The Debate Over Gay Marriages: No Unity
Elizabeth Birch, head of the Human Rights Campaign Fund in Washington, the nation’s foremost gay lobbying group, believes that the struggle to legalize gay marriage is “one whose time has not yet come. There is no reason that this battle is being played out right now, other than it fits into Republican election strategy.”
On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan, until recently editor and now senior editor at the New Republic and author of the best-selling “Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), says he has “really been surprised by the ferocity of support on this issue. It’s mobilizing the gay community like no other act has done.”
Then there’s Martin Duberman, perhaps the movement’s preeminent historian. Director of the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at City University of New York and author of “Stonewall” (Dutton, 1993), a history of gay liberation, he says he is “far from thrilled about this [issue]. . . . All our polls suggest strongly that no more than a third of Americans favor this. We are setting ourselves up for another well-publicized defeat. And in the process, we are diverting limited resources and energies from other priorities desperately in need of tending.”
So much for gay unanimity. The red-hot election-year issue of legalizing gay unions has been portrayed in some quarters as the latest test of strength between a unified gay community and the radical right. Yet, while the radical right has unequivocally campaigned against legalizing gay marriage, the issue has exposed a previously submerged breadth of opinion among gays.
The division largely pits idealists against the pragmatists, says Monica Trasandes, editor of Los Angeles-based Frontiers magazine, California’s largest gay news weekly. “We see the issue resonating among the broader community, but less so among activists. A lot of our readers feel they have a moral right to [marry], but are discouraged at the politics of it,” she says. Indeed, a protest by San Francisco gays against President Clinton’s opposition to gay marriage brought out a mere 200 demonstrators last weekend.
*
The issue has spawned wildly clashing views on the flanks of the gay spectrum. Writer Jonathan Rauch argued recently in the New Republic that should gay marriage be legalized, gays would have a moral obligation to take advantage of it. Others mock the notion of marriage as a heterosexual trap.
Evan Wolfson, senior attorney at Lambda Legal Defense Fund in New York, which is helping spearhead the case to legalize gay marriage in Hawaii, insists that “marriage is the central legal and social issue of our society. To be told that you cannot marry, that your relationships are not worthy, is to be told that you are a second-class citizen. . . .
“This is the first time that all gay groups from Log Cabin Republicans to the Gay and Lesbian Task Force have come together in a common goal,” he says. The fight over gays in the military didn’t have that kind of effect, he adds.
A soon-to-be-published poll of gays for the Advocate magazine shows 81% wanting the right to marry, 10% preferring a relationship without legal sanction and 9% undecided.
But many disagree about whether the issue is developing into what Out magazine Editor Sarah Pettit calls a “stink bomb.”
“Will we get the right to marry, but then get thrown into jail because of sodomy laws?” she asks.
“Beyond that, there’s a real question about whether our leadership is truly ready for this issue. We were caught with our pants down on the military issue. We are in danger of presenting a weak flank again on this. Then, we’d have enshrined in law what was previously ambiguous, making it worse. . . . If we’re going to play for big stakes, we’ve got to have an idea of how this is going to be handled.”
Wolfson concurs that it is the radical right that has “catapulted this issue into the state legislatures and the Congress, trying to stampede people who have not yet had a chance to talk about this to prematurely close the door on it.”
Nor is he surprised by the strategic splits within the gay community. Within the black community, “There were people who criticized Martin Luther King for going too fast. . . . We need to remember that it took 70 years for women to win the freedom to vote and 60 years to overturn the Supreme Court case which sanctioned ‘separate but equal’ schools.
“In 1967, we still had laws on the books banning racial intermarriage,” says Wolfson, the former associate counsel to Lawrence Walsh during the Iran / Contra hearings. “Thirty years from now, we will see this in the same way. The only question is how many obstacles and how much time and energy our opponents will consume in trying to prevent us from enjoying the commitment of civil marriage.”
Concurs Sullivan: “There is no more fundamental right than the right to marry. If heterosexuals were told their right to marry would be taken away, there would be a revolution. It’s the most inalienable right, akin to voting rights.
“And the message sent to teens by not having this right is that their emotional lives have no future. They are told their loves are worth less than straight people’s loves. It’s the most profound emotional blow at gay kids’ self-esteem. . . . Strategically, there have been those who say it’s not the right time to press forward. . . . But civil rights revolutions are never led by people who say we’ll do this later. What kind of revolution is that?”
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a savvy gay politician, believes, however, that the issue has come up this election year as Republicans have looked to box Clinton into a corner. Earlier in the year, major gay organizations wanted to make a proposed federal employment nondiscrimination bill their priority, he says, only to discover that Republicans refused to hold hearings.
“The Republicans picked the most divisive issue because they want gays to think that Democrats are no better than they are,” he contends. Add to this the media’s emphasizing issues “not on the basis of importance, but of controversiality,” and the debate was joined. “Given the fact that the country is not where I want it to be, frankly some of us thought [the emergence of this issue now] is a mistake.”
Birch agrees. Gays “need to realize that we are on a long and sacred journey. After basic rights such as employment, housing and public accommodation have been achieved, we should deal with the right to marry. But in many areas, gays are still struggling to survive, to not get thrown out of our homes or jobs.”
Citing a recent Newsweek poll showing 85% of Americans favoring nondiscrimination in the workplace, Birch says gays should press the battle in such areas, building up a string of victories rather than reacting to opponents’ initiatives. “We need to get out in front and get control of our own agenda. We’ve made tremendous progress in the past five years; we’re becoming more visible. But we’re still fighting from a foxhole. And it’s difficult to educate from a foxhole.”
Richard Goldstein, executive editor of the Village Voice in New York, says he would “fly to the ends of the earth to get a marriage license with my lover.” Despite his passion, however, he believes the issue has been blown out of proportion.
Gay marriage occurred in the Roman Empire, and in Thebes, a gay army was made up of the ancient Greek city’s most honored warriors, he says. Similarly, the medieval Catholic Church sanctioned sacred relationships among men, according to some scholars, as did some Native Americans. Six years ago, the Danes legalized gay marriages, and a European Community commission is preparing to put the issue before its membership.
Thus, Goldstein argues, the issue is not singularly American or even new. Aside from election-year considerations, the issue has arisen now because “American society is on the verge of change. We’re broadening the model of the family, and gay marriage is part of that change.”
Ultimately, he predicts, gay marriage “will fly in some states and not in others. We will have a patchwork system. But once it gets established, it will have to get standardized. It may take a generation before the change is complete. But the change cannot be stopped.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
What the Hawaii Case Means
Baehr vs. Miiki, the closely watched Hawaiian gay marriage case, has been put back until September, when it comes to trial in the state’s lower court. The trial has been framed by a 1993 Hawaiian Supreme Court decision, which held that a law denying a marriage license to same-sex couples appears to violate the state constitutional guarantee to equal protection.
Whichever side loses is expected to appeal back to the state high court. And since this is a decision regarding state law, the Hawaiian Supreme Court decision will probably not be appealable to the U.S. Supreme Court.