[I actually had this post mostly written before I fell ill … which shows you how quickly the flu hit, as it was still waiting at my computer for me to return to it.]
Leguru points to an article by Jonathan Rauch about how genie of gay relationships in society is out of the bottle, and will never be pushed back in. This, in turn, is causing the Right nothing but trouble, as they are faced with a choice between either accepting it, or trying (to mix my metaphors) to command the tide to turn back.
Conservatives have a decision to make. They can continue pretending that the bond between Mike and Bill does not exist, is of no social value, or has no place on conservatives’ agenda. Doing so would be of a piece with their retreat to economic Hooverism, their embrace of cultural Palinism, and, in general, their preference for purity over relevance.
Or they can acknowledge what to most of the country is already obvious: Whether the nation finally settles on marriage or on something else for gay couples, Bill and Mike are now in the mainstream and the Republican Party is not. If cultural conservatism continues to treat same-sex couples as outside the social covenant, the currents of history will flow right around it, and future generations of conservatives will wonder how their predecessors could ever have made such a callous and politically costly mistake.
The Mike and Bill being referenced are Rauch’s cousin, Bill, and his partner of 30 years, Mike. The tale of Bill’s hospitalization and Mike’s struggle to exercise the medical power of attorney he held for Bill is nothing new — it’s a story that’s happened over and over again, putting lie to the idea that, well, if we must tolerate gay couples, they can get everything they want from through legal contracts. What’s of more note is the dedication, the “drop my life and care for my beloved” attitude and actions that Mike shows — which put like to this:
“Here’s the key principle,” Peter Sprigg, a gay-marriage opponent with the Family Research Council, said in an April radio interview on Southern California’s KCRW. “Society gives benefits to marriage because marriage gives benefits to society. And therefore the burden of proof has to be on the advocates of same-sex marriage to demonstrate that homosexual relationships benefit society. Not just benefit the individuals who participate but benefit society in the same way and to the same degree that heterosexual marriage does. And that’s a burden that I don’t think they can meet.”
The benefit demonstrated in this case was that, without Mike’s dedication, his willingness to do whatever it took to get Bill back to health, Bill would be dead. We’d usually call the saving of a human life a benefit in most books.
But when it comes to Mike and Bill being able to get married, to have a formal, legal recognition of the reality of their lives, the Right has nothing.
If gay couples can’t be allowed to marry, what should they be able to do? Asked this question, cultural conservatives say, in the words of Tom Lehrer’s song about the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, “That’s not my department.” Effectively, conservatives are saying that what Mike and Bill do for each other has no significance outside their own bedroom.
The irony here is that’s a variation on the original libertarian argument used for gay rights in many circles: what two consenting adults do in their bedroom is of no concern to the rest of the world. That remains true, but the trap it’s set for many, especially concervatives, is that it defines gay relationships based on sex, not on being relationships. It focuses on the difference in plumbing and not on what those relationships mean outside of the bedroom.
What happened in that hospital in Philadelphia for those six weeks was not just Mike and Bill’s business, a fact that is self-evident to any reasonable human being who hears the story. “Mike was making a medical decision at least once a day that would have serious consequences,” Bill told me. Who but a life partner would or could have done that? Who but a life partner will drop everything to provide constant care? Bill’s mother told me that if not for Mike, her son would have died. Faced with this reality, what kind of person, morally, simply turns away and offers silence?
Spokespeople for the Right, evidently, who can only see gay relationships as being about sex, as if they are somehow different from straight relationships. Don’t get me wrong — sex is an important part of my relationship with my wife, but what we do and are, and what we contribute to each other, our family, our society, is much, much greater than what goes on in our bedroom.
(And, yes, there are gay people who engage in sex for the sake of sex, without any intention or apparent desire for a relationship. Remarkably enough, there are straight people who do the same.)
The phrase “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” might have once been a bold taunt, but to an increasing proportion of the population, it’s taken as a given. We are used to it. There are miles yet to go — the Civil Rights Act (let alone the 14th Amendment) didn’t mean that Blacks showed up in Prime Time TV as interchangeable with Whites.
But cultural momentum is definitely pointed in acceptance of gay relationships as not much different from inter-racial or inter-religious relationships — something once taboo, then “well, it’s okay, but think of the children,” to “oh, that’s interesting” to “really, I hadn’t thought about it that way.” The GOP and the Right can pretend to ignore it, and elements of the fringe can continue to deplore it and other social progress, but being the party of “No” in the gay relationship debate is a losing battle, and all persisting at it will do is increase their growing irrelevancy.