GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

In recent weeks supporters of an end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” have pointed to the military magazines of England and Israel, which have featured openly gay soldiers on their covers. England’s official magazine Soldier featured a gay servicemen next to the word “Pride” on its front. Israel’s army magazine earlier this year showed two soldiers hugging on its cover.

The idea is supposed to be, “Look at these other countries, how easy the transition has been to including open gays in the military.”

I take a different message away from it: that once the military accepts open gays, the next step will be for it to celebrate them. We should be able to have fair employment policies without the United States government putting its imprimatur on homosexuality as something to brag about.

I support ending DADT for non-combat positions because I think such a step will help the military in its mission to fight and win wars. But I don’t have any illusions that that step won’t also lead to the gay community asking for more and more and more. I don’t want Navy ship captains to be performing same-sex marriages between sailors. I don’t want the government to offer servicemembers partner benefits available only to those the person in question is having gay sex with, and not others who might be equally worthy of benefits. But we’ve seen in the non-discrimination and gay marriage debates that the gay community will say, “Oh, we’re only looking for this little thing,” and pretty soon they’ll use that as a wedge to foist different policies on an unwilling public.

Am I the only one who is confused by Bill Clinton’s and Dick Cheney’s language when they each came out in favor of gay marriage, Clinton just this last week? Here are the quotes:

Cheney: “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”

Clinton: “I personally support people doing what they want to do. I think it’s wrong for someone to stop someone else from doing that.”

It’s as if the traditional-marriage crowd was trying to pass laws stopping gay weddings, not to keep the government from recognizing same-sex marriages. The latter is the issue we’re debating.

My column on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall is appearing in Friday’s Houston Chronicle and Monday’s Philadelphia Daily News:

At the end of this month, the gay community will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which began the gay liberation movement. This season, known in gay circles simply as “Pride,” will be particularly emotional because of the gay marriage avalanche. While gays and lesbians have much to be proud of (such as early health organizing around the devastating AIDS epidemic), gay history since Stonewall is unfortunately stained with selfishness and arrogance, traits that ironically were once themselves called pride — back when that wasn’t a compliment.

Having experienced the closet and coming out as a gay man in my late teens, I understand the common gay experience of overcoming shame and the constant need for self-esteem reassurance. But I have also come to realize that sometimes gay esteem has innocent victims, and I believe it’s time to balance out gay pride with some gay humility.

To examine the gay community’s self-absorption, look no further than the event celebrated this month that has been commemorated with parades for four decades: the “Stonewall Rebellion.” Why is it that in all that time no gay leader has acknowledged that there were non-gay victims at that event, which we should regret, if not apologize for? Stonewall was sparked by a legitimate bar raid on an unlicensed, Mafia-run drinking establishment. The gay “heroes” threw glass bottles and bricks at police and at one point tried to light the building on fire while people were still inside. Even if one celebrates Stonewall’s repercussions for sparking feelings of gay pride and leading to nationwide community organizing, shouldn’t we acknowledge that our self-esteem doesn’t have to come at the expense of other people’s safety?

Another example: During the late 1980s and early 1990s, gay activists insisted that a wave of “heterosexual AIDS” was just around the corner in the United States, even though no data existed proving that was going to happen, and even though HIV spread through heterosexual sex has always been and continues to be a small percentage of the American transmissions of the virus. Out of fear that Americans would not devote energy to treating and curing a disease spread mostly through gay sex and drug use, AIDS activists consciously lied about the size of the minuscule threat to Americans who did not use drugs or have gay sex. As a result, huge sums of money were spent to educate about and prevent a “coming health epidemic” that would never materialize. People made major lifestyle changes to protect themselves from what was essentially a phantom menace.

The gay parenting movement is still more evidence of the fundamental selfishness of post-Stonewall gay America. Whereas many gay couples can and do bring parentless children into their homes in an act of loving and giving, thousands of other gay couples who could have adopted use various technologies and arrangements to make babies that from the start have no mother or have no father. This cruel act — to one’s own child — is almost never criticized in the gay community, which is so focused on everyone’s freedom and self-esteem, it doesn’t seem to want to bother to notice that children are being hurt by being denied up front the right to have both a mother and a father.

