I'm Not Gay, But My Husband Is

(Don't worry -- the couple in that photo are heterosexual. So it's all perfectly normal.)

The California Supreme Court had just cleared the way for same-sex marriage, and Ms. DeGeneres had announced on her program that she planned to marry her longtime girlfriend. “We are all the same people, all of us — you’re no different than I am,” Ms. DeGeneres told Mr. McCain as they sat next to each other in plush chairs. “Our love is the same.”

Mr. McCain called her comments “very eloquent” and added: “We just have a disagreement. And I, along with many, many others, wish you every happiness.”

Ms. DeGeneres said: “So, you’ll walk me down the aisle? Is that what you’re saying?”

Mr. McCain replied, “Touché.”

I realize the necessity of tact and genteel hypocrisy in addressing those whose opinions differ from ours, but I hope that Ms. Degeneres's love for her girlfriend, and now wife, is not "the same" as John McCain's love for his. McCain dropped his first wife when she was disfigured in an auto accident while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and whether or not one believes the reports that he has beaten his second wife Cindy, it appears that theirs is a chilly marriage of convenience, with separate residences and no love lost. Still, I like the way DeGeneres put McCain on the spot there; it's a pity only entertainers seem to ask questions like that. But once again I'm reminded how much energy people expend trying to get respect from people who don't deserve any respect themselves.

I found the New York Times article I quoted above linked through a post of IOZ'. It's not M. IOZ' best work on matters same-sexual. He blunders by mentioning the candidates' perceived need to "appease the remaining homophobes of rural America and the Midwest," forgetting the cosmopolitan homophobes of the rest of the country (and the world, including Rome, Tehran, and Jerusalem). One of his commenters points this out. A reasonably intelligent man like M'sieu' should have realized by now that bigotry is not, and never has been, limited to any one class or region. Nor, as I've argued before, is it something that springs full-blown from the foreheads of gods or priests. If sex didn't make many people uncomfortable on a very deep level, that discomfort wouldn't be made manifest in religion.

The same Times article discusses Barack Obama's confused position on the issue.

Mr. Obama believes that marriage is a sacred union, a blessing from God, and one that is intended for a man and a woman exclusively, according to these supporters and Obama campaign advisers. While he does not favor laws that ban same-sex marriage, and has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views may be “misguided,” he does not support it and is not inclined to fight for it, his advisers say. ...

Some gay allies of Mr. Obama thought, during a televised Democratic forum in Los Angeles in August 2007, that he might come out in favor of same-sex marriage, after he was asked if his position supporting civil unions but not same-sex marriage was tantamount to “separate but equal.”

“Look, when my parents got married in 1961, it would have been illegal for them to be married in a number of states in the South,” Mr. Obama said. “So, obviously, this is something that I understand intimately. It’s something that I care about.”

At that point, he veered onto legal rights, saying that — both in 1961 and today — it was more important to fight for nondiscrimination laws and employment protections than for marriage.

The best I can say for Obama is that he's no stupider on this point than many other people, including gay ones. (In 2000 I saw an interview with Dave McReynolds, an old gay activist who was running for President on the Socialist ticket. Asked about gay marriage, he said that he wasn't interested in getting married "in a church or synagogue"; the civil side of marriage escaped him altogether, as it did Al Gore, who once spoke of marriage as "a sacrament" for men and women, odd terminology for a Baptist.) As a lawyer, Obama should be aware that marriage in the United States comes in two flavors, the religious and the civil. It is religious marriage that is "a sacred union" if one believes in such things, and religious marriage is within broad limits (barring polygamy, child marriage, etc.) outside the reach of the state. Same-sex couples have often exchanged vows, often with the blessing of clergy, to sanctify their unions, and so far there is no law to prevent them from doing so -- only sectarian restrictions that prevent clergy from officiating. In this respect, same-sex marriage is already a reality in the United States.

