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Admittedly, allowing same-sex couples to marry will change the social meaning of marriage (it will no longer be part of this social meaning that every marriage is the union of a man and a woman); and for marriage to bring these intangible benefits, it needs to have a relatively stable and well-understood social meaning. However, there is no evidence that the introduction of same-sex marriage will change any other elements of this social meaning. Moreover, this social meaning has already changed radically over the years.
Marriage used to be generally understood as an unequal partnership, with the wife being subordinated to her husband, whereas now — at least in law and in most of mainstream culture — marriage is viewed as a partnership of equals. In general, the social meaning of marriage must change whenever such changes are necessary to avoid injustice; so this social meaning must now be changed so that it no longer excludes the participation of same-sex couples.
There is a lesson here for moral and political philosophy. In much of political philosophy, social institutions are conceived legalistically, as rules for the distribution of tangible benefits and burdens (such as money, health care, employment opportunities, and the like). Yet social institutions also have social meanings, which enable them to create important intangible benefits as well. Such institutions matter, not just because they are a mechanism for distributing tangible benefits and burdens, but because they create opportunities for meaningful human lives within society.
Anti-bullying backlash doesn't only come from Christian groups. Orthodox Jewish and Christian groups came together in Toronto last year to protest an anti-bullying measure “as a vehicle to indoctrinate children into embracing a new sexual revolution.” It focused on the measure's call to establish a gay-straight alliance, and add support for students of all sexual orientations and gender identities.
“To force, especially Christian, classrooms or schools to have homosexual clubs would, of course, be an affront to their family values,” said Charles McVety, president of Christian Canada College. “And what does this have to do with bullying? Nothing.”
Yes, section 377A of Singapore's Penal Code bans homosexual conduct between males. But let's not forget that as of 1970, sodomy laws prohibited homosexual acts in every state in America except Illinois. In 1986, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick, a decision overturned only nine years ago. And even today, The New York Times says Kansas Statute 21-3505, a criminal sodomy law, is "used as justification to harass and discriminate against people."
Did these laws render 1960s, '70s and '80s America unfit for liberal arts education? No. Did the Yale faculty abandon its pursuit of light and truth in 1986, when our highest court ruled against its ideals of openness and tolerance? Of course not. Has Yale severed ties with Kansas? Why, then, should section 377A preclude liberal arts education in Singapore?
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. Because the Singaporean government funds Yale-NUS, one may worry that, even beyond gay rights, national policies will dictate the campus climate at Yale-NUS. They won't. Yale-NUS students, like the many NUS students who openly debate and criticize government and university policy in class and in publications such as the Kent Ridge Common, will make sure of that.
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Just like America, Singapore has laws and norms of which I disapprove. A vibrant gay party scene doesn't mean that gays have equal rights — they don't. Yet Singapore has seen notable liberalizations over the past 10 years, including the launch of high-profile gay rights organizations and government approval for large-scale gay festivals and gatherings. Notwithstanding its historical restrictions on free speech and assembly, I applaud Singapore's steps toward equality.
If a group rests its beliefs (in the case of creationism) or its moral standpoint (in the case of gay rights) on a set of claims which cannot be borne out by the evidence, then it risks losing its beliefs, or sacrificing its moral standpoint, when the facts can no longer be denied.
Gay people — including those whose feelings of attraction are largely out of their control, as well as those who have some elbow room for how they self-identify — deserve to be treated with love and respect. The moral goal is clear. But if that moral goal must rest on a false or confused premise, then undue risk creeps in for defending it. Specifically, once the relevant facts become widely understood, the right-wing persecutors of gay men and women will be able to claim victory, and harness the data to their side. That’s the danger Cynthia Nixon was referring to when she spoke of ceding the terms of the debate to “the bigots.”
It is precisely the importance of what is at stake for “gay rights” (which I see as being indistinguishable from individual rights) that compels me to argue for firmer ground on this issue.
“My recent comments in The New York Times were about me and my personal story of being gay. I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can’t and shouldn’t be pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering. However, to the extent that anyone wishes to interpret my words in a strictly legal context I would like to clarify:
“While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship.
“As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community — as well as the majority of heterosexuals — cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.
“Our community is not a monolith, thank goodness, any more than America itself is. I look forward to and will continue to work toward the day when America recognizes all of us as full and equal citizens.”
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The Advocate online magazine illustrated their update with a photo of Nixon bald, when she had cancer treatment. I can’t help but feel they were aiming to humiliate her just a little.
when men express a ‘fear’ of homosexuality it is often to me, not motivated by hatred of the ‘other’ – gay people – but rather a fear of their own latent homosexual tendencies. I tend to use the word ‘homo-anxiety’ rather than ‘homophobia’ to describe this phenomenon.
