"If You Don't Like Gay Marriage, Don't Get Gay-Married"

Demonstration for gay marriage. Photo by mattymatt.

President Barack Obama's much re-tweeted and Facebooked statement on LGBT rights, "I think same-sex couples should be able to get married," isn't the passage of a federal law, and it isn't even the endorsement of a federal government policy, but just a cultural statement. That's all. It's good that Obama has departed not only from what was mainstream American opinion until not so long ago, but also from his own background which includes black religious communities. If you recall the California proposition for gay marriage, blacks in California generally voted against gay marriage, as did religious Hispanics. I remember a black lesbian on Twitter so furious at her fellow blacks that she wanted to disenfranchise them and decide the matter by executive fiat.

Obama's cultural affirmation came a day late and a dollar short for the actual legal proposition in North Carolina regarding the definition of marriage as "only between a man and a woman:. Had the president spoken out a bit earlier, as the Log Cabin Republicans noted, it might have had an impact. He didn't -- because in fact he's making a cultural statement, not a policy and not a law. As others have noted, this is not LBJ on civil rights and the Great Society. This is the Community-Organizer-in-Chief launching another cultural war.

But while a welcome cultural affirmation that might help turn the LGBT marriage issue, and put an end to discrimination with law, it's also profoundly calculated and political. It was designed to flush out Romney's position as well, and right on cue, Romney declared that just as he had said when he was governor of Massachusetts, he opposed gay marriage. So now Obama has succeed in turning the elections into a cultural war between liberals and conservatives and distracted from his economic and foreign policy failures. I guess they ran out of vaginal sonogram law dramas in the states. Romney's position against gay marriage will not stop me from voting for him because presidents don't decide this issue now, the states do.

Should gay marriage be a federal law, a recognized civil right that the Supreme Court will rule on, indicating that discrimination means denying citizens equality before the law? The New York Times has advocated for this position, and indicated that perhaps this issue might make its way to the Supreme Court and then the right would be established. But that might be predicated on another Obama term. I think it should be a federal law, but unlike education, housing or other civil rights, people don't perceive marriage equality as vital. We can show them desperate stories of gay couples prevented from spending their last hours together in hospital rooms or unjustly deprived war widows, but it will simply not be seen as education was in the 1960s.

Like his assault on freedom of conscience with the HHS decision to impose the provision of contraception on Catholic institutions, Obama gambled that a pro-gay cultural statement, like a seemingly minor anti-Catholic health care policy, will play big as a cultural resonator with the "progressives" and not entail any losses from the center or right voters who crossed over to vote for him in 2008.

He's gambled wrong with me -- the same affirmation of freedom of conscience or belief that makes me oppose his HHS decision is what makes me affirm LGBT marriage -- but I don't think the president will decide this issue in most states. Most Catholics don't practice birth control and many don't oppose gay rights, so why does it matter? Because of course it matters when the president of the United States uses the power of his office to enforce cultural norms and beliefs -- that is indeed an intrusion in the separation of church and state. His personal endorsement of Sandra Fluke, the grad student at a Jesuit college who insisted that the Jesuits pay for her birth control, is an outrageous assault on that separation -- especially from a president who holds his tongue on Chen Guansheng and Sergei Magnitsky.

All the HHS decision has done is sparked a backlash and Obama is going to see some pretty aggressive Catholic demonstrations and protests in the coming months. For years I haven't heard anything preached from the pulpit or read as part of the liturgy in my parish Catholic Church about the gay issue.  Now under Archbishop Dolan, a prayer appeared to "affirm the holy sacrament of marriage between a man and woman". Not a gay hate statement, but still, a coded position in a cultural war.

I'm four-square for the right of people to marry whom they chose and obtain legal standing of equality on everything from hospital visits to health care plans. If you don't like the Catholic leadership position on this, you are not required to remain a Catholic or can remain one and dissent (the Catholic Church isn't excommunicating ordinary parishioners for their views, even if it cracks down on lefty nuns). I don't think this right should hinge on behaviour, or on LGBT people proving more than heterosexuals have to prove that they are celibate before marriage or monogamaous after marriage and faithful to their partners.

Even so, I'm fully aware that this is above all a cultural war, a cultural war that has some law-faring aspects for some. I will never forget this horrendous, nasty, vicious discussion on Facebook that started around this issue. I've been meaning to write about it for months, but each time I think of it, I pause, as the price for political incorrectness is so high.

