Book contents
6 - Gay/Straight
The Binary Ontology of the Gay Marriage Debate
from PART III - Millennial Equality: A Primer on Gay Liberation in the Twenty-First Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The civilizing influence of family values, with or without children, ultimately may be the best argument for same-sex marriage.
William Eskridge, The Case for Same-Sex MarriageTrue rebels, after all, are as rare as true lovers, and, in both cases, to mistake a fever for a passion can destroy one’s life.
James Baldwin, No Name in the StreetIf the imitation is always trying to be something, and cares desperately for its status, the original is really something, but does not care.
Teresa Brennan, History after LacanThe marriage issue … is a great boon for homophobes because it lets them sidestep all the things that should be set right, from sodomy laws in various states, to discrimination in the workplace. Also marriage makes people think of God, who is so very important to our poor, bamboozled folks. The founders (and I) wanted God thrown out the window at Philadelphia, but the crazies breed like chiggers and he keeps slithering back in. He now dominates so much of radio and TV. Until a stake has been driven through the heart of monotheism, the U.S. will never come within a continuum of civilization. That suits them chiggers real fine.
Gore Vidal, Southern Voice (January 13, 2000)When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the various systems unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern WorldOn November 17, 2008, a positively giggling Robin Young, of National Public Radio’s Here and Now, interviewed Texas megachurch evangelist Ed Young. Young gained considerable notoriety and media airtime in 2008 when he preached a sermon encouraging his megachurch flock to have more sex. Of course, this admonition was for married church members only, a subsequent clarification that underscored the presumptive place of marriage as the standard for both Christian and citizen, which, from the evangelical perspective, are the same things. Young’s original message for “seven days of sex” was complete with the drama and optimism (albeit the hellfire-and-damnation variety) evangelicalism brings to every topic, delivered as Young paced in front of a huge bed, set up in the church of his flock of twenty thousand. Young occasionally reclined on the bed during this most unusual sermon, flipping through a copy of the Bible and emphasizing, as the New York Times put it, the need to “put God back in the bed.”
Once this original sexperiment came to an end, the pastor, apparently having a high old time, admonished his flock to keep it going. Parishioners at a Grapevine, Texas, satellite branch of the church were treated to a prerecorded message from Pastor Young, broadcast on jumbo screens, encouraging them to press on. Of course, Mrs. Young was on the recording, too, a mix of submissive wife/Virgin Mary – “[Do] unto me according to thy word” – and pornographic sex goddess (in jeans and knee-high black boots). “Some of us are smiling,” she said, playfully. The pastor, for his part, made crystal clear how important real sex is. “We should try to double up the amount of intimacy we have in marriage,” he said. “And when I say intimacy, I don’t mean holding hands in the park or a back rub.’’ Why not, you ask? (at least, I did). Well, we don’t get the answer from him. What he does give us is a direct link between sex, marriage, and patriarchal theology.
Just look at the sensuousness of the Song of Solomon, or Genesis: “two shall become one flesh,” or Corinthians: “do not deprive each other of sexual relations. For some reason the church has not talked about it, but we need to,” he said…. There is no shame in marital sex, he added, “God thought it up, it was his idea.”
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- The End of Straight SupremacyRealizing Gay Liberation, pp. 207 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011