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What's Their Real
Problem With Gay Marriage?
(It's the Gay Part)
By RUSSELL SHORTO,
NYTimes Magazine, June 19, 2005
Indeed, a constant refrain among the
anti-gay-marriage forces is that they are motivated not by hate but by love.
Most of the activists I spoke with say that they know gay people -- several said
they have relatives who are gay -- and that they have approached them, with
love, to try to get them to change. Rick Bowers, a pastor of a
nondenominational church in Columbia, Md., is the head of Defend Maryland
Marriage, another activist group, which works with Focus on the Family.
''There are those extremists who say that if a gay person were on fire you would
burn in hell if you spit on them to put out the fire,'' he told me. ''But
we're not like that. We love the human being. It's the lifestyle we
disagree with.''
''Lifestyle'' is a buzzword in conservative Christian circles. It's a
signal of the belief, and the policy position, that homosexuality is not an
innate condition but a hedonistic way of living, one devoted to partying, drugs
and wanton sex that ends, often, in illness and early death. In 2004 the
Family Research Council put out a book called ''Getting It Straight: What
the Research Shows About Homosexuality,'' which purports to explode the myth
that homosexuality is natural or genetic and puts forth an alternative theory
that it springs from childhood abuse or other developmental factors.
Chapter 4, ''Is Homosexuality a Health Risk?'' lines up studies and statistics
to link homosexuality with cancer, alcoholism, mental illness, suicide and
reduced life span, in addition to H.I.V./AIDS and other sexually transmitted
diseases. The activists opposing gay marriage echo these points.
''My concern is the health issue,'' said Evalena Gray, an activist in southern
Maryland. ''I want to get these people away from AIDS, out of that
unhealthy lifestyle.''
The solution to the problem of the gay lifestyle in this view is, of course,
Christ. The reparative therapy or ''ex-gay'' movement has been repudiated
by major health and mental health organizations for its assumption that
homosexuality is a defect to be repaired -- indeed, in May members of the
American Psychiatric Association recommended that the organization support gay
marriage in the interest of promoting mental health. But for both the
national leaders on the anti-gay-marriage front and Christian community
activists, ''ex-gay'' and ''gay marriage'' are closely connected, the first
being the antidote to the second. Shannon Royce, the executive director of
the Marriage Amendment Project, advised me explicitly: ''The ex-gay
movement is a very important part of the story.'' Racer spelled it out
clearly as well. ''I've had quite a few opportunities to counsel people
who were in a homosexual lifestyle,'' he said. ''They have generally found
themselves in a desperate place. They know that Christ promises an
abundant life, but that promise was made with some restrictions. These
people have tried to find fulfillment in ways that are against God's principles.
So you don't want to further the error by allowing gay marriage. Most of
these folks have had an abusive situation that goes back to childhood. You
want to heal that. You want to hold back the tide and not let such a high
impact issue harm the whole society.''
It may have been March, but the Christmas lights were still up. ''The
grandchildren like them,'' Evalena Gray said. She and her husband, Jim,
both semiretired opticians, had invited me to their home in Charlotte Hall, a
town in the region of southern Maryland that once made its money from tobacco
and oysters but now relies on tourism and high-tech industry. The Grays
have converted their basement -- paneled, wall-to-wall-carpeted, decorated with
Jim Gray's Confederate memorabilia (a portrait of Jeb Stuart, framed currency)
and the twinkling lights -- into an office. They each have a desk here,
stacked with brochures and books and buttons. Evalena is Maryland's
grass-roots director for Concerned Women for America; she and her husband devote
all of their spare hours to convincing fellow citizens of the danger that the
institution of marriage is facing. As I visited, they were organizing
buses to transport people to an anti-gay-marriage rally that was to be held in
the state capital two days later. ''The threat to traditional marriage
will affect our society more than any other issue that's come up,'' Evalena
said. ''We're just fighting with everything we have.''
As the Grays will tell you, ''gay'' is only one-half of the gay marriage issue.
If homosexuality is a heavily laden notion for conservative Christians, so, too,
is marriage. Evalena Gray handed me a copy of ''Marriage Under Fire:
Why We Must Win This Battle,'' a small, pithy volume written by Dr. James
Dobson, the influential leader of Focus on the Family, whose radio commentaries
are heard by 200 million people a day worldwide. ''Marriage Under Fire''
has been available at Focus on the Family events since it was published last
year. Dobson begins his book by rooting marriage in the same biblical
passage that graces the marriage shrine at the Family Research Council
headquarters -- ''Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and
shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh'' -- and then goes
on to add, ''With those 22 words, God announced the ordination of the family,
long before He established the two other great human institutions, the church
and the government.''
