Way back in my pre-father-of-multiple-children, pre-homeowner, pre-Dust-in-the-Light days of February 2002, Andrew Sullivan had a running thread for great insults in history. He actually published one that I emailed him — my favorite quote on Emerson, by Herman Melville:
I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.
I bring this admittedly superficial remembrance up because Ramesh Ponnuru has penned an insult that should clearly be added to the list:
I'm not totally sure whether Sullivan's habitual inability to present his opponents' views correctly is a result of malicious lying, indifference to the truth, incompetence in figuring out the truth, or some combination of these things. Readers need not know the answer to that question to conclude that he is untrustworthy.
I never actually expected to receive Andrew Sullivan's promised response to my piece about him, but I would have hoped that he'd begin conducting his end of the marriage debate with even the slightest indication that he's paying attention to what the other side is saying... or even who the other side is. Witness:
Since marriage has already been redefined to make the exclusion of gays logically absurd, the campaign against letting gays into the human family necessarily raises the suspicion of mere animus. It's not bigotry to say that these are the rules that govern civil marriage and too bad if you can't live up to them (i.e. procreation, or traditional gender roles). But it is suspicious when you abolish all those rules for straights and then use the old rules to bar gays. I don't see how gay marriage opponents manage to get round the logic of this - except by resorting to purely religious arguments (which would invalidate most heterosexual marriages today as well), or simply reiterating the definitional case that marriage is for straights, dammit.
One gets the sense that Sullivan has broken the world into straights and gays, with only the latter permitted to act independently of their "movement." Some gays wish to leverage same-sex marriage to undermine society as we know it, but Sullivan refuses to have their arguments considered as part of the issue. But through the magic of the passive voice, "marriage has already been redefined," and therefore traditionalist "yous" have had the hypocrisy to "abolish all those rules for straights and then use the old rules to bar gays."
I'm too young to have participated in the earlier debates, but I'm pretty sure — conversions excluded — that the overlap in names on petitions for divorce and contraception and against same-sex marriage is minimal. Unfortunately, one of the complicating factors when attempting to come up with resolutions to the current fight is that Sullivan's handling of the other side is way too likely to prove the norm for his.
Apart from qualities of intellect and literacy, what makes Andrew Sullivan so interesting to address is the fact that he's an excellent debater and, as such, is willing to take risks with his rhetoric. As when he approaches statism to declare the Constitution a "workable civil version" of religion, he's willing to give glimpses of cards that a more cautious man with his objectives might keep obscured.
The downside is the frustrated reaction that he can inspire in those who sense that his emphasis is on debate rather than intellect — that the principles under consideration aren't really open for discussion. Consequently, the statements that make up his arguments periodically give the impression of boxing steps rather than exposition. Once frustration has subsided, however, one can look to the areas around which Sullivan has danced to discover the heart of the matter. (Whether his contradictions and avoidance are deliberate or instinctive is a question of how much credit the reader wishes to give him, and it is one on which I vacillate.)
For example, in a recent response to Jonah Goldberg, Sullivan defines fundamentalism in relation to politics and dogma:
Just as Oakeshott very carefully allows a place within Western political thought for the politics of faith, so do I within what might be called conservatism. My worry is when that faith becomes fundamentalist, i.e. less interested in political arrangements than divine imperatives.
Yet, in the subsequent paragraph, he decries neocon cynicism as follows:
I have to say I'm not too enamored of outsiders backing fundamentalism in faiths they do not share for political purposes. But, hey, that's been the neocon position on religion for a long time: we don't believe it, but it's good for the masses.
In one breath, Sullivan worries that public faith is drifting from the political realm to the religious. In the next, he complains of those who treat religious groups as factions with which they may or may not be able to join for political purposes. But if the proper role of religion in the public sphere is to make "political arrangements" (a vexingly vague term in Sullivan's usage), then why would it be inappropriate for outsiders to encourage arrangements that suit them? Or, as Goldberg puts it, "Would Andrew support outsiders backing 'reform' in these faiths?"
The curiosity is that Sullivan — who believes that "it's best to leave religion out of" political questions of morality to maximize a freedom characterized by radical individualism — handles individuals strictly according to their roles within his political framework. Neocons "don't believe [in religion], but it's good for the masses." There are neocons, and there are religious people. Folks who fall within religious segments of the broader neocon category, as I probably do, will find Sullivan's analysis particularly discordant.
Because this separation is untenable beyond a very narrow range of argumentation, Sullivan must chase it across the boundary of religion, where it renders thus: The "central tenets" of religious groups involve faith in particular facts (e.g., that Jesus was the Messiah), but drawing social and political conclusions from those facts is "Evangelical fundamentalism and the creeping infallibilism of Wojtyla-Ratzinger." Apparently, it can be a matter of religious Truth that Jesus was the Word of God, but the implications of what He actually said must remain ever open for debate — within and outside of a particular "religious tradition."
Observers of modern society, generally, and Andrew Sullivan, specifically, understand that this distinction transfers all too easily to people's personal worldviews. What they believe is one thing; what they do is another. There are religious creeds, and there are personal preferences, and the former can only be said to be true to the extent that they do not infringe on the latter.
And here we reach the heart of the matter. Sullivan professes that his "first concern with any religious argument is: is it true? Not: is it useful?" What he does not explain is how one determines whether a religious argument is true or false. Long familiarity with his work leads me to think that his determination of Truth ultimately flows from his intuition and desires. Although I would join him in arguing that the faithful must incorporate these factors into their searches, I would suggest to Andrew Sullivan — as I would to the secular neocons whom he describes — that a religion's utility toward good ends is also evidence of its truth.
One point that Christians put forward in support of Jesus' divinity is His wisdom — that His teachings ring true, that His parables apply to our lives, that His instructions effect what He promises when followed. There is certianly space in this for ecumenism and "political arrangements"; others can act in accordance with the Truth of the Word without knowing (or admitting) that they do so.
There is also, we should all agree, room for the truth in politics. If a religion's prescriptions increase the measure of good in the world, then a rational society may very well be able to trace their functions in non-religious terms. Furthermore, a rational society founded in an ideal of pluralism can properly require advocates of one policy or another to do the work that such tracing entails. Only an irrational society would mark as invalid any policies that people of faith claim to be in accordance with God's will simply on the grounds that others disagree.
The following suggestion of Andrew Sullivan's, which I read in a piece by Jonah Goldberg, strikes me as surprising coming from a European and shocking coming from a Catholic:
[Conservatives of doubt] can point to the astonishing success and durability of the U.S. experiment to buttress the notion that the Constitution is a much more stable defense of human equality than that inherent in any religion. The Constitution itself has far wider support among citizens than any theological argument. To put it another way: You don't need an actual religion when you already have a workable civil version in place.
Readers will be aware that I'm a patriot in the conservative sense, but I have to ask: By what historical standard is two hundred years and change evidence of durability? People who live among monuments to their cultures that date back millennia might be hard-pressed to stifle a chuckle. Similarly, those whose religions are defined by documents and traditions with the same or longer heritage might wonder whether Sullivan is playing games with the terms that qualify something as durable. The question of success would be just as arguable (especially if we factor in the acceleration of social change over time).
In its jarring lack of doubt about its own premises, Sullivan's odd bit of argument by convenient assertion appears to be an attempt to tiptoe past an inconvenient factor in his assessment of the American people. Goldberg writes of the "both-and" (versus an "either-or") that defines conservatives as people who have both "skepticism about the new and faith in the old." But the self-contradiction inherent in Sullivan's blind confidence in doubtfulness lays bare a more fundamental "both-and": the Constitution may indeed have "far wider support among citizens than any [particular] theological argument," but that is only because Americans believe that — in one way or another — their theological arguments are, themselves, embedded within the Constitution.
This attitude manifests most directly in those who believe that (for example) "America is a Christian nation" as a Constitutional matter. Sullivan disagrees with that saying, no doubt, but he can't deny that those who agree with it are likely to be among the Constitution's supporters.
The less direct means of embedment — in my view, the proper Constitutional understanding — is that religious principles exist in the civil sphere as a function of the governmental processes that the Constitution lays out. This sort of support for the Constitution hinges on citizens' ability to shape their government according to their moral beliefs.
It is not enough to treat "moral appeals" simply as free speech — to be restricted to "crusades for personal salvation, evangelism, or social work, rather than... legislative change." To the extent that Sullivan is correct that the "purpose of the Constitution was to preserve the Declaration of Independence's right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" it must also allow them (as the Declaration continues in the very same sentence) "to alter" their government, "laying its Foundation on such Principles... as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Andrew Sullivan is prominent among commentators throwing about the dark image of theocracy, but again, he seems to be playing games with terminology. Theocracy does not describe a particular set of policies — or even the moral authority that informs them. It describes the civil authority that determines them: those acting as God's explicit representatives. With democracy, on the other hand, all authority must filter through the people.
That Sullivan has now gone so far as to suggest that the Constitution establishes a "civil version" of — and replacement for — religion reveals how much closer those of his political persuasion are to theocracy than are the "conservatives of faith" whom they oppose. That zealots for individual license traverse a dim alleyway to tyranny is evident in their conviction that their preferred policies — from abortion to same-sex marriage — are subjects of Constitutional guarantee.
Even those supposed "theocrats" who would go so far as to argue for mandatory prayers in their local public schools don't argue that the judiciary ought to find that the Constitution requires them.
PROEM:
A version of this piece appeared in the December 31, 2004, issue of National Review, under the title "One Man's Marriage Trap." Citations not linked in the text can be found here.
For a page design that may make for more comfortable reading, click "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column.
