The Business of America is Marriage

Jacob Bacharach, also known here as The Blogger Formerly Known As IOZ, posted a good piece last week on the fuss about Kim Davis and same-sex marriage in Kentucky.

Now, your regional sob story and hopelessly convoluted sexual ethics don’t entitle you to discriminate from your elected office, but I have the inescapable feeling that by holding her in contempt and tossing her in the clink, Judge Bunning did precisely the wrong thing. He was correct to observe that a pecuniary penalty would have had no impact; political allies of her lawyers would have made fines immaterial to her. And yes, courts do need a mechanism for enforcing compliance with their orders. But it strikes me that if Bunning could just wave his federal wand and allow others to issue the permits, then I see no reason why he couldn’t do the same without the cell. Despite her protestations to the contrary—that these certificates are somehow invalid without her signature—no one believes that the boys down at the Social Security Office are going to take her word over the order of a federal judge. I’ve seen some commentary on the convoluted authority to issue these permits in Kentucky, but state permitting statutes don’t trump the constitution, and their misapplication doesn’t invalidate gays’ right to marry.

The first thing I thought of when I heard that Davis had been jailed was an anecdote about the Roman Emperor Julian, called The Apostate because he renounced Christianity and tried to re-paganize the Empire.  He tried to take away the privileges that Christians had been given under Constantine and his successors, but without overt persecution of the cult.  He didn't have much success, but supposedly some bishop angrily said to him, "You will not even let us be martyrs!"  I can't find this episode online, but I still think it's a good principle: don't cater to the Christian paranoid delight in persecution or even the fantasy thereof.  I've been really bothered by many liberals' glee when Davis was jailed.  Yes, she deserved it, you might even say she asked for it -- but that's all the more reason not to give it to her.  (Martyr me, said the Christian; No, said the State.)

What prompted my post today, though, was a comment under JB's post:

It’s a more salient issue to me that the state is uses a religious institution as a social engineering tool. It’s a direct line from the feudal lord having to give his consent. I’m not even a libertarian and I think a country with an Establishment Clause in its constitution should not be involved in sanctioning marriages. There are other ways to collect fees from people…

I misread this slightly, as a call for the government to get out of the marriage business -- probably because the commenter referred to libertarians, who've made that call.  But, to begin, I don't agree that marriage is essentially a religious institution (and I don't see the connection to "the feudal lord," if only because marriage is a lot older and widespread than the feudal system).  Marriage hasn't always been a religious institution even in Christendom, and there's no reason I can see to regard religious marriage rites as anything but a wishful adhesive intended to help keep couples together.  What, for example, is specifically religious about Jacob's purchase of Rachel from his uncle?  If the Bible contains regulation of business practices, which it does, is commerce essentially a religious institution?  Government allied itself with religion very early on, for obvious political reasons; is government therefore a religious institution?

Reading this comment reminded me of an op-ed written by Rand Paul for Time magazine soon after the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges in June.  I remember writing at some length about Paul's piece, but it must have been in comments somewhere that I can't find now.  I meant to post about it here, and thought I had, but evidently I didn't.  So here goes.

Paul begins by complaining about the Court's "redefinition of marriage," which is of course nonsense, and goes on to suggest, "Perhaps the time has come to examine whether or not governmental recognition of marriage is a good idea, for either party."

Since government has been involved in marriage, they have done what they always do — taxed it, regulated it, and now redefined it. It is hard to argue that government’s involvement in marriage has made it better, a fact also not surprising to those who believe government does little right.

So now, states such as Alabama are beginning to understand this as they begin to get out of the marriage licensing business altogether. Will others follow?

His remark about Alabama was premature: the legislature briefly considered a bill that would have stopped government issuance of marriage licenses there, but the bill died in committee.  His general argument is dishonest, as shown by his remark that "our founding fathers went to the local courthouse to be married, not to Washington, D.C."  If Paul was correct about this, he undercut his claim: The courthouse is a government office, which indicates that the Founders saw marriage as the domain of government as well as of religion.

From the context it appears that by "government" Paul really meant only "the Federal government."  He seems to have no objection to state governments regulating marriage by passing laws and constitutional amendments which refused to recognize same-sex marriage.  Certainly all the conservatives who supported those laws and amendments can hardly claim that they "believe government does little right," or that government shouldn't overrule religious definitions of marriage, since those amendments generally forbade any religious recognition of same-sex unions.  The basic legal issue in Obergefell was whether the states -- i.e., government -- should be empowered to regulate and define marriage as they pleased.

While a few Libertarians had argued for privatizing marriage before, the idea only got any traction when conservatives, who are traditionally sore losers, decided that their best next move was try to get rid of legal marriage altogether.  As Amanda Marcotte pointed out at Slate, Paul's plan

is reminiscent of how segregationists reacted to Brown v. Board of Education. Rather than allow their children to go to school with black students, white people throughout the South started private, often religious schools, nicknamed “segregation academies.” It wasn’t just schools, either. As my colleague Jamelle Bouie explained recently, the decline of the public pool is also a symptom of this reactionary urge to privatize an institution rather than share it with people who conservatives consider undesirable. That the same logic is being whipped out by Paul is no big surprise. This is a man who famously opposed the Civil Rights Act that made the “privatize instead of share” goal harder to achieve.

I would only add that Christian racists' resort to "private" segregation academies didn't go as far as renouncing government subsidies or tax exemption for them.  Oh, no indeed.

I doubt marriage privatization will get very far, partly because its advocates are still largely comfortable with state or local interference in marriage, but mainly because the religious opponents of same-sex civil marriage want heterosexual marriages to be recognized by government at all levels for purposes of the "entitlements" that Justice Thomas sneered at in his dissent.  They want their spouses to share their Social Security benefits, they want spousal and widows' benefits for the military, and so on.  In order for that to happen, the government will have to have criteria for deciding who is married and who isn't.  Paul says he wants marriage, insofar as it's a legal bond at all, to be a purely private contract, which would presumably mean that any two -- or more -- people who've contracted marriage would be eligible for such benefits.  That will not appease, let alone satisfy the religious opponents of same-sex couples: they don't want such couples to be eligible for those benefits or any other.

Another disadvantage to privatizing marriage is that it would undermine Justice Roberts' warning in his dissent that the ruling would open the door to legal polygamy.  Privatizing civil marriage, reducing it to a contract between consenting adults, would in Roberts's words offer "no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not."  Roberts tiptoed around the fact that plural marriage is a biblical value, and offered no reason why government -- which according to Rand Paul "does little right" -- should prohibit polygamy if a religion permits it.  Another issue Obergefell was meant to settle was whether a couple can be married in one state and not in another.  In principle there's no reason why heterosexual marriages, including Paul's and a fortiori Justice Thomas's interracial one, should be valid in every jurisdiction, and DOMA (another instance of the Federal government meddling in marriage) as well as the state-level bans on same-sex marriage were meant to create a crazy quilt of definitions.  Since Paul and other privatizers are comfortable with state governments defining marriage for their jurisdictions, they should remember that there are states and municipalities where plural marriage might be acceptable, and Paul's contractual proposal doesn't seem to offer any obstacles to more than two people contracting a marriage-like relationship.

Calls for government to get out of the marriage business are really just a transparent move in the direction of theocracy.  Paul didn't bother to hide his religious agenda: "The Constitution was written by wise men who were raised up by God for that very purpose. There is a reason ours was the first where rights came from our creator and therefore could not be taken away by government. Government was instituted to protect them."  But only to protect the rights of heterosexuals, and especially Christian heterosexuals, to run American society.

To The Best of My Mismemorization, Uh ...

This morning I noticed that the Onion had an item in their faux Person-in-the-Street feature, based on a report that former President George W. Bush had offered to officiate at a lesbian wedding in 2013, but had to back out because of a scheduling conflict.

Ironically, the Onion is pretty reliable in its references to actual news (as opposed to the satire it spins from it), so I looked around and decided to look at what the Daily Caller (one of RWA1's preferred sources) had to say about the report.  It turned out to be only the barest aside in a Boston Globe piece about Dubya's brother Jeb, and for what it's worth, a Bush spokesman told the Washington Post that "While President Bush is indeed friends with Bonnie and Helen, he doesn’t recall making such an offer."  Which is a rather mild denial; it might well be true (that Bush doesn't recall it).  It's a sign of how much has changed, that rather than declare his eternal opposition to the destruction of holy matrimony by Teh Gay, Bush chooses not to remember anything about it.  I even believe that if he did offer and then withdrew, it really was because of a scheduling conflict, even if it was really a hangover.

