The Gay Gene: The Politics of Cryptogenetics

I don't know when I'll have time to invest in a more lengthy treatment of the "gay gene"; there are many interesting aspects: correlation vs. causation, nature vs. nurture, description vs. prescription, etc.

The pervasive thought (in spite of a "massive" campaign to dose the masses with "critical thinking" education components is to confuse correlation with causation.  There are any number of correlations of moral, ethical, and emotional dimensions of human personality with biogenetic and hereditary factors.  Any sort of correlation of sexual behavior with genetics is taken as proof of genetic determinism.  The urban legend of the gay gene depends on a common acceptance of this fallacy.

Any reference to Orson Scott Card on this topic may or may  not mention that he has written sympathetic treatments of homosexual characters in his fiction or attended homosexual wedding ceremonies (only with the greatest sense of wonderment and irony), but it will certainly mention how Card pointed out the naturalistic fallacy of the "gay gene" thinking with the impolitic expression that a genetic predisposition to homosexuality is not just irrelevant but "almost laughably" so, since for most people, this allows them to imagine Card sitting on his front porch with a banjo having a good laugh at a homosexual's inner turmoil and suffering from harrassment, and all sense of the absurdity of the naturalistic fallacy is lost in the process.

This, of course, depends on folks having the same kneejerk reaction to words as in the case of reading all sorts of malevolence into the use of "legitimate" by Todd Akin.  Fortunately, there are all too many freethinkers out there who freely think using their limbic brain with involvement of the neo-cortex being optional, so it is great sport to make Card into an unfeeling fiend, so the loss of the sense of the statement is both welcome and hoped for.  

But maybe the most interesting aspect is the unwelcome fact that among identical twins, there is only a 50-50 chance that a homosexual's gay twin is also homosexual.  While it is unsurprising fro the standpoint that a predisposition should be that high, it is unacceptably low for those who dearly longed for a scientific justification for a forced social embrace of homosexuality (qua social liberalism), absurd an idea as such a justification may be.

With so many identical twins also sharing similar environmental nurturing, it is a shocking discrepancy.  There are a great many identical twins (though certainly not all) that actually look for ways to differentiate themselves and be unlike the other.  This, of course, is politically unacceptable as a factor in the development of sexual identity, since it is important.  If people are naturally homosexual, God must have wanted them to be that way; just as anyone who is naturally sociopathic must have been intended to be.  Of course, the same peddlers of the "legitimate rape" pseudo-scandal would dearly love to characterize this as a proposed equivalency of sociopathy and homosexuality, rather than address whether or not the naturalistic fallacy has been exposed.

. . . [I]t is possible to conclude that, given the difference in sexuality in so many sets of identical twins, sexual orientation cannot be attributed solely to genetic factors.  -Wikipedia

Nevertheless, the disparity among identical twins is, naturally, not taken by many to be evidence against the hypothetical "gay gene," but merely an opportunity for the creative storytelling powers of Darwinian fiction.  To support the hypothesis of the "gay gene," a new hypothesis has been formulated such that if one identical twin is gay, there is a hormonal suppression system at work in the amniotic fluid that stops the other twin from "getting the gay."  Apparently, gayness has so much raw adaptational value to the species that, rather than suppress homosexuality altogether, Natural Selection has invented a clever way to leave one gay and also leave the other free to perpetuate the genes.  Well played, Natural Selection. Well played. Very clever.

I'm not making this up.  This might seem like an unfortunately elaborate epicycle in any other science, but few sciences lend themselves so well to both politics and fiction as the flexible science of Darwinian speculation.  Immutability makes as good an explanation (much better in my opinion) of the pervasiveness of this particular naturalistic fallacy as any Darwinian story.  

Gringas and Chen (2001) describe a number of mechanisms which can lead to differences between monozygotic twins, the most relevant here being chorionicity and amniocity..  -Wikipedia

"Gay" is good, so therefore it should be adaptive, therefore if there is some evidence against sexual orientation being genetically pre-determined, there must be a mechanism that acts to effect the discrepancy.  One might wonder at some counterpart to Todd Akin saying that if one of two twins is gay, the woman's body has a way of shutting it down so that both twins don't have "the gay."  Of course, some would claim that this a gross misinterpretation of the hypotheses -- that what researchers are in fact suggesting is that these "mechanisms" merely highlight that sexual orientation is simply highly sensitive to epigenetics and/or the chorionic and amniotic environments.  

Realize here that there is much political mileage, both legal and polemic, to be gained out of classifying homosexuality as an immutable characteristic.  Which is one of the primary reasons that ex-gays are marginalized and denied by leftists and homosexual activists.  As long as it is a characteristic that is immutable after a baby leaves the womb, it still makes political, if not biological, sense.

Another interesting point is Richard Dawkins' contribution to the melee.  He can be seen on Youtube commenting that homosexuality is not necessarily adaptive, as the genes for gayness may have had a different effect when they evolved:

". . . When we talk about a gene for something or other -- a gene for anything, a gene for X, a gene for being aggressive, a gene fir, um, having blue eyes, a gene for being gay -- uh, it doesn't always have to be a gene for that thing. It's a gene for that thing under the right environmental conditions.  [at time= 4:36]

Dawkins here suggests another exaptational alternative to the other Darwinian speculations for the adaptational value of homosexuality.  He imagines that the genes that now make people desire the opposite sex at one time may have had a completely different, unrelated effect.

