GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

From me to Missouri congressional candidate Kevin Craig:

I’m pleased you chose to quote me at your Web site, given that we agree that marriage must remain between a man and a woman. However, another issue I am very concerned about is prison rape, which many conservatives and Christians have seen as a crisis because people who commit a financial crime or make a mistake with drugs when they are young do not deserve to be sodomized against their will, sometimes contracting fatal diseases.

I am quite disturbed that you would joke about the subject:

It’s humorous (in a sad way) to contemplate the law saying “If I catch you engaging in sodomy, I’m going to lock you up in a federal prison where you’ll be sodomized every day for the next 10 years.”

Excuse me, but there is nothing funny about prison rape. And no one should understand that better than conservatives and traditionally religious people like us. For more information on this terrible scandal, visit spr.org.

Please remove the “joke” from your Web site, or if you won’t, then I insist that you remove reference to my ideas about marriage. I do not want to be associated with anyone who finds anything “humorous” about sexual assault behind bars.

From Stop Prisoner Rape to me:

Thank you for your recent email to Stop Prisoner Rape. We certainly agree that prisoner rape, one of the most neglected human rights crises in our nation, is no laughing matter and appreciate your efforts to spread that message. As you are aware, no one, regardless of the nature of their crime, deserves to be sexually assaulted and it is incumbent upon our government institutions to prevent such abuse. Thank you as well for passing along our website as an educational tool.

From me to Stop Prisoner Rape:

It’s interesting. I would resent, but could live with, a politician uninterested in stopping prisoner rape because he thinks criminals deserve harsh punishment. But a politician who makes jokes about it infuriates me. I almost wish he could be convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and have to spend one day behind bars fearing he’d be raped.

If SPR is open, I’d be quite interested in meeting with your group to brainstorm ways to get the LGBT community to get involved in the fight to protect incarcerated gay and bisexual men and transgender women who are victimized. I’m very happy that you guys are doing the important work you are doing, and I’m embarrassed my fellow gays and lesbians have not understood that this issue should be a priority for them.

From Kevin Craig to me:

Thanks for taking time to write me.

I assure you that in no way did I intend to convey the idea that prison rape was “humorous.” I was probably looking for the word “ironic” rather than “humorous,” which is why I added “in a sad way” to emphasize that there is
nothing funny about prison rape.

Your letter jogged my vocabulary and I have replaced “humorous” with “ironic,” and I think this improves the communication of my message.

You mentioned www.spr.org, and I had already linked to this website on my “prison” page: http://kevincraig.us/prison.htm

Again, thanks very much for helping me improve my website. Please don’t hesitate to contact me again with further suggestions.

Is that awesome or what? Not only did he remove the offensive language, but he linked to more information about stopping prison rape! I feel like I made an important difference, and it cost me very little energy and no money. : )

Every time I have claimed that “marriage equality” activists don’t understand what marriage is, I have used the fact they see no firm link between sexual fidelity and marriage as my evidence.

I now have a shocking second set of data: the attitude toward some gay marriage proponents toward adult consensual incest.

Yesterday, on this Web site, frequent commenter Mark Barton, an articulate and passionate defender of same-sex marriage rights, said he saw no reason “marriage equality” should not extend to adult twin brothers. (Shades of Life in Hell’s Jeff and Akbar - Matt Groening asked “are they brothers or lovers or both?”)

An Orthodox Jewish gay supporter of same-sex civil marriage - we’ll call him “Allen” - complained that in arguing with me over who should be allowed to marry that I claimed he said a father should be allowed to marry his 14-year-old son. He insisted that he said “parent,” not father, and it was homophobic of me to focus on same-sex incest. My reaction was that I was giving him the benefit of the doubt since at least with father-son incest there’s no problem with inbreeding. And he verified he sees no reason a mother and her young teenage son shouldn’t have civil “marriage equality.”

Do I really have to argue why people who think identical twins - and parents and their teenage offspring - should be legally allowed to marry have no idea what marriage is?

If I do, let’s duke it out in the comments section below. Any gays and lesbians who agree that the above people do not understand what marriage is are encouraged to say so.

