On Thu, 13 Nov 2008, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>> It's true that the point is to make one lesser than the other. But
>> what Bill's right about is that this isn't finally about rights.
>> Civil Unions would be less than Gay Marriage even in a hypothetical
>> situation when a civil union contract offered substantially more
>> rights.
>
> I get what you're saying but wasn't rights what got the conversation
> started? My memory is that this first became an issue when partners of
> people with AIDS were barred from seeing their partners in the hospital
> by family members who had the legal right to keep them away.
I think you're exactly right that's where it started. But then it evolved beyond that into something more radical. Gays do want all the rights everyone else has (who wouldn't?) But they also want this word, a desire which necessarily wasn't there in the beginning and which goes beyond any particular or even cluster of rights.
The fascinating irony in this evolution is that gay marriage was originally introduced by self-proclaimed gay conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch precisely because they wanted to tamp down gay politics and push it in more prosaic channels. They wanted to counter the hegemony of ACT-UP (where those originally visiting rights campaigns started) and to separate gayness from an allegiance to the left.
Sullivan's whole argument in his originally quite controversial book was that being a gay conservative wasn't freakish but a majority view. He argued most gays just wanted to live normal lives and not to push the frontiers of anything. And he explicitly argued that making gay marriage the center of gay politics would conservatize gays and gay-ize conservatives. It sounds funny now, but he actually thought making marriage the center of gay politics would make it possible for gay people to show the world their conservative inclinations and make conservatives realize they were a bloc that was on their side when it came to family values.
But boy was he ever hoist by his own petard. Normality turns out to be the most threateningly radical demand gays have ever made. It didn't damp down gay politics, it fired it up and gave it a whole new post-ACT-UP focus. Gay marriage is now so completely absorbed into the politics of the left, and it's so retextured national politics, that it's conservative origins are difficult to recall to mind. And its made the gulf between gayness and conservativism wider than ever.
But that's part of the glory of social movements. Sometimes a spark sets off an defining collective passion that no one was expecting, and it goes off in radical new directions.
Michael