Tolerance, Acceptance and Approval

Recently the CEO of Mozilla Corporation, Brendan Eich, was pushed out of his job because of his failure to support same-sex marriage.  It was discovered that in 2008 he donated $1000 to the campaign for California’s heavily contested Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting gay marriage.  He had never shown any animus toward gay subordinates and he earnestly promised as CEO that he would protect the equality of all employees.  But what doomed him at Mozilla was the persistence of his opposition to same-sex marriage; while much of the country has become more friendly toward the idea, Eich has not.  After a week of boycotts and protests, the board of directors nudged Eich out the door.

Many liberals see Eich’s semi-firing as something to celebrate, as a victory for gay rights.  A bigot has been punished, sending a salutary warning to bigots everywhere.  But many observers – mostly conservatives but some liberals as well— see this incident as a worrisome bit of McCarthyism, as possibly the herald of a new age of liberal witch-hunting in which insufficient deference to received leftist truth can damage or end one’s career.  That is, gays are winning the cultural argument, they have achieved some measure of social and economic power and they and their supporters are ruthlessly and carelessly using that power to punish and demonize even the mildest dissenters.  Last year’s heretics have become this year’s Inquisition.

But many of Eich’s supporters speak as if there is no political position one could take that would justify removal.  But this is foolish and everyone knows it.  Every society holds certain views to be self-evidently intolerable, that is, so outrageous or so destructive that anyone professing them must be denied any influence.  Would it be OK to fire a CEO who was a member of the Klan?  Or a blatant anti-Semite?   Or a supporter of al Qaeda?  This sort of social condemnation is one of the inevitable limits of freedom, even in a society with free speech.  No society is possible or sustainable without a short list of unacceptable ideas.  The argument over Eich really amounts to this: Should opposition to same-sex marriage be on that list? 

Conservatives make fun of liberals for claiming to be oh-so-tolerant while stomping on those with un-liberal opinions, but liberals (in effect) counter with the perfectly defensible argument that there’s nothing wrong with being intolerant of intolerance.  If one really believes irrational disapproval of a group undermines that group’s equitable treatment then it’s acceptable to socially punish those perpetuating that inequity.  For a very long time it was widely considered acceptable to fire, deny service to, ostracize, humiliate and even harm gays; in many quarters it still is!  Liberals argue that it’s OK to shame the shamers; not because turnaround is fair play, but because unjustified shaming is so destructive.  That is, intolerance of intolerance is not as objectionable as intolerance of racial or sexual difference, since the latter can’t be justified.  To punish someone for anti-gay actions is defensible in a way that punishing someone for being gay is not.  This is the crucial point: there is no rational basis for anti-gay or anti-gay-marriage sentiment.  Gay love, desire and commitment are morally no more or less than the straight versions.  In a decent world homophobia and opposition to gay marriage would easily and inarguably be on the unacceptable opinion list.  In a thoroughly decent world, of course, they wouldn’t need to be, since in a thoroughly decent world homophobia would be as unknown and as unimaginable as hatred of left-handed people or curling enthusiasts or tulip lovers.

The more sophisticated Eich supporters concede the necessity of the list, but argue that there are good reasons that resistance to gay marriage should not be placed upon it.  Unorthodox conservative Conor Friedersdorf, himself a supporter of gay marriage, makes a strong case here, arguing that not all such resistance arises from animus toward gays.  Many Eich detractors have compared anti-gay-marriage views to anti-mixed-race-marriage views, but Friedersdorf sees a difference:

Opposition to interracial marriage was all but synonymous with a belief in the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another. (In fact, it was inextricably tied to a singularly insidious ideology of white supremacy and black subjugation that has done more damage to America and its people than anything else, and that ranks among the most obscene crimes in history.) Opposition to gay marriage can be rooted in the insidious belief that gays are inferior, but it's also commonly rooted in the much-less-problematic belief that marriage is a procreative institution, not one meant to join couples for love and companionship alone.