But religious marriage by itself brings with it no legal benefits, and it is those benefits, the fruits of civil marriage, that the advocates of same-sex marriage covet: shared work and government benefits, visitation access in hospital, and so on. A heterosexual couple, even if they have had a sectarian wedding, doesn't receive those benefits either unless they register their union with the secular state. Contrariwise, a church is not obligated to recognize a member's civil marriage if he or she has not jumped through its cultic hoops. My brother and sister-in-law, for instance, first married at City Hall, then had to make concessions (such as promising to raise their children in the faith) before her church would grant them a church wedding. If I met an atheist woman I chose to marry (it's a lifestyle choice!), we could get a marriage license and share Social Security benefits without the blessing of any god but Mammon, and I doubt there are more than a few religious nuts who'd feel that the heterosexual marriage of two atheists injured their own marriage in any way.

Obama's veer into "legal rights" at that 2007 forum was a blatant evasion, as though the struggle for civil marriage weren't a question of legal rights. If heterosexual civil marriage were also called a "civil union," which I gather it is in numerous European countries, then civil unions for same-sex couples would not be "separate but equal"; but in a U.S. context, civil unions are marriage lite, cementing the second-class status of same-sex couples. It's frustrating to find myself defending legal same-sex marriage in this way, just as it was frustrating to defend Bill Clinton against his enemies, but I am baffled not only that Obama doesn't grasp these elementary distinctions, but that no one close to Obama has spelled them out to him. As with Bill Clinton in 1992, I have to conclude that his gay supporters and advisors are so ignorant that they don't grasp them either.

One old pet peeve of mine may also be relevant here. As "gender" has replaced "sex" in polite discourse, I noticed the term "same-gender marriage" gaining currency some years ago. I haven't heard it so much recently, maybe because "gay marriage" is the usual buzzword. "Same-gender" marriage isn't illegal in the US either as far as I know: an effeminate man and a feminine woman could marry without impediment, though tongues might privately wag. Yet a masculine man and a feminine man could not legally marry, even though they were of different "genders." When I've pointed this out to people who speak of "same-gender marriage," they usually reacted with blank incomprehension -- evidently they didn't know what "gender" means. It's biological sex that constitutes the legal (and religious) barrier, not gender. I know that "gender" and "sex" are not mutually exclusive domains, nor are "biology" and "culture"; and I know that numerous scholars have chosen to speak in terms of the sex-gender system or other terms that try to express the interconnection of biology and culture. The sex/gender distinction has largely collapsed, though many still unconsciously rely on it, and "gender" (masculine/feminine) has come to mean most of what "sex" (male/female") used to mean, wth "sex" used only to refer to copulation. So most of the old sexist baggage has been kept under the sign of gender rather than sex, and people are pretty much as confused -- or flat-out mistaken -- about these issues as ever.

That Liberace Is One Hell Of A Piano Player!

Well-meaning liberals have a difficult history with minorities: they’re always putting their foot in it while trying to persuade us that they mean well, they’re on our side, they see us as normal human beings like themselves. Sometimes they just make fools of themselves, and there’s nothing so terrible about that. At other times they let slip something that shows that beneath the surface egalitarianism, they still at times feel a need to pull rank.

I don’t mean to be smug here – I’ve put my own foot in it often enough, an important and humbling reminder that while I may be an underdog from one angle, I’m an overdog from others. A Presidential candidate will be in constant peril of such missteps, and Barack Obama just succumbed. Not too seriously – it doesn’t bother me as much as his desire to bomb bomb Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – but it’s still a reminder of the craziness that lurks in the hearts of straights and those who fawn on them. An interviewer asked him,

What event or person has most affected your perceptions of or relationship to the LGBT community?

Well, it starts with my mom, who just always instilled in me a belief that everybody’s of equal worth and a strong sense of empathy -- that you try to see people through their eyes, stand in their shoes. So I think that applies to how I see all people.

