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catsittingstillAndrew Sullivan responded to Doubthat's column about gay marriage.
Doubthat felt the need to dig himself in deeper.
You know, just in case you were confused by the moderate sounding persiflage.
He goes on to say:
Let's remember what they actually did do, which was to advocate concentration camps for homosexuals, or propose that having sex while carrying HIV should be grounds for the death penalty. Very constructive and compassionate.
In the meantime this domestic partnership err... retroactive proposal of Doubthat's is ...different. I'm trying to picture how it might seriously work. Suppose you have two sibs and a cousin living together. How do they pick which pair gets, uh, domestically partnered? Can they change later if say, the sibs partner but then the cousin loses her job and needs to be on the health insurance of one of the sibs? If the domestically partnered sibs adopt a child, how does that relationship get affected if they need to switch to the cousin? Somehow I don't think Doubthat has really thought this through. Which would be consistent with Doubthat not offering this as a serious proposal but only as yet another way of fobbing gay people off with second class status.
I will finish with Sullivan's words, being much more intelligent and compassionate than anything Doubthat has to offer this week.
If you have total gay freedom and no gay institutions that can channel love and desire into commitment and support, you end up in San Francisco in the 1970s. That way of life - however benignly expressed, however defensible as the pent-up unleashed liberation of a finally free people - helped kill 300,000 young human beings in this country in our lifetime. Ross may think that toll is unimportant, or that it was their fault, but I would argue that a Catholic's indifference to this level of death and suffering and utter refusal to do anything constructive to prevent it happening again, indeed a resort to cruel stigmatization of gay people that helps lead to self-destructive tendencies, is morally evil.
Doubthat felt the need to dig himself in deeper.
I think that at least some of the guilt that Sullivan heaps on my head actually belongs to people who would defend (or even celebrate) the wild promiscuity of gay culture in 1970s San Francisco as a “benignly-expressed … liberation of a finally free people.”In other words "Yes, I think AIDS was homosexuals' own fault. Oh, and the fault of everyone who doesn't despise them and shove them back in the closet."
You know, just in case you were confused by the moderate sounding persiflage.
He goes on to say:
So what should conservatives have done instead? Basically, they should have pushed (in, let’s say, the early 1980s) for what Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis have urged as a contemporary compromise: A domestic partnership law designed to accommodate gay couples without being sexuality-specific. (In other words, it would be available to any couple who couldn’t legally marry each other: A pair of cohabitating siblings or cousins could enter into it as well, for instance.)Coulda, woulda, shoulda, but they didn't, didn't, didn't, did they?
Let's remember what they actually did do, which was to advocate concentration camps for homosexuals, or propose that having sex while carrying HIV should be grounds for the death penalty. Very constructive and compassionate.
In the meantime this domestic partnership err... retroactive proposal of Doubthat's is ...different. I'm trying to picture how it might seriously work. Suppose you have two sibs and a cousin living together. How do they pick which pair gets, uh, domestically partnered? Can they change later if say, the sibs partner but then the cousin loses her job and needs to be on the health insurance of one of the sibs? If the domestically partnered sibs adopt a child, how does that relationship get affected if they need to switch to the cousin? Somehow I don't think Doubthat has really thought this through. Which would be consistent with Doubthat not offering this as a serious proposal but only as yet another way of fobbing gay people off with second class status.
I will finish with Sullivan's words, being much more intelligent and compassionate than anything Doubthat has to offer this week.
We gays are here, Ross, as you well know. We are human beings. We love one another. We are part of countless families in this country, pay taxes, work hard, serve the country in the armed services, and look after our own biological children (and also those abandoned by their biological parents). Our sex drives are not going away, nor our need to be included in our own families, to find healing and growth and integration that alone will get us beyond the gay-straight divide into a more humane world and society.As far as I could tell, Doubthat, despite supposedly having responded, has no answer.
Or are we here solely to act as a drop-shadow to the ideal heterosexual relationship?
If so, what form would that drop-shadow take? What morsels from the "microcosm of civilization" are we permitted to have as citizens? And at what point does conceding the substance of gay needs in a civil union actually intensify the deliberate social stigma of exclusion from marriage, rather than mitigate it?
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-20 12:06 am (UTC)One word:
Ratings.
I wonder how many folks have clicked on the NYT link, steaming mad... and given them that many more ad impressions.
This is the problem with... well, the whole publicly owned corporation organized gambling racket. The people who should be first, we the people, their customers, come last.
But, yeah. Doubthat. Glenn Beck. Rush. Even John Stewart. It's not about the truth atall, it's about money. Sullivan, Maddow, Olbermann, and the like at least have been allowed *some* professional ethics... perhaps, insisted on it... 'course, Sullivan and Maddow at least have a personal stake in it. Which is perfectly fine as long as they're open about it, which they are...
Transparency. It's the new objectivism. Some folks got it... some don't.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-21 11:08 pm (UTC)Doubthat would be right at home in some conservative newspaper. The Wall Street Journal. Fox News. Something like that.
What the HECK is he doing at the New York Times? That's what I don't get.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-20 01:08 am (UTC)That column has got to be one of the lamest and most pathetic attempts I've ever seen to take credit for admitting to an error while refusing to accept any actual responsibility for the mistake.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-21 11:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-20 10:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-21 11:13 pm (UTC)1) it is not used as some sort of gay equivalent for marriage. There was a time when I would have settled for that if the right had moved fast enough to offer it, but I no longer believe "separate but equal" can ever be equal.
That would mean that either gays and straights alike get married, and domestic partnerships are a non-romantic relationship (or at least no romance is implied) OR that gays and straights alike get domestically partnered--and *that's* what makes you family for the hospital, and the insurance, and the pension / social security / taxes.
I could go either way on that.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-22 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-21 04:11 am (UTC)What he said.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-21 11:13 pm (UTC)