What’s Love Got to Do With It?
by John Corvino | March 1, 2010
The claim that marriage must either be about love between adults or the care of children is, of course, a false dilemma. [read article]
What's New?
Gays Without Borders
by Jennifer Vanasco | February 24, 2010
Anti-gay Christians are doing aggressive missionary work in Africa. There’s no reason gays can’t respond in kind. [read article]
What Marriage Is
by John Corvino | February 21, 2010
Marriage can’t be too small to include gays while also being large enough to do all that society expects of it. [read article]
The Judge is Gay. So What?
by Jennifer Vanasco | February 17, 2010
Homosexuality is not a bias, which is why Vaughn Walker can be as fair as any straight judge in the federal gay-marriage case. [read article]
Refining—Not Redefining
by John Corvino | February 15, 2010
There’s even less than meets the eye to claims that same-sex matrimony defines marriage out of existence. [read article]
The Spiral of Progress
by Jennifer Vanasco | February 10, 2010
Advances in the big, politically charged gay-rights battles aren’t so much making progress as reflecting it. [read article]
Brian Brown’s Bad Logic
by John Corvino | February 9, 2010
There is nothing ‘rational’ about the claim that if having married biological parents helps kids, allowing gay marriage would harm them. [read article]
‘Raw Sex’ and Rev. Evans
by Richard J. Rosendall | February 1, 2010
Some opponents of gay marriage are really just obsessed with gay sex, as a recent fracas in the District of Columbia shows. [read article]
Crying Fowl about Marriage
by John Corvino | January 31, 2010
Opponents say calling gay couples married is like calling a duck a chicken. But the definition of marriage is man-made and can change. [read article]
Case Closed
by Jennifer Vanasco | January 29, 2010
Forced to present actual arguments against gay marriage, the defendants in the Prop 8 lawsuit came up with…nothing. [read article]
It’s Not Abortion, Stupid
by Jennifer Vanasco | January 20, 2010
A Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage would not be as polarizing as the Roe v. Wade decision. [read article]
Aid laced with poison
by Richard J. Rosendall | January 19, 2010
Because aid dollars continue to flow unabated, U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing the persecution of homosexuals in Uganda. [read article]
Violent Distortions
by John Corvino | January 13, 2010
For anti-gay obsessives, equating homosexuality with sexual violence is not just a misunderstanding — it’s a strategy. [read article]
The Pleasures of Aging
by Paul Varnell | January 3, 2010
As gay culture matures, it needs to appreciate the many ways in which getting older makes us better. [read article]
The Year of Going Mainstream
by Jonathan Rauch | December 28, 2009
Despite some discouraging setbacks, after 2009 gay marriage will never again be seen as a fringe or radical cause. [read article]
Comfort and Joy!
by John Corvino | December 21, 2009
Despite setbacks, the holiday season in 2009 gives gay Americans many reasons to be grateful—and, well, gay. [read article]
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The Ashburn/Perez Axis
by David Link
Posted on March 6, 2010
On Monday, March 1, John A. Perez was sworn in as California’s first openly gay Speaker of the Assembly. Two days later, state Senator Roy Ashburn was arrested for driving drunk in Sacramento’s gay neighborhood, accompanied in the car by a young man.
There you have the culture war over homosexuality in a nutshell, the two iconic ways of being gay: pride or shame.
It might not be entirely fair to call Sen. Ashburn gay; he certainly doesn’t. But he’s about the only one. His sexual orientation is usually referred to as an “open secret” in Sacramento, where his appearance at the city’s gay bars is neither infrequent nor unnoticed.
His approach to homosexuality is the one the 55 year old grew up with: denial. But “denial” isn’t exactly right, since, over time, he seems to have come to some acceptance of the fact that, by nature, he finds men sexually attractive. And even in public he does not formally deny he is gay; he dodges. His sexual orientation is “not relevant” and “has no bearing” on his job performance. He doesn’t say he’s gay, but neither is he on record saying he’s not gay.
This public avoidance of what is obvious to everyone who knows and works with him requires almost military discipline and Herculean exertions of nuance and distraction.
Not to mention self-deception. Not his (since it’s fairly obvious he knows his sexual proclivity), but the self-deception of those who are working so hard to disbelieve the undeniable.
That is what his party not only demands of its followers, but seems to prefer – the willing (if not mandated) suspension of disbelief. No GOP candidates can ever be (openly) homosexual.
The confines of that small parenthetical contain the entire culture war over gay rights. Of course some GOP candidates and elected officials are homosexual. Of course GOP voters are, as well. But that observable and unavoidable fact can’t be honestly and straightforwardly talked about in the party. Log Cabin and now GOProud keep trying, while the party leaders and voters put their fingers in their ears and shout “Lalalalala!” as loud as they can.
