GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

In recent weeks supporters of an end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” have pointed to the military magazines of England and Israel, which have featured openly gay soldiers on their covers. England’s official magazine Soldier featured a gay servicemen next to the word “Pride” on its front. Israel’s army magazine earlier this year showed two soldiers hugging on its cover.

The idea is supposed to be, “Look at these other countries, how easy the transition has been to including open gays in the military.”

I take a different message away from it: that once the military accepts open gays, the next step will be for it to celebrate them. We should be able to have fair employment policies without the United States government putting its imprimatur on homosexuality as something to brag about.

I support ending DADT for non-combat positions because I think such a step will help the military in its mission to fight and win wars. But I don’t have any illusions that that step won’t also lead to the gay community asking for more and more and more. I don’t want Navy ship captains to be performing same-sex marriages between sailors. I don’t want the government to offer servicemembers partner benefits available only to those the person in question is having gay sex with, and not others who might be equally worthy of benefits. But we’ve seen in the non-discrimination and gay marriage debates that the gay community will say, “Oh, we’re only looking for this little thing,” and pretty soon they’ll use that as a wedge to foist different policies on an unwilling public.

As part of my ongoing attempt here at GaysDefendMarriage.com to propose ways the LGBT community can move away from harmful, selfish actions like demanding a redefinition of marriage, and toward a more moral, other-oriented vision of gay and lesbian life, I am devoting this blog post to the subject of cleaning up gay pornography.

I was terribly shocked and offended last week when I discovered the many pornographic titles sold to gay men that eroticize prison rape. As far as I can tell, those films have never received any protest from any other gay person or group, even though prison rape is a scandal plaguing our community, which is disproportionately affected by it. Similarly, my Web searches found five categories of gay male pornographic films that are highly problematic.

I am certainly not proposing censorship. But a more moral gay and lesbian community would demand that video companies that serve gay men stop producing such trash, that video stores stop carrying it, and that gay publications stop reviewing it.

This is a serious matter. It’s a basic psychological principle that when a person gets a strong reward, he is more inclined to favor the activity he was involved in at the time. Users of pornography with disturbing content receive very strong rewards, and LGBT people should fight against pornography that tends to reinforce questionable sexual attractions.

1. Anything with the word “boy”

I am fully aware that the actors in the films that use the word “boy” are over the age of 18. But people who watch Daddy’s Boys, Rudeboiz 8, Sauna Boys 3, Seattle Boyz House Party, and Boys Spanking Boys (among many others) run the risk at least subliminally of acting out pedophiliac fantasies. Given the terrible harm that has been done to real boys who have been molested by adult men - not all of whom are gay - I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the adult video companies to replace “boy” with “young adult” or “young man.” Feminist women have been very effective in getting society to call female college students women instead of girls or coeds, so way don’t LGBT people do the same with “boy”?

2. Nonconsensual sex

I found many videos that eroticize forcing straight men to have sex against their will. Some of the videos, like the “Bait Bus” series, ask a straight guy to sit blindfolded while a woman services him - only to find out later it’s really a gay guy. I have no idea if the “straight” guys are really straight, nor if they’re really surprised. The point is, tricking someone into same-sex relations against their will is only erotic to a seriously disturbed person, and I see no reason the LGBT community should cater to such sick fantasies. In addition, there’s a series of “Broke Straight Boys” videos - and again I don’t know if it’s acting or real and I don’t care - in which supposedly heterosexual young men are described as “doing it all for money so they can pay their rent.” If the stars of the movie - either their characters or in real life - literally cannot pay their rent unless they agree to engage in gay sex, that’s hardly consent. It is not sexy, and should not be tolerated by a moral LGBT community.

3. Incest

I know some LGBT people - including at this site - have suggested there’s nothing wrong with brother-brother incest unless you take the Bible into consideration. Even so, the vast majority of Americans oppose first-degree incest of all types - that’s why it’s called a taboo. I found at least 20 videos that eroticize incest, including Brother to Brother, Brother Load, and Twins 3.0. Some of these titles appear to use actors who only look like brothers. Others, especially those featuring twins, certainly use real brothers, some of whom don’t have sex with each other but some of whom do. Is the LGBT community really proud that some gay businesses are paying brothers to engage in incest with each other? I think we can do better.

