Yes to Matthew Yglesias's response to Kate Antonova's smear, which misspells Yglesias. [UPDATE: The tweet has been deleted, but Antonova essentially said that Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, David Brooks, and Steven Pinker shouldn't be published because their writing adds nothing of value.]
I got hung up on the part of this that was about me, but imagine looking at a world where same sex couples can marry all across the western world and deciding that Andrew Sullivan has never had anything of value to add to the conversation.
Sullivan, Yglesias, Brooks, and Pinker are all great. I've disagreed with all of them at times, but their writing does add value to the world. For instance, I blogged this and this by Brooks, this and this by Yglesias, and this and this by Pinker.
Also, lol at the hair-splitting of: I don't want these writers to be canceled — I just want them to be stopped from getting published anywhere ever again! Reminds me of that old joke: "We're not lost — we just don't know where we are!"
But this does seem to be the sort of thing courts usually decide. And I think people will accept it quite readily. In fact, I think the overall reaction will be one of relief that we don't have to keep chewing over this issue. Let people get back to their personal relationships that were always going on anyway. The country wasn't collapsing because gay people love each other and seek the legal aspects of permanence.
What I'd like to know is: how did Roberts decide that this is not the kind of issue "courts usually decide"? That itself is a decision. What's the standard for saying the Supreme Court shouldn't decide an issue? Is it just based on whether the Justices have a bad feeling about the whole thing? And aren't issues of minority rights exactly the kinds of issues that are often very important for the Supreme Court to decide?
Of course, some people are quick to make that argument today — like Fredrik deBoer, who writes in Politico:
Now that we’ve defined that love and devotion and family isn’t driven by gender alone, why should it be limited to just two individuals? The most natural advance next for marriage lies in legalized polygamy . . . .
In Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissenting opinion, he remarks, “It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.” As is often the case with critics of polygamy, he neglects to mention why this is a fate to be feared. . . .
[P]rogressives who reject the case for legal polygamy often don’t really appear to have their hearts in it. They seem uncomfortable voicing their objections, clearly unused to being in the position of rejecting the appeals of those who would codify non-traditional relationships in law. They are, without exception, accepting of the right of consenting adults to engage in whatever sexual and romantic relationships they choose, but oppose the formal, legal recognition of those relationships. They’re trapped, I suspect, in prior opposition that they voiced from a standpoint of political pragmatism in order to advance the cause of gay marriage.
In doing so, they do real harm to real people. Marriage is not just a formal codification of informal relationships. It’s also a defensive system designed to protect the interests of people whose material, economic and emotional security depends on the marriage in question. If my liberal friends recognize the legitimacy of free people who choose to form romantic partnerships with multiple partners, how can they deny them the right to the legal protections marriage affords?
Polyamory is a fact. People are living in group relationships today. The question is not whether they will continue on in those relationships. The question is whether we will grant to them the same basic recognition we grant to other adults: that love makes marriage, and that the right to marry is exactly that, a right. . . .
Conventional arguments against polygamy fall apart with even a little examination. Appeals to traditional marriage, and the notion that child rearing is the only legitimate justification of legal marriage, have now, I hope, been exposed and discarded by all progressive people. What’s left is a series of jerry-rigged arguments that reflect no coherent moral vision of what marriage is for, and which frequently function as criticisms of traditional marriage as well.
Well, I'm sorry, deBoer, but you're missing something. Oh, I admit your argument has a certain appeal on the surface: how can we say a policy that excluded people from the institution of marriage based on their gender or sexual orientation was unconstitutional discrimination, without saying the same thing of a policy that excludes people based on their number? If it doesn't matter whether you're male or female, straight or gay, then how can it matter whether you're 2, 3, 5, 10, or 50 people?
But polygamy is significantly different — even assuming for the sake of argument that we have no concerns about coercion or power disparities within any given polygamous relationship. As my mom, Ann Althouse, explained 9 years ago:
Legal marriage isn't just about love,it's an economic arrangement. Having the state authorize your union is not the same thing as having your friends and neighbors approve of you and your religious leaders bless you. It affects taxes and employee benefits -- huge amounts of money. A gay person with a pension and a health insurance plan is incapable of extending those benefits to his (or her) partner. He (or she) can't file a joint tax return. That's not fair. A polygamous marriage, however, puts a group of persons in a position to claim more economic benefits than the traditional heterosexual couple. That doesn't appeal to our sense of fairness.
