Ross Douthat wants to ignore "the yucky"...

Note to my readers (all 7 of you!): in order to really follow this post, you should really read Ross Douthat's column on Prop 8 and the following response by Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is a gay Catholic and Douthat is a conservative Catholic.

On his blog, conservative commentator, Ross Douthat of The New York Times has continued to address with thoughtfulness and sincerity the cultural fallout from the overturning of Prop 8 and criticism of his column which argued against the recent ruling and for the idea of preserving heterosexual marriage, on the grounds that it is a special union which can create life and maintains a sound structure to raise that life. Douthat makes some valid arguments, while eschewing some others for good reason, and advocates that having a "marriage ideal" for heterosexuals is still worth preserving.

Douthat's insightful responses to the issue of gay marriage have been thoughtful and serious.  His recent posts on the topic have been building up to this direct response to Andrew Sullivan's eloquent personal critique of Ross's original column about the "marriage ideal" (read it in full here).  In his response to Sullivan, Douthat essentially proposes a desexualized domestic partnership which affords gay people a status of contractual dependency and would be open to any two adults who chose to cohabit be they cousins, siblings, or a parent and his/her Down Syndrome child.

This idea sounds nice and all, but it still discriminates against gay couples not only because it denies the existence of gay love but more-so, because it denies the existence of gay sex.

Let me let you in on a little secret, most Americans could care less about gay love.  They're totally OK with it. Hugs, held hands and rings on fingers: these are the things and symbols that are not that hard to confront.  We love our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers regardless of gender, right?  Certainly a decent person wouldn't deny anyone love, right?

The issue of gay marriage is not one of love discrimination it is one of sexual discrimination.  Conservatives want to codify in law that one group of people's sexual practices are generally less yucky than the other group's and therefore should be granted a noble and stable institution such as marriage which celebrates moral and "non-yucky" sex.  Conservatives and many Democrats cannot bring themselves to confront the fact that certain sexual practices continue to make them uneasy. Heterosexual penetrative vaginal sex, which can lead to pregnancy, is the only form of sex that most people are comfortable placing in a "moral zone" hence our culture's religiously influenced distaste for oral sex or anal sex, commonly known as "sodomy", even if the participants are two heterosexual married partners also known as "one man + one woman."

Sodomy was only recently legalized on the federal level in 2003 when the Supreme Court's decision struck down Texas' anti-sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas.  The plaintiffs in the case were two consenting gay adult men who were arrested for having sex in their own house.  Luckily, the Court understood that the Texas police were not applying the sodomy law equally as they did not seek to stop Mrs. Smith from giving her husband, Mr. Smith a blowjob. Texas was only using the law to punish homosexual people for their own private sexual behavior. Remember everybody, according to conservative Christians, homosexuals do not exist, only homosexual behavior exists.

Gay people in the United States are thought to be 1-2% of the population. Now let's imagine another small minority.  But let's say this small minority of Americans are heterosexual and couple off in pairs of "one man and one woman" but their sexual activity only consists of acts of sodomy.

Would we not allow them to get married?
Would we not allow them to adopt children or run a foster home?
Would we not allow them to visit each other in the hospital?
Would we not allow them to give blood?

I mean we're talking about the ideal of two married people "one man + one woman" right? That's the ONLY requirement!

The long story short is this.  The central argument advocated by the proponents of Prop 8 is "to protect the children" as if walking in on "Dad and Dad" or "Mommy and Mom" having sex is more damaging than catching Mom and Dad have sex. If you observe sex really closely, you realize that sex is really yucky regardless of who's having it and what's going where. Ross Douthat wants to create a legal framework where gays have most of the legal rights and responsibilities as heterosexual unions but where they are told to put their sexuality back in the closet, and keep it hidden from the rest of society, lest anyone be grossed out by the thought of two people of the same gender having sex. Gay marriage is no longer just about civil rights it's about allowing gay Americans to fully express their humanity, where their relationships and commitments are just as important and sacred as any straight marriage.

Sex is a beautiful, messy, yucky act that most humans engage in.  Ross needs to confront the yucky and realize that there's no need to protect a sanctuary for moral sexual behavior that never existed in the first place.