A side note: This is an example of the perversity (hey, I almost never use that word in gay debates but here it’s perfectly appropriate) that arises when a person decides what’s moral based his own argumentation and rationalization rather than allowing historical tradition or Revelation or both influence him. Mark has made it clear that he thinks his approach is an argument whereas my approach is not. I do not disagree at all. I do believe, and think when most people think about it they will believe, that my system leads to more moral behavior than his. The proof is in the pudding.

I am proud that in the first two months of GaysDefendMarriage.com I have given a pretty thorough answer to nearly every pro-gay-marriage question and comment posted at the site. Given the modest traffic, it wasn’t hard to do.

The traffic isn’t so modest anymore. Yesterday we got more than 40 comments.

Lots of exciting things are happening for me. I am working on some pieces about marriage that will bring far more national attention to my ideas and to this blog than ever before. I have to devote serious amounts of attention to those projects and future projects (which make me money), which means I cannot foresee responding to 40 or more comments a day.

So from now on, I’d like to try the following new policy:

1) I promise to read every word of every comment left at GaysDefendMarriage.com.

2) I will respond to the questions and comments I find most interesting and provocative.

3) You will not accuse me of “ignoring” or “refusing to answer” this or that, given that I simply do not have time to respond specifically to 40 E-mails a day.

I wish I could do everything, but I just can’t. I’m thrilled with the growing popularity of this blog. Many, many of my published pieces grew out of exchanges and challenges that happened right here. For now, I’ll just ask that some of you try to challenge each other when I’m unable to answer every question. If you go to popular blogs you’ll see they often comment very little if every. I’m trying to comment as much as I reasonably can.

Thanks!

I believe that before our society makes a big decision like whether to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, we need to consult every relevant discipline - psychology, history, biology, philosophy, sociology, and more. In my wide-ranging reading about same-sex marriage, I have never read an article that applies the skills of linguists to the issue, and that’s a shame - because linguistics has a lot to offer.

It is widely accepted that the way a language describes a phenomenon reveals the values and experiences of the culture that speaks it. For example, Estonian uses the same word, mägi, to mean both hills and mountains. I’m told that if I ever saw the landscape in Estonia, I’d understand why.

I’m fluent in Hebrew, a language that does not differentiate between liking and loving. Both are ahavah. That probably relates to the relatively low priority Judaism places on romantic love as compared to other cultures.

Serbian has only one word for church, but Polish has two - one meaning “Catholic or any other church” and one meaning “Orthodox church.” The difference may reflect attitudes toward minority Christian religions by the dominant groups in each society.

Finally, we all know that English has only one word for you, but the Japanese language, which is spoken in a nation obsessed with politeness, has thirty words for you.

So it is directly relevant to the issue we’ve been debating that it appears that every language in world history has had a different word for mother and for father. If a group speaking a particular language saw no particular distinction between parents of both sexes, it very well could have used a single word to mean “parent.” That appears to have never happened.

Dr. Jay Jasanoff, the chairman of the linguistics department at Harvard (yes, I said chairman, and yes, I said Harvard), told me he’s never encountered any language without a specific word for mother and a separate word for father. In fact, he said, he “would frankly be surprised if such a language existed.” Confirming his perspective is his colleague Dr. Patrice Speeter Beddor, who chairs the linguistics department at the University of Michigan. She said “All languages with which I am familiar, including languages from many different language families, have words for both mother and father.”

In addition, a professor at UC-Berkeley who asked to remain anonymous so he doesn’t offend his gay friends, said “I have never seen a language that does not have distinct terms for male parent and female parent…. This is the kind of thing that would make the rounds on the linguistic urban myth mill. ‘Say, I’m working in a language that doesn’t have a word for mother.’ I’ve never, in several decades in the field, heard anyone say such a thing.”

So?

Well the first thing we can conclude is that the notion that mothers and fathers provide nothing different for children, is a radical, even revolutionary notion in the context of world history. If not, at least a few of the more than 6,000 languages spoken would have only one word for parent. In my mind, that is sufficient reason to keep marriage between a man and a woman. But let’s say I’m wrong and there are other factors worthy of overriding the linguistic evidence that all cultures have always believed children get different things from their mothers and their fathers.

Nonetheless, do we really have enough evidence to declare that the old way, really the only way of every single culture in history through the very end of the 20th century, had a bigoted and offensive - rather than merely different - idea about children and parenting? Because that is the official policy of the first gay-marriage state, Massachusetts. If you want to run a Boston adoption agency, and to give just a slight preference - not an absolute one, but a tie-breaker preference - to families that provide both a mother and father, you cannot do so without being shut down by the government.

