Same-sex marriage: the stalemated sumos

Posted on November 28, 2003 by Ampersand

Here’s the best passage from an otherwise forgettable Jonah Goldberg column on same-sex marriage:

Until now, the White House has largely taken a do-nothing policy toward gay marriage and a moderately pro-gay stance – by conservative standards – in other areas, appointing openly gay officials and treating gay Republican groups with respect. But the White House understands that aggressive opposition to gay marriage is as dangerous for Republicans as aggressive support of gay marriage is for Democrats.

It’s a funny stalemate. The Republicans can’t afford to be seen as too “anti-gay,” lest the Democrats demagogue them with tolerant suburban voters, and Democrats can’t afford to be seen as too “pro-gay,” lest the GOP demagogue them in Southern and rural states.

So both sides stand there, circling each other like sumo wrestlers, hoping the other side will make the first move.

.

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 1 Comment

How not to engage an opponant's arguments

Posted on November 28, 2003 by Ampersand

Over on the Family Scholars Blog, David Blankenhorn “can’t let go of Katha Pollitt’s argument” for same-sex marriage.

Like many same-sex marriage adovcates, Pollitt argues that we don’t require straights to be able to reproduce in order to have legal marriage, so we shouldn’t require it for gays either.

The most popular theory, advanced by David Blankenhorn, Jean Bethke Elshtain and other social conservatives is that under the tulle and orange blossom, marriage is all about procreation. There’s some truth to this as a practical matter–couples often live together and tie the knot only when baby’s on the way. But whether or not marriage is the best framework for child-rearing, having children isn’t a marital requirement. As many have pointed out, the law permits marriage to the infertile, the elderly, the impotent and those with no wish to procreate; it allows married couples to use birth control, to get sterilized, to be celibate.

David responds:

Perhaps the journalist would do her research carefully and write an article saying: A central goal and good of churches is to help people know and love God. But wait a minute! Is it true that every single person who goes to church on any given Sunday does so only in order to know and love God? Of course not. In real-life individual cases, motives are usually multiple and mixed; life is complicated; all sorts of things happen. Some people go to church to meet people. Some people go just because that’s what everyone else is doing. A guy in Virginia once told me, “We have a pretty nice little town here, even the atheists go to church.”

But David’s analogy misses Pollitt’s point, because Pollitt was making an argument about how we decide marriages are legal or not. Even if we grant David’s point – marriage is, in some fundamental sense, for procreation – it remains true that we don’t legally forbid infertile straights from marriage.

To extend David’s analogy, it’s certainly not the case that Buddhist Temples make it “a central goal… to help people know and love God.” Nor could Humanistic Jewish congregations like Kahal B’raira be described that way. But no one claims that the law should therefore legally discriminate against Buddhists and Humanistic Jews by refusing to grant their temples the same legal status given other, more traditional churches. “To help people know and love god” may be a central purpose of most churches, but it’s not a means for determining their access to equal legal rights as a church.

The anti-same-sex-marriage argument doesn’t merely state that marriage is “centrally about bearing and raising children.” It states that marriage is “centrally about bearing and raising children,” and therefore lesbians and gay men should be denied equality. It is that latter proposition that Pollitt was attacking; and that latter proposition is as indefensible as denying Buddhists equal rights because they don’t believe in god..

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 20 Comments

Why they really oppose same-sex marriage

Posted on November 28, 2003 by Ampersand

It’s not a huge surprise, but a Pew Research Center poll on gay marriage shows that opponants of same-sex marriage are motivated far more by religion than by a desire to protect children. (In contrast, the conservative intelligentsia tend to argue that it’s all about the children).

Of the people who oppose gay marriage, 28% said the main reason they object to same-sex marriage is “morally wrong / a sin / the Bible says.” Another 17% said it’s “against my religion.” On the other hand, only 6% mentioned children as the main reason to oppose gay marriage..

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 1 Comment

Musing on September in November

Posted on November 26, 2003 by PinkDreamPoppies

I’m writing this without reading it through a few times, without taking the time to do multiple drafts, without really planning out ahead of time what I’m going to say.

