The XX Factor: What women really think.

Maine Voters Rejected Gay Marriage

When the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2003, the polls showed disapproval by a margin of 53 percent to 35 percent. After the ruling went into effect, legislators geared up to reverse it by amending the state constitution. But two years later, the poll numbers had flipped, and the backlash never came. That's because reversing the court's ruling was a long process, not a quick and hasty ballot initiative like the one that Maine passed in Tuesday's election. In Maine, the law passed last May and never even went into effect ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Did Obama Announce the SCOTUS Nominee to Distract Us from Prop 8?

Oppressive, Archaic Institutions and Why We Love Them

Same-sex marriage has been more of a battleground in the United States than in most other countries because marriage is more important to Americans than to people in other countries... In some European countries, gay and lesbian activists are asking instead: why, at this late date, should we buy into the oppressive, archaic institution of marriage? But in the United States many advocates say that only a marriage ring guarantees first-class citizenship. And they are right, because marriage matters more here than elsewhere.

The Good News From Iowa

I don't have much to add to E.J.'s and Kerry's posts on the good news about gay marriage in Iowa, but I would like to send a "ha-haaaaah" a la Nelson Muntz of Simpsons fame to all the more "progressive" states on the East and West coasts that got beaten to the punch by a bunch of corn-fed Midwesterners.

That's not to denigrate the hard work being done by activists and everyday citizens in places like Washington state (where I used to live), Oregon, California, and Vermont. I will admit that moving to the Seattle area in my early 20s and meeting, working, and socializing with more gays and lesbians made me more aware of the issues and more open-minded. (Though I hope that doesn't make it sound like I was a raging homophobe before; it was merely something I didn't think a lot about one way or the other.) And sometimes stereotypes are true: I cringed in 2004 when my home state of Ohio passed an anti-gay marriage amendment so restrictive that even the Republican governor came out against it.

That said, it's kind of nice when stereotypes don't hold true, when a state from flyover country can legalize gay marriage and make the rest of the country do a double-take. Because if Iowa can do it, why not everyone else?

What Happens in Des Moines ...

Where Have All the Rads Gone?

It's pretty difficult to argue that gays should not be allowed to see their ailing partners in the hospital, E.J., but your post reminded me of Ariel Levy's article in this week's New Yorker about radical lesbian feminists of the '70s. The feature focuses on Lamar Van Dyke, née Heather Elizabeth, a woman who help found the feminist separatist movement the Van Dykes, "a roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, avoided speaking to men, and lived on the highways of North America for several years."

At the end of the article, with an "almost incredulous maternal disappointment," Van Dyke tells Levy, "Your generation wants to fit in. ... Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?" Van Dyke's disappointment in the lack of radicalism in the feminist and lesbian movements is something I've thought about. I'm no radical myself, and the idea of "making the National Organization for Women look like an appeasement policy," as Levy says the Van Dykes did, holds no personal appeal. But I wonder if part of the reason the feminist movement is currently so disparate and fragmented is partially due to a lack of radical thought and action.

Van Dyke also says of my generation, "We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. ... We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted." Which reminds me of the study Emily Y. wrote about yesterday, the study that claims technology is permanently infantilizing us, ruining our attention spans and ability to communicate. But Van Dyke's fear, that my generation is narcotized by all the screens, is potentially more troubling than accusations of mass ADD.

Obama Is a Commie

Yesterday, Eve pointed out that Dan Quayle speechwriter turned National Review blogger Lisa Schiffren took a swipe at the XX Factor bloggers -- something about the audacity of our dislike of Sarah Palin and love for Michelle Obama. (Je stands accused!) Was it a coincidence that I took a swipe at Schiffren the day previous? Methinks not. Either way, such slandering prompted some digging into Schiffren's backlog of neocrank opinion, and it seems we're in good company.

According to Schiffren, our new President is a communist.

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League.

Oh, and don't get her started on gay marriage. From "Gay Marriage, an Oxymoron," a 1996 New York Times Op-Ed (not available online):

[O]ne may feel the same affection for one's homosexual friends and relatives as for any other, and be genuinely pleased for the happiness they derive from relationships, while opposing gay marriage for principled reasons.

"Same-sex marriage" is inherently incompatible with our culture's understanding of the institution. Marriage is essentially a lifelong compact between a man and woman committed to sexual exclusivity and the creation and nurture of offspring. For most Americans, the marital union -- as distinguished from other sexual relationships and legal and economic partnerships -- is imbued with an aspect of holiness. Though many of us are uncomfortable using religious language to discuss social and political issues, Judeo-Christian morality informs our view of family life.