Years later, Sullivan volunteered to assist a stranger through the final months of life with AIDS. The scene presents an eerie echo. "I remember one day lying down on top of him to restrain him as his brittle, burning body shook uncontrollably with the convulsions of fever."
If Sullivan noticed the parallel between these moments — described in his books Virtually Normal and Love Undetectable, respectively — he hasn't said so, but their implications could fill another book. The child's undefined desire for closeness, and the solitude of a man's deterioration. The vision of exploiting a doctor's power, and the reality of a nurse's powerlessness. An awakening to sexuality, and to solidarity.
Different people will derive conflicting lessons from these anecdotes, but this is often the case with Sullivan. He's unapologetically homosexual and, until recently, devoutly Catholic. His social sympathies are liberal, but he's often presented as conservative. He has written many times for the New York Times, but he is a leading figure in a blogosphere that sees the Times as the establishment it opposes.
Taken altogether, these qualities attract an interesting audience, and conservatives' criticism of Sullivan's opinions often begins with confessions of fandom or friendship. In particular, conservatives have generally appreciated his steadfast advocacy for a vigorous prosecution of the war on terrorism. The niche that he has claimed, however, has made Sullivan an especially influential advocate for a cause with which many of them do not agree: same-sex marriage. In his various expositions of the case for same-sex marriage over the years, Sullivan has trapped himself in a series of opportunistic contradictions — which may tell us something about the contradiction at the heart of his cause.
The Argument
Virtually Normal (1995) is Sullivan's unique perspective presented as a political argument. As a polemical feat, his strategy is brilliant, transforming the terms of the debate and providing a clear platform from which to volley objections. As an assessment of people's thinking, however, it stumbles on its own cleverness.
His handling of religion strains most palpably. In his chapter on "the prohibitionists" — the strongest opponents of homosexuality — Sullivan quotes St. Paul's most indisputable denunciation of it, Romans 1:27. Providing neither chapter nor verse, Sullivan moves immediately to speculation about Paul's intent: Homosexuality supposedly serves merely as "an analogy" for continued polytheism, exploited only because Paul "seems to assume that every individual's nature is heterosexual." Put in context, however, the reference is more apparently a manifestation of the larger sin Paul has in mind: the rejection of that which can be "perceived in the things that God has made."
Over the years, this divergent exegesis has spun to schismatic lengths. In November 1994, in The New Republic, Sullivan called his reading of St. Paul "so obvious an alternative... that it is hard to imagine the forces of avoidance that have kept it so firmly at bay for so long." In Love Undetectable (1998), fear-driven "loathing" of homosexuals and Jews is "fanned... by the distortion of a particular strain in Christian theology." By August 2003, the Catholic Church's failure to succumb to this alternative indicated a "war on gay people and their dignity."
This is not to deny that Sullivan can be genuinely insightful, but too often, his analysis of competing viewpoints is designed merely to generate elaborate debaters' points. The trick is to push opponents of same-sex marriage into a circumscribed pen, ruling certain lines of reasoning out of order. Already, in the afterword of the paperback edition, concerns about the instability of male homosexual relationships are declared "a truly bizarre argument for a conservative to make."
Similarly, the old-media technique of loaded labeling has helped Sullivan to fence in conservatives. The Federal Marriage Amendment is the "religious right amendment," not a cause of respectable conservatives, on the theory that its strongest backers are evangelical Christians. When Senate majority leader Bill Frist expressed support for it in June 2003, Sullivan bewailed "how close to theocracy today's Republicans have become." The spark for the charge was one word: Frist had described marriage as a "sacrament."
"Theocon" is a perennial smear in Sullivan's writing. Theoconservatism, he explained in a 1998 New York Times Magazine cover story, is "an orthodoxy... of cultural and moral revolution." (On the cover, a finger pointed over red letters: "The Scolds.") Sullivan notes the opposition of alleged theocon Fr. Richard John Neuhaus to "secular monism." By this phrase, Neuhaus means the antithesis of true pluralism, wherein a sacralized state claims to be the arbiter of truth, with no reference to or respect for the religious beliefs of its citizens. Sullivan makes "secular monism" seem less threatening, and Neuhaus more extreme, by redefining it as merely "the secular neutrality of modern American law and government." That is a subdued definition indeed from a man for whom a favorite slogan for the FMA is "graffiti on a sacred document."
Sullivan confesses in its afterword that Virtually Normal is "a profession of faith in liberal politics." His essential dogma is "public neutrality and private difference." The paradox derives from the fact that the "centerpiece" of Sullivan's proposal in that book — marriage — is the basic interface between culture and politics, where the private becomes public.
Sullivan himself has had difficulty adhering to the bifurcation. When Senator Rick Santorum uttered his infamous remarks about the erosion of morality-based laws should the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas decision make sodomy a right, Sullivan indulged in a days-long excoriation. He dismissed Santorum's argument for not making the public/private distinction: "Bigamy and polygamy are... irrelevant here," because they involve marriage, about which a right to sodomy implied nothing. Two months later, reveling in Lawrence's outcome, Sullivan declared that the expansion of privacy rights "inescapably means the right to marry."
The institutional truth that marriage is both public and private has brought into the battle over its legal definition the most fundamental of our laws, the Constitution. The Full Faith and Credit Clause has dramatically changed roles in Sullivan's usage. In 1996, he laughed in the Sunday Times of Londonthat "the punchline" of judicially imposed same-sex marriage in Hawaii was that "every state has to give ‘full faith and credit' to the laws of every other state." When Congress debated the Defense of Marriage Act, meant to keep states from being forced to recognize other states' redefined marriages, Sullivan opposed the bill in testimony: It was up to the Supreme Court to decide whether states would be compelled to grant recognition. After the bill passed, Sullivan insisted that it was unconstitutional — which, he claimed in August 2003, "the social right knew at the time and still knows."
At other times, Sullivan argues that a constitutional amendment is unnecessary because of the very same Defense of Marriage Act. In July of last year, he said that the act had the power "to stop one state's marriages being nationalized." By November, he was declaring the suggestion that the courts might force one state to recognize another state's same-sex marriages "disingenuous." He wrote this February that if the courts were to strike down the act — if "one single civil marriage in Massachusetts is deemed valid in another state, without that other state's consent" — he would support a constitutional amendment to "say that no state is required to recognize a civil marriage from another state." His standard for "consent," however, is a tenuous barrier, given his view that state courts are qualified to offer it.
Unraveling the threads of rhetoric, it appears that Sullivan thinks the FMA is unnecessary because of the Defense of Marriage Act, although he opposed that act and wants the Court to strike it down. Once that happens, he will, supposedly, be in favor of a constitutional amendment to effect the stricken act's purpose, so that courts can dismantle it again state by state.
Periodically, this twirling of convenient views moves from frustrating to astonishing. In January, Stanley Kurtz published an argument against same-sex marriage based on an examination of familial trends in Scandinavia, where social policy toward gays has long been especially permissive. "Did no one edit this?" Sullivan attacked, saying that Kurtz's analysis "would be laughed out of a freshman social science class." Simply, "the entire premise of the piece — that marriage for gays is legal in Norway, Denmark and Sweden — is factually untrue."
Yet the previous June, when he thought that evidence from Denmark supported his case for same-sex marriage, Sullivan had written that Denmark's gay partnerships were "almost indistinguishable from marriage." In his 1997 collection Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con, he noted that "different compromises" in Denmark and Sweden "affect the meaning of marriage itself." Throughout the intervening years, in multiple venues and contexts, he touted "de facto marriages." In August 2001, for example, he wrote that trends were hopeful during "the first six years in which gay marriage was legal in Denmark" (Sunday Times) and that the country provided "real data on the impact of gay marriage" (The New Republic).
When he thought empirical evidence in Scandinavia pointed his way, Sullivan conceded that the "importance of the family in society is indisputable." The politics of Virtually Normal do not, however, ultimately emphasize benefits for society. It is the benefits for homosexuals that are uppermost in Sullivan's argument. Any social difficulties that a redefinition of marriage would create he would leave to the "private sphere" to solve. No public norm can be imposed, because "outsiderdom" must be "a cultural choice," and homosexual identity must be free from "the hands of the other." (The lapse into pomo-speak is telling.)
But to conservatives, a large part of the purpose of marriage is precisely to discourage "outsiderdom" and to encourage citizens toward specific, society-sustaining identities. To Sullivan, on the other hand, marriage is a mechanism to gain "personal integrity" and "dignity," to become "fully human." A major source of friction between these two approaches is the effect that the latter's understanding of marriage might have on the ability to achieve the goals of the former. In that respect, it is relevant what Sullivan considers the fundamental determinant of "full humanity" to be.
The Opinion
In Love Undetectable, Sullivan raises the concept when discussing the act of sex. Sex involves a loss of control and submergence of intellect, and to give those things up "even under the threat of death" would be "to give up being fully human." The passage calls to mind Sullivan's greatest miscalculation in Virtually Normal, which occurs in the epilogue, while he is waxing philosophical about the meaning of homosexuality.
There, he argues that features of homosexual relationships "could nourish the broader society." Lesbians' "sexual expressiveness" and gay men's "solidity and space" are sometimes "lacking in more rote, heterosexual couplings." He speaks of "the openness of the contract," of "the need for extramarital outlets," of "flexibility." In response to critics' seizing on this passage as contemptuous of monogamy, Sullivan has asserted — and there's no reason to doubt — that he did not intend an endorsement of adultery. Affairs among married homosexuals, he clarifies in the paperback's afterword, should be "as anathema as" among married heterosexuals. The lessons implied for heterosexuals "are not direct ones." Understandable bewilderment at this passage, however, distracts from what is truly problematic here.
