Gay marriage ruling brings few fireworks
The ink had barely dried on Tuesday's gay marriage announcement from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court when CNN's "Crossfire" brought on Representative Barney Frank, who's openly gay, and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority founder, to offer up battling sound bites.
"What's your grief that two women are in love with each other and want to be married?" Frank asked. Falwell responded that the state is being used to "endorse moral perversion."
The ruling did ignite predictably passionate and polarizing arguments, but exchanges such as the one on "Crossfire" did not reflect the overall tone. The rhetorical fireworks that might have been expected to dominate opinion pages and microphones were muted yesterday; some analysts suggested that the debate over gay marriage would not unleash a full-fledged media culture war.
Rush Limbaugh weighed in, of course, telling his audience that having and raising children is "the primary reason for marriage," and one would expect gay marriage to provide endless fodder for the conservative world of talk radio. But Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, doesn't expect the subject to burn up the airwaves when Iraq and the economy are bigger concerns.
"The gay issue is not as much an `us-and-them' issue as some political issues may be, because there's an assimilation of the gay culture in our culture," he said. "The public has mixed views. It is not as cut and dried as one might think on the surface." An editorial in The Union Leader in Manchester, N. H., characterized the ruling as "poppycock and gobbledygook;" the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a key milestone in accelerating acceptance of the principle that government should not be discriminating against committed couples."
Yet many publications -- from The New York Times to The Kansas City Star -- did not weigh in on the subject in the heat of the moment. Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of the Hotline political newsletter, said staff members had perused the country's daily papers and found only about 10 editorials on the subject. (Several editorial page editors contacted by The Boston Globe said they planned to publish an editorial today. The Globe endorsed the court ruling yesterday.)
Michael Young, associate director of regional media for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, also noted the relative lack of editorializing.
"I think the antigay industry is going to do everything they can to make it an issue," Young said. "I don't know how successful it will be. Equal rights for gay and lesbian people are pretty low on the list for the American people to be concerned about right now."
In some quarters, however, the debate raged. A USA Today editorial declared: "A nation that proclaims its dedication to equality for all has no place drawing legal distinctions between gay and heterosexual partners who are similarly committed and loving."
But it also published the Family Research Council's dissenting view that "by authorizing the granting of marriage licenses to homosexual couples, this court has defied not only tradition, but also democracy and common sense."
Columnist Cal Thomas wrote that "what is happening in our culture is an unraveling of all we once considered normal." But on his website, commentator Andrew Sullivan countered: "I do not . . . believe that a gay person is somehow less of a human being -- morally, psychologically, spiritually -- than a straight person."
Some notable members of the pundit class seemed to have a more ambivalent view. On his Tuesday show, the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly opined: "Judges have no right to find loopholes in the law and impose their views on everyone else."
But he also acknowledged: "Personally, I couldn't care less about gay marriage. If Tommy and Vinny or Joanie and Samantha want to get married, I don't see it as a threat to me or anybody else." O'Reilly then segued into the big news event of the moment -- the police raid on Michael Jackson's ranch.
Genevieve Wood, vice president for communications at the Family Research Council, watched the Jackson scandal start to eclipse the gay marriage ruling yesterday and said a subject that is "going to redefine the family in America" might be too weighty to gain real traction in today's media universe.
"We just live in this sound-bite culture," Wood added. " And it's hard to have a substantive debate on something this significant."
