Positive Liberty

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for linking my post below and to the Cato debate about gays and conservatism.

I was nervous as all hell, and it shows, but if you want to see the question that prompted the post, it starts at about minute 73:

It may be worth stating the argument formally.

1) Suppose for the sake of argument that I’m gay and a social conservative. [1]

2) Suppose also that I think that the institution of marriage is not fit for same-sex partners. People tempted toward this route should stay away, because even if it’s personally beneficial or satisfying, it’s bad for society. What then?

3) There are, of course, other ways to live one’s life than in the context of marriage. Given that I reject marriage, I’m forced to choose one of these alternatives. As I see it, they are:

3a) A marriage-like or marriage-lite relationship; a civil union or domestic partnership. Conservatives tend to oppose these as well, so I suppose that they are out of the question.

3b) Promiscuity. Obviously this is a no-go.

3c) Abstinence.

3d) Ex-gay or conversion therapy.

3e) Go back into the closet.

I expected Maggie Gallagher to endorse either 3c or 3d. (Though, on reflection, this would raise troubling issues for the family I already have.) She did not choose these. Nor did she support 3e. Some other conservatives do support one or more of these things, and doing so would seem to be a logical necessity given the unacceptability of marriage, marriage-lite, or promiscuity.

How is it, then, that after years of (we’d presume) pondering the question, Gallagher has no answer?

[1] I do not, in fact, consider myself a conservative. I consider myself a culturally left but still classical (market) liberal.

Today my employer hosted a forum titled “Is There a Place for Gay People in Conservatism and Conservative Politics?”

The panelists were Nick Herbert, an openly gay Conservative member of the UK Parliament; Andrew Sullivan, who is indispensable on the subject; and Maggie Gallagher, who seemed surprised to be there. Respectively, and paraphrasing, their answers were, “yes,” “yes,” and “yes, they work for me, they support the FMA, but I can’t reveal any of their names.”

I’m more skeptical. My thoughts turned to this clip from Mike Wallace in 1967, which Sullivan himself linked to on Sunday:

Watch the whole thing. Tell me what you think is worthwhile about that time in history for gays and lesbians. I don’t see it. If you’re gay, and if you really want to stand athwart history yelling “stop” — this is what you’re asking for.

Conservatism offers virtually no usable past for gays and lesbians. Even black conservatives can say, in effect, “The past sure wasn’t golden, but when Jefferson — and plenty of others — wrote that ‘all men are created equal,’ they clearly meant us too.” Which is plausible enough, at least, for black conservatism not to be a flat contradiction in terms.

This is much harder for gay people to do, which is why we have to resort to newly thought arguments rather than tradition to justify what we’re saying. There’s a built-in liberalness to gay politics, if not necessarily to gay people. Even conservative gay politics, in this sense, is liberal. Because all we have is the future. It’s the future, or nothing.

That “nothing” was on full display this afternoon, when I got to ask Maggie Gallagher the question I’ve always wanted to ask her: What do you think that am I supposed to do with my life?

Suppose I found myself in agreement with her. Suppose I concluded that same-sex marriage was corrosive to society. Do I leave my husband? Do I send my adopted daughter back to the state? Enter ex-gay therapy, which isn’t likely to work? Tell my whole family that I’m single now, and that Scott shouldn’t be welcome at family events? Live my whole life alone, and loveless? Hide? Where is the life I’m supposed to live?

I probably wasn’t so articulate at the Cato event, but I do recall Gallagher’s very simple answer: “I don’t know.”

She certainly doesn’t, and that’s the whole problem with gay conservatism — there’s hardly a life to be lived within it. There’s no breathing room. Until social conservatives offer us a better answer than “I don’t know,” until they offer us a way to be gay, and conservative, and respectable in their eyes, they’re not going to find many gay conservatives.

The Ugandan “kill the gays” bill looks worse and worse:

As most of you know, I’m gay. If you failed to report me after reading this blog post, and if you are a “person in authority” (a very, very vague term) you could go to jail. If you’ve failed to report me twice — that is, if you’re a regular reader who knew I was gay before this, and you got convicted for it — they can kill you.

I rarely invoke Nazi analogies, because usually they’re overblown. Here they seem somehow… deficient.

Curiosity abounds, in this essay by Jennifer Roback Morse at American Thinker. It appeared on January 17, but I seem to have missed it until now. Morse writes,

I recently participated in a round-table discussion about marriage, freedom, and the state. Most of the participants were libertarians and economists. The default position of virtually everyone in the room was a presumption in favor of redefining marriage as the union of any two persons. Normally, economists and libertarians take pride in tracking the changes in incentives as far through society as possible. Yet on the subject of same-sex marriage, these economists seemed uncharacteristically incurious.

