GAY MARRIAGE AND THE DECLINE OF LIBERALISM
By Robert Klein Engler (07/28/06)
CHICAGO (27 July '06)--The news may be either good or bad, depending on your politics. Earlier in July the Nebraska News reported that, "A federal appeals court says Nebraska's voter-approved ban on gay marriage is constitutional and doesn't violate anyone's civil rights."
The ban was approved by seventy percent of voters in 2000, and along with "other laws limiting the state-recognized institution of heterosexual couples are rationally related to legitimate state interests and therefore do not violate the Constitution of the United States." This ruling comes as another defeat in a series of defeats for proponents of gay marriage.
In spite of this defeat in Nebraska and similar defeats in thirty-nine other states that have passed laws against same-sex marriages, some politicians still support the gay marriage cause. NewsMax reports that "Chicago's Democratic Mayor Richard M. Daley says he would have 'no problem' if Cook County allowed gay marriages. Daley, who appointed the first openly gay member to the City Council, adds he is not troubled by same-sex marriage, according to a report in the Washington Post. "
The mayor added, "You have to point out the strength of this community, your doctors, your lawyers, your journalists. They have adopted children. To me, we have to understand this is part and parcel of our families and extended families."
The mayor's rhetoric aside, if court rulings continue along the lines they have in Nebraska, then the politics of gay marriage will be a losing politics. Andrea Hopkins, of Reuters writes that, "The fastest-growing faith group in America, evangelical Christians have had a growing impact on the nation's political landscape, in part because adherents believe conservative Christian values should have a place in politics--and they support politicians who agree with them."
Because Democrats want to win the next national election in the U. S., they must confront the religious issue inherent in the discussion of gay marriage. Democrats have to paint a religious face on their traditional secularism. This new face of secularism may be the point of a recent speech by Illinois Senator Barack Obama to the Call to Renewal Conference this past June. In that speech, Senator Obama says, "...the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms."
Senator Obama did not bring up the issue of gay marriage, but he did go on to add, "Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting "preachy" may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems."
Later, on "Good Morning America," Senator Obama, now sounding like Senator John Kerry, seemed to back away from specifics and submerge himself in murky generalizations. He said, "So my point was that we need to have a more complex, more nuanced conversation about religion. And if we do that, then I think the whole country benefits."
In spite of this reaching out to people of faith, the Reverend Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, offers "A summary of the Democratic approach to reaching out to Catholics and other voters of faith: championing the legality of Partial-Birth Abortion calling the belief in traditional one-man, one-woman marriage 'outdated and bigoted,' opposing Catholic Supreme Court nominees who practice their faith, and now, using content from a website that depicts our Lord wearing a shirt entitled: 'The Moron.'"
Reverend Euteneuer concludes, "I can only assume that the Democrats are using Howard Stern as their general consultant for faith-based outreach." In spite of Rev. Euteneuer's comments, whatever outreach there is to support the movement for gay marriage may be an example of too little coming too late. Recent data show that the institution of marriage in the U. S. is changing even among heterosexuals.
In their study, The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2006, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe write, "We are in the midst of a profound change in American life. Demographically, socially and culturally, the nation is shifting from a society of child-rearing families to a society of child-free adults." When it comes to gay marriage, why worry about matches when the house is already on fire?
practical and theoretical revolutions
To better understand the debate over gay marriage, we could go back and look at the American and French Revolutions. In my view, the French Revolution was a theoretical revolution, a revolution from the top down. The American Revolution, however, was a practical one, a revolution from the bottom up. We are all heirs to the politics coming from these different approaches to social change.
We could say, too, that when it comes to revolutions, the Americans are Aristotelian and the French are Platonists. It is no coincidence that In 1791, France became the first nation to decriminalize homosexuality in the Napoleonic code. It made theoretical sense to do so. Only later were laws against sodomy repealed in Britain, where it was practical to do so.
The gay rights movement in the U. S., which began with conservative groups like the Mattachine Society, took a wrong turn in the sixties. This wrong turn led to the separatist issue of gay marriage and the fact that there is no gay leader like Martin Luther King, Jr., today.
The sad truth for gays is that there is no one to give spiritual cover to the issue of gay marriage. This puts gays as the unfortunate position of wanting to be part of an institution their policies will eventually destroy. They are like those illegal immigrants who want the protection of the U. S. Constitution that by their actions they despise.
After the sixties, the gay movement went from being a movement of practical social change to one of theoretical social change. Those brave drag queens who led the Stonewall protest have been replaced by well-paid lawyers who don't care what they protest. One reason this happened is because leaders of the fledging gay rights movement mistakenly thought they had common cause with other minority groups. So, letters of the alphabet accumulated: first it was G for gay, then G and L, then GLBT, now GLBTQ. Thankfully, there are only twenty-one letters left.
