I saw some heart-warming things last week. People I went to high school with who used “gay” as an insult wrote impassioned Facebook posts about the ignorance of those who oppose gay marriage. I saw the word “gay” on the front page of the New York Times every day after Obama’s endorsement. I learned that there are a lot of straight Republicans who support marriage rights.

But there were also ugly things said in support of the cause. Gawker’s John Cook lamented the President’s endorsement as phony and useless. This reminded me of Cook’s piece about the Mike Daisey/Foxconn scandal. Daisey claimed that while he may have embellished the atrocious working conditions at the Chinese factory-city, he brought to light a larger truth about human rights violations. Cook’s headline: “There is No Such Thing as a ‘Larger Truth.’” This is a rhetorically appealing yet fatuous response — exactly like Cook’s rebuke of Obama’s announcement. The President’s comment, while ineffectual, represents for millions of Americans a “larger truth” about their changing position in society. It is, like so much the President does, symbolic. Daisey and Obama and all the people who understood the import of this announcement are capable of reading a symbol: a token that represents a larger truth.

Another ugly response: in reply to North Carolina’s vote to explicitly ban gay marriage, images spread across the Internet reading, “North Carolina: Marry your cousin, just not your gay cousin.” We have all become comfortable with cousin marriage and polygamy as punch lines. It is, again, rhetorically appealing to promote marriage between gays as less threatening to society than other forms of marriage, yet these jokes strengthen the very standards they seek to undermine. What we want to say is that marriage is a private matter and that all people have the dignity to make that decision themselves. What we end up saying is, “At least we’re more normal than them.”

When advocating for gay marriage, one can quickly start sounding more conservative than liberal. Obama’s support emphasized the importance of supporting monogamous and procreative families. In February, Frank Bruni wrote a piece for the Times that both explained and exemplified this conservatism. Called “Value Our Families,” the article seeks the moral high ground by positing gay marriage as a boon for the “unholy” state of matrimony in America; calling the rate of babies born out of wedlock “ignoble,” Bruni earns his place in the hegemony by creating yet a lower “other:” those who “haven’t bothered to” get married. It’s like the feminism that empowers women by calling men lazy and adulterous: empowerment by exclusion. It will win the right to gay marriage; it will not win marriage equality.

Both Cook and Bruni fail to recognize change as a process. The former wants Obama to support a federal protection of gay marriage, yet one could argue it would have been better for him to focus on getting re-elected rather than make a politically risky announcement. Bruni also wants a pre-determined version of change to come all at once — we will impose this reform on the system and it will have that effect. But maybe the unmarried mothers he cites point to even more reforms that will be necessary to facilitate the development of new family models. Perhaps with the gay community’s influence, marriage will have to learn to accommodate polyamorous relationships. There are many types of marriage that will still be illegal and many people who will feel excluded from the system just as gays feel now.

I understand that at some point in the feminist movement it made sense to demonize men — that may have been the only power some women felt they had. And I understand that the easiest way to convince people that gay marriage is okay is to convince them that it is “normal.” Change is a process and we are still at a fairly early stage of gender and sexuality reform. But we should be redefining “normal,” not bending to it. Lest our rhetoric get ahead of us, we must remember: equality is never won through exclusion.


 
 
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