So, does this mean Schiffren's not going to come to my unholy gay communist slumber party?

Are Traditional Christians Necessarily Haters?

So where we differ is not so much on Warren himself, or over gay marriage, for that matter. It's not over censorship, as I'm sure we agree that the KKK can march around Skokie to their shriveled little hearts content and yay, odious speech. Though you think Obama's pick of Warren as official prayer-sayer is bad optics and I think it's great politics, even that isn't our real difference. Which is that I don't think opposing gay marriage automatically makes someone a bigot or a homophobe, and if I read you correctly, you do. But can you really write off the millions of people who read their Bible that way? (Don't they write off gay people?) Doubtless some do, but their traditional definition of marriage does not necessarily make them haters, does it? How could I view the Bible as (among other things) a cultural document and not see Bible readers as products of our various cultures, too?

The conservative Illinois town where I grew up (and where Obama not only lost to McCain in '08, but to ALAN KEYES for U.S. Senate in ‘04) was so lacking in diversity that we didn't have that much to work with, bias-wise, and the only conflict was the Christians versus the other Christians. Some of the neighbor kids who went to different churches were always letting us know that because we were Catholic (had not been baptized the right way, and had parents who drank and danced, though not as often as they would have liked) we were totally going to hell. So we'd run into the house - Oh no, so-and-so says we haven't been saved! -- and my Republican dad, whose greatest heartbreak in life is that he somehow wound up with the world's most liberal daughter - yes, everything really is relative -- never got the least bit worked up about our likely damnation, or ever, ever hit back: "That's what they believe,'' he'd say, and that would be that. Which was kind of frustrating at the time. But when I think now about what tolerance looks like, I do think of him shrugging and going, "That's what they believe,'' and I wish I were more like that.

Bring Back Rev. Pfleger!

E.J., I gotta say, thank you for going through all the stages of grief re: Rick Warren so I didn't have to. Here's the thing: Really, who cares. It "sends a message"—nah, don't care. As Peggy Noonan said of Jeremiah Wright, I'm finding it hard to be truly upset about this one. Maybe just distracted by my upsetness over the questionable future regulators who will be "sending a policy" in the form of "trillions of dollars."

So the guy is a huge homophobe: Meh, sorry Barney, still don't care. As you yourself have so often observed—and I'm "addressing" Barney Frank here, for the record—"the average American is less homophobic than he thinks he's supposed to be and more racist than he's willing to admit." Why is this? Well, statistically, the average American knows at least a handful of gay people. The average American knows a handful of women who've had abortions. The average American does not think people in either camp are evil for what they have "done." The average American probably even empathizes with the pain involved in belonging to said camp in an America whose moral culture is dominated by guys like Rick Warren. But wait, let's talk about that for a sec: Rick Warren's book is called The Purpose-Driven Life. It is not called The Perverts and Babykillers Bringing the Country to Ruin. I am sure he has said a lot of ridiculous things, but has he ever likened Gay Pride parades to Murderer's Pride Parades a la Ted Haggard?

I'd like to hear the Rev. Michael Pfleger on this one. One of my favorite things about being raised in such an old and big and totally screwed-up religion is all the deviant and/or dissident clerics the Catholic Church has produced over the years, exposing on a grand and tragic and awesome scale the fallibility of humanity and the consciousness that instills in us the sense that there must be something bigger and more beyond just our own petty civilization, and we can glean what that bigger thing wants from us. My favorite at the moment is the late Father Bob Drinan, the anti-war Jesuit priest Frank replaced in Congress upon the request of a new Pope uneasy at the thought of a representative in the world's most important legislature who said of abortion "I think abortion is a terrible thing … except for women."

At some point I expect science will allow mothers to test prenatally for homosexuality, and some sort of epic crisis of conscience will force Christendom to see humanity in a more nuanced light, in part because we'll all have much more pressing matters to confront by that point, like the economic apocalypse and so on.