The turn that the gay liberation movement made in the sixties towards the theoretical instead of the practical is evident in much gay poetry and fiction. The poetry of James Merrill reflects a more English and practical world then the theoretical and French influenced poetry of Audre Lorde. Merrill understands that in his gay household "the only feet that patter here are metrical," whereas Lorde claims "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
In the last resort, the only criticism that can be made of Merrill's art is that is was an art born from luxury. Few artists these days have that luxury. Perhaps that is why Merrill's inherited wealth gives credence to the view that gay is good if you can afford it.
Most gay fiction took the French path instead of the English, too. On the one hand, Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, is an example of the French, theoretical influence on gay writing and is the prevailing mode in gay publishing, today. On the other hand, E. M. Forster's Maurice is an example of British, practical gay writing. The main character in Forster's novel ends up happy, but he does not marry.
Some activists claim that Forster betrayed the gay community by later admitting that the ending to his novel was not plausible. Forster waited, too, so that Maurice was published posthumously. The novel has also been subjected to endless criticism by French inspired literary critics. All that may be true, but the point is that one cannot live a life of French theory. If you attempt that, then life ends either with insanity or The Reign of Terror.
The British never experienced a reign of terror. Perhaps they were too practical. Perhaps it was the songs of the Methodists that held off the violence. Either way, practical liberalism and religion (generally Christian and particularly Protestant), often go together in our Anglo-Protestant tradition. Perhaps that is a union Senator Obama wishes to resurrect, but he does not realize his political party has left it in the dust.
It was Christians who were at the forefront of the movement to abolish slavery in the U. S. You cannot read William T. Stead's book, If Christ Came to Chicago and not recognize the contribution of religion to the movement for social and political reform. The Civil Rights movement of the sixties was led by Christians and Jews. Now, it is mostly Christians who oppose gay marriage.
In contrast to times past, many of today's liberals do not see religion as a motive for reform. Instead, they see religion as an obstacle to reform. This is ironic, because in the past some theologians remarked on the refined religious sensibility of many gay men. Examples of this refined religious sensibility are still evident among some priests and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church.
People of faith in America may support both liberal and conservative causes. The problem for those who want to be progressive and support gay marriage today is that gay marriage is generally opposed by most people of faith referred to by Senator Obama. Unfortunately, those same people of faith are blind sometimes to seeing liberal divorce policies doing more harm to the institution of marriage than gay marriage may ever do.
a slippery slope
Any gay man who opposes gay marriage, even on religious grounds, opens himself up to criticism from all sides. Most telling is the gay critic who accuses him of unconscious hate for himself and others who are gay. "You don't want gay marriage to work because you really hate yourself," say these Freudian critics.
A gay man opposed of gay marriage can argue in turn that it is really gays who hate marriage, and their campaign to allow gay marriage is an unconscious attempt to destroy the weakened institution of marriage once and for all. Although supporters of gay marriage will deny it, the equal protection clause of the U. S. Constitution will create a slippery slope to all sorts of unions if the courts hold that marriage is no longer an institution grounded in the relationship between one man and one woman.
Scott Bidstrup believes that the slippery-slope argument used to oppose gay marriage is not valid. He writes, "The reality is that a form of gay marriage has been legal in Scandinavian countries for over many years, and no such legalization (of unusual forms of marriage) has happened, nor has there been a clamor for it."
Well, just because there is no clamor does not mean there will not be one. I'm sure those who wrote the Rights of Men before the terror of the French Revolution did not clamor for heads to roll, yet they did. The same theory that makes gay marriage possible will make all forms of marriage impossible. When you want to impose a radical theory upon the world, sometimes its best to do it with a whisper. Let's ask Robespierre how to whisper "slippery slope" in French.
Because the idea of gay marriage is derived from a theory of sexuality, from the top down, that theory will have to admit other forms of marriage, too. The conclusion of all this means that gay marriage will end simply with the end of marriage. This is the same kind of social reasoning that made, "Off with their heads!" seem so logical. This is a gay politics like the politics of Louis Farrakhan, not the politics of Martin Luther King, Jr.
the tug of nature
According to Michael Bronski, "The best argument against same-sex marriage is the argument against marriage." Bronski doesn't see the gay marriage debate as an argument between religion and secularists, but one "about sentiment and the power of advertising. People--gay and straight, but especially women--have a profound emotional attachment to the idea of marriage. Bronski claims "It is no surprise that close to 75 percent of couples who have applied for same-sex marriage licenses in San Francisco and now in Massachusetts are lesbians."