Sullivan seems to take for granted that heterosexuals are driven toward "timeless, necessary, procreative unity," whereas homosexuals must be given space beyond the "stifling model of heterosexual normality." He is even willing to place procreative marriages on a pedestal. In the spring of 2003, he proclaimed the "unique and miraculous... connection between male-female sex and the creation of new life." That connection's alignment with "a marital structure... is obviously vital to defend." It is at the heart of his cause, however, to reorder the structure from within.
In this context, here's the truly disquieting statement of those controversial pages: "The truth is, homosexuals are not entirely normal; and to flatten their varied and complicated lives into a single, moralistic model is to miss what is essential and exhilarating about their otherness." The truth that Sullivan evades is that flattening to a model is precisely marriage's social purpose, and furthermore, his arguments for same-sex marriage are in conflict with the desire he expresses in this passage to preserve homosexuality's "otherness."
After all, how can "otherness" be preserved if distinctions are effaced? Sullivan's writing overflows with appeals to equality untinted by distinctions, as when he rejects "the mealy-mouthed talk about civil unions as some sort of options for gay citizens." The exclusion of same-sex couples is indefensible when, he says (incorrectly), "the living, breathing reality of civil marriage in America" is coupling and nothing more. Just before Thanksgiving, this year, he pushed his equality-based argument almost to the point of making the case for the FMA (emphasis his):
The basic problem for the anti-gay marriage forces is that they are upholding a marital standard for gays that no one any longer upholds for straights... Once it was obvious that this standard did not apply to heterosexuals, the [Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court] had no choice but to strike down the inequality... that's why you really do have to amend a state constitution to prevent its guarantees of equality from being applied to gay citizens.
Of course, Sullivan opposes amendments intended to prevent the law from locking in mere coupling as the open-ended definition of marriage. He's also quick to attack those who seek to bolster marriage's vital connections from other angles. In July 2001, for example, he expressed astonishment at Lawrence Kudlow's implicit support for adultery laws. "Give me an adulterer over an ayatollah any day," wrote Sullivan. He has lambasted "screw-tightening" fundamentalists for targeting divorce, fornication — the whole arsenal of practices subversive to marriage. Yet, in January, he said of the same group that, when they "start proposing measures that would infringe on heterosexual abuse of marital privileges, [he will] take them seriously." If social conservatives target heterosexual as well as homosexual immorality, they are fanatics; if they don't, they are hypocrites.
In parallel debates among Catholics, Sullivan's prescription for addressing rampant sexual license is its legitimization. "Why can we not hold up marriage and committed loving relationships as the goal but not punish and stigmatize the non-conformists or those whose erotic needs and desires are more complex?" But it simply isn't clear how he thinks society should avouch its supposed goal. In Virtually Normal, he challenges the notion that it is better for a "waverer" to choose heterosexuality. In a later attempt to dismantle a column by William Bennett, he asks what is "so bad, after all, with mutual objectification."
Sullivan has written that many gay men value their sexual freedom, while many "yearn for anchors." In The New Republic, in August 2001, he cast his sympathy with the former, and in June 2002, he admitted that he would be among "those who choose not to marry." This may be surprising, given his long advocacy for what he calls "marriage rights." But in Love Undetectable, he describes sex itself as "almost a sacrament of human existence." A year ago, he said it's "one of the greatest and most exhilarating gifts our nature has given us." (Our nature?) In fact, "reduction" of it to "pure, heterosexual, procreative sex" is "excessively strict, given the not-so-terrifying moral dangers of other forms."
So in Sullivan's world of sacramental sex and moralistic marriage, what is the basic marker of "full humanity"? In the New York Times Magazine, in February 2001, he wrote approvingly of the dissipation of "the idea that no woman is complete without a man." Can it really be his position that no man is complete without a man? That those outside of legally recognized relationships are not "fully human"? Of course not. To Sullivan, possession of choice defines humanity, and "full humanity" is a relative measure. For gays, to have "full humanity" is to have the same range of choices that straights have. Whether the extension of a particular choice to homosexuals is at odds with the fundamental reason it exists in the first place is, from that point of view, irrelevant.
Given Sullivan's leveling conception of equality, he can't wish for homosexuals to gain the choice of marriage without also wishing for heterosexuals to gain the choices that gays' freedom from procreation naturally grants them. In such a field of options, society would have no remaining leverage to push for marriage. Sure, it could grant material benefits on the basis of commitment. Yet, even if we believe that marriage stops expanding with the inclusion of homosexuals, even if we believe that the standard for monogamy slips no further, Sullivan's "conservative case" collapses. One cannot simultaneously want no choice to bear stigma while presenting one choice as an expectation.
The Future
Sullivan has considered every strategy for nationalizing same-sex marriage — and he likes them all. To be sure, he has made it a talking point that time for persuasion is "the genius of a federal system," a "slow federal process [that he wants] to take place"; warnings of rapid change in the absence of a Federal Marriage Amendment are "scare tactics." He writes: "The flip-side of leaving Mississippi alone is that we should also leave Massachusetts alone. Deal?"
He constantly attacks the Federal Marriage Amendment as an offense against federalism. But when Ramesh Ponnuru pressed him on the point, this February, Sullivan clarified that while he believes in "winning over the public" and working "legislatively if at all possible," he would also support a Supreme Court finding that the Constitution demands legal recognition of same-sex marriage from coast to coast.
The judiciary is a central component of his politics. A December 2002 blog post explained that "individual states should be able to decide for themselves" about marriage — in state courts, "where marriage questions rightly belong." In July 2003, he reflected in the Sunday Times that the courts were changing hands to "judges who reflect contemporary understanding." (Apparently, they do so better than the public's elected representatives.)
After Lawrence, Sullivan confessed that he was happy that the ruling had gone far beyond "the narrowest possible grounds." Goodridge in Massachusetts convinced him "how impossible it is that any reasonable court" could deny gays marriage. For Sullivan, "democratic deliberation" must be a process whereby judges implement federal law; in the slow version, they do so state by state. Any movement to force actual votes indicates an "hysterical and polarizing campaign" and "unbounded paranoia with respect to courts."
To derail such campaigns, Sullivan will stroke racial tensions. He pioneered the usurpation of civil rights imagery for circumstances of such loose comparison that history needs knots to hold. The courage of taking a seat in a violent environment of ingrained racism is commandeered for ceremonies invited by local government and backed by the national media, the academy, and the bar. The Catholic Church's opposition to fundamental changes to the institution of marriage is taken to be akin to its support of slavery in 1866 — never mind that the documents Sullivan adduced as evidence of that support demonstrated no such thing. (They concerned penal servitude and the like, not slavery.)
Similarly, he will jab emotions made bare through religious friction. In his piece about "The Scolds," Sullivan wrote that it was "perhaps unsurprising that, when Neuhaus gathered a group of public thinkers and ministers to endorse a statement" of their political position, "there were no Jews among the signers." Unsurprising, indeed, for a letter subtitled, "A Statement of Christian Conscience and Citizenship."
The charitable explanation is that Sullivan has gotten so caught up in his cause, so feels the tingle of proximate success, that he doesn't hear his conflicting arguments draining empathy. Whatever the case, he long ago sank into naked advocacy. His work must now be approached like the material of a civil-action lawyer or lobbyist. When President Bush announced support for a marriage amendment, Sullivan reacted violently. All people of goodwill would have to oppose the president. He's said that the "fair-minded center of the country that balks at... hatred and fear" would never stand for pandering to extremists. But the emotional extremism on display in his writings is chiefly his own.
Andrew Sullivan seems, in short, to have an intellect in deep conflict with his emotions. His language practically glows with warmth when the next generation of gays appears in his writing. True to form, however, he began Virtually Normal with a contradictory admission:
No homosexual child, surrounded overwhelmingly by heterosexuals, will feel at home in his sexual and emotional world, even in the most tolerant of cultures.... Anyone who believes political, social, or even cultural revolution will change this fundamentally is denying reality.
Same-sex marriage became law in Massachusetts on the anniversary of Brown v. Board, and Sullivan naturally drew the parallel. To him, same-sex marriage is a matter of gays' integration into their own families. But even if the marriage episode concludes as Sullivan wishes, choices will still be beyond reach, requiring redirected advocacy. There will always be something for which to long intensely on the other side of the glass.
It occurs to me that folks might be expecting some sort of reaction, here, to Andrew Sullivan's announcement of a hiatus. I don't really have one.
The truth is that I rarely read the Daily Dish anymore; Sullivan's talents and temperament are much better suited to longer pieces, especially book-length essays. For that reason, I'm thrilled to hear that one reason for his break is to write a book, and I look forward to its release. (Of course, if his previous books are any evidence of that to come, I hope he'll get back to blogging, because I've found it helpful to have the blog to offset the soft feelings that his books engender.)
In the meantime, I had intended to post a version of my National Review piece on Sullivan late tonight, anyway, and see no reason not to follow through as planned. If he chooses to respond — at his leisure — I'll be interested to read what he has to say. Whatever the case, I hope God will guide him, during his hiatus, not so much toward whatever he's seeking, but to what he needs to find.
Perhaps one of the most overlooked revolutionary features of blogs is the near universal maintenance of archives. Something sound a bit odd? Look it up; with the right keywords and a few minutes to spare, you'll have an answer. Moreover, the capability is free for everybody, unlike the official media searches. Among the more beneficial effects of archives — one would hope — is to teach bloggers to be careful about what they write.
