Gay Marriage: The Gender Gap

By Richard Goldstein, Village Voice. Posted December 19, 2003.

To my surprise and delight, some prominent neocons have broken ranks with their right-wing peers over gay marriage. New York Times columnist David Brooks argues that conservatives should not only support it but insist on it. (What a novel way to stop public sex: Force any two homos caught in the act to wed!) Meanwhile Brooks's conservative colleague William Safire has concluded that, as a libertarian, he has no objection to the state licensing same-sex couples. But like many people who can't find a logical reason for opposing gay unions, Safire worries about the potential of this issue to spark religious schism. Call it the dogma demurral.

Religious beliefs and biblical teachings are the most common reasons people give for opposing same-sex marriage. As in so many matters, pleading one's faith can be a cover for other anxieties -- so my experience teaches me. Back in the old days, segregationists made speeches in Congress about the Bible's curse on blacks (the infamous Children of Ham routine), and don't get me started on the Christ-killer pretext for anti-Semitism. In both cases, the real issue was maintaining the stigma that condemned blacks and Jews to pariah status. The entire social order seemed to rest on an arbitrarily defined difference between purity and pollution. After centuries of struggle, we've finally begun to question that system when it comes to race and religion -- but not sexuality. Queers have taken on the role of the accursed. If you ask me, that's what has freed Christian fundamentalists to see the virtue in their Hebrew brethren -- at least for now.

I've been examining a recent report from the prestigious Pew Research Center, about Christian beliefs and public attitudes toward homosexuality. It seems that the more frequently people go to church the more vehemently they oppose gay marriage -- and the more likely they are to have an unfavorable attitude toward gay people. No scoop here. But there are interesting variations within this fold. White evangelical Protestants are twice as likely as similarly committed white Catholics to think homosexuals can change. That jibes with the teachings of their respective faiths. Race also plays a part in how people feel about the enigmatic question of sexual identity. Blacks are less likely than whites to think it's mutable. But here's an interesting paradox: Though they may be more realistic about homosexuality, blacks are even less likely than whites to favor gay marriage. Clearly, something deeper than doxy is involved.

There's an even more striking contradiction in the Pew survey. In nearly every group, men are more likely than women to recoil from the idea of same-sex unions. If religion is the major motivating factor here, this gender gap shouldn't exist, but it does. As the Pew researchers note, "Women tend to express more favorable opinions of both gay men and lesbians, and this is especially true among very young people." Though youths are the group most likely to favor same-sex marriage, that sure wouldn't be the case if it were only up to young men.

The libraries are filled with tomes explaining why guys are so threatened by male homosexuality. There's the struggle of boys to separate from their powerful mothers. There's the castration complex, which leads to an association between gay sex and ravishment by the father. There's the theory that male hierarchies depend on the subordination of queer -- or at least effeminate -- men. I'm not about to deny the Freudian analysis or the feminist one. But there's something else going on that makes gay marriage a formidable issue for men in general, young men in particular, and African Americans to an otherwise puzzling extent. The hidden factor I'm thinking of is social status.

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