Emotional attachment to the idea of marriage may go deeper than Bronski imagines. For all its drawbacks as an argument, something must be conceded by gays to the tug of nature. Most men and women are attracted to one another. Likewise, most men want to protect women and children, while many women say they are fulfilled by mothering children. In spite of radical lesbians, who argue that marriage is an unjust institution that oppresses women, many men and women believe there is no practical reason to change traditional marriage.
We do not find gay marriage as a guaranteed civil right mentioned in the U. S. Constitution because the Constitution is a practical document. If gay marriage is to happen at all, it will be up to the states to allow it. Yet the states, with the exception of Massachusetts, see no practical reason to institute gay marriage. From a secular point of view, marriage is a licensed activity, not a civil right and the state can set a limit on who it licenses. To this we can add that a licensed activity is to the benefit of society as a whole and not just the persons licensed.
There is no civil right to be a lawyer written into the U. S. Constitution. For the most part, the states grant licenses to practice law to those who meet certain qualifications. Why should marriage and the qualification that one partner be a man and the other partner be a woman be any different? If I want to be a lawyer, then I will pass the bar exam and be licensed by the state to practice. If I want to get married and am a man, then I will find a woman and practice being a husband.
The Rabbis of the Talmud taught that we have a duty to bring life into the world because life is the real good, or in Ruskin's words, "There is no wealth but life." These Rabbis understood, however, that some men and women were not able to fulfill this commandment. That being the case, such men and women had to further life in other ways.
One of those ways was teaching and another was healing, or being a priest. Yes, even hairdressing counts here. These are ways for gay men to ponder. If they cannot get married and bring new life, then they can at least help life already here to flourish. There is an art to doing that. Dante's great love for Beatrice did not end with intimacy, but it did end in a great poem.
People of faith must expand also their understanding of who gays are and the gifts they bring. Certainly, gay men today are not the "masculorum concubitores," or male concubines that St. Paul described in his first letter to the Corinthians. This expression St. Paul used is as unclear in Latin as it is in the original Greek.
If any one should know that sexual orientation is not per se in the service of idolatrous cults, then it should be today's evangelical Christians. For all their reliance on the Bible, some evangelical ministers seem never to get the translation of this passage in Corinthians right, let alone other ambiguous passages about homosexuality in scripture. This not to say, however, there is not room for a crowd of interpreters. In the Talmud we read where there is love it is never crowded.
separateness that preaches inclusiveness
Liberalism has reached the end of its usefulness as an ideology. It now produces the opposite of what it intends. In the struggle for civil rights, liberalism preaches integration, but Democrats must rely on urban segregation to get votes. In education, liberals fought to integrate schools and raise standards, but they have created segregated schools and lower standards wherever they gained power.
The campaign for gay marriage, like the recently publicized Gay Games in Chicago, is a form of separateness that preaches inclusiveness. The inclusiveness proponents of gay marriage imagine actually ends only in lip service. Queer theorists come only to the aid of those who share their politics. Feminists and radical lesbians seem not to be bothered by the "penis free zones" they set up in tents at music festivals that exclude men. It will be a new day politically when a Republican is inducted to Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.
A campaign for gay marriage discloses the final irony of liberalism. In its last stages, liberalism brings about the opposite of what it intends. Gay marriage will do little to integrate gays into American society. It may end up doing just the opposite, segregate them even more into gay ghettos. Gay marriage will be to relationships what Brown v. the Board of Education has been to public education--a legal victory but a practical failure.
If gay marriage does become law, then it will not change much. We will see still through a glass darkly. Politicians will still ask for a more nuanced conversation about gay marriage. Yet it will be just another illusion perpetuated by the Democrats like the so-called integrated public schools that were supposed to happen in Chicago after Brown v. the Board of Education.
Imagine, after more than fifty years of upheaval in Chicago's educational bureaucracy, higher and higher property taxes, and still Chicago's public schools are segregated. The only change that happened in the city is that the public schools have gone from separate and equal to become separate and unequal.
Gay people, like everyone else, must sort through political ideologies and choose to live a secular or religious life. Should they accept the yoke of the Torah or the glamour of the world? Should they pick a lover now or wait for something eternal? The superstructure of the liberal media, where events happen according to a secular script, is no help here. Oprah says she's not gay. Batwoman says she is. What's a girl gonna do?
ignorant or malicious
The defeat of gay marriage around the nation opens the possibility of a new purpose for gay men. Instead of talking about the "essential sameness" of gays with straights, a new definition of being gay may highlight the differences and the contributions both gays and straights make to life. Love may then become an opportunity to pass on culture. This happened in Classical Greece and in the monasteries of the middle ages. It could happen again. Some may even be encouraged to read Plato's Symposium or St. John's epistle.