4. Unsafe

Almost by definition, porn stars have multiple partners. So why do we tolerate the dozens of titles that brag that the sex is “bareback” (without condoms)? We should be concerned about the safety of the actors, but also about eroticizing a mode of sex that could get the viewers killed. Why is a bareback film more acceptable than a film of people playing Russian Roulette? Because that’s essentially what bareback films are. I’m not going to define “watersports” and “fisting” (google them if you have a strong stomach), but such activities are unhygienic at best, dangerous at worst. Why, exactly, do we tolerate them in gay-produced movies?

5. Offensive

Shockingly, gays have found a way to eroticize even the most sensitive of subjects. I find several videos including Black and Bound that eroticize the enslavement of African-Americans. Curious, I searched a few other touchy subjects and wouldn’t you know it - there’s gay Holocaust porn, too. Prominent gay director William Higgins made a film with the innocuous title Carlo and Friends with a sadomasochistic Nazi scene, albeit with a lengthy disclaimer that the film might be “very disturbing” to some viewers. You think? Finally, one would think that gay pornographers would stay away from eroticizing the sex scandals in the Catholic Church, given how many boys had their lives ruined when priests forced them to have gay sex. But no - there’s Our Trespasses, which somehow tries to make the Catholic Church controversies sexy. Is there anything some gay men won’t find erotic with a little music and a little lighting?

Last week, I invited 20 LGBT organizations to join me in calling for America’s prison systems to place most incarcerated transgender women in women’s prisons as a measure to prevent prison rape. Only one organization wrote me back, the National Center for Transgender Equality. They claimed that fighting prison rape was a “priority” for them (but strangely the issue is nowhere to be found at their Web site) but that it would be “irresponsible” to endorse any proposal I make because they are a “serious policy organization.”

What is irresponsible is the gay community’s focus on symbolic issues like same-sex marriage in California while transgender women could be saved from sexual assault (and a possible death sentence given the rates of HIV in prisons) by a simple administrative change we could bring about through a little hard work.

Lately, I’ve been thinking hard about why conservative Christian organizations like Prison Fellowship and Concerned Women for America work so much harder to fight prison rape than LGBT groups, which should be focused on any issue that disproportionately hurts members of our community. I’m coming to suspect that it’s because the Christian organizations - like me - think gay sex is immoral, and thus we’re horrified that anyone would be forced to participate in such acts against their will. LGBT people, for the most part, think gay sex is terrific, and so while they might not particularly approve of prison rape, I guess they figure - “Hey, at least they get to have gay sex.”

Shockingly, a segment of the gay community not only tolerates but actually eroticizes prison rape. A quick Internet search turned up the following adult titles for gay men (click the links at your own peril):

“Jail Bitch” from Tom “Ropes” McGurk
“Prison Master” from Pacific Sun
“Doin’ Hardtime” by Global Media
“The Prisoner’s Song” by Channel 1 Releasing
“Jail Punk” by Graphik Art
“Cellblock #9” from Prison Connection

These are not films about men who fall in love with their cellmates, and make consensual love to ease the discomfort of their time behind bars. The descriptions of these films, and their cover art (I couldn’t bear to actually watch the movies, not even in the name of “research”) make it clear that part of the thrill of watching these movies is the eroticization of forced sex behind bars. Some Web sites selling adult all-male DVDs actually have an entire “Prison” page where shoppers can click to see all the videos in that specialty.

I can’t believe I have to say this, but normal, psychologically healthy people are not aroused by imagining being forced to have intercourse behind bars. Unless the “sexy” part is fantasizing being the prison rapist, in which case I shudder to think what kind of person gets sexual thrills by that.

Child pornography is worse than prison rape videos, but the difference is in magnitude, not in kind. A more moral LGBT community would boycott video stores and Web sites that sell such trash, and pressure their makers to be more responsible. But I’m not holding my breath.

Now, there certainly are “rape” videos for heterosexual men. But they have faced loud protests from both feminist and non-feminist women. By contrast, I have googled and googled and found no LGBT person to have protested against prison-rape videos, much less one of our organized groups.

Not as bad as gay people who find prison rape erotic - but still problematic - are gay people who find prison rape funny. Several visitors to the gay-oriented “Commercial Closet” Web site indicated they were amused by a Virgin Mobile advertisement with a prison rape theme. Edward Hall of Sanford, Florida said “I apologize to anyone that has been raped while in prison but keep a light heart.” I did not make that up. In addition, I was recently the target of a prison rape joke at a gay Web site. “QVegas” over at the Queerty site said two other gay Republicans and I “should be handcuffed together in a daisy chain and dropped into the middle of a prison yard with no condoms. They all hate our ‘gay ways’ so let ‘real men’ have at them.” No one deserves to be raped, not even gay Republicans - and it’s just not funny.

