Born Free

I stumbled on a video clip from the Jimmy Fallon Show, featuring a couple of comedy characters invented and played by Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon.  It took me a few minutes to figure out exactly what was going on, but eventually I did.  (Here's an explanation for those who, like me, are not up to the minute on pop culture.)

At one point Ferrell's character announces emphatically that he's "single by choice," though he respects "a woman's choice not to want to go out with me."  Of course what he meant was that he's not single because no one wants him, it's his decision.  But what immediately occurred to me was that he, and I, and everybody except for conjoined twins, is born single.  Being in a couple is a lifestyle choice, being single is in our DNA.

Yes, I know, this was comedy, but I'm not analyzing Ferrell's character's claim as a philosophical position.  I'm interested in it as it refers to a popular motif.  One of many reasons why the whole "born this way" shtick annoys me is that it blurs distinctions that matter.  What, for example, does it mean to be "born gay"?  What proponents generally mean is "conceived gay," which is why they are still hunting the ever-elusive Gay Gene.  Or the Gay Epigene.

It's seldom stated baldly, but in many cultures, including the US until fairly recently, marriage has been not so much a choice as a duty.  Some might shirk it, and the call to celibacy could be a useful lever in doing so, but you had to have a damn good excuse: if not divine appointment then having lost one's testicles in the war or having had a hysterectomy.  Matrimony was just natural, you know? (Some of today's Christians are trying to claim that having a homosexual temperament constitutes a call to celibacy, much as Roman Catholics might find that an inconveniently unruly woman had such a call and so could be forced into a convent.)  Remember, the whole point of social construction theory is that what is called "natural," built into the structure of humanity if not of the universe, is in fact the result of human will and decisions.

Back in the old days, dating to the early days of the Modern Homosexual but still when I was scouring libraries for information about homosexuality in the 60s and 70s, the medical profession often distinguished between "situational" homosexuality and "obligatory" (I think that was the term) homosexuality.  "Situational" meant prison and other homosocial environments, where the other sex was unavailable by policy or stereotype.  The assumption was that once the inmates had access, they would revert to heterosexuality (though this was not always true).  "Obligatory" meant that because of inborn temperament or perverted upbringing, a person was uninterested in the other sex even when it was available, and so had to be an invert.  But this, it seems to me, is what "choice" actually means: I have access to members of the other sex, but I choose members of my own.  I could put it in Christian terms: like those who are "called" to celibacy, I am called to be queer, and single.  But that also means that I choose them.  People make all kinds of choices for all kinds of reason, and we are usually not required to explain why unless someone wants us to make others.  Rather than justify ourselves, we should make them justify themselves.

People who are bent on splitting themselves in half will continue to insist that their sexual desires and behavior are imposed on them, externally by Nature or internally by Gay Gene.  The reasoning resembles the endless regress of some of the the traditional arguments for the existence of God: everything has to have a cause, and when you get to the first cause it's either God or if you're a scientist, the genes.  (The biologist Susan Oyama has shown how genetic determinists have largely secularized the First Cause by assigning it to biology. That doesn't make it a valid argument.)  Maybe everything does have a cause, but we don't always know what it is, and maybe we never will.  Maybe the craving to assign causes is one of those limits of the human brain/mind, an itch that some people feel compelled to scratch unceasingly.  But not everyone does, and there's no reason why we should have to.

Making Honest Men of Us

The Blogger Formerly Known As IOZ linked to a bizarre essay on gay fiction at the Guardian.  Maybe "bizarre" is too strong: the piece exhibits the same highly selective sense of history that so many gay people cling to, but I still cling to the hope that people will learn.  It seems they never do.

The Guardian titled the piece "It's time fiction reflected gay married life," and that's largely what the writer, Matthew Griffin, is calling for.  After reading At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O'Neill's fine novel of teen love during the Irish uprising of a century ago, Griffin says,

... I wanted to know what it was like for one man to love another – beyond initial attraction, beyond the passion of youth. At 18, I probably shouldn’t have been so worried about such things, but I’d read a lot of fantasy novels as a kid which ingrained in me a need for love to endure. I’d seen my parents’ marriage do this, but I needed to know if such a thing was possible for me, even if I’d have to call it by another name. And I needed to know what it would cost.

The gay literature I read in the years after that never quite answered my questions. Much of it is rooted not in the drama of long-term relationships but in the sharp pang of sex, in the search for love in immediate beauty and physical pleasure, often moving from one object of desire to another in quick succession.

As examples Griffin cites Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and (mystifyingly) Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You, which was just published this year and could hardly have disappointed the teenaged Griffin.

Apparently determined not to miss a cliche, Griffin continues:

But the tremendous swell that pushed the marriage equality movement forward is evidence that many gay men want more than a life of sexual freedom and excitement – we want love and commitment and stability, even if we may not all want them in the particular forms our heterosexual friends have created.

He sums up:

Long-term commitment is now a real possibility. This changes the experience of desire, shifting our expectations and the meaning we attach to it. Our literature should account for this.

At least Griffin is clear that by "marriage" he's not referring only to state-recognized liaisons, but to all committed, long-term relations.  But how naive must you be to believe that legalizing same-sex marriage suddenly makes "long-term commitment ... a real possibility"?  On one hand, it was always a real possibility, even in the primitive 1980s; on the other, marriage offers no guarantee that the commitment will last.

One commenter on the article remarked, "You want a book to reflect a particular story, you write it."  Though it's mentioned only as the biographical blurb at the end, Griffin seems to have done just that: his first novel, Hide, will be published next week.  From the description, I'm not sure he's complied with his own requirements and strictures.  That same commenter added, "Literature does not have any kind of responsibility to reflect society, either real or ideal."