The gay and lesbian community today is infected with what I like to call Equality Mania. That’s the belief that there is literally nothing more important than total equality between gays and straights, no matter what the costs. They are willing to sacrifice other good, important values in the name of gay equality — such as the religious freedom of same-sex marriage opponents, the welfare of children and (in the case of gays in the military) even national security.

Forty years into this particular social movement, it’s not too late to re-evaluate priorities and find more selfless ways to help gays and lesbians.

Time Magazine weighs in on the biological aspects of the Phantom Gay Past:

Which raises the evolutionary question of why men and women who are exclusive gay and lesbian exist. One answer is that exclusive gays and lesbians are a relatively new creation: the concept of exclusive homosexuality barely existed before modernity; even a century ago, most same-sex-attracted men and women got married and had kids.(Read “Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?”)

As Bailey, Zuk and many others have pointed out, no one has offered an adequate evolutionary explanation for the relatively recent development of exclusive homosexuality among humans. In January, the journal Evolution and Human Behavior published a paper exploring the idea that certain alleles increase the likelihood of homosexuality by blocking the effect of androgens during fetal development. Having all those alleles hampers the masculinization of some parts of the brain that affect personality, making you gay, the theory goes. Brothers of gay men who have only some of the alleles would turn out straight but less aggressive than typical guys. And because those brothers exhibit less psychopathology, they would attract more women and therefore have more kids. It was a provocative theory, but it turned out not to be proved: gay men’s brothers don’t actually have more kids than straight men’s brothers do.

Once again, the opposition to enshrining same-sex relationships in American law has shown itself to be utterly tone-deaf. According to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council,

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the “Uniting American Families Act,” a bill that would allow homosexuals to immigrate to the U.S. with their partners under the same resident status as married spouses. As FRC has argued, there is no reason for Congress to carve out an exception to the immigration rule to accommodate these “partnerships.” In my written testimony, which was submitted today to the Judiciary Committee, I reiterated the fact that “families” are legally recognized by blood, marriage, or adoption. In other words, these same-sex “partnerships” don’t constitute “family” relationships. 

Arguing in favor of privileged male-female relationships (which I do here all the time) does not require alienating millions of common-sense readers and voters who know that two gay guys and a cat (or whatever) are, indeed, a family. Even if he believes a couple of lesbians and their baby are not a family, he’s only making a semantic and definitional argument here, which can be addressed by the other side saying, “Well, OK, let’s change the definition.”

I don’t support adding a whole new classification of people who have the right to go to the head of the visa and citizenship line based on who they have sex with and how. If someone wants to present to me a Salt Lake City style immigration bill, I’ll look at it.

During the Prop. 8 campaign, one important point raised by opponents of the initiative including myself is that it is far too easy to amend the California Constitution. (On this blog, I called the threshold “shockingly low.”) Whatever one thinks of same-sex marriage, it shouldn’t be a controversial notion that constitutional amendments require supermajorities and not 50 percent plus one.

So, I would encourage Californians to raise the bar for amending the state’s constitution by popular vote from 50 percent to 60 percent, at least. The problem is, of course, that many of the same people who wanted to raise the threshold during the fall campaign are now planning a new initiative to overturn Prop. 8 and they only want a 50 percent bar to get their repeal passed.

Once again, Northwestern University Professor Andrew Koppelman has distinguished himself among supporters of same-sex marriage for his clarity, timeliness, and provocative thoughts. From his latest piece:

Retribution is appropriate only if there is harm. Imagine you discover that someone has spent all afternoon sticking pins in dolls representing some people he doesn’t like (but has no just complaint against), hoping that this will cause their painful deaths. You’re entitled to decide that he’s a nasty person. But does he deserve punishment? For what, exactly?

