I don’t know who Noah Millman is, but he’s one of those thoughtful conservatives we’re always hearing about:
There’s no way to make this other than personal, so I’ll just say it straight out: my anxieties about gay marriage had little really to do with real, practical concerns about “the state of marriage in America” and certainly nothing to do with “fears” of “teh gays” but, rather, with very real anxieties about my own marriage and my own ability, as a flawed human being, to sustain it in the face of adversity.
Update. To be clear, Millman is for gay marriage now (hence the past tense). The essay is an explanation of his former opposition to it and why he’s changed his mind. I just find the whole essay strangely humorous or humorously strange.
beltane
Huh? What? No way.
Two people of the same sex getting married=Adversity for ostensibly straight couples? I must be missing something here because this makes absolutely no sense to me. My hetero marriage is cheapened by all those unloving conservative marriages out there.
Nimm
What an unreadable essay.
So many words, to say so, so little.
And to clarify: I’m just criticizing the writing style. I had to re-read the first 10 paragraphs about 3 or 4 times, before I could even figure out whether he was pro- or anti- gay marriage.
DougJ
@beltane:
It makes even less sense if you read more of the essay.
matt
Oh its pretty obvious. Conservatives need laws to prevent gays from having an easy time because they are terrified of succumbing to their gay instincts. The laws are a bulwark against republican sodomy. Its like an alcoholic telling everyone to stop him from getting a drink if he tries.
Punchy
he really wrote teh gheys as “teh gays”, as if trying to be funnily serious?
Comrade Javamanphil
Seems like somebody just cracked the closet door open a bit.
ed drone
That’s weird. Someone else somehow and sometime getting married to someone neither he nor his wife would want to marry somehow threatens his “own ability, as a flawed human being, to sustain it in the face of adversity.”
Sounds like he’s using his own failures to thwart the happiness of his fellow human beings.
Gay marriage has a simple ‘solution’ — if you don’t want ‘gay marriage,’ don’t marry someone of your own sex!
It’s all that simple.
Ed
themann1086
Whenever I hear conservatives going on about how gay sex is addictive and blah blah blah, I think “maybe for you it is, but…”
John PM
That article made my head hurt – Ideology of marriage? More like idiocy of marriage. I think Millman proves that if you look hard enough anyone can find someone to marry. I can’t wait to see his essay on how he spoke to his son about sex.
matt
The line immediately after the above quoted reinforces this: ” I looked at myself, and I told myself: I need something more than I have in me to make this work for the long term.”
bleh
“Adversity”? By gay marriage?
In a world where 50% of marriages end in divorce? Where advertising sells sex in thousands of ways, most of which are designed to make you feel bad about yourself? Where the large majority of revenues made from the web are by pornography? And it’s gay marriage he sees as adversity?
Sounds like he needs a boyfriend…
Gunner
Dear Mrs. Millman: Did you ever have thoughts or suspicions that your husband may be gay? If not, you may want to start having them.
geemoney
@matt: What Matt said. That’s the only possible “adversity” that I can think of: seeing two people of the same gender be happy together, with all the rights and considerations that you have with your other-gender partner. The horror, the horror.
Bob L
Did Milliam just say he is a gay man in a charade marriage?
DougJ
@matt:
I wasn’t sure where to cut it.
beltane
@ed drone: It sounds like he wants to marry someone of the same sex (because he is frail), and the fact that other people are doing it presents a problem because he did the conservative thing and forced himself to marry a woman against his true nature.
jibeaux
Okay, I skimmed it, but it is, to paraphrase the late great Douglas Adams, almost, but not quite, entirely incomprehensible.
He does note that the case for it is very straightforward.
Indeed.
Is the corollary there that if you can draft thousands of words strung together incoherently, that this is somehow better or more thoughtful?
Maybe it’s time for a new internet rule along the lines of Occam’s Razor.
If something just seems like a fundamentally fair, decent, and equitable way to treat people, it’s probably correct.
Ah, hell, I just rewrote the Golden Rule, I think.
Redshirt
Ahh! I’ve had a revelation! When Repugs go on and on about Gay marriage will open the door to men marrying dogs and the like, they’re just afraid that they will in fact marry a dog, should the legal opportunity arises.
Projection! Now it all makes sense.
HE Pennypacker, Wealthy Industrialist
With landmark legislation, Argentina just pulled way ahead of us on this matter. How much of the rest of the world will legalize gay marriage before idiots like this guy will stop panicking?
Stefan
Gay marriage has a simple ‘solution’—if you don’t want ‘gay marriage,’ don’t marry someone of your own sex!
Oh, you say that like it’s oh so easy.
dmsilev
Snort. By comparison, I’m reminded of my mom’s reaction when a lesbian couple moved in a few houses down some years ago. She was giving me an infodump of neighborhood goings-on, and mentioned the new neighbors in the context of “I hope our dog doesn’t hate their dog; it’s so hard to chat with people when you’re trying to control a 50 pound growling and pulling dog.” The dogs got along fine, and last time I checked, my parents’ marriage was also doing just fine.
dms
beltane
@Gunner: No wonder these conservative women are all batshit crazy. If I was married to a closeted gay guy, I’d be crazy too.
matt
The gay agenda is to turn everyone gay. If we don’t have laws stopping it they will turn everyone gay.
Stefan
How much of the rest of the world will legalize gay marriage before idiots like this guy will stop panicking?
Most of the it, but we’ll always have Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Afghanistan to keep us company.
ellaesther
@Comrade Javamanphil: Yup. That’s exactly what I thought.
It’s not adversity unless you, yourself, might actually want to leave the woman you’re married to for a man.
Svensker
Huh?
Because somebody else — whom you don’t approve of — gets married it gets harder to stay in your own marriage? I think Noah needs to decide whether he really loves his wife or not, because it sure sounds to me like he’s conflicted. In fact, I’m thinking that Noah is longing for less of “Noah and Abigail” and more of “Noah and Abe,” but those kinds of thoughts make him very uncomfortable.
Also, apparently BJ broke Noah’s internet.
licensed to kill time
It sounds like his anxieties are about marriage in general, so I expect him to try to abolish marriage as an institution for anybody in 3…2…1… oh, wait.
DonBoy
It’s a terrible slog through to the end, and I may have missed something vital, but: the quoted passage is in the past tense. The end point is pro-same-sex-marriage, and includes, about his past opinion that he leads with and that is quoted here, “I was wrong.” I suspect some of the commenters have not made it to the end.
Nimm
I think he’s mostly just saying that he was anti-gay-marriage because he had a thing for rigid social institutions that are, uh, shoved down your throat, and aren’t so much just personal choices that can be made and unmade. Because that way your marriage is less likely to fail in a technical sense only (i.e., “You made your bed, now you lie in it. Tough beans.”), and you’re less likely to look like, and therefore feel like, a failure. So, we have to accept the rigid rules of traditional marriage that are forced upon us by…tradition, I guess.
How this translates into actually looking a gay person in the eyes and saying to them, “And that is why you can’t marry your partner” is utterly beyond me.
The whole thing was tedious + crazy.
NonyNony
Jeebus fucking Christ – what a fucking mess of an essay that is.
That’s one of those blogposts that needs to be taken back and severely edited before posting. Because his basic premise is lost in all the words.
Apparently in the 90s he was for gay marriage, then in the early 2000’s he was against it, and now he’s realized he was wrong and gay marriage is actually a good thing.
That’s it. The rest of it is a soul-searching explanation for why he was wrong in the middle there. And as far as I can tell from reading between the lines is that his brain got caught up in the Republican Tribalism Meme and it infected his critical thinking skills to the point where he felt that he had to abandon his support for same-sex marriage to be a Real Conservative ™. And now he’s trying to explain his lapse in judgment to himself.
A lot of people get sucked into the Republican Tribalism Meme and it’s tough to get out of. Once you DO get out of it you look back and go “WTF? How could I have ever believed something so fucked up?”. It’s especially jarring to young libertarian-Republicans who believe that they’re staunch individualists and one day wake up and realize that they’re just another conformist believing in whatever the group believes in order to belong.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
That’s a pretty big step for someone like that. It’s shifted from being the gays to being them. It’s progress.
numbskull
Just another example of a self-selecting, self-identifying group that simply does not think rationally. They may be nice to have around at church socials and other bullshit functions, but they should be kept far, far away from the levers of power.
Sadly, they’re running one of the two major political parties in this country.