Earlier today, Jonah Goldberg mentioned the unwillingness of Martin Luther King III to endorse gay marriage, quipping "I guess he's a bigot." To Jonah, Andrew Sullivan responded (emphasis his):
What King actually said was: "I think we need to find a way to honor partnerships, but I don't think that marriage needs to be redefined." I don't know anyone who would describe that position - which is John Kerry's - as a bigot. Now, opposing any recognition or protection for gay couples is a wholly different matter.
Well. To the archives:
If you're going to give gay couples the same rights as straight couples, why are you calling it something different? If both can drink the same water, why a different water fountain?
One suspects the water fountain imagery would have a particular resonance with MLK III.
(For runners up from Sullivan's archive, see here and here.)
Whether or not the optimistic perspective expressed in the previous post is justified, we who oppose the redefinition of marriage can't put aside our arguments. Andrew Sullivan may sing in soothing tones when he writes (emphasis his):
[Same-sex marriage advocates] should refrain from any constitutional or legal challenge to DOMA for the foreseeable future (something I've urged for a long time now). We should also refrain from any attempt to force any state to recognize a gay marriage from another state (of course that's different from a state voluntarily recognizing such marriages).
But we on the other side should not fail to point out that Sullivan's rhetoric is such that a state's recognition of another state's marriages is "voluntary" if its courts decide that it must recognize them. Indeed, both sentences that I've quoted essentially advise the same thing. By Sullivan's definition, a state isn't "forced" to recognize marriages unless federal courts do the forcing, and that isn't possible unless they strike down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
That is the echo in President Bush's hollow evasion about "waiting to see whether or not DOMA will withstand a constitutional challenge." Sullivan skirts the reality of the issue when he explains:
There is no need for the FMA in any conceivable sense while DOMA is in place; and DOMA itself merely underlines the existing reality that no state is obliged by law or the constitution to recognize the civil marriages in any other state.
The "conceivable sense" (whatever that means to Sullivan) in which the FMA is necessary is that the destruction of DOMA and the nationalization of same-sex marriage would likely come in the same ruling: If DOMA were to fall to claims of "equal rights," or to assertions that the Full Faith and Credit clause applies to marriage, this argument against the FMA is akin to suggesting that, in the Sixties, there was no need for an amendment securing the illegality of on-demand abortion as long as the Supreme Court didn't find a right to abortion in the Constitution.
And most of all, let's not forget that Sullivan and other savvy gay rights activists are not the sole sources of activity, nor are even they, themselves, bound by things they say when circumstances call for lulling melodies.
All we need to know lies in the mis-start at the beginning of the President's response:
The Post: Do you plan to expend any political capital to aggressively lobby senators for a gay marriage amendment?THE PRESIDENT: You know, I think that the situation in the last session -- well, first of all, I do believe it's necessary; many in the Senate didn't, because they believe DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act] will -- is in place, but -- they know DOMA is in place, and they're waiting to see whether or not DOMA will withstand a constitutional challenge.
Well, I sincerely hope he's keeping in mind the amount of capital — of any kind — social conservatives will expend on furthering his agenda if he abandons us. Yeah, yeah, we've got nowhere else to go, and we can keep advocating for the FMA because we think it's the right thing to do, regardless. If, however, the big story of the next four years is the strength or weakness of the intra-Republican bond, this won't help.
But we should keep in mind that the political landscape is volatile, right now, and we're better off with a President who is tepidly protective of traditional marriage than one who is implicitly unconcerned with redefinition of it. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that the President has to take a broader view of the issues. For instance, installing judges who will refrain from writing elite social preferences into the Constitution will require quite a bit of political capital, and the President is more directly involved in that process; the other two branches of government are the important ones on the marriage front.
Therefore, unless I'm being unreasonably sunny, Andrew Sullivan's happiness with the President is good news. For one thing, I'd wager that we'll see less of this sort of negative hysteria from him. More generally — and acknowledging that political posturing is no doubt part of Bush's calculus — it seems obvious that a President who is potentially in a position to reshape the Supreme Court would not want simultaneously to be the most visible representative of a cause that a not-insignificant, vocal, and influential portion of the citizenry decries as tantamount to theocracy.
Just in case you still haven't made it to the magazine store for the latest issue of National Review, Marriage Debate Blog has posted another excerpt of my piece therein.
I just noticed that NRO has posted the first section of my "One Man's Marriage Trap" piece. It's only about a tenth of the whole, so now there's another step for you to take:
(FYI, I've compiled extended quotations and citations related to the piece here.)
Writing for blogs and other online venues, one becomes accustomed to the ability to present sources within the text. And even books have room for pages of end notes. Given the number of quotations in my piece about Andrew Sullivan, it would obviously have been impossible to provide sources for them all. So, I thought it only appropriate to remedy that limitation here, with the items in the order in which the appear in the piece.
Please note that current circumstances required me to compile this list of context-giving quotations and links under duress; my time is extremely limited. Consequently, I wouldn't be surprised if readers find an error or an oversight here or there.
I remember one day lying down on top of him to restrain him as his brittle, burning body shook uncontrollably with the convulsions of fever. I had never done such a thing to a grown man before—and as I did, the defenses I had put up between us, the categories that until then had helped me make sense of my life and his, these defenses began to crumble into something more like solidarity.
— Love Undetectable (1998), p. 22
There is, however, as with Leviticus, one incontrovertible condemnation of homosexual acts. I'll quote it as well: "For this cause God gave them up into vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves the recompense of their error which was meet."
Here again, however, it's essential to ask what the reason is for Paul's condemnation of this clearly homosexual behavior. The reference is an analogy to the way in which Romans, having had the opportunity to follow the one true God, persist in polytheism. ... This is the end of the reference; once the analogy has been drawn, the main point can be engaged. ...
Could this condemnation apply to people who are by their own nature homosexual? Unfortunately, Paul never explicitly addresses this point, since he seems to assume that every individual's nature is heterosexual.
— Virtually Normal (1995), p. 28-29
This is the alternative argument embedded in the Church's recent grappling with natural law, that is just as consonant with the spirit of natural law as the Church's current position. It is more consonant with what actually occurs in nature; seeks an end to every form of natural life; and upholds the dignity of each human person. It is so obvious an alternative to the Church's current stance that it is hard to imagine the forces of avoidance that have kept it so firmly at bay for so long.
— The New Republic, "Alone Again Naturally" (1994)
Both Jews and homosexuals appear in the hater's mind as small, cliquish, and very powerful groups, antipathetic to majority values, harboring secret contempt for the rest of society, and sustaining a ghetto code of secrecy and disguise. ... The loathing of each group is also closely linked to fear, and the fear is fanned, in many ways, by the distortion of a particular strain in Christian theology.
— Love Undetectable (1998), p. 19
I feel my own conscience getting closer and closer to making the same decision [of leaving the Catholic Church]. It tears me apart to see no prospect of the Catholic Church ending its war on gay people and their dignity in my lifetime.
— Daily Dish (2003)
In my view, the religious right amendment is both extreme - in that it bans any state from granting civil marriage rights to gays - and premature - in that the need for it on purely federalist grounds hasn't been in any way proven.
— Daily Dish (2004)
I think Frist is also implying that only churches grant true marriage and that the state subsequently merely ratifies or acknowledges that sacred institution. Huh? Cannot atheists have civil marriage and view it as a simple human contract and a mark of citizenship - with no religious connotations whatsoever? Does Frist even acknowledge the full civic rights of non-believers at all, I wonder? The fact that the good doctor cannot apparently see a deep distinction between a religious marriage and a civil one shows, I guess, how close to theocracy today's Republicans have become.
— Daily Dish (2003)
The new moralism has been enforced with a rigidity that puts old-style leftists to shame. It is an orthodoxy, to put it bluntly, of cultural and moral revolution: a wholesale assault on the beliefs and practices of an entire post-1960's settlement.
— The New York Times Magazine, "The Scolds" (1998)
That same order should, according to Neuhaus, apply today. For the theo-conservatives, the secular neutrality of modern American law and government is, in fact, no neutrality at all, but the willful imposition by liberal elites of what Neuhaus has dubbed ''secular monism.''
— The New York Times Magazine, "The Scolds" (1998)
This is graffiti on a sacred document. The founders of this country would be horrified.
— Daily Dish (2003)
And the case for public neutrality is—equally clearly—very different from that of social stability. I invoke both, because, simply, they are such powerful arguments in their own right as to be irresistible. But in so far as they do conflict, it is clear that my argument for public neutrality and private difference is the essential one; and that it is essentially liberal. ... The book, then, in many ways, is a profession of faith in liberal politics, for all its inherent contradictions.
— Virtually Normal (1995), p. 214
The second issue is whether his point about a "slippery slope" from non-procreative sex to incest to polygamy, and so on, is valid. Where do we draw the line in policing private sexual behavior? My golden rule in matters of limited government is an old and simple one. It is that people should be free to do within their own homes anything they want to, as long as it is consensual, adult and doesn't harm anyone else. Bigamy and polygamy are therefore irrelevant here. Bigamy means being married to more than one woman; polygamy, likewise, means being married to more than two women. [Emphasis his.]
— Daily Dish (2003)
Once you acknowledge the dignity of gays as a social class, once you have conceded that their private sexual and emotional lives cannot be reduced to a single sexual act, once you have made the law equal with respect to the private sex lives of heteros and homos, the logic of same-sex marriage becomes hard to resist ...
Equality under the law means something. And now, it inescapably means the right to marry - for all citizens and not just those with power.
— Daily Dish (2003)
Then came the punchline [of Hawaii]. The American constitution stipulates that every state has to give "full faith and credit" to the laws of every other state. So if marriage between two women is legal in Hawaii, it will have to be recognized everywhere else. Gay marriage will soon be the law of the land.