To see marriage as in any way a secular or legal union of two individuals is to
miss utterly the point and conviction of the Christian forces lined up against
gay marriage. As Dobson states in his book: ''To put it succinctly,
the institution of marriage represents the very foundation of human social
order. Everything of value sits on that base. Institutions,
governments, religious fervor and the welfare of children are all dependent on
its stability.'' Every activist on the ground I spoke with said something
similar. ''Marriage was defined thousands of years ago and has served us
well,'' said Rebecca Denning, a retired secretary in southern Maryland who
volunteers alongside Evalena Gray. ''I think marriage is about procreation
and families. And I think we're getting into something that we don't truly
understand what the ramifications will be.''
Some on the other side of the issue -- notably Andrew Sullivan -- make the
argument that extending the marriage franchise into the gay community will have
positive results for everyone: it will encourage gays and lesbians to
settle down into stable families, and given that about 40 percent of marriages
end in divorce, it will bring new devotees to an ailing institution. The
anti-gay-marriage people readily acknowledge that marriage is in a state of
crisis, but they counter that the solution isn't to dilute the traditional
meaning but to reinforce it. And that meaning, they say, is bound up in
biology. ''The homosexual community would have us believe that marriage is
simply about loving one another,'' said Rick Bowers of Defend Maryland Marriage.
''I say it's about two human beings who are wired completely differently, one
with estrogen and one with testosterone, living together in love but with the
purpose of procreation. It's a lot deeper than love. So I can't see
how someone could look on a same-sex marriage as marriage at all.''
At its essence, then, the Christian conservative thinking about gay marriage
runs this way. Homosexuality is not an innate, biological condition but a
disease in society. Marriage is the healthy root of society. To put
the two together is thus willfully to introduce disease to that root. It
is society willing self-destruction, which is itself a symptom of a wider
societal disease, that of secularism.
What would be the result of this experiment? The activists opposed to gay
marriage feel they know. We have, they say, pools of data to study in
order to see the effects. Denmark and Sweden legalized same-sex civil
unions in 1989 and 1994, respectively, and the Netherlands allowed civil unions
in 1998 and then, in 2001, gay marriage. Cindy Moles, a grandmother and
homemaker in San Diego who is a Southern California area director for Concerned
Women for America, gave me her analysis of the data from those countries:
''Look at the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage is legal. Those
marriages last an average of 1.5 years, and during that time there are an
average of eight outside partners. That's not a solid foundation for our
country.''
Family.org, a Web site that is sponsored by Focus on the Family, cites these
same figures in a Q.-and-A. section on gay marriage, but it glosses over the
fact that the study on which they were based looked not at gay marriages but at
gay relationships and had nothing to do with the legalization of gay marriage.
Several anti-gay-marriage activists drew my attention to a study showing that
since gay civil unions became legal in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, the
rate of out-of-wedlock births in those countries has increased. When I
made the observation that, of all things to lay at the feet of homosexuals, the
birth rate was surely not one of them, Laura Clark had an answer: ''When
marriage can mean anything, it means nothing. Why bother to get married at
all?'' And indeed, she is accurately reflecting the analysis of Stanley
Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution whose articles on the topic
in The Weekly Standard make the rounds of the activists. Kurtz links
rising rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth to the legalization of gay
unions. He follows a British demographer in studying cohabitation rates in
three groups of European countries: the Nordics, those roughly in the
geographic middle and the southern tier.
''The Nordic countries are the leaders in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock
births,'' he writes. ''In the early 90's, gay marriage came to the Nordic
countries, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was already high. Ten years
later, out-of-wedlock birth rates have risen significantly in the middle group
of nations. Not coincidentally, nearly every country in that middle group
has recently either legalized some form of gay marriage or is seriously
considering doing so. Only in the group with low out-of-wedlock birthrates
has the gay marriage movement achieved relatively little success.'' (This
was written before Spain's Parliament passed a bill legalizing gay marriage in
April.) Kurtz's conclusion is that ''instead of encouraging a society-wide
return to marriage, Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that
marriage itself is outdated and that virtually any family form, including
out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable.''
