John Corvino

Tag: politics

  • Senator Kerry’s Marriage Contortions

    First published October 1, 2003, in Between the Lines

    In a recent Advocate interview Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry told reporter Chris Bull that, despite his otherwise strong support for gay rights, he could not bring himself to support gay marriage.

    In a previous Washington Post interview Kerry had stated, “Marriage is an institution between men and women for the purpose of having children and procreating.”

    Whoops — wrong answer. If marriage is for procreating, what’s the story with Kerry’s current marriage (his second), which is childless?

    Having been confronted on this point, Kerry backtracks in the Advocate interview: “I don’t make a procreation argument. I was explaining the historical background. Someone was asking me where my opposition came from, and I said it’s basically from an old religious belief of what defined marriage. Procreation has nothing to do with my argument.”

    Whoops again. Religious belief? While Kerry might be right about why most people oppose gay marriage, the reporter was asking for Kerry’s reason, not most people’s. More precisely, the reporter wanted to know Kerry’s political position on the issue. And as Kerry himself recognizes, religion and politics don’t mix well. In the same Advocate interview he states, “In 1960, President Kennedy [another Roman Catholic] distinguished between those things secular and those things religious. He drew the line between his church and his state. It is a bright line, and I do not take my articles of faith and seek to legislate them against people who don’t share them. The establishment clause regarding religion is clear… ”

    Confused yet? So was the reporter, who asked, “Doesn’t church-state separation apply to marriage?” Kerry’s response is a textbook example of arguing in a circle:

    “So many people in the country view it as the cultural component of it, the religious component of it. That’s how people view it with the religious component of it.”

    So, just to make sure I’m clear on his point: We ought not to legislate people’s religious beliefs except in the case of their religious beliefs.
    Got it.

    I don’t mean to pick on Kerry here. He’s been a solid supporter of gay rights, even voting against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in an election year. (It passed anyway, and President Clinton signed it into law.)

    Moreover, every other Democratic presidential hopeful goes through the same verbal contortions when pressed on the issue of gay marriage. Even Howard Dean, who went to bat for us on civil unions in Vermont, is officially opposed to “gay marriage.”

    It’s an issue they’d all much prefer to avoid. They want to support gays, but they also want to win the election. And thus they must face one of the great paradoxes about American life: We are simultaneously one of the most secular and most religious societies in the world.

    Do we support freedom of religion? Oh yes, absolutely. Except when it gets weird. Like that Mormon polygamy thing. And gay marriage — ick.

    Marriage and religion are intimately tied in most Americans’ minds. Most marriages in this country are performed by clergy — to whom the state gives the power to perform not merely religious but also civil marriage.

    Politicians know this. And they have a hard time talking about civil marriage without talking about religion, for two reasons: (1) they want to appeal to a largely religious electorate, and (2) they are themselves largely religious.

    And so Kerry, in the same interview, talks about both his religious view of civil marriage and the separation of church and state, without noticing the contradiction.

    Similarly, when discussing the (anti-gay) Federal Marriage Amendment, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist calls marriage a “sacrament” and President Bush mentions “sinners.” Meanwhile, here in Michigan, Jackson County has passed a resolution against same-sex marriage in order to protect the “sanctity”of traditional marriage, and Lapeer County has passed a similar resolution citing “God’s intentions for mankind” and “faith in God through Holy Scriptures.”

    Kerry had it right when he said that articles of faith ought not to be legislated. By definition, articles of faith go beyond rational evidence (hence “faith”); they are learned through revelation. Law, by contrast, is supposed to be based on reasoned argument.

    The problem is that the secular arguments against gay marriage just aren’t very good. And so opponents of gay marriage — including politicians — resort to the one area where they may respectably abandon reasoned argument: religious faith. You can’t really argue with “God says so.”

    Writer Michael Woodson asks,

    “Suppose the government declared a particular mode of communion, baptism or circumcision to be valid, and required all valid communion, baptism and circumcision to be licensed by the state. Certainly, there would be an uproar — and should be a rebellion. Why is marriage different?”

    Damn good question. Don’t hold your breath for an answer.

  • Gay Marriage and the ‘Ick Factor’

    First published August 19, 2003, in Between the Lines.

    It was the sort of headline that’s become common these days: “When gays advance, America squirms.”

