Why Are Gays Liberals?
With apologies to Norman Podhoretz, I must tackle this question. I am attempting not to discover why gays hold to a liberal worldview in general, but rather to examine why so many gays have prioritized their identity over other issues, subverting any politically conservative opinions to that. I do believe that I have stumbled upon an answer.
In his mostly-forgotten tome The Political Illusion, French political philosopher Jacques Ellul described the state's effect on the deterioration of a nation's culture: the more that the government moves into the cultural and economic realm, the more that it becomes the ultimate arbiter of the nation's values. Thus, citizens increasingly feel that they cannot be validated except in light of the state. Many women, for instance, did not feel truly as if they were a legitimate part of the citizenry until the state bestowed certain "political rights" to them. Because of this state takeover of values, classical virtues and self-validation go by the wayside. And it is in this light that we must view the current same-sex marriage debate.
Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs contends that once a person's physical and financial needs are provided for, esteem issues take over one's psyche: how can one achieve the respect of others? How can one gain confidence in himself and his abilities? To those who subscribe to traditional notions of virtue, this is no problem: the good exists independently of the state and the masses and can be discovered through the utilization of human reason. A brief perusal of the works of thinkers such as Aristotle, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius should be enough to understand this and put the self-sufficient man at ease.
But classical education has all but died, and the name of Harvey Milk is much more recognizable to the average gay man than the name of Marcus Aurelius. Where Marcus Aurelius sought validation through an understanding of the nature of reality and what constitutes the good life, Harvey Milk believed that the pathway to happiness amongst gay men was to lose the apparent "second-class citizen" status conferred upon them by that master of masters, the state. The solution was and is an external one, not an internal one, to Milk and his heirs at the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD. The paradigm of what constitutes respect of others is utterly different: individual tolerance versus state acceptance.
To great classical thinkers like Aurelius, the acceptance by others of the nature of reality was outside of the individual's control and was therefore irrelevant to the good. The Gay Left ultimately seeks what is not possible: control over whether people accept them -- but it is willing to settle for acceptance by the state in the arbitrary form of marriage equality. In the meantime, at least according to Maslow , self-actualization cannot possibly occur. The respect of others -- as defined as state-sanctioned validation -- is a roadblock to the highest stage of being: the acceptance of things as they are rather than how we would like them to be, personal philosophy, the discovery of morality, critical thinking, and the like.
With this paradigm in mind, the confusion I have always faced tends to dissipate. I constantly have wondered exactly why so many other gay men have been utterly unable to understand why I simply do not care much about the marriage issue. Why is it that, to me, the Afghanistan war and an economic recession seem to be obviously of greater national relevance, but not to the gay left? The answer lies within the state-as-value-arbiter hypothesis: we are simply not seeking the same thing. I endorse same-sex marriage because I want greater access to inheritance rights and hospital visitation. They, on the other hand, are looking for the validation of their existence. With their very self-worth hanging in the balance, it's not hard to see why the issue should ignite such passion. But such lack of perspective should not be abetted. And so I turn again to the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius and his intellectual tutor, Epictetus: the desires of others are not in my control. All I can do is choose how to react and advocate instead what I know to be the good. Classical virtue gives men dignity. And I invite all other gay men seeking validation to find it there -- not in the state.