AUBADE

The response to my offense at Senator Santorum is overwhelming, at least as far the emails are concerned. Around seven out of ten say: I’m crazy. I need to take my meds. I’m distorting what the guy said. I’m playing into the hands of the left. I should shut up, already. I’m a hysteric. I take these things too seriously. Okay, okay. I get the message. I’ve made my point. I don’t have anything else to say. Except perhaps this. The anger and, yes, hurt that I have expressed these past couple of days comes from a sincere moral conviction equal to that which animated my much more extended attempt to expose Trent Lott’s remarks. Of course, the hostility directed toward the intimate lives of gay people by Senator Santorum affects me more deeply, because I am gay. How could it not? Being gay my whole life is a huge blessing but also, of course, a difficult path. To try and reconcile it with a faith that is deep but a Church that refuses to support the innermost longings of my body and soul is not easy either. To square it with a belief in individual freedom and limited government, when so many of my gay brethren have embraced a wounded rejection of all traditional authority, and backed a radical politics in its stead, is not exactly a cakewalk either. To attempt both, and then to see that people you admire or support can actually endorse criminalizing you for expressing physical love in private, or see no problem with others’ saying so, or see adult gay love casually associated with the abuse of children and not notice, is so downright dispiriting it’s enough to make you despair. I’m writing this at 5.30 in the morning. When you feel this isolated, it isn’t easy to sleep. Sometimes you not only try to argue things (and I retract not a word of what I have argued). You feel them. The simple truth is that I and many others feel immensely wounded not so much by some clumsy, ugly remarks by someone who might even in some way mean well; but by the indifference toward them by so many you thought might at least have empathized for a second. Has that made me lose perspective? I don’t think so. I think it means I simply have a different perspective – one born out of pain and honesty and disappointed hope that we might eventually help people understand better the dignity and equality of homosexual persons. I know we have made many gains. I know Santorum represents very few. I know also that many, many good people – in the Republican party and elsewhere – do not wish gay people ill. But it is hard to express fully the sheer discouragement of this past week, capped simply by a calculated and contemptuously terse political gesture by a president I had come to trust. It makes me question whether that trust is well founded. And whether hope for a more inclusive future among conservatives is simply quixotic.