And lastly, it is interesting to note that there is evidence that whatever genetic factors predisposition one for homosexuality, they are different in men and women.  That is, genetic factors that make a male more likely to develop a sexual interest in the same sex (in our modern environment and modern physiology--as we may qualify it according to Dawkins) are in general different from those factors that are similarly at work in women.

Post-script:  One new avant-garde hypothesis postulates that many so-called genetic human conditions could have pathogenic factors, including same-sex attraction. While Ewald and Cochran warn that this does not necessarily make a condition a disease, Cochran opines, “Should we drop a theory that has a chance of being correct on the grounds that it might upset people?”  Interesting question.  Let's take a vote among the Sociology faculty and see what the response is.

Christianity vs. Homosexuality?

An excellent resource here:  A Kingdom Response to the Complexities of Homosexuality, to which I'll return.

Dan Savage has been widely endorsed (by the Obama administration among others) as being representative of homosexual activism, even though not all homosexual activists delight in what R.O. Lopez calls the scorched earth approach.  This is sad, but is a sign of the times.  Savage revels in this, and he and others who do so pollute the genuine concern and effort to make schools into places that our kids don't dread going to.

In spite of these efforts to paint all socially conservative concern as religious concern (and therefore invalidate it under progressive readings of the "spirit" of the First Amendment), and to set up a false dichotomy between socially embracing homosexuality and creating a society of oppression, people of faith who are also socially conservative have obligations both to create a society that is healthy for their children and to express the compassion of God (assuming that your faith believes in "mercy that endures forever") for people.

Because of "scorched earth" activists like Dan Savage who point to Westboro as the example of faith, or rather for those who listen to those activists, it is important that people of faith not only be informed about their own arguments, but to have their hearts prepared to not be bitter or resentful against them, even though they are tyrannizing society through "civil rights" rulings.  When the future apostles told Jesus that they should call fire from Heaven down upon the towns that refused to listen to Jesus's message, they were told, "You don't know of what spirit you are."  Christians are admonished elsewhere to "try the spirits whether they are of God," shortly after being reminded that "God is love."  Those that don't know how to tell a spirit of fear or false righteousness from love might also not be able to tell a spirit of enabling and false compassion from genuine love.  As Jesus said, "You ought to have done these things, but not to have left important things undone."

For those who are interested in hearing a compassionate response articulated without compromising faith with progressivism, the link above is a great place to start.

In related news, "scorched earth" activists, who rebuke people of faith  for rejecting people's experiences, routinely refuse to acknowledge the experiences of these people:

Facts Not Empathy

Obama has said that a Supreme Court Judge cannot simply act as an umpire in matters of law.  That's all right for sports, he says.  In sports, you can have rules that everyone plays by and then

But we have a problem here in America.  Our laws don't favor who they are supposed to favor a lot of the time.  And since we can't depend on representational democracy in our Constitutional government to correct our terribly unjust laws--IT SURELY CAN'T BE ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH MAKING BETTER LAWS--it must be corrected through creative interpretation by the Justices.  I'm not embellishing here; in context of Obama's infamous "empathy statement":

I think the Constitution can be interpreted in so many ways. And one way is a cramped and narrow way in which the Constitution and the courts essentially become the rubber stamps of the powerful in society.

If you simply let the law mean what it really means, it will be unfair. So someone with empathy gets to take  advantage of perceived vagueries and technicalities and creative interpretations to correct things through other means when legislation cannot be relied on when the law "should" be something other than what the people's representatives made it to be.

Sonya Sotomayor, the "wise Latina" who represented Obama's purpose of a judge who would use the Court to legislate for the poor and downtrodden (that is, make far-reaching decisions based on progressive victimhood politics), herself

disavowed the notion of empathy during hearings before her confirmation, saying that “judges can’t rely on what’s in their heart.” *

Wow.  Now that's the exact opposite of what Obama said he intended for Sotomayor. He said that the important question for the 5% of cases that matter (the 5% in which judges can turn their preferences into public policy without representation) is "What is in the justice's heart?"  It's too bad for him that he didn't realize that Sotomayor was not on the same page as him.  But Muslims aren't the only people of faith that consider it their duty to lie to further their religion.

The [Sotomayor] decision will probably be a pillar of Obama's legacy: The choice of Supreme Court justices, with their lifetime tenure and vast sway over American law, gives presidents one of their most powerful tools to shape the country beyond their own White House years.* [emphasis mine]

If you read the recent Prop 8 decision by the Court (Hollingsworth vs. Perry) it sounds like SCOTUS is saying that they need to respect separation of powers.  But how does limiting the Court fit in with protecting the little guy, as Obama sees their primary role.  Sotomayor spoke the language of "umpire," the language of judicial restraint, the language of rule of law, to Congress.  After Obama promised that this was exactly what he was trying to avoid.  Sotomayor promised judicial restraint; Obama promised judicial activism.  in fact, he pretty much explained what judicial activism is.

