Virginia AG Dives Head-First into Culture Wars, Hits Cement
I might have been writing about William and Mary’s basketball team, which will play for the CAA championship this evening. But instead, I’m constrained to talk about something disturbing involving my alma mater, and the state’s schools more generally.
A few days ago, I reported on the rumor that Virginia’s new Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, had commanded the state’s universities to rescind their policies that prohibited discrimination against gays and lesbians. No one would talk.
Well, in an article that reminds us of the continuing vitality of and need for the mainstream media, the Washington Post obtained a copy of the letter and reported the story on Saturday. It does indeed “advise” the state’s schools to withdraw the policies, which he acknowledges are “benign.” This is one of the worst moves by a public official since — never mind, there are too many to choose from.
The letter never should have been written. The law isn’t as clear as Cuccinelli says it is. The cases in which the AG has found that such policies exceed the state’s authority involved municipalities or, in one infamous case, the Governor’s Office (when Gov. McDonnell was AG, he opined that Gov. Kaine had exceeded his authority with an Executive Order extending non-discrimination protection to gays and lesbians). None of them involved a university, and for good reason.
Although the state’s universities are of course “public institutions,” they’re not like municipalities, or state agencies, and everyone knows that. As even Cuccinelli recognizes in the letter, they enjoy a certain necessary amount of autonomy. But that autonomy isn’t only granted to allow the school to carry out its day-to-day functions; it’s also a recognition that universities need a certain freedom to act in order to flourish. Cuccinelli is right to say that they can’t contravene the General Assembly, but supplementing the state’s anti-discrimination policy isn’t the same thing as contravening it. In other words, he puts the burden in entirely the wrong place: If the Commonwealth of Virginia feels that it wants to put itself out there on the issue, it should be required to pass a law specifically stating that universities within the state system may not offer protection based on sexual orientation. Presumably, even the newly red-again state isn’t stupid enough to do that. In the silence, the current list of protected classes should be regarded as a floor, not a ceiling — a floor on which the universities may build further protections, both to affirm their basic commitment to equality and — more practically — to attract the most qualified professors, administrators, staff, and students.
This will quickly turn into a PR nightmare for the state. Most of the members of the universities’ governing boards are staying mum for now, as they figure out what to do. But at least one member of George Mason’s Board of Visitors — a Republican, by the way — called the action “reprehensible.” Senator Mark Warner stated that Cuccinelli’s action will “damage the Commonwealth’s reputation for academic excellence and diversity.” A student at Old Dominion University opined that we’ll see “the gamut” of protests on this one. He’s right, I’d imagine — and hope.
None of this can penetrate the true believers’ thick skulls. One spokesman for the Family Foundation said: “I find it hard to believe that this would be the final straw in whether or not someone’s going to come to Virginia’s universities…They are some of the best universities in the country.”
Well, part of the reason for their excellence is their refusal to accede to paleolithic principles, even if the Commonwealth lags behind. And here’s a counterexample on the “final straw” argument: Me.
When I was down to the final, difficult decision about whether to attend William and Mary or Brown University — a close and difficult call — had this issue come to my attention, I would have chosen Brown. And if William and Mary and the other state universities (where “state university” is defined as a school that gets 14% of its operating budget, and none of its endowment from the state) continues to get slapped around by the state in this way, the entire state will be off my daughters’ list of college possibilities. So, there.
Even McDonnell wisely avoided addressing this issue directly when he was AG. Cuccinelli should have done the same, but apparently he’s determined to take down his own party and to make the state a place of last choice for anyone who cares about basic equality. The opinion isn’t self-executing, though. Let’s see whether the universities’ boards have the cojones to resist.
Catching up to Reality on Blood Donations by Gay Men
When Obama was seeking the Presidency, the GLBT community had a well-defined punch list of action items, and he promised big things on all of them: repeal of DADT; repeal of DOMA (although he doesn’t support marriage equality); passing ENDA; passing inclusive hate crimes law (the only hole punched so far). A few others, notably the administrative implementation of the-then recent repeal of the insane prohibition against HIV-positive immigrants, were perhaps further down on the list, but also up for discussion. Conspicuously absent from the mainstream agenda has been an item of interest to the public health community: lifting of the ban on gay blood donors.
