GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

A discussion about me over at Wayne Besen’s blog has turned into a debate over whether homosexuality is normal and natural. I thought I might weigh in on that debate.

Besen wrote: “Finally, homosexuality is normal, in that is a fairly constant percent of the population. It is also natural, as it occurs in nature.”

Well, pretty much, yes. I have not seen any studies that show that homosexuality “is a fairly constant percent of the population.” That seems more of an ideological statement than a scientific one. But in the 21st century, gay orientations appear to happen throughout society, and across space and time there is wide evidence of people engaging in relations with members of the same sex and entering loving relationships with members of the same sex. As for occurring in nature - i.e. the animal kingdom, there is tremendous evidence of same-sex intercourse in many different species (though no proof of gay orientations in any animal but Homo sapiens).

(On the other hand, Besen’s statement that the existence of homosexuals “is a norm in every known society” is simply ignorant. He should read some of the great works of gay social science by historians and anthropologists like Jonathan Ned Katz, Esther Newton, and John D’Emilio, all of whom are gay or lesbian themselves. No scholar with a Ph.D. in gay history or anthropology working at an American university today thinks there were gay and lesbian people with homosexual orientations in every society across time and space. Gay orientations have only existed for the last 150 years or so. Before 1860 there were certainly same-sex relationships, same-sex love, and same-sex intercourse. But those people didn’t have gay or lesbian orientations in anything near the way we use the terms today.)

So I agree that gay sex is both normal and natural. But just because something is normal and natural doesn’t make it moral, right, or good. In fact, in my religion (Orthodox Judaism) often something is moral precisely because it is abnormal and unnatural. Who, exactly, thinks we should define as moral the behaviors of people before and outside Judeo-Christian civilization, as well as widely observed practices in the animal kingdom? If we did, it would be moral to punish poor people more harshly than rich people. Infanticide would be moral. So would murder of the weakest members of society. Human sacrifice? Go for it.

Most people are appalled by the refusal of bystanders to come to Kitty Genovese’s defense. Yet the “normal” behavior in that situation was to ignore her plight. The abnormal response - and the moral one - would have been to try and save her.

I believe gay sex is normal, natural, and immoral. I believe same-sex relationships are normal, natural, and mostly immoral. So arguing in favor of same-sex marriage because homosexuality is normal and natural is not going to be terribly convincing for someone like me.

Side note: I’m annoyed that I feel I have to respond to Wayne Besen’s ongoing campaign of lies about me, but since I’m linking to yet another one of his blatantly false screeds, I thought I should point out what’s not true. I never demanded that Besen pay for my ticket. (If I did, Besen should be able to produce E-mail evidence of his allegation, since we have not had a live conversation in years.) The two main reasons I decided not to pay my own way to go to NLGJA are both Besen’s fault in part or in whole. Besen announced that I was invited to be on the panel to be a “stage horse” - to be laughed at. I was concerned that might be true and asked NLGJA’s president and he said it wasn’t… and then I found out Besen was scheduled to be on my panel. I’m not willing to spend my money to serve on a panel with someone who says I’m there essentially as a buffoon. Second, I was justifying the expense of attending in part by the potential customers I might sign up for my gay-press column who would be in attendance. But Besen and some of his colleagues have been calling gay newspapers to urge, cajole, and even threaten them to cancel or never run my work, so I decided to refocus my efforts on mainstream newspapers, which pay better and reach more people. So at this point there’s just no point in my spending money to attend.

The notion that Besen considers me a “coward” yet bans me from commenting at his Web sites to respond to his lies about me is ludicrous. Besen is welcome at GaysDefendMarriage.com. What is he afraid of in letting me post at his sites?

Commenting on the same story at Besen’s other site, Truthwinsout.com, he writes “mainstream newspapers don’t pay for op-eds. It seems that Bianco may be misleading people as far as getting paid by these publications.” Uh, no. I already told Besen via E-mail how much a few papers have paid me for opinion pieces. He could have called them to verify. But anyone who knows anything about opinion writing for major newspapers knows that the biggest publications all pay. I have sold op-eds to various daily newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and more. The pay ranges from $50 to $400 per piece. That Besen would do no investigation but still raise suspicions I may be misleading people because of his own ignorance of industry standards shows the shoddy quality of his “research” about me.

