MARRIAGEDEBATE.COM Goes to Washington: Maggie Gallagher

Sorry for the silence folks. I flew down to D.C. yesterday morning to attend a fascinating HHS conference on marriage and family formation in low-income households (more on that in a separate post) AND to testify before the Senate on the same-sex marriage issue.

So I walk into the wood-panelled, green-felted halls to take my place (six feet lower of course) before the senators on the Constitution subcommittee (Sen John Cornyn, R-TX, presiding) and who should i bump into but Prof. Dale Carpenter, testifying (most ably I might add) as an expert on Constitutional law.

But you guys heard it all right hear. Actually I will post excerpts from my testimony. Dale send me a copy of yours?
posted by maggie at 5:14 PM | Link | 0 comments

APPLES AND ORANGES: Maggie v. Barry

What is a gay identity? It is a person who identifies as gay. No cliches intended. Distinguishing betweeen the experience of desire and the act of identification of the self with that desire, and the sexual act(s) that expresses (or satisfies) that desire seems to me to be basic to understanding the social process involved.

Before the idea of homosexuality was invented (or discovered) by Viennese psychoanalyst, nobody was gay, as we now understand that term. Some men had sexual desires for other men, and some men had same-sex sex with men (although typically, as Dave Bianco points out, not as an exclusive choice). But the creation of what the Victorians called a "third sex" was a social construction, a stigmatized sexual identity, which had as much to do with anxieties about masculinity emerging as we entered the industrial revolution as anything else.

The idea that sex is a simple appetite for orgasm, is I think Barry, contradicted by pretty much all of human experience, without dragging metaphysics into it. Sex is interpersonal in ways that eating simply isn't. Sex involved not only physical pleasure, but possibilities of suffering, rejection, triumph, union, and affirmation that eating really does not. If sexual desire were only a desire for pleasure, people who never be moved as they are to do and suffer so much in restless search for its satisfaction.

I once explained to a man that sex always has a spiritual component. He gave me this look, this look that said: "You're a girl. You don't have a clue."

So I explained: at a bare minimum, the man wants the girl to want to have sex with him. Nobody cares what the steak wants. We are already out of the realm of the satisfaction of merely physical needs and we have not yet left lust.











posted by maggie at 9:19 AM | Link | 0 comments

APPLES AND ORANGES: Barry answer Maggie

So many questions. Where to start!? Well, here goes.

You ask of sexual desire, what is it an appetite for? At its most base, it is the urge to satiate sexual libido. Hunger pangs urge us to seek food, libido pangs urge us to seek orgasm. And that's all the metaphysics you will get from me.

A hungry guy may quiet his craving for food in a number of ways. He can frequent a fast food eatery all by himself and wolf down a burger and fries. He can grab a bag of chips from the vending machine and continue a late night at the office. Or he can find much greater satisfaction dining at a fine restaurant in the company of a beautiful and alluring woman whom he deeply loves, basking in the warm glow of romantic candlelight and the sounds of soft, beautiful music. Ahhhh.

Same way with sex. To satisfy his craving he can do a solo while surfing internet porn. He can do a businesslike quickie with a pickup prostitute. Or he can share sexual intimacy with a beautiful and alluring woman whom he deeply loves, basking in the warm glow of candlelight and sounds of soft, beautiful music. Ahhhh.

In either dining or sex, its the intimacy, the contact with another responsive and loving being, that will give the greatest satisfaction and meaning. Though some would substitute a man for a woman.

Now, is Eros a demanding God who offers no choice? Yes, if by choice is meant that one can deliberately choose whom one finds sexually appealing. In that regard, Eros calls the shots. He can, of course, be denied or ignored in some ways. Many throughout history, mainly women, have married or been forced to marry persons for whom they had neither physical nor emotional attractions. Reported results are varied. And, fortunately, some are able to resist the darker side of Eros. Perhaps the pedophile and the rapist cannot will away their destructive fantasies but we can hope that they will find the power to refrain from acting on them. Alas, they often do not.