I’m pretty sure that I participated in the very same discussion. Curious about what I was incurious about, I read further:

They seem to think same sex-marriage will affect only the handful of people who 1) currently identify themselves as gay or lesbian, 2) are partnered, and 3) want to get married.

I wouldn’t say this.

I think that same-sex marriage will affect

4) people who are closeted. It will tell them that they can have a satisfying life, and equal legal treatment, even if they come out.

5) prospective straight marriage partners. For straight people, it’s pure win, because same-sex marriage improves the heterosexual marriage pool. More openly gay people will mean fewer closeted gay people who are only getting married to hide or to “cure” themselves. Same-sex marriage means fewer broken, loveless straight families, fewer cheating gay dads, fewer Jim McGreevey-style family dramas. Straight people who want to get married should welcome same-sex marriage.

6) kids of gay and lesbian parents, who will be better protected when their families have all the same legal protections that the other kids’ families get.

7) gays and lesbians who aren’t partnered and don’t now want to get married. It will give them a choice that they had not had to consider before. I think that this choice is probably better for them on average, but at any rate, a good economist will tell you that an option value is never negative. They can always stay how they are, but this way they won’t have to.

But anyway. Morse continues:

My economist friends do not seem to see that redefining marriage will create changes in the social incentive structure for everyone. If I’m right, the behavior of many millions of people could be in play.

Permitting people to form same-sex unions will not be the last change to the legal landscape. The entire culture, including the coercive apparatus of the state, will be pressed into service to promote same-sex relationships as wholly unexceptional. The ultimate goal of these efforts will be to make the gender of one’s partner a matter of no particular significance, a mere coin toss.

If she means that same-sex marriage will lead to restrictions on the freedoms of religion and speech, she will find me a ready ally. I oppose these restrictions. I strongly prefer open, principled dislike of me and of my family. I neither want nor need smirking, euphemistic, state-enforced tolerance. I can’t afford not to know who my enemies are, and I am fundamentally unafraid of them, as long as we live in an open, civil society together.

But something else is off here, I think. If allowing same sex marriage means that your life partner’s gender is “a mere coin toss” — then what does our current marriage system mean? That a man’s choice among women is a mere lottery? That choosing the right wife is a matter of “no particular significance”? This is palpably incorrect, and so, then, is Morse’s last sentence.

She continues:

This is significant because it will reduce or even eliminate the stigma attached to forming a same-sex union.

The stigma against same-sex love leads to gay bashing, homeless teens, suicide, prison rape, and other social ills. It presumably ought to be removed. What’s the downside? Morse has an answer, and it’s probably not what you imagine:

[C]hoosing a partner of the same sex will be a live option for everyone, not just for the 3% of the population that currently defines itself as gay or lesbian. We can safely predict that some women will decide that it is easier, all things considered, to team up with a girlfriend for parenting purposes. Think of it: You could have a child through artificial means and an anonymous donor. You can have the legal rights and benefits of a state-sanctioned relationship with a compatible friend. You can avoid the headaches involved with dealing with a pesky man, who, if actually the child’s father, might have his own opinions about the child’s upbringing. The baby can be entirely your project, with a little help from your friend and an accommodating legal and social environment.

A woman in this situation might very well continue to have sex with men. She could have a stable non-sexual relationship with her female partner and cycle through a series of male sex partners with whom she might or might not have kids. The stability of her non-sexual “marriage” with the girlfriend could allow her to have kids with multiple fathers. Instead of marriage being something that attaches mothers and fathers to their children and to each other, this new form of “marriage” will become the vehicle for “multi-partner fertility,” a family form that is fraught with difficulty and complications.

All the incentives for this behavior are being put into place. It is very curious that the economists are not curious about this.

I recall that it struck the libertarians as quite plausible, and maybe a serious concern, that same-sex marriage might possibly erode gender identities. It seemed, to me at any rate, like the best of a fairly weak pack of arguments. If I’d known that sexless lesbianism for all women was where things were supposedly headed, I’d not have given the concern so much credit.

Choosing a partner of the same sex is a “live option” for everyone right now. It’s just that most people don’t want it. The idea, though, that “many millions” (her words, not mine) of women would enter legally binding nonsexual unions with other women just staggers the imagination. It’s a puzzle why a married bio-father would be “pesky,” but another woman — armed with the very same legal apparatus — would be perfectly compliant, and would mother as many kids as you cared to pop out. In neither case is the baby “entirely your project,” legally or otherwise, so I don’t see the supposed incentive here. Unless, of course, the women were lesbians who truly loved one another.