I agree with that, but my main criticism is that Griffin's complaint is unfounded.  The key word, I suppose, is "much of it."  True, much gay male fiction has been about "the sharp pang of sex, in the search for love in immediate beauty and physical pleasure, often moving from one object of desire to another in quick succession," but much of it has not.  (And it's not as if "much" heterosexual fiction weren't about the single life, or about courtship ending with the wedding, or about marriages cut short by failure -- the novel of adultery is common -- or tragedy.)  Much gay fiction has been about "the drama of long-term relationships," so much that I hardly know where to begin.  Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels, for example.  Michael Cunningham's Flesh and Blood and A Home at the End of the World.  Robert Ferro's The Family of Max Desir.  Christopher Bram's debut Surprising Myself is about a male couple, as are several of his later novels.  Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner.  Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Catch Trap.  Alan Hollinghurst's The Spell, even if it gave John Updike the vapors.  Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man is about widowerhood, so it probably wouldn't satisfy Griffin, but the dead partner is still present in his absence, throughout the story, and that too is a lesson about the drama of long-term relationships.  I recently read Paul Russell's Immaculate Blue, which is about a male couple's wedding, but it addresses the matters Griffin says he wants fiction to cover; besides, the couple in question were Living in Sin for years before they tied the knot, so they've already been living the long-term drama.  Samuel Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders follows a male couple over several decades together, and it's a reminder that long-term coupledom doesn't necessarily exclude sexual freedom and excitement at the same time.  Hell, if we don't limit the list to prose fiction, there's James Merrill's epic poem of life, death, afterlife, and Ouija boards, The Changing Light at Sandover.  Those are just off the top of my head, and I didn't even include lesbian fiction.  If I went over my bookshelves I could list quite a few more.  None of them are what you, or at least what I would call obscure.

So, my first and major objection is that Griffin misrepresents the current and past state of gay male fiction.  The kind of story he demands is and has always been told in some gay fiction; he has, of course, no right to demand that all gay fiction do it.  (I admit that he didn't quite demand that, but then it's not clear what he really was demanding, aside from the actual state of contemporary gay fiction.  Some of the commenters saw the piece as a ploy to promote his own novel, but I don't think so, partly because he doesn't mention it and mainly because the misrepresentation he makes is a staple of pop criticism.  Some of the commenters noticed the falsity of his complaint (at least one, perhaps out of a desire to sell his own kind of fiction, confused stories about marriage with boy-meets-boy romance), but most of them swallowed it whole, and I don't think they were selling anything.

My second objection starts from Griffin's desire to know more about the reality of long-term relationships.  I share that desire, but you won't learn what it's "like for one man to love another" from fiction.  Readers who believe that prose fiction or any other medium will give them reliable information about life will soon be disappointed.  Fiction uses real life as one of its raw materials, but writers aren't bound to depict real life accurately, and they don't.  It's at least arguable that depicting reality isn't what art of any kind is for.  (What it is for is another question, which has no single answer.)  Even when a novel describes a marriage, the description is not an end but a means to whatever artistic end the author is trying for.

If someone wants insight into the process of living for a lifetime with another person, nonfiction is probably a better resource, though it has its own limitations.  We have numerous autobiographical accounts of same-sex marriages, from Jesse Green's The Velveteen Father to Paul Monette's Borrowed Time to Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast to Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart.  We have the published diaries of coupled writers -- if Griffin wants an account of the process of two men building a life together, he could read Christopher Isherwood's diaries, which cover most of his thirty-odd years with Don Bachardy.  We have reasonably reliable non-homophobic, un-closeted biographies of gay writers, artists, and other notables who lived in long-term partnerships.  There are also research studies of male couples, starting in the Eighties with Charles Silverstein's Man to Man and David P. McWhirter and Andrew Mattison's The Male Couple, and self-help tomes like Eric Marcus's Male Couple's Guide: Finding a Man, Making a Home, Building a Life.  In sum, fiction and non-fiction already reflect married life, so why is Matthew Griffin unaware of it?

As Easy as Stepping on a Rake

I'm a firm believer in the usefulness of debate.  One of its uses is to help figure out what the issues are.  It's easy to become so obsessed with the formulation of a question that you develop tunnel vision and forget that the question can be asked in different ways, and that there are more than two sides in an important disagreement.  This is why the audience of a debate is at least as important as the debaters themselves.  As I've often said, the purpose of a debate is not for one of the debaters to persuade the other that his or her position is wrong, but to inform the spectators, so that they can better evaluate the controversy.

I had it in mind to apply this point to the current controversy over the Confederate battle flag, but then I read a post on same-sex marriage -- or rather, on marriage in general -- by Amanda Marcotte at Rawstory.  Marcotte tries to administer a dope-slap to reactionary opponents of same-sex marriage:

Basically, their real concern is that people are going to stop seeing marriage as a miserable duty to be endured and instead start thinking that love, happiness, and companionship should be what marriage is about. The marriage-for-love mentality is no doubt especially threatening to some of your more sexist men. There’s already a lot of fear that women prefer singleness to being with a man who isn’t loving and supportive. That’s what all that hand-wringing about single motherhood and singleness generally is about—anger that women might actually have standards and not just marry the first guy who will take them.

She then quotes Mike Huckabee speaking on CNN:

“Regardless, heterosexual marriage is largely in trouble today because people see it as a selfish means of pleasing self, rather than a committed relationship in which the focus is on meeting the needs of the partner,” he said. “That sense of selfishness and the redefinition of love as to something that is purely sentimental and emotional, has been destructive.”