I indulged in some snark on Facebook about the story, declaring that obviously Dubya isn't really a conservative after all! I think he was just misled by his advisors when he said he opposed same-sex marriage, just like Barack was.  (Or maybe not -- Obama denied the report.)  For that matter, Dick Cheney also pretended to oppose same-sex marriage while he was VPOTUS (via).  So they were just playing eleven-dimensional chess with the Christian right!  Bush did appoint numerous openly gay Republicans to important posts, after all.  I bet if Bush could have had just one more term, he'd have shown his true colors as the progressive social reformer he really is ... As so often happens, reality tends to leave satire behind it, gasping in the dust.

Incidentally, the Most Liberal Pope Evar continues to proclaim his inclusive message of love and inclusion.

Once You Go Gay, You'll Never Turn Away

Someone left a copy of Tuesday's Courier-Journal lying around in the library today, and the headline caught my eye.  KY: BAN ON GAY MARRIAGE IS NOT BIASED.  Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear's lawyer argued in a long brief filed with the US Supreme Court:

"Men and women, whether heterosexual or homosexual, cannot marry persons of the same sex" under Kentucky law, making the law non-discriminatory.

According to another box in the front-page article, Beshear's lawyer, Leigh-Gross Latherow, also argued that "Allowing only opposite-sex marriage promotes birth rates, 'ensuring humanity's continued existence.'"  On this logic it would be reasonable to ban celibate clergy or a religion like Christianity that exalts sexual abstinence, on the ground that such doctrines and practices hinder birth rates and endanger humanity's continued existence.  Does Latherow seriously believe that same-sex marriage will become so popular as to affect population growth?

The reporter, Andrew Wolfson, commented that the "Argument mirrors Virginia's against interracial marriage."  Since that argument failed to convince the Court in 1967, it probably won't be effective now; so why do Brashear and his lawyer think it will?

I'm mildly worried that some advocates of same-sex marriage will attack the argument from another position, using the born-gay view of sexual orientation as "status" to argue that we have to gay-marry because our genes make us, and you can't go against the Will of the Gene. I've pointed out before that the decision in Loving v. Virginia significantly didn't invoke a putative 'racial orientation' that compelled the Lovings to marry each other rather than partners of their own race(s); such an argument seems never to have crossed anyone's mind, despite the widespread racist belief that interracial liaisons violated not just religion but a fundamental biological mechanism that caused blacks to be sexually unattractive to whites.

As with Latherlos' assumption that if same-sex marriage is allowed, it will spread through the population like a radioactive virus and humanity will cease to exist, the white racist belief in the repulsiveness of black people coexisted with its opposite: that the black male especially was primally irresistible to white persons.  Similarly, antigay bigots believe both that homosexuality is naturally disgusting, and mysteriously, fatally attractive: if it's not forbidden and demonized, everyone will go gay.  (Once You Go Gay, You'll Never Turn Away.)  One of the corollaries of the born-gay claim, usually invoked by gay Christians, is that heterosexual copulation is somehow "unnatural" for the congenitally gay, and vice versa -- except for jaded degenerate heteros who dabble in buggery or sapphism out of boredom or mere degraded wickedness.

And of course one of the problems with the idea of sexual orientation as a status is that it has no room for bisexuality.  If gay people should be allowed to be gay, and to marry each other, because we are trapped by our genes and compelled to do what most people would be disgusted to do, then shouldn't bisexuals be compelled to live and marry heterosexually?  The implicit logic is that if you can function heterosexually, you must do so, and homosexuality can only be tolerated if we (pitiful slaves to our gay genes) can get satisfaction no other way. The tantrums thrown by many gay people over the idea that homosexuality is a choice probably connect to the hostility shown by many gay people to bisexuals: either they wickedly refuse to be heterosexual when they could be, or they are closet cases who just pretend not to be 100% gay in order to avoid stigma.  If we allow bisexuals to marry, before you know it, we'll have to let everybody do it, and then civilization will collapse.  Despite both sides' stance of moderation and sweet reasonableness, lurking beneath their placid surfaces are beliefs of sheer gibbering wackery, barely held in check by the suits and mild tones.

And now I face a slight dilemma of my own.  What shall I say to friends in Kentucky who only a week ago were informing their Facebook communities that they would, alas, just have to boycott Indiana because of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act?   How can they expect me to visit a state like theirs, which explicitly and overtly is denying marriage equality to its citizens?  I'd like to think that their smugness will come tumbling down, but I know better than to expect it.  Tremble, O Bluegrass State, before my wrath!

Seeing What the Church Will Do Unbullied, There's No Occasion To

I'm not sure what to make of Conor Friedersdorf's latest venture into the turmoil over same-sex marriage.  The title and opening are especially problematic: "Will Christians Ever Bless Gay Marriage?", with the subhead "Some writers think that even as society changes, orthodox believers will stick to traditional beliefs."

Insofar as the title and subhead seem to equate "Christians" and "orthodox believers," they depend on a faulty assumption, albeit one often used by reactionary believers when convenient: "Christianity" means only those who fit a narrow and unrepresentative range of what I'll call the spectrum of Christianities, except when it doesn't.  (So, for example, fundamentalists will point to the fact that the vast majority of Americans identify themselves as Christians in order to advance their theocratic agenda, even though they don't consider the vast majority of Americans to be real Christians and will denounce them as apostates, etc.  Reactionary writers like Rod Dreher have drifted toward the label "traditional" Christians instead, but as Dreher himself admitted in one of his better pieces, it's surprisingly difficult to define what a "traditional" Christian believes.  In practice, at least for people like Dreher, it mainly seems to boil down to opposition to same-sex marriage.  But Dreher also is willing to recognize that "traditional" Christians as he imagines them are a dwindling minority among American Christians, though he exaggerates slightly so as to indulge the traditional paranoid delight in persecution -- or rather, the fantasy of persecution -- that so many Christians cherish.

Friedersdorf himself, to judge from this article, doesn't subscribe to this confusion.  He recognizes the range of beliefs and values held by Christians, and does a good job answering a writer, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who argues against the "false premise" that Christianity does change its values and will abandon its opposition to same-sex marriage.  I will concede that some Christians never will accept it, just as some Christians cling to theologically based anti-Semitism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.  Hell, there are some Christians who still want the Catholic Mass to be celebrated in Latin only.  There's no reason why all believers, or all churches, should agree on any issue.  And it might bear reiterating that the legal recognition of civil marriage between same-sex couples in no way obliges a denomination to recognize them, any more than it must sanctify heterosexual civil marriages involving spouses of different denominations, or a divorced spouse in denominations that don't recognize divorce, or any number of other pairings.  Catholic churches are not, as far as I know, being burned down or priests lynched or jailed for refusing to marry such couples in church.

I'll add something to Friedersdorf's discussion, though.  He quotes the writer he's rebutting, who's much given to straw men and false antitheses:

"Christianity's view of sexuality isn't some encrusted holdover from a socially conditioned patriarchal era on its way out, but is instead deeply connected to its understanding of who God is and what human beings exist for."

It's interesting to me that Gobry qualifies his claim somewhat by referring to Christianity's "understanding of who God is and what human beings exist for."   That concedes the debate right off the bat.  I'd expect a traditionalist Christian to insist that he is enumerating God's understanding.  From there I need only point out that "some encrusted holdover from a socially conditioned patriarchal era" and "its understanding of what who God is and what human beings are exist for" are not mutually exclusive -- indeed, that it's quite thinkable that a traditional Christian understanding could also be an encrusted holdover from a patriarchal era, etc.  I think the burden of argument lies on Gobry to show why it isn't, and he doesn't do so.

Gobry also whines that the proponents of same-sex marriage believe that "if you just bully Christianity enough, it will find a way to change its view of homosexuality ..."  Like many traditionalists, he assumes that advocates of same-sex marriage are not Christians (see the confusion I addressed above), though as Friedersdorf points out, the pressure to change Christian understandings of homosexuality (and of sex generally) has mostly come from within the churches, from Christians rather than unbelievers.  If it were up to me as an atheist, I would resist putting any external pressure on religious believers in this regard at all, if only because external pressure only gets believers' backs up.  But again, I think it will be mostly Christian or other religious GLBs who'll be having tantrums when their churches refuse to bless their marriages, and will want to throw out the First Amendment in the interests of their God-given right to have a church wedding.