Further, if the dangerous incentive is toward having a baby that is “entirely your project,” we already have an institution that offers it: single motherhood. Yet not many women set out to be single mothers. I don’t have data on it, but I’m not aware that many single mothers have married their nonsexual female friends in the states where this is permitted. If it were a serious threat, wouldn’t we have seen at least some of it by now?

I’ll grant, of course, that incentives matter. But so do disincentives, and here’s one that Morse isn’t considering: A significant percentage of men want to get married. To women. It’s deeply sexist to imply that women by the millions care about family and commitment so much that they’d enter into nonsexual marriages with other women, while most men would be indifferent because they only want to get laid.

For most men, the woman who marries another woman takes herself out of the running, whether or not she’s a lesbian. Women know this. They’re not going to commit to a sexless, loveless marriage with a friend, particularly not when it makes marrying a man impossible. That’s one huge downside to the social arrangement Morse seems to fear, and I think it’s probably a fatal one.

Underlying all of this, though, is probably a difference of opinion regarding cause and effect, one that I also observed at the same roundtable discussion. I tend very strongly to see marriage as a pre-political institution, one for which we make political accommodations. If the United States government were to disband itself tomorrow, I’d argue, very few people would think that their family and marriage obligations had simply dissolved. People would still want to get married, and protecting their spouses and children would still be important priorities — perhaps more important than ever.

Morse appears to see marriage as fundamentally a creature of the state; without proper treatment from the state, it will disappear, and the state is wholly in the driver’s seat. Marriage is almost infinitely plastic and responsive to the legislator’s merest suggestion. How she squares this with her Catholic faith and her commitment to seeing marriage as a sacred rather than a secular institution is beyond me. It seems improbable that of all his works, God needs the government to do marriage right, and that the Omnipotence is so completely incompetent without it. It is especially suspect when one considers that for much of Christian history, marriage was a Church matter, but not a civil one at all.

Here’s an interesting blog post from the National Organization for Marriage, a group that’s actively trying to dissolve tens of thousands of marriages nationwide:

Dear Friends of Marriage,

The defense rested in the Prop 8 trial this week. The same week, as it happens, a new government study came out which examined how family structure affects child abuse.

The study, released by the Office of Planning Research and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is called “Fourth National Incident Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4).”

Ted Olson and David Boies have claimed that Science Says there is no evidence that kids need a mom and dad. That’s just the rednecks confusing the research, which only says two adults in a family are better than one. The only reason people think a mom and dad are special is, well, because they hate gay folks.

Well, stay with me a second. This new study did not just compare married parents to single parents. Instead it compared married biological parents to four other family structures: solo parents, cohabiting parents, other married parents, and children living with no parents at all.

What family form best protects children from one of the worst harms of all–child abuse? The answer is: the child’s own mom and dad united by marriage.

It wasn’t even close.

Let me quote you the hard data:

“Children living with two married biological parents had the lowest rate of overall Harm Standard maltreatment, at 6.8 per 1,000 children. This rate differs significantly from the rates for all other family structure and living arrangement circumstances.”

It wasn’t just solo parents who had problems.

Children living with one parent who had an unmarried partner in the household had the highest incidence of Harm Standard maltreatment (57.2 per 1,000). Their rate is more than 8 times greater than the rate for children living with two married biological parents.

The incidence of Harm Standard maltreatment also is significantly higher for children living with one parent and that parent’s unmarried partner than for children in three other conditions: children living with other married parents (24.4 children per 1,000), those living with two unmarried parents (23.5 children per 1,000), and those living with a single parent with no partner in the household (28.4 children per 1,000). The risk of Harm Standard maltreatment for children whose single parent has an unmarried partner is more than 2 times greater than the risk for children living in these other living arrangements.

….the rest of us in the reality-based community understand that marriage really does matter because it’s the only way to connect a child to his own mom and dad.

All children are gifts from God and deserve our respect. All parents working hard to raise good kids also deserve our respect and help. But there is no call to wipe out the ideal itself, rooted in Nature and Nature’s God, and replace it with a man-made fantasy that same-sex unions are just the same as the one kind of union that best protects children.

It’s not clear which category same-sex couples are supposed to be like. Are they “one parent and that parent’s unmarried partner”? If so, there’s an obvious remedy: Let the parents marry. It won’t make things perfect, but it will make them better. Or are they more like “other married parents”? If so, then giving them full, legal marriage won’t hurt anything, because we’ve already admitted that they have a marriage. Wringing an anti-marriage message out of this seems impossible to me, but coming up with anti-marriage arguments, usually based on shoddy readings of social science, is precisely what the National Organization “for” Marriage is all about.