Finally, I E-mailed him that I will be in Spokane for a friend’s wedding in September and then in Seattle to visit my Dad (who lives there) around that time, and he uses that as evidence I live like a “rootless hobo.” Going to a friend’s wedding and visiting one’s parent makes one a hobo? Getting a little desperate to find things to criticize me about, are you? Please.

Last week, I invited 20 LGBT organizations to join me in calling for America’s prison systems to place most incarcerated transgender women in women’s prisons as a measure to prevent prison rape. Only one organization wrote me back, the National Center for Transgender Equality. They claimed that fighting prison rape was a “priority” for them (but strangely the issue is nowhere to be found at their Web site) but that it would be “irresponsible” to endorse any proposal I make because they are a “serious policy organization.”

What is irresponsible is the gay community’s focus on symbolic issues like same-sex marriage in California while transgender women could be saved from sexual assault (and a possible death sentence given the rates of HIV in prisons) by a simple administrative change we could bring about through a little hard work.

Lately, I’ve been thinking hard about why conservative Christian organizations like Prison Fellowship and Concerned Women for America work so much harder to fight prison rape than LGBT groups, which should be focused on any issue that disproportionately hurts members of our community. I’m coming to suspect that it’s because the Christian organizations - like me - think gay sex is immoral, and thus we’re horrified that anyone would be forced to participate in such acts against their will. LGBT people, for the most part, think gay sex is terrific, and so while they might not particularly approve of prison rape, I guess they figure - “Hey, at least they get to have gay sex.”

Shockingly, a segment of the gay community not only tolerates but actually eroticizes prison rape. A quick Internet search turned up the following adult titles for gay men (click the links at your own peril):

“Jail Bitch” from Tom “Ropes” McGurk
“Prison Master” from Pacific Sun
“Doin’ Hardtime” by Global Media
“The Prisoner’s Song” by Channel 1 Releasing
“Jail Punk” by Graphik Art
“Cellblock #9” from Prison Connection

These are not films about men who fall in love with their cellmates, and make consensual love to ease the discomfort of their time behind bars. The descriptions of these films, and their cover art (I couldn’t bear to actually watch the movies, not even in the name of “research”) make it clear that part of the thrill of watching these movies is the eroticization of forced sex behind bars. Some Web sites selling adult all-male DVDs actually have an entire “Prison” page where shoppers can click to see all the videos in that specialty.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but normal, psychologically healthy people are not aroused by imagining being forced to have intercourse behind bars. Unless the “sexy” part is fantasizing being the prison rapist, in which case I shudder to think what kind of person gets sexual thrills by that.

Child pornography is worse than prison rape videos, but the difference is in magnitude, not in kind. A more moral LGBT community would boycott video stores and Web sites that sell such trash, and pressure their makers to be more responsible. But I’m not holding my breath.

Now, there certainly are “rape” videos for heterosexual men. But they have faced loud protests from both feminist and non-feminist women. By contrast, I have googled and googled and found no LGBT person to have protested against prison-rape videos, much less one of our organized groups.

Not as bad as gay people who find prison rape erotic - but still problematic - are gay people who find prison rape funny. Several visitors to the gay-oriented “Commercial Closet” Web site indicated they were amused by a Virgin Mobile advertisement with a prison rape theme. Edward Hall of Sanford, Florida said “I apologize to anyone that has been raped while in prison but keep a light heart.” I did not make that up. In addition, I was recently the target of a prison rape joke at a gay Web site. “QVegas” over at the Queerty site said two other gay Republicans and I “should be handcuffed together in a daisy chain and dropped into the middle of a prison yard with no condoms. They all hate our ‘gay ways’ so let ‘real men’ have at them.” No one deserves to be raped, not even gay Republicans - and it’s just not funny.