Contemporary research has shown that a significant portion of gay men have traits, interests, occupations, and behaviors that are consistent with the stereotype of gay men as effeminate, androgynous, or unmasculine. A great number of gay men exhibit gender nonconformity during childhood; most, however, "defeminize" during adolescence, possibly in response to stigmatization and society's gender-role prescription. Only a relatively small percentage of gay men continue to be gender-nonconforming in their adulthood, often at a price, as they also tend to have lower psychological well-being. Although gay culture historically appreciated camp and drag, which subvert the gender-based power hierarchy and celebrate gender nonconformity, anti-effeminacy prejudice is widespread among gay men. Ironically, gender-nonconforming gay men may suffer from discrimination not only from society at large, but from other gay men, who are most likely to have experienced stigmatization and may have been effeminate earlier in their lives. Drawing from anecdotes and findings from various sources, this article suggests that beyond many gay men's erotic preference for masculinity lies contempt and hostility toward effeminacy and effeminate men on sociopolitical and personal levels. Two correlates of gay men's anti-effeminacy attitudes are proposed: (a) hegemonic masculinity ideology, or the degree to which one subscribes to the value system in which masculinity is an asset, and men and masculinity are considered superior to women and femininity; and (b) masculinity consciousness, or the saliency of masculinity in one's self-monitoring, public self-consciousness, and self-concept. These two variables are hypothesized to interact with gay men's self-perceived masculinity-femininity and their history of defeminization in predicting attitudes toward effeminacy. Research is underway to measure levels of anti-effeminacy attitudes and explore hypothesized correlates.
A continuing difficulty for webmasters is the degree to which homophobic statements, including thinly disguised appeals to pseudo-reason, should be allowed. This seems to be more difficult for webmasters than taking decisions regarding racist statements. Why is this so when homophobia is equivalent to racism? Most probably it’s because an intellectual position against racism is longer established, and ordinary people, even if they themselves cannot quite articulate the intellectual arguments against it, have imbibed the conclusion — that racism is wrong — as morally-binding. The intellectual position against homophobia is just as strong, but perhaps not enough time has passed for this to migrate into popular consciousness.
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Freedom of expression is a civil right — this means that the state is enjoined from violating it. Note: the state. Private citizens can do what they please with their private properties. Thus ‘private’. Newspapers traditionally have been mouthpieces of their owners and editors, arguing for and promoting certain viewpoints. Restaurants are not obliged to pin any and every damning review of their food and service on their front doors. Mosques do not have to include Islamophobic letters to the editor when putting together their monthly newsletters. A political party is not obliged to carry criticism of its program on its website.
Even when it comes to the role of the state, it is generally accepted that the freedom of expression that the state should protect is not an absolute one. Arguably, states can regulate hate speech — which includes speech that deliberately demean an entire class of persons, urging social and political restrictions on them. Thus, even by that measure, there is a good case for not permitting the airing for homophobic views.
the point of this video – as indeed I did not realize at first – is to make opposition to homosexual “marriage” seem ridiculous through comparison to divorce. After all, no one in their right mind could possibly want to ban divorce, right? And so… if you won’t oppose divorce, what grounds do you have to oppose gay marriage? If you want to “protect marriage” by opposing homosexuality, you’ve got to “protect marriage” by opposing divorce as well.
And of course the response to this – and the reason I failed to perceive the satire at first – is to agree. To the folks who crafted that video, I say: yes, you’re right. If we are concerned about “protecting the family”, we should – and do – want to ban divorce as well. I may not have written it here, on this blog, but I have agreed for a long time that compared to divorce, homosexuality is a sideshow. No-fault divorce has wrought untold devastation upon the family and should be repealed at once.
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the lefties who crafted this video seem to be seriously out of touch with the folks they are arguing against. Worlds apart.
To the point that I initially failed to realize that the piece is intended as satire, and I still think it utterly fails as a parody. Why? Because I and many others agree with it literally. Look, the essence of successful political satire is to take a position, alter it slightly, and ridicule the new, altered position. The goal is for everyone to thus realize just how absurd the original stance was, too.
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, none of this is news to either Christian traditionalists or the pagan manosphere. In these camps, the idea of curtailing divorce laws is pedestrian (how many of you, as you watched the first minute of that video, found yourselves agreeing completely and wondering where on earth the punchline was?). Outside the internet, in The Real World, there are similar rumblings in actual state legislatures. And that’s the reason I bothered to write about all this in the first place: I was stunned that these lefties actually thought that banning divorce was so far-fetched that the idea could only appear as parody. That’s how out of touch the anti-traditional values crowd is.
