Category: Marriage Equality

Four years’ ago, before I ever dreamed it would happen to me, I wrote the following short essay for Time, trying to explain to people who might not fully understand why the m-word means so much to many of us gay men and lesbians. We may not be a majority of human beings – we are probably only 2 to 3 percent – but that doesn’t make us any less human beings, and for us, access to marriage, to full membership in our own families, is the dream of our lives, and the struggle of my own life. Please, do what you can in California not to have this taken away from so many:

As a child, I had no idea what homosexuality was. I grew up in a traditional home — Catholic, conservative, middle class. Life was relatively simple: education, work, family. I was raised to aim high in life, even though my parents hadn’t gone to college. But one thing was instilled in me. What mattered was not how far you went in life, how much money you earned, how big a name you made for yourself. What really mattered was family and the love you had for one another. The most important day of your life was not graduation from college or your first day at work or a raise or even your first house. The most important day of your life was when you got married. It was on that day that all your friends and all your family got together to celebrate the most important thing in life: your happiness — your ability to make a new home, to form a new but connected family, to find love that put everything else into perspective.

 

But as I grew older, I found that this was somehow not available  to me. I didn’t feel the things for girls that my peers did. All the emotions and social rituals and bonding of teenage heterosexual life eluded me. I didn’t know why. No one explained it. My emotional bonds to other boys were one-sided; each time I felt myself falling in love, they sensed it, pushed it away. I didn’t and couldn’t blame them. I got along fine with my buds in a nonemotional context, but something was awry, something not right. I came to know almost instinctively that I would never be a part of my family the way my siblings might one day be. The love I had inside me was unmentionable, anathema. I remember writing in my teenage journal one day, "I’m a professional human being. But what do I do in my private life?"

I never discussed my real life. I couldn’t date girls and so immersed myself in schoolwork, the debate team, school plays, anything to give me an excuse not to confront reality. When I looked toward the years ahead, I couldn’t see a future. There was just a void. Was I going to be alone my whole life? Would I ever have a most important day in my life? It seemed impossible, a negation, an undoing. To be a full part of my family, I had to somehow not be me. So, like many other gay teens, I withdrew, became neurotic, depressed, at times close to suicidal. I shut myself in my room with my books night after night while my peers developed the skills needed to form real relationships and loves. In wounded pride, I even voiced a rejection of family and marriage. It was the only way I could explain my isolation.

It took years for me to realize that I was gay, years more to tell others and more time yet to form any kind of stable emotional bond with another man. Because my sexuality had emerged in solitude — and without any link to the idea of an actual relationship — it was hard later to reconnect sex to love and self-esteem. It still is. But I persevered, each relationship slowly growing longer than the last, learning in my 20s and 30s what my straight friends had found out in their teens. But even then my parents and friends never asked the question they would have asked automatically if I were straight: So, when are you going to get married? When will we be able to celebrate it and affirm it and support it? In fact, no one — no one — has yet asked me that question.

When people talk about gay marriage, they miss the point. This isn’t about gay marriage. It’s about marriage. It’s about family. It’s about love. It isn’t about religion. It’s about civil marriage licenses. Churches can and should have the right to say no to marriage for gays in their congregations, just as Catholics say no to divorce, but divorce is still a civil option. These family values are not options for a happy and stable life. They are necessities. Putting gay relationships in some other category — civil unions, domestic partnerships, whatever — may alleviate real human needs, but by their very euphemism, by their very separateness, they actually build a wall between gay people and their families. They put back the barrier many of us have spent a lifetime trying to erase.

It’s too late for me to undo my past. But I want above everything else to remember a young kid out there who may even be reading this now. I want to let him know that he doesn’t have to choose between himself and his family anymore. I want him to know that his love has dignity, that he does indeed have a future as a full and equal part of the human race. Only marriage will do that. Only marriage can bring him home.

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty.)

Althouse makes marriage equality opponent Dean Broyles’s argument clearer:

Let me see if I can make Broyles’s point. I think he means to say that if same-sex marriage remains a legal right, enshrined in state constitutional law, then homosexual relationships will come to be regarded normal and good, and, consequently, anyone who objects to them will start to look like a bigot who should not be permitted to have his way. Thus, in order to preserve the right to discriminate against gay people and to keep schools from teaching children that gay couples are perfectly nice and so forth — all things Broyles wants — it’s important to outlaw gay marriage, because it will be a powerful force in changing perceptions about gay people and those who think gay people are doing something terribly wrong.

