GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

1. You obviously feel that gender matters, or else lesbians could be attracted to men and gay men could be attracted to women; both genders have hands and faces and hearts and can kiss and hug and be aroused and love. If gender didn’t matter, we’d all be bisexual, right? So if gender matters in selecting a partner, shouldn’t it matter in parenting, too?

2. If a child’s parents died, all else being equal, would you rather she was raised by an aunt and an uncle or two aunts (sisters)? Would it matter? Why or why not?

In survey after survey, younger voters tend to favor gay marriage at higher rates than older voters. After a survey last May which showed such a trend, Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said the results displayed a “generational replacement,” with older voters being replaced by younger voters who supported same-sex marriage.

But what if this isn’t a generational issue, but rather an age issue? Young voters tend not to be married, a fact that could be significant in terms of attitudes toward this issue. As today’s young voters get older and marry and have children, could they come to appreciate that mothers and fathers make different kinds of contributions to the raising of a child? It certainly is possible.

1. The “Salt Lake City Plan” is the best way out of the gay-marriage morass. It allows individuals to designate any one person with whom he or she has a mutual commitment to receive benefits. The pair could be a mother and an adult son, two straight male roommates, or lesbian lovers. Because lots of conservatives can support such a system, this plan could provide aid to same-sex and other non-married couples now, at federal, state and local levels. All it leaves out is the ego boost of same-sex couples being told they’re exactly equal - which is little sacrifice, because they’re not.

2. One of the reasons for man-woman marriage is that whenever possible children need both mothers and fathers. That doesn’t mean gays can’t be good parents; they can. A lesbian can be a terrific mother, for example, but she cannot be a good father. Laws restricting gays from adopting should be repealed, but so should laws preventing adoption agencies from taking into account whether a family has both a mother and a father.

3. One reason gay marriage is not a good idea is that gay people, by and large, do not understand marriage the same way straight people do. There is extreme tolerance of open relationships of various sorts, a kind of agreed-upon infidelity. I am not saying that all gay people cheat, or no straight people cheat. I am saying that most gay and lesbian people think “arrangements” can be completely compatible with marriage, and very few straight people agree with them. Thus, gay marriage will change the nature of marriage.

4. The gay community, which once addressed all kinds of issues affecting its members, has become a big PR campaign emphasizing issues, like marriage, that make us look good and seem “just like you.” But gays and lesbians aren’t “just like” straights in every way, and we have special needs that involve LGBT suffering that should be addressed by LGBT organizations and the government. These include lesbian alcoholism, syphilis among gay and bisexual men, and prison rape among gay and bisexual men and especially transgender women. 

5. We need laws guaranteeing that despite whichever protections for gays and lesbians and institutions for same-sex partners exist, they do not trample on the rights of people to perform their jobs, run their businesses, and raise their children consistently with their beliefs about what marriage is and what the ideal way to raise a child is.

6. Democracy is central to our governmental system. Some people, like me, believe same-sex relations and gay marriage are immoral. Some of those, like me, have also identified cogent civic reasons to oppose same-sex marriage that inform their First Amendment expression and their vote. But nobody has to answer to anyone for why they support or oppose anything when it comes to their votes and First Amendment rights. It is not “imposing one’s religion” to support laws that are consistent with one’s values; that’s what both sides do.

7. Despite what they often say, gays and lesbians are not focused on benefits or rights, or else they would not have spent $40 million on a symbolic and semantic change in California which already granted all the rights of marriage to same-sex couples. This battle is primarily about gay and lesbian self-esteem, which is understandably damaged because of many decades of straight hegemony. But no child should have to suffer, or traditionally religious person be forced to violate her conscience, in order to soothe a gay person’s feelings.

A June 10 report in the Health section of the New York Times headlined “Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage” has led proponents of same-sex marriage to trumpet the news that same-sex marriage may actually be good for marriage as a whole. Comments about the article at the Web sites and print editions of the Human Rights Campaign blog, Marriage Equality News, the Washington Blade, the Volokh Conspiracy, the Huffington Post, Seattle’s The Stranger, and the comments section of this very blog have treated the article as the smoking gun that proves gay marriage is good for America after all.

It’s clear that the alleged differences pointed to in the article, that same-sex couples are “far more egalitarian” and “have more relationship satisfaction” are intended to show that admitting gay couples to the institution of marriage will help marriage altogether. Other very real differences that while perhaps beneficial, would clearly have no influence on straight couples, like the fact that lesbian couples often find their menstrual cycles in sync, or that gay couples frequently share an entire wardrobe of clothes, were not mentioned.