    I should be used to such headlines by now. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in June, we all knew there would be backlash. But I still find it rather unsettling, and this particular headline triggered my malaise full force. “When gays advance, America squirms.”

    Not “their opponents squirm.” Not “some Americans squirm.” AMERICA squirms. Suppressed premise: Gays are not real Americans.

    Okay, so headlines need to be pithy. Unfortunately, the ensuing news feature on gay marriage underscored the message: gays are outsiders trying to move in. “Us” against “them.”

    But why? Giving marriage to gays doesn’t mean taking it away from straights, any more than giving the vote to women meant taking it away from men, or letting blacks at the front of the bus meant that whites could no longer ride there.

    Yet the latter analogy is instructive: when blacks moved to the front of the bus, many whites felt a visceral negative reaction, what some refer to as “the ick factor.” Now gays are triggering the ick factor in their fight for marriage, and the results aren’t pretty.

    Some object to the comparison between the “behavioral” characteristic of sexual orientation and the “non-behavioral” characteristic of race.

    But this objection misses the point. In both cases, there’s a group whose behavior (moving to the front of the bus in the one case, pushing for marriage rights in the other) prompts hostility. In both cases, the hostility is largely visceral and inarticulate: “I can’t explain it, it just FEELS wrong.” And in both cases, the hostility results from, and contributes to, false beliefs about the group in question: “They’re going to ruin everything for the rest of us!”

    But how are gays going to “ruin” marriage? There are several possible interpretations of this charge:

    1) “If gay marriage is permitted, people will choose it over heterosexual marriage.”

    This claim is, of course, ludicrous. After all, the usual response to a gay person is not, “No fair! How come he gets to be gay and I don’t?!”

    2) “Permitting gay marriage will cheapen heterosexual marriage by turning it into ‘just another lifestyle choice.”

    Well, yes and no. Yes, it means that gay marriage will take its place alongside heterosexual marriage as an option to which persons might aspire. But again, these are GAY persons. It is not as if they would have, or should have, chosen heterosexual marriage otherwise. Let’s face it: pressuring gays into heterosexual marriage is a bad idea for everyone involved.

    Moreover, the fact that gays are fighting so hard for marriage rights should make it abundantly clear that they don’t think of marriage as “just another lifestyle choice.” Choosing to live in a high-rise instead of a ranch house is a “lifestyle choice.” Choosing marriage is a major personal and social commitment. If gays didn’t realize that, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard for legal marriage rights.

    3) “Gay marriages will be weak, setting a bad example for everyone else.”

    The idea here is that gay marriages will be less stable/monogamous/successful than their non-gay counterparts. Of course, it is difficult to substantiate this claim, since we do not know how gay relationships would fare given the same support that heterosexual marriage currently enjoys. But the more striking point is that on this logic, Hollywood actors ought not to be permitted to marry either.

    4) “’Gay marriage’ is an oxymoron.”

    The main argument against gay marriage seems to be definitional: the very meaning of marriage requires a man and a woman; thus gay marriage is a contradiction in terms. Gays who want to be called “married” are like steak-eaters who want to be called “vegetarians.”

    Thus understood, the argument betrays a fundamental confusion. The main issue is not whether gays should be “called” married. This is not to deny that words are important: they are. But the fight for marriage rights is not primarily about words. It is about legal protection for our relationships. It is about guaranteeing hospital visitation rights when a partner is sick, immigration rights when a partner is foreign, inheritance rights when a partner dies — and a host of other safeguards that married heterosexuals currently take for granted.

    Steak-eaters are not vegetarians. But if steak-eaters were denied various legal protections that vegetarians routinely enjoyed, we could not justify such discrimination on the grounds that most vegetarians find steak-eating “icky.” Absent better reasons, we would need to confront the ick-factor and work to make things right.

    If the gay-marriage issue makes some Americans squirm, perhaps it’s a sign of growing pains.

  • The Inclusive Santorum

    First Published at Between the Lines on May 1, 2003

    By now you’ve no doubt heard the flap about Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who, in response to a question about whether homosexual persons should remain celibate, stated that “if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”

    The slippery-slope argument linking homosexuality with polygamy has become a familiar rhetorical move in antigay rhetoric. Unfortunately, its use is not limited to those (like Santorum) whose mouths clearly move faster than their minds: there are a number of smart, thoughtful people who believe that the case for one lends support to the case for the other, and not all of these people are anti-gay.

