g_b from Slate.com: Gay rights� surprise weapon: Morality

[vgd67]

An instructive piece from Salon on how the gay rights movement changed tactics 
from demanding rights' and asking for tolerance to demonstrating that their 
lives were no different from that of others, which made it harder for people to 
dismiss them. Something similar, I think, may be happening here with the way in 
which the parents of gay kids have been talking about how their kids are just 
the same as any others:


frmo Slate.com: Gay rights' surprise weapon: Morality
Morality, not tolerance, moved gay marriage into the mainstream in 2011
By Linda Hirshman .

Forget pink; nothing less than lavender champagne will do justice to gay 2011.

I'm not talking about New York passing a same sex marriage law in June. I'm not 
even talking about the certification of repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," 
which happened the very same July weekend New Yorkers thronged to Niagara Falls 
for the first legal weddings. These events mattered a lot. But not as much as 
the report, on May 20, 2011, that "For First Time, Majority of Americans Favor 
Legal Gay Marriage."

For the first time ever, a majority of people polled — 53 percent — told Gallup 
that "Marriages between same sex couples should be recognized by the law as 
valid." Crossing the 50 percent mark on marriage means much more than any 
specific victory and more than the approval of gay service or equal employment 
or any of the other hallmarks of citizenship. Approval of marriage represents 
moral acceptance.  Both sides have always known that. Evan Wolfson, the father 
of the same sex marriage movement, says marriage is the central social 
institution of our society. "Marriage opponents like Iowa conservative Robert 
Vanderplaats insist that same sex marriage violates the very definition of 
marriage."

Same sex marriage is a classic example of what political scientists call 
"morality politics": "a fundamental, first-principled conflict with the values 
embodied in some aspect of a morality policy." In a lot of politics, Americans 
are willing to hold their noses and tolerate people they disapprove of or to 
change their positions based on evidence from the material world. But in 
morality politics, voters have their first principles and don't want 
compromise-inclined elites confusing them with stuff like social science data 
about harm.

So issues of morality politics surface disproportionately in the context of 
direct democracy. Hawaii voters overturned their Supreme Court's decision 
recognizing same sex marriage in a referendum while the ink was still wet on 
the decision. The Hawaii decision generated a federal law refusing to recognize 
any such rogue development, and a similar decision from Massachusetts in 2003 
was met with a tsunami of state referendums forbidding such shenanigans in 
their states in 2004. Gay marriage activists were not going to win that battle 
by arguing that anything between consenting adults in private is nobody's 
business.

How did they do it? They did it – and this is the lesson that the gay 
revolution holds for any progressive movement – not by asking for "tolerance." 
They didn't ask people to accept gay marriage by holding their moral noses. 
Rather, they set out to change change people's minds about what is moral.

Moral relationships are not about what sexual positions or organs are involved, 
the movement argued, no matter what the Bible said (or didn't say) and no 
matter what Queen Victoria thought. Against the impermeable wall of religious 
sexual morality, the gay marriage movement fired the armament of other measures 
of morality. Sexual relationships are about relationships. What is the content 
of a moral relationship with another human being?

The gay marriage movement told the stories of its courtships, invoking the 
ancient Platonic idea of love as the recognition of the goodness in the other 
person.

Genora Dancel and Ninia Baehr, the original plaintiffs in the Hawaii case, had 
a nine-hour first date. They told the stories of their caring, invoking the 
morality of the strong helping the weak and making a world you yourself would 
want to live in.

Ron Wallen, 77  years old, told a panel of the U.S. Senate, which was 
considering repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, about  his four years in 
hell nursing his partner of 58 years through fatal leukemia. "And as rotten as 
those four years were," Wallen testified, "they were made ever so much easier 
because we had each other for comfort and love." Slowly, story by story, the 
gay marriage movement began to remake the conversation about morality.

It was an uphill battle. For too long in America the subject of morality has 
been collapsed into sexual morality. For most of Western history, morality had 
richer content. Morality meant proper conduct regarding wealth, just as one 
example. In the Old Testament, people were taught to leave some of their 
harvest behind in the fields as charity. The Greek virtues included the virtue 
of "temperance," "liberality" and "magnificence" – all counseling moderation in 
the relationship to money and physical pleasure. The Enlightenment philosopher 
Immanuel Kant asked his followers to imagine they were living in a world in 
which everyone behaved as they did. The English utilitarians, horrified by the 
inequalities of the first Industrial Revolution, suggested that the 
millionaire's millionth dollar did not mean as much to him as the same dollar 
meant to a poor man.

But as inequality rose, moral debates about economic justice fell until only 
sex was left as a subject for moral conversation. Worse, in response to the 
sexual revolution of the '60s, moral sex was defined by a snapshot of the 19th 
century Protestant, monogamous, heterosexual, reproductive family. Same-sex sex 
was the definition of the immoral. Except for those uppity women wanting to 
abort their "babies," it dominated the field. With the arrival of religious 
activists into U.S. politics in the '70s, this religiously defined sexual 
morality was promoted as a proper subject for politics.

Gay activists reversed this trend. Asserting their claim to marriage, gay 
activists told the predominantly straight world that there are more ways to 
think about morality than the Evangelical Christian morality of Victorian 
sexuality. And they were persuasive. When conservative lawyer Ted Olson, former 
solicitor general under President Bush, explained why he sued to establish gay 
marriage as a constitutional right,  he invoked the essentials of the 
activists' argument: "We believe that a conservative value is stable 
relationships and stable community and loving individuals coming together and 
forming a basis that is a building block of our society, which includes 
marriage."

In this, as in so many things, the gay community were early adopters of the 
only strategy that beats the resurgent religious right: fight morality with 
morality. Once the category of morality was opened, every kind of debate became 
possible — and so did victory. It arrived in 2011.

(Linda R. Hirshman is a lawyer and philosopher. She is at work on a political 
history of the Gay Revolution).