Now, if the experts cited in the New York Times article are reliable on ways same-sex couples are different that make gays look good, surely they are reliable on the ways same-sex couples are different that make gays look, well, less good. All three of the experts directly quoted in the article, Dr. Sondra Solomon, Dr. Esther Rothblum, and Dr. Robert W. Levenson have written other studies that the “marriage equality” movement would surely prefer nobody find out about.

For example, Solomon and Rothblum did a 2005 study together examining the attitudes toward sexual fidelity of couples that entered civil unions in Vermont - a status that provides all state benefits of marriage. More than 50 percent of the male-male relationships reported having arrangements with their partner that allowed for sexual activity outside the relationship. Do “marriage equality” advocates believe that Solomon and Rothblum’s findings about egalitarianism will spill over to the entire society but that their findings about sexual infidelity will not?

In addition, Levenson participated in a 2003 study that stated that compared to married male-female couples, both gay and lesbian couples reported more autonomy and more frequent relationship dissolution. I guess it’s possible that California same-sex relationhips have become more stable and interdependent now that the exact same rights and benefits the state grants are called “marriage” instead of “domestic partnership,” but I doubt it.

Now, it’s possible that some people want marriage to be more egalitarian as well as less monogamous and less stable. Personally, I want none of those things. As an Orthodox Jew, I expect any marriage I enter into to have a fairly traditional division of roles. But surely the expectation of the “marriage equality” activists in publicizing the article citing these experts is that undecided voters who want marriage to become more egalitarian should support same-sex marriage. My response is that their expectation is fine, as long as those voters also want marriage to be more sexually open and more likely to dissolve.

The other options are for gay-marriage activists to withdraw their argument based on the Times article, or to come up with some explanation why these academics are trustworthy in some of their research, but fraudulent in other parts of their research.

I’d like to close by citing Rothblum one more time. She said two years ago that these days the difference when a state grants marriage or a marriage-like status to same-sex couples is “largely symbolic,” which supports my question why the gay movement is spending millions of dollars on a symbolic issue in California when there are many, many actual and painful problems facing LGBT people, especially in states much less friendly than California, that we could be addressing. I have yet to hear a good answer to that question.

I recently received the following E-mail:

Thank you very much for your work. Far too often the defense of marriage as a union between a man and a woman has been associated with homophobia. It is refreshing to see an openly LGBT person of faith argue that same-sex marriage is not a boon for gays or straights. It is especially outstanding to see someone speak prophetically about the problems of the socially marginalized members of our community, especially in prisons. You are a real son of Moses and Isaiah.

We’re in somewhat similar situations. I am a bisexual (Kinsey 2 or 3) person of faith. I’m in the junior reaches of academia, and am doing research in gender studies and intellectual history. I am working on translating my academic knowledge into something useful for popular debate.

Anyway, I hope this doesn’t sound like a strange email, but sometimes we end up in “queer” situations.

When I told Wayne Besen I didn’t expect him to actually apologize for accusing me of “misleading” people that I’m getting paid for writing op-eds even after he finds out that I am, in fact, getting paid for writing op-eds, I told him I’m aware that “being gay means never having to say you’re sorry.” He responded: “That is a really hateful and ignorant statement. I demand a public apology for such propaganda” which kind of underscores my point. Wayne, in typical gay fashion, won’t apologize even when the facts are clear that he falsely accused someone of lying. Yet he will demand “a public apology” for anyone who criticizes LGBT people, no matter how deserved the criticism.

But I’ve been thinking about it. I’m just as gay as Wayne is. And I’ve never apologized for any of the terrible things gays and lesbians have done in recent years. So I’m going to devote this blog post to apologizing for LGBT misdeeds - not on behalf of the gay community, because I think it’s clear I have a very small constituency here at GaysDefendMarriage.com. But I will apologize on behalf of myself. To my knowledge, no prominent gay person has ever apologized for any of the five things listed below. I’ll be brave enough to be the first, and I encourage other members of our community to join me in having the strength to express regret for hurting innocent people.

In order to keep this post of manageable length, I won’t be able to fully enumerate the LGBT wrongs related to any of the topics below, nor to propose appropriate amends to atone for our misdeeds. But if people are interested perhaps I can do so in future posts.

