Gay Marriage and all that

Hither and yawn with the president

LEt us now praise barack obama. The president has finally come out and said what everyone—except maybe himself—knew he privately believed all along: He’s for allowing homosexual couples to marry. That’s nice. Now he can tick off another item on the list of must-dos for an orthodox liberal/progressive/libertarian.

It would be even nicer if he could just give it a rest, though of course he won’t. It’s a presidential election year and there’s fund-raising to do in Hollywood. But we’re grateful for any moment of clarity in politics even if it’s only a moment. Ever since the love that dare not speak its name became the love that just can’t shut up, what used to be a taboo has become a real yawner.

Thank you also, Mr. President, for inserting that key word, personally, into your statement of belief (or maybe non-belief) and making it clear you were going to leave this issue where it belongs—to the judgment of the people in the several states, where all such questions of family law, and not just family law, belong.

Sir, if you’d only left health care there, too, you might have saved the country, its doctors and nurses and insurers and patients and employers— and just those of us who’d like to keep our old insurance—a lot of confusion and anxiety. Not to mention the Supreme Court of the United States, for its justices are about to weigh in on this convoluted issue, too.

If that august court had just left abortion to the states, as even some of its more fervent advocates now recognize, the country might have been spared all these past, divisive decades of agonizing over a great moral issue, maybe the moral issue, of our times.

So thank you, Mr. President, for not adding still another layer of obfuscation to this debate—the way that clintonesque Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy did for our armed services, which have quite enough to engage their attention these days without having to enforce a nebulous gag order.

We’re sure you feel better now, Mr. President. For you’ve finally stopped “evolving” (polspeak for changing your mind) every few years. At least for now. Sometimes it helps to get things clear in your own mind; it certainly helps those who have to keep up with what presidents—and commanders-inchief—have to say.

Keeping up with this president and C-in-c requires a certain patience, for in his case “the fierce urgency of now” keeps giving way to the political prudence of later.

AND THANK you, too, Mr. Vice President. Yes, the one and only (thank goodness) Joe Biden. This time the absence of a filter between brain and mouth in a vice president of the United States actually served a good purpose. It seems to have gotten his boss off the dime.

Imagine that: a good word for Joe Biden in this column—our own royal jester at King Obama’s Court. It’s enough to remind that jesters served a serious purpose in medieval times; they said things the king didn’t dare say, or maybe even think. Humor is transcendent, and the subject of homosexuality has received entirely too much attention from the humorless scolds on both sides of this issue that shouldn’t be such an all-pervasive one, if not outright obsession. And it wouldn’t be if the country still had a little respect for people’s privacy.

Those of us who have long believed, and still do, that civil unions are the way to deal with this matter can be thankful to those on all sides of the discussion who take a clear position. It gives politics a little of the traction it needs to move beyond a forever distracting issue instead of forever dabbling with it.

Nor are civil unions, carefully designed and delineated by each state, useful just for couples in a sexual relationship. Any folks who want to be treated as a single unit—when it comes to visitation rights at hospitals, say, or inheritance or community property—would find the corporate model useful. Great and revolutionary idea, the joint stock company now known as a corporation. No matter how often badmouthed, corporations can also represent the best interests of people united by a common interest, whether making a profit or voicing a political opinion or who just want to live under the same roof and be responsible for each other. Call ’em civil unions, corporations, partnerships . . . they were a great innovation in law.

It hasn’t been easy, or very interesting, to follow our president’s twisting course on what has become popularly known, unfortunately, as gay marriage. Some of us mourn the loss of the word gay in its original, lighthearted sense, and still haven’t been able to come up with an adequate successor. The result is a gap in the language that is not gay at all but sad. And an all too accurate reflection of the sobersided times.

All we know is that Mr. Obama was first fir Gay Marriage, then he was agin it, and now he’s fir it again but only personally. It seems that, whenever he comes to a fork in the road on this issue, he takes it. (Berra, Y.)

Yet he’s been faithful in his way. Our president’s one permanent church home, the one he sticks with whatever the changing times, seems to be the church of holy expedience, whatever sacrifice is required. Like abandoning an old pastor who suddenly became controversial and therefore a political liability.

It’s not true that Mr. Obama changes his religious convictions to fit his political needs; his first commandment and last, his alpha and omega if you were to judge only by his public statements, would be: Thou Shalt Be Elected. But as a Jewish radical out of a little village in Galilee put it, judge not that you be not judged. Judging can also get to be an awful bore. Which may be why popular interest in Barack Obama’s latest position on this question, as on so many others, wanes.

AND YET the president’s always wavering course on this issue, and not just on this issue, might have something interesting to say about the unfixed course the whole of American society has taken in what Walker Percy once called this post-christian era. So fickle a course was to be expected in the absence of the sacred in a society. Belief, like nature, abhors a vacuum. For man is the animal that worships; it’s the nature of the species. And as the old faith dwindled, it was bound to be succeeded not by emptiness but by a prolixity of new faiths—faith in politics, in ideology, in science or art or revolution, pick your own favorite, inadequate substitute.

It happens when people begin to think of faith as something for other, lesser breeds who, as our president put it so elegantly in an unguarded moment, “cling to their guns or religion.” Mr. Obama’s telling comment seemed to come naturally. It would for someone who long ago began to look on faith as only another political factor to be taken into consideration in his own plans.

When it comes to faith, our president—except on the ceremonial occasions that civil religion is so full of— tends to speak from the outside looking in. As he did even as he attempted to explain his earlier position(s): “. . . I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot people the word ‘marriage’ was something that invokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs, and so forth.” (We especially liked the “so forth.” As if one were to refer to God, country, “and all that other stuff.”)

Count us among those folks, Mr. President, the ones who still think of marriage not primarily as a civil contract or something the state invented but, well, holy matrimony, to use a now dated phrase. Yes. there are still some of us who think of marriage as “an honourable estate, instituted of God.” And have yet to come up with a better delineation of it than the one in the Book of Common Prayer. The state, like the president himself, might do well to stop fiddling with it.