My Evening Constitutional

One of my readers wrote to suggest that I was "slightly wrong" when I wrote about Bob Garon, the sixty-something gay Vietnam veteran who got all up in Mitt Romney's face a couple of weeks ago:

The U.S. Constitution doesn't say anything about marriage, so it's not correct to say that denying him marriage denies him his Constitutional rights.

My correspondent pointed out that while the Constitution says nothing about marriage,

neither does it say anything about sodomy, abortion, pornography, or, to go further afield, on whether a corporation is an individual - on all which subjects the supreme arbiters of "what is Constitutional" (spec. the Supreme Court) have found interesting things to say, based of course on their interpretation and application of the tenets of the Constitution to latter-day affairs. In Loving v Virginia, for instance, (if memory serves) the Supremes found that marriage was a "fundamental right". The 14th Amendment would seem to necessitate equal rights for all, and the DOMA cases now working through the courts would seem to be testing the applicability of this proposition to gay people and their marriages. Mr Garon might be blamed perhaps for jumping the gun as to whether he has a federal constitutional right to marry and remain married to his partner and to have that marriage recognized by the Federal Government. But it is only by the assertion of a right that anyone anywhere at all can find out if that right exists.

Damn! My correspondent even forestalled my objection that Garon asserted a Constitutional right that, so far, he doesn't have. The Supreme Court has already ruled on abortion, pornography, "racially" mixed marriages, and sodomy, so we can probably assert our rights in those areas. And it's true, Bob Garon or anyone else can assert a right whether the courts have ruled in its favor or not. Looking over his statements, though, I see that he misunderstood or misrepresented Romney's claim -- Romney didn't say that the Constitution says anything about marriage -- and is really in no position to complain that Romney "doesn't know about the Constitution." I'm no Constitutional scholar either, but the Constitution doesn't seem to have anything to say about equality in the sense Garon is talking about; where the word "equal" occurs, it doesn't refer to legal equality. But I should have written that sentence in the original post more carefully, and I sit corrected.

I still insist that "rights" terminology is being thrown around too freely in this debate. Garon, like many gay people, talked as though he thinks the benefits of marriage are rights. The question is whether same-sex couples should receive the same benefits and privileges that mixed-sex couples do, and they should. But as I and others have argued before, it's not clear why those benefits and privileges should go only to "married" couples, since we have the precedents of domestic partnerships and civil unions. Many of the horror stories -- the loss of shared property, a partner of many years reduced to penury, the custody of jointly raised children, couples separated by immigration status, and so on -- will still be told after same-sex marriage is a legal fact. Heterosexuals are voting against marriage with their feet, and have been for decades, a fact that annoys many advocates of same-sex marriage. Not even all same-sex couples will want to marry, but that doesn't mean they should have to spend thousands of dollars on powers of attorney and other instruments to protect themselves. You shouldn't have to get married to get health care, or to enter or leave the US, or to stay home with a sick friend or visit him or her in the hospital. For all that they claim to take marriage seriously, same-sex marriage advocates seem to be bent on trivializing it.

But I believe I've caught my correspondent here, though I'd return the favor and argue that he's only "slightly wrong" about it:

As to your larger point about Obama, this is of course true. But my reading of the tea-leaves is that he's waiting for a DOMA case to be ruled in the plaintiff's favour, and amidst the resulting brou-haha from the Right to announce his final evolution in favour of "marriage equality" (the neologism I expect him to use). At that stage he will have nothing electorally to lose from the declaration.

At this point I'd agree that Obama is waiting for a DOMA case with the right (or "right") outcome, which is probably the right course of action any case, since it isn't the Executive's prerogative to overturn bad laws. But don't forget that for the first two years of his presidency Obama was defending DOMA in the courts. It's also important to remember that he is personally opposed to same-sex marriage on religious grounds, an opposition that predates his campaign for the presidency. One reason it would be fun to watch Garon confront Obama on this issue is that Obama is a Constitutional scholar who clearly doesn't think that the Constitution guarantees a right to marry: he's willing to leave it to the states.

But to repeat, I was slightly wrong in my criticism of Bob Garon, and I'm glad to acknowledge it.

My Evening Constitutional

One of my readers wrote to suggest that I was "slightly wrong" when I wrote about Bob Garon, the sixty-something gay Vietnam veteran who got all up in Mitt Romney's face a couple of weeks ago:

The U.S. Constitution doesn't say anything about marriage, so it's not correct to say that denying him marriage denies him his Constitutional rights.

My correspondent pointed out that while the Constitution says nothing about marriage,

neither does it say anything about sodomy, abortion, pornography, or, to go further afield, on whether a corporation is an individual - on all which subjects the supreme arbiters of "what is Constitutional" (spec. the Supreme Court) have found interesting things to say, based of course on their interpretation and application of the tenets of the Constitution to latter-day affairs. In Loving v Virginia, for instance, (if memory serves) the Supremes found that marriage was a "fundamental right". The 14th Amendment would seem to necessitate equal rights for all, and the DOMA cases now working through the courts would seem to be testing the applicability of this proposition to gay people and their marriages. Mr Garon might be blamed perhaps for jumping the gun as to whether he has a federal constitutional right to marry and remain married to his partner and to have that marriage recognized by the Federal Government. But it is only by the assertion of a right that anyone anywhere at all can find out if that right exists.

Damn! My correspondent even forestalled my objection that Garon asserted a Constitutional right that, so far, he doesn't have. The Supreme Court has already ruled on abortion, pornography, "racially" mixed marriages, and sodomy, so we can probably assert our rights in those areas. And it's true, Bob Garon or anyone else can assert a right whether the courts have ruled in its favor or not. Looking over his statements, though, I see that he misunderstood or misrepresented Romney's claim -- Romney didn't say that the Constitution says anything about marriage -- and is really in no position to complain that Romney "doesn't know about the Constitution." I'm no Constitutional scholar either, but the Constitution doesn't seem to have anything to say about equality in the sense Garon is talking about; where the word "equal" occurs, it doesn't refer to legal equality. But I should have written that sentence in the original post more carefully, and I sit corrected.

I still insist that "rights" terminology is being thrown around too freely in this debate. Garon, like many gay people, talked as though he thinks the benefits of marriage are rights. The question is whether same-sex couples should receive the same benefits and privileges that mixed-sex couples do, and they should. But as I and others have argued before, it's not clear why those benefits and privileges should go only to "married" couples, since we have the precedents of domestic partnerships and civil unions. Many of the horror stories -- the loss of shared property, a partner of many years reduced to penury, the custody of jointly raised children, couples separated by immigration status, and so on -- will still be told after same-sex marriage is a legal fact. Heterosexuals are voting against marriage with their feet, and have been for decades, a fact that annoys many advocates of same-sex marriage. Not even all same-sex couples will want to marry, but that doesn't mean they should have to spend thousands of dollars on powers of attorney and other instruments to protect themselves. You shouldn't have to get married to get health care, or to enter or leave the US, or to stay home with a sick friend or visit him or her in the hospital. For all that they claim to take marriage seriously, same-sex marriage advocates seem to be bent on trivializing it.

But I believe I've caught my correspondent here, though I'd return the favor and argue that he's only "slightly wrong" about it:

As to your larger point about Obama, this is of course true. But my reading of the tea-leaves is that he's waiting for a DOMA case to be ruled in the plaintiff's favour, and amidst the resulting brou-haha from the Right to announce his final evolution in favour of "marriage equality" (the neologism I expect him to use). At that stage he will have nothing electorally to lose from the declaration.

