GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

A Web user responding to one of my arguments in favor of the California Marriage Protection Act wrote, “Allowing a majority of the people to decide the civil rights of a minority through a popular vote is simply bad policy. Should we have allowed the majority to vote on whether segregation should be ended or not?”

Actually, yes.

But allow me to explain: the reason defenders of man-woman marriage are pushing a vote on same-sex marriage is that is the only way a constitutional decision by the California Supreme Court can be overturned. A unanimous vote by the 120 members of the legislature, along with the governor’s vigorous approval, would change nothing without a vote of the people. Supporters of “marriage equality” can hardly complain that the system is unfair given that none of them objected to the process before the Supreme Court decision, and many of them voted for liberal California constitutional amendments in recent years on environmental, anti-smoking, education, and other issues.

I certainly feel that defenders of segregation in 1954 should have been allowed to introduce a Constitutional amendment overturning Brown v. Board of Education. That decision, which was one of the moral high points of the 20th century, had no special status that made it permanent. I definitely would have fought them, but if segregationists had convinced two-thirds of Congress and the Senate – and the state legislatures in 38 states – to pass a Segregation Amendment to the Constitution, what should have stood in their way?

A Super-Decider who gets to overrule constitutional amendments that aren’t consistent with his values would be the mark of a dictatorship, not a democracy.

The fact that California has a popular vote to amend its Constitution whereas the U.S. has a more complicated process is an accident of history, not a plot against gays.

The people crying foul that someone is trying to amend “their rights” should think about the Dred Scott case. That 1856 decision ruled that a white man had a property right to “own” an African-American. Do today’s complainers about the California amendment think Dr. John Emerson could have legitimately complained about people trying to amend his rights through the 1865 votes on the Thirteenth Amendment? Because contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t the Civil War or even the Emancipation Proclamation that abolished slavery in the United States. It was the Thirteenth Amendment.

There has to be a process under which the people and/or their elected legislators can overrule constitutional decisions they don’t agree with. The process does carry the risk that good decisions may be overturned, yes, but that means bad decisions can be, too. I don’t want to live in a state where four justices (or a country where five justices) can have the absolute last word about important issues relating to the way we live.

Finally, while “marriage equality” advocates have the right to claim there is a civil right to same-sex marriage, very few experts agree with them. The Supreme Court has never recognized a federal right to “marry” a member of the same sex, and gay and lesbian groups have actively fought lawsuits seeking such a right, because they know they would likely lose. Massachusetts has a state constitutional right to same-sex marriage, and there will be one for about 4.5 months in California, at which point the people will decide whether that right should cease. The other 48 states provide no state constitutional right to same-sex marriage. And what is the opinion of the civil rights phenomenon of the century? “I don’t think marriage is a civil right,” said U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) when running for the Senate four years ago.

My newest “Fabulously Observant” column appears in today’s Dallas Voice. It’s mostly about other things than marriage, but I thought I’d link to it because it describes five issues that people on both sides of the homosexuality debate have an interest in working together on, even if we don’t yet see eye-to-eye on subjects like marriage. Here’s an excerpt:

• Adoption: Gay parents and religious conservatives are unlikely to agree on state policies like Florida’s, which ban gay adoption, or Massachusetts’ that bar agencies from giving preference to families with both a mother and a father.

But in those jurisdictions which do allow gay adoption, traditionally religious people have a joint interest with gay and lesbian parents to foster government policies (like tax credits) that benefit families that adopt.

The more adoptions, the fewer abortions, so traditional people can push for pro-adoption legislation alongside those of us who disagree with them about the fitness of gays to be adoptive parents….

Working together on the above issues is unlikely to make a Southern Baptist hope for a lesbian daughter, or to make a gay man become “born again.” But by cooperating on important policy areas we’re all invested in, perhaps we can stop seeing each other as the “enemy.”

Then, down the road, when discussing the definition of marriage or non-discrimination laws, we will be better able to listen to each other and try to find some common ground.

I received this E-mail today:

As a gay man, people often ask me how I can oppose gay marriage. The great irony is that no one should be a more strident supporter of gay marriage than me. My partner is from Eastern Europe and we met online. I invited him to the States in 2002 and we have been together ever since though we have lived under a great fear of deportation. We have taken steps to ensure that he could stay here legally; however the process has been long, expensive, and mentally, physically, and spiritually exhausting.

How much easier life would be if we could simply legalize his status through marriage, as all straight couples can! Yet our faith and principles are more important to us than our desires and self-interests (one of the key things that attracted me to him). Regardless of what’s convenient, we won’t sacrifice our beliefs on the altar of self aggrandizement.

So the question is, am I a gay man or a man? Am I a gay Christian or a Christian? A gay American or an American? How should I define myself – how should you?