DOMA: Bad Courtroom Theater by Justices

Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13-year-old bride,
coming to a state near you.

I can't seem to recall which famous Justice said that he often had had to find in favor of people or causes that he disliked because he was a judge of law.  I'm thinking it was Justice Holmes, who also said, "This is not a court of justice, young man; it is a court of law."

I wonder, if the state of Idaho were to determine that a man could marry a girl of 12 years, to what degree would another state be bound to honor that marriage?  What about a girl of 9?  How about 8?  According to the Supreme Court, if the state next door has sanctioned it, you'd better honor it.  "A pack of cigarettes, Mrs. Daisy Jo? Umm, maybe your husband can purchase them... How about some Bazooka Bubblegum instead?"  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Exodus International Apologizes and Folds: Just As I Am

Anyone who has had a history with American Protestantism will probably remember the sounds of an organ playing "Just As I Am" as people are welcomed to come up to the front and have their lives changed by beginning a relationship with God.  The song is often chosen, even over the favorite "Amazing Grace" because it emphasizes that one doesn't change himself to approach God but comes with all his many faults.

Since then, while I've been afforded many opportunities to see that the Church falls far short of the legendary grace of Christ, I've been impressed with the writings of Philip Yancey, who has posed the question of how a person would be treated if she approached the Church for forgiveness after prostituting her own children to serve her drug addiction.  This idea often shakes Christians to their core, long after their gratifying speeches about diversity and tolerance are over.  And it does something else, I think: it exposes the tendency to adopt the Progressive position that to demonstrate acceptance of the person the Church must embrace the practice.  If we don't embrace (even celebrate) the practice, we run the risk of alienating the people Christ died for.  That's the message that Christians are inundated with from journalists, educators, social scientists, etc. all through their lives.

Would Lincoln Oppose Gay Marriage?

Was it Barney Frank who said that two vs. three people in a marriage was a quantifiable distinction for marriage, unlike the difference between a female wife and a male "wife"?   This is the logic:  Let's change slightly(?) the definition of marriage to be about two people and forget the common law roots of a marriage contract between the two distinct parties with distinct obligations.  Still two people, so not really that weird, they say.

Same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy?  Pshaw!  No, we want to keep marriage just as it is, between two people.  Completely orthodox.  The only people who want more than one spouse are weird Mormon perverts, and we don't care about them.  

Oh, so you don't care about their marriage rights.  I see. I guess they don't have all that Hollywood money (and Hollywood propaganda) to advance their cause.  You don't want them undermining society and complicating our laws with their weirdo lifestyles, eh.  "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."

Given Lincoln's strong backing of his party's anti-polygamy platform, it seems unlikely that he would have supported same-sex marriage.  (No, I'm not going to even get into the whole "Lincoln Was Gay" theory.)  Nobody made the argument then that polygamy would lead to same-sex marriage, because same-sex marriage was still universally considered a contradiction in terms, whereas polygamy was making a matter of making more commitments than the common law stated could be made in good faith.  Well, you may say, he was a man of his times in the Victorian age.

Click to enlarge

The National Republican Party's two moral planks:  anti-slavery and anti-polygamy.  (Both referred to as twin "relics of barbarism.")  It was all about legislating morality.  Did someone say that DOMA was the first intrusion of the federal government into marital policy?  Lincoln helped pass laws legalize confiscation of money from private bank accounts in the Utah territory as well as the anti-bigamy laws about which he purportedly told Brigham Young that these laws would not be executed on his people if they did not support the Confederacy.

Lincoln and his party very much believed in keeping marriage following its traditional common law roots.  The common law inherited from the British tradition, not the Bible, is what makes marriage law expect a limited number of marital commitments.

Given that, in superficial terms, the anti-polygamy stance was socially conservative* in the sense of preserving social values, while the anti-slavery issue was, for the South, a non-conservative* issue if conservative is , it would see that these issues have little in common other than determining the national morality through centralized federal power.  (*John J. Ray questions "the old equation of conservatism with a love of the status quo and a dislike of change and new arrangements." I avoid using "progressive" here to describe social change since this has nothing to do with the platform of the progressive movement, which would arise a few decades later, and the co-opting by liberal progressivism is incidental.)

In moderating his opinion on racial equality, Lincoln appealed to the following maxim, "A universal feeling, whether well- or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded."  This intuition is largely behind our rules against pedophilia (well-founded in my opinion).  A splendid aphorism, though it doesn't itself explain Lincoln's political philosophy; and it could be that Lincoln's anti-bigamy fervor could have been more to sell himself better as a social conservative for those who would paint him as a radical.  For Spielberg, this would merely make Lincoln a shrewd politician.

In general, I don't think it makes any sense to talk about gay rights as a "civil rights" issue.  Comparing the issue of interracial marriage (brought to a head in Loving v. Virginia) to the issue of same-sex marriage is kind of an affront to polygamists (but who cares how those "perverts" feel).  It is the polygamist community that has been (and is) in danger of being brought up on criminal charges for cohabitation — not just for entering more than on marriage contract, not just for performing a "plural marriage" ceremony, but for living with more that one person.