But Friedersdorf doesn’t explain why the belief in marriage as a “procreative institution” doesn’t lead to opposition to marriage for the infertile or the elderly.  Are there those who consider childless marriages to be somehow lesser?  If so, even they wouldn’t prohibit such marriages.  Friedersdorf points out that there are many who oppose gay marriage but support civil unions, but racists never suggested anything like civil unions for interracial couples.  But if they had, wouldn’t we have rejected the proposal as still grounded in racism?  Friedersdorf’s point is that opponents of gay marriage are not as morally repugnant as the segregationists who opposed interracial marriage, and that seems quite true.  But even though they’re clearly not bigots in the most hateful sense, their opposition is just as irrational and indefensible.

Some writers argue that since resistance to gay marriage is largely based upon religious dogma it’s not fair to characterize opponents as bigots or to characterize that resistance as irrational, at least not in the usual sense of that word.  But frequently religion is not the source of political belief so much as its alibi.  That was clearly true with many of the religious arguments that Jim Crow-era racists made in support of white supremacy; they used the Bible to buttress cultural and political prejudices they held independently.  But some, including Damon Linker, think that sexual issues are different:

Racism — along with opposition to interracial marriage — received its primary historical validation from ideas, prejudices, and economic circumstances that have nothing directly to do with the message of Judeo-Christian scripture.  The same cannot be said about Judeo-Christianity's normative teaching on sexuality, which is rooted in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. It is deeply intertwined with the authoritative dogmas and doctrines of churches followed by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, and has also been repeatedly reaffirmed and elaborated on at great length and with considerable theological sophistication throughout a nearly 2,000-year tradition of thinking that runs right down to the present.

That is, Jewish and Christian dogma has much more to say about sex than about race.  Linker states the obvious, that opposition to homosexuality per se is central to traditional monotheism, but he states is as an excuse.  They may be bigots but it’s OK because their God endorses it.  It should be noted that this is a very different argument from Friedersdorf’s claim that many reject gay marriage who don’t reject homosexuality itself.  If someone disputes gay marriage because they’re sincerely convinced that the creator of the universe declares homosexuality repulsive and morally wrong then it’s ridiculous to deny that such a person is anti-gay.  Just because anti-gay belief is central to Judeo-Christian dogma should not make us give that belief a pass.  Maybe it should make them question that part of their dogma.

Religious conservative Peter Wehner argues that many religious objectors to same-sex marriage wrestle earnestly with the moral confusions raised:

Let me speak from a perspective within my own faith community. Based on conversations and having written and taught classes on the subject of Christianity and homosexuality, my sense is that many evangelical Christians are working through how to approach the issues of their faith and the gay rights movement with a good deal of care and integrity. They are attempting to be faithful to Scripture in a way that is characterized by grace rather than stridency. Even as they continue to oppose same-sex marriage, they are asking whether their own attitudes have been distorted by their own cultural and political assumptions and that the focus on homosexuality is, as I’ve put it elsewhere, wildly disproportionate to what one finds in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Particularly among younger evangelicals, there’s a palpable discomfort with the approach taken by prominent figures over the last few decades – people like (but not exclusive to) Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. They are not the spokesmen they want to represent them or their faith.

Wehner is asking, in effect, for a little understanding of the difficult position in which many religious opponents find themselves.  They find the crude gay-bashing of some religious right leaders – Graham, Dobson, Robertson, Falwell – to be deeply offensive.  But at the same time the centrality of their religion’s sexual teachings makes them uncomfortable with things like gay marriage.  Are such people bigots?  Should their discomfort with gay marriage bar them from positions of power and influence?  How about the ones who support civil unions, should their attempts at conciliation illicit any from liberals in return?

Consider that even gays have had an ambivalent attitude toward gay marriage.  Before gays petitioned for marriage they asked merely to be left alone, they asked to be tolerated.  And for years, many straight Americans responded with what we can fairly call libertarian homophobia.  They looked down on gays, but allowed them their repugnant pursuit of happiness as long as it occurred behind closed doors, in their own neighborhoods, etc.  After a time and with the growing awareness of perfectly respectable gay individuals in their midst, that tolerance turned to something like acceptance, including the belief, for instance, that no one should be fired or denied housing simply for being gay.  Acceptance also ushered in the era of civil unions, which gave gay relationships the same legal rights and responsibilities as marriage, but without the name and the social status it implies. 