Even if the gay marriage movement has the preponderance of the evidence and is campaigning for the right thing to do, have they really proven their case so overwhelmingly that law enforcement should shut down the businesses of people who agree with with every single society in history until eight years ago?

There’s a word for folks like the gay and lesbian community, among whom I’m one of very few voices to have ever condemned the Massachusetts policy. It’s called arrogance. California voters will be able to decide in November whether to take the gay-marriage movement down a notch.

I rarely talk about my specific religious beliefs about the Torah’s obligations on Jews in the area of gay sex, nor do I spend much time specifically spelling out the disturbing evidence that a signicant minority of the gay and lesbian community has no objection to adult-child sex. I think talking about either issue can needlessly hurt people who aren’t Jewish or who think pedophilia is disgusting, so I rarely do so. But the most prominent opponent of the “ex-gay” movement, a petty, self-hating, ignorant Jew named Wayne Besen, has thrown down the gauntlet by banning me from his Web site for allegedly advocating the murder of homosexuals and comparing gay people to child molesters. As you will see, I did neither of the above, but since I am banned from his site, I must defend myself somewhere, so I’ll do so here.

1) Jews believe that almost any Jewish law can be suspended in order to save a life, because we believe life is precious. However, there are three categories of mitzvot (commandments) that supercede that principle. They are called yehareg v’al yaavor - be murdered rather than transgress. The three categories are idol worship, murder, and gilui arayot - certain sexual sins that include male-male anal intercourse. I confirmed to Wayne that I and all Orthodox Jews think a Jew is commanded to allow himself to be killed rather than commit the act described above. That does not mean I think it’s right for anyone to kill a homosexual! Far from it. That means if someone puts a gun to my head and says “Sodomize me” I and every other Jew who follows halacha (Jewish law) would refuse.

2) I never compared all gays to child molesters. I am fully aware that the majority of both the lesbian and the gay community is horrified by pedophilia. But there is significant evidence that a subset of the gay community has no objection to adult-child sex. In fact, there’s a participant in the discussion at Wayne’s site who insists that “the general consensus” is that pedophilia is a medical, not a moral problem. He didn’t specify but if I agreed with him I would want child molesters sent to psychiatric hospitals rather than prisons. I wonder how he feels about imprisoning what he calls “mentally sick” pedophiles. I will give just two other examples of the sympathy for adult-child sex in segments of the LGBT community, and if I am pressed, I have many more.

For example, I know of no gay or lesbian individual or organization who has objected to the stated position of the gay arm of the ACLU that “everyone agrees” that a mentally retarded 14-year-old can consent to sex with an adult. (For some reason my computer won’t access the site so the language might be slightly off but it’s pretty close.) I think by definition a 14-year old, especially if he is mentally retarded, cannot consent to sex, and I am disgusted at the fact that the LGBT project of the ACLU successfully fought to free the adult repeat statutory rapist of a mentally retarded youth barely out of puberty who allowed him to perform oral sex on him at first but then got uncomfortable and said please stop (which the predator thankfully did).

Second, a prominent gay-rights organization in Canada, Egale, argued against raising the national age of consent from 14 to 16 in part because it considers sex between a 14-year-old and an adult to be “non-harmful sexual activity.” Other pro-gay Canadian organizations opposed outlawing sex with 14-year-olds because “it would interfere with efforts to educate youth about pregnancy, disease prevention and sexual rights and responsibilities.” The executive director of Egale, Kaj Hasselriis, testified that “Egale believes very strongly that it is possible… even common… for 14 and 15 year olds to consent to sex, even with people over the age of 20.” My googling has found no evidence of prominent Canadian or American gays or even lesbians, nor important LGBT organizations in Canada, who were offended by Egale’s position and stated the obvious: there is something terribly wrong with a 21-year-old having sex with a 14-year old.

Does the above mean I advocate the murder of homosexuals and compare gay people to child molesters? I don’t think so. But I stand by every word I wrote, so you be the judge. If pressed, I will give more information on exactly how wrong Judaism thinks gay sex is, and how I know that a minority - only a minority - of the gay community has no problem with adult-child sex. I would rather not, but I will if it’s important to clarify that I did neither of immoral things Wayne Besen has accused me of doing.

