Playwright Tony Kushner and his partner Mark Harris have a letter in today’s New York Times (full text below) in response to David Blankenhorn, who was featured in an article over the weekend as a self-described liberal who opposes same-sex marriage.
First, an excerpt from the article about Blankenhorn:
Mr. Blankenhorn readily admits that the “deinstitutionalization†of marriage that he fears — the redefinition of what he considers the nation’s “most pro-child institution†as a private adult relationship stripped of public meaning — has been under way for a long time. Deeply rooted in American individualism and the quest for self-fulfillment, that redefinition “has been growing for decades, propagated overwhelmingly by heterosexuals.†Same-sex marriage only further erodes marriage as a pro-child institution, he believes.
When I read that on Saturday I got steamed.
Here’s Kushner and Harris’s letter in full, since it’s behind the Times paywall:
To the Editor:
Re “A Liberal Explains His Rejection of Same-Sex Marriage,†by Peter Steinfels (Beliefs column, June 23):
If there’s anything liberal in David Blankenhorn’s arguments against same-sex marriage, it went right by us. His opposition to same-sex marriage rests upon two familiar conservative notions: the view that interventive “protection†rather than encouragement is the best way to bolster the presumably threatened institution of marriage (the same foundation on which conservatives stood decades ago when they opposed racial intermarriage); and the idea that gay marriage is insufficiently “pro-child†to merit legitimation.
Significantly, Mr. Blankenhorn does not extend this second argument, which insults so many gay parents, to childless heterosexual couples. The basis of the discrimination he advocates, in other words, is homosexuality.
“Liberal†Mr. Blankenhorn reassures us that he isn’t a bigot and proposes an “interesting new conversation†in which same-sex couples who want to marry can learn to stop misjudging the people who would deprive us of the legal protections heterosexuals enjoy.
But the solution to our disenfranchisement is not a more amiable conversation with those who seek to perpetuate it, whatever their self-justifying pieties.
We call ourselves married, but we’re not, legally, and we want to be. We’re fans of the Declaration of Independence, the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education, and we want equal treatment under the law.
Mark Harris
Tony Kushner
New York, June 23, 2007
Incidentally, here’s Harris’s and Kusher’s wedding announcement in the Times from 2003.
Mr. Blankenthorn is a bigot, plain and simple. I could care less about the strengthening marriage argument. If straights have troubles staying married, it certainly isn’t something that gays and lesbians have been doing.
I just wish there was a way to abolish civil marriage entirely, root and branch. The government has no business whatsoever interfering in any citizen’s private domestic relationships. People should be free to have whatever ceremonies — religious or otherwise — they want to formalize their commitment, but marriage should not be some special state that grants special rights and privileges.
Alas, there are too many straight people who believe that civil marriage has some meaning or value — and too many queer people who buy into the bourgeois ideology. So instead of true equality — each individual free to form their own private partnerships without government regulation — we have to have gay marriage on top of it.
Does this mishegas really benefit anyone besides lawyers (no offense meant to the author of this blog)?
Another thought — if marriage is supposed to be for the sake of raising children, as Blankenhorn asserts — it should be limited then only to those who have or intend to have children. There ought to be an expiration date on your marriage license: “You must conceive or adopt by XX/XX/XX or this license is void.”
While i rhetorically sympathize with the idea of “If i can’t do it as a Citizen then you won’t either, over my dead body” method of civil-rights, it isn’t the best, wisest way. It’s more of an adolescent-stage response in terms of how a struggle/revolution evolves and matures towards compromise without sell-out in achieving its goals. This is what matters, really; Marriage is a contract between two individuals, or so it should be State-by-State in the Union.
Marriage is a hugely valuable contract to our NAmerican culture, and world. One need only ponder the visceral meaning of the phrase “Sanctity of The Marriage” to fully understand this contract’s unique catalytic power of social cohesiveness. Nothing else equals in force: Work? Guild? Dorm? Local club? Bar? Nope… None (…none…!) of these offer the power and force of “stay together against all else or odds” that does our ideal notion of what is marriage.
That’s why it is penultimately important (vital & life-expanding) in our own civil-rights struggle as a bsexual minority to obtain marriage as a civil-right. Marriage protects and provides numerous types of shelter, both in terms of fundamental economics and basic emotions — Straights know this, and we shouldn’t so quickly disregard the power of the public association. It’s hugely empowering.
And that’s why, exactly, some of them don’t want us to have it.
rob@egoz.org