At this point I'd agree that Obama is waiting for a DOMA case with the right (or "right") outcome, which is probably the right course of action any case, since it isn't the Executive's prerogative to overturn bad laws. But don't forget that for the first two years of his presidency Obama was defending DOMA in the courts. It's also important to remember that he is personally opposed to same-sex marriage on religious grounds, an opposition that predates his campaign for the presidency. One reason it would be fun to watch Garon confront Obama on this issue is that Obama is a Constitutional scholar who clearly doesn't think that the Constitution guarantees a right to marry: he's willing to leave it to the states.

But to repeat, I was slightly wrong in my criticism of Bob Garon, and I'm glad to acknowledge it.

Weather and Posting Forecast

Maybe because of the snow and cold and generally wretched weather, I haven't felt much like writing or anything else; I was beginning to think I was coming down with something, but a night's sleep helped. I've got a couple of big posts in the works, but for now, this clip (to which I was pointed by a couple of different people) fits well. As good satire should, it cuts both ways.


New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

Weather and Posting Forecast

Maybe because of the snow and cold and generally wretched weather, I haven't felt much like writing or anything else; I was beginning to think I was coming down with something, but a night's sleep helped. I've got a couple of big posts in the works, but for now, this clip (to which I was pointed by a couple of different people) fits well. As good satire should, it cuts both ways.


New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

Virtually Freaky; or, The Slithery Slope

I was going to say something like "While I'm talking about religion...", but I'm not sure how much this is about religion. Ostensibly it's not, but religion's probably lurking beneath the surface.

IOZ linked to this article at National Review Online by Mona Charen, the author of a couple of attack books on anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan. It's an oddly half-hearted defense of Rick Warren, in particular of his comparison of homosexuality to polygamy, pedophilia, and incest. "Those were not the most felicitous comparisons and probably unnecessarily hurt the feelings of gays and lesbians," Charen allows. I hadn't looked at Warren's actual remarks before, and they're interesting if you look at them with any care.

Steven Waldman: Now you, one controversial moment for you in the last election was your support for proposition 8 in California. A couple of questions about that. First, to clarify, do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships?

Rick Warren: I don’t know if I use the term there, but I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don’t believe that we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles or whatever stuff like that. So I fully support equal rights.

Steven Waldman: But what about, like, partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation?

Rick Warren: You know, to me, not a problem with me. But the issue to me is, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

It looks to me as though Warren is dodging the question about civil unions and domestic partnerships, though he does seem to say that insurance and hospital visitation are "no problem" with him. On the other hand, he also says, "I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage," which means that he is opposed to guaranteeing insurance and hospital visitation for same-sex couples, but not as much as he is to letting them marry. I think he should be pressed closer on civil unions and domestic partnerships (which are not, be it noted, limited to same-sex couples). Don't let him blather about equal rights regardless of "particular lifestyles": does he or does he not approve of same-sex civil unions?

Look at what Warren says about "a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Even if I agree to let him focus solely on Judaism and Christianity here, he's being absurd. Brother and sister marriage? Abraham and Sarah, according to Genesis, were half-siblings -- same father, different mothers. Most people would call that incest, yet according to Genesis they were husband and wife. Who's Rick Warren, to go against Scripture?

Maybe Abraham and Sarah are an isolated case, but "one guy having multiple wives and calling it marriage"? That is virtually the norm in the Old Testament, as a Bible-believing pastor like Rick Warren must know, and when the Christian father St. Augustine wrote about marriage he conceded that biblically speaking, polygamy is lawful, but "Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife, so as to have more than one wife living." It appears, then, that the ban on polygamy derives from Roman paganism, not Christianity. From Jacob, who married two sisters (and his first cousins), to Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, there is no suggestion that plural marriage is anything but marriage. Who's Rick Warren, to go against scripture? I'm not sure why people like him should be allowed to redefine marriage, etc., etc.

Mona Charen takes basically the same line in trying to defend Warren.

Once traditional marriage — supported by centuries of civilization and the major Western religions — is undermined in the name of love, there is no logical or principled reason to forbid polygamy, polyandry, or even incest. Gay activists recoil from incest. But on what grounds exactly? Suppose, after we formalize gay marriage, two 25-year-old sterile (to remove the health of offspring argument) twins wish to marry? Let’s suppose they are loving and committed. What is the objection? That it offends custom and tradition? That it offends God? Isn’t that just bigotry?

I think that it's misleading to speak of "the major Western religions" as though there was a slew of them; granting Judaism "major" status because of its influence on Christianity, there seem to be two major Western religions. But as a Jew, Charen must know as well as Warren that "traditional marriage" is compatible with polygamy. In Judaism, plural marriage was only banned about a thousand years ago. Who's Mona Charen, to go against zillions of years of polygamous tradition?

Even more, she offers no "logical or principled reason" for opposing same-sex marriage, plural marriage, incest, or marriage between adults and children; all she does is appeal to "tradition." Tradition in the West has permitted slavery, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, child labor, and many other practices that I doubt Charen would want to endorse now. (If Tradition still ruled, she'd be running a grocery stand in a ghetto while her husband did the studying and writing, but they'd both be worrying about pogroms and the Inquisition.) Adultery, traditionally, means having sexual relations with a married woman: a married man is allowed to stray with impunity, and as late as the end of the 1800s the English parliament refused to make a husband's adultery grounds for divorce, as a wife's adultery was already (see pages 38 and 39 at that link).

As for marriage between a child and an adult, the definition of a child has been in flux for some time. When Victoria became Queen of England in 1838, the age of consent was 10 (though a girl couldn't marry until she was 12), and it stayed there for most if not all of her reign. What most Americans and Britons nowadays would consider the marriage of a child to an adult was legal in an officially Christian nation in those days. (How old was Juliet again?) I'm not sure what the age of consent ought to be; logical and principled reasons for raising it above 10, as it was traditionally, seem to be in short supply, but I'm open to discussion.

The same goes for "incest." Leaving Abraham and Sarah aside, what about marriage between first cousins? Thirty-one states in the US forbid marriage between first cousins, though Canada and most European countries do not. As I mentioned before, the Bible seems to have no objection either. To be honest, I am not sure I see any logical or principled reasons to forbid even brothers and sisters from marrying; certainly Charen doesn't offer any. If there are no such reasons, maybe it should be permitted. Again, I'm open to discussion.

Please understand: my point here is not that I endorse polygamy, or the marriage of children to adults, or of siblings. My point is that Charen and Warren, and the gay and pro-gay Christians they oppose, have no real arguments against such practices either. Or against same-sex marriage, come to that. All they can do, apparently, is point to Tradition, as if it were monolithic and unanimous in its judgments. But it doesn't really support them. Despite all their babble about "redefining" marriage, marriage has been redefined in many ways over the past several millennia, let alone in the past half-century. (In 1967 the US Supreme Court redefined marriage in America to include mixed-race couples, for example; the early Christians redefined marriage to forbid divorce, which was permitted in Judaism, but since the political rise of Ronald Reagan at least, conservative evangelicals have decided that divorce is tolerable, and their own divorce rate is higher than that of the general population.)

