GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

I have a piece in today’s Jerusalem Post explaining exactly where I stand in the gay-ex-gay continuum. I coin a new term, “Delta,” which is explained in detail in the essay, which I have excerpted below:

I have a suggestion. Instead of gay or ex-gay, those of us who have stopped thinking of ourselves primarily as same-sexers can emphasize the fact that, whether we’re celibate or in opposite-sex relationships, we’re ‘Deliberately Living Traditionally.’ The handy acronym Delta corresponds to a Greek letter representing change; it can be a rival to the use of the letter Lambda to represent all things gay. Delta can serve as a new identity and community for people who are making or have made that tough transition. (Perhaps the Hebrew version will be known as ‘Dalets.’)

The ‘Delta’ idea correctly focuses on how people behave and organize their lives rather than what their sexuality bar codes are. Such an attitude, by the way, is consistent with Torah Judaism. By contrast, the ‘ex-gay’ approach accepts the gay community view that all of us have an innate sexual orientation, merely adding that those orientations can be changed through ‘reparative’ or other therapy….

People who are unhappy with their homosexuality will almost certainly find it much easier to try ‘deliberately living traditionally’ than to somehow transform their inner make-up. After a few years of living celibately, or perhaps in an opposite-sex relationship, such people might find their same-sex attractions have decreased or at least become less important to them. This is parallel to the Jewish concept of ‘Naaseh v’nishma’ ¬ the idea that actions precede what is internal. Also, the Talmud says with regard to King David that the libido is hungry when satiated and satisfied when
restrained.

Of course, some gays and lesbians will accuse Deltas of ‘not being true to themselves.’ But who decided that our libidos and hearts represent our true selves, even when they’re in conflict with our minds, consciences, and spirits? Shouldn’t each of us get to decide who we truly are?

Indeed, whereas the gay community celebrates National Coming Out Day, and some ex-gays have commemorated National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day, the Delta community could mark National Choose Sexual Behaviors and Family Structures Consistent With Your Values Day (We can work out the acronym later).

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.

Periodically marriage defenders’ insistence on marriage matching the traditional family model is met with the objection that infertile couples and seniors past reproductive ages are allowed to marry. Michael Johns, a GDM reader, put it this way:

Procreation is not a valid argument for marriage, because it excludes other groups as well such as individuals with disabilities that won’t allow them to procreate (should they not be allowed to get married either).

But for me, at least, the ability to reproduce is not at the center of my (secular) argument against same-sex marriage. It’s that opposite-sex couples form the kind of family format that I believe is best-suited for the welfare of children. (In case you’re new, I’m not saying gays can’t be good parents; they can. I’m saying whenever possible a child should have both a mother and a father.)

Some infertile and post-reproductive age couples adopt; others plan to never have children but find that a relative dies and they are raising a child to their surprise. The point is that any opposite-sex couple is going to be a part of that ideal format. (Again, if you’re new, I’m not saying all opposite-sex couples are better than all same-sex couples; they’re not. We’re dealing with the ideal here.)

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Meanwhile, two heterosexual Southern California college students — Ali Shams and Kaelan Housewright — want to take the state out of the marriage business.

Their proposed measure calls for the term “marriage” to be removed from state laws and replaced with “domestic partnerships.”

Shams maintains the measure would provide equality to all couples, regardless of sexual orientation, while preserving marriage as a religious and social ceremony. “This is a compromise,” Shams said. “It says ‘Get rid of marriage as a state institution. Make it a religious institution, keep politics out of it and stop the fighting.’”

This idea, which is hardly new, is not a compromise. Good compromises give both sides a lot of what they want, and leave both sides annoyed that they didn’t get everything they want, but still happy that the compromise is better than the conflict.

How is this a compromise?

The traditionalist side of the argument is trying to preserve marriage, as a state institution. None of us have been talking (publicly) about preserving marriage in our churches and synagogues. And the other side is trying to undermine or destroy the traditional definition of marriage, as a public institution. In fact, I fail to see what “marriage equality” people would have to give up with this “compromise.”

