The White Peril 白禍

A Typical Joe commented to my most recent effusion on gay marriage with this:

I don't agree with the argument (from Sean at The White Peril via Dean's World)
but it is not anti-gay.

That's a more civil response than one often gets on this topic; for that I thank him. [Uh, either I just got dizzier or there was just an earthquake...lessee, 22:00...have to check NHK.] I feel at a distinct disadvantage disagreeing with someone who looks so adorable with his partner (I think there's some kind of law: only one smiler per gay couple), but I'm going to do my best, at least on one important point.

I know, or at least am willing to believe, that for a lot of rank-and-file gays, the fundamental issue isn't psychological affirmation. But, you know, as long as overachieving, careerist urban guys are the ones making the public arguments, status is going to sneak into them somehow. Believe me, I am not casting stones here--I am perfectly capable, in my weaker moments, of detestable thinking along the lines of, Dammit, I was the obedient show-child growing up. I have the summa cum laude Ivy League degree and the management job. I don't do drugs or hang out at sex clubs. I donate to charity and pay my taxes and NO POSSIBILITIES SHOULD BE CLOSED TO ME.

You cannot just look at Andrew Sullivan's and Jonathan Rauch's and Dale Carpenter's CV's and have a comprehensive map to their psychology. But you also can't tell me that the milieux they move in don't color what they think should be theirs for the asking. Again, I'm talking about men I much admire, despite Sullivan's recent shakiness. And it's pretty much a truism that those who get the public microphone are going to be those who (1) want it and (2) have resources to compete for it.

I just wish that people with a different point of view (just so it's clear, I'm not ascribing this thinking to Joe, just using his post as a lead-in to it) would take more opportunities to stand up and say, "Look, we'll take care of being respectable in our day-to-day interactions with our family and neighbors--leave that out of it. It's not that we're not as smart as you are, or that our expectations are blinkered, or our horizons are shrunken, or anything. We don't want to be prom queen for a day. We don't want attention. We just want the government to make it possible for us to count on being able to provide for each other and then get out of our lives." I can certainly understand why they don't, though.

Added on 24 February: In the comments, Michael refers to his latest post on marriage. It's here.

If the push for gay marriage does not express people's longing for self-esteem-boosting through government policy, why is it that I read something like this at least once every few weeks?

The second argument against civil unions as an intermediate step to marriage is that civil unions send the unacceptable message that gays are second-class citizens. Civil unions, says Stanback, are "a firm message that we are less deserving of dignity, respect, and rights than other citizens and taxpayers." Marriage, by contrast, "is a universally respected cultural, legal, and social institution," she notes. "Very, very few opposite-sex couples would trade their marriage for something called a civil union."

All of that is true and counsels against being satisfied, in the end, with anything short of marriage.

You know, I've read this stuff very carefully. I've reread it. I've hung myself like a bat from the side of my bed and looked at it upside-down to make sure I'm seeing all the angles. I still come back to a point Eric Scheie made at Classical Values some months ago:

Homosexuality is not heterosexuality. There are many differences between gay and straight relationships. The laws and social mores designed for the heterosexual scheme of things reflect these differences. I see no reason why homosexuals should feel the need to ape heterosexuals, and even less reason why they should be forced to do so. This is my biggest objection to same sex marriage.

One of the things that frustrate me about this is the way gay activism constantly hoovers up the stalest, least wholesome feminist crumbs. For decades, political-action feminism argued that women and men are the same (there were certainly Mary Daly-type nutcases arguing to other academics that women were different in a superior way, but they didn't affect social policy any more than Michael Warner does), and that anyone who defended social and legal distinctions of any kind between them was a tool of the Evil Dominant Culture. You may have noticed that none of this changed the fact that women have children and men do not, that we have different hormonal systems and biological strengths and weaknesses.

