Sex Talk

So now the Republicans in the Senate are ready to tack on a new Amendment to the Constitution in the aftermath of Lawrence v. Texas, declaring that only heterosexual unions will be recognized as marriage. It makes me a bit queasy, and not because I'm an advocate for gay marriage (I don't see the point). Using the supreme law of the land to dictate the nature of something so basic and personal runs against the grain of my understanding of federalism. The federal government should not be involved in marriage.


Yet this appears to be the one remaining way to preserve the understanding of marriage. Gay activist groups have been working to put this issue center stage. And thanks to the SCOTUS overreaching in a way unseen since Earl Warren was Chief Justics, it's now a national issue that you can bet will be on the 2004 campaign talking points. Since, per Justice O'Connor, public morality no longer provides a "compelling interest" for legislation (but "diversity" does. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight), Amendment 28 is just about all the social conservatives have left.


Now, I'm not the kind of right-leaning Cat'Lick who is forever fomenting on "the gay agenda" and the bad, naughty, Wicked Gays (and after the spanking...)! I think a great deal of the fury within the Republican party aimed at countering gay activism has, at its heart, a degree of scapegoatism. Gays are not to blame for the state of the American family. American families are to blame for the state of the American family. Men who feel no obligation to the women they use like tissues, women who slaughter their offspring in the womb, couples with purely notional ideas of what "Til death do us part" means, children who wouldn't know discipline if it bit them on their joystick hands, these are our culprits, not the 4% of us who like having sex with their own body type. When we heteros start behaving ourselves, we might have the standing to lecture the gays. Until then, heal thyself.


Again, though, that doesn't mean I'm ready to sign on to gay marriage. Gays may feel their agenda is harmless, a pure civil rights issue. It's not. They feel their status is just like that of the blacks in the 60's. It's not. There are many obvious similarities, but also several obvious differences. Repealing Jim Crow and ending the second-class citizenship of blacks was an easy call. Ethnicity is a political, not a moral issue. No one but a racist kook can argue that there's anything immoral about not being white. Homosexuality is different, because it deals with sexuality, which is a region girt with taboos, a subject striking at the very center of our humanity. It has ever been our species' habit to apply special controls to our most powerful drive, and I am wary of attempts to undo those controls, without compelling (that word again) reason.


Being Catholic, I see homosexuality as but one of a myriad of sexual deviations, and among the least blameworthy. No one chooses to be gay, and being gay, even actively gay, does not necessarily bar you from being a productive citizen and worthwhile person. Sodomy laws are asinine not just because they are all-but-unenforceable, but because one man having sex with another man who wants to have sex with him is all-but-impossible to construe as doing that man any harm that the state needs to be involved in. It really is nobody's business.


And it should stay nobody's business. Gay marriage makes it everybody's business. Redefining one of the bulwarks of our society is not going to do anything to improve the abuse it's taken over the last forty years. George Will has it right: if consent is all that is required to produce legal protection, than can any deviate act be illegal? Andrew Sullivan and those like him think to skirt around this by climbing atop a high horse and getting very offended that someone would even put homosexuality and bigamy in the same ball park. I sympathize, but we're talking legals, not morals. If the law can't stop two men from marrying, why can't it stop a man from marrying two women? Feminists will object, but what if the two women involved don't? Polyamory is as old as humanity itself, and there's probably even less reason to object to it on purely moral grounds.


Prostitution? "The Oldest Profession"? Are laws against it any more enforceable or effective? It spreads disease, sure, but so does our swinging single date-but-not-marry lifestyle. If you've ever had to explain to adolescents that a third of people between the ages of 15 and 19 are carrying some kind of STD without knowing it, as I have, you'd find it pretty hard to single out those that are selling it.


Incest and pedophilia are harder, but they have their advocates, too. It's not as easy to dismiss it by saying "Homosexuality is something you are, pedophilia is something you do," as Andrew Sullivan does (So we're all sexually attracted to children, but most of us manage to resist the temptation? What C-R-A-P). I very much doubt that anyone chooses to desire children any more than someone chooses to desire someone of their own sex. Most pedophiles are the victims of abuse themselves, are they unworthy of our sympathy? Camille Paglia, for example, has argued that most of the psychological harm done to children who have sex with adults is the result of the fear of being caught, and not the sex itself (assuming the child is not raped, and isn't that the basis of our argument?). An episode of Allie McBeal all but advocated relationships between older women and teenage boys, because its so sweet and beautiful, and damn the consequences! Look how far Britney Spears has come with banal dance moves and nonexistent vocal talent, just by selling the wide-eyed innocent schoolgirl routine. How many psychologists need to start digging their pincers into child sexuality before we give this one up, too?


Slippery slopes are easy to make, because they're speculative by nature. I can't prove that any of this is valid, and neither can anyone else disprove it. The argument raises fears about the future and lets me stand athwart History, yelling "STOP!" Bully for me. But History needs to stop on this one. Our Judeo-Christian monogamist tradition is not a perfect fit for everybody, and it's a chore for those it does suit. But it's an ideal and a model we desperately need to acheive that control and deny the supremacy of the sex drive. Rousseau was wrong, and it's time we admitted it.


I'm perfectly willing to accept the "gay agenda" as being no more than "leave us alone." Gays have it tougher than most of us. They carry fear of the majority and unassuageable guilt and the pain of seperation with them constantly. I've watched friends come to grips with this aspect of themselves, and it cannot be but a brutally hard slog. We should leave them alone.


And they should return the favor.