Mnemosyne
Okay, I can almost see that, but lemme explain:
It’s not uncommon for people in bad relationships to re-evaluate those relationships when they see someone in a good relationship. Right now, Millman may still be able to tell himself that his marriage is working okay and he and his wife aren’t any less happy than any other couple out there, really.
And then you see people like these who were so happy and excited to get married, or couples like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who were together for 51 years before they could get married, and he thinks, “Well, shit, I don’t feel that way about my wife. I don’t even want to go home at night and be in the same house anymore.”
On a hetero note, my brother’s marriage broke up right when G and I announced we were moving in together. Something about seeing a happy relationship right in front of them brought their dissatisfactions to the surface. (Well, that and the fact that my brother was fucking his secretary, but that could probably be classed under “dissatisfied with the marriage”).
So, yeah, I could see jealousy at other people’s happiness being a factor in some of the anti-gay marriage BS. If you got married because it was your Christian duty and because you didn’t want to be alone, and then you see all of these couples who desperately want to be together, it will make an honest person question him/herself and a dishonest person want the people who are making them doubt themselves to disappear.
FlipYrWhig
@matt:
Is this his way of admitting that he needs to think he’s special to slog his way through the grim task of staying married, but queers getting married ruin the specialness he needs? If so, it’s like an argument about marriage derived from his inability to piss at a urinal. Don’t distract him by doing it near him, or he’ll feel uncomfortable and shut down.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
I think y’all are misunderestimating it. It’s not that conservatives are gay per se. It’s that they’re vaguely misogynistic and have a sort of “he-man women haters” mentality. Girls are gross and silly and they’d love to just have to hang with their buds. Immaturity, not homosexuality.
David in NY
I can’t make sense of the quote. I can see it if Mr. Millman feared that divorce (either straight or gay) would create anxiety about his marriage, but even that’s a stretch, because you’d think he was in control of his own marriage in large part. And while external events — the death of a child, disability of a spouse, loss of a job — no doubt cause marital instability, they have a real cause and effect relationship with a marriage. There just isn’t any real cause and effect with respect to some other marriage, no matter what kind.
Where do they get this BS?
Sentient Puddle
I think I got about halfway through that post before thinking “OK, now I remember why I don’t typically read posts about the philosophy of political ideology.” I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem to me like delving into the psyche of this stuff is all that interesting or important.
slag
@Punchy: I think he means he’s afraid of having “teh gey”…or something.
Either way, I’m pretty sure this is just an argument against marriage, in general. I can’t see why any gay/straight/other people should want a piece of the Matrimonial Industrial Complex after reading this.
KCinDC
I realize that when someone’s explaining his earlier views and how they differ from his present views there’s some possibility that it’ll be a little confusing, but it really shouldn’t be so hard to do that the reader is left wading through a muddled mess of concepts with no idea which ideas are the ones currently embraced by the author and which are the ones he’s decided are wrong.
And below the article there’s this by noted purveyor of racist comments Steve Sailer:
DonkeyKong
Why is it every time I ask Noah if he wants fish or steak for dinner he screams “I’m not GAY!”- Mrs. Millman
EFroh
EDIT: Whoops, KCinDC already flagged this comment. It really is funny though.
Man, some of those comments over there are hysterical. E.g.:
Now, the gays are trying to make getting married de jure into even more of a gay thing than it already tends to be de facto.
Those of us on the right half of the bell curve have to ask ourselves what guys on the left half of the bell curve are going to think as gays increasingly become the most theatrical participants in getting married? I predict that gay marriage means an increasing number of working class guys are going to dig in their heels about getting married.
How is this, on the whole, going to be good for society.
Can you imagine going through life that insecure? It really must be hell to be a conservative.
Guster
If my wife agreed to fuck me in the ass, I’d support gay marriage.
encephalopath
There’s also a hint of exclusivity in that statement: something only has value if it is of limited supply. If everyone gets to have it, it’s not special anymore. Marriage is cheapened if it’s universally available.
This comes up repeatedly in conservative thinking: the things I have are only valuable if other people are denied access to them; Only the right people should get to have nice things, not those undeserving, grubby interlopers.
David in NY
@FlipYrWhig:
Interesting. I guess he’s never looked around to see all the cretins and lowlifes who manage to get, and often stay, married. It’s really a lowest-common-denominator activity. How’s that make him feel special?
Dave
That is the dumbest fucking thing I have ever read. Suck it up, sunshine. If gay marriage makes you question your marriage, then do your spouse a favor and get a divorce. Because they deserve someone with more backbone than you.
Svensker
Part of the problem for the fundie Christians (fundie Abrahamics, really — I don’t know about Hindus) is that they can’t admit that gayness is inborn, cuz that would mean that maybe God wants “those people” to be that way. So gayness has to be a choice. But if gayness is a choice, then what if everybody chooses to be gay? OMG! Becuz they might! Becuz so many of those fundie Christian guys are closeted gays who hate themselves for making that “choice” and they keep trying to choose to be straight but it’s not working, which must be their own fault. So round and round they go, terrified that their children and their spouses will suddenly “choose” to be gay. Silly but tragic. Like this Noah guy.
That’s what comes of trying to retrofit reality.
NonyNony
@KCinDC:
Jesus Fucking Christ. That’s not even close to the stupidest things that Steve Sailer has posted anywhere and yet it’s so damn fucking stupid that I think a few of my brain cells committed suicide just to not have to think about it.
jibeaux
@DonBoy:
I tried, man, and I got that vibe, but I just wasn’t sure, you know?
DougJ
@DonBoy:
Yes, you’re right, I think crazy Steve Sailer in particular thinks that it was an anti-gay marriage essay.
Ned R.
You know, the comments on that article are even more surreal. (EDIT: Ah I see the Sailer stuff’s already been posted…)
Allan
@beltane: e.g. Michele Bachmann.
SpotWeld
This reads like a person who couldn’t come up with a reasonable argument to oppose gay marriage, but had to force himself to build a framework of pseudo-logic in order to come up with a “reasonable opposition” to the concept so that he could maintain the similarly fragile framework of similar conservative ideals.
Sadly time has worn away that fragile scaffold of “common wisdom” and now he has to put down another layer of tortured logic to convince himself he wasn’t being a horrible person when he created the argument against gay marriage in the first place.
cleek
wow.
that was incoherent.
i wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and read what he wrote with an open mind. but i really couldn’t make heads or tails of it. i have no idea what he’s trying to tell me. and, to me, that suggests he doesn’t know either.
something about gay marriage bugs him, but he hasn’t quite figured it out yet. maybe it’d be better if he stopped trying to talk about it until he figures it out.
freelancer
@Guster:
I’m sure there’s another novel for you to find, in that sentence, somewhere.
arguingwithsignposts
In other ghey related news, apparently David Vitter said Rachel Maddow “used to look like a woman” on a New Awlins radio program this morning. Plum Line has the story (I don’t have the link).
Way to stay classy, diaper dave.
NonyNony
@Ned R.:
But the response from turnbuckle was a classic. You should have left that in there:
I LOLed.
Lev
It’s supposed to be written by Noah Millman, but it reads like something written by James Poulos. Anyone ever read anything by him? He’s supposed to be a brilliant conservative writer, but I tried to read his posts on Culture13 back in the day and every single one was an incomprehensible word salad.
These guys must be academics.
Zifnab
@slag:
You’ll get a tax cut.
DougJ
@Lev:
I think that, yes, some of them are grad students at that blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Third Eye Open
I frequently have the same dream: One day in the near future, the leaders of the GOP and Conservative movements gather for an impromptu presser. After a few minutes of setting the mood, Boehner and Limbaugh tell the world that they have to apologize to us. They have been living a lie. The entire population of modern conservatives have actually been stealth gheys who initially began the ruse to discredit the GOP, but through no fault of their own, began to believe the BS they had been spewing. Suddenly, the lights in the room grow dim, and near the back, a hunky, young intern locks the door from the outside and that is when the music starts. As the reality of the situation sets in amongst the reporters in the room, the entire GOP and their fellow travelers rip off their suits to reveal buttless, leather chaps and begin oiling themselves up for what will only be referred to in the history books as, “The Reckoning”.
Perhaps I should get out more, who knows…
NonyNony
@Zifnab:
And health care benefits. And legal protections in case your spouse dies. And power of attorney for your spouse. And hospital visitation rights. And a host of other things that married folks take for granted.
The tax issue is actually minor compared to all the other special benefits a marriage provides for two partners.
Ned R.