Now, I have proposed a handful of real compromises on this blog. But the marriage-equality folks are never all that interested, because they are so sure of the righteousness of their cause, and their eventual victory, that de-fanging this issue as a matter of public controversy is utterly unappealing to them.

In discussing my opposition to same-sex marriage in the comments section of a previous post, GDM participant Mark Barton wrote,

We get it that it’s your sincere religious belief, and we’re sorry, but we don’t think that excuses it any more than it would excuse racism, and we don’t accept your apology. In 2009, we expect you to have had a “can that be right?” moment, and if you haven’t, or if you haven’t come to the answer “no”, then it’s personal.

Frankly, I’m sick of having my principled opposition to redefining marriage (based on both religious and secular principles) compared to racism. Anyone who does so must either be woefully uneducated about the history of prejudice and discrimination in this country, or deeply deluded as to the relative lack of pain, which is really little more than discomfort, faced by same-sex couples in America.

It’s probably both. I remember debating at ExGayWatch with several LGBT people over the notion of whether gays in America were being “treated” like Jews in fascist Europe. That ludicrous and offensive proposition was actually defended by several gay people, who seemed to hang their politics on the hook of believing they are far, far more persecuted than they are.

I don’t want to condescend to recount for the readers of this blog the horrors of racism in the last century in the United States, much less the century before that. By contrast, having to call one’s relationship a “domestic partnership” or “mutual beneficiary” instead of a marriage, even with most or all the rights is pathetically petty.

Yes, I know, in some cases screw-ups at hospitals have created tragedies for couples without a formal partnership. And there are sad situations regarding custody and inheritance, too. But it’s not like racism. Not at all. And it can be fixed without meddling with the central family institution in our society.

So stop suggesting my beliefs are akin to racism. To do so insults to very real history of persecution against African-Americans in this country and is incredibly presumptuous and arrogant. And moreso, it insults me. It suggests that I hold views akin to those I despise, and it’s way out of line. One could even say it’s personal.

I’ve written on this blog about the Salt Lake City plan, which I think is the quickest way to help same-sex and other couples in our country gain hospital visitation, inheritance, and other rights. I have not gone into much detail, though. I wrote a piece about the plan, including an interview with Democratic SLC Mayor Ralph Becker, last summer but it didn’t find a home. Instead, I’m publishing it below, slightly updated.

While the nation has been debating same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California, we’ve paid far less attention to the constitutional amendments in 18 states including Texas, Utah, and Ohio that bar any special status whatsoever for same-sex couples. Except the most unlikely of communities - Salt Lake City - has found a creative way to constitutionally provide rights and protections to non-married couples. The Salt Lake City plan is called “mutual commitments,” and it’s a terrific model for the rest of the country.

The marriage amendments mean that same-sex couples in places like Milwaukee, New Orleans, Kalamazoo, and Louisville have pretty much zero hope for any rights for the foreseeable future. No legislative solution in Utah or Georgia specifically aimed at the distress of same-sex couples in areas like hospital visitation and inheritance could be constitutional. I remember the obstacles I faced in college when I was in a relationship with a man (before becoming religious), so I understand the problem’s dimensions.

But the leadership of Salt Lake City, led by Democratic Mayor Ralph Becker (who calls himself the “guide” of the mutual commitments program), actually avoided specifically helping same-sex couples. Instead they created a mutual commitments registry for all adult couples ineligible to marry - including roommates, parents with adult dependents, and best friends. That helps same-sex couples without violating the constitution, and helps other worthy relationships as well.

In an interview, Mayor Becker told me: “What I was looking for were ways to be able to treat people equally and give people the same basic ability to live well, together, and to acknowledge those intimate relationships. To me what became the mutual commitment registry was a core way to be able to allow two adults who are mutually dependent on each other to be able to support one another.”

Most importantly, the Salt Lake City plan can appeal to traditionalists, as it already has to the conservative Utah state legislature. Mayor Becker’s chief of staff told me their plan passed with broad consensus among Democrats and Republicans, “without anybody feeling like they got burned.”

If implemented nationally, mutual commitments could mean:

1) Relief for same-sex and other couples ineligible to marry in places like Waco and Omaha who aren’t guaranteed the right, say, to visit each other in the hospital or gain custody of children they raised together.