The law doesn't assess how much two people love each other. Two persons of opposite sexes can marry for all sorts of reasons. If there were a device that could look into their souls and measure their love, we wouldn't accept the outrageous invasion of privacy it would take for the government to use it. Excluding gay couples from marrying does generate the complaint that society does not sufficiently respect homosexual love, and by harping on this point, proponents of gay marriage activate their opponents who think that's a good thing.
But it's not all about love and who respects what. It's also about economics. And in that dimension, it's easy to distinguish polygamy.
[P]olygamy imposes real costs, by reducing the number of marriageable women. Suppose a society contains 100 men and 100 women, but the five wealthiest men have a total of 50 wives. That leaves 95 men to compete for only 50 marriageable women.
[T]he case for gay marriage is the case against polygamy, and the public will be smart enough to understand the difference.
Gay marriage is about extending the opportunity to marry to people who lack it; polygamy, in practice, is about exactly the opposite: withdrawing marriage opportunity from people who now have it. Gay marriage succeeded because no one could identify any plausible channels through which it might damage heterosexual marriage; with polygamy, the worries are many, the history clear, and the channels well understood.
I've got a problem with that! Talk about a male perspective! What about the women who want to choose to share one man? They should be denied to preserve a pool of marriageable women for all the extra males that would otherwise have scarce pickings? Are women some kind of natural resource to be conserved for the benefit of males?
As the old saying goes: Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. If women think they are better off as multiple wives to one high-quality male, why should they be cut off from that way of life so that some less-desired male will have better odds of getting a woman for himself? Is this everybody-gets-just-one theory of marriage some kind of welfare program for undesirable males?
I can see that society fears its renegade young male and would like to tame them through marriage, leveraging the power of their sexuality lest they expend that energy in acts of violence and dissolution. I can see the idea of using women for this purpose and rejecting polygamy because it takes women out of commission in that service. . . . But if you use that as your overt argument, you're going to run up against ideas about women's autonomy and freedom. We're not society's tools.
I'm disappointed that the decision was only 5-4, with a majority opinion by Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.
Still, today is a great day in American history.
The majority concludes:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
There's a distinct absence of doctrinal particularity about the levels of scrutiny. There's no discussion of the government interest to be served and how closely connected it is to the policy that's supposed to serve that interest. The focus is on the gravity of the burden imposed. . . .
It's notable that the due process analysis predominated and drove the equal protection analysis. I think the inequality is easier to explain and understand, but there are reasons to prefer to frame things in terms of fundamental liberty. Equality is, perhaps, a cooler matter than liberty. There's more passion in liberty and more to disagree about. There's no end to demands for liberty, and which liberties get to be fundamental? That question sets us up for the dissenting opinions, and for those, I'll do separate posts.
Much of Justice Kennedy's opinion is workmanlike and dull, piecing together precedents in an earnest effort to show us that the right found today was really always already there and nothing to do with feelings and political preferences. But there were some glimmers of passion. My favorite example:
"Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there."
When I was first realizing I was gay, I was scared: I figured it would preclude me from full participation in society, and for that reason I fiercely resisted admitting my orientation to myself. It's still unbelievable that in just ten years since that time, the nation has moved from -- at best -- tolerance, but often outright hostility -- to widespread acceptance. This ruling will mean millions of people will be relieved of a part of the struggle and self-loathing that so often accompanies self-discovery and coming out, and will instead live with the awareness that same-sex relationships are viewed with legitimacy by their nation. Of course, no law can erase all of the difficulties that accompany being gay -- but gays and lesbians can rest easy knowing that now, at least, the government has done its part to secure our equal treatment under the law.
I can't tell you how proud I was when he linked to my post about him for the 10th anniversary of his blog, in 2010.
So many other writers were paying tribute to him that day, and many of them were being more complimentary than I was. He had solicited "toasts and roasts," but they seemed to be mostly the former.
