GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

Hi everybody I’m on vacation (in Maui, no less) and haven’t been blogging as often as I like to. However, I am consistently impressed with the high level of discussion on the blog from both sides in the comment section and hope you’ll continue as my blogging slows down (I’ll be back at the end of the month).

A few things to throw into the conversation:

• Obama continues to agree with me on the most important LGBT issues, believe it or not. Rather than pushing for an end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” right away, he’s authorized a study - i.e. he’s listening to the experts, which is exactly what I said he should do last month here on this blog.

• I’m sick of the “1,000 benefits” talk as I am (more) of tired rhetoric on my side. If it was about benefits, there wouldn’t have been an expensive Prop. 8 battle, because Californian same-sex couples already had all the benefits of marriage. But my side is worse - I’m sick of the lazy thinking and ignorance coming from the “It’s not Biblical! This will lead to incest!” crowd. Sigh.

You’ll notice the site has a new quote on the front screen from our president-elect:

I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture. (Dreams from my Father)

To me, Obama’s quote encapsulates my #1 (secular) reason for believing that marriage must be between a man and a woman - that it involves society “carving out a special place” for the best unit of child rearing. (I’ll have more to say on why in a future post.)

I didn’t vote for him, and I’m not a member of his party, but I’m impressed with Obama’s understanding and thoughtfulness when it comes to matters of religion and state. I wrote an essay about this situation for the New York Daily News last October. Here’s an excerpt:

Did you hear about the religious gathering two years ago at which John McCain’s future running mate, Sarah Palin, declared to the conference that “our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition?” Palin also told the faithful gathered that “my Bible tells me” a particular lesson and that “secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.”

Further, at a televised forum as recently as August, Palin said she opposes same-sex marriage in part because “for me as a Christian, it’s also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” She has also written two books that describe her Christian faith and its direct influence on her political views.

Pretty scary, huh?

But Palin didn’t say or do any of those things. Barack Obama did.

It has hardly been noticed, but Obama is the most articulate, most passionate defender of the right - perhaps the obligation - of religious voters, candidates and elected officials to mix their faiths, including those informed by the Bible, into their political lives….

Many of the most important causes in this nation’s history - from the abolition of slavery to African-American civil rights to conscientious objection during the Vietnam War - were motivated by the Bible and religious belief. Heck, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted the Book of Isaiah during his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Obama’s stance is firmly within the American tradition, and especially African-American history going back to Frederick Douglass and beyond.

Of course, religious arguments also have supported bad things like slavery, segregation, denying women the vote and other ills. But the question is not whether Obama’s political views are correct. It’s whether people of faith are out of order to express these views as voters, candidates and elected officials. I think there is no question that a healthy democracy should respect people who select and promote positions based on anything from history books to family traditions to favorite opinion columnists and talk radio hosts to - yes - the Bible.

When people call the use of religious motivations for choosing a political stance “a violation of the separation of church and state,” they are factually incorrect. Church-state issues grow out of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” Letting the Bible or any other religious text or belief influence a political actor’s stance has nothing to do with Congress passing laws about the establishment of religion. Pretending it does unfairly disenfranchises people who are more religious than oneself.

Welcome back to GaysDefendMarriage.com, one of the liveliest places to discuss and debate marriage on the World Wide Web. I shut down GDM last July because I did not want to assist the campaign running Prop. 8, which I considered to be unacceptably antisemitic and homophobic. Now that the campaign is over, and same-sex marriage is still in the news, I thought I’d bring back the blog.

Pretty much anything goes here except libel and name-calling. All opinions are welcome here as long as they don’t distract excessively from the main conversation.

Thanks for visiting!

-David Benkof

It is with great sadness that I announce that I feel I must withdraw from openly supporting man-woman marriage in the United States. I recently learned quite a bit of disturbing information that makes it impossible for me to continue supporting a movement I no longer respect. I have not yet decided when or even if I will write about why I’m ending my participation in this debate.

I’d like to thank Maggie Gallagher of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy who got me started with blogging at MarriageDebate.com and encouraged me to create my own blog, which ultimately became GaysDefendMarriage.com. I’d also like to thank the dozens of commenters, both those who agree with me and those who disagree, who have made this Web site a true place of conversation rather than just another pro-man-woman-marriage site.

In case you’re wondering:

1) I do not advocate that people give time or money to the Proposition 8 campaign in California.

2) People should vote their consciences on the ballot measure. I’m not a California voter, but if I was, I’d probably hold my nose and vote yes, though I can’t be sure.

Have a good summer, everyone!

-David Benkof

Please note that GaysDefendMarriage is on what will hopefully be a short hiatus while I investigate new information that may cause me to re-evaluate my approach to some of the issues discussed on this blog. People are welcome to continue to comment on previous posts, although I will not be posting anything new or responding to comments until the hiatus is over.

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!

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.”

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.

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!

I will be a guest Friday morning, May 23 at 7:05 a.m. on Seattle’s conservative talk station, AM 570 KVI. (This is a reschedule from Tuesday.) I will be discussing this Web site and my thoughts about why LGBT people should stop devoting so many resources to the marriage issue.

The Web site also got a plug in a column I wrote in last Sunday’s LA Daily News. It’s called Same-sex ruling good for no one. From the column:

CHAMPAGNE corks are popping wherever gays and lesbians gather throughout the Golden State after the California Supreme Court’s ruling in In Re Marriage Cases, which opens the way for same-sex couples to legally wed beginning next month. But my fellow members of the LGBT community shouldn’t be celebrating. This decision does next to nothing for California gays and lesbians, and causes real harm to people who believe in the “old” definition of marriage. It’s nothing to be proud of.

A slightly different version of the piece is in the 9th largest-circulation local newspaper in the country, the Philadelphia Inquirer. They headlined it “For better or worse, a bad ruling.”

That piece also appeared in:

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer as “Why California gays shouldn’t celebrate state court ruling”

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as “No ego boost is worth trading away fundamental liberties.”

We’ve also recently received plugs at National Review Online’s “The Corner” and of course, at MarriageDebate.com’s blog. And thank you to timesandseasons.org, which calls us “an awesomely contrarian website.”