Yes! That’s it.

One reason I favor marriage equality is that the simple public fact of gay married couples will in itself teach something about the reality of gay people and our lives – without any school or parent having to say a thing. It gives us a way to talk about gay couples for the first time in human history without talking about sex acts. Now, there’s nothing wrong with sodomy, in my view. But it no more defines gay people than it defines straight people (and straight people’s sex lives are now overwhelmingly sodomitic in nature – i.e. non-reproductive).

Or to put it in a way that might appeal to social conservatives: grant marriage equality and we can stop talking about homosexuality. We can start talking about love and friendship and commitment and family – for gays and straights. We can leave this horrible identity politics division behind. To give one simple example. I have never sat down with my niece and nephew, who are nine and twelve, and told them I am gay. But they were both in our wedding, along with my husband’s family’s children. They see me and Aaron for who we are – all of us, defined by all we do and are. They know we are gay but we never had to say so. And there is nothing more moving than hearing my nephew talk of "uncle Aaron." 

(Photo: the two ring-bearers at my wedding.)

The main reason the ban on marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples has been able to finance a massive advertizing campaign is that the LDS church is bankrolling the entire effort. Up to 40 percent of the financing comes from Mormons, who have also sent countless volunteers to the state to canvass door to door. It’s all legal, and totally within their democratic rights, but it is striking that one single religious grouping could invest so much in attempting to strip civil equality from gay couples:

Pollsters say that fueling the rise in support for Proposition 8 is an advertising blitz heavily bankrolled by the Mormon Church, which suggests, among other things, that if Proposition 8 doesn’t pass then schoolchildren will be indoctrinated about gay marriage.

Between 30% and 40% of the $25.5 million in donations raised as of last week by the "Yes" campaign has come from the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, supporters of the measure say.

This strong alliance between the Mormon church and the Christianist evangelicals on the marriage issue in California goes back some way. Mitt Romney explained the Mormon-Falwell connection in Christianity Today:

[S]everal months ago, not long before he died, I had the occasion of having the Rev. Jerry Falwell at our home. He said that when he was getting ready to oppose same-sex marriage in California, he met with the president of my church in Salt Lake City, and they agreed to work together in a campaign in California.

The No on 8 side has made some errors: poor advertizing and the self-inflicted wound of Gavin Newsom. But watching one religious group swamp an initiative to remove civil rights from a minority is troubling to me. It appears to be based on religious doctrine, not secular argument. If you want to counter the influence of the Mormon church in California’s democratic process, donate here.

(Photo: George Frey/Getty.)

It’s still neck and neck in California, but the gay-Democratic establishment is still in the grip of focus-group Clintonism. Ann Rostow feels that prop 8 will pass as a result:

A positive message would have pre-empted attack ads. Instead we fell into their traps, forcing ourselves to insist that California can become a marriage equality state without a corresponding commitment to equal rights throughout its institutions. No, gay marriage won’t be taught in schools if Prop 8 fails. But neither will the idea that gay marriage is wrong. We can’t tell the voters that they can vote against Prop 8 on one hand, and preserve a homophobic public policy on the other. They can’t, and they know it and we should have asked, not just for the status quo of the last five months, but for a future of respect. We could have described that future in an attractive way and I think we’d be in better shape today if we had.

Dale Carpenter adds his two cents:

What’s interesting to me is that both sides have avoided the merits of allowing gay couples to marry. Gay-marriage supporters have done so, with focus-group tested messages in hand, because they suspect a large group of people even in a progressive statement are still deeply uncomfortable with homosexuality and certainly don’t like gay marriage. Gay-marriage opponents have done so, I presume, because they know that Americans don’t like to be seen as discriminating or opposing civil rights. So they paint gay marriage, instead, as itself a threat to the rights of religious people and parents. The theory seems to be that the side that’s most seen as defending rights is the side that wins.

I doubt that any months-long campaign of television ads, no matter their content, could really change the basic impulses most people have on this issue. Those impulses, whether they lead you to support or oppose gay marriage, are developed over a lifetime of experience. Very few people come to this issue without some fairly strongly held views. Such views are hard to dislodge.

Still, there’s something to Rostow’s hope that one day gay-marriage supporters might actually argue that gay marriage is a good thing. If we’re going to lose these ballot fights anyway, why not fight the good fight rather than the agnostic one?

