Andrew Sullivan on Bush's Gay Marriage Amendment

[sturm und drang]

The article below is from this week's Time magazine. Andrew Sullivan, a noted gay conservative whom many of you are familiar with, is the author.

On the eve of Bush's support of a Constitutional amendment banning gay marraige - per this morning's Washington Post - I'd like to post it. It's an absolutely beautiful article that... well, I wish I everyone would read it.

EÂ*SÂ*SÂ*AÂ*Y
Why The M Word Matters To Me
Only marriage can bring a gay person home
By ANDREW SULLIVAN

Monday, Feb. 16, 2004

As a child, I had no idea what homosexuality was. I grew up in a traditional home — Catholic, conservative, middle class. Life was relatively simple: education, work, family. I was raised to aim high in life, even though my parents hadn't gone to college. But one thing was instilled in me. What mattered was not how far you went in life, how much money you earned, how big a name you made for yourself. What really mattered was family and the love you had for one another. The most important day of your life was not graduation from college or your first day at work or a raise or even your first house. The most important day of your life was when you got married. It was on that day that all your friends and all your family got together to celebrate the most important thing in life: your happiness — your ability to make a new home, to form a new but connected family, to find love that put everything else into perspective.

But as I grew older, I found that this was somehow not available to me. I didn't feel the things for girls that my peers did. All the emotions and social rituals and bonding of teenage heterosexual life eluded me. I didn't know why. No one explained it. My emotional bonds to other boys were one-sided; each time I felt myself falling in love, they sensed it, pushed it away. I didn't and couldn't blame them. I got along fine with my buds in a nonemotional context, but something was awry, something not right. I came to know almost instinctively that I would never be a part of my family the way my siblings might one day be. The love I had inside me was unmentionable, anathema. I remember writing in my teenage journal one day, "I'm a professional human being. But what do I do in my private life?"

I never discussed my real life. I couldn't date girls and so immersed myself in schoolwork, the debate team, school plays, anything to give me an excuse not to confront reality. When I looked toward the years ahead, I couldn't see a future. There was just a void. Was I going to be alone my whole life? Would I ever have a most important day in my life? It seemed impossible, a negation, an undoing. To be a full part of my family, I had to somehow not be me. So, like many other gay teens, I withdrew, became neurotic, depressed, at times close to suicidal. I shut myself in my room with my books night after night while my peers developed the skills needed to form real relationships and loves. In wounded pride, I even voiced a rejection of family and marriage. It was the only way I could explain my isolation.

It took years for me to realize that I was gay, years more to tell others and more time yet to form any kind of stable emotional bond with another man. Because my sexuality had emerged in solitude — and without any link to the idea of an actual relationship — it was hard later to reconnect sex to love and self-esteem. It still is. But I persevered, each relationship slowly growing longer than the last, learning in my 20s and 30s what my straight friends had found out in their teens. But even then my parents and friends never asked the question they would have asked automatically if I were straight: So, when are you going to get married? When will we be able to celebrate it and affirm it and support it? In fact, no one — no one — has yet asked me that question.

When people talk about gay marriage, they miss the point. This isn't about gay marriage. It's about marriage. It's about family. It's about love. It isn't about religion. It's about civil marriage licenses. Churches can and should have the right to say no to marriage for gays in their congregations, just as Catholics say no to divorce, but divorce is still a civil option. These family values are not options for a happy and stable life. They are necessities. Putting gay relationships in some other category — civil unions, domestic partnerships, whatever — may alleviate real human needs, but by their very euphemism, by their very separateness, they actually build a wall between gay people and their families. They put back the barrier many of us have spent a lifetime trying to erase.

It's too late for me to undo my past. But I want above everything else to remember a young kid out there who may even be reading this now. I want to let him know that he doesn't have to choose between himself and his family anymore. I want him to know that his love has dignity, that he does indeed have a future as a full and equal part of the human race. Only marriage will do that. Only marriage can bring him home.

From the Feb. 16, 2004 issue of TIME magazine

[madape]

Good article. Sullivan has done so much to show that homosexuals can embrace conservative ideals without selling out their crusade for equality. In the process, he's opened up many a conservative's mind (mine included) towards gay issues. I don't think old school Republicans will ever fully accept him, or any other homosexual, into their staunch moral fraternity. But there is a new kind of conservatism growing among the youth of America; a conservatism that holds the same views as legacy Republicans on defense and limited government, but which is more tolerant of alternative lifestyle choices. It is with the members of this movement that Sullivan's voice will have the most impact. Andrew dubs them the "South Park" republicans, but they might as well be called the "Sullivan" republicans.

BTW - did anyone see Sullivan on Bill Maher last weekend? He left Maher, Karen Mosley-Braun, and Rob Schnieder confused and bewildered after he smashed them to bits on their weak Bush-Bashing rhetoric. You could almost hear them say "Hey, you're gay, you are supposed to be on OUR side". They just couldn't beleive that a gay man was capable of being anything more than a single-issue activist. The show is probably still on repeat somewhere on one of the ten HBO channels. Check it out. It's funny.

[Dooby]

Old school Republicans? Yeah, the staunch religious conservative Republicans... that were all democrats until 1980. Just an observation.

I had a gay friend who told me back in 1992 that no gay person could ever vote republican. My response was "Yeah. You are right. No gay person could ever want to stand up to communism. No gay person ever thinks his taxes are too high."