If radicalism has had any positive value in the last century, it was to scandalize an otherwise complacent centre-left consensus on civil rights, one reason why I’ll always prefer the hardheaded wisdom of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to the treacly pastiche of “I Have a Dream.”
Richard Just -- which rather sounds like the pen name someone in his position would adopt -- has authored an indignant essay in The New Republic against Barack Obama’s nonsensical views on gay marriage, which have objectively placed the Democratic president to the right of “Laura Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, according to a new CNN poll, 52 percent of the American people.” The relevant portion is this:
Obama argues that he is against gay marriage while also opposing efforts like Prop 8 that would ban it. He justifies this by saying that state constitutions should not be used to reduce rights. (His exact words: “I am not in favor of gay marriage, but when you’re playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that that is not what America is about.”) Obama appears to be saying that it is fine to prohibit gay people from getting married, as long as the vehicle for doing so is not a constitution. Presumably, then, he supports the numerous states that have banned same-sex marriage through other means, without resorting to a constitutional amendment? If so, he might be the only person in the country to occupy this narrow, and frankly absurd, slice of intellectual terrain. Obama has also said he favors civil unions rather than gay marriage because the question of where and how to apply the label “marriage” is a religious one. This argument makes even less sense than his stance on state constitutions, since marriage, for better or for worse, is very much a government matter.
By now it’s common knowledge that Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the former manager of George W. Bush’s presidential re-election campaign, prefers the company of men to women and believes in same-sex marriage legislation. Was it cynicism or prudence that impelled a high-ranking conservative not to make the most of this aspect of his “identity” when it might have made a political difference? The Daily Show will no doubt have a sober and fair-minded discussion about this very topic in the days to come. But the DNC and those ever diminishing Obama torch-bearers are hardly in a position to score partisan points off of Mehlman’s disclosure.
In fact, the best arguments in favor of gay marriage have come from conservatives such as Jamie Kirchick and Jonathan Rauch, both of whom can’t quite fathom what’s leftist about gentrifying another ten percent of the population. (There’s also likely some forward-thinking Karl Rove in the younger crop of GOP operatives who sees expanding the party’s voter base by endorsing such a platform.)
Meanwhile, the best half-serious arguments against gay marriage come from cultural traditionalists, but not the kind you think. There are quite a few homosexuals, mostly older, who fear that by gaining admittance to mainstream institutions, they stand to forfeit the aura of camp subversiveness and bohemian affiliation that formerly clung to the “lifestyle.” If you know anything about English poetry in the 1930's, you'll know exactly what this cultivated and storied aesthetic looks like: Larkin called it the oh-my-dear-ist school, best embodied by Auden and Spender. Yet this contingent is becoming a source for idiosyncratic nostalgia -- the sexual equivalent of Yiddish revivalism -- equally embarrassed by the term "partner" as it is by Bravo's reality television programming. A viable cultural movement it is not.
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