My post lauded him for some things but was quite critical of him in other ways, and I even mentioned that I had stopped reading his blog.
Self-righteousness and dogmatism are generally not a perfect fit with foreign policy. Sullivan's style is what it is. It isn't perfect, as even he admits. But he has done far more good than most cheerleaders for the Iraq war by exposing and analyzing his own shortcomings in thinking about war.
But when I think of Sullivan's political voice, I won't think first about foreign policy. I'll think about the issue he showed me how to think about.
His opening remarks about same-sex marriage in that video (back in 1997, before he was a blogger) are dated. He thought Hawaii was soon to be the first state in the US with same-sex marriage; the first such state was Massachusetts in 2004, and Hawaii still doesn't have it. [That was true when I wrote this in 2010; the law recognizing same-sex marriage in Hawaii was signed in 2013. — JAC] He didn't do a great job at predicting the future, but his message still has great resonance today.
I was going to find some choice moment of this video, transcribe it, and quote it here to draw your attention to it. But I would have felt like just transcribing the whole thing. So please, watch the whole thing. To say this is Sullivan at his best would be an understatement.
I love how he starts by giving definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality that seem so uncontroversial as to be hardly worth explaining — and then leverages those definitions into his case for same-sex marriage (both as something that should happen and as the most important front in the gay rights movement).
Though he's often criticized as overly emotional about political issues, he took the political issue he feels the most strongly about in his life and made his case with lucid logic. He did it when it was a lot less popular than it is now, and he did it over and over.
Thank you, Andrew Sullivan. You have made a difference.
So, everyone's trying to figure out why the Supreme Court decided not to decide the same-sex marriage cases. I can't believe the reason is that the court didn't consider the issue very important because almost all lower federal courts have agreed on the issue. Of course it would be important for the Supreme Court to have the authoritative last word on the issue!
Strategy may have also played a role in the decision to deny review. The Court’s four more liberal Justices – Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan – may have been content to leave well enough alone, from their perspective. Put another way, they may have preferred to let the tide of decisions striking down state bans continue to flow steadily, rather than risk a broader decision which might turn back that tide altogether.
OK, that's fairly clear. I'd also add Kennedy to that list.
But she finds it "harder to imagine ... why some of the Court’s more conservative Justices didn’t join forces to grant review":
Indeed, it was nearly impossible to fathom that they would allow the lower-court decisions striking down state bans on same-sex marriage to go into effect without a fight, even if (as the conventional wisdom has surmised) they remained concerned about their ability to persuade Justice Anthony Kennedy to join them in upholding the bans. But apparently they did, and we may never know the full story until a Justice’s private papers are released, many years from now.
Here's how I see it. The 4 conservatives should assume, based on what they know about their other 5 colleagues, that any Supreme Court decision on this issue would conclude that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right. And they might dislike that result, but they're smart enough to realize that's the only result that can possibly be supported by citations to Supreme Court case law. Or perhaps they basically think that'd be a fine result, but they're uncomfortable enough with it that they'd rather not be the ones to make the decision. Even if they're firmly convinced that the bans are constitutional, surely they realize that the most they could accomplish is a dissenting opinion with no legal effect; the only effect would be to tarnish their legacies and forever associate themselves with "the wrong side of history." In short, the conservatives had no good way to decide the case, so they decided they'd rather not decide it.
ADDED: One more possibility I left out: Perhaps the 4 conservatives have a strong desire for a ruling saying the bans are constitutional, so they want to do anything possible to increase the chances of that happening. And they think there's no chance with the court's current personnel, but there's some chance if at least one liberal or Kennedy is replaced by a Republican president. So they might not think they're very likely to win, but they at least want to give it a chance, and they've figured out that their chances are better if they wait.
You always hear people (like Senator Rob Portman) saying they used to be opposed to it, but have seen the light through experience and introspection, and now realize it's the right thing to do. You never hear anyone say they used to support it, but have seen the light, and now realize it's the wrong thing to do.
As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is ... , in fact, incompatible with our Constitution.
