Weigel Room

Last week, I wrote something to the effect that anyone who styles himself as a libertarian would have been unable to support the civil rights movement and forced desegregation. Writing about gay marriage at National Review, George Weigel agrees with me, kind of. Noting that there are people who support the right of gays to marry because they see it as the position that best promotes individual freedom, Weigel argues that “'Gay marriage' in fact represents a vast expansion of state power: In this instance, the state of New York is declaring that it has the competence to redefine a basic human institution in order to satisfy the demands of an interest group looking for the kind of social acceptance that putatively comes from legal recognition... On what principled ground is the New York state legislature, or any other state legislature, going to say 'No' to that, once it has declared that Adam and Steve, or Eve and Evelyn, can in fact get married according to the laws of the state There is a curious rhetorical fact that has usually gone unremarked in these debates, but which is worth pointing out. That what the New York state legislature approved has to be described, not as marriage, but as 'gay marriage; or 'same-sex marriage' is itself a verbal indicator that what is being done here is counterintuitive. We all know, or thought we knew, what marriage is, and to add the qualifier 'gay' or 'same-sex' is a tacit admission by the proponents of the practice that it requires an appeal to authority to enforce what seems strange, odd, not right. The verbal tic of 'gay marriage' or 'same-sex' marriage is thus itself a rhetorical warning sign that what was done in Albany was an exercise in raw state power, the state’s asserting that it can do X simply because it claims that it has the power to do so. And that is an exercise of power that libertarians ought, in theory, to resist, not support."

The verbal gamesmanship will go over well with anyone who has ever nodded in agreement with Neil Cavuto as he's argued that climate change has to be a hoax, because one term people who believe in have used has been "global warming", and some of the otherwise inexplicable, calamitous weather events that have been occurring with ever greater frequency these last several years took place when it was cold. Pop culture nostalgists may enjoy the hilarious and argument-settling "Adam and Steve" line, which is a callback to statements made against gay rights in the '80s by such sensitive and thoughtful cultural observers as Jerry Falwell and Donna Summer, one of whom was seriously swimming against the tide of her fan base. (The whole thing about "gay marriage" being a dishonest phrase that cancels itself out will also recall some of George Carlin riffing on such terms as "jumbo shrimp" and "military intelligence." But when it appears under the National Review umbrella, Weigel's argument might also remind those with long memories of William F. Buckley's arguments in defense of racial segregation in the South. In a famous 1957 essay which itself anticipated the Supreme Court's decision that it would be indefensible to count the votes cast in Florida in the 2000 presidential election ton the grounds that the outcome might not favor George's kid, Buckley wrote that "the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically... because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." The question of how the non-whites were to become as "advanced" as the political and cultural sophisticates who put Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond in positions of power so long as the "White community" was denying them equal access to education, jobs, and the ballot box was not Buckley's concern.

Anyone who quotes from that essay today is required to mention that, of course, Buckley later recanted those views, once it became clear that anyone who kept talking like that much deeper into the twentieth century would be recognized as a monster and a butthead. (Buckley, or course, was the man who led conservatism away from the paleolithic paranoid goons, such as the John Birch Society, who were such a prominent part of its makeup when he was young. When he died, in the last year of George W. Bush's presidency, he was much admired, both as the man who helped bring modern conservatism into being and for having had the grace to largely detach himself from whatever the hell it then turned into, which is to say a movement dominated by the paleolithic paranoid goons, some of whom were working to revive the theories immortalized in the literature of, yes, the John Birch Society.) Weigel picks up the line, which has become as familiar as it is goofy, that extending equal rights to marry to gay people will result in people marrying dogs, dolphins, their siblings, their parents, indoor plants, etc. This is on the same level as the argument, which has not disappeared from the earth but is no longer exactly mainstream, that letting gay people work in the school system will result in agents of Stonewall doctrinating kids to embrace preverted lifestyles themselves. It is also on the same level as the argument that, if you let black people vote, why not gorillas. I have no idea if Weigel would have made that argument if he'd been standing proudly alongside William Buckley in 1957, but I know that he wouldn't now. just as Buckley had to backpedal from having said something similar in as elegant a manner as he could, because, as he acknowledges, "the classic civil-rights movement and its righteous demand for equality before the law remains one of the few agreed-upon moral touchstones in 21st-century American culture." To his horror, he recognizes that people demanding equal rights for gays are now widely seen as being engaged in a struggle similar to that of the movement to award equal rights to blacks. In his eyes, this is wrong, because blacks are people too, whereas gays are just filthy pervs who don't even sincerely want to marry for the same reason normal people do; they just want "to redefine a basic human institution in order to satisfy the demands of an interest group looking for the kind of social acceptance that putatively comes from legal recognition."