Strange as it may now seem, many gays initially resisted the notion of gay marriage (some still do).  They saw themselves as cultural separatists, licensed by their disparaged sexual desires to be rebels against silly bourgeois institutions like monogamy and marriage.  Conservatives like to remind us that marriage is a traditional institution with a venerable conservative pedigree.  Its goal is social stability; that is, it redirects the sexual urge into socially constructive channels, it tames sex.  And many gays were quite happy to see their urges remain un-channeled and untamed.  But the present-day fight for marriage equality seeks neither to ignore marriage nor to remake it; crucially, it seeks admission to the institution without wishing to change it.  It sees gay desire and gay life as no threat to anyone, not even middle class convention.  Gay couples can live in split-level suburban homes and drive their children to soccer practice in gas-guzzling SUV’s as wantonly and thoughtlessly as any heterosexual couple.  It turns out that Cam and Mitchell are just Ozzie and Harriet with different parts.  The 50’s absorbed the 60’s.  It fits perfectly that a transplanted Tory like Andrew Sullivan was the earliest prominent exponent of gay marriage.  It’s liberal to perceive that homosexuality is morally equal to heterosexuality, but it’s conservative to perceive that a traditional institution should express and nurture that equality.  Gay marriage isn’t the great uprising of sexual corruption and social destruction that it seems in the darkest conservatives fears; it’s not the end of traditional society, merely the accommodation of gay life to it.

But it’s an accommodation that forces the issue of approval.  Friedersdorf is right that marriage is a special case, but not because of its procreative function, because of its social function.  It may seem strange to be so vehement over a word, but the fight over the word “marriage” is so important because it conveys approval in a way “civil union” does not.  Marriage is crucially a social institution, a relationship that the entirety of society endorses, celebrates and blesses.  The push for gay marriage means gay equality can no longer be an issue of individual choice, one that I support and you oppose.  There’s always the right to disagree, of course, but society as a whole is being forced to choose one way or the other.  Society will either bless gay love and commitment the same as straight love and commitment, or it will it not.  There is no third option.

Now we see what’s at stake.  Gay marriage supporters are asking religious opponents to approve – not merely tolerate or accept – something that contradicts their fundamental views on the nature of morality and society.  Think about that.  That’s asking a lot.  That doesn’t mean that gays don’t deserve that approval; they do.  And it doesn’t mean there are defensible reasons for opposing gay marriage; there aren’t.  All arguments opposing gay marriage boil down to the inferiority of gay love, and are therefore fundamentally false.  But even though we can’t call that opposition defensible we might consider it understandable.  It’s not easy to remove one’s cultural prejudices – or even be aware of them! – and we could be a little more forgiving of those who find it so difficult to do so.  We all carry the weight of history, we are all unwilling products of our upbringings, and none of us is remotely free of prejudice or irrationality.  That doesn’t absolve anyone of the responsibility to examine and justify their beliefs, but it should make us a little less eager to punish dissent.  And we can be a little patient with religious objectors especially, particularly those of the good-faith variety that Wehner highlights, not because religion justifies their bigotry, but because it helps explain it. 

That intimate connection between Christianity and anti-gay feeling in a country as religious as ours is the greatest obstacle still facing the struggle for gay equality.  Gays understand the great power homophobia still commands and they fear its intractability.  Intolerance of anti-gay-marriage dissent is a manifestation not only of growing gay social, political and economic strength, but of gay vulnerability as well.  Gays now have some power, but without security.  They fear backlash and they fear reaction.  It’s that fear – plus justified righteousness and good old-fashioned vengefulness – that makes them strike where they can at hapless holdouts like Brendan Eich.

