By Chris Keith

I refuse merely to be tolerated, for it damages my love of love and my love of liberty.
–Jean Cocteau, Le Livre Blanc

As states continue to fall like dominoes with court rulings legalizing gay marriage, it is more important than ever to seriously examine the case for gay marriage and the motivations of the social forces that stridently seek to oppose it as a last not-yet-toppled bastion of so-called conservative American values.

The culture wars continue, despite the liberated, diplomatic, moderate and conciliatory tone of the Obama administration. With nation-threatening issues such as climate change, health care reform, the economy, energy independence and education rightly taking the foreground as they should in any responsible community of citizens, I expect that Obama has a plan in the back of his closet to expand and legalize the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.

While we are surely not a patient people, and the time for courage is now, there is a strong case to be made for attacking issues that are of primary material importance to the average Joe and Joane, so that when new leadership saves their home, restores their job, better educates their children and provides health care, they might be able to take a breath and look with fresh eyes and an open heart at the concept of equal rights and justice for those who may appear different but are really just like them.

Perhaps we will get to the point where the dual Inaugural prayers spoken in support of our first black president by  Rev. Rick Warren and Rev. Joseph Lowery will not stop at humility but encourage justice, and not stop the self-affirmative chants of  all the minorities before we get to the “gay is okay.”

While it may sound trite to spout the words of the Declaration of Independence as our founding document about “all being created equal,” this remains the core principal in all pursuits of social justice and equality. Underlying this, is a less often articulated idea that is sorely absent from the current debate over gay rights and the place of gay people in society – including military service and the right to marry. Simply put, both freedom and love are indivisible. In the same way that loving someone only adds to the mix rather than takes something from the communal ethos, no person’s or family’s or society’s freedom is diminished when more people are allowed to be free.

Expanding freedom and equality to African Americans, immigrants or gays and lesbians in no way takes anything away from heterosexual couples or families, as is constantly and insidiously spun by not only the Christian Right, but even by less fiery and extreme “moderate people” of other faiths or no faith. This is always the insinuation with regard to the marriage debate: “If they can get married and have or adopt children, the traditional (whatever that means?) family is somehow put at risk”… but HOW?

Not a single voice over this entire debate going back into history or for the last thirty years or so in America has ever explained the mysterious alchemy of how committed gay partners living and building a life together with marriage rights, tax and insurance benefits and the ability to lovingly and supportively raise children next door in any way violates “a sanctity of marriage.”

It is time those who object to equality come up with a real argument and it is time for those who believe in the expansion of freedom to demand it of them. It comes full on from both sides: judgmental Christian fundamentalism, which completely negates Christ’s central admonition to “Love Thy Neighbor,” and through the ancient and enshrined homophobia of a super-hypocritical Catholicism, which has the audacity to attack homosexuals while slamming their own closet doors shut on internal anti-gay discrimination and child abuse. Islamists in Egypt (an ally?) and recently in Iran, have murdered gay male teens by hanging.

This is not my faith, because it takes no account of the need for freedom to make our own choices and allow for self-determination. We can’t have it both ways in America where the Founders are invoked to raise the clarion call of freedom one minute, and as purveyors of religious zealotry at home and colonialism abroad the next. These are incompatible and must be rejected.

There is also more to this debate than meets the eye in terms of the grasping for political power. It is the manifestation of a larger battle of political ideologies at the heart of the relentless resistance to the politics of positive change on the part of the radical Christian right who have co-opted a now failed Republican party that has ceded its powerful center of individual liberty in favor of being on the fringe of political discourse.

Simultaneously, the Democratic left has never seemed comfortable with fighting in the language of religion in order to stand up for core principles – until recently. It is hard to imagine a day when brilliant, intelligent conservatives who valued freedom were a major force in the political dialogue. In the 1960s, Frank Meyer in his book In Defense of Freedom, said:

“The weight of the collective, of ‘society,’ upon the individual person, limiting his or her access to the transcendental sources of their being, to the foundations of value outside history and outside of society: this is the prime cause of the human malaise which the New Conservatives describe so well. The ‘social boredom,’ the ‘alienation,’ which they lament, is not a result of a ‘loss of community,’ but the result of an excess of state-enforced community.

“For ‘community,’ except as it is freely created by free individual persons, community conceived as a principle of social order and superior to the individual person, can justify any oppression of individual persons so long as it is carried out in the name of ‘community,’ of society, or its agent the state. Persons as such are anathema to the New Conservative doctrine, unless they are mere symbols for orders and ranks and hierarchies, stiffly imposed as in a Byzantine mosaic, signifying the abstract value of diversity.

“But Heaven forefend that they be actually diverse, individual human beings, unranked and uncontrolled. There is no place in this conspectus for the person as such, for those who live as individuals – ‘humble to God, haughty to man’ – scorning the bounds of a predetermined estate, vindicating the glory of person as person. Only individual persons, conscious each in their own uniqueness, can reach out and establish relations with other persons, relations charged with the content, vibrant with the tone, that all of us know unmistakably on the basis of our direct awareness. Truth has meaning only for persons; beauty illumines the consciousness only of persons; virtue can be pursued only by persons.”

Neither is it easy to believe that a Nobel Prize-winning economist such as Friedrich Hayek could write an essay called Why I Am Not A Conservative, which makes a prescient case for why the right-wing Republicans can neither be moderate nor embrace change:

“Conservatives typically lack the courage to welcome the same undersigned change from which new tools of human endeavors will emerge. They look back to the past rather than forward to the future. They have no political principles which enable them to work with people whose moral values differ from their own for a political order where both can obey their convictions. To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. Also important is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion.”

