The White Peril 白禍

I guess I hadn't been reading Ace long enough to know much about her coming out. She's posted about it at Gay Orbit and at her place. (It's the same post, but she may get different comments for each.)

I was way luckier than I expected to be. I was brought up in an extremely conservative Sabbatarian Christian sect--you know, people who weren't members of the church were collectively known as "the World," and we had two-hour services every week. You took notes when you were considered old enough, which in most families was around twelve or so. Just about every week there was at least one mention of how vigilant everyone needed to be against Satanic influences on their children in which homosexual activism figured prominently.

So when I settled in my mind that I was definitely, permanently gay, my options were very clear and very polarized. I figured my parents would tell me that they still loved me but that we weren't going to be able to have any correspondence anymore. For about a month--not very long, I guess, though it seemed like an eternity--I flip-flopped over whether to tell them, but I come from a pretty out-with-it-already kind of family, so I decided to come out and just deal.

I told them just after New Year's in 1996. The next three days were notable for their lack of relaxed family fun, but when I went back to New York, it was with the understanding that they weren't going to disown me and I wasn't about to go all druggy and bathhousey. After that there were a few awkward moments--I've never in my life eaten very much at one sitting, but after I was out, there was a sudden danger that my not wanting a third slice of shoo-fly pie meant I had an eating disorder because, you know, Cherie Bank on Channel 10 did this report that said a lot of Men Like Me do. Over the next few years, I figured out the rules: I can mention a guy I'm dating or talk about my boyfriend, but gay issues in general are a no-go. I mention the word gay--nay, use the letters g, a, and y within any five consecutive words--and the subject is changed. Not pointedly, but resolutely.

When I wanted to bring Atsushi home two years ago, everything was fine. I mean, it was so fine it was kind of spooky. They put us in separate rooms, of course, but they spent the whole time doing their mischievous/playful/intimately ribald thing, which they don't do around people they want to distance themselves from.

My mother even tried to challenge Atsushi to a drinking game, but he doesn't drink. This was at the "Japanese" steakhouse in one of the malls near where I grew up, BTW. You know, run by a Korean family, with Chinese calligraphy all over the place and Polynesian drinks on the menu. The chefs joke and juggle knives. You can get chow mein noodles instead of rice. Atsushi found the whole thing a lot of fun but utterly bewildering, and the 'rents never let him forget it. "This isn't the Japanese you get in Japan, huh, Atsu?" Mom guffawed at one point. "Yeah, I bet you're wishing you'd gone ahead and gotten a beer now!" Dad chimed in. Right about then I took a long drink of vodka and started to hope that maybe they could find it in their hearts to like him a little less. They let him go without too many more incidents, though. Since then, they always tell me to give their love to him when we talk or write back and forth, and they send him Christmas presents.

Normally, I try to leave my parents off the blog because they aren't here to give their version of events when it differs from my own. (Well, that and it's not my place to tell their stories.) I'm only giving them walk-on parts now because I wonder whether things would have worked this way three or four years after I came out. It was never my intention to use my Japanese major to move to Japan; I came here and liked it and then fortuitously discovered that my grad school mentor and I were incompatible, but I would have been in New York for another five or six years if I'd stayed on track. It's hard to say what would have happened in a reality that never came to pass. I'd been out for six years when I brought up the idea of bringing Atsushi home, so the fact that the gay thing wasn't going anywhere was pretty apparent. Time was probably the biggest factor, along with a willingness to be persistent without being pushy.

Cathy Young has posted a long and very, very good response to Maggie Gallagher's guest-blog entries at the Volokh Conspiracy. Gallagher has also responded to Young. Something near the end of Gallagher's post took me aback in a big, bad way:

I too share your hope that we can have SSM and simultaneously figure out how to increase the likelihood that children in this country are born to and raised by their own married mom and dad.

That first part came out of left field for me--I assume it means that Gallagher figures that SSM is inevitable, anyway, so she hopes we can make the best of the change. But she's been saying for some time, unless I've read her incorrectly, that she thinks support for gay marriage has been slowly starting to wane lately. In that light, it doesn't seem likely that she would be regarding it as an inevitable development. At the same time, while I've never read her as anti-gay, she can hardly mean that she's looking forward to the advent of gay marriage. I don't quite know what to make of that bit.

