newyorker.com/talk/content/?040315ta_talk_hertzberg
After summarizing the events surrounding the current fuss over same-gender matrimony, the Lariat editors stated their view. Gay couples should be granted the same equal rights to legal marriage as heterosexual couples, they wrote. Like many heterosexual couples, they went on to conclude, many gay couples share deep bonds of love, some so strong theyve persevered years of discrimination for their choice to co-habitate with and date one another. Just as it isnt fair to discriminate against someone for their skin color, heritage or religious beliefs, it isnt fair to discriminate against someone for their sexual orientation. Shouldnt gay couples be allowed to enjoy the benefits and happiness of marriage, too? This, by the way, was followed by a boldface tagline: editorial board vote: 5-2 . Wouldnt it be nice if the New York Times , the Washington Post , and the Wall Street Journal practiced this sort of transparency? Baylor, with fourteen thousand students, describes itself as the oldest institution of higher learning in the state and the largest Baptist university in the world, and is a bastion of Christian conservatism.
It was no great surprise that the Lariat s foray into dissidence was promptly squelched. What was startling was that such a foray, in such a place, was ventured at all. It was more startling, in its way, than the pro-gay-marriage ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, three weeks earlier. And the vote in the Supreme Judicial Court was narrower4-3, not 5-2. The Lariat fracas is a small part of a large drama, but it is emblematic of an essential feature of the gay-marriage debate: the most salient divisions are not religious, political, or cultural but generational. And, for what its worth, anecdotal impressions are confirmed by opinion research. One particularly striking CBS News/New York Times poll, taken last year, asked respondents if they would favor or oppose a law that would allow homosexual couples to marry, giving them the same legal rights as other married couples. Among adults under age thirty, 61 per cent said they would favor such a law and 35 per cent said they would oppose it;
Last week, it was the turn of New York States crackerjack attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who threaded the needle deftly by announcing that while it remains illegal for gays to get married in New York, gay marriages performed legally elsewhere are legal here, too. But none of it exceeds the tolerances of Americas ramshackle federal mechanism. When divisions are rampant, passions on all sides are high, and no one on any side is suffering any palpable harm, the naturaland not necessarily reprehensibleinclination of politicians is to straddle. That is what Senator Kerry has been doing, and until recently it was what President Bush had been doing, too. But then the Presidents poll numbers dropped, and his religious-right baseunsatiated, apparently, by the Administrations record of crippling stem-cell research, packing the courts with troglodytes, funding faith-based services, and defunding family planninggrew restive. The best that can be said for Bushs sudden call for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is that, on some level, he seems ashamed of it. He went to the Roosevelt Room, delivered his prepared statement, and left without taking questions. The Times reported that White House officials thought that the President appeared uncomfortable. Vice-President Cheney, whose beloved daughter is openly gay, said stoically a few days later that he will support his President, but he could not quite bring himself to say that he thinks the amendment itself is a good idea. It is close to a certainty that no such amendment will be adopted. There simply arent enough people who see gay marriage as a sufficiently dire threat to the welfare of children, the stability of society, and the most fundamental institution of civilization the Presidents words so that writing bigotry into the Constitution itself is urgently required. Theyre just trying to win an election, and they figure that the end justifies the means. Either way, the question posed in all sweet innocence by the student editors of the Baylor Lariat will remain: Shouldnt gay couples be allowed to enjoy the benefits and happiness of marriage, too?
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