But generosity would suit the cause of gay equality more than crusading vindictiveness.  We are in the middle of an evolution, a process.  That process has brought us from a time only twenty years ago when gay marriage was seen as an impossibility to its near triumph today.  The pace of that evolution demonstrates the openness of the American people to such a clear and simple call for justice.  The end of that process will be a society in which rejection of gay marriage will be treated as social anathema, as the foolish and unjustifiable prejudice which it is.  But pluralism and prudence demand that our list of unacceptable opinions be kept as short as possible; it must include only those ideas that are the most objectionable and most destructive.  This is crucial to the kind of society we will be; only a scrupulously limited list is compatible with freedom of thought and expression.  It’s terribly dangerous to add to it too readily; that would stultify discourse and deaden our intellectual and social life, and possibly even lead to something like the left-wing McCarthyism envisioned in conservative nightmares.  That we’ve come so far so fast makes it more understandable that a large dissenting minority still exists.  Human minds can evolve only so fast.  And pushing too far, too fast can create just the sort of backlash that gays and gay supporters fear.  That practical concern, plus faith in the open society, plus charity toward our common human frailty, should keep opposition to same-sex marriage off the list, for now.  We shouldn’t try to force it before its time.  When a critical mass has been persuaded by reason, not subdued by threats, it will happen of its own accord.

The Politics of Intransigence

William Buckley, in the first issue of National Review in 1955, famously distilled conservative instincts down to the desire to “stand athwart history yelling stop,” and ever since that’s just what conservatives have been doing.  They haven’t stopped history, but that hasn’t kept them from yelling, even when history has long since passed them by.  And particularly in the age of Tea Party purity, to be a conservative is to be forever fighting wars long lost.  Tea Partiers throw themselves into the debt limit breach like Spartans at Thermopylae, though the fiscal Persians passed through long ago.  They denounce the progressivism of Franklin Roosevelt and even Woodrow Wilson.  They call Social Security a Ponzi scheme.  They wish to eliminate Progressive Era reforms like the Federal Reserve, the income tax and the popular election of senators.  They rail against radical cultural developments like the widespread use of contraception.  And – the cultural battle du jour – they hope to forestall gay marriage.  But now President Obama, canny leader from behind that he is, has publically joined the fight for marriage equality just as conservatives are losing that war, too.

And make no mistake, that war is lost.  First there were civil unions.  Then there were state supreme court decisions.  Then there were democratically elected state legislatures (such as New York and Washington).  Last year the Obama administration announced it would not defend DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act, the Clinton era law preventing the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages).  Now federal courts are striking down key provisions of DOMA.  It looks like some states, such as Maryland, are about to legalize gay marriage by popular referendum.  Sure, there are states which will never accept it (North Carolina comes to mind), but that won’t matter if the US Supreme Court rules that marriage is a civil right that cannot constitutionally be confined to heterosexuals.

And this is a big loss.  It might just be the last big loss for cultural conservatives, only because they have little left to lose.  Since the days of Bill Buckley’s exhortation to intransigence, conservatives have resisted racial inclusion, gender equality, drug usage, secularization, and the entire sexual revolution, including the acceptance of contraception, pornography, experimentation, abortion, homosexuality, and blatant sexual expression in the popular media.  How many of those battles have conservatives won?  Drug use may be the only one.  (And thank God they did win that one, though not without some terrible repercussions; for example, the war on drugs remains blindingly irrational.)  A generation from now, the vast majority of Americans will think about gay marriage the way we now think about inter-racial marriage.  That is, we won’t understand why anyone was ever against it.  (Presumably, though, even then some small stubborn conservative contingent will still be struggling to reverse it.)

Why do conservatives keep losing?  What is it about the cultural evolutions mentioned above that have proven so irresistible to standing athwart?  What do those developments have in common? Some commentators sense the unifying theme: Andrew Sullivan explicitly draws out the connection between acceptance of homosexuality and acceptance of recreational marijuana use; Rod Dreher sees parallels, as well.  Daniel McCarthy casts his net much wider, claiming that these recent developments are “a consequence of a shift in the foundations of Western civilization that has been taking place over centuries—a shift from Christian to liberal foundations.”  Could any conservative disagree?  That is, all the cultural developments listed above are about individuals defining their own meaning and controlling their own lives.  They’re about liberating individuals from cultural constraint.  In the good old conservative days, each person was expected to fulfill well-defined social roles – father, employee, countryman – each with powers and duties that could not be ignored or questioned.  And each role fit neatly into its spot in the social hierarchy.  That is, each role dictated who owed deference to whom: women to men, children to parents, non-whites to whites, etc.  And it was the job of social institutions – family, church, community – to define and enforce those roles and that hierarchy.  But individuals and groups that were exploited or oppressed by that hierarchy began to rebel against it; first blacks, then women, then gays, and so on.  That’s the problem: and so on.  The engine of individual liberation, once set in motion, is exceedingly hard to stop.  In 1955, the notion that black Americans could control their own lives, unconstrained by white supremacy, was radical.  But once you accept it, how can you demand women stay in their place?  What about other races?  What about gays?  What about the sexual impulses of white suburban kids, previously constrained by Puritan repressiveness, but now urged to liberation by the irresistible physicality of rock-n-roll?  The cultural scolds of the 1950’s were right: Elvis’ dancing was revolutionary!

