By Emily Theroux
My best friend, Jim, is a Georgia native who escaped the backwaters of the Deep South after growing up there, just as I did. Since 1996, when I wandered one summer afternoon into his onetime Middletown interior design business, Jim and I have shared a multitude of interests.
We've walked miles together to stay in shape, collaborated on making pillows and curtains for clients, ranted about the sorry state of American politics, watched Rachel Maddow eviscerate conservatives, traded good books, fed each other's pets, had occasional spats over imaginary slights, laughed until we almost fell out of our chairs, and gossiped about everything from obnoxious acquaintances to attractive men. Jim taught me how to make quilts, and I helped him figure out how to navigate Facebook. We spend a solid hour or more on Skype every few days, planted in front of our computer screens only blocks apart.
Both of us are married – me for 15 years; Jim, technically, for three-quarters of one. My spouse is a man, and so is his. Last fall, after same-sex marriage became legal in New York, Jim was finally able to wed Gary, his longtime partner, on the 35th anniversary of the day they met.
Jim is a singular individual, not a demographic statistic or a societal scapegoat to be trotted out any time a televangelist needs a reason why God hates hurricane victims, or an office-seeker wants to scare "values voters" for political gain. Jim did not "choose" to be gay (as the ignorant and the powerful alike insist), and his identity encompasses a great deal more than his sexual orientation. In a blog Jim recently began writing, he succinctly expressed his reaction to being objectified by politicians who revile him and religious proselytizers who think they can change him:
"To put it simply, I am tired of 'sitting in the back of the bus.' I am tired of being labeled. I am tired of being discriminated against. I am tired of religious nutbags calling me 'evil' and 'degenerate' and blaming me for natural disasters. I am tired of political candidates using me by declaring that I am 'morally depraved' and responsible for destroying the 'sacred family unit,' while, at the same time, these politicians hide behind Jesus (I was taught that Jesus was all about love, not hate) to justify their relentless prejudices and religious intolerance. To everyone who thinks they're normal and I'm not: How the hell does my being married have any effect on your life?"
Both parties 'categorize' voters, but for different reasons
My friend sees himself as a person who happens to have diverse connections to all kinds of other people, not strictly as a "gay man" – a distinction that evades those who marginalize other people by assigning them to groups identified by a common race, ethnicity, creed, gender, or sexual orientation. The resulting "demographics" have been used by members of both major political parties to make electoral calculations.
Democrats tend to focus on "minority" social groups in order to help them succeed in a society steeped in exclusion of the powerless. While their motivations to help the less fortunate may indeed be genuine, Democratic politicians still hope to win the votes of members of the demographic groups they are assisting without losing those of "independents," whom they cannot so readily categorize.
Republicans often isolate targeted social groups in order to demonize them and thereby divide potential voters into "us" (primarily wealthy white businessmen and their families, along with "low-information" voters who hope to emulate the success of their wealthy role models) versus "them" (Democrats, a.k.a. "socialists"; racial and ethnic minorities, a.k.a. "freeloaders" and "illegal aliens"; feminist women, a.k.a, "fornicators"; gays and lesbians, a.k.a, "deviants" and "Sodomites"; and non-Christians, a.k.a "evil foreigners trying to destroy our way of life").
A North Carolina amendment making same-sex marriage unconstitutional passed all too easily because it employed such stereotypes, in order to appeal to the ignorance and bigotry of the majority. Few who voted in favor of it knew that the amendment would also invalidate domestic unions between unmarried opposite-sex couples and dissolve domestic-violence protections. The Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, said advocates of the law were asking the wrong question for a democracy – as often happens when civil-rights issues are submitted to the popular vote of a poorly informed electorate that has already been brainwashed against the targeted group. "The question shouldn't be, 'How do you feel about same-sex marriage?' but do you let the majority rule against the rights of the minority?"
The Democrats, although they don't share the ruthless Republican agenda of targeting gays and lesbians to polarize the electorate, are not entirely blameless when it comes to politicizing them. In 1996, while running for the Illinois state senate, Barack Obama indicated on a survey that he favored legalizing gay marriage, but by the time he ran for the U.S. Senate against black conservative Alan Keyes in 2004, he began to voice "religious reservations" (criticized by a shrewd Chicago reporter as "a political maneuver").
Polls of churchgoing black voters typically reveal a general cultural disapproval of gay "sinfulness" – and Obama needed the vast majority of the black vote to win his Senate seat. When he announced his presidential bid in 2007, Obama said he opposed same-sex marriage but approved of civil unions. By 2011, a spokesman said Obama believed the issue was "best addressed by the states" (a loaded historical reference that angered even Obama's gay campaign donors), while adding that committed same-sex couples should receive "equal protection under the law."
President Obama's views 'evolving' at a snail's pace
Critics have lambasted Obama for his apparent pretense of undergoing a gradual process of reevaluating his position on same-sex marriage. While advancing the causes of gay civil rights immeasurably on many fronts during the past three years, President Obama continues to claim, with increasingly less credibility, that his position on same-sex marriage is "evolving." Now that the North Carolina constitutional ban on same-sex marriage has been passed, the pressure has become overwhelming for Obama to "come out of the closet," as Ruth Marcus wrote in The Washington Post, and make his position on marriage equality clear.
The parade of Obama administration officials who have recently emerged to publicly support marriage equality makes the president's hesitation to follow suit look like a cynical election-year ploy. While the fear of alienating black voters may appear well-founded to a man living in a virtual bubble, even a conservative blogger said that the economy is so bad that open support for same-sex marriage won't cost Obama many black votes.
But will continuing to advance the notion that he's too "socially conservative" to support marriage equality really help Obama win the votes of straight, white, working-class males in swing states – or does he run the risk of repelling independents and even Democrats by pandering to prejudice, the lowest common denominator of American religious faith? The head of the Democratic Party may ironically be the last Democrat to proclaim his views on an issue that affects real people's lives, long after the general public has left his recalcitrance in the dust.
Gay activists are not necessarily willing to continue practicing infinite patience and providing political cover for the president's rear flank while he awaits the most opportune political moment to announce his next evolutionary phase. Some potential benefactors invited to an upcoming LGBT fundraiser are reportedly withholding campaign donations because of the president's tentative attitude, which they take personally as something akin to a racial affront.
Max Mutchnick, who co-created gay-friendly hit TV show "Will and Grace" and was thrilled when Vice-President Joe Biden praised the sitcom during a recent Meet the Press interview, told the entertainment magazine Variety's managing editor, Ted Johnson, that the president “needs to catch up with his vice-president in terms of his views. ... The reason I feel most offended by this is because I don’t believe the president believes this,” said Mutchnick. “I don’t believe he is evolving. I believe he is a man seeking reelection, and he all but breaks it down into Morse code.”
While Obama attempts to garner gay support in Hollywood without alienating blue-collar voters in flyover country, he may be forced to abandon his apparent plan to postpone dealing with marriage equality until after the election. "While it might take time ... we are going to build a more perfect union," the president said in 2011, several months after New York's state legislature stepped up to the plate and passed the proudly bipartisan law that enabled my friend Jim to legally marry his fiance of 35 years.
Shouldn't the very concept of "a more perfect union" exclude anything "exclusionary" – such as outlawing marriage between two people like Jim and Gary, who had already loved each other for half a lifetime before they were finally given an almost-equal chance at "the pursuit of happiness"?
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