Andrew Sullivan's take on Civil Unions

What Are They For?

Conservatives and Homosexuality

It didn't take long for many social conservatives to ponder the long-term implications of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down all anti-sodomy laws in the United States. Moves are afoot to advance a Constitutional Amendment that would bar any state's legalization of same-sex marriage; next week is "Marriage Protection Week," in which the alleged danger of Lawrence vs Texas will be highlighted across the country. This push toward blanket prohibition, however, side-steps a basic point about the post-Lawrence world. Whatever you feel about the reasoning of the decision, its result is clear: Gay Americans are no longer criminals. And very few conservatives want to keep them that way. The term "gay citizen" is now simply a fact of life.

In retrospect, this might be the most significant shift on the question of homosexuality in a generation. For if homosexuals are no longer criminals for having consensual private relationships, then they cannot be dismissed as somehow alien or peripheral to our civil society. Moreover, the social transformation of the last decade cannot simply be gainsaid: a poll this week for USA Today found that 67 percent of the 18 - 29 age group believe that gay marriage would do no harm or even benefit society. The public as a whole are evenly split on that issue, roughly 50-50. Many of the people favoring a new tolerance are Republicans and conservatives. And this is inevitable. When the daughter of the vice-president is openly gay, it's hard to treat homosexual citizens as some permanent kind of "other," as a threat to civil order and society.

But if conservatives have now endorsed the notion of homosexuals as citizens, they haven't yet fully grasped the implications of that shift. Previously, social policy toward homosexuals was a function of either criminalization or avoidance. People who are either in jail or potentially subject to criminal sanction are already subject to a social policy of a sort. You may disagree with it, but it's social policy on the same lines as that toward drug-users or speeders. It's a form of prohibitionism. But when all illegality is removed from gay people, as it has been, that social policy surely has to change.

So what is it? What exactly is the post-Lawrence conservative social policy toward homosexuals? Amazingly, the current answer is entirely a negative one. The majority of social conservatives oppose gay marriage; they oppose gay citizens serving their country in the military; they oppose gay citizens raising children; they oppose protecting gay citizens from workplace discrimination; they oppose including gays in hate crime legislation, while including every other victimized group; they oppose civil unions; they oppose domestic partnerships; they oppose ... well, they oppose, for the most part, every single practical measure that brings gay citizens into the mainstream of American life.

This is simply bizarre. Can you think of any other legal, non-criminal minority in society towards which social conservatives have nothing but a negative social policy? What other group in society do conservatives believe should be kept outside integrating social institutions? On what other issue do conservatives favor separatism over integration? We know, in short, what conservatives are against in this matter. But what exactly are they for?

Let me be practical here. If two lesbian women want to share financial responsibility for one another for life, why is it a conservative notion to prevent them? If two men who have lived together for decades want the ability to protect their joint possessions in case one of them dies, why is it a conservative notion that such property be denied the spouse in favor of others? If one member of a young gay couple is badly hurt in a car accident, why is it a conservative notion that his spouse not be allowed to visit him in the intensive care unit? In all these cases, you have legal citizens trying to take responsibility for one another. By doing so, by setting up relationships that do the "husbanding" work of family, such couples relieve the state of the job of caring for single people without family support. Such couplings help bring emotional calm to the people involved; they educate people into the mundane tasks of social responsibility and mutual caring. When did it become a socially conservative idea that these constructive, humane instincts remain a threat to society as a whole? And how do these small acts of caring actually undermine the heterosexual marriage of the people who live next door?

Some will argue that these and many other benefits and responsibilities can be set up in an ad hoc fashion. You can create powers of attorney, legal contracts, and the like, if you really need to. These arrangements can be enormously time-consuming and complex, and they don't always hold up in courts of law, of course. But even if they did, isn't it a strange conservative impulse to make taking responsibility something that the government should make harder rather than easier? One of the key benefits of marriage, after all, is that it also upholds a common ideal of mutual support and caring; it not only enables such acts of responsibility but rewards and celebrates them. In the past you could argue that such measures were inappropriate for a criminal or would-be criminal sub-group. But after Lawrence, that is no longer the case. The question is therefore an insistent one: on what grounds do conservatives believe that discouraging responsibility is a good thing for one group in society? What other legal minority do they or would they treat this way? If a group of African-Americans were to set themselves up and campaign for greater familial responsibility among black couples, do you think conservatives would be greeting them with dismay and discouragement or even a Constitutional Amendment to stop them>?