So I was buoyed to see that just a few days ago, a group of sixteen U.S. Senators sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, urging the agency to reconsider its twenty-seven-year-old lifetime ban (”deferral” is the quaint term used, but it’s politely Orwellian in this case) on blood donations for men who have had even one sexual encounter with another man.
The policy is long overdue for an overhaul. As the letter notes, the policy is inconsistent with various other exclusions, and is an artifact of a time when all that was really known of HIV infection — and we weren’t even calling it that, in 1983 — is that it disproportionately struck gay men. Even today, MSM (”men who have sex with men,” which is the term used by the CDC because it focuses on sexual behavior, rather than on orientation) are prohibited, forever, from donating blood if they have had sex, even once, with another man, at any time since 1977. The Senators’ letter points out the many inconsistencies in the policy, including the fact that there’s no exclusion of those who have had high-risk, unprotected heterosexual sex, no matter how recently. Even more absurdly, those who have had heterosexual sex with those known to have HIV are only deferred for one year; not for 33! And “sex” isn’t defined when it comes to MSM: the safest kind of protected sexual acts are, in theory, treated the same as the riskiest.
It should go without saying that none of this can be justified from a public health perspective.
These inconsistencies should be enough to sink the policy which, as the letter notes, has lately been repudiated by the major blood banking organizations, most significantly including the Red Cross. But the problems are much deeper and more serious than even the letter recognizes. A few years ago, I discussed the issue in detail in this law review article. Here, I’ll summarize the arguments I made there that weren’t explicitly raised in the letter.
First, while the CDC is careful to distinguish behavior — men having sex with men — from identity, the FDA policy undermines this sound epidemiological distinction by effectively collapsing the two. By excluding any man who’s had any kind of “sex” (not defined!) with even one other man during the past thirty-plus years, the FDA has created a policy that isn’t about relevant behavior, but about some weirdly expansive view of (gay) sexual orientation. Because if it were about behavior, the line would have been drawn in an entirely different place; say, for a year after specifically identified, high-risk behavior.
Second, the policy undermines trust in public health in a few related ways. Obviously, as a practical matter the policy isn’t enforceable, and the sheer breadth of it has doubtless caused many to ignore it. People aren’t stupid: Gay men who know they have an HIV-negative serostatus might give blood, understanding that they pose no threat. (According to this very unscientific poll over at 365gay.com, almost 200 of 800 respondents admitted to having lied about their sexual practices on the questionnaire.) But by attempting to fence them out, the FDA has sent gay men an unwelcome message that could undermine the community’s trust in other ways. One important public health principle is that it recognizes the long-term value of respecting the dignity of all populations.
Why has the policy persisted for so long? One argument seems sensible, at first blush: If the exclusion were changed to, say, one year, there would be some infinitesimal increase in the number of HIV-positive blood transfusions (well less than one in a million, it’s estimated), so why do anything to increase the risk? But the “let’s not do anything if there’s a tiny risk of harm” canard — which, by the way, is also prevalent in arguments against marriage equality — wouldn’t be, and hasn’t been, applied to any other category of people, or of conduct. Of course there will be some tiny uptick, not because of the three-week window period between infection and ability to identify it, which any contemplated new rule would easily accommodate, but because of the irreducible human error associated with the process: If you add more people, some will get through who should not. But this could be said of any proposal to add donors; it’s just that “MSM” have had such a draconian policy applied to them for so long that the donor baseline is essentially zero for this group.
It seems that uprooting this policy is fairly far down on the priority list for the LGBT community. Indeed, this story seems to have attracted but little attention. But messages matter. The radical, embarrassingly outdated FDA policy sends a terrible signal that ought to concern us. It’s good to see that someone is finally suggesting action. Will Obama back them up?
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change — Don’t Persuade
With forces aligning in favor of repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that has had untold economic and human cost on the military, into the breach steps former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak. McPeak, who served in that role in the early 1990’s (during the adoption of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy), has an op-ed in today’s NY Times where he ends up revealing more about his own biases than anything else.
There are so many weaknesses in McPeak’s argument that it would take more space and time than I can give to deconstruct them all. But the biggest problem is McPeak’s unexamined assumption that homosexuality is a kind of weakness, disability, or inherently disqualifying condition. Here he is on military fitness and exclusions:
The services exclude, without challenge, many categories of prospective entrants. People cannot serve in uniform if they are too old or too young, too fat or too thin, too tall or too short, disabled, not sufficiently educated and so on.