— Sunday Times, "US marriage maketh man" (1996)
If there is a question about the full faith and credit clause of the constitution, let the Supreme Court decide, as it alone can, the constitutionality of the matter.
— Testimony before the Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution (1996)
They're worried that if a state decides, even by legislative action, to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, then those couples will sue the federal government for federal benefits. As they should. That will then conflict with the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which the social right knew at the time and still knows is unconstitutional. So the Supreme Court, upholding states' rights to determine marriage and wary of a federal law that obviously singles out gay people for discrimination, will strike DOMA down. Then we essentially have same-sex marriage on a state and federal level.
— Daily Dish (2003)
If you merely want to stop one state's marriages being nationalized, you have the power already. It's called the Defense of Marriage Act, alongside the long established precedent of states being able not to recognize out of state marriages for public policy reasons.
— Daily Dish (2003)
No serious legal scholar thinks that one state can impose marriage rights on another, under current law. Despite disingenuous attempts to claim otherwise, the Full Faith and Credit Clause has never applied to marriages and still doesn't.
— Daily Dish (2003)
Robert George, a political philosopher at Princeton and chief intellectual guru of the Catholic right, laid out the case for banning all civil recognition of gay relationships in the federal Constitution last Friday. It's such a tenuous case - and requires unbounded paranoia with respect to courts and a disingenuous attempt to argue that the Full Faith and Credit Clause applies to civil marriages (it never has).
— Daily Dish (2003)
If all legal precedent fails, if DOMA is struck down, if one single civil marriage in Massachusetts is deemed valid in another state, without that other state's consent, I will support a federal constitutional amendment that would solely say that no state is required to recognize a civil marriage from another state.
— Daily Dish (2004)
I believe individual states should be able to decide for themselves. I believe that state courts - where marriage questions rightly belong - should also rule on a state-by-state basis.
— Daily Dish (2002)
First off: the entire premise of the piece - that marriage for gays is legal in Norway, Denmark and Sweden - is factually untrue. There are no marriage rights for gays in the countries he cites. There are, instead, what are called "registered partnerships." ...
These kinds of unsubstantiated correlations, slippery links and simple associations would be laughed out of a freshman social science class. Did no one edit this?
— Daily Dish (2004)
Yes, the Ontario Court ruling really is a big deal. And yes, it really does represent the first actual, living, breathing gay marriage. Holland and Denmark have legal gay partnerships almost indistinguishable from marriage. But the Canadian precedent is the actual thing; marriage; the same thing as hetersoexuals take for granted.
— Daily Dish (2003)
And today in Denmark and Sweden different compromises have been made that affect the meaning of marriage itself.
— Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con (1997), p. 4
Take Denmark, which has had such "registered partnerships" longer than any other country. During the first six years in which gay marriage was legal in Denmark, the rate of straight marriages went up by 10% and the rate of straight divorces went down by 12%.
— Sunday Times, "Marriage a la mode: a game for everyone" (2001)
In Denmark, where de facto gay marriage has existed for some time, the rate of marriage among gays is far lower than among straights, but, perhaps as a result, the gay divorce rate is just over one-fifth that of heterosexuals. And, during the first six years in which gay marriage was legal, scholar Darren Spedale has found, the rate of straight marriages rose 10 percent, and the rate of straight divorces decreased by 12 percent. In the only country where we have real data on the impact of gay marriage, the net result has clearly been a conservative one.
— The New Republic, "Unveiled" (2001)
Is this some sort of radical revolution? Will it lead, or has it led, to the dissolution of the family as we have historically known it? Many conservatives seem to think so and their worries should not be dismissed as bigotry or fustiness. The importance of the family in society is indisputable. But there is a far stronger case which says that far from undermining family life, giving support for solid relationships between two committed individuals who meet all the requirements of marriage bar the piece of paper strengthens the family.
— Sunday Times, "Marriage a la mode: a game for everyone" (2001)
[Virtually Normal's politics of homosexuality] allows homosexuals to define their own identity and does not place it in the hands of the other. It makes a clear, public statement of equality while leaving all of the inequalities of emotion and passion to the private sphere, where they belong.
— Virtually Normal (1995), p. 186
There is nothing in Virtually Normal which posits that certain ways of life are always and everywhere better for every gay man and lesbian. There is merely an argument that until the conditions of political and legal equality are met, gay and lesbian outsiderdom is not a cultural choice; it is making a virtue out of necessity.
— Virtually Normal (1995), p. 211
Our battle, after all, is not for political victory but for personal integrity.
— Virtually Normal (1995), p. 186-187
I came to revere sexuality not just because it was so long forbidden to me, but because I could not control or nurture it, or even fully own it. ...To give this up, even under the threat of death, would have been to give up being fully human.
— Love Undetectable (1998), p. 58
It is also true, however, that homosexual relationships, even in their current, somewhat eclectic form, may contain features that could nourish the broader society as well. ... The mutual nurturing and sexual expressiveness of many lesbian relationships, the solidity and space of many adult gay male relationships, are qualities sometimes lacking in more rote, heterosexual couplings. Same-sex unions often incorporate the virtues of friendship more effectively than traditional marriages; and at times, among gay male relationships the openness of the contract makes it more likely to survive than many heterosexual bonds. Some of this is unavailable to the male-female union: there is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman; and again, the lack of children gives gay couples greater freedom. Their failures entail fewer consequences for others. But something of the gay relationship's necessary honesty, its flexibility, and its equality could undoubtedly help strengthen and inform many heterosexual bonds.
— Virtually Normal (1995), p. 202
But in case my point is not clear enough, let me state it unequivocally so that it cannot be distorted in the future: it is my view that, in same-sex marriage, adultery should be as anathema as it is in heterosexual marriage.
— Virtually Normal (1995), p. 221
The timeless, necessary, procreative unity of a man and a woman is inherently denied homosexuals; and the way in which fatherhood transforms heterosexual men, and motherhood transforms heterosexual women, and parenthood transforms their relationship, is far less common among homosexuals than among heterosexuals.
— Virtually Normal, p. 196
But within this model [of marriage], there is plenty of scope for cultural difference. There is something baleful about the attempt of some gay conservatives to educate homosexuals and lesbians into an uncritical acceptance of a stifling model of heterosexual normality. The truth is, homosexuals are not entirely normal; and to flatten their varied and complicated lives into a single, moralistic model is to miss what is essential and exhilarating about their otherness.
— Virtually Normal, p. 203
There is something unique and miraculous about the connection between male-female sex and the creation of new life. Its connection to a marital structure in which that new life can be nurtured, protected, and elevated is also one that is obviously vital to defend.
— The New Republic, "Unnatural Law" (2003)
this is a classic civil rights issue and it's time to stop the mealy-mouthed talk about civil unions as some sort of option for homosexual citizens.
— Daily Dish (2002)
If coupling isn't the de facto meaning of that relationship, what else is? That's the living, breathing reality of civil marriage in America. Given that reality, how can civil marriage be denied gay couples? ... is it fair to deny one tiny group these benefits, simply as a means to promote an ideal that most heterosexuals don't live up to anyway?
— Daily Dish (2004)
The basic problem for the anti-gay marriage forces is that they are upholding a marital standard for gays that no one any longer upholds for straights. And this obvious inequality - recognized even by Scalia, for example - cannot withstand judicial scrutiny under any reasonable standard of equal treatment under the law. Thats why I think it's hyperbole to describe the Massachusetts court of judicial "activism." The argument of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was that gays couldn't marry because they couldn't procreate. Once it was obvious that this standard did not apply to heterosexuals, the court had no choice but to strike down the inequality. It was not a radical decision at all. It was an inescapable one. And that's why even a conservative court like Alaska's upheld it. And that's why you really do have to amend a state constitution to prevent its guarantees of equality from being applied to gay citizens.
— Daily Dish (2004)
For Kudlow, there is no distinction between private and public life - and immoral people have no right to have any privacy at all. "Judeo-Christian religions teach that marital fidelity and faithfulness are the building blocks of a civilization and society," Kudlow writes. "Without them, there can be no stability. This is not a trifling point. It is a major point. It's not merely that he covered up the affair, but that he had the affair." He goes on: "Flimsy distinctions between private and public behavior ignore all this and serve merely to muddy the waters of proper conduct. ..." Wow. Kudlow even looks kindly on a law in the District making adultery a crime. ... Give me an adulterer over an ayatollah any day.
— Daily Dish (2001)
When those in favor of traditional marriage start proposing measures that would infringe on heterosexual abuse of marital privileges, I'll take them seriously. Until then ...
— Daily Dish (2004)
Why can we not hold up marriage and committed loving relationships as the goal but not punish and stigmatize the non-conformists or those whose erotic needs and desires are more complex than the crude opposition to all non-marital and non-procreative sex allows.
— Daily Dish (2002)
And why, for that matter, can sexual expression only ever be legitimate within a single human relationship? What is so bad, after all, with mutual objectification? If both parties are willing and equal and adult, why is sexual pleasure--that isn't related to some ulterior social good--so wrong?
— TNR Online, "Natural Bias" (2003)
Gay men are certainly more sexually active with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay men can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the strains of monogamous marriage. But many also yearn for anchors for their relationships, for the structure and family support and financial security that come with marriage.
— Sunday Times, "Marriage a la mode: a game for everyone" (2001)
Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them).
— The New Republic, "Unveiled" (2001)
While I support civil marriage for homosexuals, and believe such marriage should be monogamous and will probably reduce sexual adventurism, I have never condemned other relationships, those who choose not to marry (which would include me), sex before marriage, and I have written positively about casual and even promiscuous sex.
