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    The bed's too big / The fryin' pan's too wide
    Andrew Sullivan has a new piece out on gay marriage, headlined Integration Day in The New York Times (registration required, as if you needed to be told). Sullivan's writing meant a lot to me when I was coming out in the mid-'90's and most gay writers were in the vein of, like, Michelangelo Signorile. But Girlfriend is really starting to annoy me something fierce.

    Get a load (heh-heh) of this:

    I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents' or my brother's or my sister's. It's hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound. At that moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it: the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you were born into and the love you feel.


    One wants to just whisper in his ear that when Margaret Cho said the best reason for gay marriage was that it was inhumane to deny a gay man a bridal registry, it was a joke. But, fine...what he's saying isn't that superficial. It's still, despite his unremitting complaisance as a writer and public personality, offensive.

    I like having people's respect and approval. Resilient as my ego is, my nerves are not sheathed in titanium, and having my friends and loves and the life we cherish referred to as perversion all over the place gets me down sometimes. But either you claim control over your own life and mean it, or you slaver for people's approval and give them the ability to define your worth. No fair congratulating yourself about being willing to take an unpopular stand out of moral conviction and then informing people that they will love you for it. That maneuver makes me as nauseated as...as...John Derbyshire in a roomful of Muscle Marys.

    Just to be clear: I'm not downplaying the hardships of being gay, and I give guys and gals who are just coming out quite a bit of leeway in finding their way at first. I have a more privileged life than a lot of people, but coming out was deeply painful. I didn't think I would make it through; I don't consider it whiny for anyone at that stage to be having difficulties getting it together and needing a lot of accommodation from supportive people. If I thought there were a policy proposal that would magically make that hurt unnecessary for future gay men and women, I'd be agitating for it in a second. Also, no one is going to stop me from being a thoroughgoing homo: being in love with a man, feeling that thrill when a cute guy comes into my field of vision, hanging out and being queeny with friends, and (what have I missed?...oh, yeah) mind-altering screwing. I know my own mind, and that's where it's at. I wish that didn't present an obstacle in getting along with some people, but reality is, it does. Though I'm grateful that people cut me lots of slack when I needed them to, now that I've righted myself and become a sovereign adult, I deal.

    All of this blather about how our need for marriage is connected with [yaks all over freshly-cleaned floor] self-esteem and not making us feel so alienated just reinforces the charge that our real problem is arrested development. To the extent that psychologists can even determine whether self-esteem is a useful concept, my understanding is that their idea of where it comes from is pretty old-fashioned. Encouragement from others is part of it, but most of it is meeting and overcoming obstacles, fulfilling one's obligations, and paying one's debts. For that reason--much as it galls, galls, galls me that hetero convicted felons, multiple divorcés, and deadbeat dads are free to indulge in messed-up marriages without interference, while we're told that we're going to spell doom for the concept of the family--I don't trust our own high-profile crew of dissolute, flim-flamming party animals with marriage any more than Rick Santorum does.

    Most of us are not that caricature, including, I presume, Sullivan and the like-minded Jonathan Rauch, whose book Gay Marriage I eagerly pre-ordered and ended up being disappointed by. Like Sullivan's latest article, Rauch's book leans heavily on the idea that marriage brings community pressure to be good, which helps keep married couples stable and benefits everyone. Rauch does raise the question of whether this will apply to gay marriages if a lot of people regard them as counterfeit, but as far as I can tell, he doesn't really address it.

    If we're going to be using marriage as a cure for the low self-esteem and alienation of "emotional segregation," though, the answer matters. And the answer is: Those who wish us well and want our relationships to sustain us and bind us to the community are already treating us that way; people who see our relationships as illegitimate will keep doing so no matter who has a license for what. That means that even if gay marriage becomes a long-term fact, we're initially going to have to be strong for each other, through our formal and informal institutions, every bit as much as we are right now. It may never be the case that everyone is brought around to our side, but to the extent that it happens, it will happen because people can see gays taking charge of our own lives and not bleating, two decades into adulthood, about feeling left out.

    I could also say something about DC-based political journalists who, while they may favor small government, still have the irksome habit of seeing the role of what the government does do as the conferring of legitimacy and Making things Real, rather than serving as a vehicle for the will and collected resources of citizens, but I'm too tired to get into that just now.

    Added on lunchbreak, 19 May: Brian Tiemann has a bit more temperate response to Sullivan, raising some of the same points (and including a penis pun) but giving them more context.

