WASHINGTON — So how do I feel about gay marriage?
What prompts the question, of course, is the recent ruling by Massachusetts' highest court that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry. What produced my answer is some combination of liberal sensitivity and pragmatism. Gay marriage, I thought, was probably a good idea.
We aren't discussing whether there will be homosexual couples, or whether they will have sex. There will be, and they will. The question is whether it serves the public interest to keep them more or less pariahs or to give marriage a chance to do for them what it ostensibly does for the rest of us: increase fidelity and reduce promiscuity, while regularizing such things as inheritance and health benefits.
So I said yes. Bring them into the fold of committed love and, when we see how like us straight folk they really are — how normal — maybe we'll start to get over some of our homophobic hang-ups.
And then I read Michael Warner's book "The Trouble with Normal."
At bottom, he argues, marriage is governmental regulation of sex — and gays in particular should be leery of it.
"As long as people marry," he says, "the state will continue to regulate the sexual lives of those who do not marry. It will continue to refuse to recognize our intimate relations — including cohabiting partnerships — as having the same rights or validity as a married couple. It will criminalize our consensual sex."
Warner, like other gay writers before him, divides the world into stigmaphiles and stigmaphobes — those who embrace the very things that make the disrespected groups different and those who would suppress the difference in a mistaken search for group respectability.
He includes the writer Andrew Sullivan, whose own book, "Normal," is a particular target of "The Trouble with Normal," among the stigmaphobes. Sullivan's argument, he says, amounts to "We'd be accepted if only . . . "
"Sex and sexuality are disavowed as 'irrelevant' in an attempt to fight stigma," says Warner. "But the disavowal itself expresses the same stigma!"
Two things struck me about Warner's thesis. The first is how completely I had embraced the Sullivan notion that gays and lesbians would be OK if only they behaved more respectably — and that marriage might be a way of encouraging that better behavior.
The second was, for me, more startling: the degree to which stigmaphobe describes some of my own attitudes regarding racial acting-out. Warner himself doesn't mention race in this regard. But is there any appreciable difference between Sullivan and others wishing that gays would behave more "normally" — at least in public — and my own wishing that black teenagers, for instance, would act more "respectfully" — toning down their swearing and loud conversations, muting their boom boxes, or deferring to grown-ups?
And to make Warner's point: How much of my concern is for the teenagers and how much is for myself? Isn't at least some of my desire for them to change their behavior based on the hope that if they do, maybe others will be less likely to view me and those close to me as members of a deviant group?
What drives the pro-gay-marriage advocates, Warner argues, is "the utopian notion that somewhere, one might not be defined by one's sexuality, that stigma might simply vanish from among the living. But since that utopia exists nowhere in this culture's near future, the idea reads as wishfulness, or even as self-contradiction. It is hard to claim that homosexuality (or race?) is irrelevant as long as you feel the need to make the claim."
Still, I find it hard to buy the notion that attempts at reducing stigma are always futile. And I find it hard to abandon the notion that committed unions — yes, with the sanction of the state — are an improvement over uncommitted ones.
For gays, too? I've just looked back at what I had to say on the subject a few years ago:
"If we believe sexual orientation is something people choose, then it might make sense to try to influence the choice in the direction of heterosexuality. But if we believe that sexual orientation is inborn — and that some people are as immutably gay or lesbian as the rest of us are straight, and if we know that homosexuals are going to form unions, no matter what we do, shouldn't we encourage those who are so inclined to form monogamous and committed unions?
"Isn't that the reason we have instituted marriage — civil and sacred — for the rest of us?"
Michael Warner notwithstanding, I haven't yet changed my mind.
William Raspberry's e-mail address is willrasp@washpost.com.