I’m also struggling to figure out what practical, family-strengthening advice we can take from the study. Granted, traditional families are best. But how do we create more of them out of the families we have on the ground? Except in very rare cases, traditional families can’t be reconstituted out of nontraditional ones. What we seem to end up with is a whole lot of “urge to do something” with nowhere to go. It settles, finally, on punishing broken families. Surely this isn’t a good idea. A more constructive set of messages from this data might run as follows:

1. If you’re unmarried, don’t have kids.
2. If you’re married with kids, don’t get divorced.
3. If you’re raising a biological child, never cohabit with anyone unrelated to that child. Marry the child’s other biological parent if it’s at all possible.
4. If you’re gay, don’t marry heterosexually. Doing so will likely lead to more broken families.

These suggestions are likely to annoy both the left and the right. I’m sure NOM is on board with the second and third recommendations, but liberals, who embrace divorce and cohabitation, certainly won’t be.

The problem for conservatives, meanwhile, is that the first point possibly argues for birth control (and possibly for abortion), and the fourth is clearly an argument for gay marriage. If we don’t want gay people marrying heterosexually, it only makes sense to give them a substitute. As usual, the truth is without a political home.

Now, if I were still searching the NIS4 data for ways to restrict gay people, I might use it to argue against adoption, artificial insemination, or surrogacy for same-sex couples, because we don’t want kids in nontraditional families.

But it’s possible that we can’t even get that far. Keep in mind that heterosexual families commonly form through, well, accidents. This is particularly true of heterosexual but non-traditional families. Such families, as studied in NIS4, thus may not make the best analogy to same-sex nontraditional families, which are not as often formed by accident. And even when they are accidents, it’s strange that the locus of blame should fall on the same-sex aspect of these families, rather than on other, very obvious factors.

Here’s what I mean. Some gay families are the product of a traditional marriage with kids, leading to a divorce, and then to cohabitation or remarriage with a same-sex partner. Insofar as this is the case, the problem appears to be with the divorce and cohabitation, not with the homosexuality of the parents. Divorce and cohabitation seem to be the real problem — certainly not same-sex marriage.

And when previously childless gay couples produce kids, whether through adoption, surrogacy, or IVF, all of these children are wanted. Such couples also usually endure a grueling process of evaluation before even being allowed to have kids. Few groups can ever say this.

Given that all of the categories in the NIS4 study presumably contain quite a few accidental children, and that the set of gay adoptive, surrogate, and IVF families contains no accidental children, it might be worth studying these families in isolation. The proper comparison group would be heterosexual adoptive, surrogate, and IVF families. We can’t just dig up numbers from cohabiting bio-families and pin them on same-sex families. This should be obvious, I would think. Categories are important. Comparing like with like matters.

This leads us to a larger point as well. Imagine a scenario in which a single birth mother living alone (Harm Standard: 28.4) wants to put her child up for adoption. Remember, “two married parents living together” is already off the table — she’s single, and the bio-dad is off living the irresponsible heterosexual lifestyle. We’re never getting to the first-best solution here.

So where can she place her child? Well, whether you count a same-sex household as “other married parents” (Harm Standard: 24.4) or “two unmarried parents” (Harm Standard: 23.5), we’re looking at an improvement either way. This improvement is not statistically significant, but it’s worth considering because of a difficulty that the study does not address.

Remember, this child’s birth mother has already decided to put him or her up for adoption. She’s concluded, in other words, that she’s in no position to raise the child properly. Thus the right comparison isn’t between a single birth mother living alone (who reached the opposite conclusion!) and some other category from the study. It’s between “mother who would have put her child up for adoption if only she could” and “adoptive parents who sincerely want a child and are ready to have one.” Any guesses on how well that match-up might fare?

I’ve gone on for a long time here, but the message ought to be simple: Making adoption harder, as with restrictions on gay people adopting, hurts children, because it is important for children to belong to some family, even if it’s not a traditional one. And trying to tie same-sex marriage to any of the categories in the NIS4 study is a really doubtful exercise, especially when the study suggests other, much more obviously effective methods of reducing child abuse.

I blogged about this before. The audio of this very amusing debate between the Revs. Fred Phelps and John Rankin has been uploaded to YouTube in clips.

Here are of my favorites:

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One of my favorite Pat Robertson moments.

What did Maude used to say? God will get you for that, Walter.

Heh.