I’m going to keep blogging and trying to build coalitions to protect incarcerated LGBT people, especially transgender women, from sexual assault. If the gay community continues to laugh at - and get their jollies from - prison rape, while doing virtually nothing to stop it, I don’t know what else I can do.

(In the meantime, I urge people to support Stop Prison Rape, the best organization working to address this alarming crisis.)

UPDATE: I just read about lesbian “comedian” Rosie O’Donnell’s remark at a gay concert-fundraiser yesterday comparing prison rape to being paid huge sums of money to gossip about celebrities with Barbara Walters and Joy Behar. Does anyone doubt that the crowd roared with laughter? Sigh. Most LGBT people just don’t get it….

I have a new permanent page up: “Selfless agenda.”

Because I have frequently criticized the terrible selfishness of today’s gay and lesbian community, I thought it important to lay out what I think would be a selfless gay agenda, one I could readily endorse and promote wholeheartedly.

1. Relationship recognition. I have demonstrated why it’s wrong to meddle with marriage, but that doesn’t mean same-sex couples don’t have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed. Rather than focus on the ego boost from having the government treat us as exactly equal (even when we’re not), the LGBT community should promote national, state, and local versions of the Salt Lake City plan, which allows all unmarried adults to appoint one person to receive a set of benefits. We should ask for a broad variety of benefits including hospital visitation, custody, and health care. Rather than using the relationship recognition issue to call attention to how special we are for having same-sex conjugal relationships “just like marriage,” we can be broad-minded and make sure non-conjugal relationships, like best friends and roommates, are included as well.

2. Nondiscrimination. The selfish gay community has put tremendous energy into passing state and federal laws that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and sometimes gender identity as well. But our nation’s nondiscrimination laws are a mess. Groups get protection because they can afford lobbyists to pass laws protecting them - which means the groups who need protection the most are left in the cold. Rather than cry “me too!” the LGBT community could lead a national conversation about how to write nondiscrimination laws that balance a business owner’s right to run her company how she wants, and the rights of people to do their jobs without being afraid of unfair treatment because of who they are. We can also try to come up with a single clear, coherent way to determine who gets covered by nondiscrimination laws, and who doesn’t.

3. Hate crimes. Laws should never try to regulate people’s thoughts, instead of their actions. So sentencing enhancement because the victim was gay or transgender (but not if she was a communist or overweight) is another sign of LGBT self-centeredness. Instead, let’s focus on toughening penalties for the kinds of crimes gays often face - but apply the penalties to everyone. Battery and assault, for starters. Prison rape, for another.

4. “Anti-bullying laws.” The latest trend in pro-gay legislation mandates indoctrination in pro-gay attitudes under the guise of preventing bullying. But America’s populace has lots of different attitudes about homosexuality, and insisting that LGBT attitudes get taught while other, equally legitimate attitudes are declared “bigotry” is, once again, selfish. In younger grades, homosexuality doesn’t belong in the curriculum at all - it can be taught at home, if at all. In older grades, let’s encourage lessons that respect everyone’s views, including but not limited to our own.

5. Not blaming the victim. In the 1980s and 1990s, the gay community responded strongly to the challenge of HIV, and worked assiduously to comfort and protect people who contracted AIDS, usually through gay sex. Now, more and more LGBT people are saying that the people getting AIDS today (usually poor black men who have sex with men) don’t deserve our sympathy and attention now that “everyone knows” how to avoid the virus. I disagree. I think the gay community should put more resources into education, research, and treatment for a variety of LGBT people in need - gay and bisexual men with HIV, lesbians at a higher risk for alcoholism, transgender women who are overrepresented in prison.

6. The military. I believe that gays and lesbians should serve openly in the armed forces. But I’m not an expert at whether out gays would help or harm the military’s primary mission - to win wars. I’ve heard some selfish gays say that even if it would have caused America to lose World War II, it would have been worth it to let gays serve openly. Well, I’m sorry, but there are some things more important than gay self-esteem - like, um, beating the Nazis. Let’s focus our energies on convincing the generals that ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will help them, not hurt them, in their main objective. Once the generals are on board, Congress is sure to follow.

