I don’t usually put email from readers in my blog, but this was such a good one it seemed appropriate. The writer (who wants to remain anonymous) sent me this in response to an email exchange I had with a commenter named “Chuck” at Bill Quick’s excellent blog, Daily Pundit. Here’s the entire reply:
Chuck,
Accusing Eric of not having read the wording of the FMA is absurd. No less a personage as E. Volokh has read the same wording and come to the same conclusions as Sullivan. That you assign some sort of hidden agenda to Sullivan is indicative of your thinking, nothing more.
Sullivan has been writing about ss Marriage for 10+ years. His agenda has been out there in the open for that long. It took many years for the gay community to accept his (and others, notably Jonathan Rauch) arguments and dedicate resources toward that end. Most left-leaning gay activists resisted the arguments, echoing the radical feminists view of marriage as a stifling, paternalistic anachronism that subjugated women.
What Sullivan must constantly repeat (because it is almost always ignored, or dismissed), is that he comes from the starting point of, “Gays are not going away. We’re here. Society needs to recognize that, and offer a way for gay people to become fully functioning members of society.”
Civil Marriage offers a way to do that, and to do it in the most conservative of ways, asking gay people, encouraging them, to participate in one of society’s most stabilizing institutions. His is not an agenda to change the institution; it is an agenda to use the institution to respond to the question – what do we as a society do with gay people.
So far, the Stanley Kurtz’s of this world have said, “Not that” to any proposal to address the basic question, and have refused to offer an alternative. The FMA seeks to make sure that at least one alternative (and arguably, civil unions as well), Civil Marriage, is denied as a potential solution. All the rhetoric supporting it as the only response to a an activist judiciary seeking to impose its will on an unwilling populace is belied because an alternative, one laid out by William Buckley himself, is available:
“The necessary amendment need go no further, nor should go any further, than to limit the application of the full-faith-and-credit clause to exclude any requirement to abide by laws or judicial findings authorizing same-sex marriage. If individual states wish to authorize civil unions between members of the same sex, they would be free to do so, but not free to plead immunities particular to their own state as extending to all 50 states.”
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/wfbuckley/wfb20030807.shtml
That the current wording of the FMA goes well beyond that suggestion, and adds words that are ambiguous at best, makes the accusation that Sullivan has a “hidden agenda” a rather good example of projection. Dale Carpenter noted recently in response to Stanley Kurtz:
“It is the opposition to gay marriage that has led to the proliferation of alternatives to marriage itself. These alternatives serve to knock marriage off its pedestal as the gold standard for relationships, something feminist and libertarian critics of marriage might applaud, but traditionalist defenders of marriage should abhor.”
http://www.indegayforum.org/authors/carpenter/carpenter40.html
Should, but, for the most part, don’t. Playing into the hands of those that want to change the institution. Not very conservative, in my eyes.
As for the question of animus toward gay people. I ask myself why FMA supporters haven’t also proposed wording for a constitutional amendment regarding abortion that activist judges have imposed on them. Nor a constitutional amendment clarifying affirmative action, as allowed by activist judges, nor any of a number of issues, where the standard conservative response is the political process of either electing judges that agree with their principles, or executive branch politicians able to appoint such judges. In those cases, there have been judicial decisions that have forced a uniform, nationwide basis for action. No such action at the federal level has yet taken place.
The charge of seeking to preclude debate on the subject can easily be leveled at FMA supporters. They keep trying to change the subject from “What should we do about gay people” to “judicial activism is destroying our way of life.”
Let’s get back to the basic question, and respond accordingly.
My posts on the Federal Marriage Initiative (which I think should be renamed the “Federal Incidents of Marriage Initiative”) can be read here and here.
Comments
One response to “Excellent email from a reader”
I really should read William Quick (a quick man!) more often than I do. Your friend is excellent, makes excellent points. I notice that, for all their supposed concern for the unborn, they don’t seem to be too interested in the abortion issue, except as it can be used to score cheap points against “activist judges”.
That last point is something I’ve been thinking about a great deal. As in the President’s State of the Union speech, they love to attack judges and courts while really attacking homosexual men and women. Everything is painted as a power struggle between state legislatures representing The Will Of The People vs. evil black-robed oligarchs.
John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner truly won the right to privacy even more than they realized, for, even though theirs is the very name of that historic decision, and though they are pictured in full-page full-color in the cover article in “Newsweek” (June 7, 2003) right after the decision (my copy is the one with the two delicious Lesbians on the cover!) — even with all that, those two men now seem to be more private, more obscure, than ever.
Everybody knows about Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of the abortion decision (now, ironically, she is anti-abortion). But, in every discussion I get into about the Lawrence decision, the discussion is always shifted to “the homosexual agenda” and “those activist courts”. Every opponent of the decision wants to frame it in big abstract terms of “the homosexual movement” “going to court” instead of “through the democratic process” to “advance their agenda”.
I always seem to be the only one who ever mentions the two men by name, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, who were ARRESTED in the middle of the night, hauled away in their underwear, and TAKEN TO court AGAINST THEIR WILL, and fined $200 each for making love in the privacy of their own home. It was ONLY THEN that they appealed and, after over a year, finally went to the Supreme Court for the purpose, NOT of “advancing” any “agenda” but simply of GETTING THE GOVERNMENT OFF THEIR BACKS. They didn’t want any subsidies or favors. All they wanted was to be left alone, “the right most valued by civilized men”, as Justice Brandeis put it so eloquently long ago. Apparently, that is too much to ask.
I’m still mad about this because we’re still debating this and I’m still having to refute the same old lies. All this talk about a “homosexual lobby” is exactly like all the old talk about a “Jewish lobby”.
I’m very glad that those two beautiful women Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, after 51 years together (longer than I’ve been alive!), are now openly marrying in defiance of the law against them, just as Rosa Parks had defied Jim Crow in 1955. Let Bush explain to us why their marriage is somehow less sacred than Britney Spears’s 55-minute fling. Let the debate center on concrete individual men and women and their loves.
Just as the Holocaust deniers hate and try to discredit Anne Frank’s Diary because it focuses our attention on the life and death of one concrete individual, a teenage girl, rather than an abstract “Zionist Conspiracy”, so do their counterparts fear to let individual men and women like John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner or Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon be named and known rather than an abstract “Homosexual Agenda” and “Judicial Activism”.