— Daily Dish (2002)
Sexual experience, from the beginning, seemed to me almost a sacrament of human existence, a truly transforming experience in the adventure of being human; an insight into both what love may possibly be and what death almost certainly is. In the modern bourgeois world, it may even be the only avenue for true self-risk that is still available.
— Love Undetectable (1998), p. 57
Sex is messy and dangerous. But it's also one of the greatest and most exhilarating gifts our nature has given us - and free societies respect the freedom to explore it.
— Daily Dish (2003)
My argument for the moral neutrality of homosexuality, for example, for the moral good of some homosexual sexual activity, and for the moral evil of abusive sexual activity, whether gay or straight, is not based on pure blind emotion. It's not wish-fullfilment. It's an argument that the reduction of human sexuality to pure, heterosexual, procreative sex strikes me as excessively strict, given the not-so-terrifying moral dangers of other forms of human sexuality. It's an argument that other forms of sex - pre-marital, contracepted, same-sex, masturbatory - are not always the 'evils' the Church claims them to be - and indeed might be legitimate and humanizing ways to express sexual freedom.
— Daily Dish (2002)
It will take time and persuasion and argument and experience, but that's the genius of a federal system, a system Kurtz wants to upend. I want that slow federal process to take place. Kurtz wants to pre-empt it now by writing an anti-gay plank into the Constitution of the United States. He wants to prevent the process even starting. I think that's unconservative, anti-federal, extremist and deeply divisive. Which is as good a description of some elements of the far right (and the far left) in this country as you can find.
— Daily Dish (2002)
One of the unfounded scare tactics of the anti-gay right has been the notion that civil marriage rights for gays in any one state will automatically mean their exportation across the country. Constitutional scholars know this is extremely unlikely.
— Daily Dish (2002)
That's why this move is far less radical than some are suggesting - and why it wasn't crazy for the court to find no rational reason to maintain the exclusion. Sure, it would be a radical move in parts of the South, where gay families also exist, but do so in a climate of fear and hatred and widespread hostility. But that's the point of federalism, isn't it? It can be tried out in one state before it is tried out in another. The flip-side of leaving Mississippi alone is that we should also leave Massachusetts alone. Deal?
— Daily Dish (2003)
I don't believe people's basic civil rights should be up to a majority vote. That's why we have courts at all - to check majority tyranny. (When was the last time you heard a conservative worry about democratic tyranny?) I do believe in the process of debate, winning over the public, and doing this legislatively if at all possible - because it makes the reform more stable.
— Daily Dish (2004)
Slowly but surely, as courts are staffed with judges who reflect contemporary understanding, the restrictions [against homosexuals] have begun to collapse.
— Sunday Times, "Gay marriages could be a Tory vote-winner" (2003)
I imagined that I would want the anti-sodomy law to be struck down on the narrowest possible grounds, for several reasons: I'm a skeptic of judicial activism; I feared a backlash if the ruling was too sweeping; I felt more powder should be kept dry for the gay-marriage fight. ... I changed my mind. I changed it not because I got carried away with emotion (although I'd be a fool not to admit some). I changed my mind because Kennedy reminded me of something I already believed: that, as long as you acknowledge that gay people are human beings with no choice over their orientation, there can be no constitutional or moral defense of sodomy laws, period.
— The New Republic, "Citizens" (2003)
The text [of Goodridge] is well worth a good and thorough review. It shows, to my mind, how impossible it is that any reasonable court, given the existing rules for civil marriage, can deny one small group of citizens one of the "basic civil rights of man."
— Daily Dish (2003)
You could believe all those things and still think that individual states should decide for themselves on legal civil marriage and that this issue should be dealt with slowly and with democratic deliberation, rather than in one single, polarizing campaign for an amendment.
— Daily Dish (2003)
The only way the religious right will succeed with this radical step [i.e., the FMA] is by a hysterical and polarizing campaign.
— Daily Dish (2003)
A reader sends this piece of information in, which, to tell you the truth, shocks me. Maybe it's not true. But it seems to check out. Maybe other readers can help cast light on it. In 1866, America was in the middle of another, far deeper, conflagration in part over the role of a minority. The Vatican weighed in on the debate ...
Somehow, it comforts me to know that this inerrant institution, held up today as a moral arbiter, compromised on something as fundamental as human slavery. It makes dissent today easier.
— Daily Dish (2003)
It also appears that the 1866 limited defense of slavery was and is genuine.
— Daily Dish (2003)
The guarantee of minority freedom [from Neuhausian theocons], in other words, would be majority benevolence. It is perhaps unsurprising that when Neuhaus gathered a group of public thinkers and ministers to endorse a statement reflecting this orthodoxy, in October 1997, there were no Jews among the signers.
— The New York Times Magazine, "The Scolds" (1998)
But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own.
— Daily Dish (2004)
No homosexual child, surrounded overwhelmingly by heterosexuals, will feel at home in his sexual and emotional world, even in the most tolerant of cultures. And every homosexual child will learn the rituals of deceit, impersonation, and appearance. Anyone who believes political, social, or even cultural revolution will change this fundamentally is denying reality.
— Virtually Normal, p. 13
The author listed in the corner of the latest print edition cover of National Review (writing about Andrew Sullivan) has a familiar name:
Skimming the online version, I see the author apparently writes for this blog and Anchor Rising. Interesting development.
John Hawkins alerts readers to a new Andrew Sullivan award ripping Michelle Malkin:
One sentence; four cliche-ridden, playground insults. Can you beat it? Contestants can be nominated from either right or left; but the sentence must be entirely devised to insult; it should be completely devoid of originality; it must have at least two hoary, dead-as-a-Norwegian-parrot cliches; and it must assume that readers already agree with the writer. Arbitrary mean-spiritedness wins extra points.
Curiously, all of Hawkins's nominations are... Andrew Sullivan. I see no reason to break the pattern, but I think I've got a better quotation:
Nominations for the Malkin Award are now open.
It could be argued that there's only one dead-as-a-Dutch-conservative cliché in there, but I think Sullivan more than makes up the difference by the sort of playground insult in which he indulges. At least Michelle's comment is that of a brawler — put out there to be heard by those meant to be pricked. Sullivan's is of the playground snoot snickering behind the back of his hand.
ADDENDUM:
Well, just in case that one is disqualified, here's another one:
Flag-burning, fag-burning. Anything for a few votes.
It's surely an error resulting from the publishing process, but I couldn't help chuckling at the ending of the version of his latest Sunday Times piece that Andrew Sullivan has posted on his Web site:
These contradictions are not the exceptions. They are the American rule. And if you love this tortured and fascinating country, one more reason to be thankful it still exists.endit.
Or should that be chill-inducing? I suppose I'm inclined to give Sullivan the benefit of the doubt, because he's begun to make the lives of his busy critics much easier. He spends the first half of his piece talking about divorce in Red States and Blue States, especially Texas versus Massachusetts. I recently addressed aspects of this over on Anchor Rising, and both Stanley Kurtz and I addressed it when Sullivan tried the trick back in February. His latest piece doesn't appear to take our arguments into consideration.
As for that latest piece, there are some new instances of the same old trick, but I won't bother going through the motions. You know the game by now.
I've never been a huge fan of sports. Oh, I enjoy playing them, and I think their organization is an important aspect of the world that we create for children. It's the viewing — the fandom — that never appealed to me. One reason for my athletics apathy is that I tend to be a then-do-it type of guy; whether the "it" is music, Web design, or pole vaulting, enjoying somebody else's performance merely spurs me to my own. The flip side of that urge is a hesitance to critize when I lack the ability or aggregate information to do something or to make a relevant judgment.
Although I don't recall a specific instance, a general sense of folks without that hesitance has been with me since I was a boy. The image is of the bleachers-sitting fathers of Little Leaguers complaining about the coaching of their childrens' team — not so much citing observed shortcomings and offering considered remedies as cycling through a litany of general-theory can'ts and oughts (as well as bragging).
Apart from the dubious wisdom of their collected expertise, there's an element of case-specific ignorance that permeates such idle declarations. Has one of the fielders suffered an embarrassing injury that only his parents and coach know to take into account? Are there indications that playing the best and second-best players non-stop will cause the fifth through tenth–best players to quit? Is there some guiding principle that can't be revealed for practical reasons?
As is probably evident, this meandering post is not really about sports. Indeed, one of the reasons I think organized athletics are important for children is the degree to which they teach important lessons without being so self-defeatingly blunt as to spell them out. The particular lesson at hand applies to just about any aspect of society, but the area in which it has seemed most egregious, of late, is war.
Even granting some allowance for pundits' need to make it seem as if they know what they're talking about, a post by Andrew Sullivan leaves me shaking my head:
News flash: we need more troops in Iraq. Duh. The truth is: we needed far more from the very beginning - and this incremental increase, which reflects the enemy's tenacity as much as ours, is exactly the kind of mission creep we should always have avoided. I'm still dumbfounded by the political branch's refusal to acknowledge this before now, and the lame excuse that the only justification for more troops would be if the commanders demanded them. The level of troops - like the war in general - is far too important to be left to the military. Such decisions require political and strategic judgments that can only be made by the commander in chief.
To consolidate my response in a question: Why can't maintaining just the troop level that commanders request be a political and strategic judgment in itself? In its approach to exerting its military force around the world (nation building and all that), especially in Iraq, the U.S. is attempting to walk a line between two undesirable impressions, with the possibility of abandoning the cause altogether on one side and the possibility of absorbing other countries in an American empire on the other.
