Up Close and Personal
Over at Salon, Mark Oppenheimer has a longish, interesting piece on Maggie Gallagher, NRO hack, NOM founder and arguably the most prominent opponent of marriage equality in the US. I read it because the thing that has always puzzled me most about the gay marriage controversy is why those who oppose it are so convinced it is a threat to straight marriage, and I wondered if Gallagher would offer any fresh rationales. Alas, no.
As Oppenheimer says, for fundamentalists, the answer is straightforward enough, if kooky. But I’ve never heard people who accessorize their opposition to gay marriage with supposedly secular arguments make a convincing case for why marriage equality is bad for society in general. The arguments always come down to someone’s personal conviction that it must be so, and that conviction is almost invariably derived from a personal experience projected planet-wide.
Gallagher is no exception: For her, it all boils down to her unshakable conviction that the ideal for every child is to be raised by its biological parents and that the institution of marriage must be exclusively about facilitating that arrangement or else, I dunno, cats and dogs, living together. She offers no convincing evidence for this conviction and baldly asserts that there is no evidence to the contrary that could convince her otherwise.
Oppenheimer notes Gallagher’s claim that gay marriage is, for her, wholly detached from the happiness of individuals and that, according to Gallagher, marriage equality is an issue only insofar as it broadens her very narrow definition of what constitutes a marriage. This is why Gallagher is able to airily wave away the implications of her crusade, shrugging off suggestions that otherizing LGBT people contributes to the staggeringly high rate of LGBT teen suicide, violence against the LGBT community, etc., as so much collateral damage.
Gallagher comes off as more than a little sociopathic on that score in her utter indifference to the real-world implications of what has become her life’s work. But Oppenheimer’s piece also makes the origins of Gallagher’s single-minded focus on a Platonic ideal of Marriage clear: Her college boyfriend knocked her up and then dumped her and her son.
That she was able to fend for herself and her son and later marry (although apparently not all that happily) and go on to achieve what would surely be some folks’ idea of success evidently does not balance the scales or impart any subtlety to her world view; in fact, it appears to do the opposite.
Here’s what I thought was the most revealing portion in Oppenheimer’s piece:
At one point, breaking from my script of questions, I interrupted her to ask if, despite all of her fears about same-sex marriage, she didn’t find it heartwarming to see those pictures of joyous gay couples in Massachusetts or Iowa or California, crying and hugging as they celebrated their marriages. Before answering, she takes a long pause, the only long pause of our conversation. “Am I happy for them?” she finally says. “That’s a tough question. I like to see people happy. It’s better than seeing people sad. So yes, I am happy for them. But I am sad. But I am not sad because they are happy.”
I believe her about being sad. And if she weren’t so relentlessly focused on giving her evidence-free, faith-based convictions force of law, I’d be sad for her. Because encasing the hurt and bitterness you felt in 1982 in concrete and swinging it as a mace through real, live human beings in a quest to grasp some abstract ideal is no way to go through life.
[X-POSTED at Balloon Juice]
Posted by Betty Cracker on 02/09/12 at 11:31 AM • Permalink