If they can be rendered harmless, antigay bigots, even the morally reprehensible ones, will be just like the guy with the pins and the dolls. Nasty, maybe (though I know people on that side of the political divide who, I’m convinced, are honestly doing their best to pursue the right as it is given to them to see the right). But why is it important for the law to beat up on them?

More pertinently, why is beating up on them so important that it’s worth letting same-sex marriage die in New Hampshire altogether rather than give those people any accommodation? 

There are people who are reprehensibly embracing self-aggrandizing fantasies that are hurting real people. But I’m sorry to say that they’re not the Christian conservatives. They are the people on my side, the gay rights side, who are willing to sacrifice the hopes of New Hampshire gays who want to marry, out of pure malice toward their political opponents.

As much as I like Professor Koppelman’s challenge, I actually think he’s missing part of the point. My side isn’t fighting for religious exemptions because it’s so important to us to secure the right to Just Say No to catering lesbian weddings. We’re trying (I should say I’m trying since I never got elected anything) to mark territory during the very birth of gay marriage for the concept that it’s “OK” to believe that same-sex marriages aren’t marriages and to treat them as such - in the culture, in our discourse. That is a relatively big fight, and I can understand why gay activists in New Hampshire and elsewhere would go to the mat to protect the concept that not considering gay marriages to be equal is bigotry and thus unacceptable.

The smaller fight, whether Christian photographers in Nashua have to work at same-sex nuptials, is - as Koppelman indicates - only so much voodoo.

On Tuesday, I was invited to appear on CNN to discuss Miss California USA and the scandal surrounding her comments when asked by Perez Hilton what she thought about gay marriage. I haven’t blogged about this yet, and since my segment got bumped I thought I’d share with the blog some of my thoughts on the situation:

1. Hilton’s question was vastly different than the typical question to a pageant contestant. They are usually pap such as:

What will you do as Miss USA to bring world peace?

How can society make the world a better place for our children?

What is the number one issue you’re concerned about and how will you address it if you win the pageant?

There aren’t questions on abortion, capital punishment, or affirmative action. What Hilton did was change the rules in a way that he knew - no matter what Prejean answered - would garner publicity for the gay marriage cause and, especially, for himself personally. He abused his role as pageant judge.

2. My friend Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse pointed out to me that the notion of a gay man judging women’s beauty jibes with my column on Playgirl and how straight women’s libidos get shaped by gay men’s sensibilities.

3. The question, which Hilton “knew” had only one “right” answer, was, in his mind, along the lines of asking about Brown vs. Board of Education or the passage of the 15th Amendment (ending slavery). I have blogged earlier about my disagreement with the racism comparison. But even if society is moving toward considering opposition to redefining marriage to be the equivalent of racism (and I’m not sure it is), it’s not there yet. Particularly in California, where a half-million residents more favored Proposition 8 than opposed it. Prejean represents the mainstream in California, yet Hilton treated her as if she had some fringe opinion.

4. I saw Rachel Maddow (with whom I was friends in college) on MSNBC make fun of the beauty contestant stumbling over herself in answering the question, using phrases like “opposite marriage” (which I now use on this Web site - I think it’s pithy, not stupid). But I don’t blame her, being a couple of votes away from winning the pageant of her dreams, and being asked an unfair question, for being extremely nervous.

I can’t believe I missed this, but about three weeks ago, Colorado adopted the Salt Lake City plan. Good going, Colorado!

If more states would follow Colorado’s lead, we could solve the gay-marriage issue forthwith with rights for same-sex and other unmarried couples but without undermining the institution of marriage.

I’ve been thinking about the group-but-not-individual exemption in Connecticut’s and Vermont’s gay-marriage bills. How would that apply, for example, to a Christian rock band? They’re certainly a “religious organization,” right? Does that mean that a Christian rock solo artist could be forced to work at a same-sex wedding, but if she threatens to bring a drummer, she’s exempt?

What’s the deal with that?