben & Jerry's state. It's been almost exactly a year since civil unions debuted, and social collapse doesn't seem imminent. Perhaps panicked by this nonevent, the social right last month launched a Federal Marriage Amendment, which would bar any state from enacting same-sex marriage, forbid any arrangement designed to give gays equal marriage benefits, and destroy any conceivable claim that conservatives truly believe in states' rights. Even some movement conservatives - most notably The Washington Times - demurred. The Wall Street Journal ran its only op-ed on the matter in opposition.

Perhaps concerned that their movement is sputtering, the opponents of same-sex marriage have turned to new arguments. Stanley Kurtz, the sharpest and fairest of these critics, summed up the case last week in National Review Online. For Kurtz and other cultural conservatives, the deepest issue is sex and sexual difference. "Marriage," Kurtz argues, "springs directly from the ethos of heterosexual sex. Once marriage loses its connection to the differences between men and women, it can only start to resemble a glorified and slightly less temporary version of hooking up."

Let's unpack this. Kurtz's premise is that men and women differ in their sexual-emotional makeup. Men want sex more than stability; women want stability more than sex. Heterosexual marriage is therefore some kind of truce in the sex wars. One side gives sex in return for stability; the other provides stability in return for sex. Both sides benefit, children most of all. Since marriage is defined as the way women tame men, once one gender is missing, this taming institution will cease to work. So, in Kurtz's words, a "world of same-sex marriages is a world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates."

But isn't this backward? Surely the world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates preceded gay marriage. It was heterosexuals in the 1970s who changed marriage into something more like a partnership between equals, with both partners often working and gender roles less rigid than in the past. All homosexuals are saying, three decades later, is that, under the current definition, there's no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is simply an anomaly - and a denial of basic civil equality.

The deeper worry is that gay men simply can't hack monogamy and that any weakening of fidelity in the Clinton-Condit era is too big a risk to take with a vital social institution. One big problem with this argument is that it completely ignores lesbians. So far in Vermont there have been almost twice as many lesbian civil unions as gay male ones - even though most surveys show that gay men outnumber lesbians about two to one. That means lesbians are up to four times more likely to get married than gay men - unsurprising if you buy Kurtz's understanding of male and female sexuality. So if you accept the premise that women are far more monogamous than men, and that therefore lesbian marriages are more likely to be monogamous than even heterosexual ones, the net result of lesbian marriage rights is clearly a gain in monogamy, not a loss. For social conservatives, what's not to like?

But the conservatives are wrong when it comes to gay men as well. Gay men - not because they're gay but because they are men in an all-male subculture - are almost certainly more sexually active with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual life linked to stability and love.

So what's the catch? I guess the catch would be if those gay male couples interpret marriage as something in which monogamy is optional. But given the enormous step in gay culture that marriage represents, and given that marriage is entirely voluntary, I see no reason why gay male marriages shouldn't be at least as monogamous as straight ones. Perhaps those of us in the marriage movement need to stress the link between gay marriage and monogamy more clearly. We need to show how renunciation of sexual freedom in an all-male world can be an even greater statement of commitment than among straights. I don't think this is as big a stretch as it sounds. In Denmark, where de facto gay marriage has existed for some time, the rate of marriage among gays is far lower than among straights, but, perhaps as a result, the gay divorce rate is just over one-fifth that of heterosexuals. And, during the first six years in which gay marriage was legal, scholar Darren Spedale has found, the rate of straight marriages rose 10 percent, and the rate of straight divorces decreased by 12 percent. In the only country where we have real data on the impact of gay marriage, the net result has clearly been a conservative one.

When you think about it, this makes sense. Within gay subculture, marriage would not be taken for granted. It's likely to attract older, more mainstream gay couples, its stabilizing ripples spreading through both the subculture and the wider society. Because such marriages would integrate a long-isolated group of people into the world of love and family, they would also help heal the psychic wounds that scar so many gay people and their families. Far from weakening heterosexual marriage, gay marriage would, I bet, help strengthen it, as the culture of marriage finally embraces all citizens. How sad that some conservatives still cannot see that. How encouraging that, in such a short time, so many others have begun to understand.

First published August 10, 2001, in National Review Online.

HATS OFF to Stanley Kurtz for one of the most thoughtful conservative treatments yet of gay marriage ("Love and Marriage" and The Right Balance). Kurtz has advanced the argument on both the social-policy and the constitutional side of the issue. Let me see if I can advance it further still, starting with his argument that sex difference lies at the core of successful marriage.

I've argued that marriage will have many of the same domesticating and healthful effects on homosexuals as on heterosexuals. Kurtz argues, by contrast, that it is women, not marriage, that domesticate men. Traditional marriage, in this view, is a male-female bargain: The man exchanges promiscuity for security and a stable love life. Male-male spouses, however, will continue to be promiscuous within marriage. This will weaken marriage itself. "A world of same-sex marriages is a world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates." Indeed, "our increased tolerance for homosexuality" is already part and parcel of "the weakening of marriage."

There are some important cavils with this line of thinking, the most obvious being (1) that it offers no argument against same-sex marriage for lesbians, (2) that America is already "a world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates" and has been for years, and (3) that "tolerance for homosexuality" is at most a trivial cause of marriage's problems compared with such factors as liberalized divorce laws, women's increased economic independence, the spread of contraception, the decline of the shotgun wedding, and the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Still, Kurtz's argument goes deeper and deserves a deeper reply.

