GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

Because of my opposition to same-sex marriage, some people perceive I don’t have any respect for marriage-equality activists. That’s just not true. A small minority of the leadership of the movement for same-sex marriage (maybe 5 percent?) really “gets it” and advocates for more freedom and fairness for everyone, rather than trying to force all Americans to espouse GayThink and to shove gay marriage down the throats of an unwilling nation. I believe that if two people with such attitudes got in a room with Maggie Gallagher and me (or another pair of reasonable defenders of man-woman marriage), we could hammer out a compromise that everyone could live with.

I’ll focus on just three examples, but I know of others.

• Lynne Bowman, the executive director of Equality Ohio, a statewide LGBT political group. Lynne has acknowledged to me that traditionally religious people do have legitimate concerns about their rights to continue using their religious beliefs regarding marriage in states that adopt the kind of marriage laws she favors. She sounded enthusiastic about the idea “that folks just get in a gosh darn room and find a way to hammer the thing out so that everyone wins as much as possible.” Compare that to Steven Goldstein, the Lynne Bowman of New Jersey, who said his movement “will settle for nothing less than 100 percent marriage equality.”

Lynne wrote me: “We believe that equality – whether in employment or relationships or other areas – is not a zero-sum game. One person does not have to be denied something in order for someone else to receive something. We believe that everyone has the right to their personal opinion. Our challenge as a society – and therefore as an organization and as a state – is to figure out how our laws can be crafted to make that possible.”

Her organization’s slogan is “we envision an Ohio where everyone feels at home” and they actually mean everyone, not just gay people.

• Christoper Sanders is the president of the Tennessee Equality Project, a statewide gay and lesbian political organization. Christopher identifies as a traditionally religious gay person (yes, there are others besides me) and he told me that many of the gay activists he works with in his state do too:

“Because many of our members grow up in and remain involved in churches and synagogues, I think the conversation is less threatening for us…. I met with a volunteer in Clarksville last month who without my asking simply stated that the top three influences in his life are God, his family, and his political party. While his forwardness of expression might be unusual, I don’t think that the cluster that he identified is unusual among the activists in our state.”

When I asked activists in places like California and Michigan if a business owner, a teacher, or a journalist should be allowed to use their own values about marriage in doing their jobs in a marriage equality state, most refused to answer and those who did generally said absolutely not. Christopher’s reaction can be summarized in one word: persuasion. He suggested the best way to deal with a business owner with policies that don’t treat same-sex marriages equally is to try to change the businessman’s mind. If a newspaper was not treating same-sex marriages as marriages, his group’s “preference would be to work with journalists’ guilds and put pressure on the paper in that way.”

In Yiddish, we have a term for someone like Christopher. It’s called “mensch.”

• Marianne Puechl is the co-founder of the Rainbow Wedding Network. She echoed Christopher’s modesty and practicality, without a hint of anger or vindictiveness. She told me that “suing, based on these circumstances, is not going to be the most productive measure.” She suggested that someone who doesn’t like the marriage policies of a traditionally religious business owner could blog about the company, write letters to the editor, publicize it at the local LGBT community center, and let the shopowner know that his discriminatory policy is losing him business.

I feel a little bad about quoting these outstanding activists, because inevitably the stormtroopers at the BoxTurtleBulletin and people like that will now put pressure on them to join the “Endorse Our Opinion or Else” crowd. But I think it’s really important that everyone understands that there is a way to advocate gay marriage that will gain the respect and admiration even of people like me. In the long run, I think, that’s a much smarter, fairer, and more ethical way to pursue social change.