And, as Noah Berlatsky nicely explains, present-day conservatives are just as right when they claim that allowing gays into the institution of marriage fundamentally changes that institution.  More precisely, it caps marriage’s evolution into an instrument of personal development, all as part of the liberal cultural movement described above.  Conservatives are dead right when they stress the centrality of marriage as a social institution.  They know that when marriage has completely succumbed to the philosophy of personal liberation they will have lost one of their most important battles.  But once again, they’re fighting a battle already lost.  The meaning of marriage has been changing for a very long time, and the changes started long before anyone considered that gays might marry each other.  (Conservative historian Garry Wills explains that marriage was not even a Catholic sacrament until the 12^th century!)  Stephanie Coontz provides an excellent summary of the fundamental changes in the understanding of marriage over the last couple of centuries.  “For millennia, marriage was about property and power rather than mutual attraction. It was a way of forging political alliances, sealing business deals, and expanding the family labor force. For many people, marriage was an unavoidable duty.”  But then it became permissible to marry for love.  Then the need for parental approval was dropped.  In the 60’s the Supreme Court struck down state bans on contraception within marriage and on interracial marriage.  And, most relevant to our discussion, in the 60’s and 70’s marriage lost its patriarchal strictures and became thoroughly liberalized.  Coontz writes, “The collapse of rigid gender expectations and norms has fostered the expectation that marriage should be an individually negotiated relationship between equals, replacing the older notion of marriage as a prefabricated institution where traditional roles and rules must be obeyed.”  Marriage is no longer about the political or economic merging of families.  It is no longer even primarily about fostering the proper setting for child-rearing.  The arrival of no-fault divorce in the 1960’s made legally explicit the notion that marriage is about individual choice and individual happiness.  Contemplating this history makes clear that the conservative fight against gay marriage is essentially symbolic. Liberal individualism has already changed marriage immeasurably; allowing gays to marry merely completes that change and makes it undeniable.

But marriage is a special case; it’s different from the other cultural developments listed above: it is not a merely an individual choice.  The point of marriage is to employ the weight of society to buttress a personal relationship, for social and individual good.  It used to be that there were three parties to marriage: the bride, the groom and the rest of society.  (Check out Roderick Long’s excellent depiction of the understanding of marriage in 19^th century America; it showcases wonderful historical expressions of the view that society has much to say about the particulars of individual marriages.)  And as a social institution with a pragmatic social purpose, its particulars could be defined collectively through the democratic legislative process.  But it’s not just that the purpose of marriage has changed from economics and child-rearing to personal fulfillment.  That change effects a much more radical transformation: marriage is no longer a social institution.  If it’s just about personal fulfillment then it’s simply a contract between individuals.  Society is no longer a party.  Society no longer has any justifiable claim upon marriage or one’s duties as a spouse and parent.  I decide if I marry or divorce in the same way that I decide if I eat chocolate or vanilla.  And my spouse and I define our roles within our marriage.  No one has any right to tell me what to do.  And it follows inexorably that neither can anyone tell a gay person whom to marry.  The triumph of liberal individualism simply and starkly prohibits society from constraining personal choices.  And it makes marriage into merely another such choice.  For good or ill – actually, for good and ill – all social relations are now choices.