Marcotte then denounces

this bleak view where marriage is about cosmic duty, not about being happy. In fact, there’s a suspicion of happiness underlying this, a belief that if you’re enjoying your relationship, you must be doing something wrong.

Jeez, where did Marcotte ever get the idea that marriage is about love and happiness?  She really should check out the century or more of feminist analysis and critique of marriage, and then all the research that found that the only people less unhappy than married women are unmarried men.  This research was cited by mostly male reactionaries to attack feminism (women totally owe it to men to sacrifice their happiness to propping up the male ego!), but that doesn't discredit the evidence.  This article sums up First Wave feminism's take on marriage, though it probably stereotypes Second-Wave feminism unfairly.  The best-known Second Wave critics of marriage are probably Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis.  The situation has changed slightly as married women gained more autonomy and have had their own outside-the-home jobs, and could control their own money -- which, perhaps oddly to this mindset, means that having a job makes you happier.

And then there's the "marriage equality" movement itself, which has made a big deal about all the zillions of "rights" that married people get.  Special rights, of course.  Right after the latest Supreme Court ruling I had an educational exchange on Facebook with a marriage-equality devotee who flatly angrily denied that the movement was about anything but Love!  Like, what part of "Love Wins" didn't I understand?

Marriage is not about equality: it's about inequality.  It privileges certain couples -- those who are registered with the State -- over other, unregistered couples, to say nothing of single people.  Marriage is, and always has been, about property, not about love, and certainly not happiness.  From what I see, most of my younger acquaintances, especially the gay ones, are really interested in having a wedding.  Preferably a big expensive spectacle of a wedding, like in the movies.  Preferably in a church, which is going to frustrate them when they learn that they can't force a church to be the soundstage for their spectacle.  How are they supposed to get a viral Youtube video and website out of their wedding if they can't have it in a church?

"We loved the T-Mobile advert spoof of Wills and Kate's wedding," [NIna, 28, the bride] said.

"Ever since I saw that I've always fancied giving it a go."

Back in the Seventies when I first began to realize that I preferred being single, I was bemused when to find that my coupled friends (mostly lesbians at the time) were saying that they needed to find me a nice boyfriend, so I'd be happy like they were.  When I replied that being in a couple hadn't made me happy, they would change their tune: Well, you're not supposed to be happy!  Being in a relationship is hard work!  You'll be miserable, but it's good for you! You're just selfish! ... and so on.  Bear in mind, they weren't talking about legal marriage (not available then to same-sex couples anywhere) or civil union or domestic partnership, but just about having a boyfriend.  Ironically, they succeeded in confirming my sense that being coupled was not for me.  For them, maybe, but not for me.  (A few years later, all those would-be matchmakers had broken up with their partners.  They found new ones, of course.)

Since then I've often observed that people to tend to stay in relationships long after after those relationships are making them miserable -- for fear of being thought a quitter, or immature, or selfish, or a failure -- or for fear of being alone.  Again, the propaganda that pervades the Culture of Therapy encourages those fears.  It isn't only old fundamentalist males who say this stuff.  And civil marriage makes getting out of a bad relationship even harder, as it's meant to.

Not only does marriage not equal love, love doesn't equal marriage.  I love many people; I'm not even theoretically interested in marrying most of them.  (My niece, my friends, my grandnephews, etc. -- but not my sex partners either.)  "Love" is a multivalent and confusing concept in many cultures, not just ours; often it's an outright euphemism for erotic desire or for copulation.  Equating love with marriage is propaganda, as is linking it to happiness.  One reason so many marriages fail is that people have unrealistic expectations about the institution -- again, it's not just old religious people who say this, it's a staple of the Culture of Therapy.   But what are realistic expectations?  Inflating the importance of marriage or even just of couplehood, making romantic love a prerequisite for happiness, is patriarchal propaganda.

But all this is the easy part, I think.  It's easy to mistake Amanda Marcotte for a radical: she's brassy, confrontational, and she talks dirty.  But confusing tone with content is usually a mistake. Her stated position here makes it explicit that she stands in the liberal tradition of the atomized individual.  "There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher infamously said, "there are individual men and women and there are families."  Obviously Thatcher drew different conclusions from that premise than Marcotte and many other liberals do: that doctrine can be used to rationalize a wide variety of positions.  Mike Huckabee would probably be shocked to learn that Christianity as represented in the New Testament is an individualistic (though not liberal) cult, as religions of salvation usually are.  Jesus' teaching focused on the safety of the individual, who must be prepared to break with and defy all the institutions of his society -- family, marriage, religion, state -- in order to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.  As the Confederates found with their doctrine of states' rights, the early Christians had to contain this doctrine immediately if they were to survive as an institution themselves: the apostle Paul's letters show him balancing the freedom of the individual against the rest of the community (conceptualized as the Body of Christ), under his authority as Christ's deputy.  But the early Christian communities could only be built by taking individuals away from already-existing communities.  It's worth remembering that although most early Christians probably married, Jesus' and Paul's exaltation of sexual abstinence encouraged and empowered many people to reject marriage -- especially women.

You can't have individuals without community, or a community without individuals, and social history can usefully be read as an account of the tension between those poles.  Propaganda for same-sex marriage has cited the importance of social recognition and acceptance of Our Relationships.  Which, ironically, confirms the complaint of many opponents of SSM that ratifying same-sex civil marriage forces not just them but everyone to endorse those relationships against their religious principles.  You can make an argument that this isn't so, but the proponents of SSM tend to flipflop after having done so, and demand social acceptance and support from everybody for their marriages.  Civil marriage isn't about individual happiness, it's a social and political construct, and it can enable or obstruct individual happiness.

