One aspect of the battle over civil marriage rights for gays is its emotionality. I know I’ve found it hard to keep this issue from spilling into my private life, from feeling wounded and betrayed by straight friends and colleagues who turn out not to support my right to marry, while inviting me to their weddings and social occasions. But it’s even tougher when your own family disagrees. I’m not privy to the strain the Cheney family must be under, nor would I want to be, but this is an issue that is hard to seal off from one’s heart, because it is about the heart. And it’s certainly sad that figures like Phyllis Shlafly should also have gay offspring. Or that the leading psychiatrist supporting the notion that gays can be cured, Charles Socarides, also has a gay son. I remember reading the transcript of then-congressman Sonny Bono’s attempt to square his support for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 with the fact this his own daughter was lesbian. I included Bono’s congressional statement in my anthology of writing on same-sex marriage, pro and con. (Heads up: I’ve just finished updating a brand new edition of the collection and it should be published in a month.) I loved Bono’s sentiments not because they were particularly coherent, but because they were so honest:
And Barney [Frank]’s a good friend of mine. And I see his point of view, and I appreciate his fight. He’s fighting as hard as he can because he’s a human being; he has these feelings; he’s gay; my daughter’s gay. He has to live this way… So I think we go beyond the Constitution here. I think we go beyond these brilliant interpretations here, and I think we have hit feelings, and we’ve hit what people can handle and what they can’t handle, and it’s that simple… I don’t love my daughter any less because she’s gay, and I don’t dislike Barney any more because he’s gay… my response back to [Barney] is, you’re absolutely right, but the other side of it is this has taken people to as far as they can go, and then no justifiers – I don’t want to justify it because I can’t…
Bono voted to deny his own daughter any federal marital benefits, just as Dick Cheney is having to deny his own daughter basic civil rights because of his loyalty to his president. I mention all this because of this new story on a very similar theme. The son of the leading California campaigner against gay rights is gay – and in a relationship of ten years. When “pro-family” types talk about wedge issues, they don’t often concede that one of their wedges is to split families apart. And part of the point of civil marriage for gays is to bring families back together.
BBC ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS: Natan Sharansky has a good point here.
The Dish 