On top of everything else, it would be interesting to know why both Warren and Charen present themselves as willing to accept homosexual relationships short of marriage. I mean, if the government gives special rights to sodomitical couples instead of putting them in jail or executing them (as the 5,000-year definition of sodomy would require!), letting them have insurance, and visit each other in the hospital, isn't that approving homosexuality? Won't we have to let polygamists visit their wives, or incestuous couples have insurance? What are we going to tell the children?

Charen says,

Gays and lesbians argue that their same-sex unions are loving, committed relationships. Fine. But there are, or could be, other loving, committed relationships involving more than two people. Supporters of gay marriage say this is a ridiculous slippery slope argument.

I'll pass on whether it's ridiculous, but it is a slippery slope argument, and as I've already suggested, it's a bit late to invoke it now that American traditionalists have already caved in on miscegenation, divorce, letting wives own property (or vote, or serve on juries, or keep their wages when they work outside the home), and so on -- they even seem to have given up on sodomy laws! To say nothing of Warren's claim that he supports equality for sodomites and sapphists. I don't believe he really means it, he's too cagey in his phrasing, but it's still a retreat from the grand Judeo-Christian tradition of stigmatizing queers.

My ambivalent Obama-supporting friend, by the way, referred me to Change.gov, the Obama Transition Team's site. It says there, inter alia, that "Barack Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples." That's pretty clear, but 1) most state constitutional amendments that ban same-sex marriage also "affect unmarried relationships of same-sex and different-sex couples," according to Nancy Polikoff in Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008, page 95), which means Obama has his work cut out for him; and 2) what's to stop same-sex couples in civil unions from considering and calling themselves married, especially if they decide to have a religious wedding of their own, which the law doesn't and can't forbid?

Virtually Freaky; or, The Slithery Slope

I was going to say something like "While I'm talking about religion...", but I'm not sure how much this is about religion. Ostensibly it's not, but religion's probably lurking beneath the surface.

IOZ linked to this article at National Review Online by Mona Charen, the author of a couple of attack books on anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan. It's an oddly half-hearted defense of Rick Warren, in particular of his comparison of homosexuality to polygamy, pedophilia, and incest. "Those were not the most felicitous comparisons and probably unnecessarily hurt the feelings of gays and lesbians," Charen allows. I hadn't looked at Warren's actual remarks before, and they're interesting if you look at them with any care.

Steven Waldman: Now you, one controversial moment for you in the last election was your support for proposition 8 in California. A couple of questions about that. First, to clarify, do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships?

Rick Warren: I don’t know if I use the term there, but I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don’t believe that we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles or whatever stuff like that. So I fully support equal rights.

Steven Waldman: But what about, like, partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation?

Rick Warren: You know, to me, not a problem with me. But the issue to me is, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

It looks to me as though Warren is dodging the question about civil unions and domestic partnerships, though he does seem to say that insurance and hospital visitation are "no problem" with him. On the other hand, he also says, "I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage," which means that he is opposed to guaranteeing insurance and hospital visitation for same-sex couples, but not as much as he is to letting them marry. I think he should be pressed closer on civil unions and domestic partnerships (which are not, be it noted, limited to same-sex couples). Don't let him blather about equal rights regardless of "particular lifestyles": does he or does he not approve of same-sex civil unions?

Look at what Warren says about "a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Even if I agree to let him focus solely on Judaism and Christianity here, he's being absurd. Brother and sister marriage? Abraham and Sarah, according to Genesis, were half-siblings -- same father, different mothers. Most people would call that incest, yet according to Genesis they were husband and wife. Who's Rick Warren, to go against Scripture?

Maybe Abraham and Sarah are an isolated case, but "one guy having multiple wives and calling it marriage"? That is virtually the norm in the Old Testament, as a Bible-believing pastor like Rick Warren must know, and when the Christian father St. Augustine wrote about marriage he conceded that biblically speaking, polygamy is lawful, but "Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife, so as to have more than one wife living." It appears, then, that the ban on polygamy derives from Roman paganism, not Christianity. From Jacob, who married two sisters (and his first cousins), to Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, there is no suggestion that plural marriage is anything but marriage. Who's Rick Warren, to go against scripture? I'm not sure why people like him should be allowed to redefine marriage, etc., etc.

Mona Charen takes basically the same line in trying to defend Warren.

Once traditional marriage — supported by centuries of civilization and the major Western religions — is undermined in the name of love, there is no logical or principled reason to forbid polygamy, polyandry, or even incest. Gay activists recoil from incest. But on what grounds exactly? Suppose, after we formalize gay marriage, two 25-year-old sterile (to remove the health of offspring argument) twins wish to marry? Let’s suppose they are loving and committed. What is the objection? That it offends custom and tradition? That it offends God? Isn’t that just bigotry?

I think that it's misleading to speak of "the major Western religions" as though there was a slew of them; granting Judaism "major" status because of its influence on Christianity, there seem to be two major Western religions. But as a Jew, Charen must know as well as Warren that "traditional marriage" is compatible with polygamy. In Judaism, plural marriage was only banned about a thousand years ago. Who's Mona Charen, to go against zillions of years of polygamous tradition?

Even more, she offers no "logical or principled reason" for opposing same-sex marriage, plural marriage, incest, or marriage between adults and children; all she does is appeal to "tradition." Tradition in the West has permitted slavery, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, child labor, and many other practices that I doubt Charen would want to endorse now. (If Tradition still ruled, she'd be running a grocery stand in a ghetto while her husband did the studying and writing, but they'd both be worrying about pogroms and the Inquisition.) Adultery, traditionally, means having sexual relations with a married woman: a married man is allowed to stray with impunity, and as late as the end of the 1800s the English parliament refused to make a husband's adultery grounds for divorce, as a wife's adultery was already (see pages 38 and 39 at that link).

As for marriage between a child and an adult, the definition of a child has been in flux for some time. When Victoria became Queen of England in 1838, the age of consent was 10 (though a girl couldn't marry until she was 12), and it stayed there for most if not all of her reign. What most Americans and Britons nowadays would consider the marriage of a child to an adult was legal in an officially Christian nation in those days. (How old was Juliet again?) I'm not sure what the age of consent ought to be; logical and principled reasons for raising it above 10, as it was traditionally, seem to be in short supply, but I'm open to discussion.

The same goes for "incest." Leaving Abraham and Sarah aside, what about marriage between first cousins? Thirty-one states in the US forbid marriage between first cousins, though Canada and most European countries do not. As I mentioned before, the Bible seems to have no objection either. To be honest, I am not sure I see any logical or principled reasons to forbid even brothers and sisters from marrying; certainly Charen doesn't offer any. If there are no such reasons, maybe it should be permitted. Again, I'm open to discussion.

Please understand: my point here is not that I endorse polygamy, or the marriage of children to adults, or of siblings. My point is that Charen and Warren, and the gay and pro-gay Christians they oppose, have no real arguments against such practices either. Or against same-sex marriage, come to that. All they can do, apparently, is point to Tradition, as if it were monolithic and unanimous in its judgments. But it doesn't really support them. Despite all their babble about "redefining" marriage, marriage has been redefined in many ways over the past several millennia, let alone in the past half-century. (In 1967 the US Supreme Court redefined marriage in America to include mixed-race couples, for example; the early Christians redefined marriage to forbid divorce, which was permitted in Judaism, but since the political rise of Ronald Reagan at least, conservative evangelicals have decided that divorce is tolerable, and their own divorce rate is higher than that of the general population.)