A lesbian Facebook friend (and now ex-friend) posted a comment of approval about an article in a gay publication by a gay male leader who questioned Dan Savage's position promoting promiscuity even within marriage. He felt that this was a strategic non-starter just when gays were trying to get marriage rights passed, and so many states remained without these laws (20 still do not recognize same-sex marriage). He was brave to step out in these politically-incorrect waters with that view, correct about the political strategy, and my now former-colleague clicked "like" on his article and meant it. I clicked "like" too. I said that I affirmed LGBT marriage, and *didn't think that this right had to be contingent on behaviour* but nonetheless I condemned male promiscuity that used people like kleenex. My ex-friend clicked "like" on my statement probably more because she agreed with my point that rights shouldn't be doled out contingent on behaviour. She probably thought the second half of my statement was enough of a common belief, especially among women, that it didn't need condemnation.

And it doesn't. Like most people, I simply find the callous massive serial sex practiced by some gay males to be abhorrent and demeaning of the dignity of the individual. I think it's wrong.  And most people -- including most gay people -- find this wrong, and most people don't practice massive casual sex. Whatever their infidelities and multiple partners, they don't hook up with numerous people a month, anonymously in bars or clubs or through online services. They simply don't take the health risk or the emotional distress -- and surprise, surprise, they actually prefer their regular partners.

And it's my right to think that and I insist on that right that I think is self-evident. It's not some demand for restrictions on other people; it's not a non-recognition of civil rights; it's a statement of moral revulsion about a culture that I find to be a non-culture. And in a liberal democratic pluralistic society, I get to stake out that position just like the hedonists get to stake out their position. But one of the most cunning games the hedonists play is to try to flip the very notion of tolerance they depend on into a false ascribing to their opponents of denial of the very notion of tolerance.

My statements of a) support for gay marriage and b) acknowledgement that this didn't have to hinge on anyone's behaviour, as it was a right -- even though they were visible at the top of the discussion -- were immediately ignored and discounted. I got an avalanche of hate. And I mean, vicious, violent hate, from gay men. Of the kind I've seen before on forums, but not even BDSM forums had this much vitriol. I was told to go fuck myself. I was sworn at and ridiculed. One male demonstratively described how he was dialing up a dating service even as he typed to have yet another multiple casual hook-up. Another pointed to a hate blog obsessing about the Pope and Catholics. The meme that the Pope is responsible for AIDS in Africa was replicated -- which is ridiculous. Catholics make up only a small percentage of all Africans. If they were the devout Catholics claimed, listening to their priests and the Pope in fear, they wouldn't be having sex out of marriage in the first place, such as to require birth control, you know? But they are, as many people are precisely because they are either not Catholics, or not devout Catholics! African males are responsible for the spread of HIV in Africa because they refuse to use condoms, believing it to be a slight of their manhood. That's the problem, not the Pope.

I was lectured at by numerous gay males, some in the professional, organized gay community, as if I had taken a position against gay marriage. I hadn't. Or as if I had taken a position saying gays had to be faithful before they "earned" marriage. I hadn't. I just said I thought massive promiscuity was wrong. And hey, what's wrong with that, truly?!

While most people privately believe as I do -- that they don't favour massive promiscuity -- no one dared come to my defense as this parade of gay men made obscene and vicious comments to me. In doing so, they were a poster for why people in some states don't vote for gay marriage:  it's not that they are intolerant as much as that they fear the undermining of their own valuations and values by people antithetical to them. They feel they are getting a bad bargain -- a demand of tolerance from them for lifestyles they don't condone, but not a reciprocity of tolerance for their own choices.

And that's why the original poster had affirmed the article in which Dan Savage's loose notions of marriage as an open arrangement got some pushback. His notion  of "good, giving, and game" doesn't perceive massive promiscuity as using people or as undesirable, as long as there is use of condoms, because any form of sexual pleasure is good and any restriction of it is bad, in his view.  I disagree (and I have company, albeit timid company). There is a certain emotional and psychological storehouse between two people that is violently disrupted when one is unfaithful -- maybe Savage never experienced that or lost touch with sensing it.