I think he's right that women (and children) domesticate lusty men. That's why everyone is so happy when the town bully takes a bride. But - a crucial point - women and children are not the only things that domesticate men. Marriage itself also does so. The reason is that marriage is not a piece of paper ratifying a pre-existing relationship. It is a caregiving contract that two people make not just with each other but with society, and it's enforced with a whole bundle of rituals and expectations, from public gestures like weddings and rings and anniversary banquets to in-laws and shared finances and joint party invitations addressed to both spouses. Far from being a rubber stamp, marriage is a culture that actively binds people together.

Will extending this culture to homosexuals damage it by ratifying rampant promiscuity, or strengthen it by affirming and extending its reach? This is a question that can only be answered empirically, which is why gay marriage should be tried in a few states (see below). But we do have quite a bit of suggestive evidence, in the form of existing homosexual unions of the all-but-married sort. Of the ones I know, I can't think of any that don't aspire to aspire to fidelity and lifetime commitment, even without a woman in the house. More important, when they fail in this aspiration, they do so in private, so as not to embarrass each other or their friends and family, who accept and respect their partnership. That's all we ask of straights.

In the real world, some married heterosexuals play around a lot (even if they're president), some play around not at all, and some play around a little and get over it. All, however, are allowed to marry. It might be true that on average male-male pairs will be less faithful than male-female ones, who in turn will probably be less faithful on average than female-female ones. But if the question is whether gay marriage should be legal, rather than exactly what any given marriage looks like, those are the wrong averages to look at. Here are the right ones: The average married homosexual man will almost certainly be much less wanton than the average unmarried homosexual man. And I think it's pretty likely that even the average unmarried homosexual man will be significantly less wanton in a gay culture where marriage is expected than in a one where marriage is illegal.

Really, truly, if I thought that homosexuals would treat marriage like an orgy and inspire millions of heterosexuals to do the same, I'd say we're not ready for the privilege. But I don't think that's remotely likely; Vermont isn't full of orgies posing as civil unions. And it's at least as plausible that gay marriage will strengthen marriage as weaken it. When homosexual couples can legally commit to each other for a lifetime, they, too, will be able to say to each other: "If you really care about me, as opposed to just wanting to have sex with me, you'll marry me." Many, probably most, homosexual men want to get off the market and settle down, but it's hard to sort out the serious partners if marriage isn't an option. Allow gays to marry, you don't wreck proper courtship - you allow it to begin. I'm not saying that male-male or female-female courtship is identical to male-female courtship (not that any two are alike anyway). But it doesn't need to be. It only needs to work better than, "If you really care about me, you'll move in with me."

When I started to understand I was gay, a particularly bitter realization was that, whatever the future might hold for me, it would not hold marriage. A life without the possibility of marriage is a deprivation so severe that most heterosexuals can't even imagine it. If I'm right, same-sex marriage will give stability and care and comfort to millions of homosexuals at little or no cost to anyone else. If I'm wrong, it's not a good idea. The only way to find out is to try and see, which is why I favor a federalist approach that lets some state experiment with same-sex marriage when it feels the time and circumstances are right.

In his second article, Kurtz argues that my federalist approach is a daydream. For one thing, the courts might not go along with it. Kurtz is certainly right that the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, which says that no state need recognize any other's same-sex marriage, will be challenged in the courts. Everything is challenged in the courts. I'm confident that the courts will uphold the act; I just can't see this or any foreseeable Supreme Court imposing gay marriage nationally by fiat. But, of course, there's no telling what courts may do. The answer is obvious: Write DOMA into the Constitution. An amendment saying, "Nothing in this Constitution shall require any state to recognize as a marriage any union but that of one man and one woman," does the trick. End of problem.

Such an amendment would be much less controversial, and much easier to pass, than the one that the would-be amenders have actually proposed, which bans gay marriage altogether. Why the "not one inch" position, which says that same-sex marriage must never be allowed on even one square inch of U.S. soil, regardless of what the people of any state want? Because, says Kurtz, even if states are not required by the courts to recognize other states' gay marriages, they will be driven to do so by practicalities.

Now, hold on there. It's true that having only a few states recognize gay marriage would lead to confusions and legal tangles. This, however, is what's known as federalism. In other contexts - tax law, corporate charters, environmental rules - we live with confusingly disparate state laws routinely, as any attorney for a national bank will be quick to confirm. It's a hassle, but the benefit is enormous: the ability to experiment with different policies and to let local people create a social and legal climate that suits them (or move to a state where they'll be happier).

My guess is that, after an initial period of confusion, states and the courts would fairly quickly develop workable rules for gay marriage. For instance, a state that had a partnership program might automatically include any resident gay couple with an out-of-state marriage licenses. States that firmly object to same-sex unions, by contrast, will simply tell those couples, "Sorry, you're not officially married here. If you want to be officially married, stay there. Here, you need to write a will." This doesn't seem "next to impossible." It doesn't even seem very difficult. Compared to the headaches of interstate banking laws, it's a piece of cake.

And what's the alternative? National culture war. Support for gay marriage, now at 35 percent, is likely to grow over time, and the argument is passionate. Kurtz's insistence on "all or nothing" risks turning same-sex marriage into the next abortion issue, in which the stakes are so high - national imposition of gay marriage versus national abolition - that extremism runs riot on both sides. And what if Kurtz et al. gamble on all-or-nothing and lose? What if they refuse to try federalism and they fail to pass their constitutional ban and the courts actually do rule that all states must recognize one state's same-sex marriages? Then their rejection of federalism will have brought about exactly the nightmare they feared. If that happens, don't blame us homosexuals for polarizing the argument and "ramming homosexual marriage down the country's throat."