7. Fighting homophobia. There are two federal policies that exist for no reason than to accommodate homophobia. The need to be repealed - not for the symbolism, but for the real hurts they cause to real people, not all of whom are gay. First, the ban on visits and immigration by people who are HIV+ is a Jesse Helms-era slam at the gay community that President Bill Clinton shamefully signed into law. George W. Bush wants to sign legislation allowing the government to reverse it, but the gay community has mostly been MIA on the issue, probably because it doesn’t directly affect us. Second, the FDA does not allow men who have had sex with men in the last 20 years - even if they are HIV-negative and celibate or monogamous - to donate blood or even to be tissue typed to see if they can save someone’s life. This too, should be a priority for the gay community, but barely gets any attention by our national organizations.

8. Adoption. We must overturn Florida’s ban on adoption by lesbians and gay men. The policy hurts children and insults the parenting ability of an entire class of people. If straight people in Florida were adopting all the available children, that would be one thing, but to keep children orphans when there are good homes waiting for them is just wrong. We should also undertake a massive campaign in the gay and especially the lesbian community about the joys of adopting. Unfortunately, an increasing number of same-sex couples are creating babies from scratch rather than adopting, which means rather than giving a child with no parents two same-sex parents, they’re deliberately bringing a child into the world without both a mother and a father. Such an act is selfish and cruel, and even worse since they’re victimizing their own child. While same-sex baby-making cannot and should not be made illegal, the LGBT community can do a lot to make adoption “cool” and baby-making less so.

Because I have frequently complained that the gay movement has ignored important issues in its marriage obsession, I thought it’s probably my responsibility to adopt at least one non-marriage LGBT issue around which to express my gay activism. Since, as many of you know, I am passionate about protecting LGBT prisoners from rape, I have come up with a practical plan to protect some incarcerated members of our community from sexual assault, and I will work on promoting that plan - along with passing the man-woman marriage initiatives in California, Florida, and Arizona between now and November.

It strikes me that the one group that perhaps suffers the most from prison rape - transgender women - can be rescued from regular and humiliating sexual assault through a simple administrative change in the way our prisons are organized.

Transgender women are among the most frequent targets for prison rape. After all, they are the only women in prisons filled with predatory, violent, mostly heterosexual men. It would be a surprise if they didn’t regularly face being raped. Many prison officials have the attitude that such prisoners deserve or even “like” it. Some post-operative transgender women are housed in women’s prisons, but others along with nearly all transgender women who live and identify as female but have not chosen or could not afford reassignment surgery are housed in men’s prisons.

If the state and federal prison systems had policies that transgender women - both pre- and post-op - should be housed in women’s prisons unless they request otherwise, we could prevent the overwhelming majority of prison rapes against such victims.

I’m sure some people will be concerned that incarcerated women may not be comfortable being housed together with prisoners who were born male, some of whom still have penises. But prisoners have much fewer civil rights than the rest of us, and if the government decides to make a safety move that makes a female prisoner uncomfortable, that will likely be one of the least uncomfortable aspects of her prison experience.

I have searched the Internet, and none of the major gay and lesbian organizations - nor even the transgender organizations - has ever proposed such a bold yet simple step.

Don’t LGBT organizations consider transgender women to be real women? Why don’t they use their considerable power and influence in Washington and state capitals like Sacramento and Albany to convince the government to stop treating MTF women as if they were just quirky men, particularly if allowing them to continue doing so will mean some of the most helpless members of our community will continue to face unconscionable, horrific sexual violence?

I’ve spoken to some of the terrific staff members at Stop Prison Rape, and they are sympathetic to the kind of changes I’m suggesting. But they have nowhere near the resources and influence of the organized gay and lesbian community. If our organizations tried, I’m certain they could convince at least some prison systems to stop treating transgender women as men, and thus protect them from rape.

