Moral Combat
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The state-sanctioned institution of marriage meant a great deal more to some others who tried to enter into it, and changes to support that effort were clearly underway in some progressive precincts of Christianity. In 1970, Richard John Baker and James Michael McConnell asked the Catholic priest in charge of the University of Minnesota’s Newman Center if he believed Jesus would approve of a loving union between two people of the same sex; the priest said yes. Overjoyed, the two men acquired wedding rings, planned a religious wedding ceremony, and applied for a marriage license. County officials denied their request precisely because they were both men. They filed suit, arguing that to limit marriage to different-sex couples violated several constitutional rights; the trial court dismissed these claims. The following year, their appeal went to the Minnesota Supreme Court, whose justices treated them coldly at best—one contemptuously swiveled his chair around to turn his back on their lawyer—and affirmed the trial court’s dismissal, declaring, “The institution of marriage as a union of man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children, is as old as the book of Genesis.”22 The couple’s appeal to the US Supreme Court was no more successful: in 1972, the high court dismissed it in a single sentence, noting the case’s lack of an actual federal question. In effect, this dismissal set a governing precedent on marriage—explicitly, that states should develop their own marriage laws—that would last for years.23
While this case wound through the courts, Baker and McConnell obtained a license in another county, and a Methodist minister officiated at their wedding in 1971. To many thereafter, that event was the first legal same-sex marriage in the United States, and a long-lived one: forty-four years later, the couple was still together. Few accepted its legality at the time, although the two men did receive national fame, appearing as “The Homosexual Couple” in a Look magazine issue devoted to “The American Family” as well as on television talk shows hosted by Phil Donahue and David Susskind. Their union failed to generate much of a pro-same-sex-marriage movement, however, and changed very few heterosexual minds about the purportedly commonsense view of the matrimonial norm (one man and one woman).24
Intermittent attempts at securing marriage rights prompted the beginnings of legislative restriction. In 1970, Tracy Knight and Marjorie Jones’s request for a marriage license in Kentucky earned an irate response from the district attorney, who said such a union represented “the pure pursuit of hedonistic and sexual pleasure.” In more apocalyptic terms, the county clerk testified that a marriage between two women would “lead to a breakdown in the sanctity of government,” endanger the morality of the whole nation, and potentially “spread all over the world.” This couple, too, sued and lost, the Kentucky Supreme Court in 1973 holding that “marriage has always been considered as the union of a man and a woman” and that the case gave no basis for changing that.25 That same year, Maryland legislators took matters into their own hands and enacted a law banning same-sex marriage. Virginia followed suit two years later, and more states followed.
In 1975, the county clerk in Boulder, Colorado, supplied marriage licenses to several same-sex couples—subjecting herself to vicious hate mail and death threats—until the state’s attorney general stopped her, releasing a legal opinion that voided any marriages performed under those licenses. One couple married during that time was Richard Adams, a US citizen, and his Australian partner, Tony Sullivan. After the ceremony, Adams immediately sought a green card to validate the immigration rights accorded to spouses of American citizens; the US Department of Justice’s Immigration and Naturalization Service denied the request, writing to Adams, “You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots.” Adams sued the US government and lost on familiar grounds, a federal judge noting in the court’s 1982 decision that civil law took its conceptions of sex from ecclesiastical law, and the “vehement condemnations in the scriptures” of “all homosexual relationships” meant that the law could not sanction any such marriage.26 Minnesota, Kentucky, Colorado, and more: this string of negative decisions effectively closed the early push to legalize same-sex civil marriage.
A gay couple appears to celebrate their union in 1976, decades before same-sex marriage became legal. JACK MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES.