This is a post about September 11th, which I doubt you were expecting to read on Thanksgiving. No, there’s no connection between the two; tonight I just felt like I needed to write about something and this is what came to mind. September 11th (I hate calling it 9/11–that seems so television, so like a movie that someone’s trying to sell) is something that’s on my mind a lot but not always when I expect it to be. It’s never really on my mind when I think about the war in Iraq or the botched manhunt in Afghanistan or even when I’m thinking about George Bush and how much I don’t like him. To me, September 11th has very little connection with the current geo-political situation, little to do with terrorists, little to do with “this post-9/11 world” (that phrase which I have come to abhor more than any other; it’s like someone took something tragic and turned it into coin-phrase wankery by attempting to intellectualize it). September 11th, though, has everything to do with people.

This past September 11th, on the second anniversary of the attacks, I spent most of the day browsing around on blogs of all blushes looking for people’s accounts of where they were, what they were doing, what they thought about what had happened. I didn’t find nearly enough and yet I found too much. Too much of what I read was tying September 11th to today and why we should or shouldn’t be in Iraq or why George Bush is or is not Satan’s pawn. I suppose it’s inevitable that an event of that magnitude that has such an impact on the world situation would eventually become another political chip for the left/right battle, another talking point, another proof of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of this or that strategy… But that depresses me. I feel like sometimes when professional pundits and amateur pundits banter and scrap about terrorists and national security and such they view September 11th as a symbol–as though what happened was really and truely equivalent to the statuettes, the bumper stickers, the commemorative coins, and the Osama bin Laden voodoo dolls. The Twin Towers, like the Maine, like Pearl Harbor, like the Gulf of Tonkin, like the Lusitania, have become in their rubble a physical shorthand, a morse code dotted out in scattered wreckage and scarred bodies… Again, a symbol like a work of art, a famous speech, a long-dead relative, or an urban legend.

I guess this bothers me because, for me, September 11th was a deeply personal thing. Judging from the things that people wrote at the time and that people have written in the years since, it was a personal thing for a lot of people, and I guess it just annoys me when people take something personal and use it to reinforce their political views (and I say reinforce for a reason; I’ve yet to meet anyone who says “9/11 changed everything” who actually changed their political views much as a result of that thing that changed everything). When I read people’s posts and articles from the day the attacks happened I see a lot of the same stuff that was going through my head at the time: are the people I know okay? I heard a noise; what the fuck was that? Is this real?

When I think about September 11th I tend to think of myself as an office peon in the World Trade Centers or as one of the passengers on the flights. I don’t think of myself as a terrorist, or as a politician who had to make some big decisions, or as a firefighter or police officer who died trying to save other people… Okay, so sometimes a hero, but usually just myself in a situation similar to the situation I’m in now. A paper shuffler, an ex-college student, a regular guy. I think that’s why September 11th bothered me so much: because it’s so easy to picture myself as a victim in that situation. It’s harder, although not entirely beyond me, to picture myself as a victim of genocide in Africa or oppression under the Chinese government; it’s pretty easy to picture myself, exactly as I am in slacks and worn tennis shoes, on-board a plane or fetching a latté for my boss.

On September 11th, 2001 I was at college in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma about a twenty minute drive from the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. I’d been to the memorial there but wasn’t really affected by it; I was having problems with a girl at the time and spent most of the afternoon trying to get lost so that I could think. Months later, in September, I had actually gotten up on time and had a good chance of making it to my morning class for the first time in a week or two. I was in the cafeteria eating bacon and biscuits when someone mentioned that plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center? Isn’t that in New York or something? Oh well, back to breakfast. A second plane hit so I decided to see what I could find out about it on the internet… Not surprisingly, the web was tangled.

There was only one television in the entire student center that was tuned to the news (CNN, I think) and I was the only person watching it when the second tower fell. I don’t recall clearly what I was thinking at the time… I was late for class, knew I couldn’t concentrate, didn’t want to go anyway, and was only vaguely aware that I’d just watched a couple thousand people die live on television. I knew it, but it hadn’t sunk in yet.