@NonyNony: Hahah true — thanks for adding that back in!
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
Only if you file your taxes jointly and one of you gives up their job or makes significantly less than the other.
Svensker
My goodness, Steve Sailer says jerky things.
Zifnab
@arguingwithsignposts: What is up with the constant cheap “uragay!” shots at Racheal Maddow? Is she the new Ellen “Degenerate”?
aimai
One of the most amazing things I’ve seen, in my near 50 years on this planet, is the very sharp move away from the popular notion that heterosexual marriage is a prison for men, and towards the notion that a healthy, happy, marriage is something that both participants should want and enjoy equally. When I was growing up the Honeymooners, for example, although already quite old was fairly paradigmatic for the way marriage was viewed in popular culture. Of course, we had Leave it to Beaver, too, which presented the happy patriarchal middle class home as the ideal. But it was well understood that the mass of working class families lived lives of quiet or noisy desperation. Because there was little or no divorce. Because people married young and often to the wrong person. Because of the stresses and strains of trying to raise a family on too little income. Because of the lack of freedom to choose and choose again.
The anti gay marriage thing strikes me as incredibly odd because it is often premised on the notion that marriage, for heterosexual males, is *no fun*–that they aren’t freely choosing it, that they aren’t freely choosing how they do it (like the Steve Sailor quote up above), that they are “trapped” by their wives and families. But modern companionate post birth control and divorce marriage ought to be fun. No one *has* to choose to get married to their highschool sweetheart. No one needs to do it for status. No one needs to do it, except the religious nuts, because of the baby. So you’d think that would make angry, unhappy, marriages optional and leave these anti gay people free to at least be alone and happy.
Instead they seem obsessed with the notion that gay marriage is showing up het marriage and putting less pressure on them to get married and stay married despite its awfulness. Part of the anger at gay and lesbian couples is that they seem to be actively choosing it *in preference* to the imaginary all the time hot free sex with no strings attached.
I’m het married, and I like it. I can’t imagine bothering to do it at all if I didn’t, like, love my husband and love being with him. What is the problem with these conservatives that they can’t imagine freely choosing, over and over again, to be with the person they love? What’s the “adversity” they are so afraid of? Marriage is a bulwark against adversity, not itself the producer of it. If you are in the right marriage, that is. And if you are in the wrong one: get the fuck out and stop whining about the neighbors happy lives.
aimai
db
That is so frickin’ gay.
Mnemosyne
@NonyNony:
Yeah, the tax thing is vastly overrated. It’s the other legal protections — like the presumption that you are the legal heir if your spouse dies — that are the really valuable stuff that’s hard to re-create with other contract law.
Kerry Reid
This dude is married, huh? Dammit — why are all the good ones taken?
Lev
@DougJ: Of course not. I was one once. But the problem is that they write like grad students.
David in NY
Oh cripes, you mean I gotta read the whole thing??! What was this, a test to see who clicked the link?
All right, I sorta did, although even skimming it hurt. And he said a couple of nice, simple, sensible things at the end, which wasn’t that hard, since he acknowledges that the case for gay marriage is “straightforward.”
But the real payoff is some guy’s response to Steve Sailer’s argument that gays are making weddings even more theatrical than the girls were making them before, and straight marriages will follow suit, becoming ever more baroque, and the pathetic working guys won’t put up with it any more and will stop getting married! (Really, that’s the argument in a nutshell!)
The response: “Exactly Steve. Just like the Bravo channel has made working class straight guys stop watching TV.”
EDIT: All right, just ignore this — everybody said it all already.
kommrade reproductive vigor
1. He is attempting to answer the question: Why did you change your mind about marriage equality? (He is now FOR it.)
2. Lord he takes a long assed time to get to the point. Here is one of the stops along the way:
3. Jeebus. Do they make Emo-Pants in XXXXXXL?
4. If his wife reads this, she should make him sleep on the couch. Not for agonizing about marriage, but for being an insufferable tosser.
artem1s
at least he’s admitting that its not ‘all for the good of the country’ and really cause he’s a homophobe. He’s right in that it is his personal problem, not ‘teh gays, to get over. Course his solution being that everyone else must change their behavior to save him from himself is a trainwreck.
frankdawg
I worry if my own marriage can withstand adversity! Since I thing young women could cause this adversity I insist that we pass a constitutional amendment requiring them to wear burkas from head to toe!
Seeing them on the beach or at the mall, scantily dressed & oh so tempting, soft & tender & . . . eh . . . er . . . well NOT ME you understand but those others – YES that it its those others that can’t withstand temptation.
Zifnab
@NonyNony: Well, the tax cuts were for starters. I figured it would get the attention of any conservatives on the board.
@Mnemosyne: What’s the statistic now? Women make 73% of men in the same job? And that’s assuming one parent isn’t stay-at-home.
I don’t know a lot of families where both parents make exactly the same. Usually one parent is a teacher and the other is white collar – at least where I grew up. Or one parent is a doctor/lawyer/real estate person and can afford to support the family as a whole.
Even past that, a bunch of tax credits and deductions double if you are married and under something like $100k. Funny enough, on the flip side, a bunch of credits and deductions also max out faster if you’re married. I know one straight couple that actually got divorced for tax purposes.
Jen
Did…I read the same essay as the rest of you? Because what I read was the (overly-wordy, yes, and somewhat rambling) explanation for why a former same-sex-marriage opponent is now a supporter of marriage rights. Maybe it’s because I’m going through a divorce myself, and so am naturally drawn to navel-gazing examinations of why we get (and stay) married, but I thought the way he examined and disassembled his previous stance was fascinating.
Also fascinating: someone getting more liberal as they get older, instead of more conservative; a conservative who states that while men and women may be different, those differences are negligible in the macroscopic view; glib commenters who can’t seem to be bothered to finish the entire article before dismissing it.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
That’s where the male dominance comes in, though — as long as gay men are running around screwing everything in sight, het men can point to them and say, “See, that’s just how men are, so I’m doing you a favor by marrying you and being monogamous. Aren’t I magnanimous to deny part of my nature for you?” That despite the fact that every statistic shows that men get more emotional and health benefits from being married than women do.
But having gay men get married ruins the game. It shows that, just like some (but not all) women are happier in a monogamous relationship, some (but not all) men are also happier in a monogamous relationship. It shows that, well, people are people and you can’t make an automatic assumption about how someone will behave or feel based on their gender. And that’s threatening as hell to male hegemony.
slag
@Zifnab: For sure. I know all the best lifelong commitments I’ve ever made have started out with a good bribe.
—
What’s interesting here is the difference between how a liberal and a conservative might approach these kinds of questions. As a liberal, I start out thinking, “Gay marriage? Sure, why not?”, and then, would have to be talked into rejecting gay marriage based on reasons compelling enough to override my innate tendency to favor equality. But it seems that conservatives start the other way, “Gay marriage? Why! That’s blasphemy!”, and then, have to be talked into accepting it for reasons compelling enough to override their innate tendency to favor exceptionalism and arbitrary privilege.
NonyNony
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, I think a lot of folks don’t understand exactly how many privileges come with being married unless they have had to use them themselves or they know a couple who aren’t married but who would have been better off substantially if they were.
The legal heir thing is especially important. Especially if the partner who owns the house dies without a will. I’ve seen that happen to a hetero couple and it was an ugly mess.
DonkeyKong
Sailor isnt a jerk, he’s just Burkean. Or Jerkean if you will.
Paris
Are all conservatives closeted gay men?
Guster
@freelancer: I dunno, the problem is that whole ‘stranger than fiction’ thing. Who’d believe these people?
“I am a flawed human being, so no wedding for you, homo!”
Librarian
I don’t know, but it seems to me that switching positions now from pro- to anti- gay marriage is a little like getting on board the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.
Mnemosyne
@Jen:
I think people are being a little too harsh on the guy, frankly. He’s admitting error and analyzing how he came to make that mistake. That’s a good thing, IMO.
Warren Terra
And here I always thought adversity was when you lose your job, or your partner gets seriously ill, or even when you step in a puddle of doggie vomit first thing in the morning. The possibility that my neighbors’ marriage might come with matching genitals just doesn’t qualify as adversity.
Even if I were to be consumed with fear and hatred of what Mr. Millman calls, in his hip and supremely with-it fashion, “teh gays” (and surely it’s spelled “teh ghey”?), that wouldn’t really qualify as “adversity”, not unless I decide that all of my other passions and worries qualify as “adversity”. And if those other concerns do so qualify, then – when there’s genocide in Africa, deforestation in Brazil, and M. Night Shamalyan is still making movies – what mad sense of priorities must I have to let my fear of Temptation by the Rainbow Menace be the issue that qualifies as “adversity”?