1) Heterosexual AIDS

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 miniscule 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. Now, I wasn’t openly gay until 1989, but I do remember raising a ruckus about “AIDS is not a gay disease,” despite the overwhelming evidence that AIDS was, and is, pretty much a gay disease, at least in America. I’m sorry. I was wrong.

2) Sexual Molestation

Whenever a Boy Scout leader is caught diddling young teen Scouts, or a priest is sued for fellating choir boys, the professional homosexuals trot out and declare that most child molesters, including the accused in that particular case, are “not gay.” Oh, please. Most such cases are not pedophiles who equally victimize little boys and little girls. These dreadful predators tend to be ephebophilies - men who are attracted to adolescent boys, and who coerce them into sexual activities that are precisely the same as the ones gay and bisexual men do in bedrooms, bathhouses, parks, and piers with each other. When two penguins or monkeys are found to be engaging in those same activities, the professional homosexuals rush to the microphones and announce the animals are “gay.” If a lizard who can’t speak or count to ten is “gay” when it sodomizes another same-sex lizard, what exactly is “not gay” about a Scoutmaster who does the same thing to a 12-year-old? The fact is, the gay community should apologize for and take steps toward preventing future cases of same-sex molestation. I’m really, really sorry people who enjoy the same sexual activities I am inclined toward have been hurting so many young men and boys.

3) Constitutional Amendments

The LGBT people who pushed the Hawaii and other lawsuits in the mid-1990s were fully aware they might provoke state and federal constitutional amendments to restrict the rights of same-sex couples. Indeed, 18 states now have constitutional amendments barring gay marriage or even civil unions. That means in order to get marginal benefits for same-sex couples in the super-pro-gay states of California and Massachusetts, couples in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, and a dozen other states have been sacrificed and now have no reasonable chance of any rights at all barring a Constitutional amendment or a U.S. Supreme Court decision implementing same-sex marriage nationwide, two things nobody seriously expects any time soon. I did speak out publicly against the lawsuit strategy in 1996 when I was still a sexually active gay man, but I now regret that I did not do more to stop the selfish, short-sighted lawsuits. I am deeply sorry for the pain I have caused same-sex couples in Houston, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Columbus, Ann Arbor, and many other places who can’t even be sure they can visit the most important person in their lives in the hospital because gay leaders are so cruel.

4) Blocking measures to stop the early spread of AIDS

This is almost never talked about, but while I’m apologizing I might as well lay it all out. AIDS activists in the gay community have made a big fuss about blaming Ronald Reagan and Ed Koch and various other bogeymen for the early spread of HIV, but we should really be pointing our finger at ourselves. The gay obsession with equal treatment and sexual liberation meant that in the early 1980s, when AIDS really could have been slowed, nearly all accepted public health strategies for combating an epidemic were thwarted by a gay community that kept whining about its civil liberties. Well, if there’s an outbreak of West Nile or Ebola or Bird Flu, civil liberties should be the last thing people worry about, because new viruses carry the risk of wiping out huge swaths of the population. In the first years of the AIDS epidemic, there should have been contact tracing - with names - and major sites of transmission, like bathhouses, should have been closed. Even quarantine should have been on the table. Instead we had gay activists declaring that “the government will close the baths over my dead body” - activists who often died soon thereafter. I was not yet openly gay at the time of this tragedy, but I can at least apologize that I haven’t apologized sooner for the fact people like me blamed others for the terrible things we did ourselves.

5) Stonewall Rebellion

Since the early 1970s, I am apparently the only prominent voice in the LGBT community to have criticized the horribly immoral Stonewall rebellion, and especially the celebration of it in gay pride celebrations and the names of organizations like the Stonewall Democrats. But I do not think I have ever apologized for it. During my time as a sexually active gay man I certainly spoke approvingly of Stonewall and I attended at least 25 gay pride celebrations of the anniversary of Stonewall, as many as eight per summer in the mid-1990s. I realize now that the New York City cops and the journalist that the Stonewall rebels nearly murdered were innocent of any wrongdoing, especially since the Stonewall Inn was an illegal mafia-run institution. While violence is called for in extreme cases like torture or genocide, gays faced nothing like that in New York City in the summer of 1969, and nothing more than a little civil disobedience would have been appropriate. It is embarrassing to me that so many LGBT people take such joy in dreadful behavior by members of our community. To New York City cops and to journalists everywhere, I am sorry for what we did to you at Stonewall, and I am especially sorry for pretending like our unprovoked violent attack on you is something to celebrate. I promise never to do it again.