Because Section 3 of the act defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples. Among other things, these couples cannot file their taxes jointly, take unpaid leave to care for a sick or injured spouse or receive equal family health and pension benefits as federal civilian employees. Yet they pay taxes, contribute to their communities and, like all couples, aspire to live in committed, loving relationships, recognized and respected by our laws.
When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that "enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination." Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory.
Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.
"I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's effective," Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.
Scalia has been giving speeches around the country to promote his new book, "Reading Law," and his lecture at Princeton comes just days after the court agreed to take on two cases that challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. . . .
"It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd,'" Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"
My mom, Ann Althouse, links to that article and points out that Justice Antonin Scalia is "antagonizing — antoninonizing — students."
My thoughts on this:
1. I interpret Scalia's phrase "moral feelings against" to refer to disgust. He lends this an air of dignity by using the lofty word "moral," but what he's really talking about is a visceral or aesthetic reaction expressed by interjections like "Eww!" and "Yuck!" We need to think about whether it's actually legitimate for disgust to serve as a primary motivation and justification for passing a law. There's no question that there are good laws that prohibit behavior that happens to be found disgusting. But the question is whether mere disgust can justify a law that would otherwise not seem to have a rational justification. It's fine for people to be disgusted at the thought of a particular couple having sex or even showing any kind of affection. This could be based on any number of factors, including the couple's gender, age, or physical attractiveness. Most people would find it offputting to see certain couples do so much as kiss in a movie — more offputting than they would find a movie scene showing a brutal act of murder. There's a much wider audience for images of violence than for atonal chamber music, but as long as even 1% of the population finds that kind of music pleasant, some people are going to happily exercise their right to create it, no matter how large a majority experiences it as a bunch of noise with no redeeming value. I wouldn't want to live in a society where the presence or absence of such feelings of disgust and revulsion determined what kinds of behavior we're allowed to engage in.
2. I assume Justice Scalia realizes that mentioning gay people and murderers in the same breath is going to be very inflammatory to a lot of people, and isn't the best way to win over those who didn't already agree with him. (He winked at this by sardonically adding: "I'm surprised you aren't persuaded.") This doesn't mean his words were poorly chosen — he might have good reasons to try to stir up controversy over this. And, of course, he has a right to express his viewpoint in his own inimitable style even if he offends people. But while he's remarking on the way voters can make their decisions based on visceral repulsion, he might want to consider that many people are viscerally repulsed by the way he makes his point, and this may affect people's votes in future presidential elections.
3. What matters far more than anyone's visceral feelings about what is or isn't disgusting is this: Murder laws uphold the principle that everyone in a society should have equal rights and responsibilities.
It's nice that Obama has made this announcement, albeit after noticing that other high-level politicians like Joe Biden, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Dick Cheney don't seem to have suffered much political blowback from doing the same thing. (It's interesting that our 3 most recent vice presidents are all supporters of same-sex marriage.) Obama's switch from supporting it in 1996 to opposing it in time to run for president to supporting it again (now that the polls are turning in its favor) seems analogous to Mitt Romney's calculated flip-flop on abortion. Again, I'm glad about Obama's announcement, but I don't find his "evolution" particularly inspiring.
I don't think many of those who previously criticized Obama's opposition to same-sex marriage thought he was bigoted in the slightest. I assume his personal views, then and now, are not anti-gay, and I can't believe he was being honest in the past about being genuinely opposed to same-sex marriage. I find it hard to imagine that he ever had a private conversation with someone in which he passionately defended his view that two women or two men shouldn't be able to get legally married. I assume, though it's of course impossible to know, that he's been in favor of same-sex marriage all along and has decided to be honest about it now. Good.
• Abortion — There's no significant gender gap on whether it should be legal. Only 4% more women than men think it should always or usually be legal (55% and 51% respectively). There's essentially no difference based on age. There's a huge education gap: 61% of college graduates generally support legal abortion, whereas the figure is just 46% for those with only high school or less (and 57% for Americans who have been to college but haven't graduated).
• Same-sex marriage — Support for it is rising dramatically. Just two presidential elections ago, in 2004, twice as many Americans opposed it as supported it. Now, slightly more Americans are for it than are against it. In 2004, more than three times as many people "strongly" opposed it (36%) than "strongly" supported it (11%). Now, the number's the same — 22% feel "strongly" each way.