..
P.S. I subscribe to the bloggingheads.tv podcast, because it’s sometimes OK radio and I’m just that boring, and yesterday my queue downloaded a Millman/Douthat “diavlog” that I promptly decided not to listen to. But seeing this absurd paragraph, and knowingly how resoundingly shallow and immensely self-impressed Mr. Douthat is, I admit that I’m now a bit morbidly curious …
maus
If you’ve got an insatiable lust for the cock, get divorced.
bemused
Conservatives are very uptight and have way, way too much anxiety. The ideal solution would be to legalize pot, send them all to remote location with a large supply for an extended period of time to mellow out. They and we would all be a lot better off.
Midnight Marauder
@aimai:
Yes, you do. Otherwise, you are an epic failure in the eyes of the Almighty and your life is no longer worth living. That’s the beauty of dogma, I suppose.
gbear
Did he get around to admitting that the social acceptance of interracial marriages is forcing him to beat his children?
David in NY
@aimai:
Interesting point about the change in perceptions of marriage. Not sure how uniform that is, but you’re surely partially right.
Now, I hate to go all “economic determinism” on you, but I wonder whether the fact that women now bring in lots of the money that keep families going, maybe more than the man, maybe all of it, has made some difference in this. The guys can’t just dis their wives and what they do in the same way they used to because they depend financially on it much more.
Guster
@Mnemosyne: I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it’s a drive to appear/think of oneself as magnanimous.
I think it’s sheer terror. I think (read: ‘remember’) that boys and immature men feel that they mercy of their libido, a terrifying and powerful drive that can force them to do just about anything, however humiliating or immoral. They’re completely out of control. That terrifies them. And if there’s no social sanction against being gay–or fucking box turtles, or whatever other lurid fantasy they have–they know that they’re gonna be first in line. They look into themselves and see nothing but weakness, an absolute lack of internal control, so they grow frantic with terror at the suggestion that we remove any external controls. I’m sure there’s a psychological term for this.
It’s a self-control issue. Dominance, I guess, too–but mostly terror.
Ash Can
It’ll never occur to this delicate flower that if the best reason a guy can come up with for not getting married is that it hurts his manly-man fee-fees, he shouldn’t get married.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Because somebody else—whom you don’t approve of—gets married it gets harder to stay in your own marriage?
Nah. As far as I can parse it, it’s because girly shit drives him up the wall and if he started to think marriage was a choice rather than something he was imprisoned in for life, he might piss off.
David in NY
@Mnemosyne:
A lot of people, like me at first, are failing to realize that this really is a test to see who clicked the link.
SpotWeld
@Paris: Nope, just closeted humans… *shhh* Don’t let they other conservatives figure it out. I hear humans have empathy!!
maus
@Ash Can: But because the gays do it, the straights won’t do it, and that THREATENS HIS EXISTING MARRIAGE.
@Phoenician in a time of Romans:
Don’t forget all the luscious men that will now be bachelors for life. The strapping ones. You know, who have the sex.
John Cole
You know, I’m not completely stupid. I do a lot of stupid and self-destructive things, but I’m not a total moron. I can read and figure things out.
But the last couple of years, I read Republicans and conservatives and well over half the time I sit and say to myself- “What the fuck are they talking about? What are they thinking? That doesn’t make any damned sense.”
It’s like being sober on a busload of people on acid.
NonyNony
@David in NY:
Not just a test for clicking the link – there’s a reading comprehension portion as well. And I don’t mean that sarcastically – I think you could read it two or three times and still not quite get the point.
As I said above – it’s a fucking mess of an essay that needs to be pulled back and re-edited. Because he loses his entire point in all the words, and it’s too easy to read the essay and come away thinking he’s anti-gay marriage.
slag
@John Cole:
One too many Grateful Dead concerts for you.
David in NY
@John Cole: The case he makes for gay marriage at the end is pretty clear, though getting to it is, to sort of borrow your metaphor, quite a trip.
Zifnab
@slag: I could have some existential argument with you about the nature of “friendship” and “selfishness” and the desire to socialize, and if you bought my liberal definition of the word “bribe” I might actually win it.
But yeah. Government sanctioned marriage is a legal contract. If there was no incentive to sign said contract, I can’t see why someone would bother when anyone can declare, “I wuv you forever and ever” to one’s beloved in front of a man with a funny hat and call it a day.
burnspbesq
As a straight married person, of course I’m in favor of gay marriage. Why should gay people “miss out” on all the “fun?”
David in NY
@NonyNony: Absolutely. I believe that skimming to the part that says “the case for gay marriage is straighforward” is the way to go, because it is. Guy needs an editor.
Did the women here think his note at the end to his wife — noting that his professed angst about all this really didn’t mean he wanted a divorce or something — was sweet or stupid?
Corner Stone
@NonyNony:
Dude’s having a crackup. His wife probably caught him doing a little slap and tickle with his workout partner. He swore it would be the last time, if only she’d give him another chance to be the man he promised her. But he just couldn’t do it, couldn’t perform that way for her anymore. The thought of Ed’s rippling shoulder muscles filled his mind…and he just couldn’t touch her again.
And the result of that is this truly messed up and incoherent personal journal entry he posted as an entre to his outre.
Bill E Pilgrim
What in the name of all that is holy…
I haven’t read this thread so others have probably covered this but so basically he’s saying that gay people shouldn’t get married because what, they might get divorced as often as straight people do?
Has he been excluded somehow from the knowledge of just what sort of “failure” rate straight marriages are up to these days? And this makes them superior because… what now?
Oy.
At least he used “repudiate” instead of refudiate but that’s about all there is to elevate this above what’s emitted daily by the salad shooter known as Sarah Palin.
Fleas correct the era
No, there are some conservative women too.
stuckinred
@slag: No such thing.
Corner Stone
Homer: That John is the greatest guy in the world. We’ve gotta have him and his wife over for drinks sometime.
Marge: Hmm, I don’t think he’s married, Homer.
Homer: Oh, a swinging bachelor, eh? Well, there’s lots of foxy ladies out there.
Marge: Homer, didn’t John seem a little… festive to you?
Homer: Couldn’t agree more. Happy as a clam.
Marge: [insisting] He prefers the company of men!
Homer: Who doesn’t?
Marge: Homer, listen carefully. John is a ho – mo…
Homer: Right.
Marge: … sexual.
Homer: [pause] Aaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Bobby Thomson
@matt:
That’s what I thought he meant based on Doug’s excerpt, which of course makes no sense. Allow gays to marry and fewer of them are out on the street for the closeted Republicans to engage in pubic debate.
But the essay is more twisted than that. The point of the essay is that this thoughtful conservative views marriage as an ordeal/destiny/drudgery, and not a “choice,” and that same sex couples are unlikely to see marriage the same way and therefore less likely to stay in bad marriages.
Yep, that’s really the argument. Yes, it’s really revealing.
Yes, your original instincts may, in fact, be correct, though his marriage may be loveless for entirely different reasons than repressed sexuality.
NonyNony
@David in NY:
Can’t speak for the women, but I thought it was stupid.
If you wrote something that you think your wife is going to take the wrong way, you should consider re-writing it until you reach the point where you think she’ll understand. If you can’t even get your life-partner to understand the meaning behind your words how the fuck is it going to read to a bunch of random strangers on the Internet?
OTOH, if you don’t really think she’s going to take it the wrong way, but you want to cover your ass and make her think she’s taking it the wrong way, then perhaps you and she need to have a little sitdown – perhaps with a counselor – and see if you can work out some of these issues.
Norwegian Shooter
I’ve never heard of those two marital aides but I love the euphemism of “self”. Delicious.
jl
I can’t decipher much of the post, so not sure if he is admitting something, or what. But at least he changed his mind in the right direction.
At least I think he did. As I said, much of it (like marriage is subsumption of self or whatever) I cannot exactly figure out.
So I started skimming for the bottom line, which is he changed his mind. Good.
some other guy
IMO, the Onion had the definitive piece mocking this mindset several years back.
jl
@jl: I can’t figure out your joke either. I am too simple for this blog.
asiangrrlMN
Shit, but he cannot write AT ALL. I skimmed through once and thought he had gone from supporting gay marriage to being against it. Then, I had to re-read (after reading all the comments here) it to get that he went from supporting gay marriage to being against it to supporting it again. WTF, dude? I mean, I can’t fault him for being verbose because I am the queen of verbosity when I blog, but at least make it fucking coherent. Shit. Glad he made it back to the right side of the argument, finally, but he seriously needs to edit that piece.
