Damon Linker tells me that it is totally understandable for the administrators of a high school to be concerned when they discover that a “former student also happens to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, or a neo-Nazi, or a convicted felon” and that when this happens “then the school will naturally seek to downplay the connection — and to sever any explicit ties between them.” For example, they’d be within their rights to remove links on the school’s website to an approving profile of a Klan member or Nazi that is published in the Washington Post.
Linker acknowledges that these hypothetical administrators “can…link to or remove a link to anyone it wants for whatever reason.” He’s careful to point out that what he’s discussing here isn’t really something of great import because it “isn’t about politics or the law” and “has nothing to do with religious freedom or state power.”
Indeed, not.
If I could summarize here, for Linker it doesn’t matter if the Washington Post wants to fluff a white supremacist who just happened to go to your high school, you don’t have to link to the article on your school website.
If this were all Linker was writing about we could wholeheartedly agree with him and call it a day.
Unfortunately, Linker isn’t writing about a Nazi. He’s writing about a guy who opposes gay marriage.
Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that this shouldn’t change Linker’s argument at all. I mean, the key point above was not related to the particular repellent retrograde opinions in question. The key point was that there are no legal reasons why school administrators should feel compelled to link approvingly to profiles on its graduates. Full stop.
There is no need for us to further exercise our logical minds here. A school decided not to link to a story about one of their graduates. That’s their right.
So, what is Linker going on about?
It’s not political. He said so.
It’s not about religious freedom. He admitted as much.
It has nothing to do with the law or state power.
What it does have to do with, however, is the way that opposition to gay marriage is becoming a taboo much like white supremacy became a taboo. Yet, the school administrators did not mention miscegenation or Jim Crow. Here’s what the Head of School had to say about his decision to delink from the article:
I believe that Mr. [Ryan] Anderson is entitled to hold the views he does, and I respect his educational and professional accomplishments. As the article remarks, he is seen as a “fresh face” for the anti-gay-marriage movement largely because of the civil and reasoned manner in which he presents his arguments. I hope that his ability to respectfully disagree with his opponents has at least some root in his experiences at Friends School. That said, as a Quaker school, we strive to create an environment where “that of God” in every person is acknowledged and respected. By choosing to highlight an article about an alumnus whose work is based on a set of beliefs that begin from an assumption of inequality and that argue for the denial of rights to an entire segment of the population based on their identity, I now realize that we erred. I promise that we will draw on this experience as a tool for learning about how we can help to create a sense of acceptance and well-being for all, while also providing for the open and respectful exchange of ideas. We can and must do better in the difficult work of balancing these competing ideals.
Now, Mr. Anderson doesn’t agree with that characterization of his beliefs, but you can see here that the only reference to race is one that can inferred by the idea of “the denial of rights to an entire segment of the population based on their identity.” That’s the key insight.
Because you can talk all you want about how marriage has been perceived and treated historically, but once you accept that denying marriage rights to gays is similar in kind to denying marriage rights to mixed race couples, then it’s game over.
Linker knows this, and Ryan Anderson knows it, too. That’s why they make such a fuss about it. It’s why Linker opened this column talking about Nazis and the Klan instead of some nice gay couple who is being prevented from leaving each other an inheritance or adopting a child. Linker tried to make this all about race which is self-defeating because race is ultimately the example that kills his argument.
For Anderson, the gay marriage issue is not about race.
Every great thinker who has ever written about marriage, you never see a discussion of race… Whether it’s Plato, Aristotle, or Cicero, whether it’s the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, whether it’s Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Muhammad, Gandhi — none of them talk about skin color; each and every one of them talk about sexual complementarity.
So, for the victim of this profile-delinking scandal, opposition to gay marriage isn’t like opposition to mixed race children like Barack Obama because that’s a different kind of icky. Plato didn’t concern himself with that kind of icky. Come to think of it, Plato was quite fond of the other kind of icky but…I’m losing my train of thought…
Damn you, Alcibiades!
So, where was I?
Yes, Linker wants to make this all about the Klan but Anderson desperately wants to keep this restricted to same-sex butt-sex.
But we were really talking about a school delinking to a profile of an alumnus because that’s their fucking right to do that, that’s why.
So, is this Head of School really a “petulant thug,” as Linker seems to suggest, or is he just a victim of a concerted campaign by “the gay rights movement and many liberals” to stamp out dissent and drive into the wilderness every person who holds a contrary position”?
Here’s my idea on this. Can we stop pretending that marriage is controlled by the Church? It’s a civil construct, and being married has legal consequences under state and federal law. I don’t give two fucks how you feel about two men kissing or a white man and a Japanese woman having a child together. I don’t care what your Good Book says about these things or what you think your Good Book says about them. Only one question really matters: are you for denying people the opportunity to pick one person to be married to for the purpose of being considered married under the law?
That’s it.
And if you want to deny people that right, don’t speak to me about Cicero or Immanuel Kant because they didn’t live in our society and they don’t get a vote in how we treat gays and lesbians in this country.
What this is really about is certain people wanting to keep opposition to gay marriage from being a thoroughly disreputable opinion to hold in polite society. They don’t want people to be shunned for holding an unpopular opinion. My response to this is to ask the people holding these unpopular opinions to answer my question. Do you want to keep people from being considered married under the law just because they are of the same gender?
If you do, that’s going to get you shunned for the simple reason that we now recognize what Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther did not. People do not choose which gender they are attracted to and they can’t change it through prayer. I can say a trillion Hail Marys and I will never want to get in bed with a man. We understand this now.
We’re not going back.