On top of everything else, it would be interesting to know why both Warren and Charen present themselves as willing to accept homosexual relationships short of marriage. I mean, if the government gives special rights to sodomitical couples instead of putting them in jail or executing them (as the 5,000-year definition of sodomy would require!), letting them have insurance, and visit each other in the hospital, isn't that approving homosexuality? Won't we have to let polygamists visit their wives, or incestuous couples have insurance? What are we going to tell the children?

Charen says,

Gays and lesbians argue that their same-sex unions are loving, committed relationships. Fine. But there are, or could be, other loving, committed relationships involving more than two people. Supporters of gay marriage say this is a ridiculous slippery slope argument.

I'll pass on whether it's ridiculous, but it is a slippery slope argument, and as I've already suggested, it's a bit late to invoke it now that American traditionalists have already caved in on miscegenation, divorce, letting wives own property (or vote, or serve on juries, or keep their wages when they work outside the home), and so on -- they even seem to have given up on sodomy laws! To say nothing of Warren's claim that he supports equality for sodomites and sapphists. I don't believe he really means it, he's too cagey in his phrasing, but it's still a retreat from the grand Judeo-Christian tradition of stigmatizing queers.

My ambivalent Obama-supporting friend, by the way, referred me to Change.gov, the Obama Transition Team's site. It says there, inter alia, that "Barack Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples." That's pretty clear, but 1) most state constitutional amendments that ban same-sex marriage also "affect unmarried relationships of same-sex and different-sex couples," according to Nancy Polikoff in Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008, page 95), which means Obama has his work cut out for him; and 2) what's to stop same-sex couples in civil unions from considering and calling themselves married, especially if they decide to have a religious wedding of their own, which the law doesn't and can't forbid?

I'm Not Gay, But My Husband Is

(Don't worry -- the couple in that photo are heterosexual. So it's all perfectly normal.)

The California Supreme Court had just cleared the way for same-sex marriage, and Ms. DeGeneres had announced on her program that she planned to marry her longtime girlfriend. “We are all the same people, all of us — you’re no different than I am,” Ms. DeGeneres told Mr. McCain as they sat next to each other in plush chairs. “Our love is the same.”

Mr. McCain called her comments “very eloquent” and added: “We just have a disagreement. And I, along with many, many others, wish you every happiness.”

Ms. DeGeneres said: “So, you’ll walk me down the aisle? Is that what you’re saying?”

Mr. McCain replied, “Touché.”

I realize the necessity of tact and genteel hypocrisy in addressing those whose opinions differ from ours, but I hope that Ms. Degeneres's love for her girlfriend, and now wife, is not "the same" as John McCain's love for his. McCain dropped his first wife when she was disfigured in an auto accident while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and whether or not one believes the reports that he has beaten his second wife Cindy, it appears that theirs is a chilly marriage of convenience, with separate residences and no love lost. Still, I like the way DeGeneres put McCain on the spot there; it's a pity only entertainers seem to ask questions like that. But once again I'm reminded how much energy people expend trying to get respect from people who don't deserve any respect themselves.

I found the New York Times article I quoted above linked through a post of IOZ'. It's not M. IOZ' best work on matters same-sexual. He blunders by mentioning the candidates' perceived need to "appease the remaining homophobes of rural America and the Midwest," forgetting the cosmopolitan homophobes of the rest of the country (and the world, including Rome, Tehran, and Jerusalem). One of his commenters points this out. A reasonably intelligent man like M'sieu' should have realized by now that bigotry is not, and never has been, limited to any one class or region. Nor, as I've argued before, is it something that springs full-blown from the foreheads of gods or priests. If sex didn't make many people uncomfortable on a very deep level, that discomfort wouldn't be made manifest in religion.

The same Times article discusses Barack Obama's confused position on the issue.

Mr. Obama believes that marriage is a sacred union, a blessing from God, and one that is intended for a man and a woman exclusively, according to these supporters and Obama campaign advisers. While he does not favor laws that ban same-sex marriage, and has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views may be “misguided,” he does not support it and is not inclined to fight for it, his advisers say. ...

Some gay allies of Mr. Obama thought, during a televised Democratic forum in Los Angeles in August 2007, that he might come out in favor of same-sex marriage, after he was asked if his position supporting civil unions but not same-sex marriage was tantamount to “separate but equal.”

“Look, when my parents got married in 1961, it would have been illegal for them to be married in a number of states in the South,” Mr. Obama said. “So, obviously, this is something that I understand intimately. It’s something that I care about.”

At that point, he veered onto legal rights, saying that — both in 1961 and today — it was more important to fight for nondiscrimination laws and employment protections than for marriage.

The best I can say for Obama is that he's no stupider on this point than many other people, including gay ones. (In 2000 I saw an interview with Dave McReynolds, an old gay activist who was running for President on the Socialist ticket. Asked about gay marriage, he said that he wasn't interested in getting married "in a church or synagogue"; the civil side of marriage escaped him altogether, as it did Al Gore, who once spoke of marriage as "a sacrament" for men and women, odd terminology for a Baptist.) As a lawyer, Obama should be aware that marriage in the United States comes in two flavors, the religious and the civil. It is religious marriage that is "a sacred union" if one believes in such things, and religious marriage is within broad limits (barring polygamy, child marriage, etc.) outside the reach of the state. Same-sex couples have often exchanged vows, often with the blessing of clergy, to sanctify their unions, and so far there is no law to prevent them from doing so -- only sectarian restrictions that prevent clergy from officiating. In this respect, same-sex marriage is already a reality in the United States.

But religious marriage by itself brings with it no legal benefits, and it is those benefits, the fruits of civil marriage, that the advocates of same-sex marriage covet: shared work and government benefits, visitation access in hospital, and so on. A heterosexual couple, even if they have had a sectarian wedding, doesn't receive those benefits either unless they register their union with the secular state. Contrariwise, a church is not obligated to recognize a member's civil marriage if he or she has not jumped through its cultic hoops. My brother and sister-in-law, for instance, first married at City Hall, then had to make concessions (such as promising to raise their children in the faith) before her church would grant them a church wedding. If I met an atheist woman I chose to marry (it's a lifestyle choice!), we could get a marriage license and share Social Security benefits without the blessing of any god but Mammon, and I doubt there are more than a few religious nuts who'd feel that the heterosexual marriage of two atheists injured their own marriage in any way.

Obama's veer into "legal rights" at that 2007 forum was a blatant evasion, as though the struggle for civil marriage weren't a question of legal rights. If heterosexual civil marriage were also called a "civil union," which I gather it is in numerous European countries, then civil unions for same-sex couples would not be "separate but equal"; but in a U.S. context, civil unions are marriage lite, cementing the second-class status of same-sex couples. It's frustrating to find myself defending legal same-sex marriage in this way, just as it was frustrating to defend Bill Clinton against his enemies, but I am baffled not only that Obama doesn't grasp these elementary distinctions, but that no one close to Obama has spelled them out to him. As with Bill Clinton in 1992, I have to conclude that his gay supporters and advisors are so ignorant that they don't grasp them either.