2) The government would continue to give no privileges or special recognition based on a couple’s having gay sex together - or any sex at all. In Salt Lake City, mutual commitment status is handed out to roommates, best friends, lesbian lovers, and others. Each time, the city doesn’t know which - and shouldn’t.

3) Opponents of same-sex marriage needn’t worry that endorsing the Salt Lake City plan could become a back door or slippery slope to same-sex marriage, since nobody has ever seriously advocated marriage rights for roommates and best friends.

Ironically, the biggest obstacle to implementing statewide mutual commitment laws - and maybe a federal one - is the screwed-up priorities of the gay community’s leadership. Right now, gays and lesbians are spending millions of dollars on a purely semantic and symbolic fight in the gay-friendly state of California over whether the exact same rights are called a “marriage” or a “domestic partnership.” I have repeatedly proposed that as little as 10 percent of that money go to securing mutual commitments in places like Virginia and the Dakotas, and gays and lesbians have rejected my idea, complaining I was insulting them by comparing a same-sex couple to two roommates or best friends. Well, I’m sorry, but in my eyes, and those of my religious tradition (Orthodox Judaism), that’s preciesely what they are, and they deserve the same recognition, which is not nothing, but not that of marriage either.

If you listen to the gay complaints about man-woman marriage, they fall into two categories: first, look at all the benefits and protections we don’t get; and second, it makes us feel bad that we can’t get married. I have sympathy for the first complaint, which can mostly be addressed with the Salt Lake City plan. The second set of concerns (”treat us equally” and “we feel like second-class citizens”) is not compelling given that same-sex marriage causes very real harms - to religious freedom, the welfare of children, and the monogamy ideal, for example. If gays and lesbians feel their self-esteem is harmed by not being allowed to marry, I’d be all for support groups and classes on gay history and culture - but I’m not about to change my policy positions.

At the very least, it’s time we spread the Salt Lake City plan to the 18 states covering one-third of the population where more traditional recognition of same-sex couples is banned by the constitution. Even if the gay community refuses to cooperate while we help them, fair-minded members of both political parties can work together to implement mutual commitments wherever we can. 

Some research, including that of Judith Stacey, has shown that while children of gay parents are no more likely to be gay, they are more likely to engage in same-sex experimentation. This research is preliminary and controversial, so I’m not asserting that it’s true. I just want to ask: what if it’s true? Do we care?

As someone who is tolerant of same-sex lifestyles but believes gay sex is immoral, I would be particularly disturbed by that finding. I can accept that, gosh, some, most, or nearly all gay people are going to have gay sex. But I certainly don’t want to encourage straight teens to “try out” gay sex in part because that’s what their mothers or fathers do. So if it’s true, I’d see it as another reason to prefer opposite-sex parenting over same-sex.

Finally, what’s the deal with everyone’s non-critical acceptance of the widely claimed “fact” that children of gays are no more likely to be gay? That just seems stupid to me. Of course they’re more likely to be (openly) gay. Some children of heterosexuals never come out or at least not while their parents are alive because of their parents’ homophobia. That’s obviously not a problem with children of gays. Could there be a countervailing force? Or is it possible, just possible, that the researchers find what they want to find, since they are overwhelmingly supportive of gay parenting in the first place?

Gays in the military is in the news at the start of a Democratic president’s term again. Fox news had a headline “Obama to End Military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy” which is pretty silly since Obama doesn’t have that power; Congress has to change the policy since Congress passed it. I wrote an opinion piece last September about what I feel about this subject, although I didn’t find a home for it. I thought maybe GaysDefendMarriage readers would like to see the relevant part of it. To be clear, I would like to see gays and lesbians serving openly in the armed forces, but only when the experts determine it won’t undermine the military mission:

The U.S. military exists to fight and win wars. Period. Yet in the last 40 years, various groups in society have tried to use the armed services to further their social agenda. Given that our very freedom could be at stake, the military should have no tolerance for decisions about its personnel that focus on anything but the military mission. The two most significant examples are gays and affirmative action in the military.