I have my disagreements with Friedersdorf on many aspects of this controversy, but he did a good job this time in answering Gobry, and he quotes some useful arguments from comments under a Rod Dreher post that cited Gobry.  Even so, I object to his conclusion: "It's hard to imagine that Jesus wouldn't prefer that to the previous arrangement."  I think that anyone who reads Jesus' many antisexual teachings in the gospels should find it easy to imagine that Jesus would not accept same-sex marriage or openly gay followers.  Friedersdorf talks a lot in this piece about "love" as a reason for accepting same-sex marriage, but any conception of Christian love that appeals to Jesus as a model must account for such dominical teachings as "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire."  As an atheist I don't have to reconcile Love and Hellfire, but Christians do.

Off the Old Bat

I picked up a copy of Against Equality's Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage (Against Equality Publishing Collective, 2010), and I look forward to reading it.  One thing I noticed right away: the recurring theme that "same-sex marriage is an essentially conservative cause" -- an odd claim from an anti-essentialist writer like Walter Benn Michaels, whose cover blurb I just quoted.  But leaving essentialism aside for the moment (I'm pretty sure I'll be returning to it), I think it's time to problematize the term "conservative."

Like many other go-to terms -- "moderate," "extreme," "skeptical" and "agnostic" come to mind right off the bat -- "conservative" shouldn't have any content, but is often treated as if it did.  It connotes a relation between two or more terms.  Think of William F. Buckley's definition from his 1955 mission statement for the fledgling National Review:

A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Of course there's some stupidity here, in the self-pitying and dishonest clause about "a time when no one is inclined to do," since there are always people who are inclined to try to stop history.  Liberals are just as apt to claim that they stand alone, or defy the tide.  But the definition makes sense, in referring to a relation between people and the present: someone wants to conserve something, but might very well want not to conserve something else.  It would apply, as numerous people have pointed out, better to a New Deal Democrat trying to preserve the legacy of FDR than to someone like Buckley, Barry Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan, who wanted to dismantle the American system then in place and replace it with something radically different.  Those who claim to wish to return to bygone days seldom really want to; they generally are historically illiterate, and don't know what the bygone days were like.  What they dislike is the present.

Consider a 1986 PBS documentary called The AIDS Show, about a revue staged by a San Francisco theater troupe.  I quote from memory: a group of gay men are sitting around talking about how AIDS has affected their lives.  When someone mentions safe sex, one of them bursts out, "I'm tired of hearing about safe sex!  Look: I like to get drunk, take drugs, and go out and have sex with strangers.  You can call me old-fashioned, but that's what I like." That character's position should qualify as conservative, even essentially conservative, in the context of gay men's culture.  So, for that matter would be the closet, leading a double life, marriages of convenience, gender transgression (from men referring to each other as "she" to drag), diva worship, and so on.  Indeed any appeal to culture, be it queer or gay or lesbian or what have you, is likely to be a conservative if not reactionary move: thus far and no farther!

Despite my reservations about the whole project, I'm not so sure that gay marriage is an essentially conservative cause.  Nor is it essentially progressive.  It can be seen as either, or neither.  The first thing you have to notice is that those who are usually called conservatives in the US political map have not exactly rushed to embrace the idea.  Neither, for a long time, did those who were usually styled liberals, though it's certainly legitimate to question whether the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton should be called liberals.  As Nancy Polikoff pointed out, the gay marriage movement seems to be dominated by people with otherwise reactionary views on marriage that they hold in common with the right-wing marriage movement:

... [S]ame-sex marriage supporters borrow from flawed marriage-movement arguments that further a political agenda historically out of line with the gay rights movement.  For example, psychology professor Gregory Herek argues for marriage rather than civil unions by referencing that “heterosexual cohabiting couples do not derive the same advantages as married couples from their relationships.”  But critics of the marriage movement point out that such claims are based on bad science, reflecting “selection effect” and assuming a causal connection that cannot be proven.  Similarly, cultural anthropologist Gilbert Herdt and psychiatrist Robert Kertzner assert that because “marriage supports mental and physical health,” the ban on same-sex marriage “compromises the well-being [of lesbians and gay men], that of their children, and the well-being of future generations.” …
 
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders has expressed the belief that the marriage of lesbian and gay couples will strengthen the institution of marriage, not weaken it, as though strengthening the institution of marriage, on the terms that rhetoric is usually deployed, is an unqualified accomplishment.  When the marriage movement speaks of strengthening the institution of marriage it is always in a context that asserts the superiority of marriage [Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, Beacon Press, 2008, 99].

Of course, if these views are "historically out of line with the gay rights movement," rejecting them is the conservative thing to do.

Marriage might well be "conservative" for heterosexual couples and "progressive," even radical, for same-sex couples.  A conservative stance on homosexuality would entail that gay people remain invisible, silent, closeted.  Conservative gay people, the kind I met and argued with in the 1970s and after, would agree.  Why do you have to advertise your sex life? they'd ask peevishly, much like their heterosexual counterparts: My private life is nobody else's business.  Legal marriage, which entails putting your couplehood on public record, registered with the state, entails leaving the closet, and I've often been amused by closeted people who nonetheless wanted a marriage license: to get that piece of paper, they'd have to declare their sex lives publicly.  Even if they didn't take out a wedding announcement in the local paper, the issuance of a license would be published.  If you're married, that person you're living with can no longer be euphemized as your friend, your longtime companion: that person becomes your spouse, and it's been revealing how many gay people who want the social and historical baggage that comes with marriage are queasy about the social and historical baggage that goes with husband and wife.

When I've pointed all this out, the reactions I get told me that they hadn't really thought through the implications of their position.  The same was true of those who said they wanted government to get out of the marriage business, ignoring the fact that a marriage license and all the benefits and privileges it bestows are the result of government getting into the marriage business.

True, a lot of gay people seem to think that legal marriage will prove to straights that we are sober, responsible, respectable people, just like heterosexuals.  But the right-wing backlash to the drive for same-sex marriage has shown how naive such a belief is, so it's strange to see that a self-styled queer vanguard seems to share it.  And of course there's a lot of hypocrisy among the advocates of same-sex marriage.  As a group we probably are  as sober, responsible, and respectable as straight people are, as a group -- which isn't very.  But hypocrisy, defined as the homage vice pays to virtue, is a very conservative practice.

I've mentioned before Duncan's First Law of Gay Respectability, which holds that if gay people want to have a “respectable” public life, we have to have a “scandalous” private life, and vice versa. The exact content of a respectable public life and a scandalous one has changed over the past few decades, thanks to generational changes in straights' attitudes toward homosexuality.  I've also observed that presenting ourselves so as to please straight people is a hopeless exercise, since some straights are more comfortable with gender-compliant (not "stereotypical") gays and others are more comfortable with gender-noncompliant ("stereotypical") ones.  No one approach will work across the board, so I've been skeptical for decades about buzzwords like "assimilation," "transgressive," "conservative," "liberal," and "radical."  It's not always possible to avoid using them, but they are mirages that recede as one pursues and tries to capture them.

It's essentialist to posit that gay people should be "outlaws," just as it is to claim that we should be respectable citizens.  Like straight people, we aren't by nature anything.  Human sexuality is expressed in many different ways, some of which are invalid and other of which aren't.  I see many prescriptions about what sex and love should be for; some I agree with and others I don't, but none of them is universal or mandatory.

The Baggage

There's celebration in these parts today, thanks to the federal district judge who ruled against Indiana's ban on same-sex marriage yesterday.  (A federal appeals court overturned Utah's ban on same-sex marriage on the same day.)  Couples in several counties around the state, including here in Monroe Country, flocked to apply for marriage licenses.  A local bakery offered free rainbow donuts to newlyweds.  (Damn, this is discrimination because of marital status.  Now I have to run out and get married, right away.  Any takers?  Free donuts!)

Nicola Griffith posted the other day about overcoming her longstanding distaste for the word wife.

Twenty years ago, when I first married Kelley, in a ceremony with zero legal validity, but much emotional truth, in front of family and friends who'd flown in from all over the world, I might have hurt anyone who called me her wife or her my wife.

But when we got married last year on the 20th anniversary of that first wedding, in front of a judge, with the full legal force of the USA and UK and many other countries behind our vows, we used the word wife.