When do conservatives any longer talk about the conservation of liberties – domestically, or as regards foreign policy? Legislation and court actions in pro-marriage states will force a constitutional challenge to conflicting rulings such as California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage by popular vote. These states operating under what might now be considered an outdated model of federalism are the laboratories of government acting as the catalyst to binding federal action on this question. But on issues this clearly at the heart of who we are as a people, the government must take action.

Judge/Justice Sotomayor will need to weigh in to assure equal protection of the law as opposed to timid and consoling civil unions that basically amount to throwing a noisy dog a bone. It appears that the these unions are a compromise or stop-gap measure on the part of the Democrats, and at the same time, a tool taken advantage of by the Right to quietly remove a spiritual, if not specifically religious, sanction from gay unions, thus depriving gay citizens of the full weight of the legitimacy of marriage. Slipping quietly under the radar, this manipulation subtly deprives those people of their inherent freedoms, full civil status and ultimately, their personhoods.

The Christian Right all the way back to Anita Bryant in the 70s has worked to enshrine bigotry under the guise of positive “family values” in one of the most blatant yet slickest scams in American social history. Fortunately, the tide is turning hard and ironically, the conservatives will once again  have to come to terms with a belief of their previous more admirable incarnations: anybody who stands on the wrong side of freedom will eventually lose. History has shown irrefutably that the authoritarian deprivation of human rights cannot be indefinitely sustained. The natural world and moral universe do not willingly aid this process.

Finally, there is also an element of extreme dis-ease in the American personality, despite endless explicit (and violent) television shows, movies, advertising, porn and the socially sanctioned objectification of both sexes, that assures we remain deeply uncomfortable with the idea of sex in general. Gays are not the bogeyman, but rather fear of individual sexual expression outside the established power structure of church and state that serves the few and maintains forced order. It is as if under the Abercrombie & Fitch and J Crew and behind the wheels of BMW’s, half of our population while benefiting from advanced technology and the immutable laws of science, are still seventeenth century puritans clad in black with forbidding hats and a still more forbidding look in their eye that says condescendingly, “I feel guilty inside about my sexual needs and desires, so everyone I see must be guilty too…”

It’s a nuclear judgment that appears to penetrate to the atoms and informs all we do and the flavor of our civilization. It’s this unsettling disconnect and lack of unity between the spiritual and the physical that qualifies as one of what Bill Maher on his HBO Real Time show calls “Big Old Dead Ideas…” things that we simply need to get past by honestly questioning our own intentions, analyzing our behavior and taking responsibility for ourselves first before moving to attempt to exercise our demons of sex, procreation and power by piling them onto the backs of others – making others ugly and unworthy of God’s love, so we then will feel relieved of the effort and necessity of compassion.

This leads to both neuroses and to prejudice. It a childish thing when childish things need to be put aside for the higher good and advancement of our country. We need a new Renaissance of Wholeness versus segmenting ourselves into boxes that we are then trapped in.

The New York Times recently carried an article about whether or not teens were “hugging too much?” The only area we are more paranoid about than the expression of love and sex is our irrational fear of terrorism and look where that has gotten us. The ongoing futile War on Sexuality is as damaging and ultimately unsuccessful as the War on Drugs.

The real education reform should begin with instilling an idea of the person in our young that is large enough to contain both the idea of self worth and freedom of expression. Kids are ahead of the curve anyway thanks to the Internet, music and alternative media. Why not encourage exploration instead of denial? Life can be much richer when as the doctor in EQUUS suggests: “Worship everything you see and more appears!”    

Dr. Emilie Cady once wrote: “Desire is God tapping at the door of your mind, trying to give you your greater good.” Catherine Ponder in her book called Dynamic Laws of Prosperity states: “ If you suppress those deep desires, they have no constructive outlet and often turn into destructive channels expressed as neurotic tendencies, phobias, tension, or perhaps as suppression that finds outlet through alcoholism, mental illness, drug addiction, sexual imbalance or other negative actions.”

As far as marriage goes, I have been partnered for two years with an amazing man. I adhere to the Platonic idea expressed in his Symposium regarding procreation that says: “The purpose of love is giving birth in beauty (or joy in company), whether in body or soul. The true love of the gods (or God) belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and beauty and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.”

This opens up an altogether different idea of a relationship bearing fruit in ways other than producing offspring. I enjoy the freedom I have claimed for myself, as well as the long, painful but also exhilarating legacy of the journey of gay people into the bright light of freedom.

However, I like being a rebel and now of all times, we need more rebels and not conformists. The term transgressive has long been deemed negative, but it’s not a bad thing to transgress against what is wrong or even evil. I want sex and love and travel and art and to take in the whole world. I do not require a society’s or a corrupt government’s sanction to be worthy. I do not need to be married.

BUT, for anyone who does desire that path, that personal choice certainly deserves the status of a legally protected right as an expansion of our living Constitution. This can only strengthen our understanding of our founding principles, increase our compassion and multiply the stability of our republic. Hopefully, all of our leaders will one day learn to apply all those lessons of empathy learned from coping with differences to make, enforce and truly interpret the law and end up on the side of freedom.

The time is now. Never waste a crisis, and never let surface things delude us and keep us from focusing on our true purpose and the opportunities present in every moment of life. Speak up for, or speak out against this opinion, but for all our sakes, please make sense!