Honesty

Here's a very good post from David Link at Independent Gay Forum. I usually stop by there to see who I can disagree with (and am usually rewarded), but this time I have to agree wholeheartedly:

It all begins and ends with the closet. But for this anachronistic social convention that is as useful today as a hitching post, Thomas would not have needed to try and convince first himself, and then someone of the opposite sex that he was straight. It is not enough, in this scheme, that we deceive ourselves; heterosexuals, too, have to be equally and everlastingly drawn into the fraud, some of them at the most intimate level.

This is really what the Maggie Gallaghers, the Joseph Nicolosis, the James Dobsons are encouraging: that we be fundamentally dishonest about who we are, and use that dishonesty to live our lives the way they think we should. They don't really seem to care very much about the damage they are doing, not only to us (and given their attitude toward gays, which, fine words notwithstanding, is unremitting and contemptuous hostility, I can't see that they could be expected to care about hurting us), but to those who, whether knowingly or not, get sucked into the charade.

(Oh, and in case I haven't said so in so many words, forget about "preserving marriage." NOM, the Catholic Church, the LDS Church, and their fellow travelers have offered nothing that actually preserves marriage, nothing of any help to married couples. Their program is entirely negative, entirely directed toward exclusion.)

I am truly looking forward to the day when we can consign the "pro-marriage" forces to a sardonic footnote and be as honest as humanly possible about who we are.