This not only disables the party’s gay officials, it makes the entire party look simpleminded if not entirely insane.
Compare that to the Democrats. Yes, the Dems have their closeted gays as well, but that’s not the party’s fault, it’s entirely an individual choice. And it can be as fatal to Dems as it can to their counterparts.
But homosexuality is hardly a disqualifying factor for a Democrat – or certainly isn’t in California. John Perez worked his way up right alongside heterosexual party regulars, and his sexual orientation is no more a secret than theirs. On the merits (or on the politics – the two are intertwined), his colleagues in the Assembly voted for him to be their leader. Like the Latino, women and African-American speakers before him, being a minority in California might actually have been an advantage, but among many contenders, he’s the one who made the cut. Prior speakers of both parties, including the Granddaddy of them all in modern California politics, Willie Brown, showed up to celebrate Perez’s elevation. Encomiums and accolades were offered, and Perez’s inaugural speech met with rousing and sustained cheers.
Ashburn could never have aspired to anything like that in his party. No homosexual could.
Many people fall between these radically different understandings of homosexuality. But we are now at a stage where each party has adopted its own model. In California this week, we got to see exactly how they differ.
Even at CPAC...
Posted on February 20, 2010
California Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) leader Ryan Sorba was booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) when he said CPAC shouldn't have allowed the gay group GOProud [a coalition of gay Republicans] to be there. Here's the YouTube:
Alexander McCobin of Students for Liberty provoked Sorba's comments by saying in his own short speech:
"In the name of freedom, I would like to thank the American Conservative Union for welcoming GOProud as a co-sponsor of this event, not for any political reason but for the message it sends….Students today recognize that freedom does not come in pieces. Freedom is a single thing that applies to the social as well as the economic realms and should be defended at all times."
McCobin also drew some boos, but they were drowned out by applause. CPAC is the largest annual gathering of the hard-right wing of the Republican party. This represents progress.
After the GOP makes expected big congressional gains this coming November, lobbying within the libertarian wing of the Republican party will be vitally important. But don't count on the big-name "progressive" LGBT groups to bother with anything remotely like constructive engagement.
Gays and Conservatives: The Cato Forum
Posted on February 17, 2010
The libertarian Cato Institute today hosted a forum on the topic "Is There a Place for Gay People in Conservatism and Conservative Politics?," featuring Nick Herbert, MP, the British Conservative Party's openly gay Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. Responses to Herbert's remarks (an affirmative reply to the above question) were provided by Andrew Sullivan, a supporter of President Obama who detests the Republican party, and anti-gay activist Maggie Gallagher, who opposes any conservatism that might grant gay people the freedom to legally marry and thus equal liberty under the law.
Rick Sincere has blogged a richly detailed account, which I highly recommend. It's well worth reading.
More. I see that over at Positive Liberty, Jason Kuznicki also has blogged his views of the event (as a libertarian, he's skeptical of the proposition). While Dan Blatt at the proudly conservative and pro-Republican Gay Patriot site takes umbrage at the absence of an actual gay American conservative on the panel.
Nowheresville
by David Link
Posted on February 17, 2010
If the goal of those opposing same-sex marriage is to keep us from getting married, or having our relationships legally recognized, or “destroying” marriage, you might think they’d be happy enough to see our relationships formally dissolved.
But that’s clearly not the case. The most recent example of an eager politician deploying gay equality as a strategy rather than an issue is Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who wants to prevent a lesbian couple legally married in Massachusetts from getting a divorce in his state.
It’s easy to simply scoff at this story, but it’s enormously important. It’s not just marriage our opponents are out to deny us – it’s any acknowledgement in the law that our relationships exist. Even the legal mechanism for undoing our marriages is too much legal recognition for them.
What they want is for us to return to the closet.
It is our invisibility they desire. They can no longer plausibly claim we don’t exist at all, but they’ll be damned if they’ll allow the law to include us either explicitly or even implicitly. Better a married gay couple than a divorced one, if it means permitting a gay couple to invoke the law of divorce.
Those of us who are old enough grew up in that netherworld where the law simply had nothing to say about us, and everyone was allowed to live in denial about our existence. We had to fend for ourselves, literally outside the law.
We will not return to those days, and neither will anyone else. Our existence in the law is now firmly enough established – even if it’s to deny us marriage under state constitutions – that the closet is no longer an option, for us or for the rest of the country.