Kurtz's use of data from these countries has been disputed by the Log Cabin
Republicans and countered by a study by Prof. M.V. Lee Badgett of the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst. Badgett argues that marriage, divorce and
out-of-wedlock birth rates in Scandinavia, Europe as a whole and the United
States have all changed in complex ways over the past three decades and ''those
changes have occurred in all countries, regardless of whether or not they
adopted same-sex partnership laws, and these trends were under way well before
the passage of laws that gave same-sex couples rights.'' There are also
reports from the Netherlands that conclude that after the initial hoopla
surrounding the legalization of gay marriage, it settled into a humdrum nonissue,
without much effect on gays, straights or family life. The results from
these countries, then, are debatable, but Kurtz's papers continue to get wide
circulation among religious conservatives, and for many, his theses have become
facts. ''You know the family has disappeared in those Scandinavian
countries,'' Evalena Gray, the southern Maryland activist, told me.
''Polyamory'' is a word I learned from the anti-gay-marriage activists.
It's a broad term that means having more than one sexual partner at a time, but
the activists use it as a synonym for group marriage. Here again, they are
following the lead of Stanley Kurtz; Laura Clark e-mailed me his article on the
topic that appeared in The Weekly Standard. Kurtz writes of the rise of
this ''souped-up version of polygamy'' that involves ''a bewildering variety of
sexual combinations. There are triads of one woman and two men;
heterosexual group marriages; groups in which some or all members are bisexual;
lesbian groups, and so forth.'' Kurtz maintains that ''the modern
polyamory movement took off in the mid-90's -- partly because of the growth of
the Internet (with its confidentiality) but also in parallel to, and inspired
by, the rising gay-marriage movement.''
It is the conviction of the grass-roots activists that gay marriage will open
the door to other novel unions. ' 'I bet a dollar against a doughnut that if
they get gay marriage, one day a bisexual is going to show up who says, 'I want
to marry a man and a woman,''' Jim Gray, Evalena's husband, said. ''It's
going to open the door to polygamy.''
Once the definition of marriage is altered, in this view, you will have this
group of people declaring they want to marry that group; middle-aged men will
exchange vows with children or with Doberman pinschers. As the landscape
of fear fills in, the picture comes into view. It is Hieronymus Bosch's
''Garden of Earthly Delights,'' a phantasmagoria of sin and a complete breakdown
of the social order. As Bryan Simonaire, Laura Clark's friend, put it:
''Once you start this, you could have a 45-year-old man wanting to marry a
9-year-old boy. That could be O.K. in 20 years. That's what you get
with relative moral truth. Whereas with absolute moral truth, what was
O.K. 50 years ago will still be O.K. 20 years from now.''
Protesters in Maryland are lucky in that their state has one of the more elegant
capitals in the nation. A cluster of nicely tended Victorian and Georgian
houses occupies the center of Annapolis; steeples and masts and gulls crowd the
skyline along the harbor. On a chilly day in early March, a few hundred
people gathered before the state Capitol to urge their legislators to approve an
anti-gay-marriage constitutional-amendment referendum. The Lawyers' Mall,
with a statue of Thurgood Marshall as its centerpiece, is the logical place for
such rallies, so you have to put it down to coincidence that the crowd was
grouped around a figure of the Supreme Court justice most identified with the
extension of rights to minorities. The national conservative evangelical
leaders realize that the gay-marriage issue is an opportunity to peel off layers
of the traditional Democratic coalition, and the lineup of speakers in Annapolis
was prominent with Latinos and African-Americans, who asserted over and over
that gay marriage has nothing to do with civil rights. ''Because we live
in a society today that is so sensitive, we use words like diversity and
inclusion to hide behind, so that we can promote our own agenda,'' Bishop Larry
Lee Thomas, president of the United Black Clergy of Anne Arundel County, told
the crowd.
One spark for the rally -- which also sparked Laura Clark's activism -- was the
lawsuit that the A.C.L.U. had filed against the state on behalf of gay couples.
Before attending the rally, I stopped in at the Baltimore home of the lead
plaintiffs, Lisa Polyak and Gita Deane, a lesbian couple who have been together
for more than 20 years and have two daughters. (Polyak and Deane each
became pregnant via artificial insemination, with sperm from a cryolab.)
Their quaint house is white-painted brick with a picket fence. The
hardwood floors are covered with Oriental rugs; the living-room bookshelf is
crammed with kids' books and photo albums. Both women are in their early
40's. Deane works part time as a learning specialist at Goucher College,
and Polyak is an environmental engineer for the U.S. Army. As with Laura
and Dave Clark and their children, church is important in their family. If
the Clarks are a picture-perfect suburban family, this one is, in many ways, the
urban equivalent. The difference, of course, is that Polyak and Deane are
both women.