Marriage still had meaning to people of faith such as John Fortunato and Wayne Schwandt, whose interest in the institution was more spiritual than legal. When they decided to celebrate their loving commitment in 1976, they were dedicated parishioners of an Episcopal church in Washington, DC, St. Stephen and the Incarnation. Fortunato was a former Carmelite brother who had once been a candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood, while Schwandt was a graduate of Wesley Theological Seminary who hoped to be ordained to the Episcopal priesthood; both, in other words, were devoted to their faith and the Christian church, as well as to each other. They felt theirs to be a sacred love, “a gift—from God,” as Fortunato later wrote, and they wanted a liturgical ceremony of public blessing to establish it as a “holy union.” The rector, who months earlier had been reprimanded by an ecclesiastical court for sanctioning a woman to celebrate communion in the church, wholeheartedly agreed. The bishop coadjutor of Washington, however, issued his strong disapproval of the ceremony and threatened to cut off all diocesan funds to the church for the next fiscal year. The ceremony was moved from St. Stephen to a Congregational church, and, with Schwandt’s young son at their side and their rector officiating, took place on November 21.27 Six years later, Fortunato would write the book for gay Christians that would redirect and transform Gene Robinson’s life, Embracing the Exile. And in this same era, New York’s ever progressive Judson Memorial Church, with Howard Moody still presiding, adopted a committee report calling for “a new rite of passage… or a new rite of sustenance” to celebrate same-sex couples who wanted such a wedding-like ceremony, a sign of the church’s blessing of same-sex committed relationships and an effort to “redeem the church’s history of anti-homosexual bias.”28
All of these accounts suggest that, while marriage meant something profound and even sacred for many couples in the 1970s, there was not sufficient support either in the gay activist world or the broader US populace to pursue its legalization. Some advocates grew frustrated with such apathy. Baker and McConnell, for instance, took heat from gay activist leaders for being “crazies” who would not make political compromises; disillusioned, at the end of the decade they withdrew from public life and lived quietly in Minneapolis.29 But portents of the future could be seen in the detailed pro-same-sex-marriage thesis written by a Harvard Law School student named Evan Wolfson, “Samesex Marriage and Morality: The Human Rights Vision of the Constitution.” Wolfson would spend his career focused on LGBT rights and marriage, founding the National Freedom to Marry Coalition and becoming a chief architect of the movement that ultimately overcame all legal barriers to same-sex marriage across the nation.30
Tragically, what would come to be known as the AIDS epidemic was imperceptibly gestating in the mid to late 1970s; as it erupted into view, shocking the LGBT community and the wider world in the early 1980s, political activists turned their attention to the disease and those afflicted, demanding a more effective political and medical response than what President Ronald Reagan’s administration was offering. With gay and bisexual men experiencing dire health problems, suffering unbearable pain, and dying in grievous numbers, it could seem ludicrous to think about fighting for such a bourgeois luxury as same-sex marriage.
Many whose lives were touched by AIDS were faced with a more prosaic problem: the lack of inheritance and death benefits for surviving partners of the dead. Over and over, men who nursed and cared for their ailing lovers through this gruesome illness to certain death found themselves legally unentitled to any property, pensions, or life insurance their partners would have wished for them to have. Parents, siblings, and other family members who may have shunned a gay relative in life could take all of his possessions in death; so said
the law. Legal changes were necessary to correct this wrong—the question was what changes would best serve their beneficiaries and give them legal standing.
By the end of the 1980s, the debate over same-sex marriage received new life. Its reemergence was aided by several city and state law changes that gave some benefits to unmarried partners, as well as by European examples—above all, Denmark’s passage of a law allowing same-sex couples to unite in “registered partnerships” and receive many rights enjoyed by married couples. In July 1989, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that, regardless of gender, a couple who had lived together ten years could be defined as a “family” under the rent-control regulations there. The following month, the prominent writer Andrew Sullivan published a widely read essay in the New Republic that made a conservative case for same-sex marriage as superior to the concept of “domestic partnerships” on several grounds. Like different-sex marriage, same-sex marriage would bestow societal approval upon committed couples and promote “social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence” and could also “help nurture children.”31 Shortly thereafter, attendees at the State Bar Association of California’s annual convention passed a resolution advocating the recognition of marriage between same-sex partners, with all the “very substantial benefits” that heterosexual married couples had. Paula Ettelbrick, the legal director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and a vocal critic of institutional marriage, somewhat hyperbolically (and perhaps sullenly) attributed the revival of the debate over marriage to “well meaning straight people” more than members of the LGBT community. Nevertheless, it is true that growing numbers of straight allies were taking part in the LGBT rights movement, including marriage.32
AS THE WIDER MOVEMENT FOR LGBT rights gathered steam in the post-Stonewall years, and as LGBT people came to be more visible to those outside those communities, many prominent conservative religious leaders began speaking more directly about homosexuality and its potential to destroy the United States. To them, it seemed clear that the movement was one more arm of the secular humanist campaign to destabilize the nuclear family, weaken male authority, and de-Christianize the nation. Its impact urgently needed to be contained.