Note that each of the named exclusions, whatever their merits, focuses on something about the individual that renders him or her unfit for military service. The argument against allowing gays to serve openly in the military, though, has been pitched — even by McPeak, in this same op-ed — as a question of unit cohesion. So here McPeak is making a different kind of argument — that gays are unfit to serve, not because of “unit cohesion, but because of something wrong with them. Worse, he doesn’t acknowledge that he’s shifting ground here. (He doesn’t tell, and hopes that the reader doesn’t ask.) Further evidence of this view of gays as somehow weak or inferior comes at the very end of the piece:
I do not see how permitting open homosexuality in the [military] enhances their prospects of success in battle. Indeed, I believe repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will weaken the warrior culture at a time when we have a fight on our hands.
Note the subtle elision of the unit cohesion and personal weakness claims here. “Gay men in combat will weaken the warrior culture” is a still-effective, virulently homophobic, view of gay men as less than fully male in a gender-stereotyped way. It’s clear that McPeak’s real problem with gays in the military is that it makes people like him uncomfortable. Indeed, he makes that point explicitly:
Thus allowing an openly gay presence in ranks will be very difficult until we have committed leadership for it. I certainly had trouble figuring out how to provide such leadership in 1993. While I believed all people are created equal, I did not believe such equality extended to all ideas or all cultures. And since I didn’t know how to advocate the assimilation of this particular form of diversity, I saw no way to prevent it from undermining unit cohesion.
Twenty-first century to General McPeak: “Homosexuality isn’t an ‘idea’ or a ‘culture.’” It’s a basic orientation, a vital part of one’s humanity. In fact, McPeak doesn’t believe that all people are created equal. Anyone who doesn’t understand that one’s sexual orientation is fissured deeply into the core can’t possibly be an advocate for assimilation, so it’s no surprise that McPeak “didn’t know how to advocate” for “this particular form of diversity.” But that’s no excuse for the military’s throwing up its hands. No one is suggesting that the integration of openly gay and lesbian soldiers will be seamless, any more than the integration of female soldiers has been. But, like any change to any institution, it can and must be managed, just as racial integration was (better, I hope).
Speaking of the integration of women, it’s clear that McPeak is discussing gay men, not lesbians. That’s because avoids saying anything about women in the military. Do lesbians undermine the “warrior culture” of female soldiers? Or are the women not warriors? Should lesbians be permitted to serve, even if gay men aren’t? McPeak, by the logic of his own argument, wouldn’t have a problem with this gay/lesbian division, because the military can justify exclusions and discriminations that wouldn’t be tolerated in civil society. So he avoids the topic altogether.
Then there’s the biggest elephant in the room: The plain fact that other nations, including countries whose militaries we serve alongside, like Britain, do allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly. If these population-wide, natural experiments aren’t applicable to the U.S. military, McPeak at least has an obligation to explain why. Instead, there’s only silence, broken only by the insistent murmur of homophobia (in the truest sense of that word) that misinforms this exercise in harmful sophistry.
“The Pulverizing Tedium” of Christopher Hitchens’s Rant
Warning: Here comes some negative eye candy, an avert-your-eyes pic of Christopher Hitchens. He’s guy who took off on a flight of anger against all things sport, using the just-concluded Winter Olympics as the excuse for his rant:
Perhaps the screed would have more stick had it come from someone who understood the first thing about the rush that exercise and competition can provide the body and (yes!) the soul. Surely Christopher Hitchens is aware of the compelling body of evidence linking physical activity and fitness to health and even to mental acuity, but that didn’t blunt his clumsy attack — a broadside launched against sports writing (and reading), poor sportsmanship and downright cheating, the sports themselves, and blah blah blah, in the usual, and by now wearily predictable, Hitchens style.
So let’s see: Here’s a guy for whom fitness is far, far, down on his list (although for some reason he feels the need to strip his body of evidence-concealing body hair), thundering against anything sports-related that popped into his head, and concluding with a condemnation of the “pulverizing tedium” of the Olympic events themselves. He wrote that he couldn’t escape the events, but why? Is it that hard to stay out of bars for a few weeks? I don’t believe that he actually did see much of the competition; had he put down his poison pen for a few moments, he would have witnessed some stuff that only the most curmudgeonly among us could call tedious. Here I’m thinking of the conclusion of the fifty-kilometer, cross-country ski race, where the exhausted, close-to-truly amateur competitors managed to sprint up a final hill toward the finish before collapsing in complete exhaustion; and of the gold-medal hockey games between the US and Canada, the men’s version of which was extended dramatically into OT1 on a goal with scant seconds remaining, before being won by the host team.