Symbolism Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Noreen, when I returned to Dallas, the natural church for me to attend would have been the one I grew up in. But as it happens, that church has been torn apart by the debate over gay marriage. Half the church supports Robinson; half adamantly oppose him, and a significant minority want to leave the Anglican community altogether. Hell, there are even a few members who still oppose the ordination of women! Frankly, I couldn't be bothered. As someone who struggles with faith—most of the time I’m agnostic or not even that sure—I didn’t want to spend my Sunday mornings arguing with people whose views I found repugnant. So, now to the extent I go to church at all, I'm surrounded by people who think exactly like me. But I’ve sometimes second-guessed my decision as morally lazy and cowardly. I might have been well-positioned, as a native daughter of Dallas, to make the case for the pro-Robinson forces at my old church. Maybe I could have helped tilt the balance toward tolerance, and done more overall good, had I stayed.

Wright and Wrong and Warren

Like Dahlia amd E.J., I'm not thrilled with Obama's selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration, given Warren's opposition to gay marriage and many of his other views. At a time of high divorce rates and increased infidelity—and I'm talking about hetereosexuals, who are the real threat to the institution of marriage—I find it almost comically perverse that conservatives are against a group of people who so earnestly want to form committed, long-term, stable relationships sanctioned by God.

Indeed, when I recently moved temporarily to Dallas, my way of finding an Episcopal church for me and my daughter was to Google "gay," "bishop," "New Hampshire," and "Dallas." And sure enough, I quickly found the one congregation where every priest on the staff had supported Gene Robinson, and I feel right at home. But it did gnaw at me at the time that I just wanted to be preached to by the converted. After all, were I more committed to gay and lesbian rights, wouldn't I have joined precisely those Episcopal congregations where the issue is still an open wound—and believe you me, there are plenty to choose from in North Texas—and tried to persuade my less-enlightened congregants to see the light? I took the easy way out.

In this one sense, I do have grudging respect for Obama’s choice of Warren. Yes, it’s clearly a political calculation—but political in a good sense. I do believe Obama is genuinely trying to create dialogue with those who disagree with him in hopes of bringing a few more wayward souls along. If he can get even a few evangelicals to drop their active opposition to gay rights—to become more agnostic, so to speak, on this one issue—then that might, in fact, further the cause more than I'm doing on Sundays by kneeling, smug and self-satisfied, next to my fellow liberal parishioners.

Obama did, after all, actively campaign on bringing people together, and I remember at least thinking I supported that idea during the election. While I am sinfully spiteful enough after the damage of the Bush years to wish this unity would now take place under dark of night (or maybe involve issues I care less about), so long as Obama continues to push hard for equal rights for all Americans as a matter of policy, I have less of a problem with his otherwise entirely symbolic olive branch to Warren. However, if the result of such good-faith efforts is to provide an opportunity for right-leaners like Rachael to tar Obama again with Jeremiah Wright, then never mind: Bring back those good ole partisan politics.

Marriage, Interrupted

I admit that lately I've been thinking more about clothes (and their symbolism) than issues, but in today's New York Times longtime religion reporter Laurie Goodstein writes about the various religious leaders descending on California in support of Proposition 8, a measure that would change the California Constitution to state "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," and reading it, I was jolted right back into the fray.

Back in 2004, campaigns against gay marriage were nearly as central to the Republican strategy as the Swift Boat smears and the Neiman Marcus/Saks shopping-spree-style stories of the day—like John Kerry's ill-timed windsurfing trips.That year the 11 state ballot initiatives banning same-sex marriage—all of which passed—were widely believed to be a key element in Karl Rove's strategy for flushing out Evangelicals and right-wing Bush supporters to the polls. Dems panicked at the time and didn't fight them hard enough—if at all—leaving statewide activists stranded as they went door to door with a message of equality.

This year the issue hasn't gone away—in fact, California, Arkansas, and Florida all have ballot initiatives that would restrict the rights of gay men and lesbians—but it's certainly deeper underground, despite, or more likely, because of, changes in the right-to-marry that took place this year in California  and Connecticut. But recently, the McCain-Palin ticket has tried to revive the issue, unleashing Sarah Palin to The 700 Club, where she announced support for a Federal Marriage Amendment (which Sen. McCain himself has said he does not support). Currently, polls put support for California's version of the discriminatory measure a shade less than 10 percentage points behind.

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle gives a clue as to how the measure might be defeated this time: State Attorney Gen. Jerry Brown reworded the amendment to read "eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry." With that wording, support for the measure immediately went down. Activists I spoke to in 2004 universally believed that a key to defeating the discriminatory measures were to find ways to convey to voters that this was a violation of their neighbor's rights—as opposed to the Evangelical and Republican positions that claimed gay marriage would undermine the marriages of straight voters. Those voters reached with the message that a ballot measure banning gay marriage was no better than creating a second-class citizenship—in other words, was inherently discriminatory—tended to vote no on the issue.