We'd talked about it over the years. We'd disliked it over the years. But when we were looking at the old, old vow "to take this woman as your legally wedded wife" with all the ancient rhythms of have and hold, richer and poorer, sickness and in health we knew it was the right word.

This, despite what she'd learned from feminism, and the etymology of the word itself (which she details).  I remarked in a comment that from this post, you'd think people only married in English.  What the female partner in a heterosexual marriage is called is less important than what she's committing herself to, or being committed to.  As Griffith points out:

When two women call each other wife, wife no longer means chattel. It can't—chattel can't own each other. It no longer means object not subject, that is, subject to another's will. How can two people with the same status subject each other to anything? These days, in the US and UK, wife means, Woman in a legal marriage. By association, woman also no longer means object not subject. It no longer carries with it the implication that someone else is in charge. A woman is no longer automatically a lesser member of a household.

I think Griffith is being overoptimistic here.  Male supremacy isn't dead yet.  Women in mixed households still work the Second Shift of housework and caregiving.  In same-sex couples the division of labor will be different, just because they are the same sex, and there's no automatic fall-guy for the scut work.

I've noticed over the years that many gay people are as resistant to a non-gendered conception of marriage-like partnership as many straight people are.  Some screwed up their faces in distaste when I said matter-of-factly that in a same-sex couple, there'd be two husbands or two wives; simple.  Like heterosexuals who couldn't understand how two men or two women could have sex without one "playing the man" and the other "playing the woman," they couldn't think of husbands and wives except as opposites -- you couldn't have two of each.  I've never understood why.  When I first read Joanna Russ's sf story "When It Changed," the following exchange made perfect sense to me.  The premise of the story is that a plague killed all the human males on the colony planet Whileaway.  The women who survived constructed an all-female society, with women pairing up together and children produced by induced parthenogenesis and, later, merging of ova.  After centuries of this successful arrangement, a spaceship crewed by men arrives.  (It's significant that there are no women in the crew.)  One of the men talks to a female couple:

“You are—?” said the man, nodding from me to her.
“Wives,” said Katy. “We’re married.”

Simple, no?  Two women married to each other are both wives.  Two men married to each other are both husbands.  But many gay people I encountered, even those who said they wanted to marry, balked at the notion, even if they indignantly rejected any notion of old-fashioned roles in their marriage.  (This reminds me of my welcoming reaction to the 1960s feminist who said simply that whatever she wore was women's clothing, because she was a woman and she was wearing it.  Most sophisticated social-constructionist gender rebels to whom I've quoted her were offended by her lack of essentialism.)  They wanted the "ancient" prestige of marriage and its vows, but not its content.  One commenter on Griffith's post wrote, "I call Ellen my spouse. All the celebration with none of the etymological baggage! :-)"  It's not the etymology that's the baggage, though.  It's the history, a not-all-that-distant history which despite significant changes is still with us.

More recently so many same-sex couples have adopted the standard terms that I think this battle too has been largely won.  If you want to call it "marriage," I think you should have to use "husband" and "wife" too.  "Spouse" sounds like a copout to me, a disingenuous evasion of the baggage you've just bought yourselves.  And it doesn't stop being baggage just because you call it something else.

Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice, Unless It's the Wrong Liberty

Where Christian martyrs were in fact driven to disobedience by sincere religious objections to the actions demanded of them, pagan authorities could see only contumacia, a stubborn and treasonous contempt for the emperor’s lawful command.  Ironically, as we shall see, the same disconnect would prevail under the Christian empire when secular authorities and establishment bishops looked at those they called “heretics” or “schismatics.”  They, likewise, preferred to characterize religious dissidence as a result of pride, obstinacy, or philoneikia (“quarrelsomeness” or “love of controversy”) rather than sincere belief.*

I've been trying to figure out what principles, if any, are involved in the matter of Brendan Eich and other right-wingers who've taken heat for their political beliefs lately.  I must say that the Right is tenacious: they're still yowling about the unfairness of it all, three weeks later, with no signs of fatigue.  I don't think the Left, let alone liberals, would still be setting the airwaves aflame with their indignation for such a long time, though in fairness the Left doesn't have the corporate-media access the Right has.

So, for example, the right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer just published a piece, "The Zealots Win Again," calling for an end to transparency in political donations.  (It was Brendan Eich's $1000 donation to the Proposition 8 campaign, you'll recall, that led to his removal as CEO of Mozilla.) Conor Friedersdorf discussed it at TheAtlantic.com, quoting Krauthammer's conclusion:

If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression. Our collective loss. Coupling unlimited donations and full disclosure was a reasonable way to reconcile the irreconcilables of campaign finance. Like so much else in our politics, however, it has been ruined by zealots.

What a pity.

You see, this is why we can't have nice things: the zealots ruin them.  Something's wrong here, though.  First, when did the Right begin to object to "the politics of personal destruction"?  Only when it began to hurt them, apparently: the Right has a long history of trying to destroy their political opponents.  (Analogously, liberals only object to it when it hurts them.)  Often they have relied on fabrications to do so, and professional liars who build careers on false accusations against their political enemies are considered heroes, not embarrassments to the faction.

Second, Krauthammer's argument makes no sense, because "free expression" means little if you have to hide your identity to express your views.  This makes me skeptical about the notion that campaign donations should count as free, protected "speech" in the first place, but even if they should, people should take responsibility for their speech and expect to be accountable for it.  By "accountable" I mean willing to give an account of the belief and their reasons for it, not that they should be fired.

I should acknowledge that I began writing this blog under a pseudonym (connected to my persona as a book reviewer for the gay press), partly because of concerns about repercussions against me in my workplace from other gay people.  There had been several attempts by gay managers and administrators in the University to shut me up around campus, though I had numerous allies as well, so those attempts came to nothing.  What worried me was that I might not be allowed to talk back to my critics.  But I soon put my real name on the blog.  (Or I thought I had; I must have changed it back.  My name is connected to the blog in many places on the Internet.  I've just edited my profile to put my real name back on it.)  Which feels odd, I admit, because before the Internet I wrote for the radical gay press under my own name, posted on listservs, Usenet, and electronic bulletin boards under my own name, and wrote opinion columns for the student newspaper under my own name.  I also spoke publicly to classes on GLB panels under my own name.  I knew that anyone who wanted to could track down my identity as a blogger; I just thought I'd put a small barrier up, which would only confound those who weren't determined.  And I do see it as a contradiction in my practice, and a failure of nerve.

Still, when you (or I) make a campaign donation under a regime of transparency, your name is on it, and you should be ready to stand by it.  Eich apparently was not.  When the controversy arose he issued a typical non-apology apology promising, or "committing," to continue the same Mozilla inclusivity you all know and love.  He preferred not to defend his support of a referendum initiative intended to attack the civil rights of same-sex couples, who already were marrying legally in California.  Just out of personal curiosity, I'd like to know how he justifies that in his own mind.

And here's a curious declaration in Eich's post: "And I will not tolerate behavior among community members that violates our Community Participation Guidelines or (for employees) our inclusive and non-discriminatory employment policies."  Oh, really?  So Brendan Eich himself is intolerant of intolerance, and is prepared to impose Touchy-Feely, Politically Correct standards of behavior on Mozilla "community members" and employees?  Compare the current backtracking in some prominent sectors of the Right from support of the rancher and welfare moocher Cleven Bundy, now that he's made some classically racist remarks.  Conor Friedersdorf wrote a post explaining why opponents of same-sex marriage should not be treated like racists.  But why should even racists be "treated like racists"?  Why is it okay to stigmatize and penalize one set of political beliefs but not others?  There has, after all, been a lot of fussing when white racists got into trouble for expressing their views.  Even debating the issues is considered unfair by many.  Okay, maybe these people shouldn't have been "stigmatized," to use Friedersdorf's term, but this is why I find a lot of the defense of Eich problematic: the goalposts keep moving.  First we shouldn't pick on racists, then we should or at least we may pick on racists, but not on antigay bigots.

So it appears that even defenders of Brendan Eich (and of Paula Deen, Alec Baldwin, Phil Robertson, and others) think it's okay under some circumstances to penalize someone for his or her political views and actions.  I'm having a hard time sorting out what those circumstances are, however, and I think they need to be defined.  In practice it appears, as I suggested before, that the exact circumstances are defined by the partisan position of the critic: freedom of political views for me, but not for thee.  Which is certainly a familiar stance, but it's not a principle.


*Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (California, 2005), 34.

They Don't Make Bigots Like They Used To

I tend to get Ross Douthat mixed up with Rod Dreher, but I think that's understandable because they're often grinding out the same stuff, so much alike that it seems to be written by the same person but published under different names.

So Douthat has an op-ed in the New York Times, "The Terms of Our Surrender" (via), in which he declares that before long the Supreme Court will "redefine marriage to include gay couples in all 50 states."  That "redefine" is, of course, a signal of Douthat's bad faith: partly as a dog whistle insinuating that all marriage will then have to be same-sex (a patent falsehood), and partly because as Douthat knows very well, marriage has been "redefined" many times just in Christian history.  As another conservative writer noted, for example, "While same-sex marriage may be an absolute novelty, there have been pitched battles over the definition of marriage before, as when the Catholic Church told the barbarians who had overtaken the Roman Empire that they could not continue their practices of cousin marriage—a tradition from time immemorial—if they wished to be Christians."  (Even this writer, who gets a lot of things right while still opposing same-sex marriage, talks about marriage as if it were only a Christian institution -- as though other cultures and religions, which constitute most of the world and of human history, didn't exist.)

Douthat goes on to consider two possibilities.  One, which he sees as the better one, is that

this division will recede into the cultural background, with marriage joining the long list of topics on which Americans disagree without making a political issue out of it.

In this scenario, religious conservatives would essentially be left to promote their view of wedlock within their own institutions, as a kind of dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation, while the wider culture declares that love and commitment are enough to make a marriage. And where conflicts arise — in a case where, say, a Mormon caterer or a Catholic photographer objected to working at a same-sex wedding — gay rights supporters would heed the advice of gay marriage’s intellectual progenitor, Andrew Sullivan, and let the dissenters opt out “in the name of their freedom — and ours.”

("Gay marriage's intellectual progenitor, Andrew Sullivan"?  Erm, no.)  The other scenario Douthat envisions is one "in which the oft-invoked analogy between opposition to gay marriage and support for segregation in the 1960s South is pushed to its logical public-policy conclusion" and sincere believers are forced to take photographs at or bake cakes for gay weddings lest they "be treated like the proprietor of a segregated lunch counter, and face fines or lose his business."

This is also disingenuous, signaled by "without making a political issue out of it."  The religious opposition to same-sex marriage is already political.  But more important, this scenario is exactly what the "marriage equality" movement is aiming for, since it is about civil marriage not religious marriage. Just as they can now, "religious conservatives would essentially be left to promote their view of wedlock within their own institutions."  Churches don't have to recognize heterosexual marriages that don't conform to their norms: interfaith unions, remarriages by the divorced, interracial marriages, cousin marriages, and so on.  And what about atheists or agnostic or other people who belong to no religious sect?  We can marry, heterosexually, but our unions are no sacrament, and we don't care if they're recognized by churches; we just want recognition by the state.

Even this state of affairs presents problems for traditionalists, of course.  Should a Catholic-run school or hospital or other institution be required to recognize the heterosexual marriages of staff who aren't married in the Church for purposes of benefits?  (Pensions, health insurance, and the like.)  I presume that this isn't a problem, as it shouldn't be, but if the Church doesn't object to treating unmarried-by-Catholic-rules couples as married in these circumstances, they're already sliding down the slippery slope of complicity with Mammon.  And how many people would sympathize with them for withholding such recognition?  Not many, I speculate, even if that's partly because of the widespread popular confusion about the difference between civil and religious marriage.

One way to solve the problem would be to rename all civil marriage as "civil union," thereby leaving the word and concept of marriage to religion.  This could be done by a law which declared that every reference to "marriage" in the statutes would be replaced with "civil union."  (This is, as I understand it, normal practice in numerous European countries, even those with official state churches.)  Some opponents have said they'd be willing to extend all the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples under the rubric of civil unions, but they never seem to consider that for real equality, they would need to do the same for mixed couples.  That would at least show their good faith, but I don't think it ever occurs to them, and that's a sign of their bad faith.  I really doubt that many people would go along with this move, however, even among traditionalists.  Americans are just too used to thinking of civil unions as marriage.

It's interesting that Douthat doesn't seem to object to the demonization of Christian racial segregationists, though Christian faith was invoked as a foundation for segregation.  He doesn't give any reason why the two cases should be treated differently.  He seems to want to dissociate himself from Christian racism, as in his reference to "racist holdouts like Bob Jones University, losing access to public funds and seeing their tax-exempt status revoked."  This betrays a shocking lack of respect on Douthat's part for Christian traditionalists who objected to the redefinition of American life by atheist Communists and activist judges.  He's ready to throw such people under the bus, but not opponents of same-sex marriage.

For all that, Douthat concludes:

I am being descriptive here, rather than self-pitying. Christians had plenty of opportunities — thousands of years’ worth — to treat gay people with real charity, and far too often chose intolerance. (And still do, in many instances and places.) So being marginalized, being sued, losing tax-exempt status — this will be uncomfortable, but we should keep perspective and remember our sins, and nobody should call it persecution.

I agree with him there, but the issue goes way beyond same-sex marriage: it's a problem built in to the concept and policy of freedom of religion.  Freedom has its limits, as conservatives have always loved to point out except when it affects them, and one of the downsides of living in a pluralist society is that you have to live and interact with people very different from you, and it's not always clear in advance who will have compromise their principles, or how.  As I've pointed out before, it's a sign of how far even self-styled traditionalists have surrendered to the society they attack that none of them talk about recriminalizing sodomy; they're willing to let Sodomists and Sapphists have civil unions (which they think of as separate-but-equal, as I noted above), visit their partners in the hospital, and so on; even their defenses of heterosexual supremacy are phrased much more mildly than the bigotry of the past.  Someone like Benjamin Carson or Phil Robertson, who merely continues to use the antigay tropes of a generation ago, is an embarrassment to them.  They don't even seem to realize how much they've already surrendered -- not the larger society, but they themselves.

What's Sauce for the Goose

There's an interesting article up at The Nation today, about a vice principal at a parochial school in Seattle who was fired in December when he married another man.  Students at the school protested, and the protest spread to other schools whose students "took action by organizing their own protests and banner drops to demonstrate their solidarity."

The Church's justification for firing Mark Zmuda is simple enough: same-sex marriage violates Catholic doctrine, he knew that as an administrator in a Catholic school he must conform to that doctrine, but he violated it, so he's out.  As far as I can tell from the article, Zmuda accepted his termination without protest: it was students who objected, and they are appealing to the judgment of the Church and its personnel, not trying to get the State to intervene on Zmuda's behalf.

The first thing I thought of when I read this article was the suspension of Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson for saying bigoted things in a promotional interview last month.  Robertson was quickly reinstated and the show began a new season, though its ratings in the new season have dropped significantly in the wake of the controversy.

After Robertson was suspended, many liberals pointed out that according to his contract with A&E, he could be fired for saying the sort of things he said, and that was just fine with them.  So I wonder how they will react to the very similar firing of Mark Zmuda, who must have known that he was going against Church doctrine, and his employer has the right to fire him, not just legally but morally -- right?

The writers of the Nation article have no qualms.

Some claim that the Archdiocese of Seattle was within its right to fire Zmuda, pointing out the rights and freedoms guaranteed to religious institutions. But what about the basic rights and freedoms of LGBTQ people to be treated equally with respect and dignity? Religious freedom need not entail the right to practice and promote discrimination.

Oh, really? That's exactly what it entails: churches can practice and promote discrimination in many areas -- they are generally granted an exemption from many provisions of civil rights laws.  (And don't forget that non-religious employers have a great deal of discriminatory power in their treatment of employees.  There's little question that A&E trampled on Phil Robertson's civil rights by suspending him for expressing his no doubt sincerely-held beliefs about homosexuality, especially since they probably knew about them all along.)  Churches can discriminate in who they ordain as clergy, for example: they can limit the honor to members of their denomination, and can require them to hold and express orthodox beliefs; they can discriminate on the basis of sex and probably race, let alone sexual orientation.  They can restrict their clergy's sexual practices and relationships.  So Mark Zmuda's firing is not a surprise.

