| Wednesday, February 25, 2004 |
11:33 - Make it stop raining
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I hope this is the last post on gay marriage I have to make in a long time. People who don't want to hear about it, please feel free to skip over it, or just ride it out-- it'll be over soon.
I now know, first-hand, why moderate Muslims haven't been heard in huge numbers. It's because how in the hell can they feel anything but despair, caught between one extreme-- compatriots who espouse radical, irrational dogma, yet are "family"-- and another-- people determined to defend themselves against the dogma on the opposite side by whatever means necessary?
I'm now caught between like 90% of my friends, who are now convinced more than ever that Bush is a gay-bashing, hateful, bigoted asshole in the thrall of the Religious Right-- and the rational rest of the world, who is trying with complete sincerity to keep the concept of "marriage" from being redefined by state judiciaries who almost without exception seem to keep coming to the opposite conclusions about gay marriage that the state legislatures do when they get around to voting on the issue. (What does it tell you when state judiciary after state judiciary legalizes gay marriage, followed immediately by each state legislature in question ratifying a constitutional amendment or other state law banning it? I don't know about you, but it tells me that the judiciaries aren't enacting the will of the people.)
I have to choose sides if I'm going to be able to weather this storm. And you know... the aforementioned friends aren't impressing me with their rationality or their tolerance or their willingness to compromise. Or, especially, with their desire to actually research the matter and consider it from an opposing viewpoint, one that might be founded on something other than hatred.
The reason I bring this whole thing up again is that Mike at Cold Fury has posted his thoughts at length on the matter, and I would ask-- no, I would in fact demand-- that anybody who thinks conservatives are reacting out of unthinking homophobia and bigotry read his frickin' posts. Mike's one of the most energetic conservative voices out in the blogosphere, and his is the viewpoint of the former liberal who has seen how all sides of the argument get argued. These are the words of the dreaded "neocons". And so are these:
Former Republican Congressman Bob Barr:
Make no mistake, I do not support same-sex marriages. But I also am a firm believer that the Constitution is no place for forcing social policies on states, especially in this case, where states must have the latitude to do as their citizens see fit.
Vice President Dick Cheney:
I think that means that people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It’s really no one else’s business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard. I think the fact of the matter, of course, is that matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area…. I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into.
Republican activist and CitizenOutreach founder Chuck Muth:
If gay marriages or civil unions are to be recognized, it should be by ballot referendum or via the elected representatives (who are subject to recall and defeat in popular elections) of each state. Don’t you agree?
If you DO, however, then you CAN’T support the notion of a federal marriage amendment banning gay marriages. That would be just as wrong as imposing them by judicial fiat. This matter should be resolved by the people and their elected officials in each individual state. Period.
California Republican and anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly:
As a conservative, I value commitment and responsibility. I also believe government should not intrude in people’s private lives. That is why conservatives should oppose Prop. 22 [which would ban gay marriage].
National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg:
I’ve been opposed to [the FMA] for two reasons. The first is that I’m not a fair-weather friend of federalism. Real diversity, as the founders envisioned it, requires accepting that some communities will do things you don’t approve of. The second reason is technical: I favor civil unions and I can’t get a straight answer — pardon the pun — on whether any or all of the proposed amendments would allow them.
As Mike says:
Please do note that most of these people have been denounced routinely by gay-rights extremists and plenty of other Lefties as rabid, fascistic monsters for a long time now. Do any of these statements seem “extreme” to you? Do any of these statements bespeak anything like knee-jerk homophobia or hate? Do any of these statements seem to justify a denunciation of the speaker as “an enemy”?
Not to me. I only see one side talking about an "enemy" here. And reading Bush's actual statement reveals a position so reluctant, so sad, so compromising, so full of genuine desire for kindness and understanding for all Americans and a hope that they can all come to an amicable solution without the need for playing out a tired Civil Rights-era script that can't even be cast properly today, that the people who continue even after reading it to insist that Bush is a bigot do so by implying that he's reading a prepared statement through gritted teeth, his chain jerked by an offstage puppet-handler under a floating cross.