Believe me, Mr. Kurtz: Federalism is the solution, not the problem. At the very least, it should be given a chance. Isn't that what conservatives always tell liberals?

Thanks to Stanley Kurtz for another provocative and richly argued article. Shall we drill a little deeper? If I read him correctly, his argument boils down to something like this:

1. Marriage is rooted essentially in "the underlying dynamic of male-female sexuality." Nothing else can sustain marriage.
2. As a result, it is simply impossible for same-sex (especially male-male) couples to be good marital citizens. They may get married, but they won't act married, and society won't treat them as married.
3. Because homosexuals will do a bad job of "exemplifying modern marriage for the nation" and marriage is in bad enough shape already, homosexuals should not be allowed to marry.
4. Allowing same-sex marriage anywhere in America at any time is effectively the same as mandating it everywhere forever. So same-sex marriage must never be tried anywhere, ever.

Or, to put it a bit coarsely: "I don't believe homosexuals can handle marriage responsibly. And they should never be allowed a chance to prove me wrong. Sorry, gay people, but that's life."

Kurtzism, as I'll take the liberty of calling this approach, gets four things wrong. It misanalyzes marriage. It misunderstands homosexuality. It sits crosswise with liberalism. And it traduces federalism. Other than that, no problem.

Start with Proposition 1. Kurtz argues that, whatever else marriage is about, ultimately and indispensably it's about "the underlying dynamic of male-female sexuality." I'm not sure exactly what this means beyond saying that marriage must be between a man and a woman, so I'm not sure how to address it specifically. Here is what I think marriage is indispensably about: the commitment to care for another person, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do you part.

A marriage can and often does flourish long after the passion has faded, long after the children have gone, and (yes) long after infidelity; it can flourish without children and even without sex. A marriage is a real marriage as long as the spouses continue to affirm that caring for and supporting and comforting each other is the most important task in their lives. A golden anniversary is not a great event because both spouses have held up their end of a "dynamic of male-female sexuality" but because 50 years of devotion is just about the noblest thing that human beings can achieve.

I can't prove I'm right and Kurtz is wrong. But I think my view is much closer to what people actually think their marriages are fundamentally about, and also, by the way, to what marriage should be fundamentally about. Most married people I know regard themselves as more or less equal partners in an intricate relationship whose essential ingredient is the lifelong caregiving contract. Obviously, they'd agree that male-female sexual dynamics play an important role in their marriage; but then, they're male-female couples, so they would say that. If you told them that marriage is fundamentally about (in Kurtz's words) "a man's responsibilities to a woman," rather than a person's responsibilities to a person, they'd look at you funny.

Why is Kurtz so reluctant to put commitment instead of sex roles at the center of marriage? Because, I suspect, he knows homosexuals can form commitments. To cut off this pass, he claims that in practice homosexuals too often won't form commitments (Proposition 2). Same-sex couples, or in any case male same-sex couples, won't act married, and society won't be bothered if they don't, so marriage will become a hollow shell.

I've explained why I believe that a world where everyone, straight and gay, can grow up aspiring to marry will be a world where gays and straights and marriage are all better off. Kurtz has explained why he thinks otherwise. All of that is well and good, but it only gets us so far, because the key questions are all empirical. How would married gay couples behave? How would married heterosexuals react? Unfortunately, we have no direct evidence. One can say that in Vermont, which has a civil-union law, "the institution of marriage has not collapsed," as the governor recently said. One can say that gay men (no one seems worried about lesbians not taking marriage seriously) represent probably 3 percent of the population, and that it seems a stretch to insist that the 97 percent will emulate the 3 percent. But none of that proves anything. Absent some actual experience with same-sex marriage, everything is conjecture.

Still, I think Kurtz's conjecture is based on a view of homosexuality that is both misguided and at least unintentionally demeaning. His article contains this arresting phrase: "As the ultimate symbol of the detachment of sexuality from reproduction, homosexuality embodies the sixties ethos of sexual self-fulfillment." So there you are. My relationship with my partner Michael is about "sexual self-fulfillment," because, I guess, we can't have children. Let me gently but passionately say to Kurtz that this is an affront. It implies that a straight man's life partner is his wife, while a gay man's life partner is just his squeeze. Let me also gently but firmly instruct Kurtz on a point that I and other homosexuals are in a position to know something about. Our partners are not walking dildos and vibrators. Our partners are our companions, our soulmates, our loves.

I'm not familiar with the Stiers book he cites and I couldn't get it on deadline, so I can't comment on it. I can say, though, that I wouldn't be the least surprised if right now, in 2001, grown gay men and women often regard marriage as a novelty or a convenient benefits package. What does Kurtz expect? These are people who grew up knowing they could never marry, who have structured their whole lives outside of marriage, and who have of necessity built their relationships as alternatives to marriage.

I don't expect that homosexuals will all flock to the altar the day after marriage is legalized. You don't take a culture that has been defined forever by exclusion from marriage and expect it to change overnight. I do think that, a few years after legalization, we'll see something new: A whole generation of homosexuals growing up knowing that they can marry, seeing successfully married gay couples out and about, and often being encouraged to marry by their parents and mentors. Making the closet culture the exception rather than the rule for young gay people was the work of one or maybe two generations. The shift to a normative marriage culture may happen just as fast.