And, anyone who thinks other relationships are threatening to his/her own needs to get out of said relationship. In other words, it’s you, not teh gays.
General Stuck
@John Cole: Here man, I got some Orange Sunshine for you. The colors are far out man.
Meanwhile, there is at least one wingnut making some sense, and of all people Krauthammer the WAPO Wonder.
I would only disagree with the Kraut’s timeline, in that Reagan started out with hard right ideological reforms, especially on government regulatory agencies and especially those that regulated the environment, ie James Watt and wrecking crew. The first mid term losses he had came from moderates and energized liberals unnerved by the zeal of his minions in sabotaging those agencies and others dealing with New Deal stuff. To his credit, Reagan and team moderated later that drew the ire of his RW base.
I would also say that Obama has befuddled both his left wing voters and the wingnuts out of the gate, but the Kraut gets the long political game, even if our progressive masters don’t. Act two will take on politically popular regulation, in increments, starting small. The Finreg bill was but a first step, next will come enviro stuff. But his success will depend almost entirely on the economy improving.
Ash Can
Maybe Millman was drunk when he wrote this essay.
Norwegian Shooter
Dan Savage, please pick this up:
— Steve Sailer · Jul 16, 02:15 PM
Mark S.
@Jen:
I thought he was a gay marriage proponent who is now an opponent. I’m not re-reading it.
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t know what the current status of the estate tax is, but that greatly favored married couples. Anything that goes to your spouse when you die is tax free.
David in NY
Let me do Millman a favor and edit his conclusion, which follows many long, turgid paragraphs after the quote in DougJ’s post, which represents only his past views:
Now, properly edited, that’s not bad for a conservative.
slag
@Zifnab:
Exactly right. Which is why I disagree with the guy when he writes this:
Marriage is fundamentally about property. Love is a whole different thing.
licensed to kill time
@John Cole:
Yes, and unfortunately I think we’re all in for a long, strange trip with them.
asiangrrlMN
@David in NY: Can’t speak for other women, of course.
Stupid. Passive-aggressive and childish. Own your shit and don’t do the ‘I’m sorry if I offended you’ bullshit.
@Mark S.: He was afor it before he were agin in, and now he a-afor it again. I had to skim through twice to get that point. You’re welcome.
Corner Stone
@David in NY:
It’s always been about control, and this is just one facet of it. Another piece is that if gay marriage is state sanctioned then the partner will have all the legal rights, company benefits, etc. that straights have. Gay partners will be a recognized legitimate party and have control over outcomes and destiny they don’t (or may not) have now.
And it terrifies some people that it’s another loss of control over how they force people to live a life that isn’t theirs.
This is what the conservative movement is and has always been about. Loss of supremacy and loss of control.
Because at heart they’re just scared little wankers.
kommrade reproductive vigor
It’s the reverse. I wouldn’t suggest re-reading it unless you’re suffering from insomnia.
And the fact that we saw the word “Conservative” and assumed he was anti-=marriage proves we’re the real homophobes. [sob!]
Bill E Pilgrim
@kommrade reproductive vigor: If most of the people reading your article have no idea whether your in favor of same-sex marriage or not, then you don’t need soul-searching, you need rewriting.
Yes, at the end he seems to be saying that he repudiates himself now, even though he spends most of the essay making the case for why the repudiation to come is wrong. I think.
I think conservatives need to worry less about marriage and more about being divorced from reality to the point that they make no sense whatsoever.
Norwegian Shooter
OMG, posted too soon:
— Steve Sailer · Jul 16, 02:55 PM
asiangrrlMN
@kommrade reproductive vigor: It’s the triple reverse. He was for it in the 90s before being against it in the early 00s (presumably because of his own marriage) before being for it again in the past year.
DougJ, I think you should do an update to clear up this confusion.
I just thought of something. He said he was for it in the 90s in an Andrew Sullivan kind of way. Hmmmmm…..
bemused
@John Cole:
Word mush.
David in NY
@Mark S.:
Don’t reread it. Just read his conclusion in my post (120) just below yours.
maus
@John Cole:
It’s not stupid, it’s calculated.
Personal responsibility junkies need someone to blame their horrible marriages and personalities on, and they focus on anyone that’s not exactly like them, or like how they see themselves.
Liberals, “poors” (regardless of their class, they’re never poor), gays, blacks, hispanics (and if they’re hispanic, the enemy is the underclass hispanic. Mexicans to Cubans and South Americans, etc.)
All these people are to blame for the Republican not having the perfect life. If only…
stuckinred
Watson crossed the bridge maybe for the last time.
David in NY
@asiangrrlMN: I’ve tried to clear things up a little in post 120, which states Millman’s current views, which are quite reasonable. DougJ’s quote did get me and others off on the wrong foot.
burnspbesq
@Mark S.:
All that means is that you have to find a different reason to off your spouse this year.
Seriously, though, the unlimited marital deduction against the estate and gift taxes was one of the few smart tax policy calls that the Reagan Administration made.
Zandar
Is this conservative existential comedy?
Because to me that essay came across as Seinfeld for people who live in gated communities.
Maybe that was humor. Sort of a really subtle “The Onion/Colbert Report” kinda thing.
Mark S.
Thanks David and Asiangrrl, I did read it wrong. That essay had more switchbacks than a hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro.
beltane
@licensed to kill time: Who would ever have thought that in 2010, The Bus would be full of wingnuts. Ken Kesey is rolling in his grave.
David in NY
My wife used to practice estates law, and she found lots of cases where people got, or nearly got, economically screwed by not getting married. If you don’t marry, and you die without a will, for example, your property may go to the brother you hated and not the woman you loved. My wife arranged sickroom weddings for couples, one on the verge of death, to assure the other pension benefits. And so on …
David in NY
@Mark S.: I though Cole’s metaphor of being in a bus with people on acid nailed it.
DougJ
@David in NY:
Sorry, I thought the past tense would clue people in, but the whole thing is confusing, anyway.
licensed to kill time
@beltane:
You’re either on the bus, or you’re off the bus. If Kesey was still around, he’d kick ’em off in a heartbeat. Then we’d ALL drop acid and re-attune.
David in NY
@DougJ: You should never underestimate the carelessness with which we read what you write or quote.
Anyway, thanks for the clarification. When you boil down his conclusion, as I did above in post 120, it’s actually kinda nice. Now he should just take a writing course, or go into analysis, or something.
Jenn
Huh, I thought it was pretty wordy, but also pretty clear that he currently supports same-sex marriage. Reading these comments made me wonder how many people actually read it, & of those, how many just skimmed it for ammo to bash ‘another homophobic conservative’.
There is a shitload of stuff going on where we need to get angry – piling on some dude because he was wordy about saying civil unions aren’t enough, & that he now supports same-sex marriage, seems a tad petty & counterproductive. Don’t we WANT people to realize that same-sex marriage isn’t going to adversely impact, well, anything whatsoever?
Violet
Just read the essay. This guy spent an inordinate amount of time pondering what it means “to be a man.” He comes across as having issues in that regard.
I’ll never understand why conservatives are so freaked out about gay marriage. My only conclusion is that the GOP is a giant closet full of terrified gay people. Outside of that, their opposition to it is just bizarre.
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ: It’s funny partly because it reads like the script from Spinal Tap, to me.
Yes I think if an entire team of non-right-wing bloggers are needed to re-read, edit, and tease out the meaning from conservative writers, we’re entering a stage of the wingularity that no one predicted.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Bill E Pilgrim: Agreed.
He is long-winded and felony tedious and I say that as someone who reads government regs. for a living. However, he’s NOT one of the dipshits who think that giant flying schlongs will start attacking school children if two consenting adults who happen to have matching naughty bits get hitched.
I thought it unfair that people were piling on because of the one paragraph. However, between Mark Williams and rampant bed soiling over The Kids are All Right, my standards for human behaviour are rather low today.
Thanks for the update DougJ.
DougJ
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Yes, exactly.
Sly
I have no idea who Millman is, so I have no context in which to understand what he’s saying. The big problem is that his self-indulgent tone makes me want to skip ahead a lot, and he makes some rather abrupt changes that jumble up his theme if you do skip ahead.