So even though some of the gays in this discussion believed that strategically, Savage's view, articulated in The New York Times magazine and elsewhere, wasn't good to promote, some of them hated it if any heterosexuals endorsed it, as they circled the wagons. And that's when I called out identity politics, and that's when I called out the Marxism of the 1960s behind a lot of the identity-driven movements of the left. And that's when my friend deleted me. Feminists always hate it when you point out the Marxism, even if they aren't Marxists, yet it's a factor in keeping their movements sectarian and losing followers.

In those battles in those 20 states, what do you think works to convert people? Showing how the majority of gay people are monogamous (like the numerous gay couples I've known, some of whom have been together 40 years?) or at least involved in a relatively small number of relationships over their lives, and not having daily toilet sex in bars with strangers?

Or insisting on the moral approval of multiple sex partners in a week on demand any time and also blessing that as marriage if there's a regular room-mate in the picture? That right to promiscuity in fact is already recognized, as gay sex has been decriminalized for the most part. Nothing Rick Santorum or any other politician has ever said or advocated has interfered in the slightest with Dan Savage's sex life or the sex lives of all his enthusiastic letter-writers. The question is more cultural and philosophical: how is that sort of sex supposed to be marriage? Only the sub-cultural opinion of Dan Savage and his followers claims it is.

I was walking along the Hi-Line with my daughter, who had read some of the articles on the subject and we had discussed the issue of gay marriage. We saw a big sign on a building wall: "If you don't like gay marriage, don't get gay-married."

Before this Facebook fight, I would have found the poster funny. I would have immediately endorsed it. Of course!

But now my timid politically-correct ex-friend had simply deleted the Facebook fight rather than let it stand. Simply deleted it, as if it never existed! That meant the vicious statements of her gay male friends or friends of friends wouldn't remain on the record and self-discredit. That mean my actual statements, unlike their distortions of my statements, could no longer be read. "Silence=death" was a slogan that always appeared with a gay pink triangle in the 1980s to urge society not to hide from HIV/AIDS epidemic. So now we had to reinstitute silence about some not-very-attractive gay male political positions?!

So now, thinking about the "gay-married" sign, I wasn't so sure. What was gay-married, then? Was it what I thought marriage was and what most people thought marriage was, an institution of faithfulness? Or was it what Dan Savage said it was, whatever you feel like? Were gays -- even newly-married lesbians long faithful to their partners -- unable to stand up for their valuation of faithfulness against vicious male gay attacks and aggressive demands for open marriage merely out of identity politics?

We are far from getting a federal law for gay rights, and the battle -- the cultural battle -- will have to be fought in the states. I'm not for suppressing what Dan Savage says; it's his opinion. What I want is the freedom to condemn it without having my statements deleted and having people de-friend me over what is a normal and decent view even they share. That this ex-friend couldn't concede the HHS issue, either, without seeing it as a loss of her feminist womanhood lets me know we were mis-matched as Facebook friends or RL colleagues perhaps, but it's sad, knowing that we met precisely over our common work on behalf of press freedom.

Dan Savage is savage on Catholicism and this sort of speech and video will not help the gay marriage laws in 20 states and will continue to cause backlash even where gay marriage is legalized. I always found his vandalism of Rick Santorum's name on Google to be utterly despicable -- just like the mosaic posters of Santorum made up of gay porn pictures. Nothing Dan Savage EVER says about the supposed voluntary nature of all his sexcapades or the supposedly voluntary and consentual nature of "open marriage" will EVER be persuasive, as long as we have the example of his forcible, vicious, and violent rape of Rick Santorum's name in Google -- just because Santorum advocates a different worldview and lifestyle not compatible with Savage's own. NOTHING.

I'm not for having the president of the college where he spoke censor him; student councils should have the right to invite speakers they find interesting on public policy issues and have the right to debate. Of course, this was more of a hate-in than a debate, and the politically-correct "progressives" who usually run these councils didn't give the floor to anyone with opposing views.

Is gay marriage a threat to the survival of humanity? Of course not, that's absurd. Is the sort of massive promiscuity promoted and endorsed by Dan Savage a threat to the institution of marriage? Indeed it is, and it's ok to say that. If you don't like gay marriage, then don't get gay-married. Stay in your chosen lifestyle and don't demand like terrorists that everyone else change their lifestyles to accommodate you. Indeed, you demand the same thing from them in advocating the cause of LGBT rights and equality before the law in marriage and every other civil institution.