One old pet peeve of mine may also be relevant here. As "gender" has replaced "sex" in polite discourse, I noticed the term "same-gender marriage" gaining currency some years ago. I haven't heard it so much recently, maybe because "gay marriage" is the usual buzzword. "Same-gender" marriage isn't illegal in the US either as far as I know: an effeminate man and a feminine woman could marry without impediment, though tongues might privately wag. Yet a masculine man and a feminine man could not legally marry, even though they were of different "genders." When I've pointed this out to people who speak of "same-gender marriage," they usually reacted with blank incomprehension -- evidently they didn't know what "gender" means. It's biological sex that constitutes the legal (and religious) barrier, not gender. I know that "gender" and "sex" are not mutually exclusive domains, nor are "biology" and "culture"; and I know that numerous scholars have chosen to speak in terms of the sex-gender system or other terms that try to express the interconnection of biology and culture. The sex/gender distinction has largely collapsed, though many still unconsciously rely on it, and "gender" (masculine/feminine) has come to mean most of what "sex" (male/female") used to mean, wth "sex" used only to refer to copulation. So most of the old sexist baggage has been kept under the sign of gender rather than sex, and people are pretty much as confused -- or flat-out mistaken -- about these issues as ever.

I'm Not Gay, But My Husband Is

(Don't worry -- the couple in that photo are heterosexual. So it's all perfectly normal.)

The California Supreme Court had just cleared the way for same-sex marriage, and Ms. DeGeneres had announced on her program that she planned to marry her longtime girlfriend. “We are all the same people, all of us — you’re no different than I am,” Ms. DeGeneres told Mr. McCain as they sat next to each other in plush chairs. “Our love is the same.”

Mr. McCain called her comments “very eloquent” and added: “We just have a disagreement. And I, along with many, many others, wish you every happiness.”

Ms. DeGeneres said: “So, you’ll walk me down the aisle? Is that what you’re saying?”

Mr. McCain replied, “Touché.”

I realize the necessity of tact and genteel hypocrisy in addressing those whose opinions differ from ours, but I hope that Ms. Degeneres's love for her girlfriend, and now wife, is not "the same" as John McCain's love for his. McCain dropped his first wife when she was disfigured in an auto accident while he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and whether or not one believes the reports that he has beaten his second wife Cindy, it appears that theirs is a chilly marriage of convenience, with separate residences and no love lost. Still, I like the way DeGeneres put McCain on the spot there; it's a pity only entertainers seem to ask questions like that. But once again I'm reminded how much energy people expend trying to get respect from people who don't deserve any respect themselves.

I found the New York Times article I quoted above linked through a post of IOZ'. It's not M. IOZ' best work on matters same-sexual. He blunders by mentioning the candidates' perceived need to "appease the remaining homophobes of rural America and the Midwest," forgetting the cosmopolitan homophobes of the rest of the country (and the world, including Rome, Tehran, and Jerusalem). One of his commenters points this out. A reasonably intelligent man like M'sieu' should have realized by now that bigotry is not, and never has been, limited to any one class or region. Nor, as I've argued before, is it something that springs full-blown from the foreheads of gods or priests. If sex didn't make many people uncomfortable on a very deep level, that discomfort wouldn't be made manifest in religion.

The same Times article discusses Barack Obama's confused position on the issue.

Mr. Obama believes that marriage is a sacred union, a blessing from God, and one that is intended for a man and a woman exclusively, according to these supporters and Obama campaign advisers. While he does not favor laws that ban same-sex marriage, and has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views may be “misguided,” he does not support it and is not inclined to fight for it, his advisers say. ...

Some gay allies of Mr. Obama thought, during a televised Democratic forum in Los Angeles in August 2007, that he might come out in favor of same-sex marriage, after he was asked if his position supporting civil unions but not same-sex marriage was tantamount to “separate but equal.”

“Look, when my parents got married in 1961, it would have been illegal for them to be married in a number of states in the South,” Mr. Obama said. “So, obviously, this is something that I understand intimately. It’s something that I care about.”

At that point, he veered onto legal rights, saying that — both in 1961 and today — it was more important to fight for nondiscrimination laws and employment protections than for marriage.

The best I can say for Obama is that he's no stupider on this point than many other people, including gay ones. (In 2000 I saw an interview with Dave McReynolds, an old gay activist who was running for President on the Socialist ticket. Asked about gay marriage, he said that he wasn't interested in getting married "in a church or synagogue"; the civil side of marriage escaped him altogether, as it did Al Gore, who once spoke of marriage as "a sacrament" for men and women, odd terminology for a Baptist.) As a lawyer, Obama should be aware that marriage in the United States comes in two flavors, the religious and the civil. It is religious marriage that is "a sacred union" if one believes in such things, and religious marriage is within broad limits (barring polygamy, child marriage, etc.) outside the reach of the state. Same-sex couples have often exchanged vows, often with the blessing of clergy, to sanctify their unions, and so far there is no law to prevent them from doing so -- only sectarian restrictions that prevent clergy from officiating. In this respect, same-sex marriage is already a reality in the United States.

But religious marriage by itself brings with it no legal benefits, and it is those benefits, the fruits of civil marriage, that the advocates of same-sex marriage covet: shared work and government benefits, visitation access in hospital, and so on. A heterosexual couple, even if they have had a sectarian wedding, doesn't receive those benefits either unless they register their union with the secular state. Contrariwise, a church is not obligated to recognize a member's civil marriage if he or she has not jumped through its cultic hoops. My brother and sister-in-law, for instance, first married at City Hall, then had to make concessions (such as promising to raise their children in the faith) before her church would grant them a church wedding. If I met an atheist woman I chose to marry (it's a lifestyle choice!), we could get a marriage license and share Social Security benefits without the blessing of any god but Mammon, and I doubt there are more than a few religious nuts who'd feel that the heterosexual marriage of two atheists injured their own marriage in any way.

Obama's veer into "legal rights" at that 2007 forum was a blatant evasion, as though the struggle for civil marriage weren't a question of legal rights. If heterosexual civil marriage were also called a "civil union," which I gather it is in numerous European countries, then civil unions for same-sex couples would not be "separate but equal"; but in a U.S. context, civil unions are marriage lite, cementing the second-class status of same-sex couples. It's frustrating to find myself defending legal same-sex marriage in this way, just as it was frustrating to defend Bill Clinton against his enemies, but I am baffled not only that Obama doesn't grasp these elementary distinctions, but that no one close to Obama has spelled them out to him. As with Bill Clinton in 1992, I have to conclude that his gay supporters and advisors are so ignorant that they don't grasp them either.

One old pet peeve of mine may also be relevant here. As "gender" has replaced "sex" in polite discourse, I noticed the term "same-gender marriage" gaining currency some years ago. I haven't heard it so much recently, maybe because "gay marriage" is the usual buzzword. "Same-gender" marriage isn't illegal in the US either as far as I know: an effeminate man and a feminine woman could marry without impediment, though tongues might privately wag. Yet a masculine man and a feminine man could not legally marry, even though they were of different "genders." When I've pointed this out to people who speak of "same-gender marriage," they usually reacted with blank incomprehension -- evidently they didn't know what "gender" means. It's biological sex that constitutes the legal (and religious) barrier, not gender. I know that "gender" and "sex" are not mutually exclusive domains, nor are "biology" and "culture"; and I know that numerous scholars have chosen to speak in terms of the sex-gender system or other terms that try to express the interconnection of biology and culture. The sex/gender distinction has largely collapsed, though many still unconsciously rely on it, and "gender" (masculine/feminine) has come to mean most of what "sex" (male/female") used to mean, wth "sex" used only to refer to copulation. So most of the old sexist baggage has been kept under the sign of gender rather than sex, and people are pretty much as confused -- or flat-out mistaken -- about these issues as ever.

