It was a fascinating CNN interview, in which the vice-president pointedly didn’t renounce his previous beliefs about letting civil marriage be dealt with by the states. When asked if he supported the president’s decision to ban gays from equal rights in the constitution itself, Cheney didn’t say he supported the amendment. He said he supported the president. It struck me as a very careful use of words. And after all, which father would want to explicitly consign his own daughter to second class citizenship? One thing that’s an unnoticed factor in this debate: the many Republicans who have gay kids or gay family members. There are many more of them than you might think – and I know plenty of them. But that’s what the religious right demands: that parents reject their own gay children by writing discrimination against them into the Constitution itself. And they call themselves “pro-family.”
EMAIL OF THE DAY: From the younger generation:
“So I’m doing my usual morning-shower think-time routine, and what’s occurred to me a thousand times before rises again out of the precaffeinated fog: the gay-marriage issue, the host of gay issues, will register as a blip on the historical radar in thirty years, maybe less. Then I think, I should bother Andrew Sullivan with this. Not that you haven’t considered it before – obviously you have, as it was right there on your blog this morning. But people my age (I’m way under forty), especially people younger than I (not so under thirty) are learning to cope with, and learn from, difference in a way our parents never did. It’s a simple fact of life in a relatively diverse, democratic culture and it was born out by my own college experience. Raised Catholic. Went to Catholic grade school. All-boys Catholic high school. Never knew – to my naxefve little mind – a gay person. Arrived at college (Catholic, no less), and suddenly there they were. Out. And, soon I realized, people. By the end of four years, more students came out. Homosexuality became an openly discussed issue on the campus. Old Jesuits wrote cranky, natural-law-ridden letters to the school paper (I sometimes rebutted them). A gay student group formed, and made noise about a lack of funding and space. The administration quivered and stayed put. And suddenly it seemed, well, like a mini-movement. Nothing on the order of what many early-middle-aged gay people experienced in their own situations, but for these kids, a lot of them Catholic, it was a seismic shift of self-understanding. And their friends, people like me, were taken along for the ride. We heteros learned with them, and from them. This isn’t relativism. It’s sociology.”
I couldn’t agree more, and was talking about this with Hitch yesterday in what turned into a five-hour lunch. When you visit college campuses as I do all the time, you realize that the gay issue is basically over for the younger generation. They take the presence of openly gay people for granted; it seems obvious that gays should have the right to marry. That’s another reason why this constitutional amendment is so toxic an idea. Within a few years, it will seem absurd that we even thought about it.
THE MAINE EVENTS: I’m doing a world tour of Maine today and tomorrow, speaking on marriage rights. I’ll be speaking at the Page Commons at Cotter Union at Colby College, Waterville, tonight at 8 pm, and at Chase Hall, Bates College, Lewiston, at 7.30 pm Thursday night. All are welcome.
The Dish 