I'm talking about general patterns, obviously--only a troglodyte wants to go back to the days when a woman with a bent for theoretical physics rather than mothering was coerced into choosing an unsuitable vocation just to make everyone else happy. Parenthood is the single most important job in civilization; but that doesn't mean that everyone has to be a parent to live a worthwhile life. We wouldn't be a civilization without creating and maintaining lots of systems and artifacts that are quite unnatural, in the sense that they wouldn't occur if we left the world to its own brute devices. The problem was that feminism didn't stop at making the point that she should be allowed to choose or to strike such balances as were feasible. It said that society should make the choice painless and that women who left the lab for the nursery were thereby expressing lack of self-respect.

So let's see...what's gay activism up to right about now? Society should make gay relationships eligible for marriage so we know we're respected, and if you supported President Bush for reelection or you don't support gay marriage, you're not self-respecting.

[Gets self another Scotch so he can bear to continue. Okay. Back. Mmmm...peat.]

The thing is--or one thing is--these arguments about respect always end up arriving at assertions that we love our partners, we take care of our partners, and we're not all promiscuous. These are all good things to affirm. But when you use them as underpinnings for social policy (illustrated by Andrew Sullivan's moist-eyed NYT article "Integration day" with statements such as "Gay couples will be married in Massachusetts � their love and commitment and responsibility fully cherished for the first time by the society they belong to"), it seems to me that you're essentially saying, "Approve of my sex life, please." Can't imagine why that would fail to convince anyone that we're not deserving of dignity.

After all, if it's "love and commitment" we're worried about, why shouldn't two friends (we all have friends we adore to pieces and would take a bullet for) who've decided to form a household, because neither has plans to marry and they're content with each other, be able to take responsibility for each other that includes health insurance and hospital visitation? Or be able to have one vouch for the other's application for permanent residency as a non-citizen? Okay, that second one would need careful consideration, but I don't think it's risible on its face.

When I read articles by gays built around gloopy declarations of how much they love their partners, designed to show our worthiness for marriage, I find it frankly humiliating. Such writing probably does sometimes convince a few straight people that we actually do fall in love and care for each other. I think it also serves an important function in letting gays who are in the very fragile first stages of coming out know that there's something worth shooting for beyond easily-obtainable sex and drug kicks. Where I draw the line--where I cannot imagine not drawing the line--is at some point before we start talking about the power of government to confer dignity.

Right Side of the Rainbow says everything I've ever wanted to say about defenses of traditional marriage against gays here. If I read his tone correctly, he's dead serious but also being arch. I particularly like this point:

Strip marriage of the rules that make it unappealing to gay men but keep all the nice perks that come with it — what, you think we don't want our partners to have health insurance? — and you get the inevitable. You get a political campaign driven by middle class gay men, possessed as all middle class Americans are of a suffocating sense of entitlement, that will not relent until it succeeds.

People talk about gay activists as if their sense of entitlement were some kind of evidence of special gay selfishness. But entitlements are the way modern civic life works--remember Jonathan Rauch's chapters on lobbyists in Demosclerosis? I'm happy to deplore this, and to join in any principled objection to the excesses of leftist gay advocacy. It's a target-rich environment, to be sure; however, I get very uneasy when it's treated as some sort of freakish aberration in American politics, rather than the wack-job end of a continuum that runs all the way through it.

Added on 17 February: Eric at Classical Values has mentioned common-law marriage in connection to gays, and I was sure that, somewhere, he'd pointed out that some gay-marriage advocates might not be so hot on the prospect of being considered a de facto married couple after cohabiting for seven years. Can't seem to find the post I'm thinking of, but the point was a good one.

Oh, and one more thing: childrearing is the single most important thing most people do in life, and the amount of sacrifice it requires is considerable. The view one hears nowadays that childrearing = selflessness and altruism, however, is coarse and misleading. Everywhere outside the developed world, people recognize very matter-of-factly that they're having children not just to let happy new life loose in the world but to provide work for the household, including elder care when the parents themselves are old and incapacitated.

