Pondering non-religious opposition to gay marriage

March 8, 2004 If the New York Times is any measure of things, the national superego is in a state of terrific confusion about sex.

Exhibit one: we get Jonathan Rauch's lead-off article in the Sunday Magazine promoting gay marriage. Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, is the author of a forthcoming book on the subject by (who else) Times Books. Rauch's idea is that President Bush's stance on social value of marriage is unwittingly an argument favoring gay marriage. Essentially, Rauch says, any marriage ought to be construed as a benefit to society.

Exhibit two: the lead article on page one of the Sunday Styles section about "transgender" students at elite colleges. Here's the lead:

Arriving in Providence last fall to begin his senior year at Brown University, Luke Woodward didn't have to tell friends what he had done on his summer vacation. They could tell with one glance. Before the summer, Luke had the body of a woman. Now Luke's breasts were gone, leaving a chest more compatible with Luke's close-cropped hair, baggy jeans and hooded sweatshirt. Some classmates had chipped in to pay for the surgery; to cover the rest, Luke took out loans.

Note that this story ran in what is essentially the fashion section of the Sunday paper, and note also the emphasis the reporter puts on sex change surgery as a fashion statement. The surgery goes with the outfit.

Exhibit three: the "Lives" endpaper of the Sunday Magazine, an article by a woman whose life was devastated because a 21-year-old male babysitter had given her 9-year-old daughter kissing lessons.

I have been puzzling over the issue of gay marriage myself the last few weeks, as perhaps many of you have. It seems to me that everything necessary in the way of legal protection for same-sex partners was already available in the several "domestic partner" laws already enacted in states such as Vermont. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is an effort to gain official approbation for a form of sexual behavior and establish it as socially normative. This, it seems to me, has several drawbacks for all concerned, gay and non-gay alike.

As much as the gay community wishes, they will never persuade the non-gay majority that homosexual behavior is wholesome, in particular between males. In reality, the norm of male gay social behavior is extreme promiscuity with predatory overtones -- hence, for example, all the problems the Catholic church is having with what is basically a homosexual subculture devoted almost exclusively to victimizing boys.

The wish to normalize male homosexuality is inevitably a way of discounting and marginalizing male heterosexuality. However, I'm not convinced that male homosexuals want to cede the social margin to the straights; that "outsider" position is so deeply connected with gay culture generally. What we are really seeing, I believe, is the final tactical move of the womens' movement to keep bothersome men away from them generally and to get as many men as possible corralled into a gay ghetto with the priapic diversions of gay life.

In the end what bothers me about gay marriage is the idea that it is exactly the same thing as marriage between a man and a woman, and this is the obvious result of the extreme relativism that has reigned as a kind of supreme fashion statement among high culture vamps since the 1960s. This relativism has been a long game of pretend -- pretending that all behaviors are equally okay.

It seems to me that this kind of lazy relativism is a luxury that can only be enjoyed by a cossetted elite luxuriating in a high entropy economy. Why else would the students at elite universities like Brown be so preoccupied by adolescent sexual confusion? I would think that seniors at Brown (and Yale, and Princeton, and Harvard) would be more concerned with how our society is going to function in the permanent energy crisis soon to come, or how we are going to reorganize farming so we can feed ourselves when oil-based agriculture ends, or how we are going to reestablish local networks of economic interdependency when WalMart globalism grinds to a halt. Instead, they are being encouraged to submit to extreme acts of surgical mutilation in order to erase their sexual identity.

Finally, though, the New York Times gives the game away with that Magazine endpaper about the babysitter who gave kissing lessons and thus destroyed a mother's life. The Times stands for a new and extremely peculiar form of puritanism: one that regards heterosexuality as fundamentally disgusting and homosexuality as the greatest social good. The subtext is the end-game of the womens' movement: the complete marginalization of men. As a heterosexual male (and a registered Democrat), I've had about enough of this point-of-view and I will fight to overturn the cultural consensus that supports it.

I find some things to dispute in this passage (e.g., "the end-game of the womens' movement"? Really?), but I think there's a lot of truth in here. Here's an example of how culturally extreme the gay-rights movement can be. In Fort Worth, the city council rightly understands that the police department has a problem with gays, after the gay bar beating, so the council tasked a "diversity task force" with coming up with a set of recommendations for going forward. And so they did. Excerpt:

Should taxpayer-funded health insurance pay for city employees' sex-change operations?

The proposal was one of 20 recommendations presented by a city-sponsored diversity task force formed more than three months ago after local and state police improperly raided a downtown gay bar.

Three Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission agents were fired and two others disciplined for violating internal policy and using excessive force in the raid.

Fort Worth police are expected to release the results of their internal investigation today.

City officials greeted the diversity task force proposals warmly during Tuesday's presentation.

Stephanie Klick, chairwoman of the Tarrant County Republican Party, said Wednesday that the sex-change policy is evidence of liberal politics run amok.

"I am unaware of any other city in the country considering something like this," she said. "I'd like to know how paying for sex-change operations is going to fix what happened at the Rainbow Lounge."

This. Is. Insane. The idea that the way to deal with prejudiced cops is to convince the taxpayer to pay for sex-change operations for city employees is on the face of it berserk, especially in a time of severe economic distress. I often think that gay activists have no idea how crazy, and devoid of common sense, they can sound to ordinary people. But you watch: people who conclude that it's wrong for the city to pay for sex changes will stand accused of being bigots, and will conclude, "If that's being a bigot, fine, I'll be a bigot." Gay activists throw that slur around so often that it's losing its meaning.

(Warning: I'm going to police this thread closely, so watch it.)