I know, I know. Kurtz will simply insist that real, committed marriage will never be normative for homosexuals; gays just don't have that "dynamic of male-female sexuality" thing. Unfortunately, I don't think I can persuade him by telling him about all the gay people I know who have committed their enduring love and care to each other. I doubt I could persuade him even by telling him about all the men I know who have fed and comforted and carried their dying partners, and covered their partners with their bodies to keep them warm, and held their hands at the end and then sobbed and sobbed. Who is more fit to marry, the homosexual who comes home every night to wipe the vomit from the chin of his wasting partner, or the heterosexual who serves his first wife with divorce papers while she is in the hospital with cancer so that he can get on with marrying his second wife? Alas, I think I know what Kurtz would say.

Kurtz cites figures on gay men's fidelity and attitudes toward monogamy. There are lots of problems with these kinds of numbers, but the more interesting question is: Just what does Kurtz think this kind of data proves? Exactly how monogamous do homosexuals have to be in order to earn the right to marry? I'd have thought that being better than 80 percent faithful would be pretty darn good. Would 90 percent satisfy him? Maybe 98.2 percent? And if a group's average fidelity is the qualification for marriage, shouldn't Kurtz let lesbians marry right now? And why are homosexuals the only class of people who are not allowed to marry until they prove, in advance, that they'll be good marital citizens? Last time I checked, heterosexual men were allowed to take a fifth wife, no questions asked, even if they beat their first, abandoned their second, cheated on their third, and attended orgies with their fourth.

For centuries, homosexuals have been barred from marrying and even from having open relationships. The message has been: Furtive, underground sex is all homosexuals deserve. And now Kurtz is insisting (Proposition 3) that homosexuals can't wed because we're not as sexually well-behaved as married heterosexuals? While also insisting that, no matter how badly heterosexuals behave, their right to marry will go unquestioned? Really, the gall!

Forgive my ill temper on that point. I understand that, to Kurtz and many other Americans, same-sex marriage seems a radical concept, an abuse of the term "marriage." What I think Kurtz and too many other opponents of gay marriage fail to appreciate is the radicalism of telling millions of Americans that they can never marry anybody they love. To be prohibited from taking a spouse is not a minor inconvenience. It is a lacerating deprivation. Marriage, probably more even than voting and owning property and having children, is the core element of aspiration to the good life. Kurtz would deprive all homosexuals of any shot at it lest some of them set a poor example. I think this is both inhumane and cuts against liberalism's core principle, which is that people are to be treated ends in themselves, not as means to some utilitarian social end. I am grateful to Kurtz for leaving the door open to domestic-partnership programs as a consolation prize; this is a good-hearted gesture, and I accept it as such. But surely he recognizes that domestic partnership is no substitute for matrimony. Surely, indeed, that is his point in offering it.

Same-sex marriage is too important to be approached thoughtlessly. I'm glad that Kurtz is thinking as strenuously about the possible downsides as I am about the possible upsides. Where he veers toward something like extremism is in his demand that homosexuals be denied any chance to prove his conjectures wrong (Proposition 4). "There is no such thing as an experiment in gay marriage," he says. "Rauch seems to think that if his cost-free portrait of gay marriage turns out to be mistaken, we can simply call off the experiment. But by then it will surely be too late. Such effects take years to play out, decades more to measure, and even when measured, agreement on the meaning of such data is nearly impossible to achieve."

But pretty nearly all major social-policy reforms play out over years and decades, and agreement on how to measure the results is never complete; Kurtz might just as well say that no state should be allowed to try welfare reform or charter schools or a "living wage" because the effects take years to play out, decades to measure, etc. The whole point of federalism is to allow states to try reforms that might not work, and to allow states' voters not me or Stanley Kurtz to decide for themselves what counts as working. In rejecting this principle root and branch, Kurtz emerges as a radical enemy not just of same-sex marriage but of federalism itself.

I don't have much new to say about his peculiar claim that, once any state adopts same-sex marriage, every other state will have to follow, because Kurtz doesn't have anything new to say defending it. He simply re-asserts it. "Imagine a married couple, where one spouse is hospitalized after a car accident in another state, losing visiting rights or the right to make medical decisions, because their marriage isn't recognized in that state," he says, as if the situation is obviously untenable. OK, I've imagined it. That kind of arrangement would be perfectly manageable. Gay spouses in a state with same-sex marriage would understand that they will need a medical power of attorney that's valid out-of-state. None of these complexities is remotely thorny enough to force any state to recognize same-sex marriage against its will. It seems to me that what Kurtz really fears is that one state will adopt same-sex marriage and others will look at it and say, "Actually, that doesn't seem so bad pretty good, even. We don't mind recognizing it even if we don't adopt it ourselves." What he really fears, in other words, is not a disastrous state experiment but a successful one.

Again Kurtz asserts that federal judges will high-handedly impose one state's same-sex marriages on all the others. Again I say that there is just as he says plenty of room in the law for determined judges to decide this legal issue either way, but that any sane Supreme Court will be determined not to impose same-sex marriage on an unwilling nation. And if undemocratic judicial fiat is what worries Kurtz, why does he greet with silence my suggestion that a simple constitutional amendment far easier to pass than the one he supports would solve the problem?