America's enemies have learned to leverage its fleeting political will to fight in distant lands, and people in the Middle East are famously sensitive to rhetoric about a Modern Crusade. It seems to my far-from-expert eye that one way to accomplish the necessary political balance between these two realities is to keep troop levels reasonably close to articulable need and not to hesitate to send them when the need is articulated. The Washington Post piece to which Sullivan links begins thus:
Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq say it is increasingly likely they will need a further increase in combat forces to put down remaining areas of resistance in the country.
Now that a major enemy stronghold has been taken, broader forces are becoming necessary. Discerning a CYA subtext, here, doesn't strike me as required. I don't ask this with an implied answer, but what would additional troops have done in the meantime? Among whatever tasks they could have accomplished, they would certainly have served as additional targets for insurgents who still had a place of retreat. They also would have enhanced the power of anti-imperialist rhetoric. One thing they wouldn't have been doing is contributing to the impression — mostly important to the President's global strategy — that we are not currently overextended. Another thing they wouldn't have been doing is spending time with family — or at least resting in the execution of lighter duty.
I guess I just don't understand how it can be called "mission creep" to send American men and women into the battle zone only when they are needed for a specific purpose. Mission creep occurs when a group starts undertaking tasks that aren't obviously related to its objective, and the circumstances that foster it often involve idle hands.
That the coach is not adhering to the game plan of any given bystander is not evidence that he doesn't have one. Giving commanders only as many boots on the ground as they know what to do with is not, as Sullivan insists, "passivity." (Even less passive is the implied preference for keeping levels to a minimum.)
Phrases, spoken with puzzling authority, such as Sullivan's that troop level "is far too important to be left to the military" may sound shrewd to those hanging over the chain-linked fence by third base. But it's curious that so many on the sidelines don't seem to understand that Sullivan's next sentence applies to them, as well: "Such decisions require political and strategic judgments that can only be made by the commander in chief."
Advocates of same-sex marriage have a thin beam on which to balance. On one hand, they have to argue in such a way as to leave the path through the courts — the only currently viable route for their cause — both practically and rhetorically open. On the other hand, they have to allay fears of precisely that path in order to prevent the courts from being restrained. This makes for some stunning reversals.
For the case in point, begin with Allan Carlson's Family Research Council piece on the link between marriage and procreation. Carlson traces the connection, historically, back to the days of the Roman Empire's decline; theologically, he traces it through the New Testament back into the very foundation of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. He then examines the factors that have contributed to its decline and offers some strategies for reinvigorating it. How do you suppose somebody like, say, Andrew Sullivan might respond to such a piece?
Well, as it happens, Sullivan responded by making the case for the Federal Marriage Amendment (emphasis Sullivan's):
The basic problem for the anti-gay marriage forces is that they are upholding a marital standard for gays that no one any longer upholds for straights. And this obvious inequality - recognized even by Scalia, for example - cannot withstand judicial scrutiny under any reasonable standard of equal treatment under the law. Thats why I think it's hyperbole to describe the Massachusetts court of judicial "activism." The argument of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was that gays couldn't marry because they couldn't procreate. Once it was obvious that this standard did not apply to heterosexuals, the court had no choice but to strike down the inequality. It was not a radical decision at all. It was an inescapable one.
Before I address the larger gap in Sullivan's thinking, I should note that my disagreement about the decision's inescapability highlights a more limited gap. When Carlson suggests that it is no longer possible to "defend the purpose of marriage as procreation... in the current constitutional climate," it is a practical, strategic judgment of the judiciary's disposition: "Mere words—even of a new amendment—are unlikely to contain these 'penumbras' and 'emanations.'"
In that skeptical paragraph, Carlson is addressing "the right of privacy" — the more fundamental detriment to the linkage of marriage and procreation. He makes it clear that an FMA remains one of the "ways in which firewalls could be built around the already battered institution of marriage." I would argue (and have) that the FMA would merely force the Supreme Court to acknowledge the firewall already in existence, one on which every previous loosening of the marital norm has been contingent.
In short, it isn't true that the procreative standard is not regulated within the law: the definition of marriage itself applies it. That the standard is not more strictly and explicitly regulated is only evidence of the degree to which all of the lawmakers and judicial precedent-setters believed it to be inherent. (Does anybody doubt that the oversight would have been swiftly remedied had our forebears had any inkling of our present circumstances?)
Here enters the larger gap in Sullivan's rhetoric. It simply isn't the case that "no one any longer upholds [the procreative marital standard] for straights" — unless by "no one" you mean "no judges" or (to be debatementally generous) "the law." Whether or not the average man or woman on the street would think to hammer it into words, the standard is still upheld firmly on a cultural level. In a manner of phrasing it, the possibility of this disconnect between law and culture is exactly why our representative branches are the ones that are supposed to write the law — exactly why so many judicial rulings, including Goodridge, are correctly derided as "activistic."
So, despite my expectation of disagreement when I began reading Sullivan's post at the urging of an emailer, I find that he and I are of like mind: an amendment to the Constitution is necessary if the citizens of the United States of America want the law's definition of marriage to accord with the culture's definition, and not the other way around. Oh, he'll insist that those citizens only "have to amend a state constitution," but if the decision of Massachusetts' high court was "inescapable," it is a thin ruse to insist that the same would not be true for the nation's high court.
I suffer from no delusion that advocates for same-sex marriage will allow the public's choices to remain so clear. Nonetheless, it is pleasant to bask in this little bit of light, particularly following an election day on which the people of eleven more states confirmed their willingness to write marital truths into the law.
Of all the manifold ways in which worldviews diverge over the perennial issue of same-sex marriage, one of the most irksome is actually relatively minor, in the grand scheme of things. Not surprisingly, the elections' outcome provoked an example from Andrew Sullivan:
A lot of gay people are devastated this morning, and terrified. We have seen, and not for the first time, how using fear of a minority can be so effective a tool in building a political movement. The single most important issue for Republican voters, according to exit polls, was not the war on terror or Iraq or the economy. It was "moral values." Karl Rove understood the American psyche better than I did. By demonizing gay couples, the Republicans were able to bring in whole swathes of new anti-gay believers into their party.
A trend that has been escalating for about a decade reached a fevered peak this year: After hints in Hawaii and Vermont (and, once-removed, Canada), the Massachusetts judiciary introduced into American law the concept of a same-sex marriage. Thereafter, civil servants around the country flaunted the law in an attempt to make legal recognition of such relationships an "in hand" right. In short, the courts, the town halls, and the activists who prodded them gave Americans a straightforward choice: vote on this issue, or we'll take away your opportunity. Well, Americans have started voting — not out of cynicism and aggression, but in defense of deeply held principles.
Indeed, it's somewhat telling that Sullivan and others place homosexuality so prominently in the range of "moral values." True, there were direct votes to be cast on that one issue, but what might have been the results had partial-birth abortion or cloning been available for direct comment via ballot? I'm not entirely sure, but I would hope that Sullivan's crowd could have explained the victory of "moral values" in terms other than hatred for women and sick people. By what calculus is such a large percentage of the population corralled as bigots and extremists when it comes to marriage?
Those who've read Sullivan for a while know the answer: he's back to leaping for the reasonableness turf:
But the intensity of the [traditionalist] passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful. Our safety valve must be federalism. We have to live and let live. As blue states become more secular, and red states become less so, the only alternative to a national religious war is to allow different states to pursue different options.
Just about a year ago, back before President Bush voiced support for a Federal Marriage Amendment, Sullivan expressed these same sentiments:
The flip-side of leaving Mississippi alone is that we should also leave Massachusetts alone.
The catch is, of course, that Sullivan's less-politic allies aren't going to leave Mississippi alone. So, while I agree with him, in disconnected theory, that the "passage of so many anti-gay amendments in so many states reduces the need, by any rational measure, for a federal amendment," the most conciliatory response that it is rational to make is: We'll see. The political fortunes of the FMA are more closely linked to "the inherently totalist nature" of homosexual activists than to those American Christians who actually represent the extreme that Sullivan expands so ridiculously.
PROEM:
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As one might expect from a thinker uber alles, Ramesh Ponnuru takes a circumspect approach to Andrew Sullivan's reasons for coming out for Kerry. He disagrees with Sullivan, to be sure, suggesting that a better way to spur Democrats toward adopting the War on Terror as their own would be to defeat them, this year, and hope that they put up a more palatable candidate next time around. But then he adds a paragraph on behalf of single-issue voters:
A number of critics have raised the question whether Sullivan is being a "one-issue voter," who is letting his strong opposition to the FMA determine his positions on other issues. He denies it. Perhaps the same-sex marriage debate has colored his view of Bush and Kerry: Can any of us really say with 100 percent confidence why we believe all the things we do? To be Breyer-like for a moment: I can't say with 100 percent confidence that I wouldn't cut Kerry more slack in other areas if he were pro-life.
I'll frankly confess that I've had isolated moments when the ebbs and flows of the political year have made me wonder whether I could support President Bush if he were more Arnold Schwarzenegger than Mel Gibson. But in the final analysis, Ponnuru's appeal to the natural tendency to struggle in our own measuring of issues overlooks four decisive points in the case of Sullivan and Kerry.
First is the naked transparency of the whole thing. Andrew Sullivan is — or was — a formidable political analyst. How is it, then, that he can swallow the huge pill of Kerry's campaign-year rhetoric about strength in the War on Terror, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, and still know to wink at Kerry's campaign-year rhetoric about his same-sex marriage position's being "the same as" President Bush's?
We need only look to Sullivan's record for illustration of how he swallows the "reporting for duty" nonsense. Allow me to quote an "outrageous argument" from March 1 that, based purely on his sudden anti-Bush (and anti-Mel) turn, I predicted that Sullivan would make:
A lot of the initial gutsy moves required to kick off the War on Terror have already been made. Once in office, Kerry wouldn't pull back on that progress, and what we need now is a President who will refocus international cooperation toward the group effort of the more-subtle work that lays ahead.