In my mind, the problem with gays in the military is not homosexuality but the smooth functioning of the armed forces. I know that most of the gay community (a group I’m a part of) believes that nothing is more important than equality for gays and lesbians. But the people we fought in World War II and the people we’re fighting now have far harsher plans for gays should they win a total victory than simply not allowing them to be open in uniform.

The notion that everyone should be able to serve, no matter what the social attitudes of the rank and file and the military brass, becomes silly when considered historically. Should women have been able to serve equally during the American Revolution? What about blacks (remember Glory?) serving equally in the Union army in the Civil War? In those cases, social engineering in the military would have impaired morale, unit cohesion, and the military mission. In the case of the Civil War, a Union victory was more important to freed slaves than being integrated and serving in the main ranks.

I have spoken to gays and lesbians who have said gays should have been allowed to serve openly during World War II. Given the attitudes at the time, that would have made it harder to successfully win the war effort, and I don’t have to tell gay men what the Nazis thought of them.

I discussed this issue with a scholar of issues relating to gays in the military, Dr. Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He cited historical evidence that some gays did serve openly in World War II, and said “I don’t think there’s any evidence that the policy even as far back as World War II was necessary to preserve cohesion. The question has always been, will leadership stand behind integration or not?”

I personally have a hard time believing that even the best leadership could lead to unit cohesion at certain stages in history.

Contrary to popular opinion, President Truman’s 1948 order to desegregate the military did not, in fact, desegregate the military. It took the contingencies of the Korean War a few years later, and military leaders like Gen. Matthew Ridgway finding efficiency, logistical, and morale problems in a segregated military. Due to such circumstances, the military was completely integrated by the end of the fighting in 1953.

So the questions are, when is social progress sufficient for integration, and who gets to decide? I don’t know the answer to the former question, but the answer to the latter is Congress and the president, in consultation with military leaders. I hope they decide to end “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” but only when they think such a move won’t hinder our ability to win on the battlefield….

I believe that employment equality - including for African-Americans and gays and lesbians - is a good thing. It’s just that there are other goals that are equally important or more important. Surely, fighting and winning wars is one of those goals. 

Since I published my “Phantom Gay Past” essay arguing that being gay is a recent innovation that doesn’t go back more that 150 years, I have been accused of stretching the truth and misrepresenting the scholarship. So I did a little survey and found that more than 85% of gay historians and anthropologists (n=28) disagreed with the following statement, which I believe is widely shared in the gay and lesbian community. I call it the Essentialist Credo:

Being gay is pretty much a naturally occurring sexual orientation that has existed throughout history. Every society and culture has always had a minority of gay and lesbian members, whether they come out or not.

I will be writing about the implications of this consensus among gay historians this April in a Jerusalem Post column entitled “God didn’t make me gay.” But for now I thought I would share some comments from these historians, in a page above entitled “Nine Scholars.” My conclusion from the idea that being gay is a recent, not a timeless, state of being is that God didn’t make me gay and therefore I have to reject the following gay-Jewish attitude: “God made me gay, so of course He expects me to express it, no matter what His laws say.”

I believe people have and develop all kinds of sexual impulses and attractions. As we grow, we organize them in our minds and our public lives, almost always in ways consistent with the sexual matrix of the society we live in. In ancient Greece, I probably would have had sex with a younger male lover and a wife (if I was a citizen). If I was a Native American a few centuries ago, I might have cross-dressed and had sex with both men and women. In contemporary Morocco, I probably would be married and maybe would have sex occassionally with younger men, although always playing the dominant role. Today, I organize my sexuality in a way that can be fairly called “gay,” although in my case I’m celibate.

Since I realize that this way of organizing my sexual impulses, desires, attractions, and fantasies is so contingent on living in the modern West, I can’t accept that this way is “true” and “essential” and “eternal” and all other people who had same-sex love, sex, and relationships were “ignorant” of their true selves or could not “come out.”

The concept of “sexual orientation” isn’t rocket science. It’s not like the fact that 5th-century people didn’t understand that electrons orbit the nucleus of the atom. They could have come to the conclusion that some people were oriented toward men and others toward women and others toward both. But they didn’t, because that wasn’t true to their own experiences, not because they were too primitive to understand it.

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.