GAY STUFF: When Arthur Silber posted a few items about homosexuality and straight male fears of ditto, he was surprised by the strong response he got in his comments section. For whatever reason, people were really interested in the topic; he got linked more than he expected and he got more commenters than he expected. He asked if I had any thoughts on why homosexuality was such a hot-button issue.

And in truth, it’s not an especially obvious question. We’re so used to it that we tend to assume, Oh, of course gay stuff is political fireworks. But it doesn’t involve life-or-death questions (like abortion), it doesn’t involve self-government (like the proper role of the judiciary), and now that more and more people have openly gay friends it isn’t as much of an “identity issue,” in which one issue serves as a proxy for an entire stance toward life and government, and thus the issue becomes part of a person’s identity, “who I am.” (Anything can be an identity issue for some people; an example of a substantive policy question that is also an identity issue for a lot of voters would, of course, be gun rights.) The “identity issue” question is still a big motivating factor; opposition to gay-rights initiatives is a way of suggesting a pro-family or pro-“regular people” or non-cosmopolitan stance without threatening the preferred cosmopolitanisms and family-dissolving choices of the electorate. Minority groups are generally useful in this way: Politicians can use them as symbols to capture the minds of the majority.

Here are my thoughts on a few other reasons homosexuality has become a hot political issue, and why it evokes strong emotional responses that express themselves in the political realm. I don’t claim that these are original claims, but I do think they’re true. There are four principal reasons:

1) Contraception. Once you accept that heterosexual couples can choose to eliminate the unitive-as-reproductive aspect of sexuality, it becomes a lot harder to figure out what could possibly be wrong (other than “eeuugghh, gross”) with same-sex canoodling. There’s a good essay on this in Same-Sex Matters: The Challenge of Homosexuality–Patrick Fagan’s “Inversion of Heterosexual Sex.” Once pleasure, rather than personal physical and reproductive unity, is considered the primary purpose of sex, it’s hard to make a case against masturbation, homosexuality, promiscuity, or sundry kinks and fetishes.

2) It’s not divorce. Going after gay-rights proponents allows politicians, preachers, and regular folks to “defend the family” without threatening their own preferred (pick your noun) kinks or sins. Much easier to bag on the Gay Pride parade than to mentor a troubled married couple; much easier to vote down mandatory nondiscrimination laws than to hold your own marriage together for the children; much easier to condemn other people’s temptations and failings than one’s own. Talking about homosexuality is easier for heterosexuals than talking about adultery or divorce. (Footnote: Some civil divorces are good. But most do more harm than good.)

3) It’s hard to figure out what masculinity is. Masculinity is even more contested and challenged today than femininity. What Richard Brookhiser casually referred to in his biography of George Washington as “the contemporary failure of fatherhood” is perhaps the most obvious example; mothers we shall always have with us, fathers not so much. When masculinity is contested, straight men work hard to prove that they’ve got it, and one of the easier ways is by proving their animus against and difference from queers.

4) We don’t know how to talk about the body or the role of physicality in love. Diana Hsieh argued that contemporary culture exalts the “spirit” at the expense of the body; I would argue pretty much the exact opposite in most cases. She’s absolutely right that the spirit/body dichotomy is wrong–the body itself has a theological meaning; it is a word spoken by God. But in most cases, our politics focuses on fulfilling the easily-identifiable needs of the body: We sacrifice life, liberty, and responsibility for comfort, wealth, and safety. Cigarette taxes to make us healthy, corporate welfare to make us rich. When it comes to sex, though, we suffer from the opposite problem–we denigrate the meaning of what we do with our bodies. We suggest that matter doesn’t matter all that much. Sex is “just sex.” One can be physically promiscuous without being emotionally unfaithful, flighty, or inconstant. Body and soul are divorced. For an excellent example of this confusion, try the book I just finished (per Tenebrae’s recommendation), Stephen Fry’s autobiography Moab Is My Washpot. A fun and insightful book, but the section on sex is… distressing. Anyway, this is perhaps simply another way of putting explanation #1.

So that’s my take. Your mileage may vary.