I’m going to keep blogging and trying to build coalitions to protect incarcerated LGBT people, especially transgender women, from sexual assault. If the gay community continues to laugh at - and get their jollies from - prison rape, while doing virtually nothing to stop it, I don’t know what else I can do.

(In the meantime, I urge people to support Stop Prison Rape, the best organization working to address this alarming crisis.)

UPDATE: I just read about lesbian “comedian” Rosie O’Donnell’s remark at a gay concert-fundraiser yesterday comparing prison rape to being paid huge sums of money to gossip about celebrities with Barbara Walters and Joy Behar. Does anyone doubt that the crowd roared with laughter? Sigh. Most LGBT people just don’t get it….

I have a new permanent page up: “Selfless agenda.”

Because I have frequently criticized the terrible selfishness of today’s gay and lesbian community, I thought it important to lay out what I think would be a selfless gay agenda, one I could readily endorse and promote wholeheartedly.

1. Relationship recognition. I have demonstrated why it’s wrong to meddle with marriage, but that doesn’t mean same-sex couples don’t have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed. Rather than focus on the ego boost from having the government treat us as exactly equal (even when we’re not), the LGBT community should promote national, state, and local versions of the Salt Lake City plan, which allows all unmarried adults to appoint one person to receive a set of benefits. We should ask for a broad variety of benefits including hospital visitation, custody, and health care. Rather than using the relationship recognition issue to call attention to how special we are for having same-sex conjugal relationships “just like marriage,” we can be broad-minded and make sure non-conjugal relationships, like best friends and roommates, are included as well.

2. Nondiscrimination. The selfish gay community has put tremendous energy into passing state and federal laws that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and sometimes gender identity as well. But our nation’s nondiscrimination laws are a mess. Groups get protection because they can afford lobbyists to pass laws protecting them - which means the groups who need protection the most are left in the cold. Rather than cry “me too!” the LGBT community could lead a national conversation about how to write nondiscrimination laws that balance a business owner’s right to run her company how she wants, and the rights of people to do their jobs without being afraid of unfair treatment because of who they are. We can also try to come up with a single clear, coherent way to determine who gets covered by nondiscrimination laws, and who doesn’t.

3. Hate crimes. Laws should never try to regulate people’s thoughts, instead of their actions. So sentencing enhancement because the victim was gay or transgender (but not if she was a communist or overweight) is another sign of LGBT self-centeredness. Instead, let’s focus on toughening penalties for the kinds of crimes gays often face - but apply the penalties to everyone. Battery and assault, for starters. Prison rape, for another.

4. “Anti-bullying laws.” The latest trend in pro-gay legislation mandates indoctrination in pro-gay attitudes under the guise of preventing bullying. But America’s populace has lots of different attitudes about homosexuality, and insisting that LGBT attitudes get taught while other, equally legitimate attitudes are declared “bigotry” is, once again, selfish. In younger grades, homosexuality doesn’t belong in the curriculum at all - it can be taught at home, if at all. In older grades, let’s encourage lessons that respect everyone’s views, including but not limited to our own.

5. Not blaming the victim. In the 1980s and 1990s, the gay community responded strongly to the challenge of HIV, and worked assiduously to comfort and protect people who contracted AIDS, usually through gay sex. Now, more and more LGBT people are saying that the people getting AIDS today (usually poor black men who have sex with men) don’t deserve our sympathy and attention now that “everyone knows” how to avoid the virus. I disagree. I think the gay community should put more resources into education, research, and treatment for a variety of LGBT people in need - gay and bisexual men with HIV, lesbians at a higher risk for alcoholism, transgender women who are overrepresented in prison.

6. The military. I believe that gays and lesbians should serve openly in the armed forces. But I’m not an expert at whether out gays would help or harm the military’s primary mission - to win wars. I’ve heard some selfish gays say that even if it would have caused America to lose World War II, it would have been worth it to let gays serve openly. Well, I’m sorry, but there are some things more important than gay self-esteem - like, um, beating the Nazis. Let’s focus our energies on convincing the generals that ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will help them, not hurt them, in their main objective. Once the generals are on board, Congress is sure to follow.