Of course, his article contains many truths among its efforts to explain away inconvenient counterexamples, notably the events that inspired Invictus, a case for the other side he would have been better off conceding. But Hitchens doesn’t do nuance or complexity.
What he misses, colossally, is this: There’s something vital about sports, and for those of us who struggle to rise above our own mediocrity in engaging in them, something transcendent about witnessing — yes, even cheering — those who have attained mastery over such difficult and challenging tasks. Such mastery eludes almost all of us. It’s certainly harder than writing angry, blunderbuss polemics against sports. That, in turn, is much harder than reading or writing sports, according to Hitchens. The adults, he snoots, prefer the rest of the paper.
Look, people get their emotional rushes in different ways. Some exult in their proofs against the existence of God (here are some excerpts from Hitchens’s influential book, “God is Not Great”), others in success by their favorite sports figures or teams. It doesn’t mean they apply this same “us v. them” logic to politics, or that sport assumes an unhealthy fixation for them (although that’s certainly the case for some). But no part of the opposing case is in evidence in Hitchens’s windy article.
Being a provocateur is easy, really, and clever in its way: Even by responding, one has taken the bait — been provoked enough to respond. That’s a desirable outcome in the case of arguments for or against, say, the existence of God, because it’s one or the other. A bright provocateur can get the interest, the juices, flowing. But most of life doesn’t operate according to a binary yes-no principle, and “‘The Case Against’ This or That” would be stronger if it acknowledged its own weaknesses. Otherwise, case dismissed.
- That’s “overtime,” for the proudly sports illiterate. ↩
Polyamory, continued
This discussion on polyamorous relationships continues to be interesting, and to generate thoughtful comments. Here’s another, from my lawyer-swimming friend, Eric Cheung:
In my Family Law class, which was taught by a graduate of Yale Law named Jill Hasday, she had us go over some readings discussing how social norms during the early 19th century were established against polygamy specifically to oppress Mormons. Basically, there were these series of pulp romance novels directed towards female readers depicting women being brutalized, raped and enslaved due to their status as a one of multiple wives. The result was a popular movement, led by women, against polygamy — and by extension, against LDS. What I got out of those readings was that polygamy was perhaps more acceptable in early American society, until it became identified with Mormonism. Then it became vilified so that people would learn to fear and hate Mormons.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that popular culture has directed legal and social movements, sometimes movements directed against unpopular groups. Of course I’m interested in reading more of your thoughts and comments.
Lady WordinEdgewise Visits the (Not so) Sunshine(y) State
In my previous post, I wrote cheerily about developments in DC and Maryland. Meanwhile, here in Florida matters are considerably less cheery. I’m down here with the kids for a short vacation. Right now, they’re at the zoo with my parents, while I’m wrapped in ice after apparently rupturing a muscle this morning on the tennis court– which caused much full-throated gloating among the seniors: “See? It can happen at any age!” Last night, I became the last one on my block to finally see Avatar (3D, of course)1 Afterwards, I ventured to a nearby gay bar here in Melbourne, there to see, first-hand, the effects of second-class citizenship.
Florida’s laws are among the most gay-hating in the US: No adoption (although this law is under review in the state courts), no employment protection, and an especially broad constitutional amendment against any type of relationship-recognition for gay couples. But what do you expect in a state so backward that it’s among only three that don’t require booster seats for pre-schoolers? Shoulder straps around the neck will do nicely, thanks!
And the kids might be smoking in those unboostered backseats, too. The choking plumes of smoke that almost bowled me over as I entered “The Cold Keg” reminded me of the state’s legislative foot-dragging in yet another area. I had walked in on some kind of poker night, with two oblong tables peopled by the dysfunctional gay and lesbian version of my parents’ sex-segregated poker nights. I could say a great deal about this sad lot, but one example will do: a forty-something lesbian in a Metallica tee shirt, with a hairstyle that made the mullet seem a high-fashion statement. Other than that, the bar seemed not to have sensed the passage of time, with depressing wood walls, a few sorry, hanging lights, and no real sense of decor.