It’s not about marriage per se, but my column for Pride month that questions what was so great about the Stonewall rebellion is up at the Web site of the Macon, Georgia Telegraph. The column is consistent with my complaint that gays and lesbians are so focused on being “equal” that they have no compassion for who they hurt, whether it’s orphans, Boy Scouts, or in this case, New York City cops. Some excerpts:

Stonewall is widely considered one of the gay and lesbian community’s proudest moments. The largest gay partisan organization is called the Stonewall Democrats, and every year various Stonewall Awards are handed out. But the gay community’s Stonewallapalooza shows serious errors in historical and moral judgment; the Stonewall riots are really nothing to be proud of.

Now I’m not defending police brutality, repressive bar raids or the tremendous discrimination gay people faced at the time. Nor am I a pacifist; some outrages (like torture or genocide) do call for violence. But the circumstances of gay life in the late 1960s, while certainly pain-filled and oppressive, did not justify spilling blood. Gay bar patrons weren’t being rounded up and executed. The Stonewall rioters weren’t even protesting the truly horrific aspects of gay life at the time, such as forced psychiatric shock therapy. They just wanted the police to leave their bars alone.

Could today’s Stonewall Democrats and Stonewall anniversary parade marchers possibly think the eponymous rebels were unaware of the tremendous civil-rights progress made that very decade through sit-ins, marches and other nonviolent means? Or, worse, that this aggressive hissy fit was essentially the same as those peaceful protests? Perhaps.

Even gay Christian nonviolence advocate Mel White has compared Stonewall to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1964. Preposterous - a drag queen throwing a beer bottle at a cop is no Rosa Parks.

Maybe many gays do consider the Stonewall mayhem justified - because cross-dressing and male-male dancing were illegal, because bar busts interrupted same-sex flirting or even because Judy Garland had just been laid to rest. Even so, surely we’ve chosen the wrong memory through which to unify a diverse community that includes many segments - like lesbian Quakers and gay Republicans - unsympathetic to rioting as a political technique.

There’s plenty in gay and lesbian history that deserves celebration - talented artists like playwright Lorraine Hansberry and true heroes like 9/11’s Mark Bingham. I call on my fellow gays and lesbians to create holidays and events that honor them, and name our organizations after their achievements. Nearly 40 years after Stonewall, a community that once sang “we are a gentle, angry people” should be mature enough to examine the moral dimensions of even its most-cherished myths.

UPDATE: Rev. Mel White, a practitioner of violence whom I criticize above, has written me to praise my “well-said” column: “You write very well. And the column was carefully researched and clearly written.”

Rev. White (who along with Rev. Troy Perry is one of the two most prominent gay Christians in America) followed up: “Violence (at Stonewall) got the world’s attention. As I know all too well, nonviolence is usually ignored and nonviolent acts go unreported and unnoticed. There is the dilemma. We celebrate Stonewall because it finally got our cause noticed (as did Rosa’s nonviolent protest on the bus). But as you’ve pointed out in your article we also should feel saddened that it was violence that brought our cause to the nation. Thank God it didn’t end up the Stonewall Massacre with deaths on either or both sides. And come to think about it, it is a wonder that more acts of violence didn’t follow from our community. Now, the lesson is learned. Violence gets people’s attention. Nonviolence often doesn’t. It’s a puzzlement. Soulforce always uses nonviolence but without arrests (media driven street theater) and without some kind of ‘incident’ our nonviolent demonstrations end up unnoticed and thus ineffectual, except on those who protest with us and they are changed forever.”

When I have said that same-sex couples generally do not respect monogamy the way married couples do, and therefore I believe redefining marriage will change and thus hurt marriage itself, LGBT people (including frequent posters at our site) have generally had one of two reactions:

1) You are extrapolating from a very small non-monogamous sample to accuse the whole LGBT community of not respecting marital vows; or

2) You are greatly underestimating the huge number of heterosexual couples whose cheating and swinging is well known.

In response, I would like to clarify: what concerns me is not the small, or large, percentage of same-sex couples that have open relationships, nor the size of the swinging and cheating community among heterosexual couples. What concerns me is the attitudes of gay and straight people, respectively, on what marriage is.

