Mail carrier, school-board member, and all-round good citizen, Linda Weiss is worried about the antigay sentiment that is roiling Vermont voters this fall. It makes her and her partner very anxious. "Suddenly it’s not about Linda and Joyce, the lesbians they know....It’s about ’the homosexual agenda,’" she lamented to a reporter from the New York Times (September 3, 2000). Her fears were focused on a campaign, "Take Back Vermont," organized to oppose reelecting the state legislators who, under court order, voted for legislation last spring that allows same-sex partners to register their civil union in the state of Vermont.
Have opponents really conjured up a spectral homosexual agenda and forgotten the friendly relationships Weiss and her partner have built with neighbors and townsfolk over the years? When the political trumps the personal, the changes that come can be painful, disheartening, and even frightening. Good neighbors on both sides of the fence need to express their political disagreements without undermining neighborly good will and friendships. Vermonters are probably as schooled as anyone in managing such civic differences. And we hope they do-from both sides of the fence.
And it does have to be both sides.
We say that because it is easy to imagine another interview-with one of Ms. Weiss’s "Take-Back-Vermont" neighbors. "No one had any problem when it was just about Linda and Joyce," this hypothetical Vermonter might lament. "Folks around here don’t try to tell other folks how to live. But it’s a different matter when you start changing the marriage laws and the school curriculum. It wasn’t our doing that this got political."
It got political because gay-rights advocates made it political. In a democracy, what is politics all about if not the ordering of the life of the community, whether one as small as Weiss’s town (pop. 168), or as large as the nation? What politics is all about, for instance, is disagreement over changing Vermont’s laws to give official status to same-sex unions or, following the Supreme Court’s ruling this spring, using government power to punish the Boy Scouts’ refusal to allow openly gay men to serve as scoutmasters. That is why, after all, there is an organized gay-rights movement-first, to change the way Americans treat homosexuals, and, second, to change how society as a whole understands same-sex relations. Disagreement about the goods we pursue as a society-disagreement such as there is about gay rights-almost always produces abrasive discussions and vigorous opposition.
Of course, there is a homosexual agenda-or better yet, agendas. At its narrowest, the homosexual agenda should be everyone’s agenda, namely to end discrimination in the work place, in housing, and in public life. At its most expansive, however, the homosexual agenda wants to transform what Americans think and believe about same-sex relations-pretty obviously this is not everyone’s agenda. What if many Americans are not convinced that they should change what they think and believe, or at least change in exactly the way that at least some advocates propose? What if many Americans think that they can respect the human dignity of Linda and Joyce without radically rearranging social institutions and moral norms? Is this so far beyond reasonable belief as to constitute bigotry? So far beyond the reach of reasonable argument as to justify abandoning democratic debate and legislative arenas for the pursuit of remedies in the courts, where there is little legal precedent?
There is an honorable model in turning to the courts and in characterizing opposition to one’s agenda as bigotry. Since the 1960s, virtually every group that considered itself the victim of discrimination has cast its cause in terms of civil rights and equality pioneered by African Americans-and viewed opposition as the hopeless moral equivalent of racism. This was true, in particular, of the women’s movement, and now is true of the gay-rights movement. Gay advocates have argued that the lack of legal recognition for same-sex unions is a form of civil discrimination akin to that suffered by blacks. Sometimes this deficiency is compared to the prohibition of black-white marriages found in antimiscegenation laws swept away by civil-rights legislation and court decisions. So, too, the effort to introduce sympathetic accounts of same-sex unions into school curriculums is compared to efforts to portray African Americans as parents, workers, political leaders, etc., in schoolbooks. The success of African Americans in achieving many of their civil-rights goals encourages gay advocates to press their issues against what they see as the same kind of prejudice that blacks confront.
In effect, this is argument by analogy-but does the analogy hold? It is not clear that the civil disabilities suffered by women or homosexuals as a class have been as severe as those suffered by African Americans. More important, the analogy assumes rather than examines the claim that the differences between heterosexual and homosexual relations are as irrelevant to moral reasoning and public policy as the differences of skin color. Perhaps in the long term, gays will win the political argument and succeed in legalizing same-sex unions. In the meantime, should the resistance they encounter in Vermont, Hawaii, and other states or, for that matter, with the Boy Scouts and other groups and institutions for minors, count as bigotry?
No doubt some of it is. But reasoned resistance to same-sex unions and to teaching children that homosexual and heterosexual sex are equivalent deserves equal regard as we consider how to order our common life. This resistance often rests on religious beliefs and moral views that tie procreation and the care of children to the building of families. It rests as well on deeply embedded ideas about men and women, sex and the family. Is this simply prejudice hallowed by religion and history, as some might argue, or is it religion and history reminding us that these customs and social forms are deeply congruent with the human ability to survive and flourish? In other words, altering may not be as susceptible to political pressures and court-mandated solutions as gay advocates hope. Equating heterosexuality and homosexuality when it comes to families and family formation is social experimentation on an unprecedented scale. The changes being pressed ask the citizens of Vermont, and the whole country, to overlook strongly held views about appropriate partners for sexual intercourse and about the meaning of marriage and family. Judicial caution and tolerance for real political debate would certainly seem to be in order.