I spent the next few days in something of a daze, much like everyone else on campus, trying to be normal but getting freaked out at the oddest things, none of which I remember now. I am by nature prone to paranoia, though, so who knows. Maybe I was the only one who got nervous when cars backfired, jets flew overhead, and people I knew started to develop an us-or-them mentality. I was also freaked out by the fact that I knew who Osama bin Laden was while everyone else was learning how to spell his name and make up insults about him. In high school I knew a guy in forensics/speech-and-debate (where I had foolishly signed up for a political-themed event despite knowing nothing about politics and not really having a passion for it) who was obsessed with Osama bin Laden. He was a conservative-type who thought that Jesse Ventura was the future of politics (little did he know it was the whole cast of Predator) and that Osama bin Laden was the greatest threat to the United States since… I don’t know who since because everyone who wasn’t American seemed to be bad, but this guy, Matthew, knew a lot about Osama bin Laden. I thought that Matthew was a bit nutty in both his political views and his obsession with a terrorist leader, but I thought he must have been proud of himself when the shock of three thousand dead people wore off.

I get pissed off when I see the flags on people’s cars or when I see those damn “United We Stand” or “These Colours Don’t Run” bumper stickers. Why? Because it’s part of that whole symbolfication-of-dead-people thing that generally makes me mad. I can’t explain why it is that this bothers me. I’m sure that if I were a better writer, a more experienced person, had a more politically or socially oriented mind I could explain it… but I can’t. I just get mad when I see people from any place on the political spectrum use September 11th as a justification for anything, using the three thousand dead Americans as a number to drop into a speech.

I have a lot of faith in people, but whenever I hear a politician, be he/she George Bush, Atrios, Glenn Reynolds, or Carol Moseley-Braun… I think they’re fucking cheap opportunists. (Not in the sense that they’re having sexual relations with cheap opportunists, but you get my point…) This is probably because I’ve noticed that pundits and politicians only bring up Septemeber 11th as a point of proof in an argument.

So if I had to summarize myself, which I probably should if I’m going to end this post, I’d say that I’m still sore, and others I know are still sore, from being shocked by a tragedy that it’s so easy to relate to that I’m not quite ready to have phrases like “post-9/11 world” tossed around like “post-modernism” or “post-rock.” I’m not ready to have people play with my emotions because they think it’ll get them some votes. I’m not ready to tell people to take those flags down, because September 11th may have meant as much (and as little) to them as it did to me.

In other words: it’s a different world, but not that different, so let me mourn the tragic loss of human life before trying to prove your point with it.

And that’s the end of the rant, folks. Happy Thanksgiving..

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 9 Comments

The Disability Gulag

Posted on November 25, 2003 by Ampersand

Make sure to read The Disability Gulag, an article by disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

The “gulag” referred to is the American disability care system; a system that assumes that people who are unable to care for themselves physically unassisted must also be stripped of the right to make decisions. Can you choose your own meals, your own schedule, your own assistants, your own hair style – your own life?

For many severely disabled people, the path of least resistance leads to institutional care, where they can live with little freedom of choice and at enourmous expense to taxpayers. Why is this what our system encourages?

Ultimately, saving ourselves from the gulag will take more than redefinition. It also takes money for in-home services. But in a sense, we’re spending the money now — $20,000 to $100,000 per person per year, depending on the state — for institutional lockup, the most expensive and least efficient service alternative.

For decades, our movement has been pushing federal legislation, currently known as MiCassa, the Medicaid Community Assistance Services and Supports Act, to correct the institutional bias in public financing, especially Medicaid, the gulag’s big engine. We ask, Why does Medicaid law require every state to finance the gulag but make in-home services optional? Why must states ask Washington for a special ”waiver” for comprehensive in-home services? Why not make lockup the exception? ”Our homes, not nursing homes.” It’s a powerful rallying cry within the movement. In the larger world, it’s mostly unheard, poorly understood. We are still conceptualized as bundles of needs occupying institutional beds, a drain upon society.