I see very little evidence that mainstream non-gay groups like the NAACP, Jewish Women International, and Habitat for Humanity, or mainstream non-gay leaders like Oprah Winfrey, Nancy Pelosi, and Bill Gates, think getting married does not necessarily mean one is promising to stop having sex with outsiders. I see tons of evidence that the equivalent voices in the LGBT community see no necessary, inherent connection between fidelity and marriage.

For example, my gay friend Dan Blatt, who supports same-sex marriage, did a lot of research for his GayPatriot Web site and found that “marriage equality” Web sites say very little about monogamy.

But I am happy to be shown solid evidence that the LGBT community does, in fact overwhelmingly understand what marriage is. So I would like to challenge the leaders of the “marriage equality” movement to take the pledge listed below:

The Monogamy Pledge

1. I will not enter any marriage without a firm promise of sexual fidelity.

2. I will not honor any same-sex marriage as worthy of respect if it does not include sexual exclusivity in its wedding vows (”forsaking all others”) or in some other open proclamation.

If any 50 prominent, public, recognized leaders of the “marriage equality” movement (or at least seven of the eight top leaders listed below) agree to take the Monogamy Pledge, I will reverse my claim and stop arguing that the LGBT community’s attitude toward monogamy means they have no idea what marriage is.

Now, so far only about 10 percent of the several hundred gay leaders I have contacted about marriage have written me back, and only about 2 percent have been willing to directly answer hard questions. So I’m the wrong person to tell LGBT leaders about the pledge. Therefore I encourage supporters of same-sex marriage who think, correctly, that marriage should mean sexual exclusivity (surely Dan isn’t the only one) to contact people like Evan Wolfson, Jon Davidson, Mary Bonauto, Geoff Kors, Kate Kendall, Barney Frank, Joe Solomonese, and Robin Tyler (and others who are so eager to make the rest of society treat same-sex couples as “equal”) whether they are willing to take the Monogamy Pledge, and if not, why not. My sense is very few significant LGBT leaders see any essential connection between marriage and sexual exclusivity.

Many marriage equality advocates have reacted angrily to my Los Angeles Daily News piece about male-male non-monogamy hurting marriage and to the recent New York Times feature quoting a “married” gay man in Massachusetts saying most married gay couples are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.”

“Most gay couples are monogamous!” they said. “Straight people commit adultery too!”

But I recently discovered there is a rarely publicized gay definition of monogamy that does not match the way virtually every straight person uses the term. The thorough “marriage equality” Web site of the Partners Task Force for Gay and Lesbian Couples features an article on “Keeping A Sexually Open Relationship Intact” in its “relationship tips” section. According to the article, monogamy “properly means individuals who only marry one person (as opposed to “polygamy”), which does not describe sexual agreements.” In other words two men who get married to no one but each other, but nonetheless allow each other to have sex with a different man every night of the week are monogamous in this new (to me) gay sense of the term.

The essay goes on to give 15 specific suggestions of rules that gay couples can consider for making sure the sex outside the relationship isn’t completely unrestricted. For example: no sex with mutual friends, sex is permissible only when one partner is out of town, and my favorite, sex is permitted at home, but not in the bedroom.

I am not making this up.

Now, before anyone screams that this is one minority opinion on an obscure Web site, I want to point out that the date of the article is 2002. If an article on even a medium-sized Jewish Web site said that married Jewish women could stay monogamous by having sex with as many other men as they wanted as long as they don’t marry them, it wouldn’t last a week. There would be an outcry by Jews who are offended at the open approval of adultery. The “how to have sex with many people while you’re still monogamous” article appears to have been posted for six years.

Further, as far as I can tell the Partners Task Force has never been condemned by major gay and lesbian groups. In fact, several of them actually recommend it as a “resource,” such as Marriage Equality USA, the Metropolitan Community Church (!), the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Educators Network, and statewide groups in Kentucky, Washington, Texas, New York, and Wisconsin. Both PlanetOut and lesbian.com also link to the site. Even a group you would expect to value faithfulness and fidelity - the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry - lists the Web site with the “slutty monogamy” article as one of only two American same-sex marriage issue resources.

I think the idea that in six years nobody ever clicked on the article about how monogamy doesn’t mean sexual exclusivity and thought to complain or publicize the idea is simply preposterous. I’m not saying every group that linked to this Web site knew about its definition of monogamy, but certainly some did. And even if they never read about the strange definition of monogamy, lots of gays and lesbians browsed through the list of articles, and the one about keeping your sexually open relationship intact doesn’t appear to have batted any eyes.