Individual choices are not (necessarily) determined by social or cultural forces, but they are pressured and limited by them.  The choices we make are limited by the options available, the rewards for compliance and the penalties for noncompliance.  So the question still has be asked, quoting Ellen Willis quoting Rosalind Petchesky: Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?  I agree with Marcotte's insistence that women have a right to choose their partners and relationships, to draw lines within their relationships to preserve their autonomy, and that men have no right to demand that women make all the concessions and provide all the service.  But she should consider the question whether (especially civil) marriage civil marriage, despite the reforms that have been enacted in parts of the West, is a gateway or an obstacle to personal happiness.

But, you know, if Firestone and Willis are too radical for you, there's always Nancy Polikoff's excellent and moderate Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage.  Simply negating the demands of the religious patriarchs isn't the only way to refute them, and such negation has a tendency to snap back and hit you in the face.

The Birth of Chinese Feminism

I've been meaning to write about this for a couple of weeks.  It's a commonplace that feminism and the gay movement are innately and perfidiously Western, and that activists are just trying to force their Euro-American categories down the helpless throats of indigenous women and queers around the world.  It's an odd instance of common ground between Third World fascists and Western postmodernists, which right there is a sign that something's wrong with the commonplace.  So I was happy to encounter a book on the New Arrivals shelf at the university library called The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, published this year by Columbia University Press.  Edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, it collects English translations of feminist writings by Chinese writers at the end of Qing Dynasty, early in the twentieth century CE.  These include two manifestos by male writers urging China to move into the modern age and learn from the West's openness and dedicates to equality for all, and several pieces by a woman taking those male writers to task.  The woman, Zhen He-Yin,* labeled an "anarcho-feminist" by the editors, argued in Chinese terms for the liberation of women.

The social system in China has enslaved women and forced them into submission for many thousands of years.  In ancient times, men acquired proprietary rights over women to prevent them from being claimed by other men.  They created political and moral institutions, the first priority of which was to separate man from woman. For they considered the differentiation between man and woman to be one of the major principles in heaven and on earth.  Men thus confined women to the inner chamber and would not allow them to step beyond its boundaries.  The Book of Rites states, "When a married aunt, or sister, or daughter returns home (on a visit), no brother (of the family) should sit with her on the same mat or eat with her from the same dish."  It goes on to state [m]ale and female, without the intervention of the matchmaker, should not know each other's name.  Unless the marriage presents have been received, there should be no communication or affection between them" ]53-4]. **

But Zhen didn't regard the West as a role model for China either.

Liberation means setting [the body and the mind] free from bondage.  The problem with the marriage system in Europe and America is that individuals remain constrained by three bondages: power/privilege and self-interest profit, morality, and law.  They talk about freedom in marriage and so on.  But do individuals in Europe and America get married purely out of free love?  What often happens is that a man may lure a woman with his wealth, or a woman's family fortune may cause a woman to admire her and propose marriage ... [58]

As for equality between man and woman, it is likewise often a sham.  Although men and women are both now educated [in Europe and America], they live in a world supremely ruled by man.  Women seldom study politics or law and are completely barred from acquiring knowledge in the fields of the military and police.  It is true that women and men may socialize ; but when the world is controlled by governments that systematically exclude women from their governing bodies, so-called gender equality can exist only in name [59].

Things have changed somewhat in the West, but it took the better part of another century, and there are still efforts to roll back the progress that has been made.  So-called gender equality still exists only in name here.

Zhen wrote her essays while in exile in Japan, and this kind of criticism of her culture was dangerous. The editors mention one of her feminist contemporaries, "Qiu Jin (1875-1907), the cross-dressing revolutionary martyr, who left her husband and children behind to seek education in Japan, and who, upon her return to China, was executed by the Qing state for her advocacies of dynastic overthrow.  In her essays, songs, poetry, and short stories, Qiu tirelessly wrote of the nationalist political need for female emancipation" (35).  Zhen herself, "in her published works, ... prefers to sign her name He-Yin Zhen so as to include her mother's maiden name in the family name.  This was a decision grounded in her theoretical work published in National Justice" (2-3).

The Birth of Chinese Feminism isn't for every reader. Zhen bases much of her argument on exttended citations from the Chinese classics, which were important for her original readers but won't have much effect on a modern Western (or even non-Western) reader.  Those people who are interested in the history of feminism and gender struggle will probably find it interesting, as I did.

*The surname comes first here, as usual with East Asian names.
** I've silently removed the transliterated Chinese terms the editors included in the text.

For Better and For Worse

A gay friend of mine posted this photo today from US Military Buddhists.  Yeah, that sounds oxymoronic to me too, but Buddhists have been official state killers for millennia.  Here's the caption:

Let us pause for a moment and remember Pearl Harbor. Let us remember this and move on to creating a world of love, compassion, and peace.

(Pearl Harbor veteran Dick Fiske,right, hugs Japanese bomber pilot Zenji Abe, left, during ceremonies at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The pair became friends after meeting on the "Today" show in 1991 and became a symbol for the war's reconciliation.)

My first guess on seeing the picture, of course, was that it was another of the "cute old gay couples get married in Washington State" pictures that have been all over my wall the past day or two.  Too bad; these guys are so adorable together.

My Evening Constitutional

One of my readers wrote to suggest that I was "slightly wrong" when I wrote about Bob Garon, the sixty-something gay Vietnam veteran who got all up in Mitt Romney's face a couple of weeks ago:

The U.S. Constitution doesn't say anything about marriage, so it's not correct to say that denying him marriage denies him his Constitutional rights.