On the other hand, as usual in cases like this, I wonder if the Church is being selective in its strictness.  Are all the staff of its parochial schools Catholic?  Are they all either chastely single or appropriately married?  None of them, I hope, are divorced (let alone remarried), none are living in sin with heterosexual partners.  I suppose that Mark Zmuda lived with his partner for some time before they got legally married, and I'd be surprised if no one at the school or in the Archbishop's office knew about it.  So hypocrisy, as usual, is probably operative here, but that doesn't change the fact that the Church was within its legal rights to fire Zmuda, though not necessarily in the right ethically.

The Nation article is titled "What the LBGT Movement Can Learn from Seattle High School Students," but it never really tells what the movement can learn.  Contrary to the writers' implications, these kids aren't doing anything new, nothing that the LBGT movement hasn't done many times in the past.  I suppose the answer lies near the end of the piece: "Zmuda’s story is an example of why passing a comprehensive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA)—one which does not exempt religious institutions, is of paramount importance to combating discrimination."  I doubt very much that Congress could or would pass an ENDA that didn't include a religious exemption, so this recommendation is rather nutty.  I doubt that GLBT churches like the Metropolitan Community Church would favor a law that didn't grant them the same exemptions that heterosexual churches enjoy.  Change in any church must come from within, not from the state, and I certainly favor and support the protest the Seattle students have mounted.  They're actually a lot like the Civil Rights Movement in its heyday, appealing to the conscience of their opponents rather than trying to get the State to intervene.  While I favor legal changes, I also hold that any movement for social justice must not limit itself to working with the courts and the legislature: it must also work to change people's attitudes by persuasion and example.

The Least of These

Today a friend and I had dinner at a local restaurant.  Since it's semester break and between holidays, the town is quiet, and there weren't many other people present, so I noticed a group of people sitting nearby.  They were two men and two women, all in their late 20s, and a baby about a year old. The adults were college types, possibly young professionals.  I noticed that the men were holding and playing with the baby, and I supposed they were two heterosexual couples out for the evening.

But gradually I noticed that the men never handed the baby to the women: they handed him back and forth between them, bouncing him and cuddling him, and though I couldn't make out most of what they were saying, they were both talking about him and his crotchets in a familiar manner. The women commented occasionally but didn't seem to be contributing stories of their own about his sleeping habits, diaper usage, how often he ate, or the like.  Gradually it dawned on me that while they were two couples, they weren't heterosexual couples: rather, they were a gay male and a gay female couple, and the baby was the son (adopted, I presume) of the two men.  When they finished their meal and got up to leave, the baby stayed with the men; the women didn't even hold him for a moment.  The men carried him out to their car, strapped him into his car seat, and drove away.  The women went off to their own car.

This wasn't the first time I've seen gay parents in the field, so to speak, but it's still a relative novelty in Bloomington.  It inspired a complex mix of feelings, but I think foremost in my mind was protectiveness.

I think one reason I've been so inactive lately is that I've been trying to decide whether or not to write about the fuss over the Duck Dynasty "patriarch" Phil Robertson.  I imagine most of my American readers know the background by now, but I do get some traffic from overseas, and it's possible that those readers might not have heard.  The controversy was summed ably by the blogger Ampersand at Alas, a Blog:

Phil Robertson, a long-bearded dude from a hugely successful A&E reality show makes racist and homophobic comments during a GQ interview, leading to objections from various lefties and lefty organizations, which A&E responded to by “suspending” Robertson (although the suspension may be “just for show“), which led to various right-wingers objecting to left-wing totalitarianism and blah blah blah you get the gist of it.

Ampersand went on to sum up the issues involved quite well, saying most of what I thought about the "kerfluffle" (the word I'd have used for it), so I'll just refer interested readers to that post.  Or to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote two excellent posts focusing mostly on Robertson's warped perspective on American race history, without slighting what he had to say about homos.  And, as Americans who pay attention to things also probably know, A&E lifted the suspension on Friday, which can hardly have surprised anyone.

I think the main reason I couldn't bring myself to write about all this was that I was horribly depressed by the Floodgates of Stupid opening once again.  On most sides.  Rod Dreher began grinding out warnings that Christians were being persecuted by Teh Gey, just as he had so often predicted; I stopped reading after the first two or three.  I would not have minded so much the gibbering of the Christian Right, complaining that Robertson was being persecuted just for bearing witness to the teachings of the Bible.  I had some fun pointing out that Robertson and his supporters are clearly Cafeteria Christians who ignore Biblical teachings that don't interest them, such as the apostle Paul's declaration that long hair on a man is shameful.  The Robertson men are walking, talking, embodiments of shame, going against nature according to Paul, who spoke with divine authority.  The conservative Christians I mentioned this to ignored it, thus showing how devoted they are to Scripture.  No surprise there.

The responses of most liberals, gay and straight, were just as dispiriting.  Many of them spoke piously of the sanctity of contract: Robertson had entered into a solemn binding agreement with A&E, and he'd broken it by saying things they didn't like, so he had no right to complain.  Such people didn't have much to say when I asked them if this meant that they were okay with employers controlling every aspect of employees' lives?  The First Amendment protects citizens' free speech from government interference, however inadequately, but big corporations are at least as big a threat to civil liberties as big government.  Did these people think it was okay for MSNBC to fire Phil Donohue for being too skeptical of the Bush Administration's rush to war in Iraq?  I mean, he was an employee too.  Again, there wasn't much response to this question.  As usual, the reaction was mainly partisan: only people on Our Side, whichever side that happened to be, have the right to say controversial or offensive things.

My Right-Wing Acquaintance Number One did not disappoint: he was furiously indignant about Robertson's suspension.  Like numerous rightwingers, he thought that Robertson shouldn't be penalized (or, apparently, even criticized) for saying what many sincere people believe about homosexuality, and after all, that's what the church teaches.  Another of his Facebook friends asked him what he thought about Robertson's comments about contented darkies in old Looziana, and he admitted he hadn't read that far.  After checking, he answered sullenly that not many churches support racism anymore, which was a charming non sequitur.  True, even Bob Jones University has fallen from its former fierce Bible-based defense of racial separation, but a good many American whites still subscribe to the belief that Jim Crow wasn't that bad, that Southern whites viewed their black servants as family, and that now that Those People have their rights, racism just isn't a problem anymore.  Robertson was surely talking for about as many people in his remarks on race as he was in his hysterical condemnation of buttsex.  I didn't think to ask how many churches have to teach a particular doctrine before it becomes exempt from public criticism; I wish I had.  RWA1 went on to link to a post in defense of Robertson's bigotry by Camille Paglia, whom he called a "righteous broad", and he claimed that the attack on Robertson's statements was motivated by an outbreak of class hatred.  This from a man who declares that American culture is going down the toilet because of commercial culture, which would surely include Duck Dynasty's white trash aesthetic!  It's also instructive to compare RWA1's reaction to Robertson to his condemnation of the Westboro Baptist Church; as I've pointed out before, WBC mainly functions as an extreme, compared to which other bigots can declare themselves moderate.  And though RWA1 defended the right-wing doctor Ben Carson, who said similarly stupid and bigoted things about homosexuality, he was silent when the liberal actor Alec Baldwin got into trouble for using homophobic epithets.  As I said, partisanship is obviously the deciding factor.

All this confirms my general sense of the inadequacy of American political / cultural discourse, which is nothing new but is still depressing when my nose gets rubbed in it.  (I reached a similar point a little over a year ago, during the 2012 election campaign, for the same reason.)  I don't think this is anything new, as I've said before, but I still believe that it can and must change.  I kept thinking I should write about it, but it seemed like too big a subject, and yet for just that reason I couldn't seem to motivate myself to write about anything else.  For one thing, I often have the feeling that I'm repeating myself, taking on the same cluster of topics over and over again, just because they become prominent, over and over again, in what passes for the national conversation.  Or maybe just the parts of the national conversation that I see.  I haven't started yet another post on The Modern Concept Of Sexual Orientation and Gender Binary for the same reason: I've written plenty about it before, and don't really have anything new to add.

But seeing those two dads and their son in the restaurant made me think of something else, which makes me think I should call this post "Why We Fight."  In the last analysis I'm not all that offended by Robertson's remarks about queers; they're predictable and tired, and they don't, by themselves, do me any harm.  And I've often griped about liberals' overwrought reaction to offensive speech -- Oh, how can you say such awful things!? -- which I see as self-stroking, self-displaying, self-righteous outrage not very different from that of the bigots.  It certainly does nothing to foster dialogue or debate with those who differ from us; but as I've also observed, most people anywhere on the political spectrum aren't really interested in debate or dialogue.  It can't be because they've tried it and they're tired of it: those I observe have never engaged in dialogue or debate that I know of.  I've done it much more than most people, for all the good it does.