Gay and lesbian groups are currently spending millions of dollars to make sure the same rights in California are called “marriage” instead of “domestic partnership.” The major transgender issue they have fought over in the last few years is whether a workplace fairness bill nobody expects to pass covers sexual orientation alone or gender identity as well. Meanwhile, the simple step I’m proposing would relieve real distress on the part of some of the most vulnerable transgender people anywhere. Can these groups please stop being selfish for one minute and notice that there are members of our community suffering from substantive, rather than symbolic, problems?

A piece I wrote for the LGBT press but couldn’t publish in any gay newspaper because of the “activism” of my opponents is in Wednesday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune. That’s the 12th-largest metropolitan daily in the country, and the third-largest in the Midwest. As of midnight, my piece was both the most-viewed and most-E-mailed opinion piece on the Star-Tribune Web site.

I’ve excerpted the parts that relate to marriage below:

Now that the gay white men in American cities who are the main funders of the LGBT movement are no longer dying quite so often from AIDS, the lesbian and gay community has moved on to other issues, such as marriage, while millions of people, many of them men of color who have sex with men, are still suffering from HIV-related illness.

In my eyes, “marriage equality” is a far less important gay and lesbian issue than the fight against HIV/AIDS. Virtually the entire gay community felt that way when I first became a gay activist. After all, what lesbian ever died a horrible, painful death because the government called her relationship a domestic partnership instead of a marriage?

UPDATE: I just found out that my W piece will appear in a daily newspaper in a major East Coast city next Tuesday. That means the total circulation of the papers running this piece will be close to a half a million - instead of at most 20,000 had I run the same piece in the gay press. Good going, guys!

Several critics of my “Monogamous same-sex adultery” piece in the San Francisco Chronicle complained that I had taken the anecdotal evidence of a single Web site (despite the fact it was and remains linked to by prominent LGBT groups as a “marriage resource”) and used that to conclude that the entire gay and lesbian community doesn’t understand the tight connection between marriage and monogamy. Well, my friend Dan Blatt of GayPatriot has already found little mention of monogamy at gay Web sites, so I thought I’d check out mentions of monogamy in the leading gay-marriage books. I searched at Amazon for “monogamy” in several important LGBT books on the subject, and here is what I found:

• In Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry by the father of the gay-marriage movement, Evan Wolfson, mentions monogamy precisely once.

• In Why marriage? The history shaping today’s debate over gay equality by perhaps America’s most talented gay historian, George Chauncey of Yale, there are only three mentions of monogamy, two of them critical.

• In The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and my Family by Dan Savage (not a fan of mine), monogamy is mentioned eight times in 304 pages, all but two in a critical fashion. The book contains phrases like (and I couldn’t see the whole page just the phrase so I guess it’s possible he’s being sarcastic or critical) “the erroneous notion that monogamy defines marriage.” There’s also a quote from Yale academic Jonathan Katz saying that “same-sex marriage may, in fact, sort of de-center the notion of monogamy and allow the prospect that marriage need not be an exclusive sexual relationship among people.” And people think gay marriage won’t change - and hurt - marriage?

• Richard Mohr’s The Long Arc of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Marriage, Equality, and Rights contains no positive mentions of monogamy in 160 pages, but it does have this gem: “compelled monogamy is not an essential component of marriage.” Now, I know of no state or city that has literally “compelled” monogamy - but in most marriages monogamy is compelled by the commitment (”forsaking all others”) the husband and wife make to each other. Will that be equally important in same-sex marriages? Apparently not.

• Since Jonathan Rauch appears to understand marriage better than most of his allies, I was hopeful that his Gay Marriage: Why it is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America would be the exception. But it contains just six mentions of monogamy, of which only four are positive.