But all of this stuff about states' being "forced" to accept same-sex marriage is a red herring. Kurtz makes it clear that he is no happier if a state adopts same-sex marriage by legislation or plebiscite than by judicial fiat. His proposed constitutional amendment accordingly strips states, and not just judges, of the power to permit same-sex marriage, even if everybody in some state wants to try it. What I suspect Kurtz really knows and fears is that as more homosexuals form devoted and visible unions, and as more of the public accepts and honors those unions, same-sex marriage will seem ever less strange and radical, and ever more in harmony with Americans' core values which it is. Although he fears that same-sex marriage will come to pass over the public's objections, he fears even more that it will come to pass with the public's assent.

I read Stanley Kurtz's latest contribution to our gay-marriage discussion several times, and I came away concluding that his position really does, as I said last time, essentially boil down to: "I don't believe homosexuals can handle marriage responsibly. And they should never be allowed a chance to prove me wrong. Sorry, gay people, but that's life."

Although I do think it's wrong to demand that homosexuals who want to marry prove they'll meet sexual-behavior standards that are never applied to heterosexuals, I don't believe that homosexuals have an absolute right to marriage, and I've been careful, pace Kurtz, not to rest my case on rights. (When I talk casually about, for example, "denying homosexuals the right to marry," I mean 'right' only in the weaker sense of statutory entitlement.) If I thought that legalizing same-sex marriage would destroy or seriously damage marriage for everyone, then I would oppose same-sex marriage as a self-defeating entitlement. My argument is one about presumption. If there is significant doubt about the effects of same-sex marriage and of course neither Kurtz nor I nor anybody else really knows what would happen, and in truth many good and bad and indifferent things would happen then the presumption ought to be that everyone should have a chance to participate in society's most important civic institution. At a bare minimum, if the claim is that homosexuals will wreck marriage, we should not be forever denied any hope of showing that we won't wreck marriage.

It means a lot to me to hear Kurtz say that there is an "inescapable element of tragedy" in having to deny marriage to homosexuals in order to preserve it for everybody else. Many conservatives, probably almost all until very recently, have viewed gay lives and loves as a more or less inconsequential factor in the debate over gay marriage. Their attitude has been, "Why do these homosexuals insist on wrecking marriage? Why don't they just go away and leave well enough alone? So what if they can't marry? Pass the potato chips." Kurtz will have none of that. I thank him.

But "so sorry" only gets Kurtz so far if the tragedy is of his own making. If he really believes that denying marriage to homosexuals is tragic, he should seek to avoid rather than perpetuate the tragedy. If there is any reasonable possibility that the alleged tragic trade-off between gay and straight marriage is imaginary that same-sex and opposite-sex marriage could happily coexist he should look for and embrace a reasonable option that could test that possibility. One such option is to let our federalist system run its course, letting individual states try same-sex marriage if and when they please. Then we'll see what happens. Yet it is Kurtz who seeks to foreclose this option, with a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. He would thus rule tragedy into being: tragedy in the form of perpetual homosexual alienation from the social institution that's most important for a happy and healthy life. For all that I appreciate Kurtz's stated solicitousness of gay lives and loves and believe me, I do it may be that the old-fashioned conservative "We don't care" was in some ways more honest.

How would we know if gay marriage works? Kurtz charges that it would be very hard ever to persuade me that a state gay-marriage experiment failed, and that I "will clearly oppose a rollback, on principle, anytime before the next 50 years." Here, I think, Kurtz again misapprehends federalist (and democratic) principle. The question isn't what Jonathan Rauch or Stanley Kurtz or any other pointy-head thinks of a state's experience with gay marriage; the question is what the people of that state and of other states think. The whole point of a federalist approach is that it lets the voters of the states decide what sort of arrangement counts as a social-policy success. I will accept their judgment. Why won't he?

Well, on that subject I think Kurtz and I have reached the point of repeating ourselves. Anyway, I've reached that point. So I'll leave the arguments before the reader and pass on to a couple of other threads. Kurtz says that I'm at the conservative end of the gay intelligentsia on marriage, and that a lot of gay radicals and intellectuals think I'm wrong. That's certainly true, but I don't see why it's important. Gay radicals and intellectuals think all sorts of things but are no more likely than anyone else to be right; it's the argument and evidence, not the source, that counts. I think the gay left-winger who says gay matrimony will undermine the norms of marriage is just as wrong as the conservative right-winger who says it. What else can I say?

In any case, the gay intelligentsia are all over the map on marriage. Not long ago, in an article in Reason magazine, I dissected a book by Michael Warner, a prominent and very smart gay radical who argues that sexual norms of any kind are oppressive. He loathes the idea of same-sex marriage precisely because "the effect would be to reinforce the material privileges and cultural normativity of marriage," which would reduce the amount of sexual experimentation going on, which he thinks would be awful. As I'm sure Kurtz knows, there are a lot of gay radicals who share Warner's fear that marriage will change gay culture in appallingly bourgeois ways. Does that show I'm right? Really, I don't think brandishing gay intellectuals gets us anywhere.

It may be more productive to focus on an odd convergence of interests between the world's Michael Warners and Stanley Kurtzes. Warner and his ilk dislike gay marriage, but they can't be against it because they think homosexuals should have equal rights, including the right to marry. So how do they get out of this box? By arguing for a multiplicity of alternatives to marriage, thus eroding marriage's unique prestige.

