Set the Controls

I’ve been hesitant to say anything about the gay in recent months because I have come to the realization that some of the things I was saying to justify my opposition to gay rights is exactly the sort of thing the cool people use to say to me when I was an odd adolescent trying to find a place to fit in.

In the light of that realization I decided to shut my mouth and idle my fingers. Along the same period of time I began listening to podcasts of university courses on history and philosophy. One of the first I took part in was Hubert Dreyfus’s brilliant “Existentialism in Film and Literature” from UC Berkeley. During the course of this lecture I was exposed for the first time to deeper elements of Kierkegaard’s works and his biography. One of the things Dreyfus returned to over and over was the theme of Kierkegaard’s sexuality and how it may have driven him to examine such deep teleological questions because he was so alienated as a “homosexual trying to find a place to fit in in early 19th Century Copenhagen” to paraphrase.

Now the older I get the more I learn. Things are supposed to work like that. And I’ve known for a while that many people I’ve admired in life were gay, whether it be Abe Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, Cole Porter or Morrissey. And I’ve never been one to judge people by their sexuality. As a matter of fact, I’m normally fairly oblivious to it. I can think of two instances during my time as a reporter when I worked with gay men and didn’t know it. One was a wedding clerk, just a regular dude in my estimation, we would chat at the smokers post outside and laugh around the coffee pot. One day one of the other clerks said to me “Jeff, I’m so proud of the way you treat Rob. I think that is so kind of you.” I was sort of taken aback because I hadn’t even thought about it. I mean, he was a little hi-strung all the time, but I wrote that off to the cigarettes and caffeine.

Soon after that we got a new reporter to take my place on the night shift as I moved up to a county beat. His name was Todd and, yeah, he drove a Dodge Dart from like 1973 and wore a buckskin coat with a thick wool collar, not to mention the pointiest dress shoes I ever saw, but, hey, I’m a little strange and so it never crossed my mind. But it did slap me up side the head shortly after he started. I had given Todd the tour of the cops scene in town and was heading back to the office when we ran across Eric, another reporter, heading in from the parking lot. A temp had just started, I forget her name, but she was an attractive college student from San Francisco. Eric and I started talking about her and I mentioned to Todd that he should ask her out.

Todd looked at me, flustered, batting his eye lashes like a hummingbird and said “Jeff, I’m gay.”

Later I joked with Eric how I put my foot in my mouth and he said, “I can’t believe you didn’t notice that.”

The underlying answer is that it’s just never been something I spent a lot of time thinking about.

Until 2004 when the gay marriage push began. It was everywhere on every media outlet and in the newsroom I was running at that point it was talked about often by several younger staffers fresh out of college. We all know how that story ended, with me losing my job there and it was at that time that I came on the local blog scene like a banshee looking for anything to lash out at.

And of course the issue of gay marriage was the easiest target. Honestly, to this day, I don’t understand or identify with homosexual behavior. But going back to the realization in my opening sentence, I’ve come to wonder if just maybe denying gays the right to marry isn’t similar to denying blacks the right to vote. Maybe it is a civil right.

For a time I thought that preventing gays from marrying was somehow going to forestall the decline of traditional values in this country. But I don’t think traditional values have a chance of surviving in the digital age, so that rational is irrelevant.

For a time I thought that preserving some semblance of filial piety was important to the quality of my being, and that being a stalwart for Christian values in opposition to gay marriage was important. But actions by Christians in my immediate circumstances during the last year has pretty much, yet again, negated any loyalty I have to Christianity as an ideal. Now I still believe in the goodness of many, many Christian friends and mentors, and appreciate their counsel and companionship, but there is just no getting around the fallacy that is modern American Christianity.

So in the absence of those two pillars of opposition I struggle to find a rational to deny gays the right to have a marriage and happiness.

I have historically been more of a civil libertarian, a fiscal conservative, a rabid internationalist and a staunch free trader. Social issues, to me, should be decided in the home. With homosexuality as an established part of reality and something practiced by millions of Americans, I see no reason to deny civil rights to people based on sexual preference.