    But Santorum’s version seems to go further than most. And it’s not just because he extends the list from polygamy to incest, adultery, indeed, to “anything.” It’s because the thing that initiates Santorum’s parade of horribles is not “homosexual sex” but simply “consensual sex.” According to Santorum, if the Supreme Court says you have “the right to consensual sex within your home … you have the right to anything.”

    Okay, so not everyone speaks in final draft. Maybe the “you” here refers to “you homosexuals.” Or maybe Santorum thinks no one has a Constitutional right to consensual sex, and thus that laws limiting such activity are all Constitutional (which is not the same as saying that they’re wise or justified).

    Attention to the full text of the interview, as well as to follow-up interviews, suggests that Santorum didn’t really know quite what he was saying, jumbling together some defensible constitutional concerns with radical views on privacy rights and a clear antipathy toward all things gay.

    Santorum went on to argue that polygamy, adultery, sodomy, “all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.” In his view, the state’s failure to regulate people’s sex lives — even when they are consensual and private — “destroys the basic unit of our society.”

    Santorum is the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, so you might think the president would be a bit concerned about the image he’s creating for the party. And Bush, finally, has weighed in. The “compassionate conservative,” the man who so ardently defends freedom from oppressive religious regimes (but only where oil is involved), has come out in support of Santorum, calling him “an inclusive man.”

    Excuse me?

    And then I thought about it for a while, and realized that the president is right.

    Recall that Santorum claims that right to consensual sodomy entails not just the right to polygamy but indeed, to anything. Anything. Rape. Tax fraud. Mass murder. You name it. That’s pretty damn inclusive.

    Or consider Santorum’s position on gay marriage: “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.”

    So, according to Santorum, gays’ interest in securing marriage rights for their consensual adult relationships is not merely akin to polygamists’ doing the same. It’s also akin to “man on child” or “man on dog.” That’s pretty damn inclusive too.

    (Although if he were really inclusive, he would have included “dog on man” as well. Why should the man always get to be on top?)

    Santorum’s “man on dog” comment was so surprising, it prompted the reporter to interrupt, “I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog’ with a United States senator; it’s sort of freaking me out.” Santorum’s reply scaled new heights of inclusiveness: “And that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire.”

    So Santorum thinks that the state needs to limit not just harmful behaviors, but “individuals’ wants and passions.” Lest you think this was a verbal slip, he repeated it again in response to the next question: “I’ve been very clear about that. The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don’t agree with that.”

    (If this is being clear, I’d hate to see what he’s like when he’s being muddled.) What is clear is that Santorum thinks that your bedroom should be included among the places the state belongs.

    If this is inclusiveness, count me out.

  • The Death of the Advocate

    First published in “Between the Lines” in March of 2003

    Once upon a time there was a great magazine called the Advocate. Founded in 1967, the Advocate was for many years a groundbreaking gay and lesbian newsmagazine. At a time when The New York Times would not even print the word “gay,” the Advocate kept our community — and many straight people as well-informed about significant events affecting gay and lesbian lives.

    No, the Advocate has not gone out of business. But some days I wish it would.

    Take the cover of the March 4 issue, which features a veiled figure in a judicial robe over the provocative question, “Is There A Gay Man on the U.S. Supreme Court?”

    Are you ready for the answer? Are you sure? Okay, here it is:

    Probably not.

    The teaser on the cover refers to Justice Souter, the Court’s only bachelor. When Souter was appointed, there were rumors that he might be gay. But the rumors were never substantiated (indeed, they were pretty well refuted), and the story died.

    Why resurrect the issue now? Well, the Supreme Court will soon decide a case that could reverse Bowers v. Hardwick and declare sodomy laws unconstitutional. (Fingers crossed.) Having a gay justice on the court would certainly make things interesting.

    But we don’t have a gay justice on the court — at least, not one for whom there’s any convincing evidence of his gayness.

    The Advocate concedes this point. But they decided a provocative cover was more important than a non-misleading one. (Kind of like “The Death of the Advocate” as the title for a story about a magazine that isn’t folding.)

    This cover choice would not have annoyed me so much were it not for two things:

    First, we need Souter’s vote. Which means that this is probably not the best time to suggest, on the cover of a national magazine, that he’s a homo — even if you decide to clear things up in the article.