Polyak and Deane didn't set out to be activists anymore than Clark did.
They have faced numerous difficulties as a nonstandard family, ranging from
health insurance troubles to their children's growing awareness that they may be
treated differently because they have two mothers. ''We were never
politically active,'' Polyak told me, ''except that we belonged to a local
support group, Families With Pride. They helped us get a physician.''
They never considered marriage until last year when, in the wake of gay-marriage
rulings in Massachusetts and San Francisco, they were approached by Equality
Maryland and asked to think about filing a lawsuit against the state. They
balked at the public attention it would bring to their family, but then decided
that as a relatively upscale, stable family, they could serve as a positive role
model: a poster family for gay marriage.
If you are one of the many millions of people who are vaguely opposed to gay
marriage -- who perhaps have no problem with homosexuality but also think
marriage is simply a uniquely male-female enterprise -- sitting in Polyak and
Deane's living room might put that notion to the test. Watching their kids
play, listening to stories of how, for their family, small things like taking a
child to the pediatrician can become huge headaches, you might come around to
thinking that this is, after all, a matter of giving a particular minority
certain basic rights and along with them legitimacy and stability.
But, of course, the Christian activists aren't vague in their opposition.
For them, the issue isn't one of civil rights, because the term implies
something inherent in the individual -- being black, say, or a woman -- and they
deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can't be, because that would mean
God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened.
This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue, the key to understanding
those working against gay marriage as well as the engine driving their vehicle
in the larger culture war: the commitment, on the part of a growing number
of people, to a variety of religious belief that is so thoroughgoing it
permeates every facet of life and thought, that rejects the secular, pluralistic
grounding of society and that answers all questions internally.
The speakers at the rally in Annapolis made it plain they were committed to
squelching not just gay marriage but civil unions and the extension of specific
rights to same-sex couples. A few weeks later, however, when the State
Legislature ended its session, it included some modest victories for the gay
rights forces. A bill passed allowing unmarried partners -- gay or
straight -- to make medical decisions for one another in the event of an
emergency. So did another that would add sexual orientation to a list of
punishable ''hate crimes.'' And the central goal of the conservative
activists, a state constitutional amendment, was tabled for the year.
When I talked with Laura Clark afterward, she was undeterred. ''The
purpose of the hate-crime legislation seems to be just to silence those of us
who oppose homosexuality,'' she said. As to the medical-decision-making
bill, she added, ''We know it's a back-door way for the homosexual activists to
get gay marriage.'' She said that she was taking part in petition drives
that would force referendums on both issues. ''I'm collecting signatures
from everyone I know,'' she said.
A few days later, the Republican governor, Bob Ehrlich, vetoed the
medical-decision-making bill on the grounds that it created a new term -- ''life
partner'' -- that ''could lead to the erosion of the sanctity of traditional
marriage.'' But some members of the Legislature said they had enough votes
to override his veto in the future, and the governor declined to veto the
hate-crime bill, so the conservatives' petition drives are going forward.
When I last spoke with Lisa Polyak, she said she was pleased that the
Legislature had shown courage in addressing the civil rights of gay couples but
sickened that conservative activists and the state's governor wanted to deny
them those rights. Oddly enough, though, Polyak, who once thought of this
whole issue as essentially about civil rights, says that she is now in it for
something more profound: she doesn't want her children to grow up with a
stigma. ''I want to lift the psychic burden on my family,'' she said.
That means changing hearts. How difficult that will be was illustrated by
a single vignette. When I met Polyak, she told me how, when she first
testified before a legislative committee, an anti-gay-marriage activist, a
woman, confronted her with bitter language, asking her why she was ''doing
this'' to the woman's children and grandchildren. Polyak said the
encounter left her shaken. A few days later, as I sat in Evalena Gray's
Christmas-lighted basement office, she told me a story of how during the same
testimony she approached a blond lesbian and talked to her about the effect that
gay marriage would have on her grandchildren. ''Then I hugged her neck,''
she said, ''and I said, 'We love you.' I was kind of consoling her to some
extent, out of compassion.''
I realized I was hearing about the same encounter from both sides. What
was expressed as love was received as something close to hate. That's a
hard gap to bridge.
Russell Shorto, a contributing writer and the author of ''The
Island at the Center of the World,'' last wrote for the magazine about religion
in the workplace.
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