GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

My column on “Monogamous same-sex adultery” is in today’s (Thursday’s) San Francisco Chronicle. The piece is, in my opinion, both the most important thing I’ve ever written on marriage, and the most prominent placement of any of my marriage essays so far. The ideas were developed right here at GaysDefendMarriage.com, and I owe gratitude to everyone who participated in our debate about monogamy, especially John D, Mark Barton, Dan Dirksen, LAwaters27, Fannie, Andrea J. Essecks, Mary Magdalene, Tom Chatt, and Patrick. My ideas would have been far less polished (and worthy of such major national attention) without your help.

Most of the column’s points have already been covered at our blog, but I’ll nonetheless quote enough to give the flavor of an essay I’m really proud of:

My concern is not about the extent of extramarital sex in each community. It’s about the vast gulf in attitudes between gays and straights on whether a promise to be sexually exclusive is an essential component of a proper marriage.

A gay friend of mine, Los Angeles blogger Daniel Blatt, who believes in monogamy and sees the advantages to same-sex marriage, was taken aback when he searched “marriage equality” Web sites and found very few positive mentions of monogamy. When I helped Blatt with his research, I stumbled upon a Web site hostile to monogamy that is promoted as a marriage resource by several major gay Web sites.

If a straight organization such as the NAACP, the Union for Reform Judaism, or the League of Women Voters linked to a Web site hostile to sexual fidelity that argued that adultery was consistent with monogamy, their members would be in an uproar because those ideas do not represent their values. But those ideas actually do represent mainstream gay and lesbian values, which is why there has been no uproar. The way to assess gay people’s ideas is not through how they are portrayed in the mainstream media, where gays try to conform and be accepted. It is through the gay media, where they forget that anyone could be listening.

If you hear gay people objecting to the argument that same-sex marriage is fundamentally different from marriage, ask them if they consider sexual exclusivity (don’t say monogamy because they might answer using the gay definition) an essential part of a proper marriage. Feel free to ask straight people the same question. Then you decide based on what you hear.