    Fortunately, despite being dogged by silly rumors, Souter has been a reliable friend of the gay community since his appointment by Bush the Elder. Even his majority opinion in Hurley, where he wrote for a unanimous Court upholding the right of Boston St. Patrick Day parade organizers to exclude a gay group, was groundbreaking in the respect it showed to gay and lesbian concerns.

    (Are you surprised, by the way, that a gay-friendly justice is a Bush Sr. appointee? Strange things do happen. Consider the fact that the author of the magnificent dissent in Bowers, the late Justice Blackmun, was appointed by Nixon, and that Justice Stevens, arguably the most liberal current member of the Court, was appointed by Ford. By contrast, the author of the extremely homophobic majority opinion in Bowers, the late Justice White, was a Kennedy appointee. Rest assured, however, that Bush the Younger won’t repeat his father’s “mistake” by appointing another relatively liberal justice, should he have the chance.)

    But the Advocate cover is annoying for a second, more enduring reason. The March 4 cover is just another installment in the Advocate’s unmistakable decline into tabloid journalism. The Advocate was once a great, groundbreaking magazine. Now, it reads more like a gay version of People — with occasional innuendo reminiscent of the Enquirer.

    And this decline is not merely embarrassing, it’s boring. It seems that every other cover misleadingly suggests that someone is gay. Ben Affleck’s Gay Secret! (The secret? He has gay fans.) Matt Damon’s Relationship with Ben! (They’re friends and they co-wrote a screenplay.) Romeo (the male lead in the ballet) is gay!

    Actually, that last one’s true. A gay ballet dancer. Shocking, groundbreaking news!

    Let me be clear about something: I understand that the Advocate needs readership in order to make money. I also understand that sex sells. And I’m not generally prudish about such things. I think people who heavily protest Queer As Folk because it’s bad for our community’s reputation are just being silly.

    But there’s a key difference: Queer As Folk explicitly (and, in my view, needlessly) disclaims any intention to represent the entire gay community. By contrast, the Advocate claims on its cover to be, and is widely regarded as, our “national gay and lesbian newsmagazine.” Which makes its descent into fluff all the more embarrassing and painful.

    There is one consolation to all of this. A major reason behind the Advocate’s decline is the corresponding improvement of mainstream news sources on gay and lesbian issues. We don’t need the biweekly Advocate to break gay news when we can find it daily on CNN or in the New York Times.

    But there’s still enough serious, interesting stuff in gay and lesbian news to merit a good bi-weekly newsmagazine. Which is what the Advocate once was and could be again.

  • First Gays, Then Polygamists?

    First published in “The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review” on November 30,1999

    AN INCREASINGLY COMMON objection to same-sex marriage takes the form of a slippery-slope argument: “If we allow gay marriage, why not polygamy? Or incest? Or bestiality?” This argument is nothing new, having been used against interracial marriage in the 1960’s. But what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in rhetorical force: given the choice between rejecting homosexuality or accepting a sexual free-for-all, mainstream Americans tend to opt for the former

    Unfortunately, sound-bite arguments don’t always lend themselves to sound-bite refutations. Part of the problem is that the polygamy/incest/bestiality argument (PIB argument for short) is not really an argument at all. Instead, it’s a challenge: “Okay, Mr. Sexual Liberal: explain to me why polygamy, incest, and bestiality are wrong.” Most people are not prepared to do that — certainly not in twenty words or less. And many answers that leap to mind (for example, that PIB relationships violate well-established social norms) won’t work for the defender of same-sex relationships (since same-sex relationships, too, violate well-established social norms).

    In what follows I respond to the PIB challenge. But first, I wish to set aside two popular responses that I think are inadequate. Call the first the “We really exist” argument. According to this argument, homosexuality is different from polygamy, incest, and bestiality because there are “constitutional” homosexuals, but not constitutional polygamists, incestualists, or bestialists. As Andrew Sullivan writes,

    Almost everyone seems to accept, even if they find homosexuality morally troublesome, that it occupies a deeper level of human consciousness than a polygamous impulse. Even the Catholic Church, which believes that homosexuality is an “objective disorder,” concedes that it is a profound element of human identity….[P]olygamy is an activity, whereas both homosexuality and heterosexuality are states.”
    Sullivan is probably right in his description of popular consciousness about homosexuality. Yet traditionalists may reject the idea that homosexuality is an immutable given. At a June 1997 conference at Georgetown University, “Homosexuality and American Public Life,” conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher urged her audience to stop thinking of homosexuality as an inevitable, key feature of an individual’s personality. Drawing, ironically, on the work of queer theorists, Gallagher proposed instead that homosexuality is a cultural convention — one that ought to be challenged.