    Related Posts (on one page):

    1. Around the maypole
    2. Not quite government's end
    3. The bed's too big / The fryin' pan's too wide
    Posted by Sean on 2004-05-17 02:45:27 | 5 Comments | The White Peril 白禍 » Page not found
     

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    Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: marriage
    Not quite government's end
    I was disappointed by Jonathan Rauch's book Gay Marriage, which I thought made uncharacteristically spotty arguments. (Uncharacteristically for him, I mean--not, more's the pity, for gay marriage advocates.) Being a sensible person, he knows how to confront reality, though; and with his new op-ed, he ends the year much better than he began it. Well, you have to roll yours eyes and move quickly past the loan shark analogy near the beginning. Part of his main point is this:

    The consensus has shifted rapidly, meanwhile, toward civil unions. The 2004 exit polls showed 35% of voters supporting them (and another 25% for same-sex marriage). Particularly after the Nov. 2 debacle, civil unions look to many gay-rights advocates like the more attainable goal. It is not lost on them that Vermont's civil-unions law and California's partnership program have proved surprisingly uncontroversial. For their part, social conservatives increasingly, if grudgingly, accept civil unions as deflecting what they regard as an attack on marriage. John Kerry endorsed civil unions, and in October Mr. Bush accepted them, saying, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do."

    This year may be remembered as the time when civil unions established themselves as the compromise of choice. For an indicator, watch whether there is an outcry if state courts narrow the scope of the new amendments to allow civil unions and other partner programs. My guess is that few people will fuss.


    It's been put to me that even civil unions wouldn't be possible if activists hadn't first gone the whole way and demanded "marriage rights" and then fallen back to what would then look like a more reasonable position. Maybe. It's not possible to know. I myself think the collateral damage, as it were, has to be factored in: the fixing in the minds of Americans of an image of gay public figures as, yet again, screechy single-issue activists who think of nothing but themselves. It's not fair to lay an equal share of the blame on moderate thinkers such as Rauch, but neither is it unfair to acknowledge that his influence was not always as salutary as it might have been. He's still one of the best advocates we have, especially with Andrew Sullivan still off in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, and it's a holiday treat (no one's going to jump down my throat for not explicitly calling it "Christmas" now that it's 28 December, yeah?) to see him coming around.

    (Via IGF)

    Related Posts (on one page):

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    2. Not quite government's end
    3. The bed's too big / The fryin' pan's too wide
    Posted by Sean on 2004-12-27 12:01:19 | | The White Peril 白禍 » Page not found
     

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    Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: marriage, society
    Around the maypole
    It's touching that Dean has the patience to keep coming up with new anagrams of his position on gay marriage, as if one day one of his gay friends might listen. But then, as someone's bound to point out, I'm sitting here writing this post, so who am I to talk?

    Anyway, one thing he's going off about in the comments is the epidemic of revisionist history among quite a few SSM advocates. I think it's worth expanding backward on that point a little.

    People used not to understand fertility. I don't just mean human fertility--they didn't understand why crops grew and hunt animals were plentiful sometimes but not others, either, any more than they understood why sex sometimes produced children and other times didn't. Further, the competition for precious resources was fierce. Even after the invention of cavalry and chariots and catapults and cauldrons of pitch, war essentially meant hand-to-hand combat; and there was a lot of war. There was also a lot of disease.

    What all this boiled down to was that human societies knew they desperately needed to keep replacing themselves and the things they subsisted on, but they were never quite sure what was going to work. Things like nitrogen-based fertilizer, filmstrips of sperm and ovum meeting under a microscope, and mechanical refrigeration are all very, very new in human history.

    You already know this, so why am I bringing it up? Because I think it's easy to forget how the pressure to ensure fertility at all costs has shaped civilization. (Well, Japan, with its disorienting blend of super-modernity and raw primalness, has not lost a lot of its old rites.) When people oppose gay marriage because they assume there's no love or commitment in our relationships, they're being ignorant and need to be told so. Even in old times, there were people who reproduced and people who didn't. There's no reason gay people can't contribute to civilization just because we're not contributing children, and having two people willingly take stewardship over each other's welfare has obvious benefits.

    But you can argue that, and argue that our ability to care for each other needs protecting in a world of competing interests, without necessarily concluding that marriage has to be expanded to do it. The ability to choose your own life partner is a pretty new thing. Maybe it needs a new institution. Maybe it would do better without any overarching institution but a range of contract options. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The point is, the debate is still going on, and not even all of us who are gay can agree that SSM should be legalized or why. Its advocates are not doing themselves any favors by acting as if the correct conclusion were obvious to, like, any fair-minded person with a brain.

    Related Posts (on one page):

    1. Around the maypole
    2. Not quite government's end
    3. The bed's too big / The fryin' pan's too wide
    Posted by Sean on 2005-04-07 00:26:18 | 2 Comments | The White Peril 白禍 » Page not found
     

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