I don't like to call the movement to allow homosexuals to marry "gay marriage". There is nothing really happy about the whole homosexual scene. So many stories of people who have lived in the whole "community" and the people who left homosexuality share that there is nothing really gay about the gay lifestyle.
And so, I talk about "false marriage." since it's a flagrant violation of natural law and natural right to say that two people of the same sex can form a covenant akin to marriage itself. It's just not possible. The physical, mental, emotional, and certainly spiritual dynamics relating to the marriage covenant belong only to one man and one woman.
At any rate. here's an extensive report about Sasha Isenberg in The New Yorker, in which he reports on how false marriage went from a fantastic and offensive idea to a sad reality in the United States:
In his new book, “The Engagement: America’s
Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage,” the journalist Sasha
Issenberg chronicles one of our country’s most recent civil-rights battles,
tracing the evolution of the cause from 1990, when it started to become a
political movement, to its ratification by the Supreme Court, in 2015.
Issenberg’s subjects are the activists, politicians, and judicial figures who,
intentionally or not, found themselves at its forefront. That gay marriage
would become legal after only a twenty-five-year fight, Issenberg writes, “was
beyond the wildest hopes of gay-rights activists just years before.” The book
attempts to explain why this campaign succeeded so quickly and how religious
conservatives inadvertently furthered a cause they passionately opposed.
Conservatives need to learn how this happened, and then take every step to reverse this terrible course.
I think, generally, when people think of the
struggle for gay marriage, they often think about the relative speed with which
it was accomplished compared with other struggles in American history. Do you
think that can be replicated in other movements?
I think there are certainly some structural,
tactical decisions that same-sex-marriage supporters made that helped lead them
to victory. And that, broadly, there are lessons that other campaigners or
social movements can adopt. But the idea that there’s a kind of off-the-shelf
manual for twenty-five years of social change. . . .
Exactly.
One important thing is there’s an organization
called Freedom to Marry, which was a single-issue campaign organization with
one goal: equal marriage rights across fifty states and the District of
Columbia. And, up until this point, the major players in L.G.B.T. politics, the
Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and a lot of
state-level organizations, have a really broad panoply of issues that they are
invested in. They represent a coalition that is fairly broad, basically sexual
minorities, and have a whole lot of issues that they’re working on: they’re
trying to stop hate crimes, they’re trying to get recognition for families,
they’re trying to allow gays and lesbians to serve in the military, a whole
bunch of things. It’s been a recurring trope among gay-rights activists that
the Human Rights Campaign, the most wealthy and prominent of the gay-rights
groups, is too focussed on the inside game, too focussed on winning access,
raising money. Some activists believe that the gay-rights movement as a whole
did not fight strongly enough against the Defense of Marriage Act or against
the federal marriage amendment because the Human Rights Campaign wasn’t ready
to fight and that this was evidence of their accommodationist sort of approach
to politics.
One organization focused on one goal: to make false marriage a reality in the United States. Too many conservatives want to focus on all kinds of issues at once, and they become ineffective.
It’s clear that the H.R.C. was always acting, I think,
quite rationally, in that they had had a broad set of issues that they cared
about, and they intended to use influence in Washington institutions to get it.
And they had to weigh the merits of fighting over marriage with the merits of
trying to get progress on other issues. When Freedom to Marry comes along, they
don’t have to make those compromises. And so they are able to develop a
strategy that’s not based on trade-offs between “If we push for marriage in
this state, will it step back our efforts to get a nondiscrimination ordinance
passed?” And Freedom to Marry said, “We’re going to put ourselves out of
business after we meet our goal,” which they did after the Supreme Court ruled
in 2015. And that is not the way that most interest groups are set up. They’re
set up basically to perpetuate themselves. And that means that they are having
to weigh not just their policy objectives, but their donors and their members
and their long-term stability.
And I think it raises a lot of questions. Where
would gun laws be if, instead of having these broad gun-control organizations,
a group is focussed solely on background checks?
The other issue with the gun control lobby, however, is that the right to self-preservation is so endemic to human beings, and the very culture and character of the United States was founded in large part on the right to self defense. When the British started attacking the American colonists in New England, they went after their guns. The farmers with guns on the fields of Lexington and Concord help
Probably the same place, but your point may still
be correct.
Yeah. But I think that the natural physics of
interest-group politics and coalitions is to make them bigger. And if you
really are focussed on one discrete policy objective, the bigness and broadness
of those groups can be self-defeating.
Exactly. Smaller interests tend to wield disproportionate political power, and more effectively, too.
Well, this also goes to your earlier point, that
the religious right did the cause of gay rights a favor by making it more about
one specific thing.
Yeah. They helped set up the terms of a debate,
and then, later, gay-rights activists with big donors built an infrastructure
that could fight the conflict on those terms.
We were talking about backlash earlier, and you
mention near the end of the book that a backlash to gay marriage hasn’t really
happened in the way one often expects. How do you understand that?
I think there are a few elements here. One is that
anti-gay activists were not surprised when the Obergefell decision came down in
2015. It looked almost fated, based on the court’s earlier ruling and the way
that it had handled appeals to circuit-court decisions. So I don’t think that
there was the emotional letdown on the day of the decision that would’ve
galvanized some opposition. And, because of that, many of those activists had
already begun to move to an area where they still had strength, where the
public opinion looked a lot more like it did around gay marriage twenty years
ago—which is trans issues. And so they basically said, “We have lost the
gay-marriage fight, but we have this nearby place where we can manufacture
conflict from a position of strength.” And many of the same institutions that
had been fighting over gay marriage all of a sudden just started fighting over
issues related to transgender people.
The bigger issue, which this interview does not pay attention to, is that pro-family activists refused to discuss more grounded realities regarding the dangers of false marriage. In fact, they did not even start the fight properly with the right rhetoric. They should have been calling the push for gay marriage what it really is: false marriage.
Then they should have focused on science, biology, genetic arguments. They needed to point out that every society cannot survive, let alone thrive, without the nuclear family, without natural marriage. Sadly, pro-family activists and their lawyers relied on arguments of tradition, religious sentiment, and religious liberty. These arguements cannot be persuasive in the face of the emotionally demanding "non-discrimination" arguments.
That was going to be my next question—to what
degree is it a coincidence that trans issues have become more prominent in the
past five years?
There was all this capacity that had been built. I
mean, part of the story of how we ended up fighting about gay marriage in the
nineteen-nineties is that the gay-rights movement and the religious right grew
up more or less in parallel in the late seventies and became professionalized
and well funded through the eighties. By the nineties, the gay-rights movement
was a central part of the Democratic-left coalition, and the religious right
was a central player in Republican politics. And they had developed capacity
for conflict. They were basically on a collision course. And the only question
was: What were they going to fight over? And this popped up on the radar as the
thing that they started to fight over.
I think what happened twenty years later, around
the time of the 2015 Supreme Court ruling, was that these coalitions were
bigger and stronger in many respects, more entrenched, and still needed
something to fight over. Religious conservatives had lost their position of
strength for a variety of reasons—opinion change, demographic changes. And then
they decided that they were going to go to trans issues instead.
The real change was not demographics, but rather the growing indoctrination in the public schools and the public square. The media promoted TV sitcoms and "out" celebrities, all of whom gave off this false veneer that they were "born that way", and that normalizing their lifestyle was not going to cause anyone else harm.
The other part of it is the cosmology of religious
conservatives shifted with the defeat over same-sex marriage, where they may
have ceded the broader culture wars. There’s a reason Jerry Falwell called his
organization the Moral Majority. The kind of motivating conceit of
religious-conservative activism through the eighties and nineties, and much of
the two-thousands, was based on the idea that there’s a Judeo-Christian
majority in the country and the laws of the United States should reflect its
values. And losing the conflict over gay marriage, I think, persuaded many of
those religious conservatives that they were not, in fact, the majority—that
now you don’t have to watch more than ten minutes of Fox News to understand
that the cosmology of the current American right is that they are a besieged
minority, under siege by the courts, and academia, and Hollywood. And, once
they began to think of themselves as a besieged minority, they started doing
what besieged minorities do in our constitutional system, which is to ask the
courts for protection. And that takes the form of these religious-liberty
exemptions, which is basically an acknowledgment of the concession of defeat in
the broader struggle.