My correspondent pointed out that while the Constitution says nothing about marriage,

neither does it say anything about sodomy, abortion, pornography, or, to go further afield, on whether a corporation is an individual - on all which subjects the supreme arbiters of "what is Constitutional" (spec. the Supreme Court) have found interesting things to say, based of course on their interpretation and application of the tenets of the Constitution to latter-day affairs. In Loving v Virginia, for instance, (if memory serves) the Supremes found that marriage was a "fundamental right". The 14th Amendment would seem to necessitate equal rights for all, and the DOMA cases now working through the courts would seem to be testing the applicability of this proposition to gay people and their marriages. Mr Garon might be blamed perhaps for jumping the gun as to whether he has a federal constitutional right to marry and remain married to his partner and to have that marriage recognized by the Federal Government. But it is only by the assertion of a right that anyone anywhere at all can find out if that right exists.

Damn! My correspondent even forestalled my objection that Garon asserted a Constitutional right that, so far, he doesn't have. The Supreme Court has already ruled on abortion, pornography, "racially" mixed marriages, and sodomy, so we can probably assert our rights in those areas. And it's true, Bob Garon or anyone else can assert a right whether the courts have ruled in its favor or not. Looking over his statements, though, I see that he misunderstood or misrepresented Romney's claim -- Romney didn't say that the Constitution says anything about marriage -- and is really in no position to complain that Romney "doesn't know about the Constitution." I'm no Constitutional scholar either, but the Constitution doesn't seem to have anything to say about equality in the sense Garon is talking about; where the word "equal" occurs, it doesn't refer to legal equality. But I should have written that sentence in the original post more carefully, and I sit corrected.

I still insist that "rights" terminology is being thrown around too freely in this debate. Garon, like many gay people, talked as though he thinks the benefits of marriage are rights. The question is whether same-sex couples should receive the same benefits and privileges that mixed-sex couples do, and they should. But as I and others have argued before, it's not clear why those benefits and privileges should go only to "married" couples, since we have the precedents of domestic partnerships and civil unions. Many of the horror stories -- the loss of shared property, a partner of many years reduced to penury, the custody of jointly raised children, couples separated by immigration status, and so on -- will still be told after same-sex marriage is a legal fact. Heterosexuals are voting against marriage with their feet, and have been for decades, a fact that annoys many advocates of same-sex marriage. Not even all same-sex couples will want to marry, but that doesn't mean they should have to spend thousands of dollars on powers of attorney and other instruments to protect themselves. You shouldn't have to get married to get health care, or to enter or leave the US, or to stay home with a sick friend or visit him or her in the hospital. For all that they claim to take marriage seriously, same-sex marriage advocates seem to be bent on trivializing it.

But I believe I've caught my correspondent here, though I'd return the favor and argue that he's only "slightly wrong" about it:

As to your larger point about Obama, this is of course true. But my reading of the tea-leaves is that he's waiting for a DOMA case to be ruled in the plaintiff's favour, and amidst the resulting brou-haha from the Right to announce his final evolution in favour of "marriage equality" (the neologism I expect him to use). At that stage he will have nothing electorally to lose from the declaration.

At this point I'd agree that Obama is waiting for a DOMA case with the right (or "right") outcome, which is probably the right course of action for him in any case, since it isn't the Executive's prerogative to overturn bad laws. But don't forget that for the first two years of his presidency Obama was defending DOMA in the courts. It's also important to remember that he is personally opposed to same-sex marriage on religious grounds, an opposition that predates his campaign for the presidency. One reason it would be fun to watch Garon confront Obama on this issue is that Obama is a Constitutional scholar who clearly doesn't think that the Constitution guarantees a right to marry: he's willing to leave it to the states.

But to repeat, I was slightly wrong in my criticism of Bob Garon, and I'm glad to acknowledge it.

Weather and Posting Forecast

Maybe because of the snow and cold and generally wretched weather, I haven't felt much like writing or anything else; I was beginning to think I was coming down with something, but a night's sleep helped. I've got a couple of big posts in the works, but for now, this clip (to which I was pointed by a couple of different people) fits well. As good satire should, it cuts both ways.


New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

Virtually Freaky; or, The Slithery Slope

I was going to say something like "While I'm talking about religion...", but I'm not sure how much this is about religion. Ostensibly it's not, but religion's probably lurking beneath the surface.

IOZ linked to this article at National Review Online by Mona Charen, the author of a couple of attack books on anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan. It's an oddly half-hearted defense of Rick Warren, in particular of his comparison of homosexuality to polygamy, pedophilia, and incest. "Those were not the most felicitous comparisons and probably unnecessarily hurt the feelings of gays and lesbians," Charen allows. I hadn't looked at Warren's actual remarks before, and they're interesting if you look at them with any care.

Steven Waldman: Now you, one controversial moment for you in the last election was your support for proposition 8 in California. A couple of questions about that. First, to clarify, do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships?

Rick Warren: I don’t know if I use the term there, but I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don’t believe that we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles or whatever stuff like that. So I fully support equal rights.

Steven Waldman: But what about, like, partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation?

Rick Warren: You know, to me, not a problem with me. But the issue to me is, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

It looks to me as though Warren is dodging the question about civil unions and domestic partnerships, though he does seem to say that insurance and hospital visitation are "no problem" with him. On the other hand, he also says, "I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage," which means that he is opposed to guaranteeing insurance and hospital visitation for same-sex couples, but not as much as he is to letting them marry. I think he should be pressed closer on civil unions and domestic partnerships (which are not, be it noted, limited to same-sex couples). Don't let him blather about equal rights regardless of "particular lifestyles": does he or does he not approve of same-sex civil unions?

