I’m not infrequently asked why I think that gay marriage support has basically reached takeoff velocity in the past couple years. My ordinary response is obliquely related to what I’ve been talking about in my past couple posts; it’s largely the effect of more and more people coming out of the closet. The cumulative effect of these individual acts simply reveals first, the ordinariness of gay people and second, their prevalence. The regional differences I’ve noted are obviously important, but for the most part people have gotten used to the fact that queers are here and they’ve gotten used to it. Joan Walsh, however, points to why gay marriage demands have, in the grand scheme of things, been relatively easily been accommodated: its politics are essentially conservative:
I’ve come to believe that the difference exists because, except for far right religious extremists and outright homophobes, marriage equality is, at heart, a conservative demand – letting gays and lesbians settle down and start families and have mortgages just like the rest of us will contribute to the stability of families and society.
As she acknowledges, this echoes a long-standing and ultimately successful argument in favor of gay marriage by the likes of Andrew Sullivan and more recently Ted Olsen. But Walsh also puts this trend into dialog with more troubling developments regarding women’s rights. While we’ve seen the onward march of gay rights, feminist accomplishments are being rolled back.
Walsh tries to avoid putting LGBT accomplishments into conflict with women’s rights (“I don’t mean to pit women against the LGBT community, or suggest one side is “winning” at the expense of the other), but its actually a bit hard to do. If the movement, as represented by mainstream organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, has deployed an essentially conservative vision of the family, then should we not recognize the possibility that it has, in fact, contributed to the solidification of opposition to forms of sexuality outside it? Gay marriage advocates have very effectively normalized gay partnerships, but in doing so they’ve also normalized the family itself and so have perhaps contributed to the resistance to a politics dedicated to increasing not just women’s, but everyone’s sexual autonomy outside those confines.