"Closet Tolerants"

It appears that the state initiatives to ban gay marriage had some role in the Red State wins, whether by increasing turnout (I am very skeptical that ballot initiatives on their own can ever increase turnout in a presidential year) or simply by by bolstering the pitch to white evangelical voters, that is, making sure that when they were in the voting booth they were thinking about gay marriage.

Two points came to my mind thinking about this today. The first is that I don't know many straight progressives who were particularly concerned about these initiatives or the issue generally. I can't think of a progressive organization that was particularly involved in the fight against them. I happened to be involved in a small way in putting together a fund for the opposition to the initiatives in the various states, and quickly became quite passionate about the meaning of this assault on rights but that was almost accidental. (I'm on the board of the foundation that was managing the allocation of funds.)

For the most part, I think straight liberals had the attitude that it was a gay issue and gay people are responsible for their issues. (Perhaps also assuming that gays had chosen to force this issue on the agenda.) We all have the correct views, of course, and may even care passionately about marriage and civil unions as it affects people we love. But we needed a wake-up call that "it's our fight too." Because the issue is not just gay marriage. The issue is the manipulation of hate, discomfort, resentment, displaced anxiety, etc. for political power, which will be used for all sorts of purposes. Let's put it simply: our country will have the foreign policy it does, the economic policy it does, in part because of the skillful manipulation of the gay marriage issue by people who are probably indifferent to the issue.

And straight people and in particular religious people need to be deeply involved in the thinking about how to deal with these initiatives and similar things because the key to winning is obviously reaching straight and religious people. I'm not surprised that the anti-marriage initiative that came closest to defeat was in Oregon -- 46% no -- because they have had endless experience with vicious anti-gay amendments and groups there have figured out how to reach into rural Oregon and find ways to talk to people about what they mean.

And this reminded me of something I'd written a few weeks ago and abandoned, during the stupid dust-up over Kerry's mention of the Coors Brewing Company's distinguished liaison to the gay and lesbian community, Ms. Cheney:

Andrew Sullivan had a nice phrase at the time to describe Bush and Cheney: They are "closet tolerants," he wrote. "They have no problem with gay people personally; but they use hostility to gay people for political purposes, even if it means attacking members of their own families. What they are currently objecting to is the fact that their hypocrisy has been exposed." I'm not sure they're all that tolerant, but you know they wouldn't give two hoots about gay marriage if Karl Rove didn't tell them that it was the tactic by which they would retain power.

I think "hypocrisy" is too forgiving a word for it. It actually raises one of the most interesting moral puzzles in modern politics, what I sometimes call the George Wallace question. If George Wallace wasn't really much of a racist as a personal matter (and there's every reason to
believe he wasn't), but manipulated racism and stoked it in order to further his political career ("I'll never be out-ni-----d again," he said after his first loss) is he morally better than someone who in his heart really is a racist?

I once heard Representative John Lewis speak about his visit to George Wallace, near death, in which Wallace apologized for his violence against the civil rights movement and his opposition to segregation. And Lewis speaks movingly of forgiving Wallace, because he understood that "in his heart" Wallace was not a racist. I'm in no position to challenge Lewis -- he was the one beaten to within an inch of his life by Wallace's goons on the bridge at Selma, and it's his forgiveness to offer -- but I've never been quite comfortable with it. Interestingly, it's similar to the moral logic that Bush often uses, referring to his own morality and that of others based entirely on what's "in my heart" rather than conduct.

In my moral code, it's pretty clear to me that, whatever is in your heart, there's nothing more contemptible than to increase or exacerbate the level of hate and intolerance in the world, and to do it willfully for personal gain is despicable. I'd be a lot quicker to forgive someone who had been deeply racist "in his heart," because of how he'd been brought up or whatever, than someone who merely used racism. I think that like Wallace, Karl Rove, Bush and the Cheneys, as pure as their hearts may be and as much as they may love their gay family and friends, are the more morally contemptible for the willfullness by which they choose to stoke the hostility and intolerance of others.

There are two huge problems: First, we didn't even fully understand what was going on out there. And second, we didn't know how to say just this if we did. It may be that we never hear about this particular issue again -- it has served its purpose. But we have to be prepared for the next.