As long as major gay groups are linking to the Web site featuring this article, in fact as long as the article remains up at all, I recommend that anyone - journalists, undecided voters, marriage defenders engaging in debate - ask gays and lesbians to clarify whenever they use the term monogamy, whether they main marriage to only one person or sex with only one person. That’s the only way we can have an honest conversation.

Secondly, everyone should give further consideration to my argument that same-sex marriage will change marriage forever, for everyone, and for the worse. This one example is compelling evidence that the gay and lesbian community generally does not value fidelity and faithfulness in the way married people have been expected to. After all, lesbians have a better track record on sexual exclusivity than gay men, but none of the lesbians who clicked to this Web site promoted by at least a dozen prominent gay organizations convinced the group to correct its misleading definition of monogamy or if they refused, blogged about how offensive the situation is. I believe the people who have always defined marriage should continue to do so, because there is too much evidence the LGBT community simply does not understand what marriage is.

UPDATE: I realized it was possible that the article I have criticized was one of many different perspectives on monogamy represented on the Web site in question, so I checked what other things the site had to say about monogamy. I found:

• an essay by an openly gay anthropologist disagreeing with President’s Bush description of monogamous marriage as “the most enduring human institution” by arguing that “few societies find it beneficial to restrict marriage only to this form.”

• a 1997 essay by a therapist that says “Gay couples are different from heterosexual ones, however, and several authors have noted that sexual exclusivity in relationships is optional, rather than required within long-lasting male couples.” Now, if I said that, I would be called homophobic and accused of representing the truth without proof. Yet this essay has been posted for 11 years without any apparent protest by the many LGBT people who had access to it, some of whom undoubtedly read it. Why is that? He goes on to criticize monogamy as “inadequate for male couples because of the complexity of male-to-male (sexual-predator-to-sexual-predator) relationships.” Do I really have to say that no mainstream Jewish, black, Asian, or Catholic Web site could get away with posting such an article for more than a decade?

• There are essays by politicians Ron Wyden and Thomas Keane that tend to support monogamy, but they are both married heterosexuals, so of course they understand what marriage is.

• The site quotes Gary who says “I would find it very difficult to be with someone who insisted that I be ‘monogamous.’ In fact, if would drive me crazy” and his partner Bob who says “I feel exactly the same way as Gary. I don’t want to base our relationship the same way heterosexuals do.” So why am I criticized for saying gay marriage will change marriage?

• There’s an interview with a lesbian couple, one of whom is a reverend who says “monogamy, sexual exclusivity” has been a “hard edge” for the couple.

• There’s a historical article without footnotes that makes some pretty bizarre claims such as that in Christianity, male-male marriages actually predated male-female ones, and that Western culture “did not view monogamy as essential to marriage” until the 14th century. Do I really have to ask if the same claim would go unchallenged for 15 months at the Web site of even a liberal religious group like the Union for Reform Judaism or the Unitarian Universalist church?

• An interview with Charlie and Bill (I happen to know Charlie) said that in nine years together they were monogamous “most of the time.”

• An interview with Bruce, who bragged that he and Sam “can afford to be non-monogamous.”

• An interview with Andy and Peter, who say they were monogamous for about half the eight years they were in a “committed relationship.”

Now, if this Web site totally misrepresented the gay community’s attitudes toward monogamy, why am I the first gay person to have protested it so far? If these ideas offend gay sensibilities, wouldn’t all major gay and lesbian organizations refuse to link to the site?

I’d be very interested in someone honest on the “marriage equality” side to just accept my assertion that gay people do not value monogamy the way straight people do. Then, you can still argue that it’s not fair to refuse same-sex couples marriage, but at least you won’t try to earn marriage rights through fraudulous misrepresentation.

UPDATE: I am stunned by the following statistic: I contacted 100 of the top linguists in the country, including virtually the entire departments at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, and Texas. Within 48 hours, exactly half (50) had answered my query. None had ever heard of a language that did not differentiate between “mother” and “father” - and several said they did not think I would ever find one. There are some arguments I have made in which I could be fairly criticized for not consulting enough experts, or experts with strong enough qualifications. This is, um, not one one of them.