He does an admirable job of deconstructing the arguments against marriage equality, though, once you understand that this was his purpose.
Nicole
@Jen: I’m with you and Mnemosyne- I think the guy realized his anti-gay marriage position was wrong. Now, not being like our blog host, he isn’t capable of simply saying he wished he could punch his old self in the neck (one of my very favorite Cole-isms ever and one I will likely steal); instead he has to drag readers through some pretty tortured navel-gazing on why he once held that position and now why he’s changed his mind. Which is too bad, as it’s much easier to just say, “I was wronger than the wrongest person in Wrongville” and leave it. Either way, though, he arrived at the right position, so yay for that and maybe as his moral compass improves his writing will, too.
David in NY- as a married woman, I found the little tag at the end neither sweet nor stupid- I think it was an attempt by him to head off commenters who were going to say things like, “You’re just unhappy in your own marriage/You’re just closeted/You’re just a wee little puppet man.” I don’t think it was for his wife at all- it was for the commenters.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Svensker:
Somebody needs to write a book for these poor souls, as they struggle to cope with life. Sort of like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, only it would be Pilgrim’s Progress with Gaydar. To help them get through the Slough of Straight Despond.
Mnemosyne
@Guster:
It is specifically when it comes to marriage. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have all of these hoary old jokes about the ol’ ball and chain and fun-loving men being forced to settle down into miserable domestic lives.
Men want to be married just as much as women do, and they get more benefits from it. But, culturally, they’re not allowed to admit that. They have to moan and grump and whine about their “freedom being taken away.”
Now, admittedly, I’m seeing this from the female end. I’m thinking about how many guys I know who really wanted to be married, or at least be in a steady relationship, but who felt compelled to sabotage things because it wasn’t “manly” to want those things. Or, my favorite, the guy who agrees to be FWBs (friends with benefits) as a ploy to get the girl to be his girlfriend and is enraged when he realizes that she was telling the truth the whole time and she didn’t actually want to be his girlfriend. Of course she wanted to be his girlfriend! Women always want a commitment! He was getting ready to propose! What the hell is wrong with her?!
Jenn
@Nicole:
I loved that episode. (referring to wee puppets, of course.) I sort of pretend seasons 3 & 4 don’t exist, but 5 was fun.
Jen
@Jenn:
Just for the record, this is not me (#76) posting twice…there are too many damned Jennifers in this world! Although I do agree with what she says.
Sly
Upon further reading, the best part about the post is not the post itself, but the comments. Specifically Sailer’s second comment, as he demonstrates the sheer egomania of the anti-equality mindset without even being aware that he is doing it.
“If gays are allowed to get married, then gay men will gay up the whole getting married process, which will mean that I’m gay if I want to get married!”
The obvious answer is that Mr. Sailer’s identity crisis is his own fucking problem, perhaps literally as well as figuratively.
@Nicole: I think the tag was more along the lines of assuring readers that, even though he talked about his own past personal issues with respect to marriage, those problems haven’t risen to the point where they’ve actually undermined his marriage. Whether that’s the truth, in that they haven’t created problems without him realizing it, is not something that I particularly care about.
cmorenc
Lots of 100% hetrosexual folks (like me) have come around thusly on the subject of gay marriage.
1) Most of us still don’t quite approve of it on a personal level, really, see point #4 below for what this really amounts to in practice.
2) Nevertheless, we’ve come around to approving of it in princple. At some point we’ve come to the epiphany that any alleged threat it poses to society, hetrosexual marriage, or family is a pure mirage, and therefore a dubiously intolerant one that badly flunks the healthy libertarian ideal we’d all like to think we personally and society at large should live by: “whatever floats your boat and doesn’t swamp or sink mine is fine by me”. And so, we’ve concluded that : if they gays want it, let ’em have it, they’re consenting adults and it’s their life.
3) Therefore, gays shouldn’t need our stinkin’ approval to decide whether to marry one another or not. Though like the anti-gay marriage crowd we would still firmly draw the line against marrying one’s dog or horse, we’re mature enough to understand that sanctioning gay marriage doesn’t even remotely set any sort of valid precedent or principle toward that sort of thing.
4) However, most of us aren’t exactly looking forward eagerly to the day when we might be invited to a gay wedding. This is related to the fact that most male hetros aren’t really comfortable with the idea of being around two guys making out with each other (or knowing such is imminently about to happen), although this observation has to be qualified by the fact that most hetro guys aren’t nearly as put off by being around two women being cuddly in a sexually-charged way with each other, and some even get off on e.g. lesbian porno scenes.
5) Some hetros (especially in more cosmopolitan, hip areas) are much farther along with being comfortable with the whole array, including not just legalization of gay marriage, but enthusiastically attending gay weddings and the like. Maybe most of the rest of us will be there in less than a decade, maybe much less – it’s important to keep in perspective that only a decade ago, a large majority of us were still firmly against gay marriage per se, and only went along tepidly with “civil unions”.
Of course, again, gays don’t and shouldn’t need our approval for deciding whether to marry or not. But the more that more and more of us evolve toward accepting the whole thing within our personal comfort zone, and not merely our abstract ideals, the better off everyone concerned will likely be.
Cat Lady
@burnspbesq:
As some funny guy once said – “Same sex marriage? I’m in favor of some sex marriage”.
Adam C
@Jen:
Well, it was either poorly-written or poorly-read; very few of the commenters in this thread seem to have bothered to understand it. Which is too bad, because I think SSM is an issue where it would really help to understand the other side’s objections outside of simple homophobia.
For those people: by “adversity” that threatened his marriage, he did not mean adversity caused by SSM. He meant the real-life sort of adversities that all marriages face. His worry was that if ‘marriage’ is only about love, then he wasn’t strong enough to make his work. He needed ‘marriage’ to be something bigger and more special – an institution that could lend him strength instead of relying on his own.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t find anything in ‘marriage’ that was special outside of love, except for the union between two different genders. To reinforce his belief in ‘marriage’, he needed this specialness, and gays therefore were excluded not by malice, but by definition. Gays getting married wouldn’t hurt him, but a definition of ‘marriage’ that included gays didn’t helphim.
Call it “pseudo-logic” if you like, but we all create rationalizations to greater or lesser extent in order to justify our actions and beliefs. At least he eventually realized that his rationalization was not only false, but harmful.
Also: sneering at the “manhood” of someone who is open about his failings isn’t really helpful.
ChicagoTom
Fuck you John Cole for making me read that rambling incoherent screed.
That’s 10 minutes of my life wasted that I will never get back.
This guy is the epitome of “Talking a lot, but not saying anything”.
What a waste of words
wasabi gasp
Mr. Millman appears less than cock-sure about his plunging into the sanctity of marriage.
Jen
@Adam C:
I think maybe it was written in a more academic style than we’re used to reading at our desks during the day? I know I had to turn off the podcast I was listening to and really focus – rather than just skimming while multi-tasking – to understand it.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t find anything in ‘marriage’ that was special outside of love, except for the union between two different genders.
And the point of ‘marriage’ being restricted to two different genders is to allow for the possibility of procreation. Well, what about those of us who got married with no intention of ever having children? To follow the conservatives’ argument on this point down the logical rabbit hole, my marriage would have been invalid, too.
Adam C
@Jen:
And the point of ‘marriage’ being restricted to two different genders is to allow for the possibility of procreation.
I don’t think that’s it, at least not in Millman’s rationalization. He describes procreation as the “material expression” of the greater whole that was marriage, but the “third thing” (husband+wife+marriage) would exist with or without children. It rested on the “complementarity” of the sexes. SSM would be missing this “complementarity”.
Part of changing his mind seems to have been realizing that this “complementarity” is either fictional or irrelevant.
Added: why I think this sort of thing is important to come to grips with is that I believe it’s widespread among non-homophobic opposition to SSM. It’s a wordier way of asking “Who leads?” when a gay couple dances – the idea that you can’t make a marriage without ‘male behaviour’ and ‘female behaviour’.
SiubhanDuinne
Oooh, paradox! Heavy.
IM
Well, I did leave the boat and was pleasantly surprised. it was quite insightful essay actually. The beginning, who he changed his mind twice and the end, where he did give the usual pro-marriage reasons, are somewaht boring.
The middle part, that so many of you found rambling and boring is interesting, is the interesting part, were he tries to explain the “marriage ideology”. He isn’t wholly successfull, but he still makes some good points.