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What makes the case of Patrick and Thomas so fascinating is that it calls into question both of the dominant theories in the long-running debate over what makes people gay: nature or nurture, genes or learned behavior. As identical twins, Patrick and Thomas began as genetic clones. From the moment they came out of their mother's womb, their environment was about as close to identical as possible - being fed, changed, and plopped into their car seats the same way, having similar relationships with the same nurturing father and mother. Yet before either boy could talk, one showed highly feminine traits while the other appeared to be "all boy," as the moms at the playgrounds say with apologetic shrugs.
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in 1991, a neuroscientist in San Diego named Simon LeVay told the world he had found a key difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men he studied. LeVay showed that a tiny clump of neurons of the anterior hypothalamus - which is believed to control sexual behavior - was, on average, more than twice the size in heterosexual men as in homosexual men. LeVay's findings did not speak directly to the nature-vs.-nurture debate - the clumps could, theoretically, have changed size because of homosexual behavior. But that seemed unlikely, and the study ended up jump-starting the effort to prove a biological basis for homosexuality.
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Now that same-sex marriage has been legalized in New York, at least a few large companies are requiring their employees to tie the knot if they want their partners to qualify for health insurance.
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Corning, I.B.M. and Raytheon all provide domestic partner benefits to employees with same-sex partners in states where they cannot marry. But now that they can legally wed in New York, five other states and the District of Columbia, they will be required to do so if they want their partner to be covered for a routine checkup or a root canal.
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On the surface, this appears to put the couples on an even footing with heterosexual married couples. After all, this is precisely what they have been fighting for: being treated as a spouse. But some gay and lesbian advocates are arguing that the change may have come too soon: some couples may face complications, since their unions are not recognized by the federal government.
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I was struck by this paragraph from the lead story in the Sunday edition of the Times, which charts the unlikely path New York’s marriage equality bill took to passage late last Friday night (read the whole thing, by the way, it’s a wonderful snapshot of modern American politics in action:
“…the donors in the room — the billionaire Paul Singer, whose son is gay, joined by hedge fund mangers Cliff Asness and Daniel Loeb — had the influence and the money to insulate nervous senators from conservative backlash if they supported the marriage measure. And they were inclined to see the issue as one of personal freedom, consistent with libertarian views.
Within days, the wealthy Republicans sent back word: They were on board. Each of them cut six-figure checks to the lobbying campaign that eventually totaled more than $1 million”
In other words, if a particular billionaire hadn’t have had a gay son, we might not be looking at legalized same sex marriage in the most populous state yet.
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I still think it makes for a powerful example of how much sway wealth has over the political process. The Republican senators that voted in favor of marriage equality — after having previously voted against it two years ago — said they changed their minds and were now able to vote their conscience. Only the promise of vast amounts of campaign financing and support allowed them to do so.
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To be fair, the Times story details a number of ways in which our democracy functions beautifully — the part about the Queens senator who said he’d vote in favor only if more constituents wrote to him supporting the measure than opposing it, and did so after organizers helped mobilize his district was especially encouraging
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I think one reason gay men are disproportionately unhappy is because, from the moment as teenagers we first gaze upon the frenetic dancing blur of gay culture, we are encouraged to be relentless pleasure-seekers.
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Austrian psychotherapist Viktor Frankl believed that human beings who dedicated themselves primarily to “the pleasure principle” could only ever have a thin and depleted consciousness. Instead, he wrote, all humans have a fundamental “will to meaning” – a need to be able to tell a story about our lives where we are part of something bigger than our own passing whims. He wrote: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task… If an architect wants to strengthen an arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”
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When some of your formative experiences are of pain and difference, the pursuit of fuck-you-I’m-dancing pleasure is all the more appealing.
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A 2007 study by then City Comptroller William Thompson estimated that marriage equality would add $142 million on a net basis to the city’s economy during the first three years after the legislation was passed. Most of that income would come from the increased number of visitors, who would travel here to either get married or attend a wedding. The study estimated that more than 56,000 couples would travel to New York from out of state to marry here
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NYC is hoping to capitalize on all of those couples by promoting wedding deals and venues on its NYC I Do website. The rest of the state looks to make a cool $391 million during the same time period, a point some state senators drove home in the hours leading up to the crucial vote.
So far, appeals to basic human rights and dignity have failed to win over many state and federal legislatures in the gay marriage debate. Maybe it’s time gay marriage proponents start appealing to their wallets instead.
While New York had already recognized same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, that recognition didn’t extend to state income taxes. Now, couples who marry and live in New York will be able to file their state tax returns jointly. Wealthier couples may end up paying more in taxes, but families with lower incomes may owe less.
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there’s still a long list of federal benefits that will remain out of reach. Since the federal Defense of Marriage Act — which defines marriage as between a man and a woman — is still being enforced, gay couples in New York will still need to file separate federal tax returns. They will not be eligible for Social Security spousal or survivor benefits. And they will continue to owe extra income taxes on their spouse’s health insurance benefits — a cost that opposite-sex married couples don’t have to pay.
