You know when you’re working out and the destressing feels great so you push yourself really, really hard? And then a day and a half or so later you get a memo that reads, “TO: Stupid Bitch / FROM: Voluntary Muscles / TEXT: Repeat after me: ‘I. Am. Not. Twenty. Anymore.’ / END”?

Yeah.

I’d rather talk about other people’s idiocy rather than my own, so let’s change the subject, shall we? I can never understand why people don’t live the way they say they want to live. Some problems are external–e.g., “My boyfriend’s cheating on me, and I can’t decide whether to let it blow over or to make an issue out of it”–and clearly difficult to negotiate. Where to draw the line between accepting your mate’s imperfections and being a doormat is not always easy.

But the practice of causing your own problems and then wondering why you have them? What is up with that? “See, I’m an honest person, and my relationship with Kazu is…you know, I want it to be totally pure. I don’t really cheat on him, you know, in terms of mind space? Totally his. I mean, really. But I figure once in a while if I hook up, it doesn’t detract from that. I think maybe I should tell him, but I don’t want him to think I’m not devoted to him. Like, I think he’d take it the right way and not think that screwing around on him affected the meaning of our relationship, but it’s kind of a risk, so I haven’t said anything. It’s such a hard position, you know?”

No, honey, not really. It’s not all that hard to find someone who’s willing to have an open relationship; even a sizable proportion of straight marriages work that way in Japan. If that’s what you want, you make it a criterion when you start dating. If you want to change the terms of an existing relationship, you do it. (Since Japan still recognizes the value of subtext and euphemism, it’s often possible to get this accomplished without a cruel direct hit.) If your partner doesn’t accept the change of terms, you either dissolve the relationship or find a way to accommodate each other without deception. Exposing your partner to the potential hazards of microbes and psychological baggage that you expressly promised to protect him from is not a sympathetically flawed action taken in a no-win situation.

Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty has posted a lengthy response to Maggie Gallagher’s guest posts at the Volokh Conspiracy on gay marriage (via Gay Orbit). Kuznicki’s commentary is worth reading in full, especially if you don’t want to have to slog through all the comments at the Volokh Conspiracy to figure out what the main counterarguments being offered are.

I don’t feel like reproducing my last year and a half of effusion on the issue, especially since it’s all available under the marriage debate category on the left there. I do think that one of Kuznicki’s points is worth responding to anew, though:

Meanwhile, Gallagher has also neglected the opposing argument, namely that same-sex marriages might actually strengthen the institution of heterosexual marriage. Although the empirical data on either side is scarce (and although this scarcity gives weight to the go-slow approach mentioned in the last comment I linked), still, I think there is at least a conceivable causal mechanism to explain why same-sex marriage might do a lot of good to the institution of heterosexual marriage: If we as a society send a message that marriage is a universal goal, one that admits of no exceptions and knows no gender lines, then it is reasonable to think that more people of all sexual orientations will want to get married.

But if large numbers of people–gays and lesbians, for example–are told that they do not need marriage, or that marriage cannot help them, or that they are unworthy of the institution, then some marginal number of straight people, especially those who identify most closely with gays and lesbians, will almost certainly come to have contempt for the institution of marriage and to see it as antiquated or irrelevant.

I’m perfectly willing to argue that homosexual relationships are no less moral than heterosexual relationships, that contribution to civilization in the form of the creation and upkeep of artifacts is just as important as contribution to civilization in the form of the creation and bringing up of children, and that the law should not be throwing obstacles in our paths when we try to care for our partners within the relationships we’ve chosen.

However, I’ve always found the argument above, even in the carefully qualified way Kuznicki presents it, to be ridiculous. The vast majority of people do not view homosexuality and heterosexuality as the same; that’s true even among those who believe our relationships are just as valid (word of the week, apparently) as theirs. Despite all the changes in medicine and in the family structure over the last century, there simply remains no chance that a homosexual couple will suddenly finding itself producing a child that needs eighteen years of intensive looking-after. The number of people so bohemian in outlook that they regard their gay friends as facing the same real-life sex-related issues in all respects is so small that “marginal” hardly does it justice.