Yet that is what a Texas politician is trying to do, leave a same-sex couple in the legal oblivion that he thinks should be their fate.
A Breakthrough Argument on DADT
Posted on February 14, 2010
On CNN's "State of the Union," National Security Adviser (and retired four-star general) James L. Jones argues puts a powerful frame around repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell:
I have served my country in uniform since 1967, and in that period, we covered racial questions, racial integration. We've covered the integration of women in the armed forces. People suggested that that would be a national security problem if we did both of those things. It turned out to be, as a matter of fact, a force multiplier by doing those things. People — and I grew up in a generation where they said if you integrate members of the gay community, that will be a national security problem. That will probably prove itself to be false as well.
Proponents of DADT are down to arguing, in effect: Why mess with a policy that works in time of war? As Daniel Pipes puts it, "Now is not the time for social experimentation in the armed forces." Jones has the answer: integration is not a distraction, it is a force multiplier. With those two words, "force multipler," the general has given pro-repeal forces a rallying cry. Let’s shout it from the rooftops.
‘The Homosexuals’ — Timely Again
by David Link
Posted on February 14, 2010
It’s easy to find fault with “The Homosexuals,” a 1967 documentary from CBS, the first ever aired on a major network about “the problem” of homosexuality. Dave White at The Advocate, rediscovered the relic, and provides a litany of its sins. For example, it focuses exclusively on gay men, and has not a word to say about how lesbians (who, one assumes, are also homosexual) might be different. Amazing how that focus on gay men to the exclusion of lesbians plagues our discussion even now.
That may be because lesbians don't fit so comforably into the stereotype of relentless, anonymous sex that is the documentary's framework. Mike Wallace’s sometimes squalid questions and lascivious tone appear presumptuous and patronizing today, if you can’t give yourself a little distance and appreciate its camp value:
The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his “love” life, consists of a series of chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits, and even on the streets of the city, the pick up, the one night stand, these are characteristic of the homosexual relationship.
It’s impossible to do justice to his spin on the word “love;” you have to hear it for yourself (this passage is about the 8:20 mark) to appreciate how near to contempt he finds the very thought.
And that age’s experts on homosexuality are given almost total deference in the piece. Charles Socarides pronounces, to a classroom of curious students (including us) the conventional notion of the time that homosexuality is a mental illness. But he then goes further in responding to a student question about “happy homosexuals,” by scoffing; they don’t and can’t exist. Question answered. Next?
That’s why it might be hard to appreciate how groundbreaking this documentary really was. No one who missed the 1950s and 60s can imagine how much sheer effort it took, then, for the nascent gay rights movement to be heard or taken seriously. Mention of the word “homosexual” on commercial television in a neutral way was almost inconceivable. An hour-long slot on the subject -- even with condescension, misinformation and insults -- was a bonanza.
We simply have no conception, today, of how dominant -- and successful -- the closet was in virtually shutting down any public conversation at all in which gay men are viewed as citizens rather than predators. Yet the documentary opens with a gay man who is well adjusted even by the standards of our own time. There are also interviews with a judge (from North Carolina!) and a prosecutor who are going through the first stages of questioning social conventions about homosexuality. And, of course, any journalism from those days that includes an interview with Frank Kameny won’t make it easy to leave unchallenged the notion which took for granted our (in Dean Rusk’s candid phrase) “personal instability.” (Kameny and Rusk make their points starting at the 29 minute mark.)
The toxins that still infect our debate today are closer to the surface here. And chief among them is the human distortion that Jonathan Rauch, Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan have all tried so valiantly to have heterosexuals of good will envision: What would life be like if you grew up believing that love would have no role in your future? How would that affect a human being’s ordinary development and moral thinking?
I can’t imagine any way to make that point better than Mike Wallace’s discrediting of the word “love” for gay men. He honestly felt, as virtually everyone else at the time did, that gay men were “not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of heterosexual marriage.” In fact, the documentary ends with a (heterosexually) married homosexual saying that he doesn’t believe he could have a “love relationship” with another man. His moral imagination was formed, along with the rest of the culture, around the notion that homosexuality involves no emotions, no affection, no relationship to others except the physical.
Wallace has since regretted the documentary’s tone, as well as the prejudices of the time. But he has no reason to regret having participated in helping this nation begin an open discussion about homosexuality.
Forty-three years later, this documentary is timely again. Heterosexuals today don’t have to imagine the moral deformity that was demanded of gay men by assuming they had no need for love. “The Homosexuals” shows exactly what that looks like. When we fight for legal recognition of our relationships, it is because of this sabotage of our souls. I am grateful we have it today to help make our case.