Don't get me wrong; if I can't get gay marriage, I'll reluctantly take partnership programs, which would do at least something to recognize and nourish stable gay relationships. But from a social point of view, a partnership program indeed, anything that competes with marriage is a poor second choice. Most gay-marriage opponents just say, "Fine, then homosexuals should get nothing." But a few more compassionate and far-sighted opponents people like Kurtz understand that telling homosexuals to go fly a kite is not an option. Americans really believe in the Golden Rule, equal opportunity to pursue happiness, and all that. They're going to want to do something for homosexuals, a desire that will increase as more sons and daughters and siblings and friends come out.

Something really new, without historical precedent, is happening in America. Today, for the first time, a majority is coming to realize that homosexuals actually exist: that we're not just heterosexuals who need treatment or jail. This realization will, must, and should drive change in a society whose institutions are premised on the notion that homosexuals do not actually exist. The question is whether marriage or something else should be the template. If there's one social regularity I can think of, it's that marriage the commitment to care for another person for life has good effects on human populations, and that its denial has bad effects, and that the alternatives are worse. But if Kurtz absolutely cannot accept that this might be true in the case of same-sex unions, then he had better start planning for a nation full of Vermonts, with all kinds of sort-of-marriage programs.

Note that, once partnership programs are set up, heterosexuals who don't want to get married invariably clamor to get in. "How come only the gays get this? No special rights!" As of 1998, all three of the states and all but a handful of the municipalities that offered domestic-partner programs for their workers included opposite-sex couples; so did the large majority of corporate programs. I grant that to some extent "marriage lite" will spread anyway, because some states that bar gay marriage will offer alternatives. But a constitutional ban on gay marriage will force all states that want to do anything for homosexuals to create alternatives to marriage. Employers, too, will create multifarious partnership programs that would be unnecessary if homosexuals could just get married. Is all this good for marriage? Kurtz worries about "the dissolution of marriage and its replacement by an infinitely flexible series of relationship contracts." But that is exactly what he guarantees by withholding the template of marriage!

Polygamy, which rears its ugly head in Kurtz's last paragraph and in his argument against Andrew Sullivan, merits a discussion of its own; here, just a few words. On grounds of both equality and social policy, gay marriage is completely consonant with liberal principles, and polygamy just as completely isn't and the distinction is not hard to understand and sustain. Homosexuals are not asking for the legal right to marry anybody or everybody we love. We are asking for precisely and only the same legal right that heterosexuals enjoy, namely the right to marry somebody we love: one person, as opposed to no one at all. Liberalism holds that similarly situated people should be similarly treated by law. Americans increasingly understand that a gay man who is allowed to marry a woman is not situated similarly to a straight man who is allowed to marry a woman. Nor is a gay man who wants to marry a man situated similarly to a straight man who wants to marry three women or a man who wants to marry his dog or his Volkswagen; he is situated similarly to a heterosexual man who wants to marry one woman. Saying that gay marriage leads to polygamy is no more logically coherent than saying that if blacks (say) demand and are given one vote, whites (say) will inevitably demand and be given two.

Moreover, a liberal regime has a strong social-policy interest in making marriage universal. There's a reason why no polygamous countries are liberal: if some men usually high-status men get multiple wives, then by definition other men usually low-status men get no wives. The result is a restless and destabilizing sexual underclass that must be subdued by some form of repression. Not coincidentally, gay culture, in its own way, for many years had some characteristics of a restless and destabilizing sexual underclass, and it was subdued to some extent by repression. That all began to change when open gay relationships started becoming socially acceptable. Gay marriage is, obviously, completely consonant with liberal aspirations to make marriage something that everyone can aspire to. In fact, it fulfills those aspirations.

Originally appeared August 9, 2001, in the Los Angeles Times.

Conservatives are all for personal responsibility except, of course, when it comes to their own failures. And they're always in favor of less federal intervention until it comes to their most cherished institutions. Which is why marriage gets them coming and going. It's a double bind: a failure for which they refuse to take responsibility and a cherished institution for which they are seeking special federal protection.

Hence what has been mentioned as a possible 28th amendment to the Constitution, the "federal marriage amendment," the preliminary text of which reads: "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups."

I should make it clear from the beginning that I am a natural enemy of this absurd codicil; I am a lesbian who favors gay marriage. Regardless of your point of view, you've got to bear in mind that both conservatives and liberals admit that matrimony is a mess. Some studies have reported that half of all marriages end in divorce. The anti-establishment contingent of the left wing tends to lay the blame for this sorry state of affairs on the institution itself, claiming that marriage is failing largely because it is repressive of women. Conservatives, on the other hand, say that the push for legalization of same-sex marriage is the last straw. Witness the July 23 cover story in National Review magazine, which opines that "legal recognition of same-sex marriage ... would in effect abolish the institution by collapsing the moral principles at its foundation."

Of course, in the real world the scenario is that Mr. and Mrs. Right are living in a very old house called marriage, one that is, as old houses often are, beset by termites that have all but worn away the foundation. Naturally, they're very upset about this. They fear for the loss of their home, a fear that is made exponentially worse by the fact that the gay couple next door is happily building a brand new house.

In their despair, the Rights have gotten it into their heads that their neighbors are responsible for the termites. Unable to admit to themselves that if they had taken better care of their house from the beginning, they wouldn't now be facing the loss of it, they project the blame onto poor Adam and Steve. Though any sensible person can see that the one has nothing to do with the other, the Rights have nonetheless begun circulating a petition to clean up the neighborhood. And, well, you get the idea.

