Tuesday, March 30

A Long Post - In Drew's latest column in The New Republic, he attempts to fisk a recent WSJ piece by iconoclastic black author Shelby Steele, who takes a skeptical view of comparisons between the fight for same-sex marriage and the black stuggle for equality. Steele argues:

But gay marriage is simply not a civil rights issue. It is not a struggle for freedom. It is a struggle of already free people for complete social acceptance and the sense of normalcy that follows thereof -- a struggle for the eradication of the homosexual stigma. Marriage is a goal because, once open to gays, it would establish the fundamental innocuousness of homosexuality itself. Marriage can say like nothing else that sexual orientation is an utterly neutral human characteristic, like eye-color. Thus, it can go far in diffusing the homosexual stigma.

Frankly, I think Steele is exactly right. Government sanction indisputably tells us -- once and for all -- we're normal, we're okay, we're the same as everyone else. (Leave aside for now the politicized question of whether the goal of normalcy is appropriate.) It is precisely for this reason that mainstream American (and not just the bigot brigade) hesitates on the threshhold of granting such recognition. I think many are beginning to see civil unions -- a "separate but equal" categorization -- as the legal choice best reflecting their ambivalence about us. The comfort level just isn't there when it comes to homosexuality, and thus marriage is a step too far.

Drew claims "Marriage rights for homosexuals have not been dressed up as a civil rights issue as a means to sell them to the broader public." That probably true: they've been dressed up that way to convince the judiciary, and to great effect. The public by and large remains unpersuaded, though the conversation continues. Not that it's been bad strategy: Grumblings about activist judges aside, I would argue that American society is willing to let itself be coaxed into doing the right thing by cultural elites, even if they want to take their time getting there.

Setting aside the civil rights analogy, Steele sets out into revolutionary territory. He delineates how, unlike the races, the "two sexual orientations are profoundly -- not innocuously -- different." Understanding marriage to be primarily about procreation and child raising, he proposes that "gays can never be more than pretenders to an institution so utterly grounded" in such activities. Steele actually means this benignly. He proposes enshrining the "separate but equal" nature of our relationships though civil unions, thereby allowing gays to forego "mimickry" of marriage in favor of a "quiet self-acceptance" that would "lead the way to authentic institutions" of our own.

It's easy to slam such notions as Uncle Tom-ism, and Drew doesn't hold back. But I think he fails to engage Steele on the basic connundrum of gay normalcy and gay institutions. First, in the journey from a straight upbringing to adult self-acceptance, every gay person endures a degree of estrangement from his or her own family unlike anything other minorities experience. This has long been a motif in Drew's writings:

Most blacks grow up in black families. Most blacks spend their most formative years in black culture; almost all gays grow up in straight culture. ... [H]omosexuals live in a world in which integration -- at least until adulthood -- is universal. The innocuousness of their difference--the difference between them and their straight siblings and straight parents -- is clear in the early years. It is only when gays leave their parental homes that they look back and see the locks changed and the doors bolted against them. Enforcing segregation against people already separate is noxious enough. Enforcing it against people who have grown up in integrated homes is to wrench human beings into an emotional and social ghetto that is as toxic as it is unnecessary.

For Sullivan, same-sex marriage is the magic cure for this deep-seated emotional trauma. Steele would retort that self-acceptance is more important than how society treats you. For many of us, our own self-acceptance has taught our families how to love us. Sullivan, however, believes that process can be only partly successful without inclusion in society's most important institution. Here he implicitly raises the second half of the connundrum -- that of gay institutions. Unlike black churches and other ethnic communities, gay institutions will forever be foreign to the next generation of young gays. Sure, we find our way to them and work hard to make them familiar, but integrating them into our lives is always going to be challenge, generation after generation.

The better argument, then, against Steele's utopian vision of proud homosexual uniqueness is that it does nothing to address the basic need to heal the rift between gays and their families. Because every generation of gay kids is forced to build itself up to self-acceptance, the notion that they can ever feel completely comfortable in institutions created by their unrelated predecessors is useless. Sullivan's implicit argument is that getting married, for gays, is all about coming home again. And he may be right to worry that journey can't ever be fully achieved through the alien vehicle of civil unions.