Look at what Warren says about "a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Even if I agree to let him focus solely on Judaism and Christianity here, he's being absurd. Brother and sister marriage? Abraham and Sarah, according to Genesis, were half-siblings -- same father, different mothers. Most people would call that incest, yet according to Genesis they were husband and wife. Who's Rick Warren, to go against Scripture?

Maybe Abraham and Sarah are an isolated case, but "one guy having multiple wives and calling it marriage"? That is virtually the norm in the Old Testament, as a Bible-believing pastor like Rick Warren must know, and when the Christian father St. Augustine wrote about marriage he conceded that biblically speaking, polygamy is lawful, but "Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife, so as to have more than one wife living." It appears, then, that the ban on polygamy derives from Roman paganism, not Christianity. From Jacob, who married two sisters (and his first cousins), to Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, there is no suggestion that plural marriage is anything but marriage. Who's Rick Warren, to go against scripture? I'm not sure why people like him should be allowed to redefine marriage, etc., etc.

Mona Charen takes basically the same line in trying to defend Warren.

Once traditional marriage — supported by centuries of civilization and the major Western religions — is undermined in the name of love, there is no logical or principled reason to forbid polygamy, polyandry, or even incest. Gay activists recoil from incest. But on what grounds exactly? Suppose, after we formalize gay marriage, two 25-year-old sterile (to remove the health of offspring argument) twins wish to marry? Let’s suppose they are loving and committed. What is the objection? That it offends custom and tradition? That it offends God? Isn’t that just bigotry?

I think that it's misleading to speak of "the major Western religions" as though there was a slew of them; granting Judaism "major" status because of its influence on Christianity, there seem to be two major Western religions. But as a Jew, Charen must know as well as Warren that "traditional marriage" is compatible with polygamy. In Judaism, plural marriage was only banned about a thousand years ago. Who's Mona Charen, to go against zillions of years of polygamous tradition?

Even more, she offers no "logical or principled reason" for opposing same-sex marriage, plural marriage, incest, or marriage between adults and children; all she does is appeal to "tradition." Tradition in the West has permitted slavery, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, child labor, and many other practices that I doubt Charen would want to endorse now. (If Tradition still ruled, she'd be running a grocery stand in a ghetto while her husband did the studying and writing, but they'd both be worrying about pogroms and the Inquisition.) Adultery, traditionally, means having sexual relations with a married woman: a married man is allowed to stray with impunity, and as late as the end of the 1800s the English parliament refused to make a husband's adultery grounds for divorce, as a wife's adultery was already (see pages 38 and 39 at that link).

As for marriage between a child and an adult, the definition of a child has been in flux for some time. When Victoria became Queen of England in 1838, the age of consent was 10 (though a girl couldn't marry until she was 12), and it stayed there for most if not all of her reign. What most Americans and Britons nowadays would consider the marriage of a child to an adult was legal in an officially Christian nation in those days. (How old was Juliet again?) I'm not sure what the age of consent ought to be; logical and principled reasons for raising it above 10, as it was traditionally, seem to be in short supply, but I'm open to discussion.

The same goes for "incest." Leaving Abraham and Sarah aside, what about marriage between first cousins? Thirty-one states in the US forbid marriage between first cousins, though Canada and most European countries do not. As I mentioned before, the Bible seems to have no objection either. To be honest, I am not sure I see any logical or principled reasons to forbid even brothers and sisters from marrying; certainly Charen doesn't offer any. If there are no such reasons, maybe it should be permitted. Again, I'm open to discussion.

Please understand: my point here is not that I endorse polygamy, or the marriage of children to adults, or of siblings. My point is that Charen and Warren, and the gay and pro-gay Christians they oppose, have no real arguments against such practices either. Or against same-sex marriage, come to that. All they can do, apparently, is point to Tradition, as if it were monolithic and unanimous in its judgments. But it doesn't really support them. Despite all their babble about "redefining" marriage, marriage has been redefined in many ways over the past several millennia, let alone in the past half-century. (In 1967 the US Supreme Court redefined marriage in America to include mixed-race couples, for example; the early Christians redefined marriage to forbid divorce, which was permitted in Judaism, but since the political rise of Ronald Reagan at least, conservative evangelicals have decided that divorce is tolerable, and their own divorce rate is higher than that of the general population.)

On top of everything else, it would be interesting to know why both Warren and Charen present themselves as willing to accept homosexual relationships short of marriage. I mean, if the government gives special rights to sodomitical couples instead of putting them in jail or executing them (as the 5,000-year definition of sodomy would require!), letting them have insurance, and visit each other in the hospital, isn't that approving homosexuality? Won't we have to let polygamists visit their wives, or incestuous couples have insurance? What are we going to tell the children?

Charen says,

Gays and lesbians argue that their same-sex unions are loving, committed relationships. Fine. But there are, or could be, other loving, committed relationships involving more than two people. Supporters of gay marriage say this is a ridiculous slippery slope argument.

I'll pass on whether it's ridiculous, but it is a slippery slope argument, and as I've already suggested, it's a bit late to invoke it now that American traditionalists have already caved in on miscegenation, divorce, letting wives own property (or vote, or serve on juries, or keep their wages when they work outside the home), and so on -- they even seem to have given up on sodomy laws! To say nothing of Warren's claim that he supports equality for sodomites and sapphists. I don't believe he really means it, he's too cagey in his phrasing, but it's still a retreat from the grand Judeo-Christian tradition of stigmatizing queers.