At least the jukebox was state of the art. When the second-form Lady Gaga hit “Bad Romance” issued forth, the patrons joined in song. (Wouldn’t “Poker Face” have been the more obvious choice, btw?) OK: Some things, it seems, are Gay Universals. When the Lady Parade then continued with the inexplicable country sensation Lady Antebellum, I realized that it’s now “all lady, all the time.” I was half-expecting “Lady Marmalade” to follow.2 So maybe this blog needs a new name (see title of post).
As I neared the bottom of my first and only drink, the bartender approached me and asked the usual, friendly questions that the job demands. When I told him that I was in Florida with my kids, the issue turned to adoption. He reminded me that gay adoptions were illegal in the (No) Sunshine (for Gays) State, and then related a conversation he’d had with family members, where he’d defended himself by saying: “I’m gay but I’m not a pedophile.”
Yikes! I don’t know any gay person who’d feel the need to add the qualifying part of that sentence, which somehow suggests that the listener (and the speaker) might have reason to think that gays are pedophiles. But I don’t know many gays in out-of-the-way places in such homophobic states, either. There isn’t one linear gay rights movement, and last night’s visit was a depressing reminder that in some places full dignity and equality are far off.
But even here, there are glimmers of hope. On the otherwise dismal bulletin board, there was a neatly typed request for donations made by the local high school’s Gay Straight Alliance. (Yes, I did wonder whether the lack of a hyphen between gay and straight was simply poor grammar or a more disturbing distancing between the gays and their not-quite-comfortable straight allies.) Perhaps even in the remotest areas of the cruelest states, better things are only a generation away.
- What a visually stunning film! The plot was OK, if derivative of Pocahontas, until the final chapter which culminated in a tiresome Marine general, encased in a giant robot suit, facing off against the gone-native protagonist, in a battle that for some reason reminded me of Cameron Hodge’s last-stand from an old X-Men comics plot. ↩
- “Hey lady!” “What?” “What lady?” That lady?” No!” – Funplex, the B-52’s. ↩
Marking Equality Milestones in DC, Maryland
Today we mark another milestone on the superhighway to full equality, as DC began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The District joins five states, and, although progress has otherwise slowed for the time being, who can seriously doubt that before long this struggle will be in the rear-view mirror?
There’s always something to drag it down, though. Although the Catholic Archdiocese in D.C. didn’t carry through on its empty, bullying threat to leave the city (and the many poor and homeless it serves) were the law to take effect, it did pull this stunt:
[A]n important change to [Catholic Charities] group health care benefit plan…will take effect on March 2, 2010 due to a change in the law of the District of Columbia. [T]he existing health coverage of current employees will not be affected…. New employees and current employees requesting revisions in benefit coverage will be affected by this change.
Catholic Charities will continue to honor the health plan coverage that current employees have as of March 1, 2010. As of March 2, a new plan will be in effect that will cover new employees and requests for benefit changes by current employees….[S]pouses not in the plan as of March 1, will not be eligible for coverage in the future.
Read their lips: No new spouses — gay or straight. That’s one way of complying with the law allowing same-sex unions. Another, more humane approach that would also have allowed them to stick to their principles would have been to allow each employee to designate one other adult for coverage (isn’t this fairer anyway?), or just to give each employee a certain number of health care insurance dollars to spend. That Catholic Charities instead chose to freeze out every newly married couple strongly suggests that the Church wanted to have its principles and its money, too. This is the cheaper alternative, but of course the Church doesn’t even cite that plain fact.
Well, sorry to spoil the party. It really is a great day in DC, and derivatively in Maryland, as well. As Chris Geidner authoritatively reported last week, that state’s Attorney General recently opined that the state’s supreme court, were it called upon to decide the issue, would rule that out-of-state, same-sex marriages should be recognized. Thus, just as New Yorkers may go to any of several neighboring jurisdictions to marry (CT, MA, VT, or a place called “Canada”), so too may Maryland residents (Marylanders? Marylandites?) now cruise into nearby DC, get married, and then call themselves married back home. The importance of this right hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated. While it’s a nuisance to get them in MD and NY, marriage rights are now available in seven states, as well as in DC.
The slog towards equality continues. As the next post shows, though, it doesn’t run in an unbroken line.
