 | ||
 | A year after race speech, silence | |
| Some Dems want brake in Obama plans | |
| Jimmy Carter at the West Wing | |
| Love is never having to say you lobby | |
| What are we missing? | |
| NPR Poll: Obama Approval at 59% | |
| MI Gov Poll: Anyone's Race | |
| OH Gov: Strickland Approval Down | |
| Sound or Strong? That is the Question | |
| Steele Names RNC Communications Director |
| The AIG Outrage | |
| Charles Freeman and the 'Israel Lobby' | |
| The Troops Are Still There | |
| Grin and Bear the Bonuses | |
| Getting Too Ugly, Too Soon |
| Gay Marriage vs. Democracy | |
| A Mud Fight of Civil Rights | |
| A Daring Test Case for Marriage | |
| Obama Won't End the Culture Wars | |
| The Gay Community is Losing Friends |
March 18, 2009
A Gay Marriage Compromise?
By Maggie GallagherLast Friday at the Brookings Institution, something unusual in American public life happened: Two good men tried to rise above the divisiveness of the gay marriage debate to break some new common ground.
Now in real life, that would not be remarkable at all; it happens all the time. But in public life, it seems like we too often spend our time crafting effigies of each other to hang.
Jonathan Rauch is a journalist, a gay man and (in my humble opinion) the most persuasive advocate for gay marriage in this nation. David Blankenhorn runs the Institute for American Values and is one of the country's most influential advocates for the importance of marriage and fatherhood.
They met to discuss a big new idea: Trade federal civil union protections for more generous religious liberty exemptions.
Why compromise? Rauch argues, "The consensus around the meaning of marriage in this country has broken down, it's fractured, and I think it's going to be decades ... before we have anything like a broad national consensus on what marriage means."
Gay marriage advocates who see quick victory around the corner are fooling themselves, according to Rauch:
"If you ask people ... do they favor gay marriage, or civil unions, or nothing, it's basically a third, a third, a third. If you look at people age 29 and younger, yeah, more of them favor gay marriage -- 40 percent, instead of 30 percent -- but it's really not all that different; they're also very divided."
It's going to be a long-run fight, he says. In the meantime, "Some sort of federal recognition would be a huge day-to-day improvement in the lives of ordinary gay people."
David Blankenhorn makes a different point:
"I take second place to no one in my passionate, personal opposition to gay marriage," he says. But "we have to figure out a way to live together, that's the principal."
I've been ruminating on the great gap between politics and real life -- about how nice Americans are, and how nasty our politics appear.
If, like me, you go around the country protecting marriage as the union of husband and wife, of course you get a lot of hatred directed your way. (Why, just this morning, one young woman told me at great length that what I do is exactly like what Hitler did. I can only imagine Jon Rauch's e-mail.)
But then these precious American moments also recur. Last week at Harvard a woman in a same-sex marriage came up and said, "I'm so grateful to you for speaking up about abortion." Why did she do that? Why did she make such an effort to connect across great disagreement, to point to the things we share and not just the things that divide us? Well, Americans are like that.
But the difficulties of getting to compromise were also on display at Brookings last week. Nathan Diament of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations spoke of the mistrust generated by the way in which on many issues having nothing to do with marriage, "many in the gay rights activist community did not respect religious liberty or religious institutions' rights."
Meanwhile, Lara Schwartz, of the Human Rights Campaign, had a less nuanced reaction to Rauch and Blankenhorn's proposal:
"We don't need it. We could repeal DOMA," she states, referring to 1996's federal Defense of Marriage Act that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Compromise is sometimes the product of trust and goodwill, but it is at least as often the stepchild of political necessity.
Lara Schwartz doesn't think she needs to compromise. Why should she care about religious liberty?
So here's what I think:
Getting to tolerance, to compromise, to live and let live on this difficult issue is going to require not just a different kind of conversation, but a more effective political movement -- one that organizes Americans who care about religious liberty into a more politically powerful and strategically effective force.
Does that sound cynical? As a wise man once said, "Original sin is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically verified."
