John Corvino

Category: Columns

John’s column “The Gay Moralist” appeared bi-weekly in Michigan’s Between the Lines from 2002-2007, and then weekly at 365Gay.com from 2007-2011. His columns and op-eds have also appeared in other venues, including the Independent Gay Forum, The Advocate, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic and the New York Times. Most of these columns are archived here.

  • Gay Rights and the Race Analogy

    Tucker Nichols for The New York Times
    Tucker Nichols for The New York Times

    At The New York Times, I urge caution on use of the race analogy and argue that the issues are more complex than they’re typically treated:

    The present debate is too often dominated by hasty generalizations and false inferences, on both sides. The left slides too easily from “similar” to “the same.” The right correctly counters “No, not the same,” but then jumps to the false conclusion “Not at all similar.” Where both sides go wrong is in treating analogies as if they were identities. If we want to apply the lessons of history to the current controversy — as we should — we need to take seriously both the similarities and the differences.

    Read the full article here.

  • Against Obsessive Celibacy

    Celibacy

    John replies to Michael Hannon’s startling response to “Thinking Straight” at Commonweal:

    You don’t have to be a “libertine” to recognize that what the young boy is experiencing is not just a really, really, really strong desire for friendship. More important, you don’t have to be a libertine to acknowledge that willful blindness to what the boy is actually experiencing can do serious, lasting damage.

    Read full article here.

  • “Thinking Straight?” at Commonweal

    QueerTheory

    At Commonweal, John explains how a little queer theory (misunderstood and misapplied) can be a dangerous thing:

    What social conservatives want is nothing less than to dismantle the very vocabulary by which we express and realize our inchoate longings for intimacy. They want to push us back to a time when homosexuality was not merely the “love that dare not speak its name,” but the love that could not speak it. They want to restore a regime where the boy with the funny feeling might—if he’s lucky—grow up to have a good-enough heterosexual marriage, but he might just as easily grow up to have a lonely life of furtive, dangerous same-sex encounters.

    Read the full article here. Also check out Hannon’s reply and John’s rejoinder.

  • John on Polygamy in NYT “Room for Debate”

    Corvino meme

    In a New York Times “Room for Debate” discussion on plural marriage, John rebuts the slippery slope:

    Polygamy raises a number of public-policy concerns that same-sex marriage does not. That said, the gay-rights movement has bolstered the polygamist-rights movement in one key way: by insisting that finding a practice weird or icky or religiously anathema is not sufficient reason to make it illegal.

    Read his full post, and watch the accompanying video, here.

  • John at NYT “Room for Debate” on Gay/Trans Connection

     

    At the New York Times “Room for Debate,” John argues that gay rights and transgender rights are related but distinct:

    Each group has distinctive needs and challenges. By jumbling them all together into one alphabet soup — L.G.B.T.Q.I.T.S.L.F.A.A., anyone? — we run the risk of covering or erasing people’s experiences, especially those who are already most marginalized.

    Read the full article here. And check out this video, which explains some of the distinctions:

     

  • John in The Philosophers’ Magazine

    TPM

    In a recent issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine, John dismantles the “Definitional Objection” to same-sex marriage offered by Sherif Girgis, Robert P. George, and Ryan T. Anderson, among others. From the article:

    How did we end up in such a spot? Part of the problem is that ‘comprehensive union’ is a rather vague and slippery notion: suitable for greeting-card poetry, perhaps, but not the sort of thing on which to build a marriage theory.

    Read the full piece here.

  • A Papal Surprise: Humility

    pope

    My first full-length op-ed at the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt:

    [When he says] “who am I to judge,” surely the pope is not relinquishing the church’s assertion of authority in matters of faith and morals. But he was adopting a tone of humility. And tone matters.

    Read the full piece here.

  • Paula Deen and DOMA

    My take on lessons from Paula Deen and DOMA, at HuffPost:

    Just as you don’t have to be throwing around the “n-word” to exhibit racism, you don’t have to be calling gays “faggots” in order to signal that they, and their love, and their families, are less worthy than others.

    Read the full column here.

  • Masturbation Month

    May is masturbation month. I am not making this up.

    Read the full column at HuffPost.

  • Am I Gay, or LGBT?

    The LGBT community is actually a collection of overlapping communities, each with distinctive experiences, needs, and challenges. While it makes sense to find common cause, it can also make sense to separate the various groups sometimes, in order to avoid obscuring our diversity.

    Read the full column at HuffPost.