It is one thing to oppose gay marriage (some, but not all, conservative arguments against it are reasonable, if to my mind unconvincing). But it is another thing to oppose any arrangement that might give greater security, responsibility and opportunity to gay couples. At times, the social conservative position is almost perversely inconsistent: many oppose what they see as gay promiscuity; but even more strongly, they oppose any social measures that would encourage gay monogamy, such as marriage. What, one wonders, do they want? In this, they actually have lower standards for now legal citizens than they do for incarcerated criminals: even murderers on death-row have the constitutional right to marry, where the institution could do no conceivable social good. But for millions of citizens currently excluded from such incentives for responsibility, conservatives are prepared even to amend the Constitution to say no.

If this debate is to move forward, a few simple questions therefore have to be answered: What is the social conservative position on civil unions? What aspects of them can conservatives get behind? What details are they less convinced by? These are basic public policy questions to which social conservatives, for the most part, have yet to provide an answer. It's well past time they did.

October 15, 2003, Wall Street Journal.

copyright © 2003, 2003 Andrew Sullivan

Bless Andrew Sullivan

This is a very powerful argument by Sullivan, and thus far, no conservatives have been able to answer his central question posed in this article: If you oppose gay marriage and civil unions for gay couples, then what DO you favor in terms of how the law should treat these relationships? The question is really rhetorical, because what marriage-opponents actually favor (but won't admit) is the disappearnce (or at least concealment) of anything gay - i.e., the return of the closet. That still, though, leaves no answer to the question of what this will do to gay citizens and their relationships, nor does it address obvious and basic questions of equity and fairness.

Andrew Sullivan is probably the only gay person who can articulate such cogent arguments in venues (such as this piece, published on the WSJ OpEd page) where the arguments actually matter - i.e., where advancing these positions constitutes something other than preaching to the converted. He has been a powerful advocate for gay equality for many years. In that regard, he has accomplished at least as much - if not more than - any other single individual for advancing the cause of gay equality in this country.

That is why it is so disgraceful and repugnant for gay people who place their leftist agendas over the cause of gay equality to attack him so viciously and treat him like he's an enemy and a traitor who must be destroyed. They have attempted to destroy him personally and professionally simply because he does not spew their political dogma. And yet, Sullviant has been very courageous - and very influential - in making huge strides in gay equality, particularly in venues which most gay abvocates could not even access, let alone be taken seriously.

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

>That is why it is so disgraceful and repugnant for gay people

>who place their leftist agendas over the cause of gay equality

>to attack him so viciously and treat him like he's an enemy

>and a traitor who must be destroyed. They have attempted to

>destroy him personally and professionally simply because he

>does not spew their political dogma.

And with typical gay leftist efficacy, they've "destroyed" him into ever wider readership and greater influence.

>And yet, Sullivan has been very courageous - and very influential - >in making huge strides in gay equality, particularly in venues >which most gay advocates could not even access, let alone be taken

>seriously.

I'm not sure how much courage it's actually taken -- has his career ever really suffered due to his gay rights positions? -- but the last part of your sentence explains why some of the people you speak of hate him so much. He has always carried a distinctiveness and marketability that they've never been able to manage. And in some ways they themselves have contributed to his continued success, by regularly assuming the "bad gay cop" role that he can effectively position himself against.

As for this particular article, I agree it's a powerful argument, one that will hopefully win over a few more tolerant conservatives. I imagine, though, that most hard-core social conservatives' post-Lawrence position will be fairly similar to their post-Roe position: to not<i/> accept the ruling, but rather to lobby for the appointment of justices who will be inclined to reverse that ruling. Positions like Sullivan's, in their minds, probably reinforce why sodomy laws are necessary in the first place.

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

This piece appeared in this morning's NY Times. Looks like Andrew's neo-con world is kind of crumbling around him! Fortunately, he's smart enough to eventually see the light, and being gay, he should be resilient enough to move on! Because given the way this Pope has stacked the College of Cardinals to assure a cloned successor, it's unlikely that the Roman Catholic Church will change its views on homosexuality during any of our lifetimes.