Yes, being gay is a fundamental aspect of my nature but it is hardly the whole story. Why should my sexual proclivities dictate the way I view philosophy, theology and politics? Should I vote for McCain only because he is Irish and white like I am? Or should I vote for McCain because I believe he is right on the issues and will better lead this nation? I hope all would say the latter. Yet too many appear to be arguing the former – that all issues regarding societal norms, laws and customs should be construed through the prism of gay-think.

Instead of fighting to redefine the meaning of marriage, which I need not mention are still mostly performed in churches, we should remember what it means to be something other than gay for a few minutes of the day. We should be willing to put other’s interests before our own and do what is best for the whole of society so that future generations may actually be able to live in a better world than the one we are now creating.

If civil unions grant me the basic legal protections that we are all claiming to seek then why not fight for that cause instead of instigating a religious and cultural war? Sadly it appears that too many in the gay movement desire the war and seek to divide the people of this nation whatever the cost. Being the small minority we truly are, have they considered what that future cost may be?

C. M. Lofton, Washington DC

Most of my posts take issue with an argument, a strategy, or some rhetoric coming from those who favor same-sex “marriage.” This one criticizes an approach by some of my allies in the marriage debate.

Many male-female marriage advocates like to call themselves “pro-family.” While I’m a big fan of families, along with baseball and applie pie, I do not understand what purpose is served by emphasizing that defending marriage is “pro-family.” What do such people think a lesbian couple and their baby is, if not a family? Of course gays and lesbians form families. They may not be traditional families, but they certainly are families. It’s about as insulting as if we started to label our side “pro-American” or “pro-human.”

Even some organizations I support, such as the National Organization for Marriage and protectmarriage.com, use the term. When I’ve asked colleagues why they use it, they emphasize a need to reach socially conservative voters.

May I humbly suggest that we already have the votes of socially conservative voters? Already it looks like the campaign to fight the California Marriage Protection Act stupidly plans to use leftist arguments. That means the huge middle section of California voters is ours for the taking. Using language that makes us sound like troglodytes is completely counterproductive.

I’m not making this point mostly to protect the feelings of gay and lesbian families (not that there’s anything wrong with that – at all). I’m making it so the defenders of man-woman marriage don’t get viewed as mean-spirited sadists who’ve lost touch with reality.

I want the smartest people in the same-sex marriage debate to have their voices heard. Of course, I’m thrilled when Maggie Gallagher or Dennis Prager writes something compelling about preserving man-woman marriage. But I also like it when smart marriage-equality law professors like Andrew Koppelman and Dale Carpenter speak out about same-sex marriage. As with most issues, the more thoughtful voices on both sides, the quicker we are to get to the truth. My arguments get better when I debate incisive minds – and so do theirs. Everybody wins.

But there’s a disturbing tendency among same-sex “marriage” advocates to try to silence the other side. For example, I recently heard from a low-level editor at a major East Coast daily newspaper. He was excited about one of my pieces on same-sex marriage, and wanted to run it, but he warned me that his boss was an openly gay man who had run about a dozen pro-SSM pieces in recent months, several of which he wrote himself. So far, no pieces supporting man-woman marriage. And indeed, that paper did not use my piece in the end. Then there’s the openly gay editor of one of California’s smaller dailies – but still the main newspaper in its region. After I sent him three columns supporting the California Marriage Protection Act, he wrote me back asking to be taken of my distribution list. He’s rejecting my future pieces without even looking at them!

Finally, there’s the guy who’s been encouraging people to write my editors in the gay press to urge them to stop running me. Shades of the Stop Dr. Laura Campaign, no? If people don’t like someone’s ideas, come up with a compelling argument that will convince the broader public to disagree with those ideas. But trying to stop those ideas from being expressed is fundamentally un-American.

Ever since the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) passed in 1996, gay groups have been attacking the constitutionality of the law. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s (NGLTF) initial statement in the wake of DOMA’s passage called it “unnecessary, discriminatory and probably unconstitutional.” When I pointed out on the Ricki Lake Show a few years ago that DOMA had been passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, top Human Rights Campaign (HRC) lawyer Lara Schwartz retorted that DOMA was unconstitutional. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s (GLAAD) media resource kit on marriage says “many believe” DOMA violates the Constitution.

In addition, many same-sex marriage proponents have argued that the Supreme Court case in Loving v. Virginia contains a federal constitutional right to “marry” a person of the same sex.