My friends hardly constitute a scientific sample of the population–good thing for America we don’t!–but I doubt their attitude is untypical. A few years ago on our e-mail group, I tried to get a discussion about gay marriage going…and failed utterly. The replies were along the lines of “Of course, I think you and Atsushi should be able to get married–why the hell wouldn’t i?” Even so, my friends’ expressed preference has been for marriage; there have been a half-dozen weddings since we were in our late twenties. (The result, BTW, is that I’m now friends with [even] more Jews than I was in college: three of the girls converted in order to marry three of our Jewish buddies. Talk about populations that recruit!) If forced to choose between showing solidarity with gay friends and providing the most stable possible environment for their own children–assuming that’s the choice they actually have to make–most people are obviously going to side with their kids.

Perhaps if I spent more time reading the WaPo‘s coverage of Japanese culture stuff, I would have known that Anthony Faiola, who was the irritant behind this flip-out of mine a few weeks ago, is a repeat offender. (Is Faiola supposed to be a Japan specialist? I got the impression that he was based in China.) This from Japundit about a more recent example:

It’s sort of an interesting enough article – Faiola reports that many Japanese women suffer from a stress disorder called RHS due to the unwanted presence of their retired husbands – but it’s hardly news, especially from a reporter who specializes on Japan topics for the Washington Post. And the issue has been reported on in the English language media in Japan for years.

As well, the entire “love letters and wooing words under pink cherry blossoms” stuff is a little suspect, too. The entire idea of marrying for romantic love is a recent affectation imported from the West. Arranged marriages were the norm for today’s 65-year-old cohort, as were strict ideas about the roles and responsibilities for each partner in the marriage.

Kind of makes you wish the Post and all the other papers out there could find stringers who actually understand Japan and write stories that dig a little deeper, and go beyond stereotypes.

That’s the thing that’s so annoying: a lot of these reporters probably have a healthy journalistic skepticism, but if they don’t know anything about Japan, their warning bells don’t go off when they should; they end up swallowing clichés the way a cormorant swallows fish.

…

I just looked at one of the WaPo staff pages. Faiola is based in Tokyo. Sheesh. At least his reporting was just dull this time, as opposed to very likely inaccurate.

Jonathan Rauch’s column for National Journal is up at IGF. It’s about a gay wedding in Massachusetts. I still think there are important unaddressed questions about gay marriage as policy and as an institution. Rauch mostly leaves aside those questions this time out, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. His focus is on the reactions of family members. He delineates, with a few well-chosen strokes, how Beckland and Pope are starting out–both the resources they have and what they’re going to be contending with:

Laura’s parents, Lee and Ludene, both in their early 70s, have shown up at their grandson’s wedding on the advice of their priest, who counseled support for their family even if they could not condone a same-sex marriage. They say they are open-minded Catholics, but today’s event has pushed them to their limit. “I feel that it’s wrong,” Lee volunteers. “I don’t think it’s real. I kind of wish it hadn’t happened.” He loves his grandson, no doubt about it. But “this is hard for me, to see it happen.” Ludene, who believes that marriage is for procreation, struggles to find a more conciliatory note. “We’re living in a different age,” she says.

Jamie’s two younger brothers are enthusiastic about the marriage. It never occurs to them to regard a same-sex marriage as anything but real. His father, Kim, has been supportive all along. But his paternal grandparents, Jim and Carol, are guarded as they sit on a bench awaiting the ceremony’s start. “We love Jamie, and I’m not going to drive a wedge in the family,” Jim says. Carol mentions that both are Christians who are close to the Bible. “This will be interesting,” she says. “I’m not the judge.”

Rauch has in the past written about the social pressure required to make marriage work and how it would make gay marriage a benefit to society; he’s done so in ways that push forward abstractions and skate over specifics, which I think weakens his arguments. It will be interesting to see how what he learns about people’s concrete experiences from here on will affect his views.

I may not like the way gay marriage has been pursued politically, but of course it turns me to mush to see two of our men (or women)–who clearly had to go through some major crap to right themselves–find happiness with each other. Congratulations and best wishes to them.

(Oh, and Jonathan? Sweetness? Honey, Jamie could be your son. There’s no “just about” about it. He was born when you were eighteen, and maybe most of your fellow rising Yale freshmen weren’t having kids then, but plenty of Americans were. It’s considered pretty early in most places, but not all that early. I was born when my father was twenty, and it never raises an eyebrow when I meet other people of working class extraction.)