• Gun control — Opposition to strict gun control laws is skyrocketing among blacks and whites. Blacks have always been much more likely than whites to support gun control. But the percentage of blacks who say gun rights are more important than gun control (35%) is now as high as the percentage of whites who said so 20 years ago (37%). A majority of whites take that view now (57%).
(This is from a Pew Research Center poll where they called landlines and cell phones, and then weighted the results based on how much people actually use landlines vs. cell phones.)
“I believe that marriage is between a man and woman. . . . It has been for all of recorded history and I think this is a temporary aberration that will dissipate."
"Having spent the last five years putting all of my political will, interest and energy into fighting against the spread of same-sex marriage as if it were a contagious disease, I must admit that it is hard for me to put the following text into words let alone utter them with my own voice." "I now support full marriage equality."
Louis Marinelli tells the story of how he came to a few realizations while on his anti-same-sex-marriage tour:
I really came to understand that gays and lesbians were just real people who wanted to live real lives and be treated equally as opposed to, for example, wanting to destroy American culture. . . .
I soon realized that there I was surrounded by hateful people; propping up a cause I created five years ago, a cause which I had begun to question.
The whole post is worth a read.
In an email interview, he gives more specific critiques and recantations of some of his past statements. This is my favorite:
Once I wrote that homosexuals are deceitful people who care only about themselves or something to that effect. Honestly, aren’t we all? It was wrong for me to exclude everyone else from that description. We all lie and when it comes down to it, we will do what is best for ourselves. So throwing in a little levity, I stand by the comment but want to apologize for limiting its scope to the gay community.
Remember the 2005 press conference of San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders?
This is the first post in a new series: "Blogger of the Day." This will occur at irregular intervals — definitely not every day. With each post, I'll highlight a blogger I like. Some will be obscure enough that I might hope to give them a slight boost in traffic or visibility. Some will be so big that I can't possibly expect to give them any help. The first Blogger of the Day clearly falls into the latter category: Andrew Sullivan. (Wikipedia.)
He’s been blogging daily — on a blog he calls The Daily Dish but which everyone else just calls "Andrew Sullivan" — for exactly 10 years today. Here, he looks back on what he's proud of and "ashamed of" about that decade of blogging.
Today, he's running "Toasts or Roasts": other bloggers say what they like or don't like about his blog. So far, he's posted 16 men — including Dan Savage, Jonah Lehrer, Reihan Salam, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, Marc Ambinder, and Ben Smith -- and 1 woman: my mom, Ann Althouse. She's the only who says anything critical, aside from a few others who blandly mention that they don't always agree with Sullivan. (She also describes how Sullivan's blog was responsible for her marriage.) Without her, it would have been all "Toast" and no "Roast." Good for Sullivan for including my mom's post: he didn't have to do that, but his homepage today would be pretty dull without her contribution. She concludes:
Andrew is always changing, and one could go through cycles of loving or hating him — I especially love the Andrew Sullivan of "The Great Gay Debate" — but it's not really worth getting all exercised about which Andrew Sullivan we're reading today. We keep reading.
Here's my Toast and Roast. But first, some background.
Sullivan was one of the first blogs I read on a regular basis — along with Talking Points Memo, Kausfiles, Instapundit, and Metafilter — circa 2000-2001. It's impressive that they're all still thriving, though you could also say there's a problem here: the blogs that got big early on tend to keep dominating the blogosphere. There isn't the space for some new brilliant person to come along and be a Sullivan or a Kaus or an Instapundit.
Of those 5 blogs, I still read 3 regularly: Kausfiles, Instapundit, and Metafilter. I don't read TPM much because it's no longer the same blog it was in the early 2000s. It used to be the dashed-off daily thoughts of a random journalist who had fled the American Prospect, apparently because he didn't fit neatly with that magazine's liberal orthodoxy. Josh Marshall was the kind of Democrat whose mind was flexible enough that he would praise Bush for his rhetoric in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and offer qualified support for the Iraq war. Today, TPM is a homogeneously liberal super-blog.