Next, what is the relationship between our desires and our sexual identities? If we do not choose our desires, do we then have no choice over our sexual identities? Again, it was you, Maggie, who used the term sexual identity...specifically, gay identity. I repeated the term in my last post but added quotation marks because I really did not know what you had in mind.

At first I thought you might be referring to mannerisms such as stereotypical effeminate gestures or speech affectations. Then wondered if you were referring to cultural inclinations--aren't all gay men supposed to just love Judy Garland and Cher? (Perhaps my choice of icons is out of date.)

And what common ground would there be in "gay identity" between a character such as a Jack on WILL & GRACE and a Richard Chamberlain? Or between a flaming drag queen and a masculine gay truck driver whose idea of a great night out is a demolition derby or boxing match. Clarification please. My turn to ask questions.

Which brings me to another beef, the use of gay as a synonym for homosexual. No doubt great shorhand for use by gays. But most heterosexuals who hear the work gay likely conjure up a Nathan Lane or a Harvey Fierstein rather than a Montgomery Clift, Raymond Burr or Rock Hudson. I know. I am as guilty as the rest. Gay is such a nice short word.

Now, can we be gay-bi-straight at various times of life? It seems highly unlikely to me that a man who has had only desires for and sexual experiences with other men would venture out very far on the continuum let alone slip all the way to heterosexual end of the spectrum. And vice versa for confirmed heterosexuals. In a recent interview, Richard Chamberlain acknowledged his strictly homosexual orientation yet noted that he lost his virginity to a woman. Hardly a giant step toward heterosexuality nor yet bisexuality.

The greatest swings in heterosexual/homosexual behavior is along the continuum, the murky waters of bisexual desire. Bisexuals are the most likely candidates for moving more or less permanently to one end of the spectrum or other than those who have never ventured beyond familiar territory. Question is, can one ever totally escape bisexual desires? I know one man who says he has. But who knows what lurks in the dark recesses of the human psyche? Only the shadowy sex therapist knows. And I said no more metaphysics!



posted by maggie at 5:12 PM | Link | 0 comments

WAS SHAKESPEARE GAY? More from Dave Bianco


Full essay in Planet Out here, excerpts below:


The typical pantheon of "famous gays in history" includes Sappho, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo and William Shakespeare. Many gays and lesbians believe with certitude that we are a minority group that has existed throughout time and across cultures. The ubiquity -- and by extension, inevitability -- of gay and lesbian identity is a common building block in arguments that homosexuality is natural, unchosen and good. As such, it's often presented in brochures and handbooks aimed at helping young people come out.

For example, according to the official "Straight Talk About Homosexuality" brochure from the University of California-San Diego, being gay is normal because "historians have determined that homosexuality has existed since the beginning of humanity. Anthropologists report that lesbians and gay men have been part of every culture." The "Is It Natural?" section of the University of Connecticut women's center Web site similarly boasts that "Lesbians and gays have existed since the earliest of human societies. Anthropological studies have shown that gay men and lesbians have been part of every culture."

But those studies are imaginary. The coming-out literature presents the "eternal and everywhere" view as unquestioned and irrefutable, but it's not even held by a scholarly minority. No reputable historian or anthropologist (at those universities or any other) believes that lesbians and gay men have existed in every culture throughout history. Indeed, the most eloquent critics of this idea have been gay and lesbian scholars.

All serious gay history is rooted in the assumptions and techniques of what's called "social constructionism." This school of thought sees gay identity as a constructed response to a set of economic, social and political conditions that first appeared in Western Europe in the late 19th century. Social constructionism doesn't deny same-sex desire, love, or sex in other eras, but neither does it understand their meanings to be essentially anything like those of present-day homosexuality. Thus, only same-sex behavior in the last century or so can be called "gay" if the term is to be at all useful.

It's not just that no earlier society used certain words to describe its gay minority -- there were no such minorities. Thoughtful gay and lesbian scholars like anthropologists Walter Williams and Esther Newton, and historians George Chauncey and Jonathan Ned Katz (whose "The Invention of Heterosexuality" explores this subject especially well) have gone to great lengths to describe the experiences and delineate the identities of people who had same-sex liaisons in various time periods and cultures. They have been unanimous in finding no evidence of what we know as homosexuality and heterosexuality except in recent Western culture.