A man/woman can have multiple partners, even extra-marital contacts, without being a felon, but a man can't live with more than one paramour and take care of them as domestic partners.  This exists in the state of Utah because of the federal government's involvement with Utah's state charter.   Meanwhile, a gay man can live with two or three "roommates" and do whatever he likes with them.  But the gay man is considered oppressed because if he has a ceremony with one of them, while it isn't a criminal offense, the society around him doesn't have to acknowledge it on a par with the institution as it's existed for millenia, whereas the polygamist has actually committed a criminal offense by living how he/she wants to live.  The polygamists aren't asking for society to treat it on a par with monogamous marriage (yet...); they would consider it fair if their lifestyle were decriminalized on a level with gay domestic partnership.

The decision in Hernandez v. Robles makes this comment on the difference between so-called interracial marriage (in reality, there really is no interracial marriage because race isn't real) and same-sex marriage:

But the traditional definition of marriage is not merely a by-product of historical injustice. Its history is of a different kind. The idea that same-sex marriage is even possible is a relatively new one. Until a few decades ago, it was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex. A court should not lightly conclude that everyone who held this belief was irrational, ignorant or bigoted. We do not so conclude.* 

Now on the one hand, we have polygamy which, while not ubiquitous, has been a common variant of the universal marriage tradition.  The Occidental tradition as it is reflected in the British common law we inherited does not recognize polygamy as something in particular to uphold and celebrate as a society, though this doesn't mean that society can't tolerate it, provided that states and communities don't have to recognize it just because it has been recognized in another state.  As long as a state is free to tolerate and not uphold, there is no slippery slope, and there is a means of the society determining its own values rather than the federal government determining what its values should be.  Polygamy has social precedent in societies of many kinds and has religious precedent in the Judaeo-Christian cultural roots of Western civilization.

Same-sex marriage does not have this precedent in either social or religious cultural roots.  It's not even close to being as much a candidate as an extension of the Western tradition of marriage the way that "plural marriage" is.  The "heterosexist" tradition is arguably universal because it mirrors survival-relevant instincts in our sexual dimorphism.  (Whew!)  Yet, polygamy has been much more criminalized.

If a polygamist could obtain a kind of civil union with his subsequent wives, a sort of civil agreement that would protect states' interests vis-a-vis the Full Faith and Credit clause, he and his wives would probably be pleased as punch.  And most states would be all right with making federal a legal framework for protecting each state's self-determination — which is precisely what DOMA attempted to do.

Which would be much more "progressive" than any view Mr. Lincoln held (or claimed to hold, at least).

X-Men, Children's Films, & the Gospel of Normalization

After seeing X-Men: First Class, a pretty well-made movie, I heard a teen exclaiming about how much she liked the Mystique character and supported her decision to be a terrorist (she didn't use quite these words) in light of the terrible anti-mutant oppression she endured.  This passion and the similarity of this feeling to the pervasive "enlightened" moral relativism view of the terrorist/freedomfighter distinction brought something to mind:

There was a moment in a previous movie, X2, in which the director couldn't remain content with people drawing their own parallels to gay normalization without a nice big push.  A young mutant teen "comes out" to his parents about how he's a mutant.  The reaction of one of his parents is to ask whether he's "tried not being a mutant."  I might have missed the implication had that made a lick of sense; it didn't fit at all.  It didn't work in the scene.  So it was a ham-handed, eye-rolling political message shoehorned into an otherwise interesting movie.  But I'm sure it has nothing to do with the director actually being homosexual.

I had a moment watching X-Men: The Last Stand in which I wondered whether the "cure" for mutation motif was a kind of dystopian 1984-esque commentary on the ex-gay movement.  If you haven't heard of this movement, outside of the California governor's (Jerry "No Plan and Proud of It" Brown) attack on it, it's because the Left has absolutley no interest in hearing from the people who believe that "conversion" therapy has worked for them and made their lives better.  No, the Democrats support your decision to change your genitals if they don't suit you, but not your orientation.  After all, your orientation is something you were born with.  In the end, one of the X-Men vies for the "cure" because her mutation keeps her from having normal relationships.

It would seem that we are supposed to get the impression that "normal" humans are being a little ridiculous at being afraid of human beings that are able to do things like bypass any home security, control someone's mind at will, impersonate any living soul,  kill someone with a thought, etc.  Just because ever growing numbers of people can do these things, it doesn't mean that the general population is less safe.  No, this concern is an absurd idea to the people that think the average citizen can't be trusted with guns because God knows what could happen.

If you think I am reading too much into this you should read the many quotes in Michael Brown's post about the intended parallels in X-Men.  In addition to the insider comments on the film, Brown quotes one reviewer as saying, “As I watched the film, the connections and similarities were startling. You could have made the X-Men gay and the script would have worked perfectly.”  Whatever the writer and director intended, I have a hard time fitting the intended gay rights narrative to many scenes in the film, not to mention many fundamental aspects of the story.  However, society's rejection of gifted individuals through misperceiving their difference as a defect is a narrative that in broad terms naturally appeals to the gay community.  The attempts to connect the basic story to the political movement to make society recognize LGBTQ as normal and worthy of celebration through laws/jurisprudence (i.e., political coercion) comes across as forced and superficial through some ungainly humor (the awkward "mutant and proud" dialogue, for example).

Chad Thompson, an ex-gay writer, has written in "More Than Mutants" that he sees some definite agenda in the writing of the movies.  Of special interest though, he points out the third movie's plot points (likely unintended) support for ex-gay therapy.  (Here in California, the state is anti-choice with regard to conversion therapy.)  But one of the most interesting things in his article, to me, is his quote of gay actor Ian McKellan, “As a gay man, some people think that it ought to be cured and made normal again, and I find it as offensive as someone saying that they have a cure for the color of their skin.”  Do you find it as offensive as saying that they have a cure for having the wrong reproductive organs, Sir Ian?  After all, aren't we told that gender and race are equivalent class-based social constructions?  This is a tenet of the liberal creed, near as I can tell.

A left-leaning friend once opined some contempt for Michael Jackson's "Don't Matter If You're Black or White" message since it appeared to be hypocritical given that Jackson apparently didn't feel comfortable with dark skin.  I've wondered since if that friend still feels that way, and if he would think someone who got a sex change would be hypocritical for saying that it doesn't matter if you're male or female.  Which arguably is a message in Cloud Atlas, one of the directors of which recently was surgically given female parts.  (The Wachowski Brothers are now the Wachowski Siblings, if you catch my drift.)

Michael L. Brown has also highlighted this apparently bizarre inconsistency of the new orthodoxy in his article "Glee Celebrates the 'T'."  He rhetorically asks whether it would be socially acceptable for the Glee character who is a "woman in a man's body" to come out as a Caucasian in a black person's body.  Perhaps Unique would be uniquely more comfortable in his body if he had different skin.  You can actually feel liberals across America rankling at this idea.  In the 2005 movie that sought to normalize transsexuality, the protagonist says "After my operation, not even a gynecologist will be able to detect anything out of the ordinary about my body. I will be a woman. Don't you find it odd that plastic surgery can cure a mental disorder?"  You won't have a disorder in which you mind can't accept your body once you change your body to fit what it can accept.  Maybe Jerry Brown can outlaw any non-surgical therapies that address this issue.  (Michael Jackson had a mental disorder which made him hate his skin, and physical skin treatments cured him.  Don't you find that odd?)

If you don't think of X-Men as primarily targeted for minors, then consider this.  In the animated feature Para-Norman, Norman has a unique gift.  He is isolated because he is different and people, because they don't understand him, think he's weird and repulsive.  [SPOILER ALERT] The paranormal entity that threatens his town was once a child with a similar gift, mercilessly oppressed and killed by intolerant Puritans in God-fearing Pilgrim garb. (Think of Dan Savage's recent and public anti-Bible rants.) Not content with the idea that this is something to which lots of geeky kids might relate, the filmmakers work in their own specific plug for the New Normal.  The big dumb jock who you might assume is too dumb (or simply put off) to notice that a pretty girl is throwing herself at him, mentions at the end of the movie that he has a boyfriend.  Some boys talk to ghosts and some make out with other boys.  Different is okay.  Group hug, everyone!

It's only a matter of time before Disney works little messages like this into their films, being humbled by the low turnout for their films with more explicit political innuendo (Pocahontas and Hunchback come to mind), offering a little remedial morality adjustment to the children of social conservatives.

Cloud Atlas: A Movie About Boundaries ... And Liberalism

Spoiler Alert.  I'm going to potentially give away too much information, so skip this if you plan to see the movie and don't want any surprises ruined.

The use of science fiction (a genre I very much like) for progressivism and liberalism is not new.  When you consider that this genre attracts more than its fair share of imaginative people who envision worlds that are very different, worlds that have a tenuous relationship to reality, this shouldn't be much of a surprise.

The movie Cloud Atlas is in that border area between fantasy and sci-fi, its primary claim to sci-fi being the extension of the storyline into a dystopian future.  Many social conservatives might object to its themes of reincarnation and New Agey interconnectedness.  I personally find these interesting themes, and am generally intrigued by futuristic casts to spiritual journeys.  This makes sci-fi interesting for me.  Social conservatives may find Frank Herbert's explicitly religious Pandora Trilogy to be unacceptably blasphemous.  I see it as an honest grappling with religious themes, whether or not I agree with his outlook.

But, in spite of finding Cloud Atlas to be an interesting movie, I think it is fundamentally a movie about promoting the values of contemporary Progressivism.  A (deliberately?) confusing saga of reincarnated personalities over many lifetimes that have the metempsychosing souls perpetually reigniting their relationships, sometimes as heterosexual relationships, sometimes homosexual...  And there is one dominant liberal trope that appears in the movie.  The human story (in the movie) is one long civil rights journey that puts the following in the same boat: the recognition of blacks as people (something that, liberal agitprop aside, the Republican Party has always supported), recognition of homosexuality as normal and beautiful (gay is the new black), freeing senior citizens from a dehumanizing rest home, freeing the proletariat from the control of Evil Corporations (in the movie, Big Oil is targeted--that's a new one), freeing rural people from the limitations of their backwoods ignorant religious traditions.