Before March was over, I'd traced that argument on Sullivan's part here and here. Now, here's a bit of Sullivan's recent New Republic piece:
Bush's comparative advantage--the ability to pull the trigger when others might balk--will be largely irrelevant. That doesn't mean it hasn't come in handy. Without Bush, Saddam would still be in power. But just because the president was suited to fight the war for the last four years doesn't mean he is suited to succeed at the more complicated and nuanced tasks of the next four.
My second point in response to Ponnuru relates to the first: if President Bush had changed his tune to support, say, abortion on demand, while Kerry was less so, I'm confident that both Ramesh and I would more honestly incorporate that consideration in our expressed reasoning. It isn't difficult to imagine making the argument that, as necessary as the War on Terror might be, it is more important that Western society be worth saving. It is the degree to which Sullivan has endeavored to make the War on Terror issue a plus for Kerry, rather than an unfortunate side effect that grates. Which relates to:
Third, Sullivan was never ambivalent about the War on Terror, or even about the Battle of Iraq. Indeed, the TNR piece is evidence that he still is not. But that's what makes the underlying single-issue-voter mentality that some perceive so objectionable. If one believes that the entire WoT argument on Kerry's behalf is contrived — and poorly, at that — then Sullivan is palpably risking catastrophic failure on a matter of life and death for the sake of the mere prospect of an obstacle in his rush for same-sex marriage.
For the final point, I'll return to Ponnuru's hypothetical shift in Kerry's platform. The fact of the matter is that the Democrats generally, and Kerry specifically, incorporate both the pro-abortion and anti-war perspectives. One can argue that this reality is merely a result of circumstances and how each party has coalesced, or one can sense that there's an underlying worldview that merges the two stands. I lean toward the latter. It is impossible to imagine one's reaction to a pro-life/anti-war Democrat presidential candidate, because it is impossible to imagine a pro-life Democrat of any sort becoming a presidential candidate. There is something that ties its devotion to abortion with the party's approach to foreign affairs.
For his part, Sullivan has a career invested in falling in a midway niche — as a conservatively inclined libertine. In that context, most of those who've been critical of Sullivan have been so not because he's a "single-issue voter," but because they feel that they've seen which aspect of his personality, when push comes to shove, rules over the other. When he finds he must lie down with one of two groups that he finds undesirable, which does he choose?
We all know now. And so dramatically was it revealed that one wonders whether it was ever a struggle, really. Conservatives certainly ought to be suspicious of Sullivan's attempts to drag an issue of remaining agreement with him as he wriggles away.
ADDENDUM:
Well, I see Mr. Sullivan has kudized me with his first-ever (direct) link to Dust in the Light. I won't reply at length, because we seem to be largely in agreement except where agreement is impossible. Writes Sullivan, "This notion that writers somehow exist in a purely rational world outside of human emotion, passion, sensibility and bias is a silly one." Exactly.
"Well, the great thing about a blog is that if you really care that much, you can see all the evidence splayed out in front of you." Yup, and as it happens, I've read Sullivan's writing on same-sex marriage (and related topics) from the past fifteen years carefully and with a reasonable degree of thoroughness. He may disagree with my conclusion, but I hold it honestly and derived it fairly. In fact, when I finished reading his book Love Undetectable — which I continue to recommend highly to anybody interested in him or issues around homosexuality — I questioned whether the thesis with which I'd begun wasn't uncharitable and wrong.
Going back through his blog archives, however, renewed my conviction, perhaps for the very reason that Sullivan now notes:
And the point of a blog like this is not to persuade everyone I'm right; but simply to show how one person can grapple with a variety of factors - personal, intellectual, historical, political - in coming to a simple conclusion.
Leaving aside the question of the Daily Dish's "point," Sullivan's plea skirts an important distinction. The piece in support of Kerry wasn't on the blog; it was on TNR. And my central complaint is that many of those who "really care that much" about his formative grappling see underlying agendas that aren't clearly acknowledged, either on the blog or in more polished pieces.
I've got Mr. Mom duty on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the time being, and either today or yesterday (sorry... blur), my heading-toward-three year old and I were watching Sesame Street. Thereon, Ernie wanted to play "the opposite game," but Burt protested that, every time he actually agreed to play a game with his roommate, said roommate called it quits and walked away.
Well, wonder of wonders, after Ernie had goaded Burt into declaring "Okay, I'll play!" by interrupting with the opposite of everything he said, the instigator was stumped. "Play?" said Ernie. "Gee, I can't think of an opposite for 'play.' Guess the game is over."
That's a clichéd interaction, in comedy, but it came to mind, today, after my wife relieved me of Mr. Mom duties, and I zipped through my Internet rounds. "I've got a new game," said Andrew Sullivan. "I'll make a ridiculous, translucent argument for my John Kerry vote, and the rest of you can treat it as if it isn't the nakedly contrived product of nearly a year of self-spin."
Perhaps the best line from a responding Burt came from John Hawkins — who, realizing that some people still take Sullivan seriously, offered readers a considered rebuttal:
[Putting John Kerry in office to fight terrorism is] like taking a gazelle, putting it into a cage where the only food is small animals, and expecting it to turn into a carnivore because meat is the only thing it has to eat.
Lileks is good, too, of course, with his rant being broadly applicable to a great deal of Democrat spin:
And let us shed a tear for those who believed it was necessary after 9/11 to knock off Saddam and establish a beachhead in the region 'twixt Iran and Syria, but later ran away shrieking like freshly skinned rabbits because it had somehow, by some odd turn of events, turned into a partisan affair. What scared them off? Who knows? Just happened, I guess. Somewhere between the brutal Afghan winter, the interminable quagmire of the operational pause en route to Baghdad — all 72 hours of it — and the devastating supposition that the turkey Bush presented on Thanksgiving may not have been the actual fowl consumed by the troops, we realized that the war was all failure and lies and failed lies about lying failures, and we can’t do anything and the Plan was wrong and Mission Accomplished, yeah right. Oh, and We Support the Troops.
Here's Andrew Sullivan on Bush's recent comments in support of civil unions:
Who knows what to make of George W. Bush's statement today that he now favors civil unions for gay couples--although his party platform is against them. For what it's worth, I tend to think this is his real position, rather than a belated realization that his extremism on this matter has cost him many votes. But if it is his real position, why didn't he say so before? And how can he support the FMA which specifically bars the "incidents of marriage" for gay couples? President speak in forked tongue.
You know, I'm really beginning to rethink my belief that Andrew Sullivan is a conniving activist; he may very well have convinced himself right into delusion. That part about "a belated realization that his extremism on this matter has cost him many votes" is almost too much to take. Sullivan has personally done everything he possibly could, over the past couple of years, to paint everything having to do with preserving traditional marriage in Fundamentalist Red, and now he has the gall — the gall — continue behaving as if there is no dispute about what the FMA will do, let alone as if he isn't on the wrong side of the analysis.
In fact, I was inclined to allocate some blame to Sullivan's historically obscuring rhetoric for the fact that Michael Totten, writing on Instapundit, would declare Bush's statement a flip-flop. Totten subsequently updated with a link to Eugene Volokh's explanation of why he's wrong, but it is only through the deliberate avoidance of the discussion by folks such as Sullivan that people wouldn't at least know that another side exists. Here's one version, from February, of my explanation about why "incidents of marriage" won't prevent the creation of civil unions (see also here, here, here, and multiple other posts on this blog for more):
So, a legislature could pass a law giving a $10,000 down-payment gift to married couples. It could pass another law giving a $10,000 down-payment gift to civil-unioned couples. Yet, the judiciary could not introduce that same policy arbitrarily, and if it somehow found a right to $10,000 written into the constitution, it's extremely difficult to see why it would be limited to married people, or civil unions, or groups of people, or what have you.In this example, the FMA would restrict both the legislature and the judiciary from expanding that $10,000 marital perk to others on the basis of its being a marital perk. In the amendment's language, the fact that married couples are currently entitled to the money, of itself, cannot be construed to require that other couples or groups are similarly entitled. But a legislature, by its nature, isn't limited to discerning what the law requires or restricted from setting up parallel perks; a judiciary, by its nature, is.
These arguments have been around for years. I know: I've been one of the people making them for that long. If you haven't heard them — particularly if you've paid as much attention to the issue as Andrew Sullivan has — it's because you haven't been listening.
It's of dubious sagacity to take anything Andrew Sullivan writes as being more sincere than an activist's rhetoric. However, something that he wrote about the name-drop heard 'round the world raises an interesting point:
In many speeches on marriage rights, I cite Mary Cheney. Why? Because it exposes the rank hypocrisy of people like president Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney who don't believe gays are anti-family demons but want to win the votes of people who do. I'm not outing any gay person. I'm outing the double standards of straight ones.
Note the false dilemma: one must either support same-sex marriage, or one must believe that "gays are anti-family demons." With a single logical fallacy, Sullivan sweeps away any possibility that a person can have principled reasons for taking the President's position on the issue. Swept away, too, must be any comprehensible description of the Christian "respect for the person" approach.
There's simply no use engaging such people as Sullivan in discussion — which, I increasingly suspect, is sort of the point of what they're doing.
Right at the outset, let me say that I respect Noah Millman's thinking and writing. When I manage to read his blog, I find him always thoughtful and usually correct. Still, a recent post of his, arguing that "the fight to prohibit the redefinition of marriage as a unisex institution is deeply hypocritical," falls in the category of rhetoric that many conservatives find sufficiently persuasive to let a difficult practical decision loiter unto irrelevance.
To speak b