And he doesn’t tell us really anything about his marriage, making his endnote a bit superfluous. All he reveals is very ordinary doubt that perhaps his marriage could fail, that the love would not last. And he reacted by clinging to this marriage ideology, there marriage is only a means to a higher end.
And since gay marriage did not seems to fit to the “marriage is just a shared sacrifice for a higher end (Think of the childern!)” construct he opposed it.
I think that was quite insightful.
Jen
@Adam C:
I don’t think that’s it, at least not in Millman’s rationalization.
True. I’m bringing my own frustrations and biases to bear on this discussion, obviously, which means it’s time for me to step back.
Sly
@Jen:
The half-logical response would be that people who get married with no intention of having children could either change their minds or become pregnant by accident, decide to take the pregnancy to term (the legality of abortion notwithstanding), and raise the child. We are, after all, talking about a movement that privileges the potential over the actual.
A set of better questions are these: How would couples with one or more infertile partners fit under such a principle? Should marriages be forcibly annulled if one or more partners became infertile before a child was produced? Are marriages automatically annulled once a woman reaches menopause? Etc.
IM
And he is writing much better than that inpenetrable Poulos. I did not like him at Culture11 either and was always irritated by everybody there treating him like a genius. I did read Culture11because of Friedersdorf, who was keeping it real then.
Chad N Freude
I read the entire Writing Teacher’s Delight, and I agree with Jen, Mnemosyne, David, NonyNony, Nicole. I do think that IM@163 somewhat overstates the insightfulness, although I agree that Millman really did think it through.
And
Undoubtedly the most pretentious pseudo-philosophical statement ever written. I would like to see that on a T-shirt.
ETA: I apologize to any positive responders that I omitted from my list of Thoughtful People. And you guys who jump in with comments without taking the trouble to read all of what you’re commenting on … Finger Wag!
Allan
We have a married neighbor who finds little excuses to hang around and chat with us, and when, for example, my other half said he was enjoying the World Cup, especially at the end of the matches when the players rip their jerseys off, the neighbor exclaimed, “Oh, I know!”
When I was still single, I joined a social group for gay men over 40 and fell in with a group of guys who also played bridge. While chatting between hands, we determined that of the eight of us, I was the only one who was NOT a divorced, separated, or still married dad.
So there you are.
IM
I found it insightful because this marriage ideology comes a lot from gay marriage opponents, but of course they never admit or don’t really know it is a ideology. Lot of unstated assumptions.
So getting it explained by someone who professed it and then grew out of it could be quite enlightening. Millman isn’t that good at it, admittedly.
maus
@Jenn:
Partially! But someone who shares my opinion for reasons he does not understand or can not admit is not really a “friend”, per se. I appreciate his belief, but wish that in the future he comes around via a more direct route.
With that direct route, he’ll be right about many more things, not just one particular issue that he gets a head-pat and a cookie for.
asiangrrlMN
I wasn’t trying to bash him. I honestly had no idea what he was trying to say. But, for full disclosure, I don’t believe in the institution of marriage as it is, anyway, so I don’t spend any time thinking about it. He wasn’t clear in his writing, and it has nothing to do with an academic style. I freelance edit academic papers, so I know how to read that style of writing. This guy just wasn’t very clear in his presentation. And, there was a whole lot of ‘to be a man means being with a woman in this thing called marriage’ which I simply don’t get.
@cmorenc: Honestly, for straights who are uncomfortable with it, just don’t go to the weddings. I really don’t see the big deal.
And for the umpteenth time, I really wish this hadn’t been the issues LGBT folk decided to fight for. I put a much higher priority on job safety and equal protections on the job than I do on marriage (which, as I stated, I find to be pretty discriminating and patriarchal in the first place).
Nicole
@Jenn: I am in total agreement about Season 5. Every Angel-Spike scene made me happy. Buffy, Schmuffy- those two vamps were made for each other.
IM
When did we take a turn into the Whedonverse?
And Millmann would be who, the major?
suzanne
@Adam C:
THANK YOU. I’m rather disappointed by some of the comments here. Yanno, “experts” (whoever they are) estimate 7-10% of the population is gay. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume 7-10% of conservatives are gay. Far, far more than 7-10% of them are anti-SSM, and it’s counter-productive to just write off their homophobia as sublimated homosexuality. There’s a deeper problem in than mindset than fear of loving cock, and though this article was all over the damn place, I appreciate that Millman attempted to examine it.
IMHO, the underlying issue is that social conservatives have made all sorts of unfun, unenjoyable life decisions within a framework of being told that those things would be “good for them”. Passed up sex when they wanted it. Some passed up youthful experimentation with drugs and alcohol. Passed up traveling the world and partying with friends and following their favorite rock band and writing the Great American Novel. Many did all this in order to get married. Have kids. Buy the house in the suburbs. Work in a boring office job. And because no one wants to admit they fucked up or missed out, and everyone wants their lives to have meaning, they convince themselves that those sacrifices were noble, in service of something greater to the community and to themselves. And the social order they have developed reinforces those choices and makes those decisions seem like good ones. Quite literally, their social order tells them that their lives are meaningful.
That’s why a social order that suggests that doing the things you want is not just acceptable but morally equivalent is so distressing to them. And that’s why so many of them will do that for-civil-unions-but-not-actual-MARRIAGE cognitive jiu jitsu. Most of them don’t actually give a fuck about the taxes gays pay or having partners visit each other in the hospital or any of the tangible benefits of marriage. They are fucking TERRIFIED that their life choices, the sacrifices they’ve made, will eventually be revealed as worthless. They dress it up in that bullshit “what about the CHILDREN?!?!” hysteria, but they genuinely are really scared that the next generation of society won’t, without the strict framework they’ve constructed, make similar life choices, *thereby invalidating their own*.
I think that’s what Millman is trying to get at, with all his when-do-you-become-a-man digression. And it has nothing to do with whether or not the man wants cock or twat or both.
maus
@suzanne:
So why aren’t we allowed to make fun of them for this?
Why must we coddle them, even when they’re not around?
I’m glad he found the right way, but if we can’t ridicule them for their life spent trying to make themselves and others miserable, what can we do?
I see no reason to reward this.
Tyro
I found it insightful because this marriage ideology comes a lot from gay marriage opponents, but of course they never admit or don’t really know it is a ideology. Lot of unstated assumptions.
Same. It wasn’t the most well-written essay in the world… ok, it was a mess. However, he made the effort to explain what most gay marriage opponents believe when it comes to their reasons for opposition but don’t actually state.
A better explanation of these ideas (not related to gay marriage, though) comes from Jonathan Rauch’s essay, “Do ‘Family Values’ Weaken Families?” The way it was explained, “In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families.” If marriage is to be the gateway to adulthood that people fall into, then the idea that two consenting gay adults can declare themselves “married” is in many ways antithetical to the culture surrounding marriage for many conservatives, which is about a boy and a girl falling in to marriage together and “making it work” by growing up and realizing that they’re a family, because that’s what you do. When gay marriage opponents say, “gay marriages makes a mockery of my marriage!” what they mean to say is that gay marriage means that two people could grow up and make their own decisions about life without having to go through a young heterosexual marriage with children first.
Original Lee
@aimai: Every time I watch an episode of The Honeymooners, I think, “Thank you, Carl Djerassi.”
suzanne
@maus:
You *are* allowed, and I do. But mocking someone by calling him a closet case is homophobic, and there are far better ways to make fun of him. I am disappointed by the number of commenters above who dismissed Millman’s self-examination (tangential and meandering though it was) with some variation of “he’s gay and is sad he doesn’t get cock”.
Nor I. But I do see a reason to understand what makes conservatives think the way they do, in order to combat their hateful attitudes. For some reason, telling someone they’re wrong and stupid isn’t a very good persuasion technique.
maus
@suzanne:
Ok, sure, I can see that.
But if the presence and veru existence of happy gays makes someone uncomfortable in their own skin, to the point where accepting them as human beings puts into question their otherwise happy marriage, why is it wrong to even joke that there might be something else at work?
You don’t have to be “a gay” to have thoughts and curiosities, even if you’d never follow up on them.
But really, while there might be a homophobic tone to some of the jabs, it’s not by default homophobic or insulting to mock him for his poor willpower.
suzanne
@maus:
Funny. No one mocked him or suggested ***anything else*** besides “the reason he’s threatened is because he’s secretly gay”. No one “joked” that his discomfort might stem from a shitty upbringing, or that he maybe married the wrong person (female or male), or any number of other things. No one even mocked him for him “poor willpower”. Nope. He’s uncomfortable because he’s gay. Hilarious. Nyah nyah.