The same mechanism operates here in the First World, of course; it's just that our money economy means that people are less likely to need their children's financial support and that the literal care they need can come from other people's children in the form of strong, young nurses and deliverymen. The investment of energy in child-rearing feels obvious and real. The payback from the pool of workers who keep the economy going feels diffuse and is easy to gloss over (in that one often hears people talk about parenting as an investment in the future, as if the effort went in a single altruistic direction only).

One must also consider that, in a world in which many of us don't do physical labor, and those who do are rarely involved in the farming of life's essentials, sex and the production of children is one of the few experiences left that serve primal, animal urges--which civilization teaches us to subsume but doesn't actually banish.

I am not arguing here that parenthood is on balance a selfish project. What I do think is that it paints a false picture to posit child-bearing straightness in an unqualified way as saintly and self-abnegating, which I think is the effect (however unintended) of quite a bit of the current discourse on marriage and parenting.

Michael Demmons has decided to tell us what he really thinks about gay marriage:

It�s not like being polite is going to make some backward a**hole change his mind. So why should I try? People tell us to stop calling people bigots and homophobic because they don�t want us speaking the truth. They think �baby steps.� Well, sorry folks. We�ve been taking baby steps since the 60�s and long before.

Why should you be polite to people who are determined to behave horribly? Well, for one thing, there's the old-fashioned injunction against sinking to their level. Sometimes taking the high road convinces a**holes to act more civilized, but even when it doesn't, it has its benefits. For one thing, non-a**holes are often listening to these exchanges, and it's not a good idea to turn them off. For another, there's no faster way to turn yourself bitter than to get involved in games of combat-vituperation.

Besides, not everyone who has "a different opinion on the matter" is anti-gay. I hate to sound like a broken record, but our interests are not helped when strategy is conceived in hippy-dippy terms like "Marriage is love." Give me a break. I care whether my boyfriend recognizes my love for him. I care whether my parents do. I care whether my friends do.

I don't care whether the state does, which is one of the reasons I have such a hard time figuring out what "equality" gay marriage advocates are looking for. Power of attorney and transfer of benefits, I get. The ability to get residency for a partner who's a foreign national is obviously something I'm deeply interested in. I just grow very suspicious at the way arguments for gay marriage veer quickly into the territory of what would make us happy or unhappy. We cannot fall into the trap of offering the government that kind of power if we want our relationships to be integrated into society in a way that's best for everyone, and if we want to put men and women who come out in the future in the best position to live happy and productive lives. If we do, we will lose, and so will they. I would be more than...well, happy...to see gay advocacy proceed in strides larger than baby steps if I thought the foundations of its arguments were more solid. As it is, we're still in the middle of debates over first principles, such as what constitutes a "right" and what makes someone a "second-class citizen." In that context, I don't think you need to be a patsy in order to espouse caution and slow, deep-rooted, organic change.

For possibly the first time in my entire life, I have risen at 8:30 on a Sunday morning to make myself a proper breakfast of eggs, toast, corned beef (the can didn't have a key attached; some improvising with pliers and two nails was called for), juice, and tea. This is not a move toward self-improvement on my part, heaven forfend; I just have to go into the office today.

Since I've been bustling around the kitchen to Outlandos d'Amour, I figure this is a good time to note the recent New York same-sex marriage ruling. Michael has his thoughts and a link to the PDF file of the original decision. The gay marriage debate merry-go-round started to bore me long ago, not because the issues aren't important but because participants have a tendency to talk past each other repetitiously and VERY LOUDLY about small points without first finding common ground on the basics.

I'm happy that our relationships have support from a lot of straight people, though I disagree that this is the way to channel it. On the other hand, however sincerely people may idealize marriage as sacred, it's hard to fault those who argue that it's evolved into essentially a loving relationship between two people who happen to want to be in it at the time. That is the way it's actually been practiced for the last few decades, after all. (Blech, and speaking of Baby Boomer solipsism and self-indulgence, we've arrived at "Born in the 50's"...no, not me, do it to Julia! JULIA!...where's that remote?) Perhaps if people who object to gay marriage were willing to work as publicly and strenuously to reform divorce and custody laws, it would be harder to dismiss them as just prejudiced against queers.