7. Fighting homophobia. There are two federal policies that exist for no reason than to accommodate homophobia. The need to be repealed - not for the symbolism, but for the real hurts they cause to real people, not all of whom are gay. First, the ban on visits and immigration by people who are HIV+ is a Jesse Helms-era slam at the gay community that President Bill Clinton shamefully signed into law. George W. Bush wants to sign legislation allowing the government to reverse it, but the gay community has mostly been MIA on the issue, probably because it doesn’t directly affect us. Second, the FDA does not allow men who have had sex with men in the last 20 years - even if they are HIV-negative and celibate or monogamous - to donate blood or even to be tissue typed to see if they can save someone’s life. This too, should be a priority for the gay community, but barely gets any attention by our national organizations.

8. Adoption. We must overturn Florida’s ban on adoption by lesbians and gay men. The policy hurts children and insults the parenting ability of an entire class of people. If straight people in Florida were adopting all the available children, that would be one thing, but to keep children orphans when there are good homes waiting for them is just wrong. We should also undertake a massive campaign in the gay and especially the lesbian community about the joys of adopting. Unfortunately, an increasing number of same-sex couples are creating babies from scratch rather than adopting, which means rather than giving a child with no parents two same-sex parents, they’re deliberately bringing a child into the world without both a mother and a father. Such an act is selfish and cruel, and even worse since they’re victimizing their own child. While same-sex baby-making cannot and should not be made illegal, the LGBT community can do a lot to make adoption “cool” and baby-making less so.

Because I have frequently complained that the gay movement has ignored important issues in its marriage obsession, I thought it’s probably my responsibility to adopt at least one non-marriage LGBT issue around which to express my gay activism. Since, as many of you know, I am passionate about protecting LGBT prisoners from rape, I have come up with a practical plan to protect some incarcerated members of our community from sexual assault, and I will work on promoting that plan - along with passing the man-woman marriage initiatives in California, Florida, and Arizona between now and November.

It strikes me that the one group that perhaps suffers the most from prison rape - transgender women - can be rescued from regular and humiliating sexual assault through a simple administrative change in the way our prisons are organized.

Transgender women are among the most frequent targets for prison rape. After all, they are the only women in prisons filled with predatory, violent, mostly heterosexual men. It would be a surprise if they didn’t regularly face being raped. Many prison officials have the attitude that such prisoners deserve or even “like” it. Some post-operative transgender women are housed in women’s prisons, but others along with nearly all transgender women who live and identify as female but have not chosen or could not afford reassignment surgery are housed in men’s prisons.

If the state and federal prison systems had policies that transgender women - both pre- and post-op - should be housed in women’s prisons unless they request otherwise, we could prevent the overwhelming majority of prison rapes against such victims.

I’m sure some people will be concerned that incarcerated women may not be comfortable being housed together with prisoners who were born male, some of whom still have penises. But prisoners have much fewer civil rights than the rest of us, and if the government decides to make a safety move that makes a female prisoner uncomfortable, that will likely be one of the least uncomfortable aspects of her prison experience.

I have searched the Internet, and none of the major gay and lesbian organizations - nor even the transgender organizations - has ever proposed such a bold yet simple step.

Don’t LGBT organizations consider transgender women to be real women? Why don’t they use their considerable power and influence in Washington and state capitals like Sacramento and Albany to convince the government to stop treating MTF women as if they were just quirky men, particularly if allowing them to continue doing so will mean some of the most helpless members of our community will continue to face unconscionable, horrific sexual violence?

I’ve spoken to some of the terrific staff members at Stop Prison Rape, and they are sympathetic to the kind of changes I’m suggesting. But they have nowhere near the resources and influence of the organized gay and lesbian community. If our organizations tried, I’m certain they could convince at least some prison systems to stop treating transgender women as men, and thus protect them from rape.

Gay and lesbian groups are currently spending millions of dollars to make sure the same rights in California are called “marriage” instead of “domestic partnership.” The major transgender issue they have fought over in the last few years is whether a workplace fairness bill nobody expects to pass covers sexual orientation alone or gender identity as well. Meanwhile, the simple step I’m proposing would relieve real distress on the part of some of the most vulnerable transgender people anywhere. Can these groups please stop being selfish for one minute and notice that there are members of our community suffering from substantive, rather than symbolic, problems?