    If Gallagher and her social constructionist sources are right, the “We really exist” argument must be abandoned. But whether they’re right or not, there are good pragmatic reasons for abandoning this argument. “We really exist” sounds dangerously like “We just can’t help it.” And to this claim there is an obvious response: “Well, alcoholics really exist, too. They can’t help their impulses. But we don’t encourage them.” Though the alcoholism analogy is generally a bad one, it underscores the rhetorical weakness of claiming “We really exist” in response to the (rhetorically strong) PIB challenge.

    A second response to the PIB challenge is to argue that as long as PIB relationships are forbidden for heterosexuals, they should be forbidden for homosexuals as well. Call this the “equal options” argument. To put the argument more positively: we homosexuals are not asking to engage in polygamy, incest, or bestiality. We are simply asking to engage in monogamous, non-incestuous relationships with people we love — just like heterosexuals do. As Jonathan Rauch writes,

    The hidden assumption of the argument which brackets gay marriage with polygamous or incestuous marriage is that homosexuals want the right to marry anyone they fall for. But, of course, heterosexuals are currently denied that right. They cannot marry their immediate family or all their sex partners. What homosexuals are asking for is the right to marry, not anybody they love, but somebody they love, which is not at all the same thing.

    Once again, this argument is correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough — at least not far enough to satisfy proponents of the PIB argument. As they see it, permitting homosexuality — even monogamous, non-incestuous, person-to-person homosexuality — involves relaxing traditional sexual mores. The fact that these mores prohibit constitutional homosexuals from marrying somebody they love is no more troubling to traditionalists than the fact that these mores prohibit constitutional pedophiles from marrying somebody they love, since traditionalists believe that there are good reasons for both prohibitions.

    In short, both the “we exist” argument and the “equal options” argument are vulnerable to counterexamples: alcoholics really exist, and pedophiles are denied equal marital options. (Indeed, traditionalists are fond of pointing out that, strictly speaking, homosexuals do have “equal” options: they have the option of marrying persons of the oppostite sex. Such traditionalists usually remain silent on whether this option is a good idea for anyone involved, but so it goes.)

    There is, I think, a better response to the PIB argument, one that has been suggested by both Sullivan and Rauch (whose contributions to this debate I gratefully acknowledge). It is to deny that arguments for homosexual relationships offer any real support for PIB relationships. Why would proponents of the PIB argument think otherwise? Perhaps they assume that our main argument for homosexual relationships is that they feel good and we want them. If that were our argument, it would indeed offer support for PIB relationships. But that is not our argument: it is a straw man.

    A much better argument for homosexual relationships begins with an analogy: homosexual relationships offer virtually all of the benefits of sterile heterosexual relationships; thus, if we approve of the latter, we should approve of the former as well. For example, both heterosexual relationships and homosexual relationships can unite people in a way that ordinary friendship simply cannot. Both can have substantial practical benefits in terms of the health, economic security, and social productivity of the partners. Both can be important constituents of a flourishing life. Yes, they feel good and we want them, but there’s a lot more to it than that. These similarities create a strong prima facie case for treating homosexual and heterosexual relationships the same — morally, socially, and politically.

    “But wait,” say the opponents. “Can’t you make the same argument for PIB relationships?” Not quite. It is true that you can use the same form of argument for PIB relationships: PIB relationships have benefits X, Y, and Z and no relevant drawbacks. But whether PIB relationships do in fact have such benefits and lack such drawbacks is an empirical matter, one that will not be settled by looking to homosexual relationships.

    To put my point more concretely: to observe that Tom and Dick (and many others like them) flourish in homosexual relationships is not to prove that Greg and Marcia would flourish in an incestuous relationship, or that Mike, Carol, and Alice would flourish in a polygamous relationship, or that Bobby and Tiger would flourish in a bestial relationship. Whether they would or not is a separate question — one that requires a whole new set of data.