Young is also right that Gallagher didn't present her arguments very fluidly, but it's hard not to sympathize with her. The crux of the pro-gay marriage argument, on the part of many of its supporters, can be delivered in a snappy sentence: "Conventional marriage isn't always about pro-creation, and gays fall in love and want to provide for their families just like straights--what justification is there for not treating their relationships the same legally?"

The crux of the argument against gay marriage is not as easy to put succinctly, involving as it does all the messy hormones and impulses and choices and things that are involved in taking a child through the two-decade transition into someone who's healthy, self-reliant, and ready to assume a place in adult society. Half of the evidence involved is probably boring even to the research psychologists and demographers who generate it. But that doesn't mean it's illegitimate.

Eric has also addressed--I hope I don't sound self-infatuated linking this, since the post in question begins by citing me approvingly; I'm not really going to deal with that part--some of the issues raised during Gallagher's guest-posting stint:

I think this "if you disagree with me, you're a bigot" meme has gotten really, really tired. The problem is, the more time people spend talking only with each other and not with people they disagree with, the more likely they are to be convinced that not only are they right, but that their opponents are more than wrong; they are evil, bigoted, and analogous to Nazis.

The irony involved in reflexively dismissing people with opposing arguments as "bigots" would be delicious were it not for the fact that the practice has so coarsened public discussion of...well, just about everything. I sometimes think it should be banned, the way your ninth-grade English teacher banned the passive voice from your first few expository essays--not because it was incorrect in and of itself incorrect but because it was too easy to get lazy and overuse.

Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty has posted a lengthy response to Maggie Gallagher's guest posts at the Volokh Conspiracy on gay marriage (via Gay Orbit). Kuznicki's commentary is worth reading in full, especially if you don't want to have to slog through all the comments at the Volokh Conspiracy to figure out what the main counterarguments being offered are.

I don't feel like reproducing my last year and a half of effusion on the issue, especially since it's all available under the marriage debate category on the left there. I do think that one of Kuznicki's points is worth responding to anew, though:

Meanwhile, Gallagher has also neglected the opposing argument, namely that same-sex marriages might actually strengthen the institution of heterosexual marriage. Although the empirical data on either side is scarce (and although this scarcity gives weight to the go-slow approach mentioned in the last comment I linked), still, I think there is at least a conceivable causal mechanism to explain why same-sex marriage might do a lot of good to the institution of heterosexual marriage: If we as a society send a message that marriage is a universal goal, one that admits of no exceptions and knows no gender lines, then it is reasonable to think that more people of all sexual orientations will want to get married.

But if large numbers of people–gays and lesbians, for example–are told that they do not need marriage, or that marriage cannot help them, or that they are unworthy of the institution, then some marginal number of straight people, especially those who identify most closely with gays and lesbians, will almost certainly come to have contempt for the institution of marriage and to see it as antiquated or irrelevant.

I'm perfectly willing to argue that homosexual relationships are no less moral than heterosexual relationships, that contribution to civilization in the form of the creation and upkeep of artifacts is just as important as contribution to civilization in the form of the creation and bringing up of children, and that the law should not be throwing obstacles in our paths when we try to care for our partners within the relationships we've chosen.

However, I've always found the argument above, even in the carefully qualified way Kuznicki presents it, to be ridiculous. The vast majority of people do not view homosexuality and heterosexuality as the same; that's true even among those who believe our relationships are just as valid (word of the week, apparently) as theirs. Despite all the changes in medicine and in the family structure over the last century, there simply remains no chance that a homosexual couple will suddenly finding itself producing a child that needs eighteen years of intensive looking-after. The number of people so bohemian in outlook that they regard their gay friends as facing the same real-life sex-related issues in all respects is so small that "marginal" hardly does it justice.

My friends hardly constitute a scientific sample of the population--good thing for America we don't!--but I doubt their attitude is untypical. A few years ago on our e-mail group, I tried to get a discussion about gay marriage going...and failed utterly. The replies were along the lines of "Of course, I think you and Atsushi should be able to get married--why the hell wouldn't i?" Even so, my friends' expressed preference has been for marriage; there have been a half-dozen weddings since we were in our late twenties. (The result, BTW, is that I'm now friends with [even] more Jews than I was in college: three of the girls converted in order to marry three of our Jewish buddies. Talk about populations that recruit!) If forced to choose between showing solidarity with gay friends and providing the most stable possible environment for their own children--assuming that's the choice they actually have to make--most people are obviously going to side with their kids.

Jonathan Rauch's column for National Journal is up at IGF. It's about a gay wedding in Massachusetts. I still think there are important unaddressed questions about gay marriage as policy and as an institution. Rauch mostly leaves aside those questions this time out, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. His focus is on the reactions of family members. He delineates, with a few well-chosen strokes, how Beckland and Pope are starting out--both the resources they have and what they're going to be contending with:

Laura's parents, Lee and Ludene, both in their early 70s, have shown up at their grandson's wedding on the advice of their priest, who counseled support for their family even if they could not condone a same-sex marriage. They say they are open-minded Catholics, but today's event has pushed them to their limit. "I feel that it's wrong," Lee volunteers. "I don't think it's real. I kind of wish it hadn't happened." He loves his grandson, no doubt about it. But "this is hard for me, to see it happen." Ludene, who believes that marriage is for procreation, struggles to find a more conciliatory note. "We're living in a different age," she says.

Jamie's two younger brothers are enthusiastic about the marriage. It never occurs to them to regard a same-sex marriage as anything but real. His father, Kim, has been supportive all along. But his paternal grandparents, Jim and Carol, are guarded as they sit on a bench awaiting the ceremony's start. "We love Jamie, and I'm not going to drive a wedge in the family," Jim says. Carol mentions that both are Christians who are close to the Bible. "This will be interesting," she says. "I'm not the judge."

Rauch has in the past written about the social pressure required to make marriage work and how it would make gay marriage a benefit to society; he's done so in ways that push forward abstractions and skate over specifics, which I think weakens his arguments. It will be interesting to see how what he learns about people's concrete experiences from here on will affect his views.

I may not like the way gay marriage has been pursued politically, but of course it turns me to mush to see two of our men (or women)--who clearly had to go through some major crap to right themselves--find happiness with each other. Congratulations and best wishes to them.

(Oh, and Jonathan? Sweetness? Honey, Jamie could be your son. There's no "just about" about it. He was born when you were eighteen, and maybe most of your fellow rising Yale freshmen weren't having kids then, but plenty of Americans were. It's considered pretty early in most places, but not all that early. I was born when my father was twenty, and it never raises an eyebrow when I meet other people of working class extraction.)

Several days ago I received a wonderful e-mail from reader Leslie W. She gave me permission to post it:

I wonder if gay guys have the same problem I do, being a lesbian who is amazed at how antagonistic literally every lesbian I know is about our not being let into a terribly boring party we're so desperately trying to crash! I just don't get this fixation on marriage as against civil unions. Though not religious in any institutional sense, I do respect the rights of traditionally religious people and do not see it as overarchingly "mean" for them to express the belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman. I also don't mind when people of that ilk assert that sex with someone of the same gender is sinful. Of course, I don't think that--and I always tell such people that it's OK to have that viewpoint but that they should check out Romans 2 before they ponder what punishment to inflict. But why should I be concerned with what they feel, much less with what they say? That is, unless what I'm really seeking is their absolute approval--cheap grace, you might say. If my rights as a citizen are genuinely threatened by a rightist religious agenda, I'll be among the first to man the barricades. But I'm very tired of the false oppression that so many lesbians claim as their lot in life, and I'm extremely weary of the us-them dynamic that permeates my milieu surely as much as any other.

Right. Just a dozen or so years ago, Bruce Bawer could write the following:

Committed gay couples exist by the millions, and it is unquestionably in the state's interest that homosexuals live in such couples rather than live alone and sleep around; why shouldn't the state, then, recognize those relationships as it does heterosexual commitments? For the state to do so would not deny to anyone the right to consider his or her marriage morally superior to my domestic partnership--or, for that matter, to anyone else's heterosexual marriage.

Note the lack of assumption that recognition of our relationships must call them marriages and, in every last finicking little respect, treat them as exactly THE SAME as straight relationships, lest some gay person's self-esteem be dinged. When was the last time you heard a gay public figure talk that way? Now it's all about enshrining our love for each other in state policy.

BTW, Leslie, and anyone else, if you're looking for sensible lesbian writing, check out Ace Pryhill. She supports marriage rather than civil unions, but I agree with her about big-picture issues of what legal recognition means and how it relates to individual responsibility.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of e-mails and policies, it appears that this is a good time to formulate...well, an e-mail policy. I think this post from a few months back should get the point across.