GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

My column on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall is appearing in Friday’s Houston Chronicle and Monday’s Philadelphia Daily News:

At the end of this month, the gay community will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which began the gay liberation movement. This season, known in gay circles simply as “Pride,” will be particularly emotional because of the gay marriage avalanche. While gays and lesbians have much to be proud of (such as early health organizing around the devastating AIDS epidemic), gay history since Stonewall is unfortunately stained with selfishness and arrogance, traits that ironically were once themselves called pride — back when that wasn’t a compliment.

Having experienced the closet and coming out as a gay man in my late teens, I understand the common gay experience of overcoming shame and the constant need for self-esteem reassurance. But I have also come to realize that sometimes gay esteem has innocent victims, and I believe it’s time to balance out gay pride with some gay humility.

To examine the gay community’s self-absorption, look no further than the event celebrated this month that has been commemorated with parades for four decades: the “Stonewall Rebellion.” Why is it that in all that time no gay leader has acknowledged that there were non-gay victims at that event, which we should regret, if not apologize for? Stonewall was sparked by a legitimate bar raid on an unlicensed, Mafia-run drinking establishment. The gay “heroes” threw glass bottles and bricks at police and at one point tried to light the building on fire while people were still inside. Even if one celebrates Stonewall’s repercussions for sparking feelings of gay pride and leading to nationwide community organizing, shouldn’t we acknowledge that our self-esteem doesn’t have to come at the expense of other people’s safety?

Another example: During the late 1980s and early 1990s, gay activists insisted that a wave of “heterosexual AIDS” was just around the corner in the United States, even though no data existed proving that was going to happen, and even though HIV spread through heterosexual sex has always been and continues to be a small percentage of the American transmissions of the virus. Out of fear that Americans would not devote energy to treating and curing a disease spread mostly through gay sex and drug use, AIDS activists consciously lied about the size of the minuscule threat to Americans who did not use drugs or have gay sex. As a result, huge sums of money were spent to educate about and prevent a “coming health epidemic” that would never materialize. People made major lifestyle changes to protect themselves from what was essentially a phantom menace.

The gay parenting movement is still more evidence of the fundamental selfishness of post-Stonewall gay America. Whereas many gay couples can and do bring parentless children into their homes in an act of loving and giving, thousands of other gay couples who could have adopted use various technologies and arrangements to make babies that from the start have no mother or have no father. This cruel act — to one’s own child — is almost never criticized in the gay community, which is so focused on everyone’s freedom and self-esteem, it doesn’t seem to want to bother to notice that children are being hurt by being denied up front the right to have both a mother and a father.

The gay and lesbian community today is infected with what I like to call Equality Mania. That’s the belief that there is literally nothing more important than total equality between gays and straights, no matter what the costs. They are willing to sacrifice other good, important values in the name of gay equality — such as the religious freedom of same-sex marriage opponents, the welfare of children and (in the case of gays in the military) even national security.

Forty years into this particular social movement, it’s not too late to re-evaluate priorities and find more selfless ways to help gays and lesbians.

Time Magazine weighs in on the biological aspects of the Phantom Gay Past:

Which raises the evolutionary question of why men and women who are exclusive gay and lesbian exist. One answer is that exclusive gays and lesbians are a relatively new creation: the concept of exclusive homosexuality barely existed before modernity; even a century ago, most same-sex-attracted men and women got married and had kids.(Read “Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?”)

As Bailey, Zuk and many others have pointed out, no one has offered an adequate evolutionary explanation for the relatively recent development of exclusive homosexuality among humans. In January, the journal Evolution and Human Behavior published a paper exploring the idea that certain alleles increase the likelihood of homosexuality by blocking the effect of androgens during fetal development. Having all those alleles hampers the masculinization of some parts of the brain that affect personality, making you gay, the theory goes. Brothers of gay men who have only some of the alleles would turn out straight but less aggressive than typical guys. And because those brothers exhibit less psychopathology, they would attract more women and therefore have more kids. It was a provocative theory, but it turned out not to be proved: gay men’s brothers don’t actually have more kids than straight men’s brothers do.

Once again, the opposition to enshrining same-sex relationships in American law has shown itself to be utterly tone-deaf. According to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council,

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the “Uniting American Families Act,” a bill that would allow homosexuals to immigrate to the U.S. with their partners under the same resident status as married spouses. As FRC has argued, there is no reason for Congress to carve out an exception to the immigration rule to accommodate these “partnerships.” In my written testimony, which was submitted today to the Judiciary Committee, I reiterated the fact that “families” are legally recognized by blood, marriage, or adoption. In other words, these same-sex “partnerships” don’t constitute “family” relationships. 

Arguing in favor of privileged male-female relationships (which I do here all the time) does not require alienating millions of common-sense readers and voters who know that two gay guys and a cat (or whatever) are, indeed, a family. Even if he believes a couple of lesbians and their baby are not a family, he’s only making a semantic and definitional argument here, which can be addressed by the other side saying, “Well, OK, let’s change the definition.”

I don’t support adding a whole new classification of people who have the right to go to the head of the visa and citizenship line based on who they have sex with and how. If someone wants to present to me a Salt Lake City style immigration bill, I’ll look at it.