Since I have one foot on each side of the homosexuality divide in America, I’m perhaps uniquely qualified to propose a compromise on the gay marriage issue that can appeal to enough people on both sides that everyone can live with it.

I am certainly not a big fan of what I am about to propose. I would much rather get to write all of society’s laws about sex, relationships, and the family myself based on my ideas and values rather than to have to consult other people. But in a democracy, I have to consult other people.

The first point I want to make is about tangible and symbolic concerns. Both sides have some of each, and nearly all are legitimate. Gays and lesbians have tangible concerns about losing custody of their children, not being able to visit their partners in the hospital, and not being able to designate various financial and health benefits to go to the person who is most important in their lives. Traditionally religious people have tangible concerns about not being able to use their own values in having their adoption agencies decide which families are favored for adoption and running their fertility clinic in a way that is consistent with their views on parenting. They also have tangible concerns about being able to write, teach, run their businesses, and raise their children using their definition of what a marriage is rather than that of the gay and lesbian community. Those are just a few examples on each side.

There are also legitimate symbolic concerns. They gay and lesbian community is concerned that being forced to use a different term - even if it provides the exact same benefits as in California - gives the appearance that they are second-class citizens. They see no reason same-sex couples shouldn’t be accorded the same respect and dignity by society at large as male-female marriages. Traditionally religious people are concerned that extending the word “marriage” to relationships that are significantly different and which they believe are not right and not even marriages will change the nature of the word as used in the culture away from the way they prefer to use it. They are concerned with the government no longer giving extra prestige to the family format they think is the best for children.

If there was a way to accommodate every single tangible and symbolic concern of the people on both sides, I’d be all for it. But that’s impossible. I think that most people in the middle of this debate would like to accommodate as many of the tangible concerns on both sides, while not being as concerned about the symbolic concerns. So my proposal below, which again is not my first choice, aims at accommodating as many of the tangible concerns as possible, while not putting too much energy into the symbolic concerns.

I think that a compromise that addresses most or all of the tangible concerns on each side, but virtually none of the symbolic concerns on both sides, is good for our democracy, good for gays and lesbians, good for traditionally religious people, good for America.

The only other choice I see before us is some states that accommodate all of the symbolic and tangible concerns of one side, and other states that accommodate all of the symbolic and tangible concerns of the other side. Gay couples and traditionally religious people would need a road map to figure out which states they’d feel most safe in. Is that really a country we want to live in?

So here’s my proposal:

1) Each state that wants to find a compromise on marriage convenes 10 or 25 or 50 passionate but reasonable people from each side. They meet in a conference lasting a few days, and hammer out together two proposals, described below:

2) Proposal A retains the man-woman definition of marriage, but addresses through legislation or constitutional amendment all or nearly all of the major substantive concerns gays and lesbians have about the ways man-woman marriage tangibly hurts them. Hospital visitation, inheritance, and custody would undoubtedly make the proposal in nearly every state, for example.

3) Proposal B implements same-sex marriage, but addresses through legislation or constitutional amendment all or nearly all of the major substantive concerns traditionally religious people have about potential losses of freedom under same-sex marriage. I imagine most such proposals will contain language guaranteeing the right of adoption agencies and fertility clinics and teachers and journalists to use their own definitions of marriage in performing their functions even if it conflicts with the new state definition.

4) Then, both proposals are put on the state’s ballot to be voted on by the voters. The ballot initiative that gets the most votes (as long as it’s a majority) becomes law.

I really don’t like the fact that under Proposal A and Proposal B I get almost none of the symbolic things I’m concerned about. I also don’t like the fact that I either have to lose on what I’m most concerned with (marriage itself) or on a variety of benefits I would prefer not to go to people on the basis of their having a gay relationship. But the whole point of compromise is that each side gives in a little in order to have a whole package that provides the most satisfaction to the most number of people.

The proposal above tries to do that. I am very interested in the reactions of people on both sides, as well as proposals to make the compromise even more fabulous.

My longtime gay friend Tom Chatt recently posted a really good criticism of my “Same-sex marriages can do harm” piece. Because I was in a rush to get a piece to newspapers that could run on Tuesday, and because I only had 800 words, my point about same-sex kissing being a reason to oppose gay marriage appears as a total non-sequitur. Since I now have the leisure to more fully explain what I mean, and because blogging gives me an unlimited word length, I will now try to elucidate exactly what I was trying to say. The basic point relates to my belief that given the uncompromising attitudes of “marriage equality” advocates, a world without gay marriage will have more freedom for more people than a world with gay marriage. More on that below.