My ambivalent Obama-supporting friend, by the way, referred me to Change.gov, the Obama Transition Team's site. It says there, inter alia, that "Barack Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples." That's pretty clear, but 1) most state constitutional amendments that ban same-sex marriage also "affect unmarried relationships of same-sex and different-sex couples," according to Nancy Polikoff in Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008, page 95), which means Obama has his work cut out for him; and 2) what's to stop same-sex couples in civil unions from considering and calling themselves married, especially if they decide to have a religious wedding of their own, which the law doesn't and can't forbid?

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.

The Love Boat

It has been entertaining, I admit, the spectacle of right-wing bigots tumbling out of the closet like the finale of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

Every time I started to write this post, another case would appear. But not all the hypocrites are on the religious right pretending to be straight; some are openly gay. This has a lot to do with bigotry in the larger society, of course, but so do they all. The late Randy Shilts, for example, hid the fact that he was HIV-positive for a long time after And the Band Played On, his book on the AIDS epidemic, was published. As Michael Bronski wrote,

while no one is mandated to announce their health status it would have been interesting to see how the straight media would have responded to Shilts the “objective” reporter as an out, openly HIV positive gay man. For among all of the things that AIDS has contributed to our thinking and culture it has made the link between the more palatable idea off a “gay identity” and the less palatable reality of “gay sexual behavior” inevitable; simply put: you have to get fucked to get AIDS. And would Shilts's public position as a Person With AIDS have made the mainstream press see And The Band Played On as a document of special pleading--a label that is quickly attached to most all "non-objective" minority writing from Kate Millett to Larry Kramer to Lani Guinier.

The fault here lies not so much with Randy Shilts, but with the context and parameters set up from the mainstream press and media about what is acceptable. Randy Shilts understood that he lived in a world that would not take him seriously as a journalist if he was too partial to the gay press or showed too many signs of “non-objective” writing.

For, despite Shilts’s public criticism of gay male bathhouses (he eventually advocated closing them),

During the 1970s Shilts – like most all gay men in San Francisco – was an avid bathhouse attendee, both in the more mainstream baths as well as the more s/m oriented South of Market establishments. This is not news, it is common knowledge and up until the publication of And the Band Played On. Shilts was always forthcoming about the details and the vagaries of his sexual history. The story of how he was accidentally locked outside of South of Market's Handball Express (an establishment that specialized in fist-fucking), naked and handcuffed, was told by everyone – including Shilts himself. What would have happened in the critical reception of And the Band Played On if Shilts had been more forthcoming about his own involvement with the institutions about which he spoke. Would straight critics and media folk have treated him with the same respect he received by not disclosing his relationship to his material? I suspect not.

Stephen O. Murray reports that the offensive to close San Francisco bathhouses in 1984

was undertaken by Larry Littlejohn, a gay deputy sheriff later shown to be engaged in competition with bathhouses – he was dismissed from his job in 1987 after being charged with pandering for young male prostitutes. Littlejohn did not attempt to organize a gay community response, such as demonstrating in front of the establishments or talking to patrons inside or outside them. After meeting with Shilts and Leonard Matlovich, Littlejohn’s first resort was to seek government intervention [American Gay, Chicago 1996, 112f].

That was a long time ago, I admit. But since then we’ve had cases like that of Michelangelo Signorile, who blamed the gay community for his inability to use a condom with a hot man in the privacy of his hotel room, and we’ve had scourges of gay male ‘irresponsibility’ like Larry Kramer who seroconverted after they’d been demanding that everyone else stop having sex altogether. (Kramer was also a bathhouse customer, which wasn’t a secret – he portrayed his alter ego in The Normal Heart prowling the tubs and rejecting men who weren’t young and twinky enough.)

One of the Promiscuous Reader’s Laws is that if gay people want to have a “respectable” public life, we have to have a “scandalous” private life, and vice versa. I codified this in the late 1970s. It explains why so many respectable heterosexually married men get caught with male hustlers or prowling tearooms… Oh, dear; that bit of slang may be out of date by now. It’s camp argot for public restrooms where men go for sex with other men. One of the traditional features of gay male life has been the ironic juxtaposition of our grubby reality with our affectation of elegant terminology – compare “coming out,” taken from high society debutante parties, let alone “queen” itself. In the old days, say before the late 1970s, gay bars tended to be murky, grotty sub rosa places; nowadays it’s possible to have commercial gay establishments that are clean, well-lit, and appealing.

The flip side of this Law is that, in order to have a “respectable” private life (partnered, ostensibly monogamous), a gay person must have a “scandalous” public life (admittedly, openly, unabashedly, militantly flaunting gay -- one of Those!) But things are changing here too, as Homo-Americans fight to become respectable on both fronts at once. As far back as 1963, Erving Goffman wrote in Stigma (page 7, note 10):

Interestingly, a convention seems to have emerged in popular life-story writing where a questionable person proves his claim to normalcy by citing his acquisition of a spouse and children, and, oddly, by attesting to his spending Christmas and Thanksgiving with them.

Goffman was writing about various sorts of stigma, including physical handicap, but when I first read Stigma a couple of years ago, I was struck by the parallel to my Homo-American contemporaries. In the 1980s, some theatre people made a splash coming out at the Tony Awards by thanking their lovers in their acceptance speeches. When celebrities come out nowadays, they nearly always seem to have their Partner, and often a child, standing nearby for the announcement, making with The Gaze like Nancy Reagan beaming at Ron.

I’m wary of the grand claims and promises being made for marriage by gay people now. One assumption is that legal same-sex marriage will “civilize” gay men by turning us monogamous, though marriage has never had that effect on straight men. So what will it do for lesbians, since they’re presumed civilized already? (And if they aren’t, the male proponents of marriage don’t want to hear it.) Most of this talk ignores the differential roles men and women play in heterosexual marriage, where the husband’s happiness is bought at the price of the wife’s. More recent research finds that married women are happier than they used to be, because they’re more likely to work outside the home – i.e., to be more independent of their husbands. But they still have to work the Second Shift of housework on top of their paid jobs. I’m curious to see how this symbiosis (if not parasitism) will work itself out in same-sex marriages, especially between men.

