A Stitch in Haste

An unusually mean (even by her standards) bit of homophobic crap from Maggie Gallagher, who, having found exactly one adult child of gay parents who opposes gay marriage, essentially declares the issue closed.

"When growing up, I always had the feeling of being something unnatural," Cassidy says. "I came out of an unnatural (SIC!!!) relationship; it was something like I shouldn't be there. On a daily basis, it was something I was conflicted with. I used to wish, honestly that Pat wasn't there."

Why does she oppose same-sex marriage? "It's not something that a seal of approval should be stamped on: We shouldn't say it is a great and wonderful thing and then you have all these kids (SIC!!!) who later in life will turn around and realize they've been cheated (SIC!!!). The adults choose to have that lifestyle (SIC!!!) and then have a kid. They are fulfilling their emotional needs -- they want to have a child -- and they are not taking into account how that's going to feel to the child; there's a clear difference between having same-sex parents and a mom and a dad."

So apparently, by Gallagher's standards, if I can find a single adult child of a mixed-race couple (or a handicapped couple, or a multicultural couple, or a couple who later divorced, or a test-tube baby) who had anything less than a perfect childhood or who was in any way "conflicted" by their parents' "unnatural" relationship, then I'm entitled to call for bans on those kinds of families?

The intellectual bankruptcy of the bigots who are fighting gay marriage is imploding so rapidly that one can hardly keep up. If this is the best that they can do, then we are really seeing the death throes of their debate.

Gay-marriage resources at Lambda Legal and Human Rights Campaign.

Vicious homophobe Maggie Gallagher is actually quite dear to me, since she gave me fodder for one of my very first substantive blogposts. So of course I'm following with interest the brouhaha over her doing undisclosed contract work for the federal government.

I think that those who are distinguishing her situation from disgraced commentator Armstrong Williams are probably closer to correct than incorrect. Accepting payola is not the same as failing to disclose conflicts of interest.

Still, her own statement on the incident is quite illuminating:

I'm a marriage expert. I get paid to write, edit, research and educate on marriage. If a scholar or expert gets paid to do some work for the government, should he or she disclose that if he writes a paper, essay or op-ed on the same or similar subject? If this is the ethical standard, it is an entirely new standard.

I was not paid to promote marriage. I was paid to produce particular research and writing products (articles, brochures, presentations), which I produced. My lifelong experience in marriage research, public education and advocacy is the reason HHS hired me.

But the real truth is that it never occurred to me.

Of course it never occurred to her, because she's not a "professional."

As I have blogged previously, I am subject to not one but two legally enforceable ethics codes -- as lawyer and as investment analyst. Those are true "professions." Lawyers understand about conflict of interest; so do investment bankers (at least we do now). We know about the "appearance of impropriety" and "Chinese Walls" and the sin of commingling. We get it, precisely because we are "professionals." And those of us who fail to get it quickly become "former professionals."

"Marriage expert," by contrast, is not a profession, but gobbledygook. Practitioners of gobbledygook are not "professionals" and of course have no need therefore for ethics codes or for "standards" generally. Hence Gallagher's obliviousness is both understandable and condonable.

I'm glad Gallagher appears likely to wiggle off this ethical hook -- it reduces to crystal clarity the hypocrisy of the mainstream media. When journalists, commentators, professional pundits, paid bloggers and others who "get a check" find themselves on the wrong side of the law, they claim "journalist shield" and "First Amendment." When they're on the wrong side of "mere" ethics, it's "what's the big deal?"

As I've said before, the view from the Moral High Ground is quite lovely.

POST SCRIPT: Heh.

Eugene Volokh is "delighted" that Maggie Gallagher is guest-blogging at his site to debate same-sex marriage.

I'm "delighted" that I de-blogrolled him well over a year ago. It saves me having to do it now.

Gallagher, a notoriously vicious anti-gay bigot, is not a constitutional law scholar (in fact she's not even an attorney) and has nothing jurisprudential to bring to any debate on same-sex marriage. This "debate" will really be about the "pros and cons" of anti-gay bigotry, rationalized as a legal debate on same-sex marriage.

Perhaps next Volokh will invite some of those Ohio Nazis to guest-blog to discuss the "pros and cons" of anti-Semitism and rationalize it as a debate on the heckler's veto.

POST SCRIPT: Judging from the various independent analyses, it appears fairly obvious that I was right after all (invalid "Godwin's Law" histrionics notwithstanding). Perhaps the better heuristic would have Occam's Razor: Rather than rationalizing Gallagher's self-humiliating performance as the work of a brilliant but compository-writing-challenged "expert" on marriage, perhaps the easier explanation was the correct one, namely that Gallagher is simply an anti-gay bigot trying to defend an indefensible position.

Maggie Gallagher is getting pretty desperate in her quest to find a reason, any reason, to oppose gay marriage (but remember, she's "not a bigot"):

But to find out whether marriage is doing just fine, the New Jersey judges might learn more listening to Kanye West.

His latest hit, "Golddigger," is the quintessential postmodern love story told from the male side, full of fantastic need and longing, punctuated by the grim reality of sexual betrayal and gender mistrust...
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So call me dubious: Right smack in the middle of this unprecedented marriage crisis, what should courts do to marriage, according to these distinguished scholars? Why, gut it of the presumption that marriage has something to do with joining the man and the woman who make the baby.

