The White Peril 白禍

I was disappointed by Jonathan Rauch's book Gay Marriage, which I thought made uncharacteristically spotty arguments. (Uncharacteristically for him, I mean--not, more's the pity, for gay marriage advocates.) Being a sensible person, he knows how to confront reality, though; and with his new op-ed, he ends the year much better than he began it. Well, you have to roll yours eyes and move quickly past the loan shark analogy near the beginning. Part of his main point is this:

The consensus has shifted rapidly, meanwhile, toward civil unions. The 2004 exit polls showed 35% of voters supporting them (and another 25% for same-sex marriage). Particularly after the Nov. 2 debacle, civil unions look to many gay-rights advocates like the more attainable goal. It is not lost on them that Vermont's civil-unions law and California's partnership program have proved surprisingly uncontroversial. For their part, social conservatives increasingly, if grudgingly, accept civil unions as deflecting what they regard as an attack on marriage. John Kerry endorsed civil unions, and in October Mr. Bush accepted them, saying, "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do."

This year may be remembered as the time when civil unions established themselves as the compromise of choice. For an indicator, watch whether there is an outcry if state courts narrow the scope of the new amendments to allow civil unions and other partner programs. My guess is that few people will fuss.

It's been put to me that even civil unions wouldn't be possible if activists hadn't first gone the whole way and demanded "marriage rights" and then fallen back to what would then look like a more reasonable position. Maybe. It's not possible to know. I myself think the collateral damage, as it were, has to be factored in: the fixing in the minds of Americans of an image of gay public figures as, yet again, screechy single-issue activists who think of nothing but themselves. It's not fair to lay an equal share of the blame on moderate thinkers such as Rauch, but neither is it unfair to acknowledge that his influence was not always as salutary as it might have been. He's still one of the best advocates we have, especially with Andrew Sullivan still off in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, and it's a holiday treat (no one's going to jump down my throat for not explicitly calling it "Christmas" now that it's 28 December, yeah?) to see him coming around.

(Via IGF)

I'd prefer to keep my plans for self-improvement in the New Year private, but I'm perfectly happy to share the things I'd like you all to resolve to do for me. Since I like people with interesting vices, I'm not going to tell you to stop overeating, drinking, or smoking. What I would like everyone to stop over-indulging in are words--just three little ones that have rapidly become a public menace through their overuse by gays and our sympathizers.

hate (used as n.) Oh, children, when your dotty gay Uncle Sean was in college ten years ago, we had many, many ways to accuse people of being intolerant. You could call someone "misogynist" or "sexist" if you thought he was keeping women down, "racist" if he questioned affirmative action, or "heterosexist" if he expressed any discomfort with homosexuality. If you wanted to imply that he was not only intolerant but pathological, you could call him "homophobic." These pronouncements were shrieky and sententious, but rotating through the different charges at least preserved some variety of phrasing and subject matter.

But, being busy people, we've dispensed with all that. Now hate is the word that slices, dices, peels, juliennes, and transforms ordinary radishes into professional-looking rose garnishes at the touch of a button. Just designate someone as "motivated by hate" and move on. The problem, of course, is that calling moral opposition (however misplaced we believe it is) an emotional reaction doesn't make it one; Right Side of the Rainbow explained this beautifully.

Fascinatingly, the venerable noun hatred is not abused this way. When you see someone mention "hatred of gays" or "hatred of women" or the like, you can normally trust him to confine his characterizations to people who really do want to infringe on our rights to self-determination without giving rational reasons. It's a rare instance of more syllables = less airy pretension.

second-class citizen (compound n., usually plu.) My objection to this one is less fundamental than my objections to the other two, so I have less to say about it. If second-class citizens were actually used in the process of making a thorough argument that marriage to the partner of one's choosing is a basic human right, I wouldn't mind so much; and occasionally, very occasionally, it is. Most of the time, though, it comes off as shorthand for, "Why don't you love me?" It also tends to accompany coarse, overarching comparisons to the Civil Rights movement that, in my opinion, only hold up in very limited ways. The term has mutated into a buzzword rather than a concept useful for explicating one's logic.

self-respecting (adj., used esp. in negative construction "no self-respecting gay could possibly...") I used to think I'd be overjoyed when the locution self-loathing dropped out of the queer public discourse. What a naif I was. The wording is gone, but it's been replaced by a longer, more convoluted construction that is, if anything, more annoying. If I had a nickel for every time I read or heard the sentence, "No self-respecting gay could possibly vote for George Bush this year," I'd be retired to a château with guys in loincloths dropping peeled, seeded grapes into my mouth by now.

It was always obnoxious for one gay to call another "self-loathing" for deviating from the activist-approved list of political positions and life choices, but it was almost touching, in a weird way, in its suggestion that the addressee was just stuck in that denial stage on the way through coming out and it was making him behave like a jerk. Accusing someone of not being "self-respecting" goes the whole way and asserts that he's a willful, reasoned-out jerk--in addition to implying that his sense of dignity is properly arbitrated by others.

If I wanted to dwell on things that annoy me, I have no doubt that I could lengthen the above list without much exertion. If our commentators can start avoiding these terms, however--or at least being certain they're using them to build and not substitute for argumentation--it will be a good thing for gay issues and for civility in general, neither of which has benefited from many of this year's installments in the public discourse.

Happy New Year.