The Love Boat

It has been entertaining, I admit, the spectacle of right-wing bigots tumbling out of the closet like the finale of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

Every time I started to write this post, another case would appear. But not all the hypocrites are on the religious right pretending to be straight; some are openly gay. This has a lot to do with bigotry in the larger society, of course, but so do they all. The late Randy Shilts, for example, hid the fact that he was HIV-positive for a long time after And the Band Played On, his book on the AIDS epidemic, was published. As Michael Bronski wrote,

while no one is mandated to announce their health status it would have been interesting to see how the straight media would have responded to Shilts the “objective” reporter as an out, openly HIV positive gay man. For among all of the things that AIDS has contributed to our thinking and culture it has made the link between the more palatable idea off a “gay identity” and the less palatable reality of “gay sexual behavior” inevitable; simply put: you have to get fucked to get AIDS. And would Shilts's public position as a Person With AIDS have made the mainstream press see And The Band Played On as a document of special pleading--a label that is quickly attached to most all "non-objective" minority writing from Kate Millett to Larry Kramer to Lani Guinier.

The fault here lies not so much with Randy Shilts, but with the context and parameters set up from the mainstream press and media about what is acceptable. Randy Shilts understood that he lived in a world that would not take him seriously as a journalist if he was too partial to the gay press or showed too many signs of “non-objective” writing.

For, despite Shilts’s public criticism of gay male bathhouses (he eventually advocated closing them),

During the 1970s Shilts – like most all gay men in San Francisco – was an avid bathhouse attendee, both in the more mainstream baths as well as the more s/m oriented South of Market establishments. This is not news, it is common knowledge and up until the publication of And the Band Played On. Shilts was always forthcoming about the details and the vagaries of his sexual history. The story of how he was accidentally locked outside of South of Market's Handball Express (an establishment that specialized in fist-fucking), naked and handcuffed, was told by everyone – including Shilts himself. What would have happened in the critical reception of And the Band Played On if Shilts had been more forthcoming about his own involvement with the institutions about which he spoke. Would straight critics and media folk have treated him with the same respect he received by not disclosing his relationship to his material? I suspect not.

Stephen O. Murray reports that the offensive to close San Francisco bathhouses in 1984

was undertaken by Larry Littlejohn, a gay deputy sheriff later shown to be engaged in competition with bathhouses – he was dismissed from his job in 1987 after being charged with pandering for young male prostitutes. Littlejohn did not attempt to organize a gay community response, such as demonstrating in front of the establishments or talking to patrons inside or outside them. After meeting with Shilts and Leonard Matlovich, Littlejohn’s first resort was to seek government intervention [American Gay, Chicago 1996, 112f].

That was a long time ago, I admit. But since then we’ve had cases like that of Michelangelo Signorile, who blamed the gay community for his inability to use a condom with a hot man in the privacy of his hotel room, and we’ve had scourges of gay male ‘irresponsibility’ like Larry Kramer who seroconverted after they’d been demanding that everyone else stop having sex altogether. (Kramer was also a bathhouse customer, which wasn’t a secret – he portrayed his alter ego in The Normal Heart prowling the tubs and rejecting men who weren’t young and twinky enough.)

One of the Promiscuous Reader’s Laws is that if gay people want to have a “respectable” public life, we have to have a “scandalous” private life, and vice versa. I codified this in the late 1970s. It explains why so many respectable heterosexually married men get caught with male hustlers or prowling tearooms… Oh, dear; that bit of slang may be out of date by now. It’s camp argot for public restrooms where men go for sex with other men. One of the traditional features of gay male life has been the ironic juxtaposition of our grubby reality with our affectation of elegant terminology – compare “coming out,” taken from high society debutante parties, let alone “queen” itself. In the old days, say before the late 1970s, gay bars tended to be murky, grotty sub rosa places; nowadays it’s possible to have commercial gay establishments that are clean, well-lit, and appealing.

The flip side of this Law is that, in order to have a “respectable” private life (partnered, ostensibly monogamous), a gay person must have a “scandalous” public life (admittedly, openly, unabashedly, militantly flaunting gay -- one of Those!) But things are changing here too, as Homo-Americans fight to become respectable on both fronts at once. As far back as 1963, Erving Goffman wrote in Stigma (page 7, note 10):

Interestingly, a convention seems to have emerged in popular life-story writing where a questionable person proves his claim to normalcy by citing his acquisition of a spouse and children, and, oddly, by attesting to his spending Christmas and Thanksgiving with them.

Goffman was writing about various sorts of stigma, including physical handicap, but when I first read Stigma a couple of years ago, I was struck by the parallel to my Homo-American contemporaries. In the 1980s, some theatre people made a splash coming out at the Tony Awards by thanking their lovers in their acceptance speeches. When celebrities come out nowadays, they nearly always seem to have their Partner, and often a child, standing nearby for the announcement, making with The Gaze like Nancy Reagan beaming at Ron.

I’m wary of the grand claims and promises being made for marriage by gay people now. One assumption is that legal same-sex marriage will “civilize” gay men by turning us monogamous, though marriage has never had that effect on straight men. So what will it do for lesbians, since they’re presumed civilized already? (And if they aren’t, the male proponents of marriage don’t want to hear it.) Most of this talk ignores the differential roles men and women play in heterosexual marriage, where the husband’s happiness is bought at the price of the wife’s. More recent research finds that married women are happier than they used to be, because they’re more likely to work outside the home – i.e., to be more independent of their husbands. But they still have to work the Second Shift of housework on top of their paid jobs. I’m curious to see how this symbiosis (if not parasitism) will work itself out in same-sex marriages, especially between men.

E. J. Graff, author of What Is Marriage For?, sent me a nice e-mail arguing that I’d misinterpreted her remark (which I construed as a complaint) that “anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float.” I can see where she’s coming from, though after checking it in context again I don’t agree. Graff was writing about the Protestant rebellion against Roman Catholic clerical celibacy, and quoted the reformer Martin Luther’s claims about thousands of dead baby cadavers (aborted or killed after birth) found in convents. Graff commented:

Of course these are nonsense charges, equivalent to the medieval cry that Jews killed Christian babies for their Passover feast – or, to use similarly ludicrous charges from contemporary anti-gay pamphlets, that most gay men eat feces and prey on young boys, or that lesbians die by age forty-five. Luther could get away with such exaggerations because everyone knew some local sexual irregularity (or, to be contemporary again, because anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float) – and so listeners could imagine that, far away, things could be so much, much worse.

(Bold type is mine.) Leaving other issues aside, it seems to me that Graff agrees that scantily-clad leathermen are not a Good Thing – unlike, say, scantily-clad female cheerleaders shaking their buns and bazooms before drunken (but presumed-heterosexual) football crowds. She also has a slight fixation on drunken queers, apparently assuming that married people never get drunk (or for that matter, gyrate drunkenly on urban [as opposed to rural?] Pride floats). I was sure there was another passage in What Is Marriage For? complaining about Pride parades, and I finally found it: this cute bit from page 144, boldface mine:

And yet the very existence of same-sex marriage would send a message to young people – a good one. It would offer visible evidence that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, that “sodomy” is a sin only in the eyes of the beholder. Some commentators would much rather see outré urban queers throwing drunken kisses off bar floats than have two nice married girls move in next door, with or without papoose, demonstrating to every neighborhood kid that a good marriage is defined from the inside out.

