A flyer advertising “Queer Awareness Days” is taped to the doors of the campus bookstore here on the Stanford University campus. Among other things, it mentions that a National Day of Silence in support of homosexual rights is due to take place on Wednesday, April 21. Given all the noise and ill will generated on both sides of the rights question in the last few weeks, a little silence might well be in order. Some of us need time to do a little thinking.
I hope I’m not alone in feeling thoroughly confused about the debate over same-sex marriage. My position on the subject tends to shift back and forth depending on which article I have just finished reading. At the moment I am in favor of civil unions and dubious about the idea of homosexual couples tying the knot in San Francisco Town Hall, or anywhere else for that matter.
But all that could change once I finally get around to reading Jonathan Rauch’s new book, “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.” Christopher Caldwell’s typically cogent review of the book in last Sunday’s New York Times found plenty to praise. Even so, Mr. Caldwell could not help noting that Mr. Rauch downplays — for fairly obvious reasons, cynics might say — the importance of child-rearing in traditional marriage.
What is more, Mr. Caldwell suggests, if same-sex marriage is legalized, some followers of Islam and certain strains of Mormonism will inevitably begin pressing for the right to practice polygamy. Somehow I doubt that even some of the free spirits in the Bay Area are quite ready for that step.
But then, as Mr. Caldwell also points out, if marriage is at risk of being radically redefined, we set the process in motion decades ago when we uncoupled sex and procreation. Technology and morality are locked in a race at the moment, and so far technology seems to be a lap or two ahead.
There is some reassurance in the thought that even an author as clear-sighted as Shelby Steele admits to mixed emotions on the homosexual marriage issue. When I caught up with him in his hometown of Monterey earlier this month, the Hoover Institution fellow and author of the uncompromising racial polemic “The Content of Our Character” reflected on his ongoing spat with conservative commentator and homosexual activist Andrew Sullivan.
The standoff began when Mr. Steele wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece opposing same-sex marriage and, more to the point, lamenting the homosexual movement’s decision to borrow the imagery and symbolism of the civil rights movement. Instead of trying to imitate heterosexual rites, he argued, homosexuals would do better to create their own alternative domestic arrangements.
Back came Mr. Sullivan — an avowed admirer of Mr. Steele’s work — with a robust critique in the pages of the New Republic. More in sadness than in anger, he essentially accused Mr. Steele of indulging in exactly the kind of separatist rhetoric that is usually the preserve of multiculturalists and the Al Sharptons of this world.
Mr. Steele, so far, seems unbowed. It transpires that a week before he wrote the Journal piece he was actually inclined to support homosexual marriage — thanks in no small part to the urgings of his wife and grown-up daughter. After a few more days of reflection, however, he changed his mind, although he still supports civil unions and believes that a constitutional amendment is a terribly blunt instrument to use on such a delicate social issue.
Why did he switch sides on same-sex marriage? In retrospect he feels that, as he had no personal stake in the argument, he succumbed to the temptation simply to take the high ground — which in this case, he believes, lay on the liberal side of the debate.
Later he decided that broader issues were at stake: “The hope of gay marriage advocates is that marriage will weaken stigma,” he told me. “Sullivan admits as much, but I’m not sure it will. I think gays could gain the right to marry tomorrow and still face stigma. Popular culture would immediately invent ugly names for homosexual marriages and stigmatization would march ahead … Without realizing it, Sullivan is hoping gay marriage will be a kind of ersatz heterosexuality.
“There is some evidence — largely from Sweden, Denmark, and now France — to suggest that the institution of marriage, already weak, weakens further when opened even to civil unions. It seems that when marriage is justified more by love and adult fulfilment, when it gets farther away from its procreative and child-nurturing function, it is weakened. Mr. Sullivan might win the right to enter an institution that will offer him none of the — somewhat idealized — opportunities he sees. Worse, his right to join it might be the blow that finishes it.”
Mr. Steele confesses to being struck by the depth of hostility towards same-sex marriage he encountered among many of the people he consulted. Black Americans, he finds, feel enormous resentment towards homosexual activists who attempt to dress their campaign in the colors of Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. One source of that hostility, Mr. Steele observes, is to be found in the Baptist traditions of the black churches.
Nor does he discount the influence of the cult of hyper-masculinity that is part of the heritage of slavery. This is, in short, one of those branches of the culture wars that grows more complex and troubling the longer you reflect on it.
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A small crisis of conscience assails me inside the bookstore. Hidden away in the bargain bins at the rear is one of my favorite Anthony Trollope novels, “The Small House at Allington,” on sale at the ridiculous price of $3. Even though I already own a copy I am seriously tempted. I am a longtime Trollope fanatic, after all, and my own edition back home is a faded hardback, printed around the time of the upsurge of interest in the eminent Victorian that occurred during World War II. (The more fashionable critics have often been sniffy about Trollope’s gifts as a novelist; ordinary readers have always had a much better grasp of his virtues.)
The Stanford copy is a virtually brand-new Everyman edition that would look perfect on the shelves at home. Then again, I tell myself, maybe I should resist the acquisitive impulse, and leave the book in its place, so that it can be discovered by some innocent undergraduate who has never read a word of the great man. Imagine the service I would be performing for him or her.
Feeling overwhelmed by my sudden attack of virtue, I walk away from the bin. A few minutes later, I drift back again, wondering if there is any point wasting a book as good as this on a student when everyone knows you have to be at least 30 years old and burdened with a mortgage before you can appreciate Trollope’s eye for the necessary compromises of adulthood.
Clive Davis writes for the Times of London, and is a media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
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