    Another way to indicate the logical distance between homosexual relationships and PIB relationships is to point out that PIB relationships can be either homosexual or heterosexual. Proponents of the PIB challenge must therefore explain why they group PIB relationships with homosexual relationships rather than heterosexual ones. There’s only one plausible reason: PIB and homosexuality have traditionally been condemned. But (whoops!) that’s also true of interracial relationships, which traditionalists (typically) no longer condemn. And (whoops again!) they’ve just argued in a circle: the question at hand is why we should group PIB relationships with homosexual relationships rather than heterosexual ones. Saying that “we’ve always grouped them together” doesn’t answer the question, it begs it.

    The question remains, of course, whether PIB relationships do, on balance, have benefits sufficient to warrant their approval. Answering that question requires far more data than I can marshal here. It also requires careful attention to various distinctions: distinctions between morality and public policy, distinctions between the morally permissible and the morally ideal, and — perhaps most important — distinctions between polygamy, incest, and bestiality, which are as different from each other as they each are from homosexuality. In what remains I offer some brief (and admittedly inconclusive) observations about each of these phenomena.

    Polygamy provides perhaps the best opportunity among the three for obtaining the requisite data: there have been and continue to be polygamous societies. Most of these are in fact polygynous (multiple-wife) societies, and most of them are sexist. Whether egalitarian polygamous societies are possible is an open question. Whether egalitarian polygamous relationships are possible (as opposed to entire societies) is an easier question. Though I find it difficult to imagine maintaining a relationship with several spouses — having had enough trouble maintaining a relationship with one — I have no doubt that at least some people flourish in them.

    This conclusion leaves open the question of whether such relationships should be state-supported. As my acquaintance Josh Goldfoot put it, “Marry your toaster if you like, but please don’t try to file a joint tax return with it.” Whatever reasons the state has for being in the marriage business (and this point is a matter of considerable debate), these may or may not be good reasons for the state to recognize multiple spouses.
    Polygamy also provides the most troublesome case for the traditionalists, since polygamy has Biblical support. True, the Bible reports troublesome jealousies among the sons of various wives, which perhaps should be taken as a lesson. But polygamy is clearly a case where the religious right can’t point to “God’s eternal law.”

    Incest, too, is common and expected in some societies — typically in the form of rites of initiation. In our own society incest typically results in various psychological difficulties, difficulties that should at least give pause to the supporter of incest. But one can easily construct a case that circumvents most (if not all) of these difficulties: imagine two adult lesbian sisters who privately engage in what they report to be a fulfilling sexual relationship. Can I prove that such activity is wrong? No — at least not off the top of my head. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s incumbent upon me to do so. If there are good arguments against such a relationship, they will remain unaffected by the argument in favor of homosexuality. And if the only argument traditionalists can offer against such a relationship is that longstanding tradition prohibits it, so much the worse for traditionalists. Again, that same argument is applicable to interracial relationships, and history has revealed its bankruptcy.

    The bestiality analogy is the most irksome of the three, since it reveals that the traditionalists are either woefully dishonest or woefully dense. To compare a homosexual encounter — even a so-called “casual” one — with humping a sheep is to ignore the distinctively human capacities that sexual relationships can (and usually do) engage. As such, it is to reduce sex to its purely physical components — precisely the reduction that traditionalists are fond of accusing us of. That noted, claiming that bestial relationships are qualitatively different from human homosexual relationships does not prove that bestial relationships are immoral. Nor does the lack of mutual consent, since we generally don’t seek consent in our dealings with animals. No cow consented to become my shoes, for example.

    To be honest, I feel about bestiality much as I feel about sex with inflatable dolls: I don’t recommend making a habit out of it, and it’s not something I’d care to do myself, but it’s hardly worthy of serious moral attention. I feel much the same way about watching infomercials: there are better ways to spend one’s time, to be sure, but there are also better things for concerned citizens to worry about.

    Why, then, are we even discussing bestiality? Perhaps it’s because traditionalists have run out of plausible-sounding arguments against homosexuality, and so now they’re grasping at straws. And then there’s the emotional factor: mentioning homosexuality won’t make people squeamish the way it once did, but mentioning bestiality and incest will at least raise some eyebrows, if not turn some stomachs. In short, the right wing knows that it’s losing its cultural war against homosexuality, and it’s trying to change the subject. We should steadfastly refuse to join them.