As the evidence builds that the “marriage equality” crowd does not understand the fidelity aspect of marriage - the Web site presented as a “marriage resource” that is hostile to monogamy; the lack of mentions of monogamy at same-sex marriage Web sites; the E-mails I received that were offended I would try to insist that marriage change gay couples, rather than the other way around; and now the gay-marriage books that are either hostile to or silent on monogamy, we’re getting to the point that someone on the other side is going to have to present some evidence that LGBT people actually do see the importance of monogamy in marriage. Otherwise, I think I’ve pretty much proven my case that the marriage equality movement has no idea what marriage is.

In the last few weeks, a number of gay activists (Timothy Kincaid, Emily Kesselman, Wayne Besen, and others) have been blogging and campaigning to try to convince the LGBT newspapers who have run my columns to discontinue doing so. They have lied (one editor said she was told I was “ex-gay,” a preposterous accusation) and pressured and threatened and been pretty successful. Now that I have no regular gay-press subscribers (though I have been invited by one of the largest gay newspapers in the country to occasionally write pieces specifically for them), I have stopped writing more installments. But the four installments I had written but not yet published are not going away. I plan to eventually place them all in mainstream newspapers. I just began distributing the first of them to mainstream publications, and a few hours ago I made a deal with one of the dozen largest metropolitan dailies (with a circulation significantly higher than the San Francisco Chronicle) to run the column probably Wednesday, or if not, soon thereafter. They are paying me far more than I would have received in the gay press.

For me, it’s a win-win. I make more money, I get far, far more readers, and I can focus on actually convincing people (my goal in the mainstream press) rather than just making them think (my goal in the gay press).

How this is a win for Kincaid et. al. is beyond me. Presumably they support “marriage equality,” which means it’s in their best interest to have my stuff run in places where the fewest people could be convinced to oppose gay marriage. Nobody intelligent would think my column in the gay press would have any such effect on more than a handful of people. But in a publication with a circulation of more than 300,000, I could potentially change the minds of hundreds if not thousands of undecided Americans.

The only way to understand this silly activism is with something I’ve been saying for a long time. Gays and lesbians are far more focused on symbolic goals (like getting their first-choice term for the exact same rights in California or keeping an anti-gay-marriage voice out of the gay press) than on actually getting something done (like fighting lesbian alcoholism, prison rape, or the FDA’s gay blood ban, or like refocusing the energies of someone like me away from the forum where they can hurt their cause the most).

In this case, my cause has clearly triumphed absolutely. But most of the time, this selfish symbolism-over-results attitude hurts lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans who are really in need. In those cases, it’s not silly. It’s just sad.

Most “marriage equality” activists have no interest in any sort of compromise, or in finding way to accommodate the legitimate concerns of male-female marriage defenders. That’s because they openly state that we have no legitimate concerns.

But since starting to blog on this issue in early May, I have run across a small minority on the other side that has strong marriage-equality goals but that respects and wants to be fair to the other side. One of the most impressive of those activists is Michael Taylor-Judd, the president of Washington state’s Legal Marriage Alliance. Michael and I disagree on most points of contention on this debate, but we have exchanged several long, heated, yet nonetheless respectful E-mails about same-sex marriage.

Still, I was floored when he wrote me recently with a proposal which, while problematic, directly solves one of the serious problems I have with “marriage equality.”

He wrote me:

Putting more power back in the hands of private business owners is a conservative proposition I would support, but it would cut across everything. Owners don’t get to just choose to recognize only marriages of opposite-sex couples. Changing the existing laws, would also have to mean owners could discriminate on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, and religious belief. If someone gets to treat same-sex couples differently, then I get to treat Orthodox Jewish couples differently, for example.

To understand Michael’s proposal, try thinking about discrimination laws like we think of free speech. I would be a happier person if I lived in a country in which Holocaust denial was illegal, lesbian couples could not be legally described as “married,” and people could go to jail for referring to ferrets as “rodents” (they’re mustilids). But if my language preferences become law, what things that I want to say will be banned and enforced by the language police? It is much better to live in a country where everyone can say pretty much whatever they want.

When the government says a business cannot discriminate against same-sex couples, Orthodox Jews, and women, but can discriminate as much as it wants against Republicans, short people, and transgender people (as is true in many places), it is taking a stand judging people’s personal opinions. You think lesbian marriages aren’t really marriages? You could lose your business. You think transgender women are really guys in dresses? No problem. Have a nice day!