We know better. Integrated into communities, we ride the city bus or our own cars instead of medical transportation. We enjoy friends instead of recreational therapy. We get our food from supermarkets instead of dietitians. We go to work instead of to day programs. Our needs become less ”special” and more like the ordinary needs that are routinely met in society. In freedom, we can do our bit to meet the needs of others. We might prove too valuable to be put away.

One thing the activists are pushing for is the right to hire non-nursing care, and to have non-nurse care seen as valid (and thus qualified for Medicare coverage). Johnson argues is that nurses are often ruled by standard proceedures, rather than allowing patients to control their own care.

Back in March, incidentally, I blogged another article by Harriet Johnson, describing a debate between Johnson and philosophy professor Peter Singer, which is also terrific..

Posted in Disabled Rights & Issues | 10 Comments

Why the ERA?

Posted on November 20, 2003 by Ampersand

In email, someone wrote:

As for the ERA, I’m in the camp that believes that it was redundant. Does it really have to be spelled out in the Constitution?

Yes, because it’s a fundamental right. The Constitution is the appropriate place to spell out fundamental rights.

It’s true that the ERA was redundant (to a great extent) by the time it failed. However, that’s largely because the fight for the ERA led directly to a lot of good legislation being passed, which led to the ERA being redundant. That stuff might not have happened, or might not have happened as soon, without the ERA fight. Plus, legislation can be revoked far more easily than a Constitutional amendment.

Finally, I think that an explicit, spelled-out Constitutional right to sex equality would form a better basis for abortion rights than the non-explicit, non-spelled-out right to privacy that Roe rests on. (Of course, a constitutional right to privacy – or, better yet, to reproductive freedom for women – would also do the job. But the ERA actually came close to happening, unlike those other two)..

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 16 Comments

My kind of conservatives

Posted on November 19, 2003 by PinkDreamPoppies

In the comments to one of Amp’s posts there seems to be a bit of polite back and forth between some of the liberal and libertarian Alas readers. I have to say, I’ll probably disagree with libertarians to the bitter end but they’re my kind of conservatives. Actually, there are some Republican-type conservatives who are my type of conservative, but they seem to be getting more and more rare.

So what’s my type of conservative? People who will debate policy, ethics, and political philosophy without ever falling back on the excuse that their God told them so and that’s the way it is. It’s possible to argue with someone who says “the free market does a better job of predicting social needs than does the government,” but it’s just not possible to argue with someone who says “we should do X because God says so.”

Before I get accused of bad-mouthing people of faith (seeing as how I actually am one, it’d be pretty silly of me to bad-mouth them all in one fell swoop) I think there’s a nice overlap whereby a person’s politics can be influenced by their religious morals, but presuming to have a right to trod on anything in the name of religion is disgusting.

For instance, take the gay marriage debate. People who think that homosexuality is morally wrong can propose policies based on that, but I would expect them to offer evidence for their position that presents a basis for why people who don’t believe homosexuality to be morally wrong should be forced to conform to morals they don’t believe in. Perhaps they can offer statistics of death rates, or present a model for how society would be worsened by allowing gays to be married, but if there doesn’t seem to be an over-all social benefit to banning gay marriage I would think they would be capable of viewing it as a choice that people make like whether or not to drink beer, eat chocolate, not go to church on Sundays, or not believe in God; all of which are things that people of faith may or may not believe to be morally wrong and yet do not often advocate requiring by law. So being rational and recognizing that people have free will is great, even if you disagree with their choices and think they’ll be punished in the afterlife for them, but trying to force people to behave a certain way because you can is, in my opinion, morally wrong and damaging to society at large.

Thus I’m much more happy with libertarian-type conservatives than Republican-type conservatives..

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 26 Comments

How to lose what we've gained

Posted on November 19, 2003 by PinkDreamPoppies

I started writing this post about three weeks ago but was shortly thereafter pretty swamped with stuff and afflicted with a bad case of blogger’s burn, that curious state where you think that if you ever see another blog again you’ll throw your computer out the window. Thankfully, I’m over that and I’ve weaseled my way into some more free time (although the extended edition of The Two Towers may steal it all back) so here’s a new post. It may be either utterly irrelevant or groovily apropos. I’ll blog, you decide.

