This is an "open draft" — meaning that I welcome input in creating the list of reasons why exgays should support civil unions. I’ll be out of town on vacation for a week, which means I might have time to help work on this — or I may be unable to access the Internet, in which case the content of this post is entirely up to you.
Reason 1: Gay life partners are united in love and commitment, not lust. (Substantiate.)
Reason 2: Civil unions are not marriage. (Explain.)
Reason 3: Same-sex retirement benefits lag (Boston Globe, Dec. 29, 2004)
Reason 4: Hospitals, landlords, police, public agencies, and antigay family members often disregard powers of attorney and other costly legal substitutes.
Reason 5: Civil unions ease the government’s job of taxation while resolving inequities suffered by gay taxpayers. (Explain.)
Reason 6: Civil unions reward monogamy, decreasing health risks and removing opportunities for exgays to be tempted by the availability of single gay men. (Self-evident?)
Reason 7: Civil unions reduce opportunities for societal discrimination, which may otherwise be used by some activists to justify pre-emptive or retaliatory discrimination against exgays.
Reason 8: (Add your own reasons, along with substantiation — including links whenever possible.)
I hate to start out on the wrong foot, because I like this “position paper” idea a lot; it will ultimately help us all refute the misinformation coming from the exgay camp.
But there are complications. A moderately discouraging piece on NPR this morning about developments in Massachusetts since the state supreme court decision on same-sex marriage:
https://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4249123
The problem? Same-sex couples in the process of adopting children are typically in a “don’t ask-don’t tell” situation. The adoption agencies willing to work with same-sex couples only do so if they can stay under the radar. If couples, mid-adoption, get married, they’re outed, and their efforts to adopt will crumble as the agencies run for cover from the religious right’s pressure.
And the people who bought us the pro-life movement ruin yet another child’s chance for a healthy and love-filled childhood.
I realize that you’re looking for collaboration and not challenge here, but it should be self-evident that no person who calls themselves “ex-gay” would support any sort of instutionalized same-sex relationship, no matter what it was called and no matter what the legal terms. They believe that homosexuality is evil, and by extension they believe that they themselves are evil. There are copious theological arguments that attempt to circumvent this psychological reality (“Hate the sin, lover the sinner” and so forth), but in my personal experience, there is no such thing as a gay person who is against gay marriage or civil unions for themselves who would grant the same privilege to others.
They think being gay is wrong. They think their natural romantic and sexual desires are wrong. They believe that the gay “lifestyle” is destructive because they cannot distinguish between their own self-destruction and the healthy relationships of the people around them.
It’s time to stop attempting coalitions with our enemies. Let. Them. Go. Leave them to their misery — they are merely a distraction on the road to our liberation.
Coalition-building is not the purpose of this exercise. 🙂 I’m mainly looking for folks to think outside the box.
That being said, I have encountered a handful of exgays over the years who saw religious-right politics as unethical and counterproductive for exgays, and/or who did not believe they must oppress everyone else for their own well-being. But again, they’re not necessarily the target of this exercise.
My question remains: For what reasons, theoretically, should exgays support civil unions?
You can’t be sure of your faith unless it’s tested, and the existence of gays in happy, committed relationships provides the perfect background against which ex-gays can ascertain whether they’ve truly given up their focus on this life and devoted themselves to God, even when they don’t understand His plan.
I apologize in advance for a post that is going to be of no help in answering Mike’s question–not directly, anyway.
Though it’s been less than two months since the election, it now seems to be the consensus among the GLBTQ community and its supporters that it was a HUGE mistake, politically, for gays to push for gay marriage rights. The whole idea of “marriage” is too complex, and carries too much historical/religious/political baggage, for us to expect that the straight community is going to accept a redefinition of it anytime soon. We ignored the lessons of civil rights history, pushed too hard too fast, and got hurt as a result.
HOWEVER, there is such a thing as crossing the Rubicon, and I can’t bear the thought that we’ve been beaten so far back that we now have to beg heterosexuals for even a small amount of reasonable thinking where gay relationships are concerned. Having played the marriage card, disastrous as it may have been, we can’t go back now to begging for some sort second-class status. We can’t.
As far as this forum is concerned, I find myself, surprisingly, to be speaking from a radical queer point of view. Radical queers aren’t exactly crawling out of the woodwork at ExGayWatch.com, as far as I can tell; I’m not even certain that this kind of viewpoint is welcome here. I hope that it is, because I admire the spirit of this enterprise and salute the contributions of writers who are more cool-headed than I am. Thank you.
How about: Because they should feel guilty for cutting off marriage as an option for responsible gays who wish to demonstrate fidelity in committed relationships? A reasonable person would seek a middle ground between marriage, which they oppose, and relational anarchy on the opposite pole. If they *truly* wish to provide a construct for rewarding responsibility within gay relationships, they should support Civil Union; or come up with something that offers an opportunity to demonstrate fidelity and responsibility.
Of course the political x-gays won’t do this because their core canard is that gays cannot be responsible or committed. If gays are able to demonstrate those qualities in a relationship their entire house-of-cards (and financial backing) evaporates.
oh dear god please don’t leave us with this new banner graphic for the next week 😛
Comments welcome — about the (spooky?) banner, the fonts, etc. These are just little pieces of a much bigger redesign.
well I liked the old and simple “ex gay watch” text-based banner more but I like the rest of your redesign. Would it be possible to adjust the kearning of each post headline?