NRO COMES AROUND?

Here’s a sentence you don’t expect to read in National Review: “Homosexuals are and should be entitled to all of the civil rights that heterosexuals possess.” The author, who pens a screed against gay people being allowed any position of authority in the Anglican Church, nevertheless seems to recognize that civil laws and religious edicts are separate matters. This is huge progress. There is no deeper civil right than the right to marry. It’s great to see NRO publish someone who sees this Constitutional and moral truth. On the other hand, Jonah Goldberg is shocked to find that a few gay radicals in Canada – including the editor of something called “Fab magazine” – don’t want to get married. You could find plenty of “hip” straights who feel that way too, of course, especially if they edit something called Fab. But Jonah doesn’t seem to believe that because many heterosexuals are ambivalent about marriage, shack up, commit adultery or get divorced, they shouldn’t be allowed the right to marry in the first place. Why not?

JONAH AND LINCOLN: Jonah also rebuts the civil rights argument that the denial of same-sex marriage is equivalent to the denial of inter-racial marriage. Why? Jonah argues that it’s because no blacks back in the 1960s entertained radical notions about marriage and family life. Really? Has he read much cultural history? In 1967, when blacks first won the constitutional right to marry whom they pleased, you could also have had a front-page story in the New York Times citing many blacks who disapproved of inter-racial marriage. A hefty plurality still do. Would Jonah have written a column saying: “See? Those negroes don’t even want to marry whites! Why should we debase this sacred institution for just a few of those people who don’t represent most blacks anyway?” I doubt it. The racial analogy is also instructive in other respects. I wonder if Jonah has looked at the rates of illegitimacy, single motherhood, divorce and promiscuity among African-Americans as a group. Does Jonah infer from that that the right to marriage should be denied African-Americans? Of course not. If anything, such a minority, with difficult cultural and social baggage, is more in need of the anchor of marriage than others. And those members of that minority who aspire to marriage are not lumped in with those who don’t, but cherished and supported, as they should be. So why does that logic not also apply to gays? Why should culturally conservative gays be denied the right to marry because more socially radical ones don’t want to? The argument reminds me a little of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas essentially argued that blacks were intrinsically unable to be as full and worthy citizens as whites. Lincoln replied that that was even more reason to grant them equality, so that they could live up to their fullest potential even if it wasn’t as elevated as the white norm. Today we rightly abhor even Lincoln’s bigotry of low expectations. But in the case of gay citizens, some social conservatives endorse not Lincoln’s posture, but Douglas’s.