Over the weekend, I got an e-mail promoting same-sex marriage from a gay Democrat named Patrick Nailon. We went back and forth on a few topics, and he finally summarized his supposedly air-tight case against the California Marriage Protection Act in three points, which I responded to:

1. By specifically excluding law-abiding, tax-paying, worshiping, honest members of the community specifically because of a difference in lifestyle, Prop 8 is discriminatory, and thus unconstitutional. Marriage has been amended throughout the history of the US to include different colors, which at that time was considered an assault on traditional marriage and interracial marriage resulted in arrests and people having to leave their states. Unconstitutional is wrong.

By now, long-time readers know what I think of the “it’s discriminatory, and thus unconstitutional” argument when applied to a constitutional amendment. No, he wasn’t referring to the federal constitution, and no, he’s probably never heard of the concept of a “revision” (which I’m still waiting to see an expert say would make an amendment unconstitutional). He has this asinine opinion that there’s some mysterious force in our democracy that will overrule a constitutional amendment that he considers discriminatory. As for “unconstitutional is wrong,” I wonder how he feels about the DC gun law, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. Are all laws like that one that restrict gun ownership “wrong” because they’re unconstitutional? And there is no question that in Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and many other states same-sex marriage or anything like it is unconstitutional. Does that mean Patrick thinks it’s “wrong” for two lesbians to marry each other in Dallas, Detroit, Atlanta, or Cleveland?

2. The Constitution of the United States of America specifically allows churches to practice as they will, including the right to marry whom they will. This also guarantees the rights of gays to marry, provided their congregation supports gay marriage. Just as one religion may prohibit eating cows and another allow it, freedom of worship, like freedom of “pursuit of happiness” is a right guaranteed in the US.

Uh, no. Fundamentalist Mormon churches allow polygamy - does that mean the laws must accommodate them? If I started a church that said a man can marry his adult sister, must incest then be legal? The Supreme Court has found Native Americans do not have a constitutional right to ingest peyote - they must get specific legislative permission or face our nation’s drug penalties.

3. The Pledge of Allegiance states that we are a nation of “…Liberty and Justice for all.” With laws that specifically forbid the right of marriage from certain members of the population, these words are a mockery and an insult to the men and women who died to pass down these rights to this and future generations.

Nobody except Patrick draws legislative conclusions from the Pledge of Allegiance. The current version of the Pledge is only 54 years old. And of course Patrick conveniently ignores that part about “Under G-d.”

I told Patrick that his three arguments are so unbelievably weak that I’m actually thrilled. If that’s the best his side can come up with, convincing voters to pass Proposition 8 will be a breeze.

He responded with a lengthy E-mail quoting several of the Lyin’ Kings and silly activists I’ve been talking about at GaysDefendMarriage.com. It also contained several death threats.

I actually hope most supporters of same-sex marriage are more sophisticated than Patrick - we have a few who clearly hold their own when they comment here at GaysDefendMarriage.com. Because debating against someone like him is far, far too easy.

Yesterday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), his party’s presumptive nominee for president of the United States, gave an outstanding speech here in St. Louis (I couldn’t go because of Shabbat) in which he embraced the role religion has played in his life and politics. I’m not planning on voting for him, but if he’s elected, I believe Obama will have the most nuanced, carefully considered view on faith and politics of any American president in history.

For example, in a speech interrupted by shouts of “Amen,” he said yesterday:

The values we believe in - empathy and justice and responsibility to ourselves and our neighbors - these cannot only be expressed in our churches and our synagogues, but in our policies and in our laws.

I am moved to hear the leading candidate for the nation’s highest office speak about his belief that we should try to express our church- and synagogue-based values in our nation’s laws in part because of the difficulty I’ve had with “marriage equality” supporters who have been nearly hysterical in their insistence that doing with Obama and I have been doing is unconstitutional, theocratic, and downright rude.

Some examples:

Popsiclestand at boxturtlebulletin.com wrote: “The one mistake I might have made was not realizing that your particular interpretation of Judaism calls for a theocratic government. Sorry about that, but I’m afraid you’re in the wrong country for that crap.”

SammySeattle at Joe.My.God wrote “Mr. Benkof once again cannot get past religion and see this as a civil matter. Separate is never equal. The government will not ‘redefine’ marriage in the Jewish religion, it will only enhance marriage in the civil forum. ”

Bruce Garrett, of boxturtlebulletin.com wrote “It’s about forcing people into one way of life versus letting them live their own lives. If you think same sex marriage is immoral, then don’t have one. If you think sex outside of wedlock is sinful then don’t do that. By all means, live your life according to your ‘traditional’ religious values. But you need to extend the same respect to your neighbors.”