A piece I wrote for the LGBT press but couldn’t publish in any gay newspaper because of the “activism” of my opponents is in Wednesday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune. That’s the 12th-largest metropolitan daily in the country, and the third-largest in the Midwest. As of midnight, my piece was both the most-viewed and most-E-mailed opinion piece on the Star-Tribune Web site.

I’ve excerpted the parts that relate to marriage below:

Now that the gay white men in American cities who are the main funders of the LGBT movement are no longer dying quite so often from AIDS, the lesbian and gay community has moved on to other issues, such as marriage, while millions of people, many of them men of color who have sex with men, are still suffering from HIV-related illness.

In my eyes, “marriage equality” is a far less important gay and lesbian issue than the fight against HIV/AIDS. Virtually the entire gay community felt that way when I first became a gay activist. After all, what lesbian ever died a horrible, painful death because the government called her relationship a domestic partnership instead of a marriage?

UPDATE: I just found out that my W piece will appear in a daily newspaper in a major East Coast city next Tuesday. That means the total circulation of the papers running this piece will be close to a half a million - instead of at most 20,000 had I run the same piece in the gay press. Good going, guys!

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. : )

When I was a sexually active gay man living in places like San Francisco and West Hollywood, I knew that nothing was more pleasing to most gays and lesbians than being treated as if homosexuality were completely equal to heterosexuality. I remember getting excited when a college professor would lecture about gay sexuality in a completely matter-of-fact, approving way. During the Clinton Administration, I listened raptly to every State of the Union address hoping the president would use the word “gay.” When he did, I felt like a million bucks. When he didn’t, I was annoyed and maybe a little insulted.

The gay community’s obsession with marriage strikes me as an expression of excitement about a gay issue that makes same-sex couples look wholesome and all-American. That same attitude causes gays and lesbians to de-emphasize and even ignore urgent needs of our community that happen not to make us look good. It seems the gay community is setting its priorities as if we’re just in the middle of a big PR campaign to improve our public image. That’s really sad.

For example, here are four important issues I care about that involve real distress on the part of gays and lesbians that can be alleviated without hurting straight people:

• Lesbians are more likely to become alcoholics than straight women or men. I would support a few million dollars in federal funds to research why that is so, and to explore effective strategies to prevent and treat lesbian alcoholism. This is no small issue. Alcoholism is linked to terrible things like domestic abuse, drunk driving, and liver disease. Family members are often devastated by a loved one’s alcoholism. People who care about lesbians should want to find ways to work on this issue. But the Web sites of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and even the National Center for Lesbian Rights combined contain one mention of lesbian alcoholism. They contain more than 6,000 mentions of marriage.

• Prison rape is ignored by most of the gay community. The fact that forced gay sex is a de facto method of social control in our prisons should be a good enough reason to fight prison rape. But it’s also true that gay and bisexual men, and transgender women are disproportionately victims of this terrible phenomenon. Yet NGLTF mentions prison rape on its Web site a total of three times, which is actually impressive compared to HRC’s big fat zero.

• The main way people get syphilis is through gay sex. If there ever was a “gay disease,” this is it. And it’s on the rise. Victims of the illness face horrible pain, blindness, paralysis, and insanity if they don’t get the proper treatment. HRC’s Web site mentions syphilis among gay men twice - the same number of times they encourage lesbians to make sure the sperm they use when (selfishly) making a baby doesn’t have the disease.

• Currently, the Bush administration is pushing harder to pass legislation to allow HIV-positive men to immigrate to and visit this country than the major gay and lesbian organizations are. You’ll never hear it from the gay groups, but President Bush is unquestioningly the best president on AIDS issues ever. We don’t know if the next president will sign a bill lifting the ban. Most of the rest of this administration will be distracted by the election. So it is currently urgent that we pass the bill pending before Congress that would allow the government to lift the ban, so Bush can sign it and we can get rid of this homophobic legacy of the Jesse Helms reign of terror toward lesbians and gay men. With congressional legislation, HRC is the main gay group to lobby our representatives. Yet you have to look really hard at their Web site to find mention of the bill. It’s there - but only nine times. Yet marriage is all over the front page and virtually every page of the Web site.