Of course, I would be appalled if Michael’s idea meant a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, goes back to refusing to serve African-Americans. But that’s in a state where a once-racist Democratic Party just voted overwhelmingly for an African-American candidate for president. Somehow I think such a store would lose more business than it would gain.

I don’t want to see ice cream shops in Berkeley, California, refuse to sell smoothies to Republicans wearing John McCain buttons, nor do I want bed and breakfasts in Provincetown, Massachusetts to publish a policy that only same-sex couples may lodge there. But if I have to live with that so adoption agencies could choose the kinds of families they think are best for children and so fertility clinics can inseminate the kind of women they believe will make good mothers, I can live with it.

What do people think?

One frustrating aspect of the same-sex marriage debate is that most but not all gays and lesbians take it personally if someone they know believes marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s staggering - they’re the ones wanting to change a longstanding social institution that wasn’t anywhere on the gay agenda until a dozen years ago, yet if someone thinks about it and decides to stick with the old way, the gays and lesbians in their lives go ballistic.

For example, my friend “Paul” told me several months ago that if I get involved in the campaign to pass the California Marriage Protection Act, he would have a hard time staying my friend. Confused, I pointed out that the amendment makes only a semantic difference. Every right of domestic partnerships, which are completely equal to those of married couples, will remain the same. Paul’s response was that I was trying to make him a second-class citizen. Given that same-sex marriage seriously limits my freedom to run my life using my own values instead of his, I had little sympathy that he didn’t like the symbolism. Since I’ve been blogging and publishing opinion pieces on marriage, he thankfully hasn’t stopped being my friend altogether, although he does answer fewer of my E-mails. I think there may be hope for that friendship yet.

That’s not true of “Regina,” who decided several years ago once she realized I not only supported but publicly advocated keeping marriage limited to man-woman couples, that I was now officially “anti-gay” and we were no longer friends. Of course, she never directly told me. But once I found out, I asked her why it was OK for her to cut an Orthodox Jew out of her life for doing what Orthodox Jews do, but not OK for someone to cut a lesbian out of his life because she did what lesbians do. I mean, it’s not like we have a lot of choice here. Orthodox Jews are called upon to oppose gay marriage. Even very pro-gay Orthodox Jews like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) oppose gay marriage. It’s who we are. If anyone should be offended, it’s we for the fact that some of our friends are meddling with a crucial societal institution that’s been working effectively for, well, ever. That our sticking to our beliefs would be treated as treason makes me come back to my belief that the gay movement is terribly selfish.

Another example: a top linguist at Berkeley told me that in his several decades’ worth of professional expertise, he was very confident no language lacked different words for mother and father. And then he hastened to ask for confidentiality because he has “some close friends and colleagues who are gay and married to their partners. I’d prefer not to have to explain to them why I’m quoted by someone opposed to gay marriage.”

Let’s consider the implications of that statement. He’s very pro-gay, but he’s also a professional scholar and feels a duty to report the facts of his discipline as he sees them. Yet he doesn’t want his gay friends and colleagues to find out he told the truth because he assumes they will take it personally. This is an academic at the second best university in California! (Yes, I went to Stanford.) Ideally, he’d prefer to feel free to tell the truth, using his name, but he feels constrained because he doesn’t want to betray his gay friends.

Knowing the above, what could we expect if a sociologist or psychiatrist were to stumble across some data that if published would suggest that being gay is a choice or that children should ideally have both a mother and a father? If the data would have made gays look good, she would probably publish it. But knowing the pressures from gays and lesbians who take it personally when a scholar writes the truth that nonetheless makes them look bad, I have to wonder whether she might figure it’s not worth the trouble and bury what she’s found.

Even if only 10 or 20 percent of academics feel that kind of pressure, it seems that the research coming out of universities is unfairly skewed toward gay-friendly findings.