Look, every time we taunt someone with “You’re gay! You’re gay!”, we’re helping to further the idea that being gay is ***something worth teasing about***. YOU CAN’T MOCK SOMEONE FOR BEING SOMETHING THAT IS COMPLETELY FUCKING OKAY. If you could, it wouldn’t be mocking or teasing.
So seriously. We all need a nice big glass of Get The Hell Over It.
soylenth
I think a lot of you are unfair to guys who are genuinely trying to work through all the conservative “how to be a man” bullshit they were raised in. It’s totally fair to call out people who get hurt feelings for not having the privilege to be an asshole, but mocking people who have essentially realized that conservative tribalism is a sad and joyless existence and are trying to work through it to get to a more human place is utterly classless. You all act like you had your shit together from age 3 as a compassionate, well-adjusted liberal and people trying to get their shit together should be shamed for not being the enlightened and wonderful beings you all effortlessly are. The SMALLEST dose of compassion and patience might actually persuade people who could be brought around to your point of view. But attacking them for still having weird conservative issues that they’re trying to work through, as they are transitioning to YOUR side, is, uh counterproductive.
There’s a LOT of people who are in the middle of figuring shit out at a variety of ages. Is it really necessary to attack them for it, especially the ones trending closer to your own point of view? Or is the catharsis of attacking anything not-liberal really all that matters to you? And does that behavior remind you of any OTHER tribalistic entities you claim to loathe?
Nicole
@IM: My fault for the Whedon tangent- I made a reference in my original post which Jenn caught right away.
Cat Lady
@soylenth:
Most of us here never experienced that place so it’s difficult to understand why, if you have a choice, which you do, would you put up with that? It just seems so obvious that as a free agent, which you are, if you put up with it, then you choose to be miserable. Conservatives seem intent on enacting policies that prey on people like you, and ensure everyone else is miserable too. There are things no one has control over – skin color, sexual orientation, ethnicity and gender (the Other), which conservatives shamelessly and hypocritically use to manipulate fear in low information white people for their own selfish power hungry purposes. A lot of us here are the Other. We’re not attacking, we’re fighting back. We didn’t come here effortlessly, we found our way. John Cole was a Bush loving conservative, until Terri Schiavo. Read the archives from 2005-2006.
maus
@suzanne:
Nobody at all? I did :)
The “joke” is that the person in question is obviously very uncomfortable with himself, and maybe he would be tangibly happier being gay than being filled with fear and loathing all the time, as in it’s not as bad as he thinks.
You seem to be immune to the concept of context and aims in humor.
Allan
@soylenth: I bookmark BJ in a folder labelled “Snark.”
I don’t come here to hold the hand of questioning conservatives and bathe them in warm liberal acceptance and rhetorical lovingkindness.
Peter Daou blogs at Huffington Post. You should really check it out. I think you’d be really comfortable there.
Allan
@suzanne: It’s Occam’s Razor.
I’m gay and I went there the moment I saw that he not only has a position on same-sex marriage, he has thought very long and hard about same-sex marriage over the past 20 years or so and slowly, cautiously given himself permission to support it.
Sorry, but straight men really don’t spend that much time thinking about same-sex marriage.
soylenth
@Allan: I read this site everyday and love it. Just sometime the snark of the comments seems more bitter than amusing. I still mostly love you all. Just thought that hatefest was particularly pointless.
Maybe you could not assume a lot about me from one post?
suzanne
@maus:
Yeah, apparently I’m the problem. Because I don’t think that “teasing” someone about something as personal and complicated as sexual orientation furthers a world without prejudice. Once again, when we “tease” someone for being closeted and gay, it perpetuates the idea that being gay is something worth teasing about. So stop it. I mean, do you honestly think *anyone* who is gay is going to come out of the closet because they find themselves the butt of jokes and love being a punchline for others’ (usually straights’) amusement?
Christ. I would think here, of all places, people would get it.
Oh. Wait. I forgot. I’m humorless.
suzanne
@Allan:
You may be right. I have no idea. And it isn’t even the point. The point is that teasing someone for being gay and in the closet creates an environment that makes it harder to come out.
soylenth
@Cat Lady: I’ve been reading this site daily and in full since just about the time John changed sides. I love how people assume I’m new here. I’m well aware of the history of all of this and the general tone of the site. I typically love it, except for the soccer threads which were very skippable.
The comments in this thread were not fighting back against someone who was attacking you, they were attacking someone who was trying to support you for being “different” and “strange”. You guys missed the target this time. DougJ didn’t post it in that spirit, but that’s where it went.
It IS strange to grow up conservative. You are not taught that you are a free agent, you are taught that your behavior must fall in very narrow guidelines to be accepted. Or at the very least that there are a variety of behaviors (for a man: being gay, being feminine, being emotional) that will warrant social punishment of some sort. This author has just recently realized that he IS a free agent and all of these “how to be a man” guidelines were bullshit. I don’t think he needs to be coddled, but I generally like to support conservative-ish guys who realize the “manly men do X” narratives are bullshit in the vain hope that since they still have one foot in the door, so to speak, they might be able to convince some of their brothers of the same. because you know they don’t listen to the rest of of godless heathens.
Sometimes understanding why what you’ve chosen makes you miserable takes TIME. And more time to figure out how to get out of it. Your hand-waving about how people should in 30-seconds just decide to stop putting up with 30 years of indoctrination is unfair. It takes time to deprogram yourself. Obviously, I’m speaking from experience. as “the other”, you should have more sympathy for someone who’s starting to realize he doesn’t fit in with his conservative brethren, not less. There are far better targets for this type of thing.
Having said all that, in general I’m right there with you guys in spirit for making fun of the anti-gay crusaders who turn out to be very, very gay later on. I just don’t think it’s cool to attack people being honest with their struggle in public and someone who is willing to very publicly admit they were wrong in a clearly sincere if poorly edited and confusing way.
I can understand why you wouldn’t love this guy, but the constant gay jokes and attacks are really kind of embarrassing. We’re supposed to be the side that doesn’t think being gay is a reason to be mocked. Gay hypocrisy yes. Just being gay and confused, no.
Allan
@soylenth: It was a very long post.
Allan
I don’t particularly care for the emo tone this thread has taken.
I find it to be at odds with the mission of this site.
Corner Stone
@Allan:
Propagation of pictures of fat cats?
Allan
@Corner Stone: That, and teasing the closeted gay proprietor so he’ll remain too uncomfortable to come out.
soylenth
@Allan: yes, yes, too long. I need to stop working out my issues in public on low blood sugar. So I’m gonna shut up. Just know I’m open to talk if you ever decide to approach reality on a non-snark level. :)
PanurgeATL
@suzanne:
Is it me, or is this The Continuing Story of the ’60s?
OTOH, what I notice about gay marriage is that it seems to be the, um, apotheosis of a sort of “we’re just as square as you, won’t you accept us now?” attitude. I’m kind of embittered by that, being fairly queer, but with a fairly wide (but not all-encompassing) freak streak, and thus not belonging in either world. My life has thus become a veritable fiesta of fucking up and missing out, with little prospect of things turning around.
(Side note: Someone on Usenet recently brought up the idea that “the gay part of town” was often previously “the hippie part of town”. But the connection is rarely noticed, much less acknowledged. Both movements have at their core, among other things, rejection of one aspect or another of traditional manhood, but modern gays seem to be fairly preoccupied with putting across that they can be “manly”, too–i.e., “manly” precisely in the traditional, conservative sense.)
Allan
@soylenth:
I tried that once. It didn’t end well.
Good luck and don’t lurk! Fortune favors the bold.
maus
@suzanne:
The “tease” is that it’s not in actuality a big deal. That’s the different framework from which the joke operates. It’s not hi-larious, and it’s filled with bitterness and snark, but I’d rather see them as eventually coming around (one way or another) than staying angry and confused forever.
@soylenth:
I’m too busy trying to deal with what they’ve left us to stop and coddle them all publically. In private I do what I can, but there are plenty of people raised in misogynistic families that made it through without being jerks, and they get no special treatment. If they’re a friend, they’re a friend. If they came to the right realization through a fairly illogical manner, all the better, but I just hope they reach the full enlightenment. Then I’ll be more comfortable in trusting/embracing them.
David J
What’s longer and harder to read — the original post or these comments?
Didn’t read the post, couldn’t finish the comments.