And in contrast to my mom's roast/toast to Sullivan, I can't say I always keep reading him no matter how matter how much he changes. The truth is that I don't read Sullivan regularly anymore.
Oh, I'm sure his blog continues to be excellent. But he got too passionately moralistic about every issue — especially when he would flip-flop on foreign policy without bothering to dampen his moralistic fervor.
However, I have to give him credit for recognizing his own failings: he wrote an unblinking mea culpa for supporting the Iraq war. In 2008, to mark 5 years into the war, he wrote that he had committed "four cardinal sins," one of which was "narrow moralism":
I became enamored of my own morality and this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and that unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in anything much but self-righteousness. I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly.
greatest failure by far in these ten years . . . was giving in to my legitimate but far-too-powerful emotions after 9/11 and cheer-leading for a war in Iraq that remains one of the most disgraceful, disastrous and murderous episodes in the history of American foreign policy. I was wrong - but more than wrong, I was dismissive of those who turned out to be right. Some of those I mocked I did so for the right reasons. But some I didn't listen to when I should have. All I can say is that the great virtue of this blog is that it gave me nowhere to hide. And if you read the archives, you can see my mind and soul twisting slowly in the wind of reality, as illusion after illusion fell from my eyes . . . . In many ways, you forced me. You demanded that I hold myself responsible for my errors and, yes, sins. And we did this together, you and I, in a way that no form of media had achieved before. So in the shame and error, there was some kind of achievement. At its best, that is what blogging can do.
Self-righteousness and dogmatism are generally not a perfect fit with foreign policy. Sullivan's style is what it is. It isn't perfect, as even he admits. But he has done far more good than most cheerleaders for the Iraq war by exposing and analyzing his own shortcomings in thinking about war.
But when I think of Sullivan's political voice, I won't think first about foreign policy. I'll think about the issue he showed me how to think about.
His opening remarks about same-sex marriage in that video (back in 1997, before he was a blogger) are dated. He thought Hawaii was soon to be the first state in the US with same-sex marriage; the first such state was Massachusetts in 2004, and Hawaii still doesn't have it. He didn't do a great job at predicting the future, but his message still has great resonance today.
I was going to find some choice moment of this video, transcribe it, and quote it here to draw your attention to it. But I would have felt like just transcribing the whole thing. So please, watch the whole thing. To say this is Sullivan at his best would be an understatement.
I love how he starts by giving definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality that seem so uncontroversial as to be hardly worth explaining — and then leverages those definitions into his case for same-sex marriage (both as something that should happen and as the most important front in the gay rights movement).
Though he's often criticized as overly emotional about political issues, he took the political issue he feels the most strongly about in his life and made his case with lucid logic. He did it when it was a lot less popular than it is now, and he did it over and over.
Thank you, Andrew Sullivan. You have made a difference.
Thousands of years of discriminatory homophobia has led to gay people not being allowed to marry, and this judge (finally someone enlightened) has come along and seen it. Wrong.
Later in the monologue, he says that "leftists . . . are cheering a judge who has just said that Prop 8, voted on by seven million Californians is unconstitutional because of decades -- generations, thousands of years -- of homophobia and discrimination practiced by heterosexuals."
Though he doesn't quite say this explicitly, his implication is that supporters of same-sex marriage hold an underlying belief that people throughout almost all of human history have been irrational in their opposition to same-sex marriage.
This is a powerful way of framing his opponents. Who are these liberals to deem almost all of humanity irrational? Maybe they're the irrational ones. But this is a confused way to think about the issue of same-sex marriage.
Limbaugh -- along with many others on his side -- seems to be assuming that by not having same-sex marriage, people throughout history have thought about same-sex marriage and decided that they don't want it happen. But just because something is an issue now doesn't mean it was an issue in the past. For most of human history, people didn't think about "same-sex marriage" or "same-sex civil unions" or even the concept of "sexual orientation."
By recognizing these facts, I'm not putting down people throughout history as irrational; I'm excusing their behavior. If they hadn't even advanced to the level of being conscious of their decisions, they're not very culpable for what they did or didn't do.