Remember the quotation from Goffman, above. Graff takes for granted that you have be outré, drunk and urban to throw kisses from a parade float (she’s evidently never seen a small-town Fourth of July parade), that a “papoose” defines a good marriage, that everyone will see “two nice married girls” as positive (which is why conservative Christians support same-sex marriage, right?), that those “two nice married girls” couldn’t possibly drive into the city from the suburbs on Pride Day to ride bare-breasted on their motorcycle, with “papoose” in tow. I’m not sure which “commentators” Graff has in mind here, but her polemic is built on the assumption that you have to choose between drunken Pride parades and sober couplehood, between city and suburbs, between niceness and badness. She may not actually believe that, but it’s what she wrote. Aside from being false, it’s the same Manichean divide that drives a lot of anti-gay propaganda: either be decent Christian father-ruled married heterosexuals, or degraded feces-eating homosexuals blowing kisses from Pride floats. (Those interested might check out page 188 of What Is Marriage For?, where Graff grinds the same ax to misinterpret Michael Warner and Edmund White.) In the real world it’s not either/or: you’re going to see both the party animals in the Pride Parades, and the suburban same-sex couples, and sometimes they'll be the same people. Legal same-sex marriage won’t silence bigots, who will simply not see what they don’t want to see.

For a variety of reasons, I have increasing doubts about legal same-sex (and mixed-sex) marriage. Graff, like so many advocates, thinks that marriage is basically a good thing, born of people’s “more common human desire to pair off, for two people to dedicate themselves to one another, to build a shared life and a home – and have it recognized by those around them, whether parents or governments” (page 190). If there are any problems with those desires, they can be reformed by, um, getting married; if your marriage doesn’t work out, it’s your fault, not anything wrong with marriage itself. Graff turns up her nose at what she terms the arrogance of Utopians, but it’s hard to get more Utopian than this. It is fine with me if people pair off to, in Graff’s terms, dedicate themselves to sharing sex only with each other; we all have our kinks, and I’m very tolerant of diversity. But outside Utopia and romance tales, that desire doesn’t always (or even often) last for very long. I’m not sure that the State should be invited to enforce it, nor that the other legal privileges that go with civil marriage – which I agree are important – such as inheritance, health care, and the like, should be reserved for couples. Everyone should have health insurance and Social Security, whether they’re married or not, and children should have enough to eat, health care, and good educations, regardless of the marital (or class) status of their parents. (Hm. What if a nice single lesbian moves in next door to you with a “papoose” in her arms? Would Graff and her wife rally the neighborhood association to run the cheap slut out of town?)

If, or rather when same-sex civil marriage is implemented, it will be only a matter of time before we start seeing news stories about the Baptist minister, father of two, with a loving husband of twenty years at home, caught making sexual advances to an undercover police officer in a park tearoom. (Better yet, imagine him caught picking up a female streetwalker, and defending himself with the claim that he thought she was really a male transvestite.) Or about the nice Episcopalian couple in the suburbs – he’s a lawyer, he’s an accountant – whose child keeps coming to school with mysterious bruises, or worse. Or the nice Jewish lesbian couple – just celebrated their tenth anniversary -- one of whom turns up at the Emergency Room with a broken arm from “falling down the stairs” of their ranch home. How about the not-so-nice trailer-trash butch-femme couple who scream drunkenly at each other every night on the other side of your thin apartment wall – but they’re married, bless ‘em! (Graff’s vision of wedded bliss is not only clean-and-sober, it has a decided middle-class bias.) Being single won’t solve all your problems – I know! – but marriage isn’t Utopia either.

The Love Boat

It has been entertaining, I admit, the spectacle of right-wing bigots tumbling out of the closet like the finale of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

Every time I started to write this post, another case would appear. But not all the hypocrites are on the religious right pretending to be straight; some are openly gay. This has a lot to do with bigotry in the larger society, of course, but so do they all. The late Randy Shilts, for example, hid the fact that he was HIV-positive for a long time after And the Band Played On, his book on the AIDS epidemic, was published. As Michael Bronski wrote,

while no one is mandated to announce their health status it would have been interesting to see how the straight media would have responded to Shilts the “objective” reporter as an out, openly HIV positive gay man. For among all of the things that AIDS has contributed to our thinking and culture it has made the link between the more palatable idea off a “gay identity” and the less palatable reality of “gay sexual behavior” inevitable; simply put: you have to get fucked to get AIDS. And would Shilts's public position as a Person With AIDS have made the mainstream press see And The Band Played On as a document of special pleading--a label that is quickly attached to most all "non-objective" minority writing from Kate Millett to Larry Kramer to Lani Guinier.

The fault here lies not so much with Randy Shilts, but with the context and parameters set up from the mainstream press and media about what is acceptable. Randy Shilts understood that he lived in a world that would not take him seriously as a journalist if he was too partial to the gay press or showed too many signs of “non-objective” writing.

For, despite Shilts’s public criticism of gay male bathhouses (he eventually advocated closing them),

During the 1970s Shilts – like most all gay men in San Francisco – was an avid bathhouse attendee, both in the more mainstream baths as well as the more s/m oriented South of Market establishments. This is not news, it is common knowledge and up until the publication of And the Band Played On. Shilts was always forthcoming about the details and the vagaries of his sexual history. The story of how he was accidentally locked outside of South of Market's Handball Express (an establishment that specialized in fist-fucking), naked and handcuffed, was told by everyone – including Shilts himself. What would have happened in the critical reception of And the Band Played On if Shilts had been more forthcoming about his own involvement with the institutions about which he spoke. Would straight critics and media folk have treated him with the same respect he received by not disclosing his relationship to his material? I suspect not.

Stephen O. Murray reports that the offensive to close San Francisco bathhouses in 1984

was undertaken by Larry Littlejohn, a gay deputy sheriff later shown to be engaged in competition with bathhouses – he was dismissed from his job in 1987 after being charged with pandering for young male prostitutes. Littlejohn did not attempt to organize a gay community response, such as demonstrating in front of the establishments or talking to patrons inside or outside them. After meeting with Shilts and Leonard Matlovich, Littlejohn’s first resort was to seek government intervention [American Gay, Chicago 1996, 112f].

That was a long time ago, I admit. But since then we’ve had cases like that of Michelangelo Signorile, who blamed the gay community for his inability to use a condom with a hot man in the privacy of his hotel room, and we’ve had scourges of gay male ‘irresponsibility’ like Larry Kramer who seroconverted after they’d been demanding that everyone else stop having sex altogether. (Kramer was also a bathhouse customer, which wasn’t a secret – he portrayed his alter ego in The Normal Heart prowling the tubs and rejecting men who weren’t young and twinky enough.)

One of the Promiscuous Reader’s Laws is that if gay people want to have a “respectable” public life, we have to have a “scandalous” private life, and vice versa. I codified this in the late 1970s. It explains why so many respectable heterosexually married men get caught with male hustlers or prowling tearooms… Oh, dear; that bit of slang may be out of date by now. It’s camp argot for public restrooms where men go for sex with other men. One of the traditional features of gay male life has been the ironic juxtaposition of our grubby reality with our affectation of elegant terminology – compare “coming out,” taken from high society debutante parties, let alone “queen” itself. In the old days, say before the late 1970s, gay bars tended to be murky, grotty sub rosa places; nowadays it’s possible to have commercial gay establishments that are clean, well-lit, and appealing.

