Month: June 2007

The Unlikely Triumph Of Marriage Equality

Kissdarrenmccollestergetty

I’m still pinching myself. What happened yesterday didn’t get much press, but it’s an earthquake. It was the day that marriage equality came to America for good. A reader exults:

I fully expect that the social right will react just as you predict, claiming that only a popular vote could give gay marriage genuine legitimacy. But the fact of the matter is that there have been multiple popular referendums here in Massachusetts on the issue, in the form of elections to the Legislature. If there were really a hidden swell of opposition, presumably it would have punished the politicians who supported gay marriage, ushering in a new class of legislators dedicated to overturning it. What we’ve seen is the opposite: anti-gay marriage politicians being voted out en masse in favor of those who support it.  The people have spoken, over and over, and the result is one we can all be proud of, a wonderful example of our republic in action.

This is a historic moment and one every supporter of individual freedom should be celebrating. I hope you have a smile on your face.

Ear to ear. And it will soon be a personal epiphany as well, which is something I truly never expected.

Looking back on two decades of struggle, past the ashes of so many, to the clearing on which we now stand, it’s hard not to weep. Two decades ago, marriage for gays was a pipe-dream. Some of us were ridiculed for even thinking of the idea. And yet here we are. Past the vicious attack from the president, past the cynical manipulation by Rove, past the cowardice of so many Democrats, past the rank hypocrisy of the Clintons, past the inertia of the Human Rights Campaign, past the false dawn in San Francisco, and the countless, countless debates and speeches and books and articles and op-eds. Yes, we have much more to do. Yes, we still have to win over those who see our loves as somehow destructive of the families we seek merely to affirm. Yes, we don’t have federal recognition of our basic civic equality. Yes, in many, many states, we have been locked out of equality for a generation, because of the politics of fear and backlash. But look how far we’ve come. From a viral holocaust to full equality – somewhere in America, in the commonwealth where American freedom was born. In two decades. This is history. What a privilege to have witnessed it.

It was driven above all by ordinary gay and lesbian couples and their families – not activists, not lobbyists, not intellectuals. Couples and their families. It was driven by a brutal, sudden realization that we were far more vulnerable than we knew. In the plague years, husbands reeled as they were denied access to their own spouses in hospitals, as they were evicted from their shared homes in the immediate aftermath of terrible grief, and refused access even to funerals by estranged and often hostile in-laws. This day is for them, for all those who were abused and maligned and cast aside because they loved another human being. It’s also for all the lesbian mothers who realized in the last two decades just how much contempt and hatred existed for their care of their own children, who lived in constant insecurity, or who, at best, had to endure erasure from visibility. It’s for gay families in Virginia today, denied dignity and protection multiple times over, enduring popular votes of meretricious contempt, and carrying on regardless, living their lives, building their relationships, cherishing their homes, caring for their kids, honoring their parents. And it’s for the countless, countless gay couples throughout human history – who for so long had to live lives in which their deepest longings and loves were denied, crushed, ignored or threatened.

The media didn’t much notice yesterday. But America changed. The world changed. And an ancient and deep wound began, ever so slightly, to heal.

(Photo: Greg Kimball and Brian O’Connor kiss outside the State House June 14, 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts. A special convening of the congress voted to kill a referendum that would have placed the Gay Marriage issue on the ballot in 2008. BY Darren McCollester/Getty.)

Kaus and Wright On Torture

Mickey comes out for torturing terror suspects, as part of a third category of detainees who are neither civil not military. He uses the hoary notion that if you concede the ticking time-bomb exception, everything is on the table, including torture in non-ticking-bomb scenarios. Why am I not surprised? Bob worries that establishing a new international norm that allows torture will help North Korea and Iran. You think? America’s endorsement of torture under Bush has been the biggest set-back for global human rights in my lifetime.

But what I do not understand is how this debate can happen at all. The law is clear; and the Geneva Conventions are clear; and the U.N. treaty on torture is clear. These abstract debates are not available to us until we repeal such laws and renege on such treaties. If the GOP wants to propose this, fine. But the current debate is surreal. Mickey, by the way, still believes that the worst that happened at Abu Ghraib was leashes and panties on the head. This means he has the same grasp of the basic facts as Rush Limbaugh. The only possible reason for not knowing the truth, at this point, is a desire not to know.

We Win

That was quick, wasn’t it? Mike Kinsley writes about the quiet gay revolution here. Money quote:

We still argue about it, but the whole spectrum of debate has moved left. A right-wing thug like Tom DeLay or Newt Gingrich probably has more advanced views about homosexuals than dainty liberals of the past century like Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey.

My only dissent is with the concept of "left." I know, I know. The GOP has clearly been on the other side of this issue, for the most part, for years now. But the basic argument for gay equality these past two decades has not been "left". It’s been a classic integrationist argument: let us serve openly in the military; let us embrace the responsibility of family; leave us alone. In some ways, as I have quixotically been arguing for too long, the gay movement since the 1980s has been pretty conservative. (And Kinsley got me to write the first serious conservative argument for gay marriage back in 1989.) For example: Can you think what people would call a mobilization of African-Americans to tackle HIV without government assistance – a mobilization that helped arrest the HIV epidemic in a matter of years? They’d call it a paragon of self-help and individual responsibility. But we’re gay, and so we don’t qualify for conservative support, help, or encouragement, let alone what we deserve, which is admiration ad respect. One day, the conservative movement will realize what a terrible mistake they have made, and how only callousness and prejudice can explain it. One day.

Hippies and Christianists

One of the premises of Brink Lindsey’s new book, "The Age of Abundance," is that the prosperity of 1960s and 1970s spawned two genuine social movements – the rebellious spiritual counter-culture of the Summer of Love and the religious right’s attempt to put the genie of sexual and personal liberation back into the fundamentalist bottle. Brink’s thesis is that capitalism’s post-war success in creating unprecedented prosperity led to widespread spiritual yearning and the leisure to express it fully. Neither hippies nor Christianists fully won, and their forced truce helped cement modern America’s libertarian, federalist politics. Count me convinced of the case for forgoing moral certainty in politics in favor of a shallower, skeptical formalism of live-and-let-live.

The genius of America, it seems to me, is its capacity to include people of radically different worldviews within a loose, flexible and constantly adjusting constitutional system. Given the huge differences between, say, a born-again evangelical in Georgia and a pot-smoking post-boomer in Seattle, no single cultural strait-jacket can ever hold America together. That’s why we mercifully don’t have such a strait-jacket, despite the excesses of the cultural left and right. We have a constitution that allows us to live together and even learn from each other in a morass of competing life-choices. This kind of politics eschews the dictatorial uniformity of Roe vs Wade and of the Federal Marriage Amendment. Both spring from the same controlling, moralistic urge to compel coherence in a society where freedom and sheer time will always spawn glorious, always-shifting incoherence and moral doubt.

George Will gives "The Age of Abundance" a rave in the NYT:

"Americans," Lindsey writes, "have become a different kind of people," transformed by capitalism’s fecundity. Although often "derided for its superficial banality," materialism has resulted in "a flood tide of spiritual yearning." Various scolds and worrywarts have exclaimed, with Wordsworth, that "getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." To such Jeremiahs, Lindsey provides an essentially cheerful, although not altogether so, counterpoint: affluence has made America a more libertarian, and hence a nicer, place.

Brinks’ book-blog can be read here. Danny Finkelstein had some thoughts about it yesterday. I’ve only read the Reason excerpt. But it alone sold me on the book.