As a Jewish historian, I have often asked my colleagues, “What would you do if you found out the Jews really did kill Jesus?” and “What would you do if you discovered Anne Frank’s diary was a hoax?” Overwhelmingly the answers have been that scholars have a duty to the historical record to publish what they find. (One professor actually said, “The diary is a hoax.” But that’s a story for another day.) And I never met a Jew who would take it personally if a scholar wrote an academic paper critical of Jews in history. (Critical of Israel is another story.)

In an attempt to investigate how widespread this phenomenon is, I wrote 100 academics to ask if they would hesitate to report information they discovered that made gays look bad, but got only a statistically insignificant 7% response rate (as opposed to the 56% response rate I got from linguists). A recognized expert at gay research, Dr. Robert-Jay Green has encouraged me to collect “independently verifiable evidence from professional ethics committees or scientific review boards that researchers have falsified or otherwise distorted their findings on LGBT issues because of external pressures.” I think it’s a great idea, but I’m hardly the person best qualified to perform such a study.

I want to encourage Dr. Green and others involved in gay research to investigate to what extent the attitudes of the Berkeley linguist are widespread, or alternatively to what extent his request for anonymity so his gay friends don’t take his research personally is a fluke.

In the meantime, I will from now on be skeptical and dubious toward every piece of research on gay and lesbian issues that comes out of academia. That includes studies that suggest being gay is inborn, and studies that claim children do just as well with two mothers as they do with both a mother and a father. If those in academia working on gay and lesbian topics can prove that researchers like them have no or next to no pressures to find and report only gay-friendly results, I will be happy to reconsider.

More than once in the last several weeks, on Web Sites such as Pam’s House Blend and GaysDefendMarriage.com, I’ve pointed out a double standard held by many of those advocating for same-sex marriage.

Basically, many “marriage equality” activists I’ve spoken to have said that public-school teachers who tell their students that marriage is the union of a man and a woman should be disciplined or even fired for teach contrary to “the facts”; and journalists who describe a couple as unmarried despite their having had a legal same-sex marriage should be subject to libel suits.

However, advocates of “marriage equality” have been completely free to do precisely the opposite for years without fear of punishment. For example, in 1999 the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educators Network published and promoted a curriculum that encouraged public school teachers to instruct their students about marriage using a definition that makes no reference to gender. And I’ve seen dozens of examples in the gay press and even in mainstream publications such as People Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle in which a prominent gay or lesbian person’s partner who is not legally married to them anywhere in the world is nonetheless called their husband or wife. I am very confident that no gay-friendly teacher or journalist has ever been disciplined, fired, or sued for libel for using a definition of marriage that is consistent with his or her values but not with the legal reality.

So my question is this: why is it OK for gay advocates to use their own definition of marriage without punishment when it doesn’t match the government’s, yet traditionally religious people cannot use their own definition of marriage without punishment when their definition doesn’t match the government’s? Wouldn’t it be better to use a system where everyone is free to live their lives consistently with their beliefs? In the marriage debate, the only position that allows such a system to operate is the old system in which marriage is between a man and a woman.

And saying that it’s unconstitutional to collect damages from a newspaper for saying Del Martin is a bachelorette or to fire a teacher for saying marriage is between a man and a woman isn’t enough. We should all live in a country in which no one has to fear harassment and lawsuits for using their definition of marriage - even if they end up victorious. Where are the fair-minded advocates of “marriage equality” who want to amend gay marriage bills or state constitutions to make it clear that people can continue to run their businesses, perform their jobs, and raise their families using whatever definition of marriage they believe in?

Now, there are some pretty intelligent, completely reasonable proponents of same-sex marriage like Andrew Koppelman and Jonathan Rauch. What is their response to my challenge above? Or the smart, passionate proponents of “marriage equality” who comment at blogs like mine and all over the Web? Do any of them have a smart, clear, fair way to explain why their side gets a free pass to use its illegal definition of marriage but my side doesn’t? If not, do any of them have a lame way to explain it? Because so far, I haven’t even heard that.