by Bruce Bawer
I moved to Amsterdam in late 1998; just over a year later the Netherlands instituted gay marriage. I moved to Oslo in 1999; Norway adopted a gay marriage law in 2008. I came back to New York in 2011; only days (!) afterward the state legalized gay marriage. Deny my powers, if you dare.
Seriously, it's been instructive to watch gay marriage move toward becoming a reality in three quite different jurisdictions while I was living in them. In the Netherlands gay marriage seemed virtually an inevitability – after all, if America is the land of hot dogs and apple pie, the Netherlands is the land of windmills, tulips, pot, assassinations of high-profile critics of Islam, and cutting-edge legislation on gay rights.
In Norway, by contrast, gay marriage was seriously argued over. The right to gay adoption, which at that point was already a fait accompli in almost the entire U.S. but not in “liberal” Norway (where having a child is seen not as an inalienable right but as a privilege bestowed by the state), was a major bone of contention. Some Norwegian politicians who supported gay marriage were people I loathe for everything else they support; some of its nominal opponents were people I otherwise admire. I say “nominal” because Norway is a land of strict party discipline, so that even people who you knew really supported gay marriage were obliged to step up to the microphone during the parliamentary debate and deliver palpably un-heartfelt speeches against it.
And that’s precisely what was so moving about the New York vote, which I can’t imagine happening either in the Netherlands or in Norway. The spectacle of those tough, cynical middle-aged Republican pols – members of a legislature right out of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, a body that hardly has a reputation for, shall we say, its delicate touch or generosity of spirit – breaking away from the pack, saying “fuck you” (in one case literally) to the party line, and voting their consciences was, quite simply, gloriously American: raw and real and right.
The Dish 