Presumably for National Coming Out Day, the Washington Blade ran two editorials last week (at least on-line) about coming out–one by Log Cabin Republicans’ Patrick Guerriero, and one by the National Black Justice Coalition’s Keith Boykin.

Boykin’s criticisms, especially, are aimed at people who remain closeted in order to play both ends against the middle:

If you don’t come out, then you can’t complain. You can’t complain about homophobic politicians who want to take away your rights. You can’t complain about bigoted ministers in church. And you absolutely cannot complain about the direction of the gay and lesbian movement.

…

Too many of us are good at offering critiques without offering help. “Why are there so many ‘queens’ in the movement? Why aren’t there any people of color? Why are they talking about marriage, the military, hate crimes, AIDS, or fill-in-the-blank issue that ‘real people’ think activists shouldn’t be talking about?”

Well here’s another question: Why aren’t you doing something about it? Posting an anonymous comment on someone’s blog is not enough.

I’m not saying the activists shouldn’t be criticized when they do something wrong. But I am saying we need to be participants instead of observers in our own liberation. If you don’t like the way things are going, then come out and be visible so you can be the change you hope to see in the world.

Yes, yes, yes–with a side of sauteed morning glory greens. (One qualification: I don’t see anything wrong with commenting anonymously on blogs. A person who’s out in real life could still have legitimate fears about identity theft, for example, or be interested in protecting her relatives’ privacy rather than her own.) But I can think of few more annoying gay personality types than the ones who piss and moan about how poorly our public advocates are handling things…and then expect sympathy because they “can’t” come out at work or to the ‘rents or to their friends from college. I think Boykin strikes exactly the right balance. Honorable people who are really willing to make the trade-offs that going along to get along requires recognize that they’ve disqualified themselves from bitching that our activists aren’t doing enough to make the world safe for them. Honorable people who want to bitch that our activists aren’t doing enough recognize that the way they live shouldn’t offer cravenness as an alternative course of action.

Eric likes the Constitution State’s Supreme Court’s ruling on a First Amendment case a few days ago. (Well, the actual opinion is here.) Eric refers to a prior post of his:

Whether the imputation of homosexuality is defamatory these days is open to question, at least in some places.

Should it be?

If the imputation of homosexuality is defamation, then is that not itself an outright admission by the tort system that there is something so dreadful about homosexuality that we will allow you to sue others if they accuse you of it?

I’m kind of hors de combat on this particular issue, of course. I don’t think people should get away with telling lies, but I don’t see identifying someone as homosexual as some kind of smear in and of itself.

At the same time, I wish there weren’t this sort of blanket statement (from Michigan’s Between the Lines) from the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s representative of what we hear in the run up to National Coming Out Day every year:

Readers of BTL’s editorial pages in the past have heard us say it before, but it bears repeating: come out, come out wherever you are.

…

It is difficult to imagine how one could argue that staying in the closet enables a person to live a full, rewarding and emotionally healthy life. Heterosexuals, for example, would never dream of keeping their wives and husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends and even children a secret from their coworkers, neighbors, family and friends.

Oh, wouldn’t they? People have been known to keep marriages secret for the sake of not angering parents who didn’t give permission, or not giving the appearance of a conflict of interest if they met through business. Those arrangements aren’t the hetero default setting, but you can’t say straight people would “never dream” of keeping their relationships a secret.

Besides, everyone is subject to intrusive questions these days. I know more than one single straight person who’s heartily sick of being asked when he’s going to get married or why she hasn’t settled down and had children yet. “Maybe if people thought I was gay they’d shut up and give me some peace,” one exasperated career-focused acquaintance said to me once.

I don’t want to slush things together to the point of being obtuse about the real issues that remain. I assume, though I haven’t run about polling people, that most closeted gays would prefer not to have to be secretive about the relationships that matter to them most. Being known as gay, risky though it is, means that you don’t have to mask something important about yourself when interacting with people. I think it’s great to have public voices reminding closeted gays that, if they meet a hostile reception when coming out, their gay friends will stick by them and they won’t be left to deal with the fallout alone.