Any serious look at the people from other cultures who've been put forth as "gay" shows the impotence of that anachronism outside the contemporary context. Same-sex "eros" (romantic love) among men in ancient Greece, for example, usually involved men of different generations who also paired with women. The Native American individuals known as "two-spirits" or "berdaches" differed from fellow tribesmen primarily in their feminine expressivity and social function, not in the sex of the people they turned to for intimacy. In some contemporary Latin American cultures, categories of male sexuality are much more closely shaped by passive/active role-playing than the gender of the other person.

We shouldn't call Shakespeare "gay" even as a shortcut for suggesting he had sex with men, because there's no evidence he identified with any category of men-oriented men. It's like calling Pocahontas an American or Moses a Jew. The labels might sound right at first, but they would have meant nothing to the figures in question, as they require a set of experiences, categories and identifications such people could never have encountered. Even saying Shakespeare was "gay but didn't know it" is arrogant. Our system of classifying people into sexual orientations may work for us, but forcing it onto everyone who ever lived is simply bad history.


posted by maggie at 4:58 PM | Link | 0 comments

APPLES AND ORANGES: VCorrigan applauds Eve

[VCorrigan describes herself as a 54 year old mother of three, a lawyer, and a sexuality wonk. Cool]

Maggie:  You are really closing in on the heart of the question. "What is GAY" is the elephant in the room.  The post you are responding to demonstrates the confusion - thought process totally muddled by the unleashing of emotion around this issue.  Barry discusses the interplay of desire and opportunity, appetites and acquired tastes, the famous Kinsey concept of sexual "fluidity" - and then seems to say this all supports the thesis that gay is not a choice!  His post seems rather to raise the question of to what extent are we the slaves to our libido.  Is control of the libido possible?  Desirable?  Is it controlled by our intellect or by some personality trait?

Eve's post is so insightful:  The interpretation and characterization of love and attraction between individuals is what changes over time.  The name of the relationship and the degree and manner in which we allow ourselves to demonstrate our emotions is what's being manipulated by the GLBT agenda today.   These feelings are not so easily defined or classified by adults, let alone children - as Barry, presumably an adult, himself reveals.  Love is so complicated today partly because it is so ubiquitously intertwined and confused with sexual expression.  These days we find ourselves constantly trying to interpret relationships and feelings.  If we are turned off by the thought of going on a date with a guy because we know the expectation is sex, does that mean we have an aversion to the opposite sex?  If we feel safe and relaxed among our women friends, does that mean that we must be lesbians?  If we are feel sexual stimulation upon exposure to sexual images, innuendoes, pornography - are we gay?

Sexuality without borders:  recipe for disaster!

posted by maggie at 3:05 PM | Link | 0 comments

APPLES AND ORANGES: Ben v. Eve

From Ben Dykes:

Eve is right that stories are important in making sense of our lives. But not all stories are alike, and we shouldn't equate complexity with total fluidity. Some straight women self-identified as lesbians in the 70s and 80s, not because they were actually attracted to women (though some were curious), but because it was a political label stemming from anger at sexism. That women are encouraged to be emotionally close with each other made it seem even more sensible. They got into relationships with other women, and left a lot of genuine lesbians heartbroken when they realized their mistake and went back to men. But the narratives many tell themselves now are either: "I am a lesbian who has relationships with men," conflating a political stance with sexual orientation; or "all sexuality is fluid," a sheer projection from their own confused experience. Genuine coming-out stories about self-discovery, hiding, coming out to parents, etc., are stylized depictions of real events and meanings, not sheer retrospective justifications.