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Income Taxes Married couples will be able to file their state tax returns jointly, though they will still need to file separate federal tax returns (either as single or head of household). Some couples who jointly earn less than $65,000 may end up paying less in state income taxes than if they filed individual tax returns because they will get what known as a marriage bonus. But some couples with higher income may be end up in a higher tax bracket by filing jointly. In other words, they would owe less if they remained single and filed separate returns, said Tina Salandra, a New York accountant with expertise in planning for same-sex couples.
Filing joint state returns is also likely to complicate matters for federal tax purposes, and it’s likely to cost the couple more in tax preparation fees (or time, if they fill out their own returns).
Here’s why: Even though the couple must file separate federal tax returns (as single or head of household), they must still prepare a dummy federal tax return using a married filing status, so that they can use that data for filing their joint state return.
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I'm going to consider how same-sex attraction might persist in human populations in the face of its apparent selective disadvantages. In the absence of direct data--such as systematic measures of the total evolutionary fitness of gay men or lesbians in specific societal contexts--it's easy to make up stories about natural selection, but much harder to determine which stories reflect reality. I'll try to delineate which stories fit with what we know about how selection works, and with the little data we do have--but that's the best I can do. If there's one point I hope you take from all that follows, it's that evolution is complicated, and human evolution doubly so.
The fight over legalizing gay marriage in New York is getting ugly online as the Republican Senate plans to finally consider the bill in closed-door conference Thursday.
The leader of the state Senate, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and at least one other lawmaker have been besieged by offensive posts, forcing them to curtail comments.
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"Our unofficial Facebook policy is not to automatically delete comments that disagree with us, but when the comments come into untruths or uncharitable, then we have to delete them," Poust said. "And when it really becomes abusive we have to ban them."
According to the group, one Facebook post stated: "Eventually your kind of 'religion' will be extinguished from the memory of mankind forever, because this sort of interference in the lives of people you only wish to harm. You have NO MORAL AUTHORITY any longer because of your evil pedophilia."
Another said the Catholic church only approves of marriages "that produce altar boys to be molested."
The group deleted both.
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"The tension has really reached a fever pitch for some people. ... I'm sure there are certain unstable members of both sides who are prone to excess," Poust said.
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Michael wrote of “people scrambling for a home amidst the labels,” and in another he hoped for the day when “men who love women wave flags for identification.”
It all sounded very much like the Michael I knew at XY, a young man who was fascinated by queer theory — namely, the idea that sexual and gender identities are culturally constructed rather than biologically fixed — and who dreamed of a world without labels like “straight” and “gay,” which he deemed restrictive and designed to “segment and persecute,” as he argued in a 1998 issue of XY. Though he conceded back then that it was important “to stay unified under a ‘Gay’ political umbrella” until equality for gays and lesbians had been achieved, Michael preferred to label himself queer.
As Ben and I reminisced, I couldn’t help wondering if Michael’s new philosophy might, in a strange way, be a logical extension of what he believed back then — that “gay” is a limiting category and that sexual identities can change. Ben nodded. “A radical queer activist and a fundamentalist Christian aren’t always as different as they might seem,” he said, adding that they’re ideologues who can railroad over nuance and claim a monopoly on the truth.
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I told Michael about a recent conversation I had with our former boss at XY, Peter Ian Cummings, who surprised me by wondering aloud if Michael was ever truly gay. “In retrospect, more than you or me or anyone else who worked at the magazine, his sexuality almost felt more theoretical than real to me,” Peter told me. “At a very young age, he had all these very well thought out theories about identity and sexuality. Maybe this gay or queer identity that fascinated him, and that he had taken on, wasn’t really true for him. It doesn’t explain why he says such ridiculous things about gay people now, but maybe, just maybe, he’s not in denial about his own sexuality.”
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no other minority has the luxury of being able to decide whether or not they inform other people about what makes them a minority. (“In a tearful interview yesterday Barack Obama revealed that he is mixed race,” is not a sentence you’ll ever read.) Yet no other group faces the kind of early isolation that we do. Jewish people aren’t thrown out by their parents. Asian people don’t grow up hearing their dad say “paki”. But for gay teenagers, often bullied at school and subjected to homophobia at home, their only access to other people from their community is through the media.
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When people in the closet say, “Why should I tell anyone? It’s no one’s business,” they are absolutely right – it isn’t. When others say that it should be everyone’s individual choice whether or not they come out, they too are absolutely right. But we don’t live in hermetically sealed vacuums. We live in a world drenched in a hatred that affects millions of powerless people. The unavoidable, uncomfortable truth for closeted celebrities is that until gay people enjoy the same levels of happiness, success and safety as everyone else, staying silent helps to keep us from achieving those same levels.
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