* * * * *

As you already know, the Massachusetts Supreme Court handed down a decision Tuesday in favour of gay marriage. I haven’t had an opportunity to read the entirety of the decision as of yet, but what I’ve seen so far looks remarkably like victory. It isn’t a total victory—the struggle goes on—but it sure does feel great, doesn’t it?

The President has issued a statement saying that he isn’t going to let any of those damn light-loafered liberals sodomize the sanctity of holy matrimony on his watch, or something to that effect. Other opponents of gay marriage have begun to pick at the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s ruling looking for a loophole or a paragraph written in invisible ink that, when decoded, says, “Just kidding! God hates fags and so do we!” Suffice to say, they haven’t been finding much; the ruling is pretty airtight from what I can tell.

One phrase I have seen tossed about, though, is this one:

The question before us is whether, consistent with the Massachusetts Constitution, the Commonwealth may deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry. We conclude that it may not. The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals. It forbids the creation of second-class citizens. In reaching our conclusion we have given full deference to the arguments made by the Commonwealth. But it has failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason for denying civil marriage to same-sex couples.

Specifically, the interest seems to be in the phrasing “the Commonwealth may deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry” [emphasis added] as opposed to “the Commonwealth may not deny civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry.” The difference is enough that some opponents of gay marriage have latched on to this phrase as being a route to denying gays the right to marriage and instead establishing a new social institute of civil unions.

This is, of course, flagrant crap and desperation. On Monday many of these born-again fans of civil unions would have opposed them as vehemently as gay marriage.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen some liberals (too many, and I fear more if things get rough) who have latched on to this sudden shift in their opponents’ position and think that now would be a great time to push through a civil union bill. Such a bill, hypothetically, would appeal to opponents of gay marriage because civil unions are “unions” and not “marriages” and would appeal to gays because they want their relationships and lifestyle legitimized and legally sanctions, and hell, Howard Dean signed a civil union bill so it must be a good idea. It’d be a win-win situation!

This is, of course, flagrant crap and desperation. Civil unions are, as John Isbell nicely put it in the comments to Amp’s post, bullshit. I can think of a few other terms (despicable, immoral, a scam, et al.) but “bullshit” seems to cover it.

I’ve been amazed by the number of people on the left I’ve encountered who support civil unions. Some, I think, support them because they seem like the easiest way to get a theoretical step toward equality. Other liberals, I think, support civil unions because they think that civil unions aren’t any different from marriages, anyway, so why butt heads with the Republican party? The latter are wrong and the former need to realise that a civil union bill, while possibly easier to pass, would not advance the cause of equality any significant degree precisely because of the reasons that the latter group is wrong.

I don’t know where the idea came from that civil unions are equivalent to marriage. I suspect it comes from the way that people tend to define civil unions: “they’re a way by which homosexual couples would have the same legal rights as heterosexual couples.” That sounds reasonable but depending on how the bill is written—and here keep in mind that I am not a legal expert—if civil unions confer unto couples only the rights of marriage written into law then this opens new paths for discrimination. I’m not entirely certain which rights are guaranteed by law to currently married couples but it’s not hard to imagine expressions of prejudice that would be, if I may use the term, market-based. Business could exploit a key difference between civil unions and marriages: the fact that couples entering into a civil union would be issued certificates of civil union instead of certificates of marriage. Unless protections were written into the civil union bill to make it mandatory that these two certificates be considered equal in all situations (an unlikely protection if the bill were to be passed on a national scale) then this difference could be leveraged into a means of discriminating against same-sex couples.

Consider an example or two: a hotel starts offering special discounts on certain rooms to married couples, discount to be applied upon presentation of a marriage certificate; an airline or cruise line has a special deal for honeymooners doing to Hawaii, just bring your marriage certificate with you when you pick up your tickets; etc.