The three orientations of homo, bi, and hetero are highly stable and established (and have correlates in traditional cultures), even if they don't answer most of the important questions. True, we shouldn't use them to shoehorn people into categories on the basis of a single fantasy or crush. But just because there are some changes in people's sexual self-consciousness doesn't mean that the orientations themselves change. Their cultural acknowledgements and elaborations change, as do inessential preferences within each of them. There's no contradiction or total "fluidity" in a married man (who likes women) having relationships with men after she dies: it means he is bisexual. He was not "straight" first, and "gay" later. We mustn't confuse behavior with orientation. He is bisexual, even if there were changes in his preference between men and women at some point in his life.
posted by maggie at 11:36 AM | Link | 0 comments

POLL WATCHING: Maggie's thoughts

I was interviewed about that particular poll result. If you take it literally, people are actually a bit more opposed to civil unions than gay marriage. Most polls show about 5 to 10 percentage points greater opposition to gay marriage than civil unions, depending on wording etc.

The key here is the framing of the marriage question. Questions which ask people whether they want to "ban gay marriage" get less public support than question that ask people whether they want to define marriage as the union of a man and woman.

Since we do not have gay marriage now, the question of "banning gay marriage" may be confusing. I think people read it as asking whether they support imposing new restrictions on gay and lesbian couples. (The 52 percent who support "banning" gay marriage, are almost exactly the same proportion of Americans who view homosexual acts as always wrong.)


posted by maggie at 10:54 AM | Link | 0 comments

Attraction or Compatibility?: Rabbi Marc Gellman responds

[You may recognize Rabbi Gellman as one-half of "the God squad" of Today show (and major newspaper column) fame]

Rabbi Boteach says about homosexuality: Sure it's a sin, but so is turning on a light on the Sabbath.

This argument is flawed on so many levels it is nearly impossible to recount them all:--there is a clear difference to all but orthodox Jews between the violation of ritual laws and the violation of moral laws. This is essentially the message of God through the Prophets "Sure you fast on Yom Kippur but you oppress your workers so your fast has no value to me." (Cf. Isaiah 58 which is read as the haftorah on Yom Kippur!) The truth God has taught and we are to learn is that moral laws (those that can be universalized as obligations for all people) have a higher moral claim than ritual laws (the kind that cannot be universalized and are obligatory only upon Jews). Homosexuality, if it is morally wrong (and this is a topic for another more extended discussion) is wrong for all people. It is not a ritual but rather a moral offense. Therefore if it is a sin, and Rabbi Boteach is compelled to affirm this, it is a sin of much greater gravitas than eating a cheesburger! He misses this fundamental point and goes down the wrong road from there.

--to make sexual attraction and compatibility of interests antinomies is also foolish and wrong headed. Both are needed for good marriages, not one or the other. And furthermore it is simply wrong to say that all women hate football and all men hate shopping. The point of marriage is to produce children who can grow up in a loving home with a father and a mother. If this proposition is controversial it is the fault of our age not the fault of our ancient religious wisdom traditions.

posted by maggie at 11:54 PM | Link | 0 comments

POLL WATCHING: Jonathan Rauch

In catching up on my reading I just came across this August AP poll. Contrary to common belief (including mine), it suggests that whether you talk about "civil unions" or "gay marriage" makes basically no difference either to people's approval of the idea or their presidential voting intentions.

Hmm. Can it be so? I'd be most interested in hearing how fellow bloggers respond to this question: do you or equally approve/disapprove of legal same-sex unions regardless of whether they're designated marriage? To what extent is this a debate about the label?

Here's the poll:

ASSOCIATED PRESS Gay Marriage.Conducted 8/8-12/03; surveyed 1,028 adults; margin of error +/-3% (release,8/19). A response of * indicates less than 0.5 percent.

Question one: "Would you favor or oppose allowing gays and lesbians to form a civil union that would give a same-sex couple the same rights and benefits as a married couple?"

41% favor; 53 percent oppose; 6 percent refuse or don't know

Question two: "Would you favor or oppose a law that would ban gay marriage, requiring that marriage should be between a man and a woman?"

52% favor; 41 percent oppose; 7 percent don't know, refuse.


posted by maggie at 11:44 PM | Link | 0 comments