Now, Lara Schwartz doesn’t get to decide what laws are or are not constitutional. She doesn’t get to determine what the Constitution does or does not mean. The people who get to decide that are Ruth Bader Ginsberg, John Roberts, and the other seven members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Which is quite promising for gays and lesbians. Ginsberg and Breyer are Clinton appointees. John Paul Stevens is the most liberal member of the court. David Souter, according to a 2003 cover story in the gay newsmagazine The Advocate, may be gay himself. And Anthony Kennedy has written two stirring pro-gay opinions overturning an anti-gay law in Colorado and sodomy laws nationwide. That’s five votes. You only need five votes.

So the gay community is pushing for the Supreme Court to overturn DOMA and declare that Loving v. Virginia‘s right to marry applies to same-sex marriage, and thus implement same-sex marriage nationwide, right?

Wrong.

This week nine gay-rights groups, including NGLTF, HRC, and GLAAD, released a six-page set of instructions to same-sex couples about why they shouldn’t sue, even if they think suing will get them their “rights.” It says, “Most lawsuits will set us all back.”

Now, gay groups cannot have it both ways. If they think courts are unlikely to find that there is a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage, and that DOMA would probably be found constitutional after all, then they need to stop claiming otherwise. If they believe their rhetoric, but wish to put their resources elsewhere (the document says “these efforts take time and money, and we don’t have unlimited resourses”), that’s fine, but they should respect the choices of people not under their thumb to file federal lawsuits.

That’s not what’s been happening. Same-sex couples in California and Florida who felt they had promising cases for a federal right to marry had to fight – not homophobes but gay-rights groups – every step of the way, groups who complained that the lawsuits weren’t “coordinated” with national strategies. Now, if these groups were run democratically like the National Organization for Women and the NAACP, I could see their point. But the boards of gay groups consist of two types of people: wealthy donors, and “affirmative action” appointees, usually people of color, youth, and transgender people. The actual opinions of the general membership are never taken into account. So these staff people appointed by people who got their positions because they are rich or because they make liberal people feel openminded believe they have the right to stop same-sex couples who never had a chance to influence these groups from suing for what they feel is their own rights? It’s seriously messed up.

Gay groups can admit there is no federal right to marry your own sex, and that DOMA is constitutional. Or they can get out of the way and let LGBT people sue for their rights. But to claim that these phantom rights exist, while doing everything they can to prevent the experts (the Washington Nine) from determining whether they exist or not, is just more gay doublespeak.

Hat tip: GayPatriot.

Lots of media attention lately. I was on New York’s historic radio station WOR, on the Steve Malzberg program, today. I am scheduled to be interviewed by Michelangelo Signorile on the leading Sirius network gay radio show in the next few days.

Monday I had a piece in the New York Post about why there are better things HRC could spend its money on than the California marriage battle. The Post piece makes no religious arguments or child-welfare arguments; it gives only gay and lesbian reasons to spend the money on more pressing concerns. Yet the critics of my piece on LGBT sites virtually all ignore the points I make and attack me as a person instead.

Today’s Town Talk, the daily newspaper for Alexandria, Lousiana and surrounding areas, contains an op-ed I wrote complaining that gay groups are so focused on being treated as entirely equal (even when we’re not), that they don’t even notice the people they’re hurting. I give the example of the gay community’s turning Matthew Limon, a serial statutory rapist, into a hero, and fighting to set him free, because his sentence wasn’t equal to what it would have been if his victim was female. I also mention the gay groups that have fought to make it harder for Boy Scouts to hike and camp on public property (now there’s a cause gays can be proud of – persecuting 11-year-old boys who don’t even know what homophobia is). And, of course, the rush to sue for marriage which has unquestionably left same-sex couples in America with fewer rights than they would have had otherwise. I call it the “broken gay moral compass.”

Next week a new piece I’ve written about why lesbians make lousy fathers will make its appearance; One of the top dozen East Coast daily newspapers has already confirmed it will use it, and there may be others as well.

Seattle is in an uproar over the question of public displays of same-sex affection. The situation raises larger issues important to the same-sex marriage debate. At a May 26 Mariners game, Sirbrina Guerrero and her girlfriend were told by an usher that a mother was complaining that their repeated kissing was confusing her young son. The usher asked them to stop. A Mariners investigation later found (though this is disputed) that the couple had been “making out” and “groping” each other – not just an affectionate peck on the cheek.

The controversy outraged the openly gay editor of Seattle’s alternative weekly The Stranger, Dan Savage. He wrote:

Sorry, mom, but if straight people can kiss on the lips at Safeco, so can we…. You’re going to have to tell your kids about the existence of gays and lesbians sometime—and if you want to avoid that conversation for as long as possible, don’t leave the house, turn off the TV, throw out the radio, and close the blinds.

Savage, who has called me a “self-hating douchebag” for dissenting from the gay community’s attack on man-woman marriage, called for a same-sex “kiss-in” at the ballpark.