Progressivism has no tolerance for free exercise

Well said (and in the NY Times no less):

To the extent that the H.H.S. mandate, the Cologne ruling and the Chick-fil-A controversy reflect a common logic rather than a shared confusion, then, it’s a logic that regards Western monotheism’s ideas about human sexuality — all that chastity, monogamy, male-female business — as similarly incompatible with basic modern freedoms.

Like a belief that the gods want human sacrifice, these ideas are permissible if held in private. But they cannot be exercised in ways that might deny, say, employer-provided sterilizations to people who really don’t want kids. Nor can they be exercised to deny one’s offspring the kind of sexual gratification that anti-circumcision advocates claim the procedure makes impossible. They certainly cannot be exercised in ways that might make anyone uncomfortable with his or her own sexual choices or identity.

It may seem strange that anyone could look around the pornography-saturated, fertility-challenged, family-breakdown-plagued West and see a society menaced by a repressive puritanism. But it’s clear that this perspective is widely and sincerely held.

It would be refreshing, though, if it were expressed honestly, without the “of course we respect religious freedom” facade.

If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching, or prevent Jewish parents from circumcising their sons, or ban Chick-fil-A in Boston, then don’t tell religious people that you respect our freedoms. Say what you really think: that the exercise of our religion threatens all that’s good and decent, and that you’re going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will.

There, didn’t that feel better? Now we can get on with the fight. . . .

If the 51st State Were Muslim

There's little doubt in my mind that Obama's previous stance on gay "right to marry" (as was that of Bill Clinton who has also "come around") was calculated to increase his odds at winning the Presidency.  Even when my opinion of him was at its peak, I didn't doubt that Obama was more liberal than his moderate trappings.  The opinion of his VP (or that of his daughters) would not ordinarily change his mind in an election year.  So why would Obama take such a risky decision unless he felt that he had so little credibility in his finance-related policies that he had no choice than to stop pretending that he is a moderate and start crusading for his side of the culture war?

I think people generally have a right to live how they want to live when it isn't obviously causing harm.  How much control municipalities have over that right is something that is yet to be truly ironed out, since there is, and has been, different ideas about what is bad for the community.  But there is also the fundamental question of how much power a community (no, not a nation, a state perhaps, but not necessarily) has the right to decide how their children are raised, what they are exposed to.  There's a balance between freedom and democracy, between protecting the individual from the community and protecting the community from the individual.

A recent NY Times op-ed (5/9/2012) opined that marriage rights "are too precious and too fragile to be left up to" the democratic process.  The scope of people's inalienable rights are best decided by wise judges.  If the wisdom of the people is scary, I find much scarier the wisdom of judges basking in the warm light of their own enlightenment.  Liberals seem to like the most fundamental issues to be decided in the least democratic manner.  Look up Thomas Friedman's lament about our "one-party democracy" [sic] in which one political party is allowed to interfere with the plans of another.  (What a world!)  If I had a dollar for every liberal that praised an authoritarian goverment with an atrocious civil rights record, I think I'd be  rich.

Now, some of the same people that love Chavez and Castro, deplore DOMA as a civil rights violation. Hmm.  Here's where even many conservatives get it wrong: Many people think that DOMA is the federal government's lone foray into marriage rights. Wrong. While homosexuals can have a ceremony, call themselves married, wear rings, and announce their wedding without committing a crime, it isn't the same for the people on "Sister Wives," who never ask for or expect the privileges of the legally married and yet are potentially in trouble with the law for living as they do.  The "civil rights movement of our generation" would gladly redefine marriage in a way that would leave these people out in the cold.  They are, after all, "fundamentalist" religious people--not a demographic the Left is remotely interested in.  And most religious people, orthodox Mormons included, are not willing to fight for them.  The ACLU's official policy is pro-plural marriage, but this seems to be merely a plank for challenging the definition of marriage.

It is not a crime in most of the U.S. for a man to father children by several women simultaneously.  In Utah it has been a crime for a man to cohabit with multiple women or otherwise pretend that multiple women are his wives.  This has been true since Lincoln orchestrated the passing of an anti-polygamy law (that he promised Brigham Young not to enforce as long as the LDS would not make trouble in the Civil War), which also made it legal for the government to seize excessive riches from religious corporations in Utah.  Utah was coerced into enshrining anti-polygamy into state law as a condition for statehood, and there it remains enshrined.   I suspect that in Utah a man can father children by as many women as he can as long as he doesn't live with them. I suspect a man could be living with two male sexual partners and not be violating any law in Utah.  A man could probably be living with his legal female wife and their shared male lover (polyamory) and not be violating any law. No, I think it's only a man cohabiting with more than one woman that violates the laws that Utah was coerced into passing by the federal government.

Many equate gay marriage with the issue of interracial marriage.  After all, isn't Loving vs. Virginia a precedent for gay marriage?  There's already a federal ruling that it doesn't apply.  But that aside, I think that there are at least two fundamental differences between the two issues.  One is that gender, unlike "race," is not an arbitrary distinction.  Otherwise, men and women's restrooms are "separate but equal," and the fact that there are double standards on who can walk around barechested is an affront to the Constitution.  I think, in general, there is more physiological and neuropsychological difference between a brother and a sister than between genetically diverse people of the same gender.