First off, to clarify, I think gays should be allowed to kiss in ballparks, but I think they shouldn’t. I think Hare Krishna people should be allowed to try to convert people in airports, but I think they shouldn’t. I think racists should be allowed to teach their children that blacks are inferior, but I think they shouldn’t. I think lesbians should be allowed to make a brand-new baby without a father, but I think they shouldn’t.

Based on my long history of involvement with the gay community, my Internet surfing and my many conversations at this blog and others, I have come to believe that at least 90% of gay and lesbian people have a set of attitudes I’ll call GayThink. One of the most important tenets of GayThink is that believing that gay sex is immoral and that man-woman marriage is better than same-sex relationships and that it’s best for children to have both a mother and a father is by definition bigotry. According to GayThink, it is as offensive to hold such beliefs as it is to believe that interracial sex is immoral and that people should marry their own race.

If LGBT readers of this blog do not in fact hold the beliefs of what I’m calling GayThink, please correct me. I’m not out to misrepresent anyone.

Now, according to GayThink, my views about sex, marriage, and the family are bigoted. Through most of my life, that hasn’t been a problem. I’ve had my views and LGBT activists have had theirs. But in the last few years, the gay community’s lobbying and especially lawsuits have begun to get more and more goverment units to adopt GayThink. And the more that happens, the more freedoms I lose.

One example is that if I want to start an adoption agency in Massachusetts, I will be shut down if I use my values about what’s best for children instead of GayThink’s values. I have heard from more than 15 gay activists, some of them quite prominent, who think a teacher should be disciplined or fired for using the definition of marriage she believes in with with her students instead of the GayThink definition. Now, a decade ago the gay group GLSEN convinced many public schools to use a curriculum that contained a definition of marriage that made no mention of opposite sexes. I am quite certain no teacher was disciplined or fired for teaching the GayThink definition of marriage, which was purely imaginary and legal nowhere at the time the curriculum was published. Yet under gay marriage, people with my values will find our jobs at risk if we don’t adopt GayThink in the way we perform our tasks.

Now, kissing. GayThink believes that it is bigoted to want to wait until your children get older to teach them about homosexuality but to teach about male-female love when they are quite young - especially if your reason is to be able to teach them when they are mature enough that your family considers gay sex immoral and that they should plan on marrying a member of the opposite sex when they grow up. (LGBT readers, again, tell me if you don’t agree with this tenet of GayThink.)

So LGBT people in Seattle grew quite angry when a mother tried to get lesbians to stop kissing because it was confusing her son. Some gays even proposed the solution of arranging for lots of same-sex couples to make out in front of children at the ballpark. That is a reasonable strategy in GayThink because any parent who would object is a bigot, and for the sake of her children - especially if someday they grow up to be gay - they should be exposed to homosexuality right away, rather than when the parents desire it.

If gay “marriage” becomes permanent in California, I am quite certain that the folks at GLSEN and the gay caucus of the National Education Association will start looking for ways to teach younger and younger children that when they grow up they can marry a man, or a woman - it’s up to them. (I will withdraw this statement if those groups pass a resolution never to support curricula such as I have described.) Parents who want to teach their children that they should only marry an opposite-sex person will have some of their freedom taken away. Now, any time a public school teacher tells her students that homosexuality is immoral or gay relationships are inferior, the gay-education lobby goes ballistic and makes sure the teacher stops saying that, or is even fired. Yet if GayThink becomes part of the law, traditionally religious parents will have no recourse when their children are taught at school that their family’s values are a form of bigotry similar to racism.

So you see, even freedom-loving people who personally see no reason gays shouldn’t get married should vote for the California Marriage Protection Act. If it passes, same-sex couples will lose no rights other than the word “marriage.” Gays and straights will continue to be able to teach, write, run their businesses and raise their children using the definition of marriage they believe in. If it fails, only people who accept the tenets of GayThink (an extreme ideology most Californians don’t agree with) will be able to use their own definition of marriage in running their lives. For anyone who cares about living in a free country, the only possible vote on the CMPA is yes.