But why, you may ask, are conservatives so set on this insensate amendment? The answer is at once simple and complex. American conservatism always has been plagued by an irrational distaste for homosexuality, a robust and righteous hate for the sin that cannot help extending to the sinner. And this has made it well-nigh impossible for the right to see anything but corrosive evil in the gay lobby's push for equal access to heterosexual privilege.

There is no good, objective reason to believe that legalizing gay marriage would adversely affect traditional marriage, just as there is no good reason to believe that restricting marriage to a man and a woman would resuscitate an institution whose problems are human, not cultural. The sex of spouses has nothing to do with why relationships fail. They fail for lack of love or, more precisely, for lack of understanding what love is and what it entails over the long haul.

A constitutional amendment that purports to protect marriage will do nothing for the chronic human inability to love in sickness and in health. To think otherwise is naive. Moreover, to blame a third party for one's conjugal failings is exceedingly uncharitable, not to mention obtuse. But then, that's the nature of blind prejudice.

Originally appeared August 8, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

WHEN A LEAKED MEMO about the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney indicated that the event might be cancelled because of mismanagement and a financial shortfall, there were headlines but not much surprise.

And why should we be surprised? We've seen this before.

We need to think back only as far as last year, when the controversial Millennium March on Washington hovered on the brink of cancellation. To save it, organizers had to scurry to secure an extra $600,000 in last-minute loans from corporate sponsors and individuals.

Most of us also remember when money from the affiliated Millennium Festival went missing - did an insider stuff $500,000 into his or her pockets before he or she left for the night? Or was attendance not as high as organizers thought?

Then there was the 1990 Vancouver games and the 1994 New York games, both of which ended up with deficits. The 1998 Amsterdam games turned out to be a financial disaster, requiring the local government to pony up $2 million so that they could continue.

So now it's Sydney. The gay money curse strikes again.

Trouble is, the curse seems to strike so frequently that many of us have stopped noticing. Who cares if newspapers fold because they lose ad revenue, if vendors are forced to take loans to keep their businesses afloat, or if sports teams are stranded on the other side of the world?

What does it matter if a local government has to bail us out, as long as we get to bask in the gay pride glow we get whenever thousands of us converge together. As long as people have a good time, as long as the community is burnished with an extra polishing of fellow feeling, an event is successful, right?

Wrong.

It is shameful that we refuse to take fiscal responsibility for ourselves, especially now that we are a maturing movement. Perhaps in our movement's childhood and adolescence it was forgivable to live the dream and damn the consequences, but 26 years after Stonewall, we need to think a little first.

If we want to throw a party or put on a competition, we need to pay for it ourselves and not expect others to bail us out. They don't owe us money; they don't owe us in kind donations. The world owes us nothing but rights and respect.

This is important, because the numbers we throw around - $2 million to bail out the Amsterdam games! - represents real money that has an impact on real people. That $2 million could have gone to public transportation, or housing, or health care, or even stayed in tax payers' pockets. Instead, it paid off businesses that would have suffered had they not gotten their expected return. After the Millennium March fiasco, one festival vendor described how he was forced to sell his jeep to pay salaries. Food vendors, it seems, were collectively owed $300,000.

When our special events organizations are not financially responsible, we hurt our supporters - generous individuals, gay and lesbian owned businesses, supportive legislators, friendly corporate sponsors. And when we hurt our supporters, we hurt ourselves.

Why is this happening? Perhaps because our organizations are built on the shoulders of visionaries who dream a world independent of real costs. We depend on people like that; without them, we could never have broken through the brick wall that sealed our closets.

But it is time to silence our inner children who demand extravaganzas and instead cultivate our inner grown-ups, scaling events back to what can be accomplished responsibly. We must hire people who have the experience to manage mammoth, complex events. More, we must take a close look at the events we take for granted and re-evaluate their purpose.

For example, as the world, country by country, is becoming more open to gays and lesbians, we should think about whether we need a Gay Games modeled on the Olympics. Since the Games are more about brotherhood than about international competition (everyone gets a medal, after all), perhaps we should model the Games on the AIDS ride instead, requesting that athletes who wish to participate raise their own funds through local support. Or maybe we should simply have smaller global competitions for sports that are not in the Olympics - like same-sex couple ice skating.

But we also need to ask how necessary it is that we have any national or international gathering that doesn't pay its own way. Once, these events served as proof to the world - and ourselves - that we existed in large numbers. Now they are just places to spend our disposable incomes acquiring rainbow-themed merchandise. Is it possible that these events are financial failures because not enough of us are interested in attending?

It's true that for those newly out or for those living in conservative areas, these gatherings serve to reassure and strengthen. But our local pride events serve the same purpose. Doesn't it make more sense for someone in conservative southern Illinois to seek out a gay presence in Chicago or St. Louis than to travel to Sydney, half a world away?

We must ward off the gay event money curse with fiscal responsibility, experienced management and honest evaluation. We need to play fair with our supporters and sponsors and prove to them that it is worth investing in our movement. It's only sporting.

First published July 27, 2001 in the Wall Street Journal.

THE OTHER DAY I ATTENDED what seemed an unusually disingenuous press conference, even by Washington's standards. The event was the unveiling, by a coalition of church and community groups called the Alliance for Marriage, of a proposed 28th Amendment to the Constitution. The "Federal Marriage Amendment" was soon to be introduced in Congress, the alliance announced. National Review (on the cover), a conservative bellwether, had already endorsed it.

