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.