In fact, Weigel thinks that, when you get right down to it, gay rights are a lot like the racist white citizens' councils. "Legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause," he writes. "Once the American people came to see that these arrangements, however hallowed by custom (and prejudice), were, in fact, unnatural and not obvious, the law was changed... What the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power."

If this is a reflection of anything, it's not historical reality but how far alienated anti-gay rights conservatives, today's legislative bigots, have become from the true story of how their predecessors, even noble, silver-tongued Bill Buckley, reacted to the notion of blacks as equal partners in society when that idea was still controversial enough to push against. To call for racial desegregation, especially in the South back then, was precisely "a call to reinvent reality," arguably "to fit an agenda of personal willfulness." That's certainly how it looked to Buckley and others who objected to desegregation partly on the grounds that it was so much the way things were that fighting it would be more trouble than it was worth. Was Buckley himself a racist, or to put it more gently, someone who couldn't have cared less about the lives of those less white then himself? It would be unthinkable to even suggest such a thing about so fine a man. Funny thing, though: he never argued that trying to dismantle Communism would be more trouble than it was worth, or that the suffering of those forced to live under it was not his concern as a Christian. Perhaps he thought that tearing down the Berlin Wall would be a breeze compared to making some redneck sheriffs obey the goddamn law.

Movements devoted to ensuring the rights of oppressed minorities have a way of throwing into stark relief the fantasy that libertarianism has some claim to having a moral dimension. Both Buckley and Weigel cite tradition as the reason to keep standing on people's necks, because it's just how things have always been done around here. In neither argument is there any acknowledgment that there's a central flaw to the idea that it is amoral, to put it kindly, to support the denial of rights to one group just because you naturally feel closer to the group that's doing the denying, and not for any reason more enlightened than what Mike Huckabee memorably termed "the ick factor." Back in Anita Bryant's day, anti-gay bigots had an armload of reasons why gays shouldn't be treated as full citizens, and now they're down to this one that they feel inexplicably comfortable saying in public: if they can get married, then my marriage will be less special! Does Weigel really not hear how much that sounds like Archie Bunker complaining about the effect that blacks moving into his neighborhood would have on his property values? Is that an argument that Weigel himself would still be able to get behind, if it was just him and me alone in the country club locker room?

The American people did not, in fact, suddenly come to see that laws enforcing racial inequality, "however hallowed by custom (and prejudice), were, in fact, unnatural and not obvious"; those of them who weren't moral imbeciles had always known it, because it was always impossible to miss, but many of them had become inured to it over time, and then, when they heard the spoken poetry of the most eloquent civil rights leaders and saw the worst white barbarians in America clubbing and kicking those people and blasting them with fire hoses and setting dogs on them, they realized that the moral high ground had been taken in public, and there was no way to even be on the fence about that issue without knowing that you were coddling monsters. The gay rights movement has come along by other means, and it hasn't had one spectacularly wrong part of the country (the part I'm from. I should probably remind everybody) to be seen as pitting itself against, but it has its secret weapon: as its become more and more acceptable to be known to be gay, there have been fewer and fewer families who don't know that anti-gay laws hurt someone they love.

Because Weigel has a brain the size of a raisin and the moral sense of a turnip, he can't be expected to understand any of this, let alone agree with any of it. He can't even be expected to get the key similarity in the way that the path to gay marriage mirrors the civil rights movement: both have come to a fight against cruel, witless, and bigoted "state's rights" laws, partly because he's in step with the modern conservative/libertarian fantasy that the civil rights movement was somehow conservative/libertarian in nature, instead of a rebuke to everything he and his lot stood for. In the case of gay rights, we're talking about the rash of ballot measures passed all over the country in 2004 in response to the gay rights scare tactics that went into the stew that got George W. Bush re-elected by the skin of his teeth. Those laws were part of the way that a generation of aging Boomers expressed their bewilderment over living in an America where, a new study reports, whites will no longer be in the majority within less than thirty years and homophobia is literally dying out with each displaced generation; William Saletan refers to such laws as "a prison inflicted by the old on the young." The thing about the civil rights movement is that it really did create exactly the world that racist Southerners--such as my father, who had a stack of pamphlets whose text was just there to pad out the meant-to-be-horrifying photographs of chaste-looking young black men and pretty white girls walking on campus, holding hands--warned that it would, a world where "miscegenation" just looks like normal people living their lives. George Weigel gets the cold sweats from imagining a world where two men walking home together hand-in-hand and bitching at each other about their insurance plan will just look normal, too. That world will come, and if he's lucky, Weigel, like Buckley, may live long enough to get to explain to some curious, tolerant interviewer what he really meant when he wrote all that garbage that, from a modern standpoint, just looks like a scared bigot having a hissy fit.