The flip side of this Law is that, in order to have a “respectable” private life (partnered, ostensibly monogamous), a gay person must have a “scandalous” public life (admittedly, openly, unabashedly, militantly flaunting gay -- one of Those!) But things are changing here too, as Homo-Americans fight to become respectable on both fronts at once. As far back as 1963, Erving Goffman wrote in Stigma (page 7, note 10):

Interestingly, a convention seems to have emerged in popular life-story writing where a questionable person proves his claim to normalcy by citing his acquisition of a spouse and children, and, oddly, by attesting to his spending Christmas and Thanksgiving with them.

Goffman was writing about various sorts of stigma, including physical handicap, but when I first read Stigma a couple of years ago, I was struck by the parallel to my Homo-American contemporaries. In the 1980s, some theatre people made a splash coming out at the Tony Awards by thanking their lovers in their acceptance speeches. When celebrities come out nowadays, they nearly always seem to have their Partner, and often a child, standing nearby for the announcement, making with The Gaze like Nancy Reagan beaming at Ron.

I’m wary of the grand claims and promises being made for marriage by gay people now. One assumption is that legal same-sex marriage will “civilize” gay men by turning us monogamous, though marriage has never had that effect on straight men. So what will it do for lesbians, since they’re presumed civilized already? (And if they aren’t, the male proponents of marriage don’t want to hear it.) Most of this talk ignores the differential roles men and women play in heterosexual marriage, where the husband’s happiness is bought at the price of the wife’s. More recent research finds that married women are happier than they used to be, because they’re more likely to work outside the home – i.e., to be more independent of their husbands. But they still have to work the Second Shift of housework on top of their paid jobs. I’m curious to see how this symbiosis (if not parasitism) will work itself out in same-sex marriages, especially between men.

E. J. Graff, author of What Is Marriage For?, sent me a nice e-mail arguing that I’d misinterpreted her remark (which I construed as a complaint) that “anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float.” I can see where she’s coming from, though after checking it in context again I don’t agree. Graff was writing about the Protestant rebellion against Roman Catholic clerical celibacy, and quoted the reformer Martin Luther’s claims about thousands of dead baby cadavers (aborted or killed after birth) found in convents. Graff commented:

Of course these are nonsense charges, equivalent to the medieval cry that Jews killed Christian babies for their Passover feast – or, to use similarly ludicrous charges from contemporary anti-gay pamphlets, that most gay men eat feces and prey on young boys, or that lesbians die by age forty-five. Luther could get away with such exaggerations because everyone knew some local sexual irregularity (or, to be contemporary again, because anyone can see on TV some scantily leather-clad man gyrating drunkenly on an urban Pride float) – and so listeners could imagine that, far away, things could be so much, much worse.

(Bold type is mine.) Leaving other issues aside, it seems to me that Graff agrees that scantily-clad leathermen are not a Good Thing – unlike, say, scantily-clad female cheerleaders shaking their buns and bazooms before drunken (but presumed-heterosexual) football crowds. She also has a slight fixation on drunken queers, apparently assuming that married people never get drunk (or for that matter, gyrate drunkenly on urban [as opposed to rural?] Pride floats). I was sure there was another passage in What Is Marriage For? complaining about Pride parades, and I finally found it: this cute bit from page 144, boldface mine:

And yet the very existence of same-sex marriage would send a message to young people – a good one. It would offer visible evidence that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, that “sodomy” is a sin only in the eyes of the beholder. Some commentators would much rather see outré urban queers throwing drunken kisses off bar floats than have two nice married girls move in next door, with or without papoose, demonstrating to every neighborhood kid that a good marriage is defined from the inside out.

Remember the quotation from Goffman, above. Graff takes for granted that you have be outré, drunk and urban to throw kisses from a parade float (she’s evidently never seen a small-town Fourth of July parade), that a “papoose” defines a good marriage, that everyone will see “two nice married girls” as positive (which is why conservative Christians support same-sex marriage, right?), that those “two nice married girls” couldn’t possibly drive into the city from the suburbs on Pride Day to ride bare-breasted on their motorcycle, with “papoose” in tow. I’m not sure which “commentators” Graff has in mind here, but her polemic is built on the assumption that you have to choose between drunken Pride parades and sober couplehood, between city and suburbs, between niceness and badness. She may not actually believe that, but it’s what she wrote. Aside from being false, it’s the same Manichean divide that drives a lot of anti-gay propaganda: either be decent Christian father-ruled married heterosexuals, or degraded feces-eating homosexuals blowing kisses from Pride floats. (Those interested might check out page 188 of What Is Marriage For?, where Graff grinds the same ax to misinterpret Michael Warner and Edmund White.) In the real world it’s not either/or: you’re going to see both the party animals in the Pride Parades, and the suburban same-sex couples, and sometimes they'll be the same people. Legal same-sex marriage won’t silence bigots, who will simply not see what they don’t want to see.

For a variety of reasons, I have increasing doubts about legal same-sex (and mixed-sex) marriage. Graff, like so many advocates, thinks that marriage is basically a good thing, born of people’s “more common human desire to pair off, for two people to dedicate themselves to one another, to build a shared life and a home – and have it recognized by those around them, whether parents or governments” (page 190). If there are any problems with those desires, they can be reformed by, um, getting married; if your marriage doesn’t work out, it’s your fault, not anything wrong with marriage itself. Graff turns up her nose at what she terms the arrogance of Utopians, but it’s hard to get more Utopian than this. It is fine with me if people pair off to, in Graff’s terms, dedicate themselves to sharing sex only with each other; we all have our kinks, and I’m very tolerant of diversity. But outside Utopia and romance tales, that desire doesn’t always (or even often) last for very long. I’m not sure that the State should be invited to enforce it, nor that the other legal privileges that go with civil marriage – which I agree are important – such as inheritance, health care, and the like, should be reserved for couples. Everyone should have health insurance and Social Security, whether they’re married or not, and children should have enough to eat, health care, and good educations, regardless of the marital (or class) status of their parents. (Hm. What if a nice single lesbian moves in next door to you with a “papoose” in her arms? Would Graff and her wife rally the neighborhood association to run the cheap slut out of town?)

If, or rather when same-sex civil marriage is implemented, it will be only a matter of time before we start seeing news stories about the Baptist minister, father of two, with a loving husband of twenty years at home, caught making sexual advances to an undercover police officer in a park tearoom. (Better yet, imagine him caught picking up a female streetwalker, and defending himself with the claim that he thought she was really a male transvestite.) Or about the nice Episcopalian couple in the suburbs – he’s a lawyer, he’s an accountant – whose child keeps coming to school with mysterious bruises, or worse. Or the nice Jewish lesbian couple – just celebrated their tenth anniversary -- one of whom turns up at the Emergency Room with a broken arm from “falling down the stairs” of their ranch home. How about the not-so-nice trailer-trash butch-femme couple who scream drunkenly at each other every night on the other side of your thin apartment wall – but they’re married, bless ‘em! (Graff’s vision of wedded bliss is not only clean-and-sober, it has a decided middle-class bias.) Being single won’t solve all your problems – I know! – but marriage isn’t Utopia either.