But consider the question: Could conservatives have allowed gays to marry each other while maintaining the general framework of well-defined, hierarchical social roles?  Could there have been room for gays in the old conservative vision of marriage?  Theoretically, yes; but realistically, no freakin way!  You’d have to put aside the fact that acceptance of gays and gay marriage came much later than the transformation of heterosexual marriage, and put aside the tenacious Old Testament revulsion of homosexuality (and of sexual expression in general), and put aside centuries of irrational prejudice and oppression.  Even putting aside all those stumbling blocks you’d still be stopped short by the deepest of conservative fears: the fear of mixing categories and blurring boundaries.  Hierarchies demand discreet roles.  Men must be men and women must be women.  The God of Genesis made each animal distinct and separate; one never gives rise to another.  If a man marries a man it confuses those separate categories, it blurs the distinctions between the sexes.  To conservatives, gay marriage is a moral monstrosity, like the miscegenated giants of Genesis 6, born of the daughters of men, fathered by the sons of God.  And hierarchies, particularly ones based on social categories like gender, race or sexual orientation, cannot help but oppress.  The logic of conservatism seems to require a subject class.  It’s no longer acceptable to advocate subordinate status for non-whites or women.  Once gays are safely on that no-oppression list, conservatives may have no one left to bully.  (Thank God for Muslims!)

Liberalism taught subject classes that their subjection was unjust.  The rest is merely the inevitability of that idea.  But there’s more: there’s conservative complicity in the overthrow of their own worldview.  Conservatives hold that freedom and equality are enemies, that more of one means less of the other, but the broader debate surrounding gay marriage nicely demonstrates how closely bound freedom and equality can be.  As we’ve seen, the goal of the liberal cultural project is the complete liberation of the individual from cultural constraint.  But this dauntingly vacant freedom implies an equally daunting and radical egalitarianism.  For each person to be free no one can claim power over another.  No person or institution has any justified authority over anyone’s meaning, goals or standards.  Thus, as conservatives have argued for almost perfect freedom in economic affairs – sounding like anarchists – they have inadvertently undercut their own arguments about cultural and moral truth.  But not just in the obvious way that conservative embrace of market freedom contradicts their defense of cultural control.  When they argue for freedom they unknowingly argue for equality as well, and that equality is a dagger aimed at the heart of cultural authority.  Modern conservatives thought they could be cafeteria liberals, simultaneously champions of freedom and warriors against equality.  But they were wrong: hierarchy and freedom are as much enemies as allies.

When gay marriage becomes widely accepted, it will have become so through liberal process and in liberal form.  It will be seen as the culmination of the liberal cultural revolution whereby all social institutions have been relieved of their authority to shape individual judgments.  It will not be an accommodation of gays into the conservative notion of marriage, though some conservatives – most notably Andrew Sullivan – have long urged such accommodation.  Sixty years ago, American social conservatism was about hierarchy composed of well-defined social roles that themselves expressed received moral truth.  But all the standing athwart in the world could not withstand the righteous power of those demanding liberation from that hierarchy.  Rhetorically at least, conservatives have repudiated that old-fashioned hierarchy; now all they have left are the well-defined social roles and the received moral truth.  But those roles and that truth are quickly succumbing as well. And it could not have been otherwise.  As an important conservative theorist once said, ideas have consequences.  More to the point, they have momentum.  Conservatives, being conservatives, waited too long to lose the hierarchy.  They defended it so long that the notions of well-defined roles and moral truth have become conflated in the public mind with that hierarchy, and they have all been rejected as a whole.  Thus the new non-hierarchical conservatism is punished for the injustices of its hierarchical progenitor.  The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.  By forcing impulses of liberation into liberal channels, conservative resistance against social developments like gay marriage has only added to the triumph of the new individualism.  What started as emancipation from arbitrary and unjust power became emancipation from every possible external constraint.  In the new liberal vision, persons are not the roles they play, but unique, growing, complicated, uncertain creatures; each one a project, a growing, an ongoing liberation.  Modern freedom is self-actualization defended with relativism.  My life is entirely mine and entirely not yours.  Granted, conservatives have much to say against that disposition and they are furiously standing athwart it and yelling stop.  The history of the last 60 years promises that there will indeed be much yelling, but no stopping.