Virginia’s Slide into the Dark Ages Continues Apace
First, Va. Reactionary-in-Moderate’s-Clothing Governor Bob McDonnell issued an executive order pointedly omitting sexual orientation from the list of permitted grounds for firing state employees. In so doing, he rescinded the earlier order from his predecessor, Gov. Tim Kaine. To be clear, that means that the state can: Ask interviewees for state positions if they’re gay; refuse to hire them on that basis; and fire those discovered to be gay. This should have surprised no one; as Attorney General, McDonnell had opposed the previous executive orders, finding that the the governor’s office had no authority to extend protections not afforded by the legislature. (Never mind that this sort of executive order offering protections against sexual-orientation discrimination are common and rarely questioned; they can at least state the policy of the executive office, even if they can’t grant rights to enforcement.)
Now, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has reportedly asked Virginia state schools, including my alma mater (William and Mary) to overturn policies barring sexual-orientation discrimination, invoking the same “no authority” argument. What is going on here? The AG surely has actual issues to deal with, and anyway can’t expect that the College is going to rescind its policy, or to start discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. But the developments are just weird enough to have inspired a state senator in neighboring Maryland to have urged local corporation Northrup Grumman not to relocate to Virginia. Here is the letter, which also mentions that McDonnell and Cuccinelli rejected a request from a consortium of the major state universities (including W&M and UVA) to allow for health benefits of same-sex partners even if the employees paid for those benefits in full.
Although a corporation responsible to its shareholders for the bottom line will focus on a number of economic climate issues in deciding where to locate, nothing would make my day more than for Northrup Grumman to choose either Maryland or D.C., and, for good measure, cite the increasingly gay-hating policies of Virginia as a reason for doing so. Maybe the loss of business is actually something they’d understand.
One more thing: It’s particularly outrageous for the state to be so heavy-handed towards its universities when it’s cut funding for them to the bone. According to this story from a few months ago, the percentage of William and Mary’s operating budget that comes from the state has dropped, over the past thirty years, from 43% to 14%. And the cuts, they just keep on comin’. That same article explained that the College was going to have to rebalance its budget in Draconian ways because of:
“a 15%, or $6.2 million, reduction in state support, announced in September 2009 for the current fiscal year ending in June 2010. This was the most recent in a series of state reductions in operating support for the College as the state wrestles with balancing its own budget. Since April 2008, William & Mary has seen its state support permanently reduced by a total of $16.7 million, or 32%.”
Well, things are tough all over, as they say. But faculty salaries at the school have become an embarrassment, strong in-state high school students are being rejected in favor of higher-revenue-paying out-of-staters…and now this. The College should start thinking about a way to go completely private. Otherwise, they’ll continue to get less and less, and pay — in reputation, at least — more and more. Let the state keep its 14%-and-falling.
More on Polyamorous Relations
In response to yesterday’s post on the FLDS, I received two of the most thoughtful and intelligent comments ever sent to this blog. (Read the post and the comments here.) Both were the kinds of testimonials I’d solicited, and hoped for, in writing the post.
One of the commenters is one of two men married to the same woman, in an egalitarian, non-religious “consent-based tradition,” and vivisected what he saw as my facile equation of the FLDS with polygamy. (Re-reading the post, I’d say I deserved the criticism.) It turns out that “Polygamy in America” (as the National Geographic article called its series on the FLDS) is far from the only example of such relationships, and I repeated the error by examining the example without seeing it in a broader context of both polyandrous (two or more men, one woman) and polygynous (two or more women, one man) relationships. Moreover, polygamy and polyamory aren’t the same thing, either: the first refers to a marriage, the second does not.
The other commenter, one Seth R., is descended from early Mormons, only a minority of whom, he says, were polygamous. This commenter provided me with a quick education (and an offer of more information) on the LDS’s traditions, and on some of the more enlightened practice of Brigham Young. (These did not extend to enlightenment about race, it’s worth remembering; LDS long maintained racist view and practices, which have only relatively recently been renounced.) He also leveled informed criticism at today’s FLDS sect, which essentially amounts to this: Drive a practice underground and behind the walls of a compound, and don’t expect a healthy, consent-based society. (Am I the only one reminded of the Catholic Church here?) If Seth R. is reading, I’d of course be interested in any other information you might send, and I suspect many of my readers would be, too.
This is exactly the kind of dialogue I was hoping to foster.
