Maggie Gallagher is the former President of the National Organization and one of the leading figures opposing marriage equality. She has come to realize her side has lost. In an interview with Lila Shapiro of Huffington Post, she concedes defeat:
As I said last summer, it was clear to me from reading Windsor [the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor], gay marriage advocates now have five votes for inserting a right to gay marriage in our Constitution. We are now in the ‘gay marriage in all 50 states’ phase whether we like it or not. What’s next? In my view people who believe in the traditional understanding of marriage, and believe that it matters, have to become a creative minority, finding way to both express these sexual views, culturally, artistically and intellectually and to engage with the newly dominant cultural view of marriage respectfully but not submissively.
She expanded on this in a remarkable post on her blog titled “Cooper, Mozilla, Firefox”. Charles Cooper was the lawyer defending Proposition 8 in Court. Gallagher explains:
Unbeknownst to any of us, Cooper was at the time in the middle of the turmoil of the political becoming the personal. In 2013, before he attempted to argue the Prop 8 case before the Supreme Court, he learned his wife’s daughter (his stepdaughter) was gay and would be married to a woman in Massachusetts. He and his wife are co-hosting the same-sex wedding ceremony.
Cooper said two things that upset many people on our side: “My views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it ten years ago,” he said to [New York Times reporter] Jo Becker some months ago. And when … the news of his stepdaughter’s wedding came out he told AP: ““My daughter Ashley’s path in life has led her to happiness with a lovely young woman named Casey, and our family and Casey’s family are looking forward to celebrating their marriage in just a few weeks.”
They even lost their lawyer! However, what is particularly striking about this is that she admits that love of a child can be pretty compelling:
Our children are beloved and yet do not necessarily put together the world the way we would have them. We have to love them anyway, across all the gaps.
A movement able to withstand what is coming will have to face the Love problem first. Anything we say, anything we believe, we are going to have to be willing to say it not only with a generic gay person in the room, but as if to a beloved gay child.
Try it before you judge Charles Cooper.
I think Ms. Gallagher has hit on precisely the contradiction in her movement. In fact, there is nothing that they can say to a beloved gay child. It is at least a hopeful sign that she has proposed such a standard.
Many whose bigotry is religious-based still reject their gay kids. But I do agree that it is highly significant that a prominent figure like Gallagher is modeling thoughtfulness about loving rather than rejecting gay children. Many of us have long suspected that Gallagher’s son in gay. I wonder if this is why we’re hearing a more measured approach from her.
Maybe more cynically: Gallagher thinks a lot about messaging. Elsewhere in the blog entry she complains about the weakness of socially conservative politics. She seems to be aware that what happened with Charles Cooper can happen to anyone else on her side, and, until they find an answer that doesn’t require cruelty to “the beloved gay child”, they’re kind of stuck.
Well on the one hand that is what the gay rights movement did. Perhaps it’s why they won and her side lost. On the other hand, she still fails to recognize that anyone at any point in US history from now until the end of time can and always will be able to express these sexual views. What they can’t do is force it on others. And with the debatable example
Of the Mozilla CEO-nobody is forcing the equality viewpoint the same way these guys would’ve forced their views on the rest of us. And I honestly never understood the opposition to civil laws regarding marriage equality. So long as religious opposition is kept within the confines of a particular religion it doesn’t really bother me. But we’ve always wanted to leave Gallagher alone-maybe she’s finally starting to realize she needs to leave the rest of us alone.