What has concerned me since the 1960s, when I first began delving into these issues -- the Civil Rights and antiwar movements at first, then the gay movement and feminism -- is that other people should not be hurt.  I don't want to be hurt either, but I've suffered relatively little.  And once I could speak up, it seemed important to do so, so that other people could be emboldened and feel less alone.  Just standing together isn't enough -- I think of Stephen Vizinczey's remark about the anti-Semite who "wouldn’t look for a Jew to fight, only for a Jew to mob" (The Rules of Chaos [McCall, 1970], 208).  Alas, most liberals aren't looking for fundamentalists or bigots to fight, only for one they can mob.  Even in a controlled, structured situation, they can't carry on a discussion.  This doesn't distinguish them from their right-wing counterparts, of course; that's the trouble.  Both groups can throw up prefabricated, predigested opinions on their Facebook timelines, but if they're challenged about the content or the ideas they can only retreat to abuse and self-pity.

And yet I can't withdraw from the struggle.  There are plenty of people who would feel fully justified in taking that little boy away from his fathers.  Such things have happened before.  They will happen again.  I don't know where Phil Robertson would stand on an issue like that.  Instead of throwing hissyfits about how awful he is, someone should ask him, in public.  If he wants to be grossed out by the idea of two men having sex, that's his right, but I want to know what he proposes to advocate about public policy.  The same goes for opponents of same-sex marriage when they pretend that they don't object to gay couples, they just want to reserve the sacrament of marriage for one man and one woman.  The same thing goes for someone like Pope Francis, who talks a nice non-judgmental line about gays, but I want to know what that means in practice.  Would a male or female couple with a child be welcome in his Church, or its facilities?  I don't think this is that hard; finding out that it apparently is too difficult for the reality-based to handle is what depresses me.

When the Son of Man Comes, Will He Find Faith on Earth?

Something else I meant to say about Rod Dreher and Megan McArdle's complaints about same-sex marriage: They may be right about the effects of social change on conservatives like them, because they appear to have abandoned all opposition to homosexuality except for same-sex marriage.

It's been hard for a long time to find a religious conservative who'd cite Leviticus 20:13 and call publicly for the execution of perverts.  Even Orson Scott Card tried to claim that when he endorsed keeping sodomy laws on the books, he was talking solely about intra-Mormon business.  Sex between males hasn't been a capital offense in the United States for centuries now, and though the sodomy laws are still in force in some states despite Lawrence v. Texas, not many people want to defend putting homos in prison anymore.  Not publicly, anyway.  For a decade or more, bigots would call on the Bible to back them up in their opposition to "normalizing" homosexuality, but they seemed to have given up on actual State persecution of sodomists, and wanted only to be able to denounce us from their pulpits and force their kids into ex-gay boot camps.  Rick Warren, the evangelical hustler befriended by Barack Obama, is careful not to froth at the mouth when he talks about gays: he believes in "equality", he says, and is coy about issues like civil unions and hospital visitation.  Some old-guard reactionaries are still warning America that the Gayish Media are coming for your kids, but for media consumption they claim they'd just like to seriously "debate gay teen propaganda."  And they all complain that the Gay-controlled media "are not celebrating diversity.  They are intimidating dissidents."  But they don't object to intimidating dissidents -- they just want to be the intimidators.

Marriage appears to be their last stand.  They've pretty much given up on legal prohibitions of homosexuality itself, and on mobilizing majority disapproval against it.  They like to imagine themselves reading Leviticus 20:13 and Romans 1:26-7 behind locked doors by candle-light with a faithful remnant of real believers, just like the primitive Church in the catacombs!  And being true Americans and devout Christians, they are terrified of majority disapproval themselves.  Just being called bigots, or homophobes, or old-fashioned, brings them to their knees.  There's no need to throw them to the lions, or send them to Politically Correct Re-education Camp, or disenfranchise them.  Even name-calling may not be necessary.  Just a frown of disapproval seems to be enough to make them deny their Lord.

As a gay man who was born in a time when gay men and lesbians met behind drawn curtains and locked doors, even in big cities, when gay meeting places were raided and customers beaten up and humiliated, their identities exposed in the press, and who has seen a remarkable change of social attitudes in my adult lifetime, I certainly can't resist some Schadenfreude at the moral cowardice of such people.  When I came out, I knew I'd be subject to public hostility and disapproval, and sometimes I was.  But as long as I knew it was okay to be gay, and as long as I had some allies, I didn't need majority support.  It turned out not to be as hard as I feared at first, though of course I chose my terrain carefully, a fairly liberal university environment.   (Which didn't mean there wasn't antigay bigotry and violence there too.)

And much of that bigotry has melted away over the past several decades.  It's not gone yet, nor do I believe it will ever be.  As with interracial dating, which after decades of banning, a reactionary institution like Bob Jones University finally, sheepishly, admitted it didn't have a biblical basis to forbid, because the social revulsion against interracial dating had largely dried up, it appears that many people are finding that they don't really find homosexuality so horrible to contemplate anymore.  That doesn't mean they want to be gay themselves, only that it doesn't bother them in others, and a growing number of people don't oppose same-sex marriage for those who want it.  That's really not so surprising: although heterosexuals are less likely to marry than they were when I was a kid, the institution still has immense prestige.  In our culture, it's considered a Good Thing, something everyone should want to do someday, and since it is almost universally agreed that if you meet someone you really really really love and want to spend the rest of your life with, marriage is the obvious and necessary next step.  Given that bedrock belief, most people find it obvious that gay men and lesbians should feel the same way, and they can't think of a good reason not to let them marry.  It seems unfair not to let them.

McArdle doesn't appear to be religious, except for her Randite background (she used to blog under the name "Jane Galt," I understand).  I don't know what kind of social support network she has, though as a good rational Objectivist libertarian she should be prepared to stand utterly alone against the looters and moochers and other collectivist scum -- though what that has to do with opposing gay marriage, I have no idea.  Dreher, like most antigay Christians, has a community to back him up, so I don't really see why being in a righteous minority scares him so much.  Even if official persecution comes, however unlikely that is, he will, Scripture says, have his reward in heaven.  As an atheist I never had any such reassurance, and it's an interesting question, which I can't answer, why I never felt the need for it.  Perhaps in Dreher's moral universe that would be monstrous Pride.  But Christians have an ancient tradition of expecting and facing worldly opposition to their faith -- a paranoid delight in persecution, as Graham Shaw called it in The Cost of Authority.  The paranoia goes some way to explain why they're so sure that gay goons will invade their churches and force their ministers to say, "I now pronounce you wife and wife."  They love scaring themselves with the thought.  I suspect that a major reason they feel the need to do so is that many of themselves can't, when they search their hearts, think of any good reason to oppose same-sex marriage either.  But they have to.  The enemy is in themselves.

Despite all this, I'm not complacent.  If homophobia is declining in the US and England, as the sociologist Mark McCormack argues in his 2012 book, it is just as possible that it will return someday, like the tide.  There's still plenty of bigotry and violence around, along with racism, misogyny, and gut anti-Semitism.  People of good will must continue working against such things.  But if the job is turning out to be somewhat easier than we expected, that also means we can pause now and then to think about what we're doing and why.  The most dispiriting thing to me is the dishonesty and irrationality of so many people who are supposedly on my side.  Even if all antigay bigotry disappeared magically tomorrow, I'd still have to work against that.

We Will All Be Gay-Married

Rod Dreher has also been working the religious-freedom aspects of the question of same-sex marriage.  Mostly it's the same old stuff, with new examples culled from the Gay-Marriage Panic Department of the Right's propaganda mills.  On Friday he linked to an article by one Jim Antle at The National Interest, who wailed:

A viewpoint that was once acceptably held by the President of the United States—indeed, a viewpoint one had to hold to be elected president in the first place—is now considered rude to express in public. The Mary Cheneys who once allowed people to simultaneously support traditional marriage and avoid charges of bigotry against gays and lesbians have revoked that protection.