What, exactly, would the amendment do? Speaker after speaker affirmed that its only effect would be to stop unelected judges from ramming homosexual marriage down the throats of an unwilling public. The intent was merely to require proponents of homosexual marriage to "go through the democratic process" rather than the courts. This seemed odd, because in full view, on an easel next to the podium, was displayed the text of the amendment, whose operative sentence read: "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman."

You didn't have to be James Madison to see that the proposed amendment strips power not from judges but from states. For centuries, since colonial times, family law, including the power to set the terms and conditions of marriage, has been reserved to the states, presumably because this most domestic and intimate sphere is best overseen by institutions that are close to home. The marriage amendment would withdraw from states the power to permit same-sex marriage even if 100 percent of the voters and legislators of some state wanted to allow it.

One reason to revoke such a core state power might be to prevent a single state from effectively adopting same-sex marriage for the whole country. In 1996, however, Congress and President Clinton foreclosed that possibility by enacting the Defense of Marriage Act, which holds that no state need recognize a same-sex marriage performed or sanctioned in any other state. Meanwhile, three dozen states have legislatively passed pre-emptive bans on same-sex marriage. The country is thus almost 75 percent of the way to a national ban.

Under those circumstances, there can be only one reason for a constitutional amendment putting gay marriage out of the reach of not just state judges but of states. The sponsors must be worried that eventually some state's legislators or voters, acting in the old-fashioned democratic way, will decide that same-sex marriage suits their state's temperament or helps solve their state's problems.

That conservatives would contemplate so striking a repudiation of federalism is a sign of the panic that same-sex marriage inspires on the right. As people usually do when they act in a panic, conservatives are making a mistake. Even if you don't believe, as I do, that same-sex marriage is good because it is just and humane, the attempt to pre-empt federalism is bad policy from a conservative point of view.

For there is a compelling and deeply conservative case for thinking that homosexual marriage, far from being the end of civilization as we know it, would be a win-win-win proposition: good for homosexuals, good for heterosexuals, and good for marriage itself. The reason is one that conservatives have long understood: Love and marriage go together. Marriage transmutes love into commitment. Love is often fleeting and crazy-making. Marriage is lasting and stabilizing. For all the troubles that divorce, fatherlessness and illegitimacy have brought, marriage remains far and away the most durable bond that two caring people can forge.

Though some homosexuals have children, even childless homosexuals - in fact, especially childless homosexuals - need and benefit from the care of, and promise to care for, another, till death do you part. Society stands to benefit when all people, including gay people, have this care and make this commitment.

Before rushing to ban same-sex marriage, conservatives ought to remember that the real-world alternative is not the status quo or the status quo minus 30 years. Same-sex unions, however viewed by law, are real and increasingly honored by the growing number of Americans who have gay friends and family members. I take my partner, Michael, to the company Christmas party every year, and my colleagues treat him as my spouse. Because governments, businesses, religions and ordinary people are increasingly supportive of these unions, the likely result of a national ban on same-sex marriage would be the profusion of partnership programs and other versions of "marriage lite" - many of which, majoritarian politics being what it is, will inevitably be opened to heterosexuals as well as homosexuals.

Some left-wing gay activists favor the establishment of diverse alternatives to marriage as a way to weaken the real thing, which they regard as rigid and oppressive. It is odd for conservatives to try to help them. Marriage, like voting and property ownership and other encompassing civic institutions, is strongest when it is universal and unique, without carve-outs or special cases. It works best when society and law send a clear message that marriage is for everyone - gay and straight alike - and that the only way to secure the benefits and recognition of marriage is to get married.

The retort, of course, is that unyoking marriage from its traditional male-female definition will destroy or severely weaken it. But this is an empirical proposition, and there is reason to doubt it. Opponents of same-sex marriage have done a poor job of explaining why the health of heterosexual marriage depends on the exclusion of a small number of homosexuals. Moreover, predictions that homosexual integration would wreck civic communities and public institutions have a perfect record: They are always wrong. When same-sex couples started holding hands on the street and buying houses in the suburbs, neighborhoods did not turn into Sodoms and otherwise solid families did not collapse. The British military, after protesting for years that morale would be ruined by open homosexuals, has instead found their admission to be a nonevent. Integration of open homosexuals into workplaces has not replaced pinstripe suits with stud collars or ruined the collegial spirit in offices across the country.

Like it or not, homosexuality exists and is not going away. The question is how to ensure that it is pro-social rather than antisocial. I believe that marriage, the greatest civilizing institution ever devised, is the answer. I could be wrong; but the broader point, in any case, is that same-sex marriage bears potential benefits as well as risks. The way to find out is to try, which is what federalism is for.

Thanks to America's federalist structure and the existence of the Defense of Marriage Act, the United States is uniquely positioned among all the world's countries to get same-sex marriage right, by neither banning it pre-emptively nor imposing it nationally. Instead, same-sex marriage could be tried in a few places where people feel comfortable with it and believe it would work. Letting states go their separate ways, moreover, is the way to avert culture wars, as the misguided nationalization of abortion law so unpleasantly and frequently reminds us.

Same-sex marriage should not be a federal issue. Conservatives, of all people, should not be attempting to make it one. They have been trumpeting the virtues of federalism for years. Here is a particularly compelling opportunity to heed their own wisdom.