Can I suggest that a “kiss-in” is exactly the opposite of an appropriate response to this situation? The gay and lesbian movement, particularly with regard to marriage, has been arguing until it is blue in the face that it only wants to obtain rights for same-sex couples, and poses no threat to any heterosexual family. Well, doesn’t it threaten heterosexual families to prevent them from deciding for themselves when and how to introduce the topic of homosexuality?

I mean, Savage’s suggestion that parents who prefer to teach about gay couples at, say, age eight instead of age three shouldn’t leave the house is hardly a practical suggestion. If anyone should stay in their houses, it should be people who want to express modes of affection that if done in public are likely to interfere with other people’s parenting rights.

Even normally modest and conservative gays have expressed this attitude. A friend of mine who fits that description once complained that when he held his date’s hand in a major Midwestern city, some parents turned their children away. Who is he to determine at what age a father teaches his own daughter about homosexuality? It’s not like the parents called him names or demanded he let go of his date’s hand. They simply made sure their children wouldn’t see his behavior.

I mean, seriously, with all the problems facing gays and lesbians in America, is the freedom to smooch at the ballgame and hold hands in the park really that big of a deal? I don’t think anyone, including me, wants to outlaw same-sex displays of affection. But it sure would be nice if my fellow gays and lesbians would use some tact and discretion in not constantly shoving their sexuality in everyone’s face. You want to kiss your lesbian lover in public? That’s what Gay Pride Day is for. Or you can go to the Castro or West Hollywood. In other times and places, please have some humility and realize that we’re a diverse society and most parents want to make their own decisions about how to introduce their children to the gay subculture.

The militance of gays and lesbians on the subject of public displays of affection suggests that the marriage debate isn’t really about the right of a same-sex partner to inherit custody of children or to visit a loved one in the hospital. If it was, domestic partnerships would be a good solution. This is a much larger battle over what kind of society we’re going to live in. Groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network are already working with gay-friendly teachers in public schools to introduce lessons about homosexuality to children as young as kindergarten. Shouldn’t parents get the right to decide when and how their young children will learn about homosexuality, rather than gay activists?

Some gays and lesbians have been up front about the fact that they’re not just looking to gain rights for themselves. Mark, a GaysDefendMarriage.com reader put it this way: “it’s a zero-sum game – for gay people to achieve full civil rights, traditionally religious people have to lose. I intend for them to lose pretty much totally.” Now, it so happens I am open to finding compromises with marriage-equality advocates that will provide protections for same-sex couples in distress nationwide. But if Mark is right, and I have to choose between no rights for gay couples and a culture in which marriage is redefined and parents have no control over what their young children learn about sexuality, I will regretfully choose “no rights for gay couples.” Given that far more Americans agree with me on what marriage is, and whether parents should be in charge of when children learn about homosexuality, it’s just not smart politics for LGBT people to insist that whoever loses this debate will lose totally.

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot starts tonight at sundown, and continues until Tuesday at sundown. I will be completely unreachable by phone, E-mail, and blogging during that time. If you need a fix, there will probably be a piece of mine on HRC’s recent donation of a half a million dollars to the fight against the California Marriage Protection Act in the New York Post on Monday. Later!

Advocates of “marriage equality” often assert that same-sex marriage is a civil right. For example, the Web site of the Maryland chapter of the National Organization for Women declares in big letters, “Civil Marriage is a Civil Right.” And marriageequality.org claims that “marriage is a civil right and two consenting adults should be allowed to enter into the institution if they so choose.”

But they usually have little to back up their claims. The United States Supreme Court, for example, has never found a right to same-sex marriage in the text of the Constitution. Indeed, LGBT advocates are asserting that there’s a civil right to marry a member of the same sex because, well, because they say so.

A lot of people make claims about what’s a civil right, some of which are reasonable while others are ridiculous. Look around the Web and you’ll find people claiming:

• Bilingual education is a human and civil right.
• Telecommunications access is a civil right.
• Peace is a civil right, at least according to Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio).
• Breastfeeding is a civil right.
• School choice is a civil right.
• Cheap booze is a civil right.
• Algebra is a civil right.

Surely, something doesn’t become a civil right just because an activist on its behalf declares it so. Something becomes a civil right when the levers of our democracy move in such a way as to indicate that the society has decided it is a civil right. That simply has not happened with same-sex marriage.

Personally, I like the approach to this question of a bright law professor and liberal activist from Illinois who said in 2004 that “I don’t think marriage is a civil right” while at the same time attacking gay-bashing and supporting workplace protections from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. He’s done very well for himself since then – in fact, he’s the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States. That fact alone is probably the civil rights achievement of the century. If it’s good enough for Barack Obama, it’s good enough for me.