The other fundamental difference is historical tradition.  Vastly different cultures have enshrined the idea of marriage as between a man and a woman.   It's not religiocentric or ethnocentric.  In Greco-Roman cultures where homosexual relationships were tolerated or even encouraged, there was one kind of marriage.  A read about an Indian man recently who was told by his mother that he could "f*** an alligator" for all she cared as long as he married a woman and had a family.  Modernism and feminism has deplored the historical tradition of marriage with little softening by postmodernism and little care for the history of the economics of households.  A new marriage for a new age.  (Polygamy, by comparison, is a historical and recurring flavor of marriage and was a part of the life of various heroes of Biblical tradition: Abraham the "father of our faith", Jacob/Israel, and David.)

Incidentally, I never understood those who opposed interracial relationships on supposedly Biblical grounds.  Moses had an Ethopian wife after his Midianite wife.  Boaz, the great-grandfather of David, had a Canaanite mother and a Moabite wife.  Joseph had an Egyptian wife. David offended God by stealing the Hittite's wife.  (God seemed to honor that marriage.)  Everybody was marrying everybody else. Semites marrying Hamites marrying Japhethites. All good. Biblical references supposedly against interracial marriage--pretty weak by comparison.

Back to gay marriage...  My opinion would probably not be considered conservative by many "paleoconservatives" in that I think that not just civil unions or plural marriage but cohabitors in general and non-cohabiting betrothals should count for certain rights that are applicable to "choice of law" rules across state boundaries. A state would have a right to not recognize a second marriage made in a state where polygamy is legal, but should still be subject to certain contractual obligations (regarding inheritance, for example) implied by the civil contract made in the state of origin.  Too messy?  We already somehow manage something like it.  Why should a husband be allowed a hospital visit but not a fiance?  Why should someone be admitted just because he claims to be a blood relative while a domestic partner is not allowed even if the patient specifically vouches for him/her?  A state could pass a law from which a person could have a notarized statement that is recognized in a hospital for visitation rights.

But I disagree with Obama's regulatory czar Cass Sunstein that marriage as a legal concept should be abolished.  Marriage law has its basis in English common law as it is the basis for federal law and state law for almost all of the states.  Common law is assumed and referred to by our Constitution.  Marriage is a civil contract which is entered by a husband and a wife in which the two parties have separate responsibilities and different contractual expectations.  Which role you can assume is determined completely by your gender.  Statutory law can modify it, adjust it, and has done so over the years, but not redefine it.  

Here's a thought experiment I often turn to:  Imagine an Islamic country like Iraq, as though Maryland was currently as Muslim as it was once Catholic.  Let's call it Mohammedland, instead of Maryland--or Americastan, if you prefer.  Let's say that we had a national interest in setting up a democratic government with free elections, that the people of this land cry out to us to give them democracy.  Let's say further that Mohammedland eventually gets adopted as a state after 10 successful years as a democratic republic. For five years, they've lived without oppression.  But they have a proud Muslim tradition.  Their Department of Justice has words from the Koran prominently displayed on the building with a picture of the Dome of the Rock where Mohammed was taken to Heaven.

Their legislature starts out with a call to prayer, and there is an area outside where legislators may voluntarily pray toward Mecca if they are Muslim.  No one is required to be Muslim to serve in the legislature, and the one non-Muslim legislator from a county with many Catholics, Jews and Armenian Orthodox, well, he observes the prayer moments in respectful silence. They have a public school system where the kids learn scripture from the Quran as part of their cultural history.  There's no religious persecution but Islam permeates the culture and the civil life. They talk about evolution in school but they also talk about criticisms of evolutionary theories in school (they even refer students to books about intelligent design they keep in their libraries); 94% of the people believe in special creation after all.  They recognize polygamy but not same-sex marriage.  Homosexuality is not a crime as it is in many Muslim countries, but the Americastani constitution precludes homosexual marriage.  The government considers homosexuals as first-class citizens.  and allows them to live as they will, but 97% of the population considers it a terrible affront to their culture and society to recognize a homosexual partnership as a social institution.

After 10 years of their democratic experiment, they enter into statehood with its privileges, thinking naively that the Constitution really does reserve to the states powers not specifically granted to the federal government.  They don't realize that their educational curricula will be cleansed of Islam (and anything remotely favoring theism) for the benefit of their secular and Judaeo-Christian minorities that might be offended by references to Mohammed.  Criticism of of the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary theory will be outlawed. The words of the Quran will be scoured from their Dept. of Justice; the Dome of the Rock will be gone.  An atheist will sue their state over the existence of the dedicated prayer area in the public forum of the legislature, and he will win in the Supreme Court.  There will be a private ecumenical chapel instead. Their children will be taught liberal sex ed that covers safe anal sex. Their children will get abortions without their permission or knowledge. They'll be read books promoting gay marriage, and attend state universities where liberal professors will tell them to question authority as long as the authority is parental or Muslim. Their tax dollars will be used to not merely prepare their children to engage the world on a new intellectual level but to indoctrinate their children against their culture.