Mike's posts are aimed at Andrew Sullivan, but they may just as well be directed at my friends, peering in horror southward from the safety of a country where they're fortunate enough to have federal judiciaries who arbitrarily legalize things like gay marriage without considering the desires of the voting public, and fortunate further to have a voting public too disaffected to really even care (as a Canadian commenter said on Dean Esmay's blog a week or so ago-- forgive the paraphrase and lack of linkage). And let me tell you, it's been a Herculean effort all this past blustery, rain-drenched night not to dive in and verbally beat the crap out of these guys, saying something like: Look, I know 9/11 is just some faraway abstract thing to you, because your goddamn Xboxes and MUCKs still work and everything. But can you at least pretend, just for a second, just to humor me, to have some compassion and understanding for what's actually important to Americans at large? To comprehend what the fall of the WTC really, really means to us? To realize that we place it higher on our list of priorities than something that jumped out of a closet all of a sudden like gay marriage, and that the gay activists like Mayor Newsom are if anything more to blame for the FMA than the Religious Right is? And to realize that if you root for Kerry because of this single-issue-voter-baiting controversy, you're advocating putting a man into the Oval Office who voted against the development every single piece of military technology since Vietnam, which if he'd had his way we would not be able to use today in Afghanistan and Iraq? Democrats are actually claiming that Bush is bringing up gay marriage now to "distract from his record as President". Shyeah, if anything it'll detract from his record, which is one of putting the fear of God into our terrorist attackers. Doing that job right is something that is so goddamned important that I am more than willing to forego such a petty and frivolous domestic debate as whether we put a sentence into the Constitution that solidifies the in-effect-since-1996 Defense of Marriage Act (and nothing, in fact, more). If wanting to pursue the War on Terror the way we've been fortunate to have the ability (and the President) to do is an offense that strips me of my Gay Card, well, I'll tear it up right now, and happily too.
....Now: Now that we're all dutifully thinking in terms of interior-decorators being herded onto boxcars, can we pleeeease take another nice, long, hard look at what the FMA (or whatever form of it is proposed) would actually do? Can we ponder for a second how it would actually affect anybody? Can we acknowledge that in comparison to Jim Crow laws and the Warsaw ghettoes, this issue is so damned petty and insular that even if it weren't wartime, acting like this is the end of the free world would be like committing hara-kiri over an unpaid phone bill?
If it's any consolation, the FMA probably won't pass Congress, let alone 38 of the States. And Bush will probably go down in flames if this debate is conducted during the election campaign. So by forcing his hand, inducing him to play a losing card at this critical stage of his presidency, Mayor Newsom and the Massachusetts State Supreme Court may well have elected us a Kerry.
Which I'm sure will make them plenty happy.
Al Qaeda too.
UPDATE: What a short, strange trip it's been. In the past-- what, month? I've rubbed shoulders with religious-right creationist types who think homosexuality is the cause of everything from teen pregnancy to 9/11; gay radicals who don't even want to win the right to "marriage" because it's tainted with the stink of straight people; neocons and war-liberals who think gays are just peachy and are willing to vote against Bush because of the FMA; flowers-and-sunshine Leftists who nod and smile at me as long as I'm talking to them, and then go back to raving against Bush the moment my back is turned. I've probably seen more of the political spectrum, first-hand, in the past month than I've been exposed to in my whole life to date. I've written post after post, starting as calmly and evenly as I knew how, and ending up with this bristly piece of lunatic ravery that I know full well looks like I've come totally unhinged. And maybe that's sort of intentional-- maybe I wanted to just stick a stake in the ground that shows how far I'm willing to go if I'm pushed really hard, but where I'm really not comfortable being. I imagine people from all the aforementioned walks of life will read the post above, and each will have his or her own strong reaction.
And I know who I'll really be catching it from, if and when they stumble across this post: my dearest and closest friends.
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Brian Tiemann