In spite of Alice Thomas Ellis's claim that "Religion is for women and queers," Pope Benedict's first encyclical was called Deus Caritas Est, or "God Is Love." The Pope claims God's love is available to everyone, gay or straight, a prince of the Church or one like my mother who had faith but lived in obscurity. Marriage is just one way this love emerges in the world. There are other ways, too. Such a truth may be proclaimed also by a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips.
How is it, then, that for many gay people love remains a knot in their soul? The secularists answer that this knot may be untied if we only see the body and its desire as flesh and blood here for our amusement. These secularists claim what the Pope writes is irrelevant. The knot of love need not be suffered. Madonna's music is a knife that cuts right through it. Or, so they believe until they grow old.
After your fiftieth birthday you are no longer gay. You are something else: a dirty old man, a bitter queen or a wrinkled coat upon a stick. Some may even be saints. After fifty, some men see gay marriage as a noble but mistaken cause for the young, the young who are these days much accustomed to getting what they want. These young men dream of gay marriage, a honeymoon on Fire Island, then adopting two children from China, yet, if they really wanted to change the world, they would do less meth and more math.
What will those of the younger generation do when they don't get what they want and are forced to look deeply into the well of love? Will they hear the Pet Shop Boys or Darren Hayes calling up a truth? Will they answer an ad posted on Craigslist.com? Are they terrified to be single? In the Dhammapada we read: "If you cannot find someone equal or better to go with, then travel alone. Do not travel with a fool."
What of the young with their aversion to things religious? The world and its troubles soon belongs to them. They forget that few have done more to minister to people with AIDS than the Roman Catholic Church. They may view gay marriage as a civil right and overlook the intimate involvement marriage has with religion. Many are shallow and will not do the hard work necessary to correct their mistaken ideas. Yet, just because something is mistaken is no guarantee it will not come to be by the efforts of the ignorant or malicious.
What of the young in love, or what they think is love? Who is to tell them their light is really darkness? If you do not want gay marriage, then you have to offer something instead. Call it an adult sacrament, civil registration, or a blessed union. They say when you call the demons by name they go away.
Gay men do not need marriage to have a fulfilled life. What they do need are intimate relationships and a sense that their life has a meaning beyond their own existence. Those who love one another will find a way to live together or to live alone, even when hemmed in or oppressed. After that, who knows? Edgar Lee Masters, echoing the words of Jesus recorded in Matthew 22:29-30, wrote that "there is no marriage in heaven, but there is love."
Campaigns for gay marriage do not occur in a political vacuum. Other events, both national and international, may soon make gay marriage irrelevant. Illegal immigration, the widening so-called war on terror and even the possible rise of third party candidates, along with more defeats in state courts for gay marriage proponents, may push the issue of gay marriage farther into the background.
We do not know what tomorrow brings--what love and what new lands. Imagine an urchin standing on the dock at Palos. He watches the ships of Columbus sail west, growing smaller and smaller until they drop off the horizon. He cannot see past the sorrow of his own life to the future. So, he turns and walks to a tavern, his palm open for a small coin. Beggars, lovers and politicians often live on a flat world. Dare they go so far as to come back to the clear air of their beginning?
Merle Miller ended his book On Being Different with the words, "The air is extraordinarily clear, and the sky...is dark, almost navy-blue. On such a day I would not choose to be anyone else or any place else." Today, I see Miller standing by his window looking out as a witness to the beginning of the gay movement. I look out my window and I see the end. When I first read Miller's book I was looking for the courage to love and the courage to write. I imagine few read his ending today.
To say that liberal, Democratic politics reaches a dead end with the issue of gay marriage does not mean that some Democrats will no longer win elections. It is to say, however, that secular liberalism is no longer a viable political ideology, but is, instead, at best a juvenile taste and at worst a bad habit. Gay marriage brings us to the edge of a cliff where liberals can go no farther and only look down. The next step is a leap into the void of contradiction.
This may be why many liberals are unhappy. The ground is shifting beneath their feet. Add to this unhappiness a deep hunger for they know not what, and the future looks grim to many Democrats. If the gnashing of teeth hasn't started among Democratic politicians near you yet, it will, as we come closer to the end of liberalism and they turn back to eat their children.
ON THE NET:
http://www.answers.com/topic/lgbt-social-movements
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2006/06/obama_on_faith_and_politics_an.html
http://www.bidstrup.com/marriage.htm
http://marriage.rutgers.edu/Publications/SOOU/TEXTSOOU2006.htm
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/2/21/144920.shtml
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