Marriage And Other Answers

More from Dale Carpenter on David Blankenhorn's attempt to take down SSM:

I simply maintain that the existence of this cluster in some people is not very important in the public policy argument about SSM. By itself, it tells us nothing about what the likely or necessary effects of SSM will be. It would similarly not be very useful in the debate over SSM to note the existence of other correlations more friendly to the case for SSM, like the fact that countries recognizing SSM tend to be wealthier, more educated, more democratic, healthier, have lower infant mortality rates, longer life expectancy, and are more devoted to women’s equality, than countries that refuse to recognize gay relationships.

It's a very interesting post that touches on something that has been a subliminal discomfort to me, particularly in light of Andrew Sullivan's occasional trumpeting about the "death of gay culture" over the past year or so. I like gay culture. I'm an admitted anti-assimilationist. And I think Sullivan and Carpenter have missed one point, and it's a subtextual one.

The political necessity of being "just like you" hasn't really changed gay culture at all. It's merely changed the wider perception of it: gay couples now have kids, live in the suburbs, worry about making mortgage payments, and the whole ball of wax. Except. . . . They don't, necessarily. It's the "necessarily" part that's important. It's a little bit of extending a media image to a real population -- well, OK, it's a lot of that. We're also seeing an aspect of "either/or" thinking, dichotomies instead of continua, black-and-white views of a universe that is composed of shades of gray. Big mistake, I think. Needless to say, this either/or image is a response to the either/or perceptions of the intended audience. It's still wrong. We should be introducing to the audience the idea that there are always more than two answers.