In 1975, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the body of the Roman Catholic Church charged with transmitting and preserving Catholic doctrine—issued Persona Humana, a declaration of the church’s teachings on sexuality and sexual ethics. Describing the current era as one in which “the corruption of morals has increased” and where there was an “unbridled exaltation of sex,” the document condemned all manner of “licentious hedonism” infecting the contemporary world. Reminding Catholics that the true meaning of the sexual function was to be found only in “true marriage” and that sexual acts must “preserve the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation” within that marriage, the text affirmed the church’s unyielding stance against premarital sex, homosexual relations, and masturbation. The latter two categories were “intrinsically disordered,” while homosexual sex was a “serious depravity” whether same-sex orientation was a matter of a “pathological constitution” or a state that was “transitory or at least not incurable.” None of this was new teaching, as the document emphasized; it was simply a reiteration and a moral warning to Catholics to remain sexually pure within an increasingly corrupt world.33
Conservative Protestant leaders and spokespersons likewise sought to shore up the rules on sexuality, and often in much more aggressive and colorful terms. The 12.7-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, in the throes of a bitter struggle between fundamentalists and the more liberal moderates, declared at its 1976 annual convention that “homosexuality is a sin” and asserted the importance of keeping gay people out of the clergy—indeed, out of church employment more generally. The winning resolution, this denomination’s first official statement on homosexuality, also urged local congregations not to “afford the practice of homosexuality any degree of approval.” While some clergy and messengers attempted to include a final paragraph exhorting “Christian compassion” for all people “whatever their lifestyle,” that passage was removed.34
In the same year, Tim and Beverly LaHaye’s best-selling The Act of Marriage—the first evangelical sex manual—proclaimed from the start that sexual intercourse was a “sacred experience” that was “shared uniquely by a husband and wife in the privacy of their love.” Masturbation, though not technically sinful (their view differed from the Catholic position on this issue), was problematic and a “psychologically damaging habit.” Premarital sex was unquestionably sinful but, with repentance, could be forgiven. Homosexuality was another thing altogether, an “abnormal, deviant practice” that was “increasingly rampant in the world.” That proliferation was intentional, the LaHayes taught: “Every homosexual is potentially an evangelist of homosexuality, capable of perverting many young people to his sinful way of life.” It was “propaganda” from atheistic humanists and liberal institutions such as higher education and the entertainment industry that was pushing social acceptance of gay people—and winning. The passage of laws in several states that were “overturning centuries of opposition to homosexuality” was an important factor in allowing gay people “to multiply tragically.” Christians needed to stop being passive and “encourage lawmakers to enact laws against this trend.”35 As they made the battle against gay rights the very center of their politics, the LaHayes’ message presaged the coming surge of Christian literature and other materials that called Christians to mobilize politically by identifying the LGBT rights movement as a threat to the nation.36 That opposition to homosexuality and support for a traditionalist gender hierarchy went together was clear: in another best-selling book published around the same time, Beverly LaHaye admonished her female readers to remember the divine order in which a Christian woman must “die to oneself” and submit to her husband’s authority.37
In 1977, the popular entertainer Anita Bryant further activated Christian opponents of gay rights with her campaign to repeal an ordinance in her home seat of Dade County, Florida, that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the arenas of housing, employment, and public accommodation. Heading an alliance comprised predominantly of conservative Protestants and Catholics called Save Our Children, Bryant was tireless in describing “militant homosexuals” as sick deviants bent on recruiting children and teens into their immoral and disgusting lifestyle. Occasional insinuations of even more wicked behavior were dramatic: the fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell, a staunch opponent of gay rights, appeared at a rally shortly before the referendum took place and told the crowd gathered that “so-called gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you.”38 On the date of the June vote, the community voted overwhelmingly by a 2–1 ratio to repeal the ordinance. Save Our Children campaigns developed in other locales.39 Delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, meanwhile, voted to adopt a resolution commending Bryant for her “courageous stand against the evils inherent in homosexuality.”40
For traditionalist Christians like these, the prospect of socially approved homosexuality was outrageous and alarming because it cast the entire nation in danger. One of their chief concerns was plainly the authority of the Bible and of the one true God who ruled over the world: if the Bible, as God’s Word, spoke clearly against homosexuality and the practice of sodomy, as these believers felt certain it did, then to resist this clear teaching was, ipso facto, nothing less than a spurning of God and a wholesale rejection of God’s plan for humanity. This was not a justice issue, or an equal rights issue, or a compassion issue; the matter was far deeper, and far greater, than those human inventions. The issue was obedience to core teachings that had been passed down for thousands of years—humble compliance with the will of God, whatever one’s personal preference.
Christian singer and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant condemns a local gay rights ordinance on behalf of her group Save Our Children, 1977. ASSOCIATED PRESS
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All this time, city councils and state legislatures were battling over nondiscrimination laws like the one in Miami. When San Francisco passed a civil rights bill outlawing sexual orientation discrimination, a state senator sponsored Proposition 6, a measure to fire any teacher or public school employee who openly supported gay rights; California voters rejected the measure by over a million votes. Weeks later, California’s best known gay rights activist—Harvey Milk, the sponsor of the San Francisco anti-discrimination bill—was assassinated, angering and invigorating activists in the gay rights movement and mobilizing others to confront the prejudice and vicious hate facing gay Americans. The following year, the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights attracted an estimated seventy-five thousand supporters, the largest political gathering ever organized in support of gay rights. Successes by Christian right leaders had served to galvanize the gay rights movement, leading to gradual expansion of the legal rights accorded to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.
The more these rights expanded, the more some ultra-conservative Christian constituencies raged. Tim LaHaye’s 1978 book, The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know About Homosexuality, expressed the views of many in that constituency: homosexuals were “self-indulgent, self-centered, undisciplined” people, the secular opposites of Christians—they caused heartache to good people around them, deceived others, despised women, lived only for sex, and skillfully recruited others into the fold. Homosexuality was such a “blight on humanity” and homosexuals themselves such immoral people that, LaHaye wrote, many parents “would prefer the death of their child to his adopting the unhappy wretchedness of homosexuality.”41 Certainly both LaHayes understood the links between equal rights for women and equal rights for gay people that would include marriage; as Beverly wrote, “lesbians, homosexual men, and feminists” were in cahoots to nullify the traditional definition of a family in order to secure “the legal right to live their perverted lifestyle protected by the laws of the land.”42