So many openings here.  For one thing, when the President of the United States declared his personal belief that marriage should be limited to one man and one woman -- as he and his main competitor had also declared during the 2008 campaign -- many people did object, but most of them were just homosexuals and didn't count.  Most Obama supporters didn't even notice it, and excused his statement as a political necessity if he was to be elected.  When he changed his mind a few years later, any suggestion that he did so as a political necessity to be re-elected was dismissed as callous cynicism.   But I don't recall anyone objecting because he was "rude" (though I don't doubt that some fools did).  I objected because he was trying to impose his personal religious beliefs on the secular institution of civil marriage, flouting the First Amendment.  He was and is entitled to his personal religious beliefs (just as I'm entitled to criticize and mock them), but they aren't and shouldn't be law.

For another thing, what does it mean to "support traditional marriage"?  Antle seems to believe that it means denying civil marriage to anyone who isn't "traditional."  And that's not rude either; other words apply.  Consider the ultra-orthodox Jewish men in Israel who, when they get into trouble for harassing and spitting on young girls they consider immodestly dressed, complain that "we feel we are being prevented from observing the Torah in the manner in which we wish" and compare their Jewish critics to Nazis and themselves to victims of the Holocaust. "They hate us because we’re going the Jewish way.  And there’s only one Jewish way."  Just as there's only one form of "traditional marriage," if we can just figure out which one it is.

The haredi also protest that "We do not hate the secular people, but rather love them, we bring them closer."   Sound familiar?  But 1) the little girls assaulted by haredi men on their way to school weren't "secular," they were Orthodox; and 2) the secular people might well suspect that "we bring them closer" only so that "we" can more easily spit on them.

On the other hand, no one seems to be trying to prevent the ultra-orthodox from observing Torah as they wish, in Israel or in the US; they are only prevented from attacking other Jews who observe it differently.  Likewise, no advocate of same-sex marriage is saying that men and women should not marry legally -- at least, Dreher and his allies haven't quoted anyone who is.  "Traditional marriage" (which the conservatives interpret very elastically when it suits them, including even heterosexual marriage by atheists with no religious dimension) is not under attack, only the attempt to forbid marriage to "non-traditional," same-sex couples.

So it seems that by "traditional marriage" Dreher means not the marriage of one man to one woman, non-traditional though that is, but the heterosexual monopoly on marriage, civil as well as religious.  Being prevented from imposing their particular sectarian doctrines and practices on everyone -- religious and secular alike -- is exactly what religious reactionaries everywhere decry as a violation of their religious freedom, "the dictatorship of relativism" as Pope Rat called it.  They must even be exempt from any criticism or disagreement whatsoever, or they'll cry intolerance.  Let them cry.

But I want to pursue the word "rude."  We've been through that one too, and I've often attacked liberals for their refusal to debate ideas, their taking refuge behind emotive wails of Oh, how could you say such an awful thing?  It's likely that opponents of same-sex marriage will be called rude for expressing their views, but so far they've shown a resilient ability to steal their opponents' tactics and return accusations of rudeness for accusations of rudeness.  It's entertaining to imagine a traditionalist Christian like Dreher facing a Roman governor's order to burn incense before an image of the Emperor.  If he can't even stand up to being called rude for "defending traditional marriage," it's a safe bet he'd have apostatized under real persecution in a New York minute.)  It's so much easier than discussing the issues.  A rational person -- at least the kind of rational person I respect -- will respond to accusations of rudeness by taking the high road and defending his or her views with evidence and good reasons, challenging his or her opponents to refute them.  Our corporate media aren't interested in evidence or reason: they prefer the diversionary tactics of name-calling followed by insincere apologies.  But those people who care about the issues shouldn't let themselves be deterred, and will try to focus on the issues.  Digging through the muck and obfuscation to try to get at what is important in a disagreement.  But as Dreher's citation of Antle shows, the conservatives are just as invested in muddying the issues as liberals are.  Sometimes indeed, liberals and conservatives join hands in the struggle against rational thought.

Dreher also linked recently to an old post on same-sex marriage by (be still my heart!) the Randite blogger Megan McArdle, in which she made this challenge to proponents of same-sex marraige:

My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes. The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can’t imagine it changing your personal reaction is pretty arrogant. It imagines, first of all, that your behavior is a guide for the behavior of everyone else in society, when in fact, as you may have noticed, all sorts of different people react to all sorts of different things in all sorts of different ways, which is why we have to have elections and stuff. And second, the unwavering belief that the only reason that marriage, always and everywhere, is a male-female institution (I exclude rare ritual behaviors), is just some sort of bizarre historical coincidence, and that you know better, needs examining. If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that’s either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I’m a little leery of letting you muck around with it.

The reference to "rare ritual behaviors" shows that McArdle doesn't know what she's talking about, as usual, but I think she does have a point.  The trouble (or the good news, if you prefer) is that it cuts both ways: opponents of same-sex marriage can't say what the longterm effects of same-sex marriage on society will be either, though they are quite sure they'll be cataclysmic.

And the question is more complicated than either McArdle or Dreher cares to think about.  For one thing, heterosexual marriage in the West has become increasingly degendered over the past half-century or so, with the partners formally more and more equal.  So far that is in many ways a good thing, since married women with more autonomy consistently appear to be happier than their counterparts with less autonomy; on the other hand, reactionaries are claiming that women's increased autonomy in marriage has made men unhappier, making them impotent and unwilling to work for a living, etc.  It's not easy to say what to do about that; I don't believe that all men need a woman as a footstool, and those who do might as well adjust or do without.  Anyone who wants to turn the clock back must justify why women -- half the species, after all -- should have to be miserable to boost men's egos.  Defenders of tradition have been perfectly happy to let women suffer.  If it's a zero-sum game where both can't be happy, there's no solution.

Which brings me to my next point: Whether or not same-sex marriage is legalized in the US, heterosexual marriage will continue to change, from pressures within heterosexuality.  And that's not news; heterosexual marriage has never existed in just one form.  Marriage hasn't even been the cultural ideal in Christian cultures, as an Orthodox Christian like Dreher ought to know.  There have been waves of rejection of marriage, by women and men alike, throughout Western history, and in Christian tradition that rebellion has the sanction of Scripture and practical precedent.  We're living in such a time now, in the US and elsewhere in the world, when many heterosexuals are voting against marriage with their feet.  Since gay people are a small minority, and those who will marry are a minority within a minority, those who want to play Chicken Little over marriage should worry more about the social changes being wrought by the heterosexual majority.  It's possible of course that same-sex marriage will have effects greater than the numbers suggest.  But it will be hard to distinguish those effects from those of heterosexuals choosing other options for their own reasons; it might even be that the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage is an effect of changes in heterosexual marriage and coupling.  As I've indicated, there are reasons to think so.

People like Dreher and McArdle cultivate a blissful ignorance of larger social forces and trends, except when they endorse destructive ones.  The weakening of heterosexual marriage is arguably connected to political and economic changes whose effects have already been noticed by people who care: the destruction of America's industrial base, for example, followed by the attack on jobs with benefits and security, has devastated the nuclear family (which isn't really "traditional" anyhow) and made it impossible for most men to support a family on one paycheck.  When higher-wage jobs with benefits are eliminated, they are usually replaced with low-wage, no-benefit jobs, forcing many married couples to become two-paycheck families, or even three-paycheck since it is often necessary for at least one partner to work two jobs.  (The wife will usually work two jobs anyway, the Second Shift of housework in addition to wage work.)  If the Right wanted to worry about "traditional" marriage and families, it could focus on this trend, but if anything the Right endorses it.  The longterm effects of these and other economic changes are likely to outweigh any caused by the legalization of same-sex marriage, but the Right finds it convenient to have Teh Gay as a scapegoat while ignoring other, arguably more significant factors.

Notice that McArdle is playing the same dishonest game as many other traditionalists: "If you think you know why marriage is male/female, and is either outdated" etc.  Advocates of same-sex marriage don't think heterosexual marriage is "outdated" -- very much the opposite.  They approve of it, and they want same-sex couples to get its privileges and benefits.  (If they consider anything outdated, it's limiting marriage to mixed-sex couples.  It's a bad argument, but a popular one for many issues.  But Loving v. Virginia didn't mean that white people marrying white people was "outdated" either.)  Legalizing same-sex marriage won't stop marriage from being overwhelmingly, even primarily, male/female.  Letting a few same-sex couples marry legally won't change what marriage predominantly is.  Heterosexuals never had any difficulty in using "marriage" as a metaphor for same-sex relationships in the past, and since marriage is a metaphor, not a natural phenomenon, civil same-sex marriage isn't going to change anything that wasn't already changing.