E. J. Graff, author of What Is Marriage For?, sent me a nice e-mail arguing that I’d misinterpreted her remark (which I construed as a complaint) that “anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float.” I can see where she’s coming from, though after checking it in context again I don’t agree. Graff was writing about the Protestant rebellion against Roman Catholic clerical celibacy, and quoted the reformer Martin Luther’s claims about thousands of dead baby cadavers (aborted or killed after birth) found in convents. Here's the context. Graff commented:

Of course these are nonsense charges, equivalent to the medieval cry that Jews killed Christian babies for their Passover feast – or, to use similarly ludicrous charges from contemporary anti-gay pamphlets, that most gay men eat feces and prey on young boys, or that lesbians die by age forty-five. Luther could get away with such exaggerations because everyone knew some local sexual irregularity (or, to be contemporary again, because anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float) – and so listeners could imagine that, far away, things could be so much, much worse.

(Bold type is mine.) Leaving other issues aside, it seems to me that Graff agrees that scantily-clad leathermen are not a Good Thing – unlike, say, scantily-clad female cheerleaders shaking their buns and bazooms before drunken (but presumed-heterosexual) football crowds. She also has a slight fixation on drunken queers, apparently assuming that married people never get drunk (or for that matter, gyrate drunkenly on urban [as opposed to rural?] Pride floats). I was sure there was another passage in What Is Marriage For? complaining about Pride parades, and I finally found it: this cute bit from page 144, boldface mine:

And yet the very existence of same-sex marriage would send a message to young people – a good one. It would offer visible evidence that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, that “sodomy” is a sin only in the eyes of the beholder. Some commentators would much rather see outré urban queers throwing drunken kisses off bar floats than have two nice married girls move in next door, with or without papoose, demonstrating to every neighborhood kid that a good marriage is defined from the inside out.

Remember the quotation from Goffman, above. Graff takes for granted that you have be outré, drunk and urban to throw kisses from a parade float (she’s evidently never seen a small-town Fourth of July parade), that a “papoose” defines a good marriage, that everyone will see “two nice married girls” as positive (which is why conservative Christians support same-sex marriage, right?), that those “two nice married girls” couldn’t possibly drive into the city from the suburbs on Pride Day to ride bare-breasted on their motorcycle, with “papoose” in tow. I’m not sure which “commentators” Graff has in mind here, but her polemic is built on the assumption that you have to choose between drunken Pride parades and sober couplehood, between city and suburbs, between niceness and naughtiness. She may not actually believe that, but it’s what she wrote. Aside from being false, it’s the same Manichean divide that drives a lot of anti-gay propaganda: either be decent Christian father-ruled married heterosexuals, or degraded feces-eating homosexuals blowing kisses from Pride floats. (Those interested might check out page 188 of What Is Marriage For?, where Graff grinds the same ax to misinterpret Michael Warner and Edmund White.) In the real world it’s not either/or: you’re going to see both the party animals in the Pride Parades, and the suburban same-sex couples, and sometimes they'll be the same people. Legal same-sex marriage won’t silence bigots, who will simply not see what they don’t want to see.

For a variety of reasons, I have increasing doubts about legal same-sex (and mixed-sex) marriage. Graff, like so many advocates, thinks that marriage is basically a good thing, born of people’s “more common human desire to pair off, for two people to dedicate themselves to one another, to build a shared life and a home – and have it recognized by those around them, whether parents or governments” (page 190). If there are any problems with those desires, they can be reformed by, um, getting married; if your marriage doesn’t work out, it’s your fault, not anything wrong with marriage itself. Graff turns up her nose at what she terms the arrogance of Utopians, but it’s hard to get more Utopian than this. It is fine with me if people pair off to, in Graff’s terms, dedicate themselves to sharing sex only with each other; we all have our kinks, and I’m very tolerant of diversity. But outside Utopia and romance tales, that desire doesn’t always (or even often) last for very long. I’m not sure that the State should be invited to enforce it, nor that the other legal privileges that go with civil marriage – which I agree are important – such as inheritance, health care, and the like, should be reserved for couples. Everyone should have health insurance and Social Security, whether they’re married or not, and children should have enough to eat, health care, and good educations, regardless of the marital (or class) status of their parents. (Hm. What if a nice single lesbian moves in next door to you with a “papoose” in her arms? Would Graff and her wife rally the neighborhood association to run the cheap slut out of town?)

If, or rather when same-sex civil marriage is implemented, it will be only a matter of time before we start seeing news stories about the Baptist minister, father of two, with a loving husband of twenty years at home, caught making sexual advances to an undercover police officer in a park tearoom. (Better yet, imagine him caught picking up a female streetwalker, and defending himself with the claim that he thought she was really a male transvestite.) Or about the nice Episcopalian couple in the suburbs – he’s a lawyer, he’s an accountant – whose child keeps coming to school with mysterious bruises, or worse. Or the nice Jewish lesbian couple – just celebrated their tenth anniversary -- one of whom turns up at the Emergency Room with a broken arm from “falling down the stairs” of their ranch home. How about the not-so-nice trailer-trash butch-femme couple who scream drunkenly at each other every night on the other side of your thin apartment wall – but they’re married, bless ‘em! (Graff’s vision of wedded bliss is not only clean-and-sober, it has a decided middle-class bias.) Being single won’t solve all your problems – I know! – but marriage isn’t Utopia either.