Heaven knows I’ve had a lot of time and experience to learn lessons in the debate over gay rights. I started my career in Washington DC the year that Congress first began to deal with AIDS. It was the same year of the first Gay March on Washington to get Congress to approve federal funding for AIDS. I still remember writing a press release for my congressional boss that included these words, “How much money do we have to spend to tell people not to bugger each other?” And, with that, a much maligned, but very effective, homophobic career was born.
Since 1989 the gay agenda has been set – and, yes, there is a gay political agenda. It was pronounced in the book After the Ball, and its blueprint was clear and convincing, but not without some controversy within the gay movement. Its authors chastised, in no uncertain terms, that the freak show had to end and mainstream Americans had to see another face of homosexuality – the face of a regular person, a family member, a co-worker, an otherwise “normal” person who just happened to be gay. It was a Madison Avenue approach to selling the gay lifestyle.
By 1997, I had the equivalent of my Ph.D. in gay rights, but I was still learning. It was that year that I gained an important insight into the new gay strategy – Utah was to become ground zero in the war over gay rights. I learned this at an event at the University of Utah sponsored by Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Sitting there amidst a small group of gays and their loved ones, two lesbian sociologists reported on a community survey they had just completed. Their findings were revelatory in directing their strategies: they said, if we couch being gay in very personal terms, emotionally and with familial sentimentality, Utah’s Latter-day Saint population responds positively – in fact, so much so that they’re inclined to accept gays and give them civil rights, notwithstanding their religious beliefs.
Proposition 8 was not about California. It’s about Utah, and particularly Latter-day Saints. If Utah falls for gay rights, the whole nation falls for gay rights. The strategy to take Utah has been in play for over 10 years now. You can see the growing network of families and sympathetic neighbors who empathize with the plight of their young gay and lesbian family members. Utah’s streets are not filled with ridiculous displays of gay culture as you’ll find in San Francisco. Instead, we’re approached by well-dressed, respectable gays, or better yet their straight parents, simply appealing to our good consciences and moral sense of fairness.
Nothing else has changed. The arguments in favor of gay rights and gay marriage are as vacuous today as they were during the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Bar in New York City. Even their best minds still cannot explain how gay sex or gay marriage, or anything beyond gay fashion sense, benefits society. They simply can’t express a compelling state interest in their lives – a standard that our judiciary has long held important before we make public something that is typically private.
They still try to argue civil rights. They try to compare their plight to that of women or minorities throughout US history. They say their lives should fall under our “equal protection” laws. It’s almost as if they forget that what we do as human beings is infinitely more important in this case than who we think we are. The point isn’t who we are, the compelling state interest is about what we do and how what we do benefits society. And this is why laws dealing with marriage and adoption are wholly conditional.
Emotion is still the engine and heart of their argument – and we should never underestimate the violence this realization does to the human psyche. It goes to purpose, and when we humans realize our behavior has no purpose or only selfish purposes, it makes us crazy. That’s exactly the point at which we demand the approval of others – when we’re doing something that obviously doesn’t warrant approval. The angry, sometimes violent, but always irrational, protesting is only a symptom of this void of purpose.
And so you can imagine what Prop 8 has done to Latter-day Saints who favor gay marriage. If Mormon doctrine is about anything, it’s about the purpose of life. To realize they, or their loved ones, have made a choice that cuts against everything they know as Latter-day Saints to be the true purpose of life is naturally devastating. The crying and lamenting isn’t over their lack of rights. The crying and lamenting is over their loss of purpose and no longer being able to reconcile their emotions with their faith.
It’s all very sad and unfortunate, and they have brought all of this misery to the doorstep of Utah and its Latter-day Saint population.
I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.