RobertinCali at Joe.My.God wrote “Religious zealots who use the shield of ‘I’m one, so listen to me’ should be shouted down by the chorus of supporters. Benkof and his ilk are using old arguments to try and deny rights to us. They think that our right to marry is going to harm their marriages in innumerable ways…. Benkof needs to call his argument what it is, his religious belief, not the opinion of the ‘Community.’”

PiaSharn, of boxturtlebulletin.com wrote “I’m not a member of your religion. So I don’t understand why I should be forced to live my life according to your beliefs. Not all religions think that same-sex marriage is wrong. But you seem to be saying that everyone should be legally forced to conform to your religious beliefs.”

Now, please understand: I have never tried to impose my beliefs upon the nation as a dictator or a theocracy. All I have done is try to use my one vote and my freedom of speech and freedom of the press to promote policies that are motivated in part but not in whole by my deeply held religious beliefs.

If that approach is dangerous, it is a million times more dangerous when Obama does it than when I do. After all, he appears to be a few months away from the most powerful and most symbolic office in the land.

But where are the protests of popsiclestand and SammySeattle against Obama? It appears that promoting policies based on faith is OK when a Democrat does it, and offensive and unconstitutional when a Republican does it. In other words, they’re making absolutely no point at all.

I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing. My hunch is Obama will as well.

There’s a worldview that lies beneath the contemporary debate on same-sex marriage and other controversies related to homosexuality. More and more people have come to believe that being gay means membership in a naturally occurring minority in every society. The problem is, it’s just not true. However, explaining the scholarship (which has almost all been done by LGBT scholars) that proves being gay is a culturally bound phenomenon arising in Western society over the last 150 years is not easy to do in a paragraph or two - or even in an 800-word column.

So I’ve written a new permanent page - “Phantom Past” with a more than 3,000-word essay citing a half-dozen leading gay and lesbian historians and anthropogists, which meticulously refutes the errors made by people who espouse the widespread mistaken belief that a certain percentage of every society across space and time has been, is, and will be gay or lesbian.

The debate on same-sex marriage needs to be understood in the context of the role of both freedom and equality in the American gay and lesbian past.

Since sexual minorities began to organize in the United States the 1950s, gays and lesbians have experienced alternating periods - some emphasizing freedom, and some emphasizing equality. For example, during the McCarthy era, gays emphasized equality - not losing security clearances because of your sexuality, and not having the government stigmatize and even arrest you because of the way you have sex.

In the 1970s, however, freedom was more important. After all, the most visible gay organization right after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion was the Gay Liberation Front. Liberation, of course, means freedom. And the lesbian separatist movement that promoted books like Jill Johnston’s Lesbian Nation and events like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (founded in 1976), by definition didn’t want to integrate into American society, but to have the freedom to build self-contained lesbian-feminist communities.

Today’s same-sex marriage movement has all the hallmarks of a return to equality. Most “marriage equality” activists are so focused on the current emphasis of the gay community that they fail to remember that the pioneers who started the gay liberation movement believed in freedom for everyone. Thus, many gay and lesbian activists I have spoken with say that once gay marriage passes, they want the government to force traditionally religious people to use the gay definition of marriage in their jobs and businesses or face punishment. And in both Massachusetts where adoption agencies cannot give even a slight tiebreaker preference to families with both a mother and a father, and in California where the Supreme Court appears set to force religious fertility doctors to violate their consciences and inseminate lesbians, few if any voices in the gay community have stood up and asked, “Wait, isn’t our movement about freedom?”

It’s time for everyone to accept that sometimes, gay people just aren’t equal. That’s not an insult, it’s a fact. Other groups seem to understand this. Women know they’re not equally qualified to be major league baseball players. Asian-American actors know they’re not equally qualified to play Othello or Lena Younger. Similarly, while lesbians may be terrifically qualified to be mothers, they are not equally qualified to be fathers.

Who knows how long the current gay emphasis on equality over freedom will last? If history is any guide, it won’t last forever - but then it will be back. In the meantime, is it really a good idea to make a radical social change that expands gay equality but limits everyone else’s freedom just because that matches the present priorities of the gay and lesbian community?