The big concern with California, and elsewhere, as Goodstein points out in the NYT, is that there tends to be a kind of Bradley Effect on gay issues: Voters are loathe to tell pollsters they plan to vote against their neighbor. But if Prop 8 is defeated, maybe Jerry Brown finally found out how to get that message across more broadly: Write the ballot truly explaining the amendment's intended impact, so voters are forced to face its intended bigotry.

Is Being Tolerant Acceptable?

I couldn't help but cringe last night when Sarah Palin said the word "tolerant" three times within seconds in the debate. I hate that word.

Tolerance is widely accepted as an admirable virtue, but it still feels cheap to me. Essentially what Palin is saying is that she puts up with homosexual couples. There's no approval there, no acceptance, just respectful disregard. The difference between "tolerance" and "acceptance" is like the difference between looking the other way and actively supporting something. Her tolerant speech doesn't mean she supports, or even approves of, homosexuality. It means she just doesn't act out against it.

To be fair, neither Biden nor Palin support gay marriage. That was the one point on which they both whole-heartedly agreed last night. But Biden's answer was more political, less personal, and absolutely less grinding than Palin's, who seems to think looking away is a virtue in itself.

But maybe it's all just nuance.

Gay Marriage at the Schoolhouse Door

I think I like weddings only when they’re an act of civil disobedience. When my straight friends announce their engagements, there’s always a faint sense of dread at the impending rites of veil-lifting and glass-stomping and Pablo-Neruda-poem-reciting (coupled, of course, with a sincere wish for their lifelong happiness—but I’d wish them that whether they got married or not). But those images of the San Francisco lesbian couple, 84 and 87 years old, who were wed Monday at 5:01 p.m. after 50 years together (and after a California Supreme Court decision invalidated their marriage performed in 2004) had me tearing up like a fond aunt at a rehearsal dinner. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that: Overturn our union, will you? Great, we’ll just line up and get married again the first minute—literally—that state law allows. I love imagining the two of them, frail and bent, walking out of City Hall to a mixed crowd of supporters (both women are well-known S.F. gay rights activists) and jeering protesters with placards reading “Homo Sex Is Sin.”

I honestly think that in a matter of years, this kind of image will look to us like the 1963 photographs of George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door as two black students attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Good Lord, we’ll say, can you believe it was just a generation ago that people were debating the pros and cons of institutionalized bigotry and publicly protesting the right of two octogenarian women to love each other? I just hope that shift will take a lot less than 45 years and that, when Obama gets asked about gay marriage in the fall (and you know that wedge is being sharpened by the McCain campaign as we speak), he won’t fall back on that cowardly (and tautological) dodge about how “marriage is between a man and a woman.” No duh—and it’s high time we did something about it.

We Need To Talk

Melinda and Rachael, your recent posts about knee-jerk political assumptions and the trend toward only listening to people we agree with really resonated for me. In years past, I had no trouble finding my political tribe. As a lefty lesbian, I might occasionally roll my eyes at the bourgeois liberalism of the mainstream American left, but I knew the difference between us and them.

And then, to oversimplify matters, came 9/11. Suddenly, I was out of step with a lot of my friends on national-security and foreign-policy issues, and conversation became more difficult. Should I tell my pals they sounded naive and disturbingly isolationist? Could they disagree with me without denouncing me as a deluded cog in the Bush-Cheney war machine? (The answer to both questions is sometimes.)

It's tempting to stay silent, but while I occasionally rely on a rueful smile to convey, "I think you're totally wrong, but now's not the time for that conversation," I've mostly learned to express my dissent. For one thing, it's more honest: To paraphrase a line from this week's Exes and Ohs, "You start be saying nothing ... and soon you have nothing to say." (I get all my political philosophy from bad TV shows.) But it's also damaging to pretend we all agree when we don't. One of the reasons I've found the anti-gay-marriage referendums of the last few years so hurtful is that, judging from the wide margins most of them have passed with, lots of Democratic voters supported them. My assumptions about what Democrats believe betrayed me.

We need to talk. The Democratic Party needs pro-life progressives. And the GOP needs social liberals (pro-life or not) like you, Rachael.