Bothered

Read another post at GayPatriot this morning about SSM. (This was before I lost today's blog, which was another At Random with some priceless one-liners. Oh, well. Your loss.)

And I've read just about all of Andrew Sullivan's posts about SSM.

And y'know what? I can't think of any gay blogger on the left who is dealing with SSM. Except me, and I'm not really all that left. (Honestly, I'm not. I'm just not a follow-Our-Leader right wingnut.) I'm probably fairly radical/Libertarian on social issues, though. I guess that makes me left. (Paul Varnell has written somewhat on it, but his latest pieces are as much about the failures of the gay leadership as they are about marriage -- it's obviously a nonpartisan issue.)

At any rate, the post at GayPatriot was kind of interesting for what it almost said. (Here's the link.)

For the most part, I can't fault his diatribe against the "gay leadership." In fact, in some points I think he's absolutely correct, except that there's too much knee-jerk right wing rhetoric. Let's do some parsing.

In response, gay leaders acted like spoiled children, refusing to contribute to the debate because they hadn’t set the terms.

Sort of bassackwards. The problem is that "they" (HRC and their ilk) did not set the terms. They let people like Santorum, Frist, Wildmon, the usual suspects set the terms. (This has become the pattern of the past generation -- the right is setting the terms of the debate, so of course the debate is skewed.) That's where they blew it, and they backed themselves into just the corner that GayPatriot West describes. I'm not sure I can lay it all to the "leadership's" ineptitude. (And for purposes of this commentary, I'm just going to describe the major gay advocacy organizations as "the gay leadership," without quotes from here on. You know who I mean.)

I've been commenting on the role of the press in shaping public opinion, and the investment that the press now has in being shapers rather than reporters -- once again, it's marketing, not journalism. Whether you believe that the press should advocate or not, the fact is that the press does advocate, and not only in the OpEd pages. It's what they're advocating that bothers me. By emphasizing the gay-bashers on the right, the press effectively silences the gay leadership. In turn, the gay leadership doesn't seem to be able to bust out of their corner -- I don't think they're using the resources available to them. Call it institutional blindness.

Angrily sulking, instead of eagerly advocating, they accused those pushing the amendment of being “divisive.” Funny that they would accuse those (who believe they are) defending the status quo of being divisive when they (the accusers) are the ones promoting social change.

By all the gods beneficent. There is so much wrong with this that I barely know where to start. "Sulking." OK -- we can just dismiss that one. That's really just another case of the right-wing namecallers accusing anyone who disagrees with them of namecalling. There's a conceptual leap here that should be obvious to anyone who is reading critically: of course the advocates of the MPA are being divisive. It's a divisive issue and they are milking it for all it's worth. It's been their strategy since the days of Gingrich and the Contract on America. Comments like "marriage is under attack!", "activist judges rewriting the laws!" and the other rhetoric from the right (does anyone else think it's getting a little shopworn?) are meant to be divisive. How else can you scare people into doing what you want?

Nor does it necessarily follow that advocating social change is being divisive. Another leap (of faith, I guess). Yes, there will always be a contingent who are perfectly happy with the status quo and who have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new order. There is always a potential for divisiveness there, because there is always some demagogue who stands to gain a little bit of power, at least temporarily, by fanning the flames among the conservative elements. C'mon, guys -- this country is all about social change and always has been. Representative democracy? Universal sufferage? Equal rights for all? Freedom of conscience? Those are not instances of major social change?

(He quotes Charles Krauthammer. If you have to quote Krauthammer, you know you're on thin ice. By the way, read Krauthammer's column. And note that he swallows the judicial restraint bullshit hook, line and sinker -- in fact, he takes it and runs with it. He manages to turn a column that is ostensibly about same-sex marriage into a plea for more right-wing judges. It's really an amazing sleight of hand -- don't tinker with the Constitution, just mess up the judicary. Which, in effect, does a lot more damage to the Constitution than a policy-specific amendment, which can always be repealed. He quite conveniently forgot the role that popular sovereignty plays in amending the Constitution. The whole question of popular sovereignty in this has been skewed by the right, and no one on the left, except me, to whom no one listens anyway, has come back at them.)

It would seem that the burden is on those who would overturn or alter such a cultural norm. And yet many gay activists bristle at having to undertake this burden. Rather than by building promoting social change through experience and advocacy, they would effect it through judicial fiat.

Ahem. First statment is just flat wrong. Who does he think is fighting the court cases and lobbying legislators? Who is pushing towns and cities and corporations for recognition of same-sex relationships? Bill Frist?

Not bloody likely.

Oh, and there's the "judical fiat" mantra again. You know my response to that. I will add, though, how can I take anyone seriously when they don't even know what the process of public discourse in this country involves? Once again, class: court cases are part of the debate. (I wonder what he would have thought of the cases involved in the Black civil rights movement? "Judicial fiat"? Oh, I know, it was the Republicans in Congress who passed the Civil Rights Act. And how many of them would have voted for it if they hadn't been faced with yet more lawsuits?) And how do you accumulate the experience without events such as civil unions in Vermont, full marriage rights in Massachusetts? And who did that?

If we want to create a new social consensus, we need to talk about marriage the same way straight people talk about marriage. This is something I have been saying almost since I started blogging. Just nine days after my first post, I wrote:

"We need to make clear that just as we seek the same privileges that the government grants straight people, we accept the same responsibilities expected of them."

Soon thereafter, I said we needed to talk about gay marriage not in the language of rights, but in terms of “values and mutual responsibility.”

Now it seems that some on the left agree with me. In Thursday’s New York Daily News, “progressive” Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote that it was a “mistake” for gay and lesbian groups “making the case for gay marriage” to rely “on the language of equal rights.“

Half right. The legality is necessarily bound up with equal rights. It has to be. There is no alternative, and it's the same argument we have faced every time we have sought to bring a new group within the social fabric: can we legitimately and morally continue to exclude this group from full participation in our society? (And, as always, we have a sector that is in favor of exclusion.) And it is, at the nuts and bolts level, a legal argument. That might not have been the right tack to take, and maybe we should have done more groundwork first, but that's where we are.

However, equal rights cannot be the whole argument, particularly since the right has managed to poison the idea of equal rights. (Yes, they have -- "special rights" is their catch-phrase, and I'd love to see them apply that to Jews and Blacks. You notice they don't.)

And, to be perfectly honest, I've run across a number of people who are talking about same-sex marriage in terms of love, establishing a family and raising children, mutual responsibility, mutual caring -- all the things that straights supposedly talk about, when they're not talking about their tax breaks. They're not getting a lot of coverage. Most notably, they're not getting a lot of coverage from places like GayPatriot.

Back to the gay leadership. The right has appropriated the idea of morality (based on a limited reading of Christian scripture -- and a reading entirely based in the Old Testament). I haven't really seen anyone come back at that, or even make the attempt to take the idea of morality away from the right. Morality, after all, is much bigger than a set of fairly arbitrary rules governing specific behaviors. I should note there that I am in regular correspondence with a number of Christians, both evangelical and not, and that most of them understand morality the way I do: as a set of basic values that inform and direct our daily lives. (This is a good place to put in a plug for Musings On. You'll see what I mean.) In this understanding, I should also add, "one man one woman" is not a value. "Values" in this sense are things like respect for others, a sense of fairness, a realistic sense of one's own worth, tolerance for differences -- what the Plains Indians called "walking in a sacred manner." In defense of the gay leadership, which is, really, leftist, they are hampered by their sincere respect for diversity. From the right wingnuts we get Christianity does not allow compromise. From the left wingnuts we get Every opinion is of equal value. Sort of crippling to the left, no?

One last comment about the leadership's reaction to the whole marriage phenomenon: they got caught by events. They never managed to get in front of them, and they should have. My take is, I think, pretty much the opposite of GayPatriot West's: the leadership has been too cautious, too conscious of its place in the power structure (and I'm not at all sure it's a realistic sense of its place, given that we pretty much know the Democrats will sell us out in a minute), and, to agree with him on one point, they have not engaged in any sort of effective advocacy -- they never took back ownership of the debate. Keep in mind that one of the deciding factors in Goodridge was the children of the gay couples. Why is no one asking the right wingers the hard questions, like "Why do you want to damage my family?" Shove that at Bill Frist, loudly and publicly and often. I'd love to hear his answer.

I strongly recommend you read the entire post at GayPatriot. Then you might, perhaps, be able to answer a question that still puzzles me: why is he taking the gay community to task for the tenor of a debate they didn't frame? Politics certainly does make strange bedfellows. So to speak.