Seat me with the prophets rather than the counsellors

One northeastern US Waldoreader, who, inexplicably, keeps reading months after deciding she hates what I write and that she can deduce from my writing that I'm a dissolute insomniac misanthrope who imagines myself much smarter than I in fact am, finds my "hobbyhorse" issue, same-sex marriage, especially grating.

It's just one hobbyhorse, actually. I have a mental carousel of them.

But I go on about it because MSM coverage is so shallow, and discussion of it in the political sphere and the chatterati veers between extremes of fear, ignorance and disingenuousness. The default position among conservatives has become the circular argument, it's nothing personal, it just can't be done because it hasn't been done.

Here's an example from National Review Online:

Friday, August 15, 2008

"divorced, stigmatized and barred any legal protections" [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Andrew Sullivan says that's how I want gays in America to live. No, I just want to protect the institution of marriage — which is between a man and a woman. That doesn't necessitate marginalizing or making second-class citizens of anyone. It's protecting the integrity of what marriage is.

I know we disagree and that doesn't delight me in any way. But marriage between man and woman, raising children is at the heart of civilization. And we're in danger of losing it. That can't be. Redefining it would be the wrong direction.

Here's Sullivan's response, which conveys my views much more articulately than I can, being a Bear of Little Brain:

Time for a fisking:

"Divorced, stigmatized and barred any legal protections." Andrew Sullivan says that's how I want gays in America to live. No, I just want to protect the institution of marriage — which is between a man and a woman.

The Federal Marriage Amendment for which K-Lo campaigned would render my civil marriage null and void. It would also explicitly remove any legal protections even under the rubric of "civil unions" that would provide me and my husband security. It would give people other than my spouse legal claims on my property were I to die or be rendered in some way incompetent. It would effectively divorce us. This is not factually in dispute. And if K-Lo supports equal treatment for gay couples under the rubric of civil unions, I'd be happy to discover that. But that is the only way she can argue that she is not, in fact, insisting that gay couples be stripped of defensible rights and stigmatized under the law.

K-Lo even supported Virginia's Marriage Amendment which claims to bar even private legal arrangement between gay spouses. The removal of all these rights and responsibilities, by the way, in no way "protects" marriage for straight people: their rights are guaranteed regardless, and I am an enthusiast for those rights and for those families. I came from one, after all.

That doesn't necessitate marginalizing or making second-class citizens of anyone.

I'm afraid it does, unless all gay people disappear off the face of the earth.

It's protecting the integrity of what marriage is.

This is a tautology.

I know we disagree and that doesn't delight me in any way. But marriage between man and woman, raising children is at the heart of civilization. And we're in danger of losing it. That can't be.

We're not in danger of losing it in any way - and never will. Such heterosexual unions will remain and should remain at the heart of civilization, and heterosexual desire is hardly likely to evaporate because society is inclusive of all people, and not just the overwhelming majority. Moreover civil marriage already allows people to commit to one another without reproducing and no one seems to believe that marriage needs to be protected from this. So why the double standard for infertile or non-reproducing straights and gays - unless the point is purely to stigmatize homosexuality?

Redefining it would be the wrong direction.

We are not redefining it. We are making it available for the tiny minority of human beings and citizens who otherwise have no secure legal or social protection for their relationships.

I'm sure K-Lo doesn't mean to hurt gays and in her own mind doesn't believe that stripping me of basic rights in my relationship renders me second class. But it does, and her feelings about this are irrelevant compared with the facts. Under her vision of society, my husband and I are denied the basic rights granted to every heterosexual. Under my vision, we all have the same rights; and gay people can and should celebrate the families of straight people, do all they can to support parenting, while straight people can do the same for their gay siblings, offspring and friends.

Her vision necessitates marginalization and second class citizenship. And she and others on her side of the debate need to acknowledge it as such and own it.

Exactly.

When I box the rhetorical ears of politicians and members of the commentariat on the issues, it's over this new-fangled, shrug the shoulders, upend the palms, 'what-can'-I-do' position they hide behind. They're the Donald Rumsfelds of social policy: "Stuff happens."

I've always preferred an open, honest opponent to a fairweather ally. I don't much care for the cheerful homophobia of people like Albert Mohler, Ken Hutcherson, Phyllis Schlaffly, Alan Keyes, Patrick Buchanan, Jesse Helms, Donald Wildmon, and the like, but they are at least willing to step right up and say it out loud.

"Ideas have consequences." One flavor of right-wingery loves that quotation from Richard Weaver. That's how people who don't believe in full equality ought to argue. But there's streaks of Libertarians, most of the Republican Party, a chunk of the Naderlite uberleft (who with their leader, abjure 'gonadal politics'), and most of the Paulines, all of whom share a bromidal commitment to 'Liberty,' which, when you press them on it, ends up being Liberty for people like them. It's nothing personal. The Bible leaves them no choice. Or, in the case of Ron Paul and the GOP originalists, the Constitution.

But it's nothing personal.