Daniel Harris: Daniel Harris is an essayist and the author of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture.
Abstract:
This book is a wonderful example of the conservative efforts of gay activists such as Andrew Sullivan to dissolve the traditionalist view of marriage and reclaim the institution for the gay and lesbian community. The book divides the debate into sections, political or religious, and then presents compelling arguments from both sides. He takes us to the house floor for the defense of marriage act debate, walks the reader through the Hawaii court case and its repercussions, and even includes original works of poetry giving the personal prospective on the marriage experience.
The book is well edited, including original court cases, and boldly offering specific texts countering the arguments of Sullivan himself. Though the book ends abruptly and on a negative argument, clearly Sullivan orders the book so as to present arguments against same sex unions and then unravel those arguments until they no longer hold. As a sympathetic reader I was constantly made to question my reasoning for siding with the author and then reaffirmed in my faith through reason and logic. The book is a must read for anyone who wishes to get all of the facts and reigning arguments for a debate that can be most aptly called the civil rights war of the new millennium.
Review:
For those baby boomers most influenced by feminism and the Sexual Revolution, the issue of gay marriage — of “Eve versus Steve,” as the evangelical Right chooses to frame the debate — is as significant as the controversies that swirl around the hotly contested issue of whether one should be allowed to attend one's high school prom with a date of the same sex. Like the prom, gay marriage seems to us a simple matter of a basic civil right but not something we can get terribly excited about, having watched too many relationships founder on the rocks, with once doting spouses brawling in the divorce courts, haggling over every stick of furniture, pot holder, and place mat, taking each other to the cleaners and sparring cynically over the fate of the children.
For us, gay marriage is like a lunch counter where homosexuals aren't allowed to dine and where we therefore fully intend to stage a lengthy sit-in, to park ourselves down right beneath the noses of the exasperated waitresses until they pull their pencils from behind their ears and take our orders. And yet please don't mistake our eagerness to sit at this counter as a sign that we like the food. Please don't insist that we see this fast-food joint as a four-star restaurant that merits our unqualified respect.
Conservative gay commentator Andrew Sullivan asks us to treat this endangered institution much more reverently than many of us really care to. His interesting, if extremely fragmentary, anthology Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader brings together disparate and fascinating documents from both ends of the political spectrum, from vicious attacks by reactionary Jewish talk show host Dennis Prager, who maintains that gay liberation is one small step down a slippery slope toward “incest liberation,” to maundering transcriptions of Congressional debates in which the eloquent Barney Frank squares off with the stammeringly inarticulate Sonny Bono, the homophobic father of a lesbian. The book offers the profoundly demoralizing spectacle of presumably rational and intelligent people using reason to justify their visceral, unthinking prejudices, at once boldly championing the civil rights of blacks and yet reviling homosexuality as an abomination against nature or a self- indulgent exercise in socially irresponsible narcissism.
One of the reasons that many gay baby boomers find the issue of gay marriage so troubling is that it is closely linked to another related issue, one that the uxorious purists in Sullivan's anthology almost unanimously take to task as the ultimate no-no, sexual promiscuity. The controversy over gay marriage has become so pressing in the last few years because many gay activists view it in explicitly prophylactic terms as a leash that will curb our voracious sexual appetites and save us from the ravages of AIDS. The subtext of the marriage debate is not love but death, not valentines but viruses.
Writers in Sullivan's collection take every opportunity to cluck their tongues disapprovingly at casual sexual encounters, asserting with evangelical fervor that monogamy is the only permissible context for the expression of homosexual desire, which must be swathed in thick layers of sentimentality and viewed through the rose-colored glasses of romance. In Sullivan's anthology, an eerie similarity emerges between the monogamist and the bigot: both do what homophobes have done for decades — outlaw promiscuous gay sex, stigmatizing homosexual encounters in all but the most limited, morally sanctioned situations, as the gay conservative Jonathan Rauch does in his essay “For Better or Worse?” in which he sadistically ostracizes old maids and eagerly anticipates a time when single gay people are “disapproved of or pitied.”
Many of the reactionary commentators in Sullivan's collection argue that homosexual marriage would sap the foundations of an already shaky institution, that it would deliver the coup de grace to an arrangement that has become a travesty of what it once was, trivialized by an epidemic of domestic violence, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and even partial- birth abortions. But this argument is simply a dodge, an attempt to scapegoat innocent victims who are being forced to bare the brunt of the disintegration of the entire nuclear family, a beleaguered unit that many view as the very backbone of social stability but that in fact has collapsed into a shambles because of spousal abuse and child neglect, dead-beat dads and latch-key kids. The threat of legally recognized homosexual relationships is a scourge that many intolerant heterosexuals are using to put their own houses in order, a clever tool that deflects attention away from the institution's self-inflicted wounds by evoking the specter of godless reprobates who would defile a sacrament that elevated divorce statistics have already done a splendid job of desecrating.
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