The Moral Majority cannot win a political or cultural majority based on statements, speechs, conventions, and conferences. The intellectual and legal activism essential to preserving a culture was not prominent among religious conservatives for the last twenty years. In fact, for decades conservatives have avoided court battles, have avoided taking over key institutions of the culture, hoping that by reducing the government and pressing "live and let live" as a cultural policy, everything would work out just fine.
Clearly, that is not what has happened.
You wrote an op-ed last weekend in the Times which
was headlined “Cancel Culture Works: We Wouldn’t Have Marriage Equality Without
It.” For the book, you went back and looked at the different ways that
gay-rights organizations and gay-rights activists shamed, shunned, and
boycotted opponents of same-sex marriage. Do you feel that you’re seeing some
of the same tactics that are today labelled “cancel culture,” or do you feel
like those activists avoided what critics of cancel culture find so damaging
today?
This is a bigger part of the reason why false marriage took over the country. Again, referring to my previous reflection above, the homosexual lobby fought the culture war in the fields of public opinion, including academia and the general media. They worked hard to shame and shun anyone who spoke out in favor of natural marriage and against false marriage. These Stalinist tactics have barely abated in the last five years since false marriage was imposed on the country via a corrupted Supreme Court decision.
Yeah. Well, I’m glad we’re not going to have a
conversation about what cancel culture means or doesn’t, because I actually
don’t really know. I think that one of the big changes that take place in the
marriage debate is how the money dynamic shifts in the years between 2008, when
gay-marriage supporters suffered this massive setback when Proposition 8 passed
in California, and four years later, in 2012, the first time they sweep four
ballot measures. One of the big things is the extent to which the
pro-gay-marriage side of the debate opened up a major financial advantage over
opponents. You had a cluster of exceedingly wealthy gay donors, mostly gay
white men who had made their money through tech or inherited it, who in the
two-thousands had become uniquely interested in marriage among all the issues
on the agenda. By 2012, Mike Bloomberg was giving major contributions. Jeff
Bezos was giving major contributions. You had a whole lot of Wall Street
donors, including Republicans, who were giving generously as well.
Notice that Big Business got behind the false marriage movement big time! Conservative donors did not want to get their hands dirty in that fight. I would go one step further and submit that conservative donors have been more interested in making money than in perserving the culture. As Dinesh D'Souza pointed out in his book "Letters to a Young Conservative," conservatives care about the economy. Liberals care about power. The fight to force false marriage on the country was a powergrab of the first order, and the Left understood this dynamic very well.
The other thing that’s happening is big donors
basically abandon the other side of the fight: by 2012, it’s clear that the
folks running the effort to ban same-sex marriage are just having trouble going
to their normal donors, including archdioceses. There’s something about being
associated with this issue that people don’t want to deal with, in terms of
media scrutiny and acceptance among their peers in the business world. I think
so often this cancel-culture conversation is played out over the propriety of
it, or the place of these tactics in a liberal democracy, and here’s this
really important recent case study that shows it actually works. Scaring away
propositions’ financial backers through shame is something that can have a
dramatic effect on the trajectory of a particular political debate, and the
Internet has made it much easier for individuals to launch and organize these
types of attacks.
Final Reflection
Supporters of false marriage relied on shame, degradation, and all-out war against anyone who disagreed with their perversion. Conservatives simply refused to understand the nature of the tactics which LGBT militants would use to push their destructive, hateful agenda.
Too many people were caught up in the lie that they are "born that way," and therefore it is cruel to discriminate against them. Furthermore, I submit that there was too little research at the time on the necessary reasons for children to have a mother and a father. Much of the reason for the paucity of research, however, is due to the fact that academies, universities, and research facilities have suppressed inquiry into these issues. Intellectual activism has included cancelling, suppressing, stopping any investigation into the long-term damage of undermining natural marriage in any community.
Conservatives, pro-family activists have ample opportunity to push back. What is needed is not just political change, but cultural and intellectual activism of a new sort to push back. Conservatives cannot abandon the public square and public institutions because they do not want to engage with destructive, hateful, anti-family, and anti-American liberals. They need to get into the fray, get into the fight, and win.