Putting aside any racial analysis (since Gallagher is so good at being "not a bigot," I'm sure she's also an exemplary "not a racist").

Here we have the same tired Gallagher gobbledygook that inspired literally hundreds of rebuttals to her recent humiliating stint as a guest blogger elsewhere. Here is her thesis: Heterosexuals generally have undermined marriage via liberal divorce laws. Hip-hop heterosexuals specifically have undermined marriage via violently misogynistic lyrics. Therefore, the solution is to codify, and perhaps constitutionalize, discrimination against those who are neither heterosexuals generally nor hip-hop heterosexuals specifically.

Because it is, somehow, "all about the children."

This is the logical equivalent of banning cats because some dogs bite people. Because it is, somehow, "all about the children."

Of course, if Gallagher really wanted to take on hip-hop, then she should start by recognizing that marriage isn't even part of the equation. The problem with sexist hip-hop is not that it blanks out marriage or blanks out babies, but rather that it blanks out love and respect. Get that back into the picture, and hip-hop marriage and will take care of itself, complete with happy, healthy hip-hop babies.

For someone who is so good at blanking out love and respect when it comes to gays, one might think that Gallagher would actually be more sympathetic to misogynist hip-hop artists. She and they are actually more alike than they are different: both motivated strictly by hatred, contempt and narcissistic self-absorption.

Professional bigot Maggie Gallagher actually makes a remarkably lucid point in her most recent screed:

By opposing the Marriage Protection Amendment, McCain leaves himself with a position on gay marriage that is virtually indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton's.

Well of course it does, since McCain is "virtually indistinguishable" from Clinton. Both are pathetic, decrepit hack politicians who have shown time and time again that there is no principle they won't sacrifice in order to garner votes. What's the puny little difference of "R" v. "D" after their names compared to that?

And make no mistake about it: there is no rational worldview for the McCain-Clinton position on the Federal Marriage Amendment. You either advocate bigotry cloaked in mob rule or you don't. There is no principled distinction between constitutionalizing bigotry at the federal level and at the state level. The bromide of "it should be left up to the states" is wholly invalid when the "it" is itself unconstitutional (not to mention spiteful, mean-spirited and fundamentally un-American). The only truthful basis for the McCain-Clinton position is classic split-the-baby political positioning, and not a reflection of any core values. It is an insolent contradiction in terms — which is precisely why politicians like McCain and Clinton are so eager to embrace it.

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The rest of the Gallagher screed is her typical mediocre bigot gobbledygook: will of the majority, activist judges, persecuted Christians, the Others Who Are Ruining America™, etc. Blah, blah, blah. Read at you own risk (i.e., of getting a headache).

My previous McCain posts here; Clinton posts here. Gallagher posts in the chain below.

(Why aren't you reading this at the new website?)

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Professional bigot Maggie Gallagher continues to weave her web of anti-gay lies and illogic:

She said the government regulates such religious authorities' ability to perform marriages because the state didn't create marriage and doesn't create marriages. Rather, legal authorities merely recognize and regulate an institution that already exists and is rooted deeply in the society's history and traditions.

Of course, the ancient Romans and other heathens got married and understood marriage to be a legal status long before there was even such as thing as "Christian" marriage (or Christians, for that matter). In fact, it was the ancient Romans who invented the metallic wedding ring.

Government is in the marriage business because encouraging the best environment for raising and protecting children is a benefit to society at large, Gallagher noted. That's why the institution has special legal privileges and responsibilities attached to it that aren't given to other intimate adult relationships.

"There's a reason the government has always been involved in marriage but not in baptism or my priest's vow of celibacy," Gallagher, who describes herself as an "orthodox Catholic," said. "Marriage is not a sacrament that has only religious implications, like baptism."

Put aside Gallagher's unethical and anti-intellectual regurgitation of the malicious "kid's do best" lie. Note instead the precedent lie, the deliberate (and laughable) suggestion that it was the church that invented "marriage" in the first place. That marriage was originally and always conceived strictly as a religious sacrament. And that it was only after the "social" benefits (including, apparently, coverture and spousal rape) of church-crafted "traditional" marriage were realized that the government then decided — "for the children" — to get in on the act.

A facially absurd thesis contradicted by both ancient and modern history. A purported model that is the exact opposite of current practice. All neatly packaged and peddled to redneck illiterates for the sake of rationalizing their backward beliefs.

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Oh, sorry, I still owe you a "comment left elsewhere," don't I?

Well, I found Gallagher's screeches via Box Turtle Bulletin:

Oddly, I could be persuaded to support this idea. If the government were to allow churches to define marriage and then recognized and enforced those religiously distinctive marriage contracts, gay people could marry in every state of the union and in any nearly every city that had a Unitarian Universalist fellowship, a Quaker meeting, or a United Church of Christ congregation.

To which I commented:

Of course, one could just as easily turn around and say that the government will issue marriage licenses to all, but let the religious groups craft a new, additional and exclusive status just for themselves.

Call it "holy matrimony," "covenant wedding," "sacramental union" or "zoop-de-do." Whatever you like. And they can have it all to themselves. But marriage stays a government institution subject to constitutional standards of equal protection and due process.

Think Gallagher would go for that?

Me neither.

Because when they say it's "all about marriage," they lie. When they say it's "all about the children," they lie. Whenever they insist it's about anything other than un-Christian hatred of others, they lie.