Now if we had set up that kind of system in Iraq, there would be no shortage of progressive voices crying out against our arrogant overriding of their culture, intrusion into their sovereignty, redefinition of their culture.  The relativists would all be standing up for Iraq because it is a sovereign state, unknowing (or conveniently forgetting) that our states once had sovereignty.  The Middle East rightly fears Westernization and fears democracy, because they've seen how Europe and the U.S. has redefined "democracy" as secularization.  We've given them firsthand evidence of how you can't forbid Congress from respecting a mode of worship without forcing secularization on a culture.  So why should we be suprised if they repeatedly bomb schools we set up in Afghanistan even if they are being set up by a President with a Arab name?  They've seen what liberals mean by "democracy."  In a "democracy," even a representative one, even in a republic, some things are "too fragile and precious" for goverment by the people; they are instead determined by an elite group of unelected academics. Welcome to Utopia, our Muslim friends. Resistance is futile.

In California, the Prop 8 episode was interesting.  The homosexual comunity was "betrayed" by the African Americans and Catholic Latinos that didn't share the "progressive" view of marriage. (Some liberal commentators noted ironically that the black voter turnout for Obama might have kept Prop 8 from failing.) They vilified the Mormons instead though, which accounts for a relatively tiny minority out here.  Gay rights activists said the facts were deliberately skewed about the effect of the court ruling on marriage.  People were "crazy" to think that their children would be exposed to alternative kinds of marriage.  Is it crazy?  Is it crazy to think that once a state redefines marriage, all of a sudden a special interest group will point out that the curriculum is "hetero-centric" and unfairly biased toward heterosexual marriage as uniquely normative?  (I smell hate crime.) That homophobia will be seen as an epidemic problem that can only be cured by exposing kids at a early age to images of happy homosexual marriage and scientific(?) studies that all lifestyle is nature not nurture?  As one left-center person put it, "They're lying about it not affecting education--it would have to have an effect--but so what?"

Does anyone really think that if a law had been proposed granting greater status to civil unions and domestic partnerships (those longed for hospital visitation rights, for example) that it wouldn't have passed?  After Prop 8, Orson Scott Card wrote about Californian Mormons who had gay friends that would no longer speak to them because they had voted for and endorsed Prop 8, even though their Mormon views had not changed and .  Concerning Prop 8, since the resulting riot, most people probably follow a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. (Unless they voted on the side of liberty, the enlightened choice favored by the non-Hispanic white voters of California. Don't give me that look; it's the liberals that are constantly reminding us what category we belong in.)

I don't know. On the one hand, I've disliked the whole concept of being licensed to marry. Do I need the state's say-so? For matters of custody though and "community property", there may be very important rules for distinguishing between living together and having a semi-permanent union. And there is also a community's ability to control what their kids hear and how they're raised, and what impressions they get in their mandatory attendance at school. I think it was disingenuous in the Prop 8 that a marraige redefinition wouldn't affect what kids are told in school. The ACLU already used a kid's harrassment to wrangle a no-opt-out same-sex training. What will it be like when all of a sudden the curriculum unfairly portrays heterosexual marriage as the norm? One kid's pain is another progressive's golden opportunity. Many people don't care what their kids see in school; and the parents that do, well, their opinion really doesn't matter.

I read one blog that made an argument that DOMA was unnecessary BS because "choice of law" already kept one state from overruling another state's laws. All DOMA seems to do is ensure that a state can't be coerced into acknowledging marriage laws that aren't their own. This is the part that is hated most, and yet it is the one that does most to protect state sovereignty. The part of DOMA about federal acknowledgement also protects states from "end runs" around state law. So it ensures that states can continue dictating their own policy. Since DOMA there have been suits where people have married in one state and tried to get it recognized in another--citing the very "full faith and credit" clause that people were "ridiculous" to worry about. In one such suit is was specifically recognized that there are thousands of federal laws referring to marriage, and DOMA was meant to keep them from being co-opted for relationships the people's representatives never intended the laws to apply to, and to keep one state from dictating national policy.

So I think that the individual has a vested interest in his/her personal liberty to have relationships without society's "permission", but I also think that a state and a community have a vested interest in how that relationship is recognized on a social level. I think almost any proposition to grant civil unions more privileges would have gone over here in CA. I don't think progressives want that. I think the hard left wants the next generation to be malleable and be shaped into the utopian society, free of the ignorant superstitions of their parents. It's not enough that they own the entertainment world, but they want the schools as well.
Now, as I understand it, there is also common law with regard to marriage. The Constitution, federal law, and most states' law is based on English common law. Marriage is a civil binding agreement with two parties: a husband and a wife. The two roles have different responsibilities and liabilities, and you don't get to choose which role. (Feminism would denounce it as sexism, but then feminism has been fine with certain inequalities.) That is the basis and precedent of the social law, subject to modification (but not total redefinition) by democratic statutory revision.

I think a provision could be made for protecting the economic and personal interests of domestic partners, polygamists, civil unions, common law marriages across state lines without affecting a state's protection against recognizing a marital status that it considers antithetical to its culture. But it has to be something that the states can live with. Something that doesn't involve North Carolina being forced to give their kids "sensitivity training."