There’s a GaysDefendMarriage reader named Mark who thinks when I raise issues like the above I’m “concern trolling” - I’m pretending to sympathize to distract and confuse people on the other side. I know that isn’t true. But even if Mark thinks it is true, the key question isn’t why I care about those issues more than marriage, but why do people like Mark appear to care about marriage thousands of times more than those other issues?

I think it’s because their main goal isn’t actually helping gay people. If it was, I’ve just listed four issues that would help gay people far more directly and clearly and compassionately than changing the word for the completely equal state benefits given by the State of California to same-sex couples. The issue, rather, is public relations. “See, America? We’re just like you.” Lesbian alcoholics and syphilitic gay men and transgender women getting raped in prison are most definitely not “like you.” So we’re not going to do anything that could make us look bad - even if it means those transgender women getting raped in prison and the lesbians drinking themselves to death and gay men going blind from syphilis have to suffer terribly.

And people get mad at me when I say most gays are selfish and morally obtuse. Well, I’m mad at them for being selfish and morally obtuse.

What’s worse, the only “victims” of a federally funded study on why lesbians are more at risk for drinking problems and how to best help them are taxpayers who are charged a fraction of a penny each. There are no victims to lifting the HIV immigration ban. And who are the victims of fighting prison rape - the rapists?

Yet changing the definition of marriage has direct negative effects on other people. In Massachusetts, it has meant that orphans who want both a mother and a father are less likely to get them. From what gay activists are telling me, it will put teachers and businesspeople and journalists at risk of losing their assets, their jobs, and even their freedom if they continue to live their lives as if the definition of marriage they believe in is true instead of the “new” definition. (Something that never happened to people who believed in gay marriage under the old definition.) It will hurt the monogamous expectation of marriage by admitting to the institution far more people than ever who openly reject monogamy as a necessary part of marriage. And it will hurt parents’ ability to instill in their children a traditionally religious view of marriage when the public schools start teaching that it’s bigotry to believe that man-woman marriage is the only acceptable kind of relationship to form.

Of course, gay activists keep telling me that those harms either aren’t harms or that they only harm “bigoted” people, which they say is OK. Well, when do we ever let the people causing the harm decide whether any harm is actually caused? It’s usually much better to speak with the victims.

When I say same-sex marriage is not a good idea, and a lesbian says “but your position could cause me to lose my children,” my immediate reaction is to look for a legislative solution that ensures she won’t lose her children - but still respects my values that marriage is between a man and a woman. Yet I have never heard a gay man react to any of the points above by saying “Well, what if we have gay marriage, but ensure your kids can learn your values about marriage by barring the schools from teaching anything about marriage until sixth grade.” or “Oh, good point. Well, what if we pass gay marriage but add a stipulation that no teacher can be fired by teaching her own definition of marriage.” Instead, I get people like Mark, who tells me he intends for people like me “to lose pretty much totally.”

Same-sex marriage is the most important issue to the gay community because it makes them look good and feel good, not because it helps gay people very much, especially in places like California. Yet the lack of action on issues like prison rape and the HIV immigration ban and lesbian alcoholism shows that the gay community cares very little about helping gays and lesbians affected by problems that make the gay community look bad.

I think the gay community needs to show it is “equal” in moral reasoning before it starts demanding to be equal in marriage law.

We haven’t heard from many women lately, nor many left-of-center opponents of same-sex marriage, so I thought I’d link to one of the first pieces staking out that territory. It’s from Salon, and it’s headlined “Same-sex marriage: I don’t care if it is legal, I still think it’s wrong — and I’m a lesbian.”

Author Dr. Laurie Essig is an assistant professor of sociology at Middlebury College in Vermont. She teaches a variety of undergraduate courses including “Sociology of Freakishness” and “Sociology of Heterosexuality.”

Some excerpts:

Although we like to pretend that marriage is natural and universal, it is an institution founded in historical, material and cultural conditions that ensured women’s oppression — and everyone’s disappointment. Monogamous, heterosexual marriages were an invention of the Industrial Revolution’s emerging middle class….

What annoys me is that no one, not even queers, can imagine anything other than marriage as a model for organizing our desires….

But why should those of us who have organized our lives in a way that looks a lot like heterosexual marriage be afforded special recognition by the government because of that?….

The legalization of gay marriage does not make me feel liberated as much as it makes me feel depressed. It’s sort of like getting excited about gays in the military — until I remember that I don’t really care about the military as an institution.

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.