Somebody else who influenced me, I actually had a professor at Occidental -- now, this is embarrassing because I might screw up his last name -- Lawrence Goldyn, I think it was. He was a wonderful guy. He was the first openly gay professor that I had ever come in contact with, or openly gay person of authority that I had come in contact with. And he was just a terrific guy. He wasn’t proselytizing all the time, but just his comfort in his own skin and the friendship we developed helped to educate me on a number of these issues.

“Proselytizing” – how that takes me back! Back to the days when “militant recruiting homosexuals” were the bogey of the Christian Right. (Also of sex researchers and militant recruiting heterosexuals William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who wrote in their books of homosexuals “recruiting.”) It shows that despite his claim to “try to see people through their eyes,” and despite making nice noises about giving us civil unions and letting us into the military so we can help stomp on Arabs, Obama is still seeing us through the eyes of bigots.

Even better, Obama was being interviewed for the gay magazine The Advocate when he said this. It’s as if a white politician were to tell Ebony about the first black professor he’d ever come in contact with, who was just a terrific guy and wasn’t chasing after white women all the time, just really comfortable in his own skin. How do you think that would go over?

When the interviewer asked Obama about his inviting an ex-gay preacher to address a gospel concert he hosted in South Carolina, Obama explained:

If you’re segmenting your base into neat categories and constituency groups and you never try to bring them together and you just speak to them individually -- so [if] I keep the African-Americans neatly over here and the church folks neatly over there and the LGBT community neatly over there -- then these kinds of issues don’t arise.

The flip side of it is, you never create the opportunity for people to have a conversation and to lift some of these issues up and to talk about them and to struggle with them, and our campaign is built around the idea that we should all be talking.

But according to the account I read, the gospel concert where Donnie McClurkin sang and preached was predominantly African-American in its makeup. So Obama was segmenting his base, pandering to the prejudices of one group -- I doubt he'd have invited McClurkin to perform at services in a predominantly white Episcopal church in Manhattan. I don’t see how this “create[s] an opportunity for people to have a conversation,” either. Obama has the strange notion (shared with the Christian right) that there are no gay Christians, or Christians among Democrats for that matter, so it’s necessary to bring the sundered groups together by keeping them segmented so they can have a conversation. Stuff like this probably sounds better in person or on TV, which is one reason I prefer to read text, where Obama’s charming personality doesn’t get in the way and what he’s actually saying comes through more clearly. And what he’s saying is reactionary.

Another revealing bit from the interview: when Obama says that he prefers to let “the LGBT community” decide whether to accept civil unions or to push for equal marriage rights,” the interviewer asks him, “Is it fair for the LGBT community to ask for leadership? In 1963, President Kennedy made civil rights a moral issue for the country.” Obama counters by pointing out that Kennedy didn’t overturn the laws against interracial marriage, and the interviewer concedes the point. But Kennedy did not lead on racial issues, very much the opposite: he dragged his feet, refusing to intervene when anti-racism workers were being beaten and killed in the South; and he actively worked against the Civil Rights movement, trying to prevent the 28 August 1963 March on Washington. The movement forced him to act (along with embarrassment – when the US government did act in those days to protect the rights and lives of black Americans, it was out of fear that the Communists would capitalize on the bad image American racism was giving the country in the eyes of the world). It wasn’t Kennedy who “made civil rights a moral issue for the country,” it was the Civil Rights movement that did so. The best that can be said for Kennedy is that he followed, not that he led.

As will Obama, most likely. His small gaffe about “proselytizing” is probably less important than his expressed grasp of what equality actually means. (Not that I support him, much less trust him.) Voting will not bring about change, as the aftermath of November 2006 should remind us. But no politician can deliver on his or her fine promises, especially those not made to corporations, unless he or she is made to.

(A squidge o' the mouse to Al Schumann for the link to the interview, and to my old friend Leslie for the Onion clip.)