The question raised and decided by the Connecticut Supreme Court and California’s Supreme Court is whether civil unions, with the same rights and responsibilities on a state level as civil marriage, are a fair equivalent to civil marriage, under the rubric of equal protection of the laws. This is Obama’s position. It is one on which I strongly disagree with him. My own explicit treatment of this particular aspect of the debate is in an essay published eight years ago in The New Republic. I stand by it. If you’re interested, check it out.

I think the core resistance to marriage equality stems from a deep suspicion that gay men are incapable of the responsibilities of marriage and will taint it if allowed to own the name. (Tellingly, you almost never hear the same argument about lesbians, who make up a majority of same-sex marriages and tend to be more monogamous than straight couples.) But even this argument falters on inspection. Money quote:

Look at it this way. Even if you concede that gay men–being men–are, in the aggregate, less likely to live up to the standards of monogamy and commitment that marriage demands, this still suggests a further question: Are they less likely than, say, an insane person? A straight man with multiple divorces behind him? A murderer on death row? A president of the United States?

The truth is, these judgments simply cannot be fairly made against a whole group of people.

We do not look at, say, the higher divorce and illegitimacy rates among African Americans and conclude that they should have the right to marry taken away from them. In fact, we conclude the opposite: It’s precisely because of the high divorce and illegitimacy rates that the institution of marriage is so critical for black America. So why is that argument not applied to homosexuals?

This, however, is to concede for the sake of argument something I do not in fact concede. The truth is that there is little evidence that same-sex marriages will be less successful than straight marriages. Because marriage will be a new experience for most gay people, one they have struggled for decades to achieve, its privileges will not be taken for granted. My own bet is that gay marriages may well turn out to be more responsible, serious, and committed than straight ones. Many gay men may not, in practice, want to marry. But those who do will be making a statement in a way no heterosexual couple now can. They will be pioneers. And pioneers are rarely disrespectful of the land they newly occupy. In Denmark, in the decade since Vermont-style partnerships have been legal, gays have had a lower divorce rate than straights. And that does not even take into account the fact that a significant proportion of same-sex marriages in America will likely be between women. If gay men, being men, are less likely to live up to the monogamy of marriage, then gay women, being women, are more likely to be faithful than heterosexual couples. Far from wrecking the neighborhood, gay men and women may help fix it up.

By Daniel Larison

They may have been unaware of it, but Matt and Ross have stumbled upon some old Orthodox Church wisdom in their rejection of fourth marriages.  While even second marriages were discouraged by the Orthodox Church, particularly in the Byzantine era, the canons did permit some flexibility and oikonomia in practice, and third marriages were allowed in extreme cases where a couple could produce no heir or in the event of a spouse’s death.  Fourth marriages, however, were utterly beyond the pale, and this applied to the emperor just as it did to everyone else. 

Leo VI had married three times without producing any offspring, which threw the succession into doubt, but the canons strictly forbad marrying a fourth time for any reason.  The emperor’s concubine, Zoe Karbonopsina, gave birth to the future heir, Constantine, but even this did not lead to a compromise, but instead resulted in the emperor being banned from the Great Church.  Once Patriarch Nicholas Mystikos, who had opposed the marriage, had been deposed, oikonomia prevailed again, but the ensuing rivalry between the factions of the two patriarchs disrupted ecclesiastical and political life in Constantinople for more than a decade.

Cross-posted at Eunomia

Matt disagrees with me about Obama’s incoherent position on marriage equality:

I can’t peer into Obama’s mind and see what he’s thinking, but this looks like a political strategy rather than a logically coherent set of statements. Contra Andrew, I don’t think chalking this up to "cowardice" is the most reasonable interpretation. If you want to see the cause of marriage equality advanced, you need sympathetic politicians to win elections. If the sympathetic politicians all say things that are politically toxic, they’ll just lose and nothing will be accomplished. But if the sympathetic politicians hew to the more politically tenable line that special anti-gay constitutional amendments are wrong and discriminatory, and also appoint the sort of progressive jurists who are likely to look sympathetically on gay rights causes, then you’ll get to equality.

I take the point, except no national politician can or will give us marriage equality. It’s a state matter, and in those debates, it’s worth holding up the incoherence of politicians’ public arguments, if only to make our case better. It’s not a huge deal to me because the work is being done outside presidential politics and seems oddly detached from it. Look how much progress we made under Bush: a fiercely Christianist president failed to pass the FMA, presided over California and Massachusetts affirming marriage equality and the abolition of all sodomy laws – laws Bush backed when Texas governor. If we can move this far under a Christianist president and, for much of Bush’s term, a Republican Congress, the future is bright.