But some people really do think that their sexuality is an individual matter and appreciate the way remaining unmarried allows them to avoid opening their private lives to public scrutiny. Why is it hard to believe that the way they live is “full, rewarding and emotionally healthy”? If you value personal liberty, you believe that people get to choose their own trade-offs, even if those trade-offs wouldn’t suit you. The only people I think should be pressured into coming out–not, just so I’m clear, forcibly outed, but pitilessly encouraged to put their money where their squalling mouths are–are those who bitch that our public advocates haven’t yet made it safe for them to do so. It’s not Michelangelo Signorile’s job to take your risks for you, honey.

Several days ago I received a wonderful e-mail from reader Leslie W. She gave me permission to post it:

I wonder if gay guys have the same problem I do, being a lesbian who is amazed at how antagonistic literally every lesbian I know is about our not being let into a terribly boring party we’re so desperately trying to crash! I just don’t get this fixation on marriage as against civil unions. Though not religious in any institutional sense, I do respect the rights of traditionally religious people and do not see it as overarchingly “mean” for them to express the belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman. I also don’t mind when people of that ilk assert that sex with someone of the same gender is sinful. Of course, I don’t think that–and I always tell such people that it’s OK to have that viewpoint but that they should check out Romans 2 before they ponder what punishment to inflict. But why should I be concerned with what they feel, much less with what they say? That is, unless what I’m really seeking is their absolute approval–cheap grace, you might say. If my rights as a citizen are genuinely threatened by a rightist religious agenda, I’ll be among the first to man the barricades. But I’m very tired of the false oppression that so many lesbians claim as their lot in life, and I’m extremely weary of the us-them dynamic that permeates my milieu surely as much as any other.

Right. Just a dozen or so years ago, Bruce Bawer could write the following:

Committed gay couples exist by the millions, and it is unquestionably in the state’s interest that homosexuals live in such couples rather than live alone and sleep around; why shouldn’t the state, then, recognize those relationships as it does heterosexual commitments? For the state to do so would not deny to anyone the right to consider his or her marriage morally superior to my domestic partnership–or, for that matter, to anyone else‘s heterosexual marriage.

Note the lack of assumption that recognition of our relationships must call them marriages and, in every last finicking little respect, treat them as exactly THE SAME as straight relationships, lest some gay person’s self-esteem be dinged. When was the last time you heard a gay public figure talk that way? Now it’s all about enshrining our love for each other in state policy.

BTW, Leslie, and anyone else, if you’re looking for sensible lesbian writing, check out Ace Pryhill. She supports marriage rather than civil unions, but I agree with her about big-picture issues of what legal recognition means and how it relates to individual responsibility.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of e-mails and policies, it appears that this is a good time to formulate…well, an e-mail policy. I think this post from a few months back should get the point across.

Chris Crain has posted on the Washington Blade blog about the problems with gay PR, though he doesn’t exactly put it that way:

Then remember this: We gay Americans do not have the luxury of intolerance. When it comes to minorities, we are remarkably minor. Kinsey was nice enough to propagate the 10 percent myth, but subsequent surveys place us at even smaller numbers, well under half that amount. And about one-quarter of us — of us! — voted for the election and the re-election of George W. Bush.

If we cannot tolerate the viewpoint of someone who tries to explain why one-quarter of us like and support the president, then how can we expect the 96 percent of Americans who are heterosexual to listen seriously to our demands for equality?

The growing polarization of American politics has taken root within gay America as well. The explosion of liberal gay bloggers, many of whom spend about as much time on the “gray” of most issues as Rush Limbaugh and his “dittoheads,” has only exacerbated the proud queer tradition of disdain for gay Republicans (“Nazi Jews”) and the caricature of conservative Christians (“religious right,” “religious political extremists”).

Whatever the public opinion surveys may say about the growing acceptance of gays, we have lost, and lost badly, every ballot measure to date on marriage, and the numbers haven’t improved since Alaska and Hawaii voted on the issue almost a decade ago.

Our activists groups have grown quite fond of talking about the “conversations” we need to have with straight America. Well half of that conversation involves listening, not talking. And if we won’t even listen to the heretical views of our own kind, then how can we be open to one of “them”?

He’s right. I do think that while the subject is open, though, we might make a request of the conservatives, too: some of you have a real chip on your shoulder about what a brave, exclusive little club of dissenters you are. If you don’t knock it off, you’re going to have a hard time winning over rank-and-file gays who despise the shrill left but are wary of Republicans.

