OldSpeak

Gay Marriage, Half-Time Bodice Rippers, Allen Ginsberg’s Queer Shoulder, and Other Paradoxes of Cultural Hypocrisy

By David Dalton
April 13, 2004

Can morality be legislated? Well, you can try. But in the past, such attempts have frequently had an odd way of achieving just the opposite of the legislator’s intentions. Take attempts to curb teen smoking and drinking, gun control, ban pornography, and the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit.* All achieved exactly what the laws didn’t want.

For example, take Janet Jackson’s bare breast—metaphorically speaking, of course. This exposure was treated as if it were a sign that we were all going to hell in a handbasket. Western Civilization on the brink! Admittedly, this outrage occurred during one of our sacred rituals, wherein genetic freaks compete on steroids and Astroturf while beer-guzzling males gather in loutish little groups to cheer them on. But who, among all the sanctimonious commentators, mentioned the violence of the act? Or the song’s lyrics (they told you what was coming), or various pantomimes of sexual perversion in Justin Timberlake’s choreography.

If you’re talking about baring erogenous zones during sacred events, that’s one thing. But if you’re talking about curbing soft-core pornography on television in general, well, that would be just plain un-American. You’re talking about undermining the very foundations of American capitalism, which would lead to the overnight collapse of the advertising industry and the instant demise of MTV.

The polls say that 44% of Americans oppose gay marriage. Only 44%? What I find more surprising is that 35% of voters are in favor of legalizing gay marriage, and another 14% say they don’t like it but could live with it. And bear in mind that public opinion is not static—the very debate itself has begun affecting people’s attitudes.

The withholding of rights from a minority is seen by defenders of civil rights as unconstitutional, especially when opposition to gay matrimony is essentially a religious objection. But a far more potent element in the area of public opinion is the empathetic factor. Scenes of joyous couples embracing at gay marriage ceremonies has melted the heart of more than one sentimental viewer and prompted them to ask, “Who would want to deny this ceremony to people in love, whatever their persuasion?” As mayors in city after city have permitted gays to marry, we are starting to see TV news shows on gay marriage with segments entitled “Love Versus the Law.” If there’s anything Americans are more addicted to than double standards, it’s sappy love stories. At this point in time, practically everyone in America works with someone who’s gay or has a gay relative (including Dick Cheney). Homosexuality, especially among the young, is hardly an issue anymore, as epitomized by Seinfeld’s now classic line: “Well, he’s gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

George W. Bush’s demand for a constitutional amendment condemning gay marriage, a clear attempt to create a “wedge issue” in the coming election, could easily backfire. Polls say that even people who support a constitutional amendment acknowledge that it is a political ploy intended to divide and distract voters’ attention from more serious issues. And average voters find it shocking that, at a time of rampant unemployment and a war in Iraq, Congress should be debating such a minor issue. Worse, Bush’s pushing of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage may be seen by the general public as just plain mean.

By and large, Americans’ basic impulse is to be fair and avoid hurting people who are simply trying to get the same rights as everyone else. By overplaying their hand, those in the anti-gay marriage crowd run the risk of appearing intolerant, reactionaries out of touch with an evolving society—a morality police whose intrusions into other people’s private lives may end up with federal snoops spying into your bedroom window. From an administration that is often seen as eroding our civil rights, this is a scary prospect.

Banning, censoring, prohibiting of any already-entrenched social behavior has generally had the perverse effect of increasing the behavior in question, if not actually bringing on a cultural revolution. A case in point was the prosecution of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl.

In When I Was Cool, Sam Kashner’s hilarious account of his education at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (with Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso as his professors), Kashner at one point asks Ginsberg how he became famous. Ginsberg enthusiastically launches into an account of the absurd attempts to suppress his contested tome. Early in 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao, the owner and manager of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, were arrested for selling Howl and Other Poems to two undercover cops. When the obscenity trial began in the summer of 1957, Howl became a cause célèbre. “It started to seem to me,” writes Kashner, “like the arrest and trial were the best thing that could have happened to the Beats. It made them famous.”

Persecution made the lives and behavior of these literary outlaws irresistible to the young and set the stage for the sixties. A misguided attempt to protect public morality led to the conversion of an entire generation to a cult of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. So before the forces of reaction and repression begin another moral crusade, they might want to put that in their pipe and smoke it.

*For an exhaustive essay on the misguided and farcical attempts of lawgivers to keep people from temptation see Dwight Filley’s “Forbidden Fruit: When Prohibition Increases the Harm It Is Supposed to Reduce” in The Independent Review, Winter 1999.

DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN OLDSPEAK ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE.