Episode 1: Gay Marriage with Moira and Adrian

fight against gay marriage wasn't really about gay marriage, and that's why we are still having the same fight, just in a different sort of container.

Hello and welcome.

I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

This is our podcast where we examine conservative and right-wing ideas about gender and sexuality and how they continue to fuck up our lives.

So maybe we should say a little bit more about who we are.

I'm Moira Donegan.

I'm a writer covering gender and politics for The Guardian, and I'm a writer in residence at Stanford's Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

I'm writing a book on anti-feminist backlash since 2017, so I spend a lot of time thinking about misogyny, its influence, and its influences.

And I'm Adrian Dobb.

I'm a professor of literature and cultural history at Stanford.

I direct the Clayman Institute.

I've become super interested in the way conservative ideas persist and how they end up influencing public discourse that doesn't necessarily understand itself as conservative.

Before we get into it, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for their generous support.

We'd like to thank Jennifer for Portillo for setting up our studio.

And our theme music is by Katie Lau, and our producer is Megan Calfas.

Maybe we should start off by saying a little bit about how we got interested in this topic.

Maybe it doesn't require too much explanation after like Dobbs, after the

Supreme Court just took a nice time machine back to separate but equal last week.

Maybe it's obvious to everyone why these ideas are worth engaging with, but maybe we'll say a little bit more about the way their persistence has kind of made us interested.

And, like, well, given that we're stuck living with this shit, like, might make sense to understand where it comes from.

Yeah, you know, I think the more I see the rise of the right in America and the more they turn towards this like pseudo-populist authoritarian turn, the more they lean into a

regressive, hierarchical understanding of gender, of femininity and masculinity, of the ways that the sex body at birth can or should or does influence somebody's life outcomes.

And, you know, we're seeing that more and more in our policy, in our law, and in our culture.

So I think this is as good a time as any, maybe the best time to look at conservative ideas about sex and gender because they're becoming really obviously present in our lives.

Yeah, I agree.

And people have been sort of pointing out that in a lot of these moral panics, we revisit these ideas from the 70s and 80s.

You know, the anti-drag ban, I mean, the words female impersonation sort of showed up again.

Like this is how in the 60s or 50s

you were charged if you were gender non-conforming in public.

These are deep cuts.

People are really playing, you know, not the hits from 20 years ago, they're playing them from 70 years ago.

And I think it's really worth thinking about both what makes these ideas so virulent, but also how on earth they're still with us.

Our very first episode, we are going to take a little look at something something that is maybe more relevant and more tenuous now than we thought it was going to be.

And that is gay marriage.

Mailage.

May wage.

It's

2013's hottest topic.

Yeah, and it's back, baby.

It's got everything.

Nuptials, two men bound by the law.

Websites.

Websites.

Flowers.

Yeah.

Cakes.

Yeah.

But just don't ask that lady from Colorado to make it.

So it's hard to remember that before freaking out about 12-year-old shop putters, kids allegedly pooping in litter boxes at school, and the woke mind virus tearing down statues to your local slave owner, serious conservative voices were worried about how two dudes in San Francisco tying the knot at City Hall might lead to a licentious all-out fuckfest in your local cul-de-sac.

Especially for younger listeners, I think this is going to be a pretty strange conversation.

I have a good friend who teaches LGBT history, and he once tweeted that he was looking at a bunch of interesting documents from the 1970s and one of the kids was like, oh, wait, was gay marriage legal then?

And, you know, it's just like how quickly we forget.

Yeah, I think it's weird.

I mean, Adrian and I are a smidge older than our students, but we've got, what, like 10 years between us or something like that?

And when gay marriage became legal, I was kind of like newly an adult, like had just started dating.

And it was this whole abrupt reversal of what the terms of adult life were going to look like just kind of as soon as I got there.

You know, there were suddenly all these avenues for assimilation and acceptance that had been like very foreclosed when I was a kid.

And now they're kind of, you know, maybe in danger of being foreclosed again.

Yeah.

So why talk about marriage for our first episode?

Well, for one thing, it's been 10 years.

Happy anniversary, everyone, since the federal government began recognizing gay marriages after the Supreme Court, United States v.

Windsor.

It's just the right amount of distance, I think, to have kind of sufficiently estranged ourselves from the discourses and to kind of notice how freaking weird they were to begin with.

Yeah, there was all of the rhetoric about what a family really meant and how to raise children and why the word marriage could or could not be extended to these like lifelong unions that like looked different.

And then there was also a lot of maybe kind of well-intentioned but misguided stuff on the pro-gay marriage side.

Yeah.

Love is love, born this way.

Macklemore made a song.

It was rough.

It was a dark time.

I mean, the weddings were great, but it was just...

Yeah, there was a lot of

joy, a lot of hope, a lot of like sort of moral determination, and also

a lot of compromises and sort of strange political position taking and how we got there.

And I think maybe we are at enough of a remove and hopefully knock wood secure enough in our rights to be able to like look back at that era with a little more honesty or a little more critical foresight and see how history shaped this conversation about this institution and how it was going to change going into the new century.

Yeah, I also think that there's an element here where, right, there was a lot of worry about it being the wrong issue, about being too soon or being kind of pointless.

Part of that was, and I think this is why it's an interesting topic to start a podcast about conservatism off on, is that conservatives were not all in the predictable positions here.

You got these like, you know, God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve kind of people, but like we'll meet some conservatives who will meet later and like junk on like heartily being kind of on an interesting side of this, like either outwardly pro-gay marriage or even leading the conversation.

And so it's an interesting moment where sort of like the very obvious camps into which everyone fell at the end weren't always so obvious.

And I think that makes it interesting too.

Yeah, gay marriage was, and I think to some extent remains, a little bit of a weird issue because it's a combination of of something that the left likes, which is gay people, and something the right likes, which is marriage, with something the left often doesn't like marriage, with something the right really doesn't like, gay people.

So it's not an intuitive issue.

It was not an intuitive place for the gay rights movement to go.

It was not an intuitive goal for the conservative movement to oppose.

All of these things were very contingent.

And the way it worked out is not exactly the way I had remembered.

from my own life before I went back and investigated this.

Well, the other thing to think about, and this is something that's going to sound maybe a little strange to people who haven't sort of delved deep into queer history, but like we'll get back to this point later on if it doesn't make sense right now.

But like the idea that queerness in some way opposed itself to these kinds of institutions was kind of foundational, right?

I was reading this essay by the German novelist Thomas Mann, which is from 1925, so quite old.

Marriage and transition.

Probably gay man, as far as we know, married to a woman, and it's all something like the essence of marriage.

And he's like, the whole point of non-reproductive sex and love is that it's like, it's momentary, it's irresponsible.

And like, he means that both, like, the essay is both like, oh, that's horrible, and that's why you probably should get married.

But also, he's saying, but also, it's kind of awesome, right?

So there's this, like, the worry that you're kind of throwing out the, you know, well, not the baby with the bathwater, but really.

Not the baby, very emphatically, not the baby.

Yeah, but like that you are.

There was a worry among some like more radical queers.

This is like the left-wing critique of gay marriage, is that it like kind of gets gets rid of everything that is cool and promising about gay people, like alternative visions of kinship, challenges to hierarchical, patriarchal property relations and things like marriage.

These ideas that, you know, we have this community that's actually really challenging the way we organize family, sex, love.

kinship, and why would we just reintegrate that into the status quo?

Doesn't that kind of burn up all its potential?

And here's another reason I think this is kind of worth revisiting now.

I think gay marriage reveals that while most of us would say that we're kind of a little suspicious of the idea that, oh, we're always making progress, is it all getting better?

I mean, I think it's a really hard thing to claim in the 2020s.

But when it comes to social issues, we actually do have this kind of knee-jerk instinct that says like, well, we're moving forwards, not backwards.

We think we're done talking about a certain social issue.

We've moved on.

And gay marriage is a great case of that.

Or like, I think for you and me, having lived through it, it's a lot more obvious maybe than for folks who haven't.

But it was a hotly contested issue until the decision came down in 2015.

And then everyone kind of just moved on.

It was just Zippo, right?

It was an election turnout issue.

It was something that George Bush probably won in 2004, partly because of this.

Like people made a point to go to the polls for this.

And then in 2016, it was like, who gives a shit, right?

And in some way, we would like that to happen, but it has two corollaries, right?

When it became legal, everyone kind of just memory hold the substantial opposition that existed.

Everyone just kind of memory hold just that 50% of the country had been dead set against it, kind of the same way that conservatives who love quoting MLK, including last week when affirmative action was abolished, right, probably, sorry, but would have held the club that hit him over the head back in the 1960s, right?

Like, you know, people now are like, oh, let's just move on.

But like, there was substantial buy-in on the anti-gay marriage position that we all kind of memory hold.

And here's the thing.

Memory holding things is fine, but the thing is these, these ideas have a way of persisting.

The moment the gay marriage issue was mooted by the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v.

Hodges in 2015, the right pivoted to a different issue.

I remember thinking at the time, God, this is so desperate.

Like, if this is the best you can do, I'm not that worried for the future, shows what I know.

And it was basically trans people and their rights to use bathrooms, right?

And like, and the thing is, historians, I think, agree that like it didn't work then very well.

But the thing is, it's back with a vengeance, right?

So like a month after Obergerfell, these questions were back, but they needed to marinate for another seven years.

And then, boom, they're back.

And, like, we're having the same freakouts we had about gay marriage, about trans kids using the bathroom of their gender.

And I think that that's really interesting.

Part of what I'm really excited about to talk with you about, Adrian, is tracing the common sort of intellectual foundations of these moral panics, of these beliefs about sex and gender.

Because, you know, we see a lot, as you mentioned, a lot of the same arguments that were used used in the 2010s against gay marriage now being used against trans rights but then you know also it's not like gay marriage has actually gone away you mentioned that like after i would say the end was actually in 2015 with overgefellow like windsor was the decision in 2013 right that struck down section three of the defense of marriage act and made the federal government for the first time recognize same-sex marriages, right?

And at that point, the writing was kind of on the wall.

But two years later is when gay marriage actually became legal nationwide in Oberville v.

Hodges in 2015.

And at that point, states lost the ability to ban gay marriage within their borders, the way they had lost the ability to ban abortion with Roe.

But then, you know, in Dobbs, which overturned Roe in 2022, Clarence Thomas wrote a dissent that really kind of outlined his gender reaction program, right?

And he says, now that we've overturned Roe and Casey and we've given states an ability to ban abortion, next up, we're going to overturn Ogre Buffett.

We're going to overturn Lawrence, which made gay sex legal nationwide.

And we can

sodomy statues illegal, yep.

Made sodomy statutes illegal, yeah.

De facto decriminalized gay sex.

And

we're going to go for Griswold, which was the legalization of birth control for married couples.

So, you know, there is a coherent, expansive project.

The right views all of these struggles as related to their sort of sexual agenda.

And I think we can, you know, begin to tease out how they got there

over the course of our conversations.

Yeah.

So maybe we should just give folks a little bit of a rundown of what exactly this marriage debate looked like.

When did gay marriage become an issue?

How did it become an issue?

You know, like Tarzan swinging on vines, we're going to sort of be using mostly legal questions as our guide.

But keep in mind, like we're not really interested.

This is not a law podcast.

There are excellent law podcasts out there, but neither of us is a lawyer.

You're not, right?

No, I'm not a lawyer.

Oh, my God.

I was like alarmed there for a second.

But, because I have this thing, I have this ticket.

Can I contest it?

No, it's important to remember that, like, you know, we've mentioned Obergefell, we've mentioned Windsor, we could mention Perry, we've mentioned Lawrence, right?

These are sort of the big milestones, but of course, like, there was a bunch of discourse around it.

And things were sayable and claimable in public discourse about morality, about policy, etc., etc.

never really held up in court.

So in some way, you know, we're giving you one version of this story, but keep in mind that it's not identical with the whole story.

There's an interesting line that I remember from an interview with, well, a man who emerged as a bit of a hero in the Obergefell, who has since turned out to be, he's done a bit of a heel turn, let's say.

Yeah, this is another thing you're going to learn of, the more you learn about marriage, the more you realize that some of the people on the very right side of marriage are on the very wrong side of a lot of things now.

David Boyce, for instance, was also like, I think Harvey Weinstein's lawyer, Elizabeth Holmes, really, you know, if

you just really need to like mess with your employees, like he's apparently your guy, but he also was, you know, at the forefront of the

final push towards legalizing gay marriage.

And I remember him saying in an interview at some point that, you know, there's all these things you can say in the public sphere, but there is no more, and I'm hoping I'm paraphrasing it correctly, there's no more lonely place than a witness box, right?

You sit there and you have to say things you know to be true, and you do it under penalty of perjury.

And if you look through, and this is why I sort of singled out Windsor as opposed to Obergefell, because for Obergefell, like they barely even bother to marshal any more experts, I remember, because it's like, it was so fucking embarrassing, right?

Like it's just like all this stuff sort of collapsed in on itself.

Now, we're not looking at that stuff.

We're not really looking at the witness box.

We're talking about all the stuff that you could just sort of talk about out there in the public sphere.

A lot of that went very, very silent once you were in court.

And people were like, do you, do you actually have.

data for this?

And then you're like, well, no, no, not so much.

It's just I don't like them.

And you're like, yeah, well, that's, I'm sorry, but that's not going to be good enough.

And we're really interested in the kind of ways that like, you know, in media it was talked about, in the way it was talked about on college campuses, the way it was talked about in sort of emerging social media, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, and I think that's interesting because the reality is that gay marriage had been, since really the Stonewall era, it had been something that came up periodically mostly as a thought experiment.

It would be a challenge for philosophers or for sort of like the fringes of the legal academy or occasionally like theologists, right?

But it was not a central demand.

of the gay rights movement.

What it was, was a sporadic demand of individual couples who didn't really have a ton of institutional support.

And then very much like the moral panics of our day, there were these sporadic moments that then got whipped up into right-wing reactions to it, right?

People who are sort of my age, so, you know, in my 40s, I can recall the big debates where you can sort of tell, again, 2004 is one example of this, but apparently I found out in researching this episode that it went way back further, that Republicans would turn to this if they needed an interesting get-out-the-vote thing.

Like Vermont would do a thing and like 20 marriage licenses would be issued or some dude in Hawaii sued and like, and then you do another one of these freakouts.

I think that the mainstream gay rights movement for a long time thought like we're being forced into this.

This is a sideshow.

And I think that distraction sideshow note sort of always clung to it, at least on the left.

People were like, this isn't actually the thing we want to be talking about.

I think that's sort of the thing, the way people sort of came around to it was to say, you're using this as a metonymy for attacking our dignity in general.

And that's worth defending.

Not sure this piece of paper is like the hill I want to die on, but like my dignity is important to me.

And so, like, I guess we'll do battle on this battlefield of your choosing.

But it was always kind of like, it was not an area that the gay rights movement in any way kind of proactively pushed into.

It was really much more something that they usually felt they got forced into, if I recall correctly.

Right, the big gay rights organizations, the like sort of legal, fundraising, lobbying, juggernauts, so places like Lambda in the Northeast, the LAD group, and then the Human Rights Campaign, they really were not interested in marriage.

They thought it was symbolic, marginal, not very important.

Their focus, especially sort of after the AIDS crisis or their non-AIDS focus, was

around civil rights litigation, right?

So things like lobbying states or suing to get sexual orientation included in the list of protected statuses in a public accommodations law, which, you know, as we're talking, the Supreme Court just drove a truck through, or employment non-discrimination, housing non-discrimination.

And what had sort of emerged in that effort was sporadic bits of legal recognition or corporate recognition for gay relationships.

So in the 1980s, I believe, there was one of a number of post-AIDS litigations was this ruling by a judge in New York City that a man whose partner had died was entitled to remain in his rent control department.

And it was things like that that sort of slowly gave little marginal bits of legal acknowledgement to, you know, the legitimacy of these relationships, their cognizability before the law, and the ability of gay partners to sort of claim benefits.

But it was a lot of things that were sort of in these tragic moments.

There was a case in, I believe, Pennsylvania, where a young woman, she was like 24 or 25, was in a car crash that paralyzed her and gave her permanent brain damage.

And her woman's parents took custody of her and forbid her live-in girlfriend for many years from taking any part in her care.

And that partner sued and was eventually able to take custody.

And that was in the, I believe, early 1990s.

But it was things like that.

It was at the margins, tragedy, extreme cases, often involving debilitation or death in the aftermath.

Yeah.

And we should mention also maybe, so going way back, so I discovered that there were like attempts to get marriage licenses as early as 1970, as Jack Baker and Michael McConnell in Minneapolis.

What that drove home to me was that basically marriage is, of course, one of those places where we intersect with, and there is the little product of a gay marriage in the background,

where basically, you know, we interact with our government at the most local level.

That is to say, right?

Also, after gay marriage became legal, there was that famous case in Kentucky, I believe, of the of the woman who refused to issue marriage licenses.

Kim Davis, the fundamentalist with hair down to her ankle.

Yeah, yeah, with like super long hair.

That's the only thing I remember about her, and I forgot her name, but she's the hair lady.

She had a meeting with the Pope, but she was an individual county clerk who refused after Oberga fell, I believe, to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples as was required of her job.

In a prefiguration of the 303 creative, yeah, it's, and that will be how gay marriage rights are begun to be eliminated is through these individual religious liberty partitions, I bet you money.

But, you know, it does mean that also there were sporadic cases where there happened to be a sympathetic county clerk official, such as in Minnesota when Baker and McConnell applied for that license.

Yeah, apparently they got it.

Yeah, briefly.

I mean, there's famously, we're sitting here in San Francisco, Gavin Newsom issued a bunch in 2004, right?

When he was mayor, yeah, he decided to,

you know, it was very Gavin Newsome, but in 2004, as this had become a national crisis, he went to George Bush's State of the Union and heard, you know, some homophobic aside and said, I'm going to make a point and get a lot of attention.

And he instructed his city clerk to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

And the first one was issued to this couple, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who were old women.

They had been the founders of a a pre-Stonewall lesbian rights group called the Daughters of Bolitis back in the 1950s.

And they were these two tiny old women who got married at City Hall in 2004.

And then they got married again.

And they had to get married again in 2008 because their marriage was eventually voided, as were all of the same-sex marriages issued.

But, you know, there were same-sex marriages issued in San Francisco under Gavin Newsom's leadership for like two weeks.

It was like a very festive atmosphere.

And there was a lot of little moments like that.

Like Vermont had that.

Massachusetts formally legalized gay marriage.

There was a lawsuit in Boston, and those couples went and got married.

Hawaii, they didn't actually get married in Hawaii because that was Hawaii was the first time.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Because they sued and in 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court, there were three couples that sued for marriage licenses in Honolulu.

And the Hawaii Supreme Court said, you know what, I think there's an equal protection claim here.

And you guys have to go back down to trial court.

You can't just throw this case out.

And while they were waiting for a trial, Hawaii,

with the aid of a massive opportunistic effort by Republicans, particularly the Mormon Church, which I think we'll have to talk about again, they went in and passed a constitutional amendment, I believe, in 1993.

But there was so much worry that a state, one of these liberal blue coastal,

you know, decadent states was going to legalize gay marriage, that that would

create an obligation for other states to recognize licenses given in one of these legal states under the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, right?

And this became a fundraising juggernaut for the Republican Party, for the religious right.

They scaremongered about this forever.

Yeah, so in 1973, Maryland becomes the first state to ban same-sex marriage.

And then there's basically this trickle that, you know, it's very interesting that like gay marriage then becomes, as you say, because of the full faith and credit credit clause of the constitution, becomes kind of a state issue.

That's to say, you know, it's state supreme courts and it is uh state constitutions that get amended to ban this practice, get operationalized in this way.

So, right, you have these like local clerks sometimes bucking the trend, but then you have like with the exception of Massachusetts, like usually the states kind of by mid-90s, everyone had essentially banned gay marriage.

And then we get actually, this is a question.

Maybe you can explain it to me.

Like, so DOMA is signed by Bill Clinton in 1996.

Like, if there were all these state constitutions that were had been amended was there a real fear that the federal government would be the one to contravene that because like clearly no one was going to flip 50 states no what they were afraid of was a domino effect because here's the thing the full faith and credit clause of the constitution requires that states recognize the laws and legal orders of other states right so if I get a marriage license in Hawaii, the fear was that I could then take that back to my house in Kansas

and go to my Kansas government.

Well, that was what ultimately did happen.

All about that, yeah.

I could take that license and go, no, Kansas, you have to recognize this.

And DOMA

was the Defense of Marriage Act was put forth by the Republicans directly in response to this Hawaii Supreme Court ruling that said, you know, gay couples might have an equal protection claim.

to a marriage license because the idea was once Hawaii goes, the gay people in all 50 states are all going to get on a plane to Hawaii and they're going to come back with these marriage licenses.

We're divorced in Nevada and we're going to get married in Hawaii.

Yeah, exactly.

And then, you know, these other states will have to recognize gay marriages.

And so DOMA was an attempt to

sort of carve out a loophole to the full faith and credit clause so that other states wouldn't have to recognize gay marriages that were performed in Hawaii or Vermont or Massachusetts or whatever.

And also shield the federal government from recognizing gay marriages.

So you can't take your, you know, Hawaii didn't actually wind up legalizing gay marriage.

They wound up amending their constitution to prevent that.

But the idea was nobody would be able to take a hypothetical Hawaii marriage license that was valid in Hawaii and, you know, cash it in for a legally cognizable marriage in Kansas or Minnesota or Arkansas.

And also,

the federal government would not acknowledge those marriages as legitimate for taxation purposes mostly.

You can already hear sort of the rumblings of like capitalism in the background here, right?

Like one reason why we have the full faith and credit clause, as far as I understand it, is that like, imagine you and I incorporate a company in California and then like Kentucky says like, yeah, it's not a company under our law or something like that.

Or like, you know, you don't own this, right?

Like if you purchase a car and drive it over a state line, I don't forfeit this car, right?

The kind of carve-out that DOMA created in some way was saying, oh, this isn't just any other contract, because any other contract, you really can't do that.

You know, now Dobbs is creating kind of similar things, but that's a pretty new thing.

The only other, I mean, I'm sure there are other antecedents that I think of because I'm not a lawyer, but the famous one are fugitive slave laws, right?

Where basically, you know, there were questions of like recognition and non-recognition of people's individuality and people's status as property, basically, right?

So it's this really, really central thing.

And DOMA was basically creating this absolute, you know, like, oh, this contract is not really a contract.

And of course, that becomes, I think, even more interesting after the year 2000 when Vermont became the first state in the country to legalize civil unions between same-sex partners.

So suddenly you had these unions that were saying, it's not a sacrament, it's just purely contractual.

A lot of countries went this way, like in French, you have the le Pax, things like that, right?

Like civil unions were very hot for a moment there.

At the same time, right, it just kind of recreated the recognition problem on another level, right?

Well, civil unions were

an attempt to square the circle because Vermont was one of a few of these states after Hawaii.

There was also Massachusetts, there was Vermont.

There were a couple of

very carefully planned lawsuits that were orchestrated, I believe, in Vermont by GLAD.

And these were a handful of couples who were, you know, like paragons of bourgeois marriage, like people who were raising kids together, people who owned homes together, people who had been in sort of monogamous, long-term committed partnerships and were like visibly partnered in their communities, who sued for marriage licenses and were often making sort of similar equal protection claims or anti-sex discrimination claims on the basis that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination.

And Vermont's Supreme Court did what a lot of these state supreme courts wound up doing, which is saying,

yeah, the law as it is written does not actually allow the state of Vermont to deny gay couples marriage licenses.

This is all in 2000.

And what we're going to do is we're going to suspend that decision and make it not go into effect to allow the state legislature to ban it because obviously, you know, the logical conclusion here cannot be

cannot be what happens.

So there was this kind of

legal recognition that the couples were entitled to some kind of state cognizability of their relationships, right?

And a ton of pressure.

from outside groups, from in-state Republicans, there's a huge backlash to this in basically every state where it happened, to

not give acknowledgement to gay couples, right?

So there was

sort of the legal equality doctrine emerging, and then there was widespread popular homophobia.

So this is actually one of these areas where, you know, the law was sort of ahead of popular social progress.

We're now, like, you know, talk about whiplash, but we're now in an era where the law is being dragged very far behind popular opinion.

But at the time, in like the very early 2000s, the law was kind of, in at least a few of these states, was kind of getting ahead of it.

And so the way that these legislators tried to square the circle to both comply with the court order and keep their jobs was they invented this novel formulation called civil unions, which is basically in most states, it was marriage without the name,

all the legal protections of marriage, all the entitlements of and obligations of marriage.

They like rewrote the rules around dissolving this to just basically mimic a divorce, you know.

But it wasn't called marriage.

It was called something else.

So, and I kind of am fascinated.

It was a separate thing, but it was equally.

Oh, yeah.

You know,

it was just, it's all of the material benefits of marriage without the dignity.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, and this is sort of the moment when we get into it becoming this kind of big national issue.

The federal marriage amendment is introduced in the House of Representatives in 2003, becomes a big election issue in 2004.

Between 2004 and 2006, I think like something like 23 states ban.

same-sex marriage.

2008 is when Proposition 8 bans same-sex marriage in California.

Also the Mormon Church, big involved in that.

I was here for that campaign.

You were.

I saw it, yeah.

Oh, Jesus, how was that?

It was frightening.

I mean, it was, and just to give you a sense of how unsettled that territory was, right?

California resoundingly delivered all the state's electors to Barack Obama.

And that same night, it became very clear that by a small but definitive margin, I think it was something like 51, 49 or 52, 48, Proposition 8 had passed.

Yeah, and the churches were, of course, extremely instrumental in that.

And it turned out, you know, that a lot of the statements made pushing for Proposition 8 became an issue later on.

I remember there being rampant misinformation.

And, like, yeah, this is, I think, where David Boyce then comes in with that statement about there's no lonelier place than the witness stand, because a lot of these people then got asked about, like, where did you get your data here?

And it's like, well, no, I'm out of my ass.

I, you know, I just don't like gay people.

And so vibe-based data.

Yeah.

Yeah,

going on vibes.

But it gives you a sense, right?

Like, so Barack Obama comes into the White House basically with the biggest state in the Union, determining that even in already pretty blue California, it's not quite what it is today, but it was pretty liberal even then.

In very diverse California, there is no majority for gay marriage, at least, you know, if you if you lie to people about it enough.

You know, and I think it's worth pausing there to reflect on the Democratic Party, right?

Because Bill Clinton signed OMA without blinking.

He was willing to do it.

And his,

you know, quite prominent funders in the gay community, especially in California, didn't push back.

They were like, don't be a martyr on this, is the line I heard.

And Elena Kagan in his White House Counsel's office at the time was trying to get this signed as quickly as possible.

They wanted it done.

And Barack Obama in his 2008 Yes We Can, inspirational, oppressively saccharin campaign that now I think I look back on with a little bit of bitterness because of what came after.

But in all of his hopefulness and sort of unapologetic progressivism, he didn't favor gay marriage.

No, no.

That took, you know, the thing that seems to solve all our problems these days, a gaffe by Joe Biden

as one of the many things that he seems to sort of blunder into that like...

end up kind of going his way in interesting ways.

He just kind of...

Joe Biden falling up.

It's a recurring theme in American history.

Yeah, he just kind of talked out of turn, apparently, and got the ball rolling.

I think in 2011 is that

it was 2012.

It was during the re-election campaign.

Yeah.

And it was, you know, a time of, I guess, some vulnerability.

But between 2008 and 2012,

the politics had shifted enough that it had gone from being a vulnerability for Barack Obama to support gay marriage in 2008 to being a liability for him not to.

Right.

So he had told the Justice Department to stop defending DOMA in 2011, saying that he believed it to be unconstitutional.

And then what happened in 2013?

2013 is Windsor.

It's when DOMA gets struck down or Section 3, which kind of made sure that the federal government had to recognize same-sex marriages that were performed in states where they're legal.

Then there's Hollingsworth v.

Perry, which was formerly known as Hollingsworth v.

Schwarzenegger, which is where the governator briefly enters our story, where SCODIS ruled that there is no legal standing to defend Prop 8, effectively allowing same-sex couples to marry in California.

And then that's when the first seven states legalized same-sex marriage that very year.

So after 2013, like that's when the dominoes really fall.

And also when I think kind of public opinion shifts in this really big way, that basically it becomes this partisan issue.

The number of Democrats that are openly against gay marriages dwindles really quite substantially.

Whereas, you know, when Biden took that position, still kind of a minoritarian position officially within the Democratic Party.

Everyone knew where they really stood, but they didn't want to say it on camera, basically.

Like, you know, know, the way that Democrats were about choice for a long, long time until they ended up winning elections on it.

And then the dominance would have fall very, very quickly.

And then it kind of goes down the memory hole.

And maybe we pick it up there.

I mean, something I want to dwell on about this era of very rapid change is that there were...

you know, something very kind of unique to gay marriage is that it had so many sympathetic mascots, right?

These couples who wanted to get married, or like very frequently, widows who had been, you know, in these long devoted relationships.

And sort of Edie Windsor like becomes this

great case study of how the narrative politics of gay marriage works.

She was with this woman, Thea Speier, since they were very young, I think they were in like their 20s.

That's right.

Thea Speier was a clinical psychologist in New York, and Edie Windsor worked for IBM.

They were together for 40 years before marrying in 2007.

And Thea, who had by that time been sick for a while, died in 2009.

But they had been together for a very long time.

They considered themselves sort of informally engaged for a long time.

Like famously, Thea had given Edie a diamond pin instead of a ring so that they could have a symbol of their union and Edie could stay in the closet at work.

And they were so rich, dude.

They had a...

If you're ever in New York City on Fifth Avenue, like right just like a block north of the Washington Square Park,

Arch is their building.

It was a huge, beautiful apartment.

I think they had a place in like Provincetown.

Like they were

richer than God.

And Thea, you know, when they got older, had this long illness that required a lot of like years of intimate patient care.

And Edie did it.

And she did years of very difficult, emotionally, and physically taxing caretaking for her partner.

They had been married in New York, I believe, in 2011 when New York, the state of New York legalized gay marriage.

But the Defense of Marriage Act was still in effect, which meant that when Edie went to go file her taxes, she got slammed with all these inheritance taxes that would not have been applied to her if her marriage had been recognized by the federal government, right?

So like, on the one hand,

This is an heiress who doesn't want to pay her taxes.

On the other hand, why doesn't the other heiress whose dead spouse is male have to pay those taxes?

And, you know, she became a very sympathetic figure.

She's also kind of like good on camera in this way that I also wonder if there's like a little bit of, like, not all of these plaintiffs were so good at being in the media.

And Edie Windsor was very media savvy, very comfortable being interviewed, kind of like sassy in this way that I think was like non-threatening, maybe, especially because it was coming from a woman.

Yeah, I think there's a bunch.

that that's shifting there, right?

Republicans were trying to make this about, hey, gay sex is gross.

But what it ended up being is about a lot lot of end of life decisions, about care, about what kind of a legacy you leave.

And I think these, that's sort of how it was universalized, right?

Like basically the question of shifts away from, you know, what sets these couples apart to like, what makes these couples kind of universal.

And one of the interesting things is like, I think you're right, that it came with these really interesting narratives.

What's interesting about it, too, though, is that they weren't actually like culturally that influential or powerful.

There was like one, it wasn't the, it wasn't Windsor, right?

It was a movie starring Elliot Page and Julianne Moore about this issue, I believe.

Right.

Where also about like dementia, yeah.

Older and it was, yeah, there was a lot of, in a way, there's nothing less sexy than marriage.

Right.

And there's a way in which marriage sort of desexed the gay rights movement.

I think that's right.

And you know, that like, I think it's really worth thinking about.

We're in 2023.

2013 are the events we're talking about, this big tipping point for marriage equality in that movement.

But we're only 10 years out in 2013 from 2003, which is Lawrence versus Texas, the end of sodomy laws.

And that had been when sodomy stopped being fun.

Jump the shark.

Well, you know, states had these laws on the books that were kind of sporadically and like really cynically enforced.

It was often something they got you on when they really wanted to get you for something else.

States retained the right to criminalize gay sex and non-productive kinds of straight sex also.

And then once that was over, it sort of freed up a space in the straight mind, I think, to stop thinking about like the terror of anal sex so much and to start sort of seeing this other side of gay life, which is very domestic, very imbued with these kinds of values that I think are kind of sex neutral or asexual, like, you know, devotion, loyalty,

sacrifice, these kind of unfun like emotions.

Watching Bravo.

Yeah.

It's like, yeah, these like sides of romantic life that are not exactly sexual.

And that sort of led to both tragic and like politically very efficient depoliticization of gay life.

So we've gone through the legal and judiciary history of this thing, but of course, of course, also it has an intellectual history.

For every one of these decisions, there were op-eds written, there were public debates had on television, there were people that sort of explaining publicly why they thought gay people didn't deserve to marry.

And my sense, at least, is looking over those debates for this episode, is that while we've memory-holed some of these important judicial milestones, we still remember them.

People will remember what Lawrence v.

Texas was about.

But like, we've just memory-holed the absolute fucking bejesus out of the bonkers, quote-unquote, studies, the bonkers op-eds that people wrote about this stuff in 2003, 2004, 2010, right?

Like, it's really astonishing from some of the purveyors of today's anti-trans

bullshit.

Like, they were out in force back in the day and pulling the same shit in this desperate attempt to stave off that tie that you were describing, where things were getting away from this question of sodomy and were getting towards this question of like, what is marriage?

What really is this union?

And why are we withholding it from people?

And so I think there's a lot to be said here because, frankly, marriage had changed a lot.

It's changed a lot throughout history broadly, but it had changed a ton in the 20th century.

And so I think you're looking when you get into like the 1990s at an institution that's like unrecognizable for like the parents of the people who are the generation getting married.

Like marriage had been sort of earlier in the 20th century, not just exclusively heterosexual, but like not particularly emotionally intimate necessarily.

Like there were a lot of married people who didn't seem especially close

and didn't really like each other or know each other that well.

It was an economic arrangement.

You know, even when we did our Middle episode, which will come out sort of like later or pretty soon, I think, we talked about, you know, this 1950s intellectual who complained that marriage had been feminized since the war, that it had been, had gone from a sort of sexually disciplining institution about hard work and honor and self-control, and had become this like wishy-washy, like morass of feelings.

And this was something that conservatives had really bemoaned.

And along with the shift of marriage from a sort of behavior-disciplining enterprise into a like paired effort towards happiness, you had also gotten, you know, more legal and technological capacities to dissolve those bonds.

So, like, suddenly, birth control was available that was not, you know, barrier methods or quetus interruptus.

There were like things that were controlled by women, so women could control their own reproduction.

Abortion became legal, and pretty soon, you know, you didn't need your husband's permission to get one.

And then there was the introduction of no-fault divorce laws, which were huge and have still really roiled the right.

You see a resurgence of antagonism, like open antagonism towards no-fault divorce, which allowed people to dissolve their marriages because they were no longer happy, as opposed to needing an excuse such as physical abuse, infidelity, or non-consummation were the three big ones.

So what marriage was really changed?

And people found that marriage was still something they aspired to.

and valued, generally speaking, most people kept doing it, even though now you didn't need to be married really to survive, like not even if you were a straight woman.

And that sort of feminist transformation of marriage really opened the door for gay marriage to become thinkable.

Which is also probably why the opposition to it was why it became this kind of focal point, right?

It's in some way it's a little bizarre looking back, but the reason is exactly that.

It was a lagging indicator of a change of social norms that conservatives were extremely worried about and leery of, and had been since the 1950s.

And it was this sort of like cherry cherry on top of this whole pie that basically they didn't like.

And so, in some way, they attacked it as this, as a stalking horse of some kind of destruction of marriage.

But really, what it was was the final certification of the fact that, yeah, that social mors around this had shifted and had shifted away from them kind of inevitably.

Right.

They were like standing up astride history, not just yelling, stop, but yelling, actually, go back.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you read a lot of these conservative intellectual cases against gay marriage from the 90s and from the 2000s, and they are trying to make a defense of what they see marriage as being.

And what they're describing bears no relationship to what heterosexual marriages look like at the time, like at all, right?

They're like, marriages are between one man and one woman.

They are institutions that are permanent.

They are institutions that are for the purpose of raising children.

They are, you know, sanctifying and recognizing the kind of sex that makes children.

And it's like, way, way, way, way, way, way.

What you're describing is an institution that is without birth control, without abortion, and without divorce.

And, you know, the kind of unspoken truth of a lot of these oppositions to gay marriage is that they are also oppositions to birth control, abortion, and divorce.

So, like, there's kind of two

camps, I would say, of the conservative case against gay marriage that emerged at this time.

There's the revelation camp, and then there's the natural law camp, right?

So, the first camp, you know, Christian biblical revelation,

there are some pretty explicit condemnations of both male and female homosexual sex in the Bible.

This is the Adam, not Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve crap, right?

Like, this is, you know, God was pretty clear about this thing specifically.

The word is abomination.

It is in Leviticus, it is in Romans, it is not something we're supposed to do.

And we would just note, right, like, just to be clear for our listeners, like, it is also a way of saying what's in the Bible needs to be dispositive for, right?

This is not someone doing something before the state.

This is a sacrament first and foremost, right?

Right.

This is also like marriage is also this weird thing where it is a religious ceremony that is also recognized by the state and is also in the tax code.

And it's like the primary means of social organization of like private bonds, but it's also got all these religious connotations, right?

And, you know, we also do have in the U.S.

this kind of less formalized separation than might be, you know, present in some other countries, like France is a famous example between civil and religious marriages.

Like you get a marriage license and then you go have to have somebody perform a ritual.

And then the person who performs the ritual has to sign the marriage license saying that they performed the ritual.

And only then do you get your marriage.

Yeah.

If they do it, if they do it wrong,

I don't know what happens, but the Holy Ghost will haunt you or something.

But, you know, that was sort of like the Christian opposition, right?

It's like, it says in the Bible, we're not supposed to do this.

This is fundamentally a religious exercise.

Also, there is, you know, a religious rite in the United States that sort of doesn't have a ton of respect for the separation of church and state and really believes that the law should reflect biblical values.

But of course, it is a more secular country where all this is happening, as you're pointing out.

And so, what you're calling natural law traditions basically position nature rather than God, as sort of like.

Right.

So, there's revelation and then there's natural law.

And these these things kind of rhyme right natural law is coming from a long tradition of western thought that posits that the way things are that we see in nature like quote unquote nature one of those terms where you're always i want to ask somebody to define that whenever they say nature but you know this is that nature is morally superior that we have a moral obligation to follow our nature that is either inevitable or correct to do things in the quote unquote natural way.

And usually when people make this argument, what they are identifying as the quote-unquote natural order of things happens to coincide quite nicely with existing social hierarchies, right?

We look back to the Neolithic and all we can see is like, oh, it's just mom, dad, and one car garage.

2.5 children, single income household.

Yeah.

And then they all like have a 10% tax rate on mammoth.

I was thinking of like the Flitstones cars where they have a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I'm dating myself maybe without reference.

We also have this, you know, it's a secular country even the 90s and 2000s when there's like an ascendant religious right it's a pretty secular country and we've got like this intellectual elite that is like very vain and they don't respond well to appeals to faith or superstition.

They want to think of themselves as empiricists.

Right.

And so that's when natural law really becomes ascendant.

I don't want to spoil anything, but like one of the things that of course is interesting, if we think about how this morphed, as we mentioned in 2015, almost immediately from a gay marriage argument to an anti-trans argument, is that like the religious part of this is very quiet by now.

I don't know if you agree with this, but like the straight-up biblical appeals against trans people are pretty minimal.

It's all natural law, right?

It's like, oh, if we look at nature, like there are, I'm sorry, but there are just true genders, right?

Like this has become the number one cudgel.

The kind of argument from Leviticus stuff seems to have largely disappeared in the anti-trans discourse.

It is all, just to flag that for listeners, out of that natural law tradition.

Yeah, the argument against trans rights is not these people are an abomination, although I always feel like that's like a little bit of a silent subtext.

It's all like they are defying nature, they are going to be punished by nature, they are, you know, we're messing with natural order, yeah.

And you see this also a lot in opposition to birth control and abortion, it's like it's not the natural way you're supposed to do it.

I'm always like, okay, well, then you have to stop, and maybe this will give them ideas.

I'm like, but then you're not allowed to have like antibiotics or vaccines because none of these are natural either.

Or like fucking wear pants, right?

Like

you have to give up indoor plumbing and go shit in the woods.

Boner pills.

Definitely not what nature intended.

God wanted you to be bald and your toupee is an abomination.

Yeah.

So the natural law reasoning against marriage and, you know, against these other gender liberation efforts, like positions nature and not God as the authority that dictates the sexual and gender order.

And nature, the thinking goes, favors heterosexual marriage as superior because heterosexuality is the kind of sex that makes babies.

Oh, yeah.

And like children become an intense focus of the natural law argument against gay marriage.

Nature is like God in that you really can't argue with it.

Exactly.

You can't disprove it.

And it's just kind of this absolute authority that knows better than you.

It's much bigger than you.

And you can't defy it.

And it always seems to speak the language of the currently existing social order.

It's essentially a theodicy of whatever hierarchies are in place right now.

Yeah, yeah.

And I should say that the critique of this as such, like the appeals to nature, is also 200, 300 years old.

Like there are a lot of Enlightenment thinkers and post-Enlightenment thinkers who exactly critique that.

They're like, it might be interesting what's natural, but like, it seems like we don't really know.

The natural is like never defined.

It's always like conveniently deployed against a new claim for equality or for like tolerance of difference or for new freedom.

And it's never like taken to its logical conclusion.

The thing about the natural is that like it's kind of fake.

Right.

Like nobody really knows where nature ends and humanity begins.

Nobody can give you a good account of this.

And it just, I hate it.

Nature is fake.

Anyway.

Yeah, I mean, like, we should say that

the very unsophisticated version of this is basically saying, oh, this is natural, right?

This is the kind kind of thing that you get out of evolutionary psychology today where they're like oh it's just like what we were like or whatever but there is also just a version where it's like more natural right i'm just going to flag that for people because like freudianism is going to come up in this conversation as it does is going to come up in all of our conversations basically That's another way.

Like, we're going to see some people who are against gay marriage because they're like, sure, like, there's something artificial about all human relationships.

But, like, it's more natural if like it's a mom and a dad and a kid, right?

Like, that's more like what nature intended.

so So, there's that version too that you're not saying like oh these two people and their 2.5 kids and their two car garage in suburban Texas are like what the human species what the T loss of the human species is no it's to say it's closer to that than you know

two guys in San Francisco adopting you know a child yeah and there's um it's basically meant to give like a scientific gloss on whatever the preferred order is, but the science is always very dubious.

Yeah, and we'll maybe link in the show notes to a couple of these things.

There were attempts to really do this kind of work.

I believe his name was Mark Regineras, is that right?

He was a sociologist somewhere in Texas, and he basically did these family structure surveys, and he tried to sort of create the empirical science around these natural law arguments, even though he never explicitly made the natural law argument, but like the data would always suggest, oh, kids that grow up in same-sex families always have all these bad outcomes, right?

He never said what, why he thought this was the case, but that's what it boiled down to.

Yeah, this is a famous survey, and it showed the best outcomes were from children with married heterosexual parents.

And the worst outcomes were from children with lesbian parents, I believe.

And, you know, it did not control for things like divorce or, you know, the impact of sexism or homophobia.

And it's been a, it's a survey that has been methodologically debunked.

It's called the New Family Structures Survey.

New Family Structures, yes.

And it was incredibly influential at the time.

And it, and, you know, it was kind of, I think the New Family Structures survey is kind of a paradigmatic example of like this explosion of bad science

around the idea that children raised by gay couples have worse life outcomes than children raised by heterosexual couples.

Turns out to be very empirically dubious, but it also rests on this assumption that marriage can only be justified

by having and raising children and doing it very well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kids, as you say, kind of come up in these debates in really funny ways.

I mean, I think I mentioned this before we started recording.

They're like 18th-century arguments against basically definitions of marriage by recourse to children because philosophers back then pointed out, like, we let old people marry.

There's no expectation that they should ever procreate.

And clearly, we recognize that their relationships have dignity and we call them marriages.

But children are extremely, extremely central to all these debates.

One of them is exactly out of this natural law tradition.

The only way you can really distinguish relationships is by sort of projecting them onto this like figure of the child.

As the natural law argument against gay marriage sort of emerges, what really crystallizes is that it's an attempt to redefine marriage.

around what is supposedly its oldest, most original, and hence most like authentic and authoritative version as a union of one man and one woman for the purposes of having children, right?

That this is revisionist is actually kind of an intellectual problem for the natural law of people, which to their credit, they do try and get around, right?

So they're not saying necessarily that every marriage has to produce children in order to be legitimate.

What they're saying is that the kind of sex

can create a child has to be special, different, legally and culturally culturally recognized as special, different, and better, right?

So, this kind of necessarily leads to this like persistent, like really lurid and weird emphasis on vaginal intercourse as morally and even existentially distinct, right?

As having this like power to change and transform the people who engage in it, having not engaged in it, like maybe.

I mean, the uh, the reviews I've heard are mixed, yeah, yeah, no, exactly, yeah.

I looked it up on Yelp and I was like, man,

two and a half stars.

So like

there was a syndicated columnist named Maggie Gallagher, who's like kind of an interesting C-list celebrity of the marriage debate, but she was a social conservative.

And her backstory,

a lot of them have these kind of like tragic origins.

Like Maggie Gallagher's backstory is that she was able to come from like pretty humble origins and got her way into Yale.

And then at Yale, right as she was about to graduate, she found herself pregnant.

She had met the guy who knocked her up through like a conservative debate club.

And she

was a Catholic opposed to abortion, decided to have the baby.

As her pregnancy progressed, decided to keep the baby.

And the guy who got her pregnant kind of just disappeared.

He was like, this is depressing.

I don't want to do it.

I don't feel like it.

Bye.

Thanks.

And, you know, she became a crusader against birth control, against abortion, and for marriage because she, you know, thought that it was very important to sort of secure men's obligations to fulfill, you know, to support women and their vulnerabilities.

Why are women so vulnerable and dependent on men is not a question these women ask themselves.

But her

line when she sort of turned, like.

became really kind of fixated on gay marriage and opposing it, her line was sex between men and women is weighted with the knowledge that this is the act that produces new human life.

And, you know, you kind of need that distinction

to make marriage only for straight people in a way that like really encompasses all straight people.

Because otherwise it's only for young, fertile people.

But then like some of the fixations on straight sex kind of lead to even more like obsequious pronouncements.

There's this guy, Robert George, from Princeton, who's one of the intellectual leaders of the anti-gay marriage movement.

He's a legal philosopher, also the best friend of Cornell West.

Oh.

And like an obsessive gender conservative.

He's at this place called the Witherspoon Institute, which I'm sure we're going to have to talk about at some point, like this nasty little think tank that's just like sex obsessed at Princeton.

And he goes,

the bodily union made possible by sexual reproductive complementarity for reasons we explain in detail in our book, he wrote a book against gay marriage, is no mere mutual stimulation, is indeed personal union, personal union of the sort that can enable spouses to unite in all dimension of their being as persons, becoming truly and not merely metaphorically, quote, one flesh.

What does that mean?

Nobody can tell you.

I mean, I think that, you know, the opposing terms here are really interesting, right?

Like, so mutual stimulation is basically, right, what George clearly thinks gay relationships are about.

I also think that, you know, when the risk that you might produce life, right, that you mentioned has to be heard in the first years of the 21st century against this idea that you know that gay sex i'm usually conservatives when they think of gay sex they think of anal sex between two men two cis men right carries the germ of death right like which in the in the aids era still sort of like you know has only this opposing possibility of like actually being able to cause death and i think that that's that's so key here the way we move from like this complementarity argument that george is making here that used to be about like oh you know like there's a there's the famous clip from a daily show with this ex-gay preacher who's like, you know, this doesn't fit.

And he's like, you can't see it, but I'm pointing my two fingers at each other, right?

He's like, you can't do that, but, you know, this, and then he'll make a hole with one finger and stick his other finger through it.

Like, this fits, right?

That's what complementarity is on some level.

But then, of course, it's like, and of course, which leads, I think, is Ed Helms interviewing him like, I'm no expert, but I don't think that's how they do it, which I think is the perfect response.

Anyway, it combines that with the far loftier idea that like people are complementary in these like existential ways.

And we're going to encounter that again later on.

This is like the moderating influence of the woman versus the strong, but impetuous way of the man, right?

Like, all this shit gets packed into this idea of complementarity.

And the trick is that you never have to mean any one thing, because any one thing by itself is obviously a name.

But, like, the ability to kind of hop from one to the other is extremely important to making these kinds of claims plausible.

Yeah, the very slippery metaphor between like the physical mechanics of straight intercourse to the supposed essential nature of men and women as like quote unquote complementary is very insidious and they do just sort of slide without denoting when they're talking about the body and when they're talking about the character.

Yeah, I mean, like right down to like, I'm sorry, like this is like where I'm, the literary scholar comes up.

Like George is saying, becoming truly and not merely metaphorically one flesh.

I'm sorry, but you are only metaphorically becoming one flesh.

If your literal flesh is contained in your child, like what the fuck did you do, right?

like

yeah you you definitely provided important genetic information but like i don't know like it seems like how did this flesh transfer happen like i'm sorry that is a metaphor yeah like these are also the same people who will go like the body inside your body is not your body as a retort to any kind of uh like bodily autonomy argument for yeah abortion rights so like either the child belongs to you when you can assert argument over it, then it's an extension of yourself.

And when you want to like exercise some kind of autonomy, suddenly the child is its own being with its own rights.

Yeah.

And I don't want to be like glib about this.

Like there's something mysterious about the act of, and something amazing about the act of reproduction, obviously.

There is like human autonomy and our way of thinking about ourselves hits a certain limit.

But if anything, that moment complicates our thinking, should complicate our thinking rather than like making it obvious.

And something like they become truly and not metaphorically one flesh is like, well, congratulations.

you took something that's actually highly ambiguous and interesting, and you made it this like supposedly straightforward thing when it is no such thing, right?

Like, anyone who's undergoing the experience of pregnancy or of birth will probably confirm that, like, yeah, certain self-conceptions hit a limit, but like at the same time, like, identity and difference are really poor ways of thinking about this.

I don't know that gay sex needs a like a thorough defense.

I think it's got a lot of fans, you know.

The idea that straight sex is like emotionally transcendent and that gay sex is merely mutual stimulation is like so incurious and like tawdry and just myopic and dumb.

That like sex comes only, its meaning, its potential, its joy comes only from this like free soul and of the potential to create life.

It's just, it's not true.

And it also frankly overlooks

what was in like 2000, 2012, not at all true of heterosexuality either.

Right.

You know, heterosexuality is actually something that most of it does not produce babies.

And that's, you know, something these guys also want to take away, which is also the subtext beneath all of this.

Yeah.

And I mean, do we think that a straight couple's marriage is negatively impacted if they are really drew butt stuff?

Or just like if the husband has a vasectomy, you know,

all kinds of non-procreative sex exists under the heterosexual umbrella.

And like there's also kind of a disparaging of those unions as well, sort of implicit in this idea that sex is only meaningful or most meaningful when it's potentially pre-productive.

Yeah.

It's like such a weird understanding of what sex is and how, like, do you not have any sexual joy in your life?

This is how you're thinking of it.

Well, I mean, I think that in some way it suggests that you mentioned earlier, you quipped that this is no longer conservatism standing astride, the freight train of history yelling, stop, but rather, you know, beep, beep, beep, back that shit up.

Like this is refusing to ask the kinds of questions that the sexual revolution and advances in medicine really kind of put differentiations within human relationships and human reproduction that like, you know, it's kind of impossible to turn the clock back on.

And I think part of why some of these attacks on gay marriage could feel so overdetermined was precisely that they could pretend one last time that a bunch of things were the same that everyone, everyone, if they delved into their own lives and their own existence, could sort of see had slid apart, had come apart really rather decisively.

Yeah.

So in this book that Robert George mentions, he wrote it along with a couple other little chods.

Sharif Gerges, who's a Catholic activist lawyer and a former clerk to San Alito, and Ryan T.

Anderson, who's a one-time Heritage Foundation fellow and affiliate at that same Witherspoon Institute.

They, along with Robert George, wrote this book called, What is Marriage?

question mark, colon, man and woman, colon, a defense.

It came out in 2012, and it was sort of the big intellectual contribution to the natural law argument against gay marriage.

And it relied really heavily on this idea that there were two kinds of marriage.

There was what was called a conjugal marriage, and then there was what was called a revisionist marriage.

And a conjugal conjugal marriage was this unrecognizable, like kind of ahistorical idea of a marriage that was exclusively heterosexual, only something you ever did once in dissolve

and had to produce children.

Right.

Marriage unites a man, I'm quoting here, a man and a woman holistically, emotionally and bodily in acts of conjugal love and in the children such love brings forth for the whole of life.

Yeah.

And then, so like, this is a book that kind of correctly identifies a change in marriage.

It was like this conjugal model that they were upholding as like superior and then this like revisionist model where like there might not necessarily be children.

It's more about intimacy and therefore like necessarily kind of potentially at least dissolvable.

And this was considered an effeminization of marriage, a weakening of marriage, but it was also just like a necessary component of women's equality.

I feel like this is kind of the elephant in the room, right?

Is that like this natural law conception of marriage requires marriage to be an institution wherein women are subordinated.

And by the time

this like 2012 book comes along, and by the time Windsor and Obergefell come along, marriage isn't necessarily that, not just because of like sort of a passive cultural change, but because of a very active effort of this feminist family law movement to make marriage something that like women can.

survive and thrive in.

Yeah.

So, you know, they were like kind of very alert to this reality that marriage had changed.

I want to read briefly from this Robert George

post-Windsor interview, like right after the Windsor decision.

He gave his interview to the National Review.

I know that Alito quoted their book in his Dissent in Obergefell.

I think he probably also quoted it in his Descent in Windsor.

George says, for a long time, the idea of marriage as a conjugal union was, of course, simply taken for granted.

It was established in culture and then in law long before the development of the modern concept or construct of, quote sexual orientation, and quite apart from debates about same-sex conduct and relationships.

Now, of course, it is under severe attack from people whose attitudes and beliefs have been shaped by a culture whose influences include Sanger and Reich, Kinsey and Hefner, value-free sex education, and me generation liberalism.

We think those influences have been baleful, in large measure, because they have tended to obscure the nature of marriage as a conjugal union.

Our goal is to make what has become obscure vivid again.

This gives away the anti-marriage equality game, doesn't it?

The effort to retain marriage as exclusively heterosexual due to its natural law function can't really coexist with tolerance for divorce, contraception, or abortion.

And we should say also without thinking hierarchically, right?

Like the idea of

what made marriage socially significant to conservatives, and this is true for Joseph de Maestre in the 19th century as much as it is for Robert P.

George, clearly, to enter a marriage is say we enter into hierarchies.

To enter into society is to enter into hierarchies where some people are quote unquote naturally on top and other people are quote unquote naturally not.

And so anything that takes that away is anathema to these kinds of constructions.

But there's another argument about gay marriage that kind of sees those hierarchies, those disciplining functions, those like sort of severe elements of the old conjugal style of marriage and goes, no, no, no, I want that for gay people too.

And that brings us to the big man.

Future friend of the pod.

Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew Sullivan.

Do you want to introduce Andrew Sullivan?

I mean, I'll say this about Andrew Sullivan.

He will be a frequent subject of dunking on this podcast, although not today.

I feel like this is an interesting, a genuinely interesting text, a genuinely kind of path-breaking text that he wrote in 1989.

Andrew Sullivan was born in England.

He is of Irish extraction.

He was raised Catholic and is still Catholic and he's gay and he's a conservative.

He was for many years the editor of The New Republic, probably at the peak of The New Republic's influence, I would say.

He's most famous for his quite passionate embrace of race science.

So, you know, you don't have to hand it to him.

Revising an earlier tweet of ours.

You know, Andrew Sullivan is not a good guy, and he has made his career sort of subsequent to his departure from the New Republic being

racist, anti-feminist, you know, really inexplicably passionate in transphobia.

You know, he's on the wrong side of basically every item of social progress that doesn't stand to benefit him personally.

But on gay marriage, he was a very early, very outspoken advocate for gay marriage at a time when it was not a priority of the gay movement, when it was not,

you know, really even thinkable to other conservatives.

And he did use his platform at the New Republic.

to really advance this and try and put it in the national conversation before anybody else was.

Yes, Yes, I say it's called Here Comes the Groom.

It was a cover story, wasn't it?

It was a cover story of the New Republic in August 1989.

So, this is even before the Hawaii lawsuit.

In the middle of the AIDS crisis, I mean, like, holy cow.

Yeah.

And so, Here Comes the Groom is a conservative case for gay marriage.

And basically, Andrew Sullivan makes this case that, you know, the domesticating, disciplining features of that old-style marriage are something that he wants for gay couples.

He argues against legal recognition for gay couples outside of marriage.

He sees the emergence of these sort of like domestic partnership recognitions in sort of municipal governments and like on the fringes of state law as actually a threat to the order of marriage.

He's like, this

consecrating these relationships outside of the like nuclear family and marriage structure is what the threat is, not consecrating them at all.

And he also kind of, at other points throughout his career, makes this argument that gay men are promiscuous, they're undisciplined, they're like undomesticated, they're having too much fun, and that marriage will sort of bring them into the home, quiet their sexual lives, and, you know, kind of get the gay male community to like straighten up and fly right.

Yeah, I think that that's exactly right.

He thinks basically everything that like lefties and queer theorists were like scared of for gay marriage, like this is all take everything exciting away from same-sex relationships.

He's like, yeah, more of that, please.

Like time to calm that shit down a little bit and cannalize it or usher it into the safer waters, safer shoals of matrimony, basically.

You know, Sullivan was definitely the most visible conservative proponent of gay marriage, but this idea that, you know, marriage will stop gay people from doing all the cool things that we don't like them doing.

This was like, it had a few proponents on the right.

There was a gay opinion writer at the Wall Street Journal who advanced this idea.

There was

a paper from two University of Chicago economists at the height of the AIDS crisis that basically argued that, you know, we should start acknowledging gay marriages and sort of domesticating gay men's impulses so that when they die of AIDS, that will be the financial burden that falls on their husbands and not on the state.

Very dark, very cynical idea of gay marriage that, you know, we can exploit these people's affection for them to sort of outsource their care and privatize it.

And then there's this weird guy called David Blankenhorn, who was a

heterosexual pro-marriage thinker.

There was what was called like the pro-marriage movement in the 90s and aughts that was not really initially concerned with gay marriage.

They were just concerned with promoting straight marriage.

David Blankenhorn actually started on the new left.

He's a boomer.

He got like a labor history degree.

He was like a lefty, but had this B in his bonnet that he thought the feminists had gone too far.

And so he devoted his life to trying to roll back.

Oh, I know, so atypical.

But he devoted much of his life to trying to roll back no fault divorce because he thought it was bad for the working class.

And he, you know, created this organization called the Institute for American Values.

Is that not the most fascist name you've ever heard?

Beautiful.

That existed basically to try and encourage marriage, deny benefits to people who weren't married, discourage divorce.

And he kind of had this come to Jesus moment where he started thinking, like, no, actually, I believe in marriage even more than I believe in heterosexuality.

And, you know, started making a conservative case for gay marriage.

So this was sort of an idea that was in the ether, but Andrew Sullivan really became its poster child.

And we might point to a couple of things here, right?

On the one hand, first of all, this is not just a libertarian case for gay marriage.

Oh, that existed too.

These are to some extent kind of communitarian conservatives.

And this idea that basically there's this individualistic or anarchic energy contained in queer sexuality, and that the best way to basically rein it in is to institutionalize it somehow is there.

The other thing we should point out, of course, is that, like, as you're hearing, right, like the idea that social ills might be attributed to decaying family structures, right, like was so incredibly influential when it came to, especially the, you know, as you say, the working class, especially the non-white working class or, you know, non-white poor, right?

Think of things like the Moynihan report about the African-American family.

And in some way, a certain number of conservatives kind of got so caught up in that logic that basically they realized like, oh, we actually may have to make that same argument about queer people, right?

Like the fact that these are not families in the way that we would recognize is actually a problem.

This is where like this is dangerous to the body politic and people need to start getting married.

And then it's like, well, you're two ladies.

Like, well, I don't like it any more than you do, but we're going to have to

have to swallow that bitter pill, right?

Like, so we'll come back to this question of family values again and again, but like there is this kind of split personality to a lot of the opposition to gay marriage that the same people who hold up marriage as this panacea to everything.

It's like, oh, could this be structural racism?

Nope.

It's just that people are getting divorced, right?

Then are like, well, but we got to exclude people from that, right?

It's really interesting.

And then the other thing that I would say about Andrew Sullivan, of course, is that like, this is where sort of capitalism comes back into it, right?

That like marriage is, of course, one way in which we keep the state out of our finances.

It's one of the ways in which we make sure, as we've already talked about with Ed Windsor, that our massive capital gains redound easily down to our spouse.

Back in the day, of course, you had gay adoption, where basically partner adoption, where gay people would adopt their partners in order to make that happen.

But that was essentially a difference to the fact that, you know, capitalism in the United States knows one place where its rules sort of stop working, and it is a legally recognized family.

And the idea that, like, it has an important domesticating function, but also that it is how we build clout,

influence, how we build political power in this country.

So, like, in addition to there being some conservative cases for gay marriage, there were a few like lefty cases against it.

Oh, yeah.

A lot of this came from the places where, like, the queer movement had really overlapped and been influenced by feminist thought.

Right.

So,

when gay marriage became initially a legal struggle, it was actually kind of a unique legal specialty because gay rights litigation outfits had been all about, you know, civil rights protections, non-discrimination law, and family law had been all about trying to extricate women from abusive marriages.

Right.

So, there was this big sort of like cleave in expertise and also a big difference in the perspective of marriage from something that the gay sporadic fits in the gay movement were really seeing as aspirational and as this like moral claim.

And then that the feminist movement was seeing as patriarchal, retrograde, a you know, perfect container to insulate abuse from the law.

Basically, just a capitalist trap, right?

I mean, oh, and a sexist trap.

You know, this is like, let's put you in private with somebody a lot bigger and stronger who makes more money than you in a place where the law kind of can't reach you.

And, you know, hope he's nice because if he's not, you've got like basically no recourse.

So like there had had to be a feminist effort to make marriages more dissolvable, which simultaneously made gay marriage more thinkable as we're like talking about this transition in the institution of marriage, but also made marriage like kind of unpopular.

to the feminist intellectuals who are looking at this long history of marriage as a tool of the oppression of women.

So, you know, there were some queers who were saying, you know, not just gay marriage will take everything away that we like about gay life, but also gay marriage will like bring us into,

you know, purchase into this institution that has been terrible for gender freedom historically.

And like, why would we want to sign on to this anti-feminist claptrap?

Yeah, exactly.

And I think that it's noticeable that like people like Judith Butler like weighed in very, very late and very hesitantly on this topic.

And it was people like Martha Nussbaum who basically kind of for the experts cited in court.

This was a liberal project.

This was not a left-wing project.

And Queer Theory, for instance, had an extremely difficult time with it.

I mean, for one thing, right, like the idea you mentioned earlier, kinship networks, right?

Like the easiest, basic distinction was always, and since Foucault had been in queer theory, that like there are kinship systems here that are chosen, that are elective, and that are non-hierarchical.

right well now we're entering an institution that's limited to two people that at least historically has always been about submitting to some kind of hierarchy.

And again, as you say, like makes things unintelligible and non-negotiable.

You sort of take all these things, you know, for richer or for poorer.

You take all that on

that moment when you say, I do.

And there were a lot of people in queer organizing who were like, why on earth would we fight for this?

And I think the answer that kind of won the day was...

It's money.

The straight people get money, they get material benefits, they get these practical protections.

You know, the law has the ability to hurt us if we are not under, you know, the protective shield of its recognition.

And, you know, we want to be able to live safer, more comfortable lives.

And this is the way to do it.

So it was definitely a ends justify the means kind of an argument that I think.

eventually brought over the radicals to a begrudging acceptance of the gay marriage project, if not of marriage per se.

Exactly.

But then there's also a handful of kind of eccentric, weird arguments against gay marriage from the putative left.

Do you want to tell us about Sylvain Agosinski?

Sylvian, I think it's pronounced.

Yeah, I have no preference.

Yeah, so Sylvian Agosinski is kind of a deep cut, but I thought this was kind of interesting.

You know, we looked at a conservative who made a case that can feel pretty liberal and we showed what it's sort of the classic conservative case is like.

And I wanted to look at something that might seem a little strange, but maybe not that strange, which is a feminist case against gay marriage, not quite from the left, I think.

This is not about, like, oh, this is a bad institution, you shouldn't buy into it.

It's saying this institution is worth protecting and gay people shouldn't have access to it, right?

So, a little bit about Agosinski.

She's an exponent of what's, you know, called difference feminism.

So, she's she's really interested in basically starting not from a general human standpoint, but from a standpoint of sex humans, meaning

we fall into two camps to her.

Today, this position may remind you of like TERFs.

I think that's where it often comes from.

But it also had a really hard time with gay marriages, as it turns out.

So, Sylvia Nagosinski was born in 1945 and teaches or taught, I don't really know, at the École des Out Etude Ancien Sociale, the School for Advanced Studies and Social Sciences, in Paris.

And her boss there was none other than Jacques Therida.

She was the driving force behind the Parité movement in France, which led to France mandating 50% women for all political candidates.

It's a really interesting.

I mean, I guess they never actually reached it, but somehow in law, it's enshrined in law.

Not to define her entirely by the men in her life, but she is married to Lionel Jospin, who was a socialist prime minister of France.

So that's part of why she had this influence, that she is sort of part of the political class as well.

And she, during these debates, was a pretty strong voice against gay marriage in France.

And there's a couple of texts, some of them are available in English.

And one of them that I thought was really, really interesting, and I'm going to quote from a little bit here, is called The Turning Point of Feminism Against the Effacement of Women.

And I think that's super interesting.

If you note the word effacement of women, like that's something you could read today, and it wouldn't be about gay marriage.

I feel like it would be about trans people.

This is part of why this was kind of a sideshow in the international debate over gay marriage.

But at the same time, like so much of this.

prefigures the debates about trans identities that we're witnessing today.

I don't know what Agosinski thinks about trans people, but like based on my reading, I have some pretty strong hunches.

You know, there's a couple of traditions in the feminist movement where, you know, there's the traditions, like the radical feminist gender abolitionist tradition, and then there's sort of the gender reverence traditions.

Like, what actually we need to do is reaffirm the value of women and of traditionally, you know, women-coded

activities and qualities.

This is also like in the American context, like Mary Daly kind of reminds me of this field, you know, the idea that what we need to do is reinstill reverence for, you know, female qualities, female habits, female vibes.

And, you know, it does sort of lend itself to some of this complementarianism arguments.

It starts to rhyme with the conservatives a little bit at times.

Absolutely.

But it's really interesting.

Of course, she like, she would endorse what you and I said to make fun of like this whole natural law tradition entirely.

But I'm just going to quote this at length because it's kind of interesting, right?

So like in this text, which I am quoting from the translation by Mary schwartz so this is from the turning point of feminism she starts off by explaining what she's not saying right she's not saying that you know certain things that gay marriage for instance is unnatural she understands that nature quote has never founded anything Whenever someone makes a claim that certain hierarchies are natural, right, she understands that that's a political claim in disguise.

Okay, I'm with her so far.

Yeah, that seems, right?

It seems that this is something that like we've been saying, but there is something that supersedes nature, it turns out, right?

So she says, La parité is not a way of letting nature dictate law, right?

It is a way of making sense of out of human existence characterized by sexual difference.

I think the French here is être sexué, so like the fact that we are sexed, right?

Nature has never founded anything, neither the hierarchy of the sexes yesterday nor today, the demand for their equality.

All this is political through and through.

On the other hand, that a human being is characterized by its sex, that it is born a boy or a girl, that it can become a father or a mother, but not both at the same time.

Such is the constraint of the dichotomy of the sexes, is not political, despite what Judith Butler and some others have said.

Oh my God.

Now we're in turf land.

Yep.

This is why, see, I think you can see why I got interested in this.

Like, this is about something different at the time, but like, it's very, very clear where this is going to end up.

So, I do find this really interesting because, like, if this isn't a claim about nature, then what the fuck is it a claim about, right?

Like, like etra-sexual, like, sexed being?

Yeah, it's, it's almost mystifying yeah i mean she's she i think it's a metaphysical claim yeah exactly so and i think it's actually it has a kind of unique french extraction it's partly right an existentialist point right so human subjectivity is as salt says right like a moca être it's about to be a subject is to be defined against what we're not right and the most important aspect in subject formation is thus the experience of I'm not this, I am that.

And so gay marriage, Agasinsky thought, leads to gay parenting and gay parenting deprives children of this absolutely central experience of intra-human difference, right?

I'm either like mommy or I am like daddy.

Yeah, I think that's the way that works.

I'm sorry, as somebody who has the feminist critique of marriage, of how horrible it has historically been for women and how it has shielded them from access to the public sphere and to equality, the idea that you need to preserve diversity within a marital unit is so fucking stupid.

Yeah, Yeah, and I guess it's like, why, why along this axis?

Sure, if you were raised by two clones of the same person, I could see how it might be hard for you to understand interpersonal differences, but why around this particular aspect of the matrix rather than any other?

Right.

It presumes that there is not difference within a sex.

Like, I'm sorry, there's tons of difference, including tons of, excuse me, gender difference within a sex category.

But like, also, like, the idea that you are either like your mom or like your dad is actually something that I have been working very hard to decondition in therapy.

You know, like it's just not true.

It's like the child who, you know, I guess we are back to assuming a marriage will produce is not in fact an extension of the egos of one of or both of its parents.

It is its own person.

Yeah.

I mean, so in another book, Agasinski writes, and I looked this up, quote, the establishment of affiliation relating to individuals of the same sex might complicate the child's awareness of sexual alterity and his or her access to his or her own identity, which I think is like so wild.

So, like, alterity, right?

The idea that, meaning, just for listeners unfamiliar with, you know, French 20th century thought, that there are people who are different from you.

The experience that, like, you know, I am not like other people, and that's okay, right?

Like, the idea that the fact that your parents share the same set of two chromosomes

might

somehow make that impossible is,

I'm sorry, it's cuckoo for cuckoo puffs.

This is also an argument against intra-racial marriage, right?

Like, oh, yeah, you don't know any racial.

Both of your parents are white, so you have to mandate interracial marriage.

I know,

get on that, Sylviana.

But, like, it also assumes that the marriage, the family unit, is kind of hermetically sealed, right?

That, like, there's no examples outside of it, that the two parents are, A, if sex the same, then identical in every way, but also kind of the only examples of

possibilities for human life that the child will be exposed to.

I think the fact that she doesn't mention race here is so important because ultimately this is, for all its feminism, a deeply conservative point, right?

It's saying there are certain things that we have to grapple with and submit to, whether we like it or not.

That's what human existence is, right?

Like, I think there's a metaphysical point here, too, right?

Like, as we were saying, the human being is not characterized, right?

Like, we can go with Sartre, by an anterior essence, but by existence, right?

The fact that we have to do a bunch of shit against a bunch of constraints.

That existence basically is one of articulating your freedom over and against a certain number of given horizons.

We don't choose everything.

We choose with reference to certain givens, right?

That we all die, that we cannot answer the question why we exist, stuff like that.

And Agosinski is saying that being sexed is one of those horizons.

We enter the world being this, not that, and we find ourselves in that condition of not of being human, but being a particular kind of human.

Now, and that basically there is no point trying to transcend that.

Now, I can see why in

when she wrote this, 2007 or 2008, like people somehow think this is okay to say about the sexes, but imagine the same said about race.

It's like, oh my lord.

It's an argument against the feminist project, right?

Like, because if sex is an all-encompassing existential condition, then changing the terms of inhabiting a sex body is

futile, kind of unworthy.

I could be completely misunderstanding this.

No, I think that's right, but I think she's taking this from De Beauvoir.

It's both a continuation and a kind of critique of de Beauvoir.

She's basically saying, I think any attempt to transcend sex is basically trying to make women into men, right?

It's trying to like get towards a universal that is implicitly masculinized, right?

Which historically it often was, right?

Like the unmarked human being was a man, right?

Like was imagined masculine.

So, I guess she's saying any form of transcendence, basically, would essentially just be another androcentrism, right?

She writes: Homosexual marriage, in quotation marks, would symbolically make individuals of the same sex parental couples, and that would call into question the bilateral affiliation of their children, the maternal side and the paternal side.

The homosexual parental couple would abolish the man-woman distinction in favor of a distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals, right?

So, she's saying, really, really what this is, is it occludes the fundamental difference amongst human beings and it carries or it kind of gets caught up in this nice but ultimately illusory idea that like we can all be the same.

We are not and we shouldn't be, I think is her idea here.

But I mean, like, I think, I think your reaction to this is like totally.

Totally right.

Like in the end, Agosinski's feminism, and this is kind of why I wanted to dwell on this and quote from it in such extended way, is that it sounds an awful lot like conservative natural law theorizing right like uh just like with a little bit more you know french existentialism thrown in right and i think reading agosinski i think you do get an inkling why people today can consider themselves feminists but be against the liberation of trans people right you can get an inkling as to why transgender identities became almost by necessity the next issue once the gay marriage fight was over, right?

I'll quote one more time from her, and I'm sorry I'm like doing all these block quotes, but she's not exactly short in these, but it's exactly this thing where, like, the changing family dynamic that you were talking about is like her topic today.

I'm quoting, blinded by the mirages of technical power, we would like to defeat old age and death, even surmount our condition by changing our sex or by making embryos in the laboratory with genetic material withdrawn from individuals.

Right, those who on both sides of the Atlantic advocate the effacement of sexual difference no doubt congratulate themselves for this progress and for the new liberties that such progress offers individuals.

That each person can give life on one's own and become at the same time father and mother thanks to the techniques of medically assisted procreation seems to them to mark progress towards individual autonomy, right?

I think she's responding to the exact same pressure that you were identifying in the natural law philosophers from, is it the Witherspoon Institute?

I remember it because it's like Reese.

Oh, yeah.

That makes sense.

Yeah, you know, the sense of the nobleness of resigning to the inevitability of sex, right?

And that what follows from that is also a kind of particular, special, superior place for heterosexuality is like a very insidious turn.

But I also think that there was a degree to which some of this reliance on nature as an authority also bubbled up in the pro-gay marriage

debate.

Like, I think we should talk about the insistence on the pro-gay marriage side as a legal necessity to say that homosexuality was like an unchangeable identity, which is mirrored now also in campaigns for trans rights.

Yes,

born this way, I didn't choose this.

And this subtext of that claim is that you're conceding that it would be a wrong thing to choose, right?

Yeah.

And this is like partly a side effect of just how civil rights law works in the United States, is that like unchangeable characteristics are the ones that tend to get protected.

Yeah.

And changeable characteristics is like, well, you know, you have to deal with the outcomes of your choices.

And that sort of obfuscates just a lot of the reality of people's people's experience around sex and gender, and that there is a wide variety of such experiences and all kinds of different contingencies that shape them.

But it also sort of seeds the idea of nature as like something real and legitimate and also something authoritative.

Yeah, something legible above all.

Right.

Do you like, do you remember my wife calls it the gay penguin industrial complex?

Yeah.

Like the tango makes three.

Yeah, the, but like, also just like all these almost desperate news stories about like two male penguins at the cincinnati zoo stole an egg from a female penguin and now they're raising the chick and they're doing a good job you know it's like the searching out of homosexual behavior in animals or in some like pre-modern society the idea that it has to exist either in the animal world or in the past to be legitimate it's an attempt to shoehorn homosexuality into the natural law order, into like this kind of inevitability structure that like Agosinski is looking at.

And I just wish that we had the political wiggle room to say nature is fake.

Yeah.

Fuck this.

Well, or I mean, you can believe about it what you'd like, as you can with your religious convictions.

But as Agosinski kind of correctly says, even though she then moves away from it faster than you can say existentialism, like basically you could just say you can have your beliefs about nature, but like you can't.

if you can't fucking prove it and you can't then maybe don't legislate on the basis of it right like maybe we legislate on the basis of our values.

We legislate on questions of logic, but we maybe shouldn't legislate on what is quote unquote natural.

Here, here.

This is something so interesting because I'm glad that we sort of built it this way, because it really shows why this debate went away so fast.

I think like when we started this, I was like, why did this memory holding take place?

And I think as we've been talking, it's become really clear to me that like, it's because the underlying questions will always find a way to assert themselves.

And like everyone moved on to the next best target, which I think was trans people, which was just gender expression in general.

And I think that that's part of what happened here.

It's not that, I mean, yes, did Republicans kind of opportunistically just like pick, oh, what's the next minority we can pick on?

Yeah.

But there's a logic to this, right?

Which is to say, this is a desperate attempt to say nature speaks a language that we can understand and we have a and the hierarchies by which we live our lives are to some extent natural and people have to be willing to submit to them to some extent and we just got to keep finding fights where we can make that argument in ways that people will still give it the kind of plausibility that in their own private lives they would never give it right yeah the fight against gay marriage wasn't really about gay marriage and that's why we are still having the same fight just in a different sort of container exactly and i think we're going to probably be visiting a whole bunch of those containers over the course of our podcast yeah well so i think it's safe to say we're going to record a short intro episode.

We have recorded an episode.

Yeah, when we started this off, Adrian was like, let's do a short one to start off.

And then we wrote like a 12-page outline.

And I don't think it wound up being too short, but I had a lot of fun.

Yeah, this was great.

And I hope you all did too.

And I think in some way, maybe it's good not to pull Switch Uru and do like a nice, short, fleet one, and then hit people over the head with our next one, which is going to be a 90-minute conversation with the guys from Know Your Enemy about Mitch Dector.

Like, I think that's the way our thought processes seem to work.

Like, give you the tight 90, just set aside an hour and a half.

Well, thanks so much for tuning in.

And as always, we are, whether we like it or not, in Biddy with the Ride.

See you next time.