How long has this issue been actively on most people's minds? I'd say about 20 years at most, and for the beginning of that period it was fairly theoretical possibility. The issue has mainly picked up steam in this millennium. I find it pretty amazing how much the law has changed in the direction of same-sex marriage in that extremely short period of time -- including in some unlikely places. (For instance, Argentina, a predominantly Catholic country, recently instituted same-sex marriage; the United States is a relatively conservative country and already has same-sex marriage in 6 states.) Since support for same-sex marriage is heavily concentrated among the young, we can expect this trend to intensify in the coming decades.
The question isn't why same-sex marriage supporters are so critical of most people who have ever existed. The question is why same-sex marriage opponents are so pessimistic about the direction in which the world is clearly headed.
Later in the day on August 3, 2009, she explained:
This afternoon, we drove from our hotel in Bachelor Gulch to the Office of the Clerk and Recorder in Eagle County, where we showed our driver's licenses, answered a few questions, paid $30 cash, and got a license that empowered us to marry each other. We drove up Bellyache Ridge — just the 2 of us — where we did things our way and solemnized the marriage on our own. Then, we did the additional red tape — filling out the bottom of the Certificate of Marriage and handing it back to the county official who'd asked us the questions earlier. . . .
One thing I love about American federalism is that — subject to the limitations of national law — individual states can do things their own way, and we can move around finding the law we like. We decided against marrying in Madison, because under Wisconsin law, not only do you need to pay $125 or so for the license and then go get a minister or a judge to perform the wedding — you have to wait 6 days between getting the license and doing the wedding. What's that all about? It's insulting, not to mention avaricious. We went west, out of the grip of a paternalistic state, for greater freedom and individuality.
And, yes, we think same-sex couples should also have the right to marry. You'll have to travel somewhere other than Colorado if that's the freedom you want. We traveled and got what we wanted, and obviously, we have the additional benefit of getting a marriage that will be recognized everywhere. I hope the day will come when the Coloradan attitude that favored us will smile on gay people too. But for now, I'm just really happy to be married in Colorado, on Bellyache Ridge, with just me and Meade on the scene. Aptly, it turned out that there was a big old cell phone tower on top of the ridge, so we texted and emailed and telephoned.
And I made a blog comment — a comment, not a post, because that's where I found my dear husband, in the comments.
I'd so much rather save the money we'd use on a wedding and have a months-long honeymoon, but I also don't want to kick myself in a few years. Has anyone ever exchanged vows in the most basic way possible and ever regretted it later?
There were a lot of good answers in that thread, but the best one was my mom's answer:
My husband and I married each other, alone together on a mountain in Colorado — where the law lets you do that. It was only last August, but I haven't regretted it yet. It's true that if you don't throw a wedding, you won't have wedding memories, but why assume that those memories would be so great? Maybe some bad or disappointing things would happen, including all the effort you put into trying to make sure the memories would turn out good. And all that effort could instead be put into real love and the beautiful details of your normal life together. There are so many memories to be had: Why try to manufacture conventional wedding-type memories, when the best things that happen to you might occur the next time you go for a walk or eat breakfast or go to bed with your husband? Today.
I get that she supports same-sex marriage, but what does that have to do with anybody forcibly silencing her? If you have something to say, lady, just say it and quit blaming others.
It's generally better, in political discourse, to focus on substance than process unless there actually is a process problem that's too important to ignore. And I don't see one here. Who's being silenced about same-sex marriage? I'm not -- I can say whatever I want about it on this blog. If I have a voice, then Cindy McCain -- a multimillionaire who's married to a US Senator -- definitely has a voice.
Kasey Nicholson-McFadden has a voice. He says:
It doesn’t bother me to tell kids my parents are gay. It does bother me to say they aren’t married. It makes me feel that our family is less than their family.
He made that statement to the New Jersey legislature, and it was reported in the New York Times. He's only 10 years old. If he can be heard making a substantive point in this debate, then rich celebrities can be heard too. If they want to.
This is essentially the same problem that keeps coming up when people like US Attorney General Eric Holder complain about America's supposed failure to have a national conversation about race. As John McWhorter aptly said in response to Holder (which I blogged at the time):
I suspect those who call for this "conversation" know the claim has become more gestural than concrete. Otherwise, they would state their case directly rather than asking to "talk." ... What, or who, would determine that we had finally "talked" enough?
If you want the country to engage in a particular substantive discussion, lead by example.
Perhaps there's an implicit populism in Cindy McCain's protest. If unspecified, impersonal forces have prevented genuine debate on the issue from occurring, then the public can't be blamed for not being more supportive of same-sex marriage. But if this is the intended message, it's condescending in addition to being wrong.
There's an episode of The Office from a couple years ago (Season 3) where the boss, Michael Scott (Steve Carell), calls a meeting to reveal that one of the other employees is gay. Predictably, he uses the opportunity to lecture the office about homosexuality, and he says this:
MICHAEL: Gay marriage currently is not legal, under U.S. law. I bet a lot of straight men wish that applied to them -- so they could go out there and have some torrid, unabashed monkey sex, as much as they could. You know, that sounds pretty good, right?
KEVIN: That sounds great.
I've watched that episode many times, and I've always laughed at that interchange because of how cheerfully Michael has become convinced of his own fallacious reasoning. But no one would say something so dumb in real life, right?
[M]arriage changes the nature of sexual relations between a man and a woman. Sexual intercourse between a married couple is licit; sexual intercourse before marriage, or adulterous sex during marriage, is not. Illicit sex is not necessarily a crime, but licit sexual intercourse enjoys a sanction in the moral universe, however we understand it, from which premarital and extramarital copulation is excluded. More important, the illicit or licit nature of heterosexual copulation is transmitted to the child, who is deemed legitimate or illegitimate based on the metaphysical category of its parents’ coition.
Now to live in such a system, in which sexual intercourse can be illicit, is a great nuisance. Many of us feel that licit sexuality loses, moreover, a bit of its oomph. Gay lovers live merrily free of this system. Can we imagine Frank’s family and friends warning him that “If Joe were serious, he would put a ring on your finger”? Do we ask Vera to stop stringing Sally along? Gay sexual practice is not sortable into these categories—licit-if-married but illicit-if-not (children adopted by a gay man or hygienically conceived by a lesbian mom can never be regarded as illegitimate). Neither does gay copulation become in any way more permissible, more noble after marriage. It is a scandal that homosexual intercourse should ever have been illegal, but having become legal, there remains no extra sanction—the kind which fathers with shotguns enforce upon heterosexual lovers. I am not aware of any gay marriage activist who suggests that gay men and women should create a new category of disapproval for their own sexual relationships, after so recently having been freed from the onerous and bigoted legal blight on homosexual acts. But without social disapproval of unmarried sex—what kind of madman would seek marriage? ...
Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage—much less three, as I have done—were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom. There would be very few flowerings of domestic ecstasy were it not for the granite underpinnings of marriage. Gay couples who marry are bound to be disappointed in marriage’s impotence without these ghosts of past authority....
Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system—a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender. If gay men and women could see the price that humanity—particularly the women and children among us—will pay, simply in order that a gay person can say of someone she already loves with perfect competence, “Hey, meet the missus!”—no doubt they will think again.
How do you think his wife -- or his ex-wives -- feel about this article?
To be clear, the above block quote is not a parody. The Weekly Standard is one of the most respected conservative periodicals, and it published this in all seriousness.
UPDATE: A comment on my mom's blog pointed out that I never actually explained my objection to Michael Scott and Sam Schulman's reasoning. Here's my response, for those who'd like to see this spelled out:
Let's concede the point that there are a whole lot of men out there (of all sexual orientations) who would rather have unrestrained, promiscuous sex than be tied down by being married. Does it follow that men are more fortunate if they're gay? Of course not, because straight men aren't forced to get married! Men who want promiscuous sex so much that they'd rather not be married are in the same position whether they're gay, straight, or bisexual: they just shouldn't get married. For those men, the legality of marriage is a wash. But there are still plenty of men, of all sexual orientations, who would rather be married. Among that group of men, the ones who want to legally marry a woman are in a more fortunate situation than the ones who want to legally marry a man, since the former but not the latter are allowed to do what they want.