Yes, yes, yes, I know–there are gay enclaves in which you risk vandalization of your property if you’re openly conservative. More commonly you just risk being demonized. (That overused word strikes me as being appropriate here for once.) I’m more than happy to acknowledge that the outrages committed by extreme gay leftists are way worse than the smugness of some of the gay right. But smugness is a turnoff, and as long as the center-right range of gays stays so firmly a minority, it’s going to remain easy for lefty activists to claim to represent gays en masse.

Oh, yeah, did something gay happen in California this week? Hmm. Sample reaction (the comments, not the main post): Bleating about the democratic process? Check. Mewling about equal protection? Check. Hysterically brandishing dodgy civil rights analogies? Check.

Where, oh where, I keep asking myself, do people get the idea that gays are cheap opportunists with self-centered princess complexes? I just don’t understand, you know?

Romeo Mike has two great posts up this week. The more general one is about how movements for tolerance mutated into political correctness. I’m going to zero in on the gay content–go figure–but there’s a lot more to it:

I never wanted anything more out of my gay rights than to not be arrested for it. I was perfectly aware that my dynamics were different from the mainstream, so why should a tail wag the dog. Yet now society itself is being dismantled to accommodate a few hundred people who demand to have the same everything, even when so much of it has to be artificially constructed, and risks affecting essential social fabric.

Well, societies do evolve. The decriminalization of homosexual conduct has itself certainly been a change in the social fabric, after all–however innocuous those of us with the most to gain by it may find it. And entitlement-mindedness did not originate with gays; it’s the way politics works nowadays. Furthermore, just about everyone who espouses “traditional values” is picking and choosing customs from the past that he deems worth reviving or updating, and human institutions are by definition artificial constructs. Even so, none of that vitiates the point that fecklessly restructuring long-standing institutions to serve political ends that only emerged a decade or two ago is ill-advised. Not even all gay activists can agree on why gay marriage, as opposed to the other potential ways gay unions might be recognized, is the only way to go. The reasons most frequently and loudly offered appear to center on “respect” and “dignity,” which it’s dangerous for free people to expect the government to confer on them.

About feminism, RM (I hope he doesn’t mind my calling him that; I am certainly not going to refer to him as “Romeo”) says,

Though males had to work to support their families, feminists co-opted work as an equality issue. Now, child-rearing is disdained by many women who identify their life purpose by labouring for their employer. For many, children aren’t part of the equation anymore, even though they still mate. Yet the subsequent rise in mean income forced up the cost of living so now women have no choice but to work, child or not. Surely, on their death beds their last words will be,”I can rest now knowing my life’s purpose was to make profits for my boss.”

Again, I’m with RM overall. Encouraging people to think of their career as their primary source of fulfillment (or even intellectual stimulation) works against their instincts and the good of their children–no argument here. At the same time, let’s not lose sight of a couple of things. For one, while Australia has a different tax system and welfare state from the US, my understanding from Australian friends is pretty much that the two countries are not much different in this respect: families with children can make it with one income if they’re willing to forgo the frills of full-on bourgeois living.

For another, not everyone is cut out for child-rearing. We are a complex civilization with many important artifacts to maintain and develop for future generations, and there’s no shame in devoting yourself full-time to such tasks. The problem is that everyone–including the vast majority who will eventually become parents–has been encouraged to develop in a way that’s at odds with good parenting, not that women who aren’t the mothering type are now free to pursue careers.

The big problem is mouthing abstract bromides about “diversity” while taking concrete steps to shoehorn people into politically-approved personality and behavioral types. RM tackles that in the other post, coming up with a useful neologism:

mis.het.eur.andry; from misandry, hatred of men + het, heterosexual + eur, euro

“denigration of straight white male/s under the guise of promoting anti-patriarchal ideology.”

The whole mentality of seeing different ways of life as some kind of rebuke directed at your own is something I’ve never understood. If you have to defang people’s personalities in order to be able to deal with them comfortably, there’s something wrong with your spine. Liberal societies nurture strong, combative personalities and will always have their share of friction. Feminists and gay activists who expect us to make lasting gains that are woven into society instead of being appliqueed onto it need to see the advantage there. Opposition doesn’t just tear you down, it also shows you where your own arguments have flaws so you can improve them.