An argument could be made that similar types of discrimination did not occur after the legalization of miscegenation, but I don’t believe that the situations are entirely analogous because interracial couples who married are and were given marriage licenses that were no different from the ones issued to couples of the same race who married. So, if an interracial couple encountered a situation like one of those described above the only basis for the company’s different rates would be the racial make-up of the couple which would qualify as racial discrimination which can be prosecuted under the Constitution. However, no such Constitutional protection exists for non-heterosexuals so discrimination in the way I’ve described is, as I understand it, theoretically possible. I’m sure there’s a lawyer out there ready and willing to split words for a company that wanted to try.

I have to admit, though, that this discrimination-by-marriage-certificate thing sounds a bit too paranoid and dark-side-of-the-fifties to me. The real reason why anyone who is concerned about equality for everyone should oppose civil unions is, thankfully, much simpler than the potential for legal wrangling.

If the goal of enabling gays and lesbians to legally marry is not to legally bind them in long-term relationships nor to grant them certain previously ungranted rights but rather is to signal a greater acceptance of people with different sexual orientations as not being abnormal, substandard freaks but instead as being individuals worthy of respect and fair and equal treatment, then creating a social institution for them that is separate from the institutions established for heterosexuals is counter-productive. By making a different form of union—a separate form of union—especially for the reason on legislative expediency, one would only be sending a message that same-sex relationships are not normal, are not acceptable, and should be segregated from the relationships of so-called normal people. Civil unions would, in effect, reinforce prejudiced perceptions thus not making it any easier, and possibly making it harder in some ways, for non-heterosexual couples to be socially accepted. It’s much easier to dismiss gay marriages as not being “real” or “true” if in a very real, legal sense they’re not.

So both legally and socially, civil unions would not do much more than resurrect the old canard of “separate but equal” and apply it to a new group of people and a different situation.

Here’s hoping that the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision blows civil unions clean off the political landscape..

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 13 Comments

The Massachusetts Supreme Court on Gay Marriage and Children

Posted on November 18, 2003 by Ampersand

I’ve got to run and do some chores, but I wanted to post this section from the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision. It’s become clear that the anti-equality bigots (I’m sorry to use such language – some of the anti-equality bigots are people I respect and consider friends – but there are times when we should call a spade a spade) who oppose gay marriage have fallen on “marriage is about the children” as their last pretense at a rational reason to oppose gay marriage.

Anyhow, the Massachusetts court decision does a wonderful, succinct job destroying the anti-equality case. Although some of the argument is specific to Massachusetts law, much of it is generally applicable.
Continue reading →

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 44 Comments

Massachusetts Supreme Court says Gays have Right to Marry

Posted on November 18, 2003 by Ampersand

So here’s the deal, as I understand it:

  • The Supreme Court of Massachusetts has ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry is a violation of their rights – under the Massachusetts State Constitution. This means that the case can’t be appealed to the Supreme Court of the US, since the U.S. Supremes don’t have the authority to interpret state constitutions.
  • Under the ruling, second-class citizenship measures like “civil unions” aren’t acceptable. It’s equality time, baby.
  • But – the court didn’t enact it’s decision immediately. Instead, it gave the legislature six months to revise Massachusetts marriage law. The legislature is mostly anti-equality, so it’ll spend that six months looking for a loophole.
  • The best loophole for the anti-equality folks is to revise the Massachusetts State Constitution to define marriage as “no gays allowed.” However, that would have to be done by statewide ballot – and unless they find a way to change the rules, the next opportunity for them to do that is 2006. So even if the anti-equalities go this route, there may end up being a year-and-a-half of legal gay marriage first.
  • This means that gay marriage will most definitely be a live issue in the upcoming presidential election. Look for the Republican party to play to anti-equality sentiment a lot in their fundraising drives.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this, myself. On the one hand, I really think that these decisions are best made by the legislature, not by the courts. Court-driven social change can backfire – look at the way that Roe v Wade has energized the right-wing for decades (and arguably led to the defeat of the ERA). This decision – especially if the legislature doesn’t find a loophole – may lead to a vast increase in anti-equality, homophobic legislation around the country.

On the other hand, equality is good.

Links: Here’s the AP story. And here’s the Boston Globe story. And here’s the New York Times story. And here’s the decision in Microsoft Word format. And here it is again, in .pdf format..

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 21 Comments