Of Mormons and Gays (First Steps)
For a political movement to gain traction, it must first come from the shadows. Somewhat to my surprise, that’s what starting to happen with the fundamentalist sect of Mormons (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). First there was Big Love, the well-acted and compelling HBO series that depicts one polygamist family, with a patriarch and three sister-wives. And now comes a feature story (”Polygamy in America“) in this month’s issue of National Geographic, which is notable for its balanced look at this reviled and ridiculed group. Of greater significance, in the long run, is the article’s accompanying photo essay. To show a group is, often, to begin a conversation that had been avoided. Sometimes, the depiction only serves to confirm worst fears, but at least the subject is no longer unspeakable. And conversation can lead to a multiplier effect: As more people are emboldened to “come out,” they in turn give courage to others, and so on until the movement seems inexorable and inevitable.
You can see where this is going. When I saw and read the story, I was of course reminded of the gay rights movement. One can pick any milestone from Oscar Wilde’s Invention of (Gay) Love to Stonewall, but the cry for equality and dignity only became deafening after enough people, emboldened by courageous forebears, came roaring out onto the political and social landscape. Now the efforts to hold it back are as doomed as King Canute’s, even if that conclusion may at times seem less than apparent.
So I’m on a bus traveling from the airport in New Orleans to a conference, sitting next to a colleague who is a member of the more mainstream LDS, a guy I quite like and respect. For reasons that will surely be obvious, I had never engaged him directly in the subject of gay rights, much less marriage equality. But when he heard what I was speaking about at the conference (more gay rights stuff, natch), he performed a cannonball right into the deep water, saying something like: “We’ve never discussed gay marriage, but here’s what I think.” Gulp.
What ensued was about ten minutes of the kind of conversation I wish I could have more often. He told me that some in the Mormon church had serious concerns about the decision to support and fund Proposition 8. While his religious beliefs (he strongly implied) were against gay marriages, he thought that Mormons, “of all people,” should have understood the dangers of ganging up against a despised minority. Somehow, this led into a discussion of polygamy, and my friend said that I had a duty to seriously consider the equality claims of those who sought legal recognition of their (multiple) unions. I murmured something about my concerns regarding whether the women really were consenting, and he said: “I think you’d be surprised.”
Maybe he’s right. Polygamy isn’t exactly unknown, world-wide. What, exactly, are the arguments against it, and how, if at all, do they compare to the arguments on same-sex marriages? Maura Strassberg has relied on Hegel’s notion of the proper role of the family within society to denounce polygamy. Here’s the crux:
Hegel believed that in a monogamous marriage, a “mutual, whole-hearted, surrender” of individuality that acknowledges the husband and wife as fundamentally equal creates positive feelings of love, confidence and faith. Certainly, a husband in a polygamous family cannot make such an undivided surrender to any single wife. As a result, none of his wives will return such sentiments of surrender. Because no mutuality of individual sacrifice for the union exists, positive natural feelings cannot characterize the polygamous family. Competition between individual wives and between their children not only precludes love, trust, and confidence between these sub-units of the family, but must breed jealousy and disharmony within the fully consanguineous family sub-units as well. Indeed, modern studies of formal and informal polygamy across many historical and contemporary cultures have suggested that so little loyalty naturally develops among polygamous family members that strong external controls, such as walls, armed guards, or the threat of torture, mutilation, or death for sexual or political disloyalty to the patriarch, are frequently utilized to preserve family integrity. In the polygamous family, therefore, neither love nor justice is likely to flourish.
Is Hegel right today? (Is Strassberg?) The National Geographic article suggests that, to an extent, these polygamous families are matriarchal, not patriarchal, given the power that these women wield by dint of their specialized labors: not just the labor associated with child-bearing and rearing, but their economic division of responsibility (some teach, some cook, some sew, etc.). I need much more convincing, because fulfilling professional lives don’t seem to be in the mix, and I have a hard time believing that none of these women would have chosen that path, were their choices uncoerced. (I’m not talking here about marriages to under-age girls, which are clearly something else, and at least under a certain age not a fit topic for debate.)
But maybe I’m wrong. And my friend is right: We don’t have the luxury of dismissing, out of hand, others’ claims to authentic lives. I’m interested in reading testimonials. Here’s one that doesn’t reflect the FLDS in a positive light, to say the least: