Who Needs Marriage? Part II

The LHG is on record as being in favor of gay marriage. Yesterday's Sunday The New York Times, however, has an interesting piece on gays who oppose seeking the right to marry. On what grounds you ask? On grounds that the gay movement was not about gaining all the rights that heterosexual people possess, but rather was about the freedom to pursue lives unburdened by the weight of convention.

Here are some highlights:

"To these activists, the fight for gay marriage is the mirror image of the right-wing conservative Christian lobby for family values and feeds into the same drive for a homogeneous, orthodox American culture. The Stonewall confrontation and early gay rights movement, after all, was about the right to live an unconventional life, and to Mr. Dobbs and others like him, marriage is the epitome of convention. He said that he does, however, support civil unions for all as a replacement for civil marriage."

"But as the fight for same-sex marriage rages across the country — this month being defeated in the highest court in New York State as well as Washington — the anti-marriage gay men and lesbians say they are feeling emboldened to speak out against what they view as the hijacking of gay civil rights by a distressingly conservative, politically correct part of the gay establishment. They say the gay marriage movement, backed by major well-funded organizations like Lambda Legal, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has drained resources and psychic energy from other causes like AIDS research, universal health insurance and poverty among gay people."

"They question whether monogamy is normal. They wonder why gay men and lesbians are buying into an institution that they see as rooted in oppression. They worry that adapting to conventional “family values” will destroy the cohesion that has made gay men and lesbians a force to be reckoned with, politically and culturally."

"And some see the insistence on defining homosexuality as strictly a matter of biology — rather than a matter of choice and sensibility as well as biology — as part of the same conformist impulse. Rob Klengler, a businessman in Marblemount, Wash., is troubled by the focus on what is normal in sex or domestic life. I don’t know if I would use the term ‘normal’ or not,” he said. 'To me, it’s a simple choice. To me it’s a choice like whether I eat red meat. I like chocolate versus vanilla ice cream. It’s just a choice.' Other groups, while supporting gay marriage, are using the issue to push for legal recognition of other nontraditional relationships, like unmarried couples of all kinds."

While we still support the drive for gay marriage (if you're gay and don't want to get married, just don't) we like the disruptive thrust (no pun intended) of the argument. In particular, we like the way the personal politics, who and how you choose to love, overflows into societal politics as it challenges traditional family structures. We also like the rejection of the whole idea of the gay gene. While the LHG is not up on the literature on this topic and we're sure this will come across as naive, we have long thought that a Sartrean like choice to be gay is more empowering than the idea of succumbing to a biological impulse - in the former it's about the creation of new ways to be human, in the latter it's an accident of fate.

We appreciate the ambiguous advice Sartre once gave a young man torn between two incompatible paths: "choose, that is, invent."