LOSING A CHURCH, KEEPING THE FAITH

By ANDREW SULLIVAN

Published: October 19, 2003

Last week, something quite banal happened at St. Benedict's Church in the Bronx. A gay couple were told they could no longer sing in the choir. Their sin was to have gotten a civil marriage license in Canada. One man had sung in the choir for 32 years; the other had joined the church 25 years ago. Both had received certificates from the church commending them for "noteworthy participation." But their marriage had gained publicity; it was even announced in The New York Times. This "scandal" led to their expulsion. The archbishop's spokesman explained that the priest had "an obligation" to exclude them.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a very small event. But it is a vivid example of why this last year has made the once difficult lives of gay Catholics close to impossible. The church has gone beyond its doctrinal opposition to emotional or sexual relationships between gay men and lesbians to an outspoken and increasingly shrill campaign against them. Gay relationships were described by the Vatican earlier this year as "evil." Gay couples who bring up children were described as committing the equivalent of "violence" against their own offspring. Gay men are being deterred from applying to seminaries and may soon be declared unfit for the priesthood, even though they commit to celibacy. The American Catholic church has endorsed a constitutional amendment that would strip gay couples of any civil benefits of any kind in the United States.

For the first time in my own life, I find myself unable to go to Mass. During the most heated bouts of rhetoric coming from the Vatican this summer, I felt tears of grief and anger welling up where once I had been able to contain them. Faith beyond resentment began to seem unreachable.

For some, the answer is as easy as it always has been. Leave, they say. The gay world looks at gay Catholics with a mixture of contempt and pity. The Catholic world looks at us as if we want to destroy an institution we simply want to belong to. So why not leave? In some ways, I suppose, I have. What was for almost 40 years a weekly church habit dried up this past year to close to nothing. Every time I walked into a church or close to one, the anger and hurt overwhelmed me. It was as if a dam of intellectual resistance to emotional distress finally burst.

But there was no comfort in this, no relief, no resolution. There is no ultimate meaning for me outside the Gospels, however hard I try to imagine it; no true solace but the Eucharist; no divine love outside of Christ and the church he guides. In that sense, I have not left the church because I cannot leave the church, no more than I can leave my family. Like many other gay Catholics, I love this church; for me, there is and never will be any other. But I realize I cannot participate in it any longer either. It would be an act of dishonesty to enable an institution that is now a major force for the obliteration of gay lives and loves; that covered up for so long the sexual abuse of children but uses the word "evil" for two gay people wanting to commit to each other for life.

I know what I am inside. I do not believe that my orientation is on a par with others' lapses into lust when they also have an option for sexual and emotional life that is blessed and celebrated by the church. I do not believe I am intrinsically sick or disordered, as the hierarchy teaches, although I am a sinner in many, many ways. I do not believe that the gift of human sexuality is always and everywhere evil outside of procreation. (Many heterosexual Catholics, of course, agree with me, but they can hide and pass in ways that gay Catholics cannot.) I believe that denying gay people any outlet for their deepest emotional needs is wrong. I think it slowly destroys people, hollows them out, alienates them finally from their very selves.

But I must also finally concede that this will not change as a matter of doctrine. That doctrine — never elaborated by Jesus — was constructed when gay people as we understand them today were not known to exist; but its authority will not change just because gay people now have the courage to explain who they are and how they feel. In fact, it seems as if the emergence of gay people into the light of the world has only intensified the church's resistance. That shift in the last few years from passive silence to active hostility is what makes the Vatican's current stance so distressing. Terrified of their own knowledge of the wide presence of closeted gay men in the priesthood, concerned that the sexual doctrines required of heterosexuals are under threat, the hierarchy has decided to draw the line at homosexuals. We have become the unwilling instruments of their need to reassert control.

In an appeal to the growing fundamentalism of the developing world, this is a shrewd strategy. In the global context, gays are easily expendable. But it is also a strikingly inhumane one. The current pope is obviously a deep and holy man; but that makes his hostility even more painful. He will send emissaries to terrorists, he will meet with a man who tried to assassinate him. But he has not and will not meet with openly gay Catholics. They are, to him, beneath dialogue. His message is unmistakable. Gay people are the last of the untouchables. We can exist in the church only by silence, by bearing false witness to who we are.

I was once more hopeful. I saw within the church's doctrines room for a humane view of homosexuality, a genuinely Catholic approach to including all nonprocreative people — the old, the infertile, the gay — in God's church. But I can see now that the dialogue is finally shutting down.

Perhaps a new pope will change things. But the odds are that hostility will get even worse. I revere those who can keep up the struggle within the channels of the church. I respect those who have left. But I am somewhere in between now.

There are moments in a spiritual life when the heart simply breaks. Some time in the last year, mine did. I can only pray that in some distant future, some other gay people not yet born will be able to come back to the church, to sing in the choir, and know that the only true scandal in the world is the scandal of God's love for his creation, all of it, all of us, in a church that may one day, finally, become home to us all.

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

>Because given the way this Pope has stacked the College of

>Cardinals to assure a cloned successor, it's unlikely that the

>Roman Catholic Church will change its views on homosexuality

>during any of our lifetimes.

I guess one would not expect Rabbi Trisexual to know much about the Holy Spirit. Was John XXIII expected to be a liberal when the white smoke went up, and the crowd in St. Peter's chanted "Habemus Papum"?

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

I'm sure the Cardinals who voted for John XXIII must have had at least some clue as to the kind of Pope he would be, and in what directions he might lead the Church. He wasn't the only candidate, after all. But that College wasn't anywhere as monolithic as the current one is, since virtually all of its members now are conservative clerics appointed by John Paul II, in his own image.

As for the Holy Spirit, who knew it had a political position? Evidently Auntie S has been privy to it!

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

Thanks guys for posting this. I intend to print these out and show them to my conservative friends. I guess we'll have to change minds one at a time.

Jeff

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

P.S. And to answer more directly, of course I don't "know" anything about the Holy Spirit. I don't believe in it. Rabbi Tri is Jewish, remember? Like Muslims, we believe in one indivisible G-d. We don't believe G-d takes human form, or divides into separate persons. That's what makes Jews and Muslims fundamentally different from Christians. (There are other differences, of course, but that's the rock bottom basic one.)

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

>I'm sure the Cardinals who voted for John XXIII must have had

>at least some clue as to the kind of Pope he would be, and in

>what directions he might lead the Church.

Sorry to disapoint you, but the Cardinal wh became John XXIII was considered to be a small town consevative Italian priest before he was elected. So I guuess, the Holy Spirit does have a political possition, but I guess it is too mich to expect a know it all jew boy like Rabbi Trisexual to be an expert on that too!

>As for the Holy Spirit, who knew it had a political position?

>Evidently Auntie S has been privy to it!

RE: Bless The Devout and Holy Andrew Sullivan

All I can say is "What took Sullivan so long to realize that the Church doesn't want him (or us) as members?" They are a bunch of fat hypocrites who allow babies to die or grow up without parents, refuse birth control to the people who need it the most, and call gays a violence to children all the while they are diddling the little boys themselves. They treat women almost as badly as the Muslims do.

Yet Sullivan still believes the pope is a deeply holy man. All the while he is packing the vote for the next pope and declaring saints out of people that never literally existed! Holy shit is more like it.

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

>And with typical gay leftist efficacy, they've "destroyed" him

>into ever wider readership and greater influence.

You're right that those attacks have not harmed - and, if anything, have probably helped - his career. But certain of the more vile schemes - such as publicly identifying his barebacking Internet ads - had to have a profoundly hurtful effect. Most people cannot even conceive of their Internet sex chats and activities being disseminated to their co-workers, friends and families - let alone to millions of people.

I am convinced that Dante has a particularly tortuous and deep level of hell waiting for the repugnant, bitter gay ideologues who engineered that disgusting invasion of his privacy.

>I'm not sure how much courage it's actually taken -- has his

>career ever really suffered due to his gay rights positions?

Given his political views, he depends on conservative political connections to publish him and his political allies are all conservative. He could easily take a much more muted view on gay issues or simply avoid the issue altogether in order to ensure a comfortable place in those circles. But he doesn't - he demands relentnlessly they discuss the issue, even though they desperately want not to, and he attacks his natural political and journalistic allies mercilessly for their illogical and unjust views on the position.

Very few journalists or punidits who are squarely in one camp or the other so vigorously advance a view which their camp rejects. I think that's pretty courageous - not courageous in the sense of rushing from a foxpit into battle, but it reflects a principled commitment to the cause of gay equality and a willingness to sacrifice for it that I think is commendable.

>-- but the last part of your sentence explains why some of the

>people you speak of hate him so much. He has always carried a

>distinctiveness and marketability that they've never been able

>to manage. And in some ways they themselves have contributed

>to his continued success, by regularly assuming the "bad gay

>cop" role that he can effectively position himself against.

I agree that jealously over his success plays a large role in why so many gay leftists are consumed with an ugly personal animus for him. But I think it's (at least) equally explained by the fact that gay leftists think that there mere fact that you are gay compels you to embrace that ideology, and a refuse to do so makes one a "traitor." It's the same reason that liberal blacks hate conservative blacks far more than conservative whites. They think they are entitled to dictate the "group policical views," and anyone who deviates from it commits a griveous crime.

>As for this particular article, I agree it's a powerful

>argument, one that will hopefully win over a few more tolerant

>conservatives. I imagine, though, that most hard-core social

>conservatives' post-Lawrence position will be fairly similar

>to their post-Roe position: to not<i/> accept the ruling,

>but rather to lobby for the appointment of justices who will

>be inclined to reverse that ruling. Positions like

>Sullivan's, in their minds, probably reinforce why sodomy laws

>are necessary in the first place.

Yes, I think this argument just exposes the truth - that these far-right marriage-opponents are really about wanting to banish homosexuality, or at least any mention of it, from the society, and that the interests of gay citizens and their relationships are wholly irrelevant in forming public policy.

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

And he loves to have simpering lil'neocon fags to lick the soles of his boots-and we have one of these lil'boot lickers right here in our midst.

Sullivan is a lying hypocrytical fag who thinks he can win over those that hate fags by proving he is "just like them"

Well fuckem.That silly little geezer in rome does not like us-fuck him

The good ol' boys in the repug party do not like us-fuck them Assimilation is not Acceptence.

By the way,nothing was mentioned in the above about Sullivan mot disclosing his HIV poz status to the guys he was looking to bareback with-now is that the best the neocon fags on this board can come up with as a role model?Pathetic

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

>And he loves to have simpering lil'neocon fags to lick the

>soles of his boots-and we have one of these lil'boot lickers

now is that the best the neocon fags on this

>board can come up with as a role model?Pathetic

[email protected] big guy.........hell they don't get it big guy, let the dip-shits wallow in it.......

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

I still say it probably doesn't matter if they would appoint a progressive Pope or not, if they did he'd end up just like John-Paul I.

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

>But certain of

>the more vile schemes - such as publicly identifying his

>barebacking Internet ads - had to have a profoundly hurtful

>effect. Most people cannot even conceive of their Internet

>sex chats and activities being disseminated to their

>co-workers, friends and families - let alone to millions of

>people.

What nonsense! Andrew Sullivan is a self-serving opportunist and a philosophical hypocrite. Just as with Rush's drug use, Newt's infidelity, Andrew Sullivan's barebacking deserved to be disclosed. My favorite part is that for such a big racist, he was searching to be topped by big Black guys. I think that tells us a lot about the psychology of this pompous ass.

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

>And he loves to have simpering lil'neocon fags to lick the

>soles of his boots-and we have one of these lil'boot lickers

>right here in our midst.

>Sullivan is a lying hypocrytical fag who thinks he can win

>over those that hate fags by proving he is "just like them"

>Well fuckem.That silly little geezer in rome does not like

>us-fuck him

Given that we live in a democracy, unjust laws can be changed only by convincing your fellow citizens who don't agree with you that the views which they ascribe to are wrong. Therefore, anyone who refuses to try to convince advocates of anti-gay discrimination that such discrimination against gay people is wrong - and instead says "fuck em" - is not merely an illiterate adolescent, but is also someone forever consigned to total irrelevance.

If Martin Luther King had adopted your attitude (after he first deciphered its illiteracy), and had said: "Those whites don't like us - fuck em", then we would never have had civil rights legislation and other legal changes to eradicate racism.

Similarly, if gay people like you prerfer to cower in the corner and refuse to engage others who dislike gay people and oppose gay equality, then gay people will forever be consigned to second class citizens under the law.

Thankfully, not all gay people are as lazy or cowardly as you, and there are many gay people who are willing to attempt to persude those who are anit-gay that their position is in error. It is only thanks to such people that the cause of gay equality has achieved so much success.

The notion that one should only engage in dialogue only with those who already agree with you is one of the more idiotic ideas that has ever been expressed, which is precisely why it was so unsurprising to find it in your post.

RE: Bless Andrew Sullivan

How dare that creature put Martin Luther Junior and Andrew Sullivan in the same league.

You get noticed and you get action by being LOUD AND PROUD,being visable,being BETTER than your straight cowerkers at your job.We are not equal-we are so much more evolved than 90% of the straights out there-so act on it.And if they try to "put you in your place"then ACT UP.

These folks will never like you,they WILL TOLERATE you if they know that stupid intolerence will open a big ol'can of whoopass and "social disorder"

You do not have to play in their yard or by their rules.But they cannot survive without us.

Assimilation is not Acceptance.