POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: I haven’t written anything about the recent gay-marriage decisions. I really didn’t think I had anything to say that I hadn’t said already. But apparently I do… because I have too many friends?

This post was prompted by an ad from the National Organization for Marriage, which a friend of mine described as “Orwellian”; in his view, the ad said that love is hate. So here are three thoughts about the ad [EDITED: It’s that “Gathering Storm” one–I’m too lazy to find a link, but I’m sure YouTube can hook you up] and that adjective, in order from least interesting to me to most interesting to me, because a) the last shall be first, yo; and b) I acknowledge that your priorities may not be the same as mine. So this post is about the implicit concessions of the slippery slope; religious liberty; and how our language acknowledges the divergent forms of eros.

Full disclosure: I do weekly html monkeywork for NOM. I have exactly no input into their ads, but, you know, if I really disagreed with what they do on a fundamental level, I’d quit. My bosses don’t know I’m writing this post, since they don’t read my blog and I don’t plan to bring this to their attention.

That said, the ad. It’s really, really cheesy.

It’s fearmongering, and I feel really conflicted about that. I don’t want to become so missish on this issue, so much in thrall to political prudery, that I reject the gutter-punching, tabloid ethos I profess to love.

And yet at the same time, I wonder whether this ad goes against John Paul II’s Gospel admonition to “Be not afraid!” We’re told to “duc in altum,” to put out into the deep. Maggie Gallagher, a.k.a. my part-time boss, told me once that the slippery-slope argument is already a concession. The implicit premise is, “Well, gay marriage isn’t really that bad, but look at what it might cause!” I think the religious-liberty ad partakes in the same concession. It’s the kind of ad you’d expect from a lost cause. We’ve lost, but please, can’t we have our small enclave of resistance?

And yet, and yet. There’s probably a reason I don’t get to do these ads, you know? Am I just using effective ads as my redshirts? Am I using them as the demotic worldview from which I, as a Respectable Person, must distance myself? Am I giving in to the pressure to rule all arguments against gay marriage out of bounds as bigoted? (A move made quite strikingly here, for example, where “I don’t want my children to be taught things deeply contrary to my faith” becomes “Gay people molest children!” If the ad described in that comment is out of bounds, what argument could possibly be permissible?)

John Corvino describes a similar dilemma from the opposite side, here.

And it’s not like the ad is wrong. I guess I just can’t understand how people mock or disagree with the basic premise, or call it paranoid or hysterical. It’s obvious to me that the whole culture changes when gay marriage happens. That’s what gay marriage is for.

I don’t think you can say, “You are just like the bigots who oppose interracial marriage–but nothing will happen to you as a consequence!”

If you’re at all interested in the religious-liberty implications of gay marriage, I’d recommend Marc Stern’s and Chai Feldblum’s chapters from Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty. For a shorter overview, you could try Maggie Gallagher’s “Banned in Boston” article, which in my obviously-not-neutral opinion is very fair.

The best counterargument is the same as the best counterargument on all gay-marriage topics: “This isn’t just about gay marriage but about a whole panoply of prior changes, most of which have obvious good qualities as well, so you’re not seeking status quo so much as rollback.” Dale Carpenter makes that argument ably and concisely here.

I see the force of that argument, and of course I acknowledge that there’s no way we would be having this conversation without the prior cultural changes which led to e.g. laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation. For that matter, every single day I take advantage of the cultural changes which have made it possible for me to be an out lesbian while facing very limited explicit hostility.

But I still disagree that gay marriage is only a trivial turn of the ratchet (do ratchets turn?? I’m really not the home-improvement kind of dykey!), a mere formality, or something you can only worry about if you also reject all of the prior cultural moves which brought us here. I think prudence can allow you to draw a line, and frankly, gay marriage is a really obvious place for that line. Gay marriage is a big deal for the same reasons given by its supporters!–it is a real change in the culture, a deeply significant change, and a change with far-reaching public implications. I don’t think you can write paeans to marriage as a public and cultural status, then turn around and say that gay marriage will have very limited public effects. Marriage isn’t designed to have limited public effects.

For a more mechanism-focused take on this stuff, check out Eugene Volokh here; or, I can’t stress this enough, Stern’s and Feldblum’s essays cited above.

Or take public schools. NOM and its allies were ridiculed for suggesting that where gay marriage is legal, public schools will have to teach about it. What I never understood was–why on earth wouldn’t public schools teach about it? Was it to be legal yet shameful? Of course not! Public schools already embrace “family diversity” for families reshaped by divorce, remarriage, and cohabitation—none of which bear the same “if you think this is troubling, you might as well put on a white hood and sheets!” baggage as gay marriage.

(continues in next post)