Intimidation or Association?

Maggie Gallagher (guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy) brings back up an old issue in the Massachusetts gay marriage debate. Some pro-gay marriage advocates are posting the names and addresses of people who have signed a petition against gay marriage online. This information is part of the public domain, but obviously this action makes it a lot more public. I first blogged on the topic here and much of the argument applies here (obviously, the problems I had with Ms. Barber's particular post should not be cross-applied to Ms. Gallagher's).

A few facts need to be gotten straight. Ms. Gallagher says that this is "a bid to discourage anyone from signing the petition." This isn't actually true--the stated goal of the organization is so that gay and gay-friendly voters know who their political opponents are in their neighbors so that they can foster a dialogue with them. Put this way, it seems far more benign--indeed, perhaps something positively beneficial to a democratic polity. Do we not want more political engagement and discussion between voters? Absent intimidation, I have difficulty seeing how this is a bad thing.

In any event, the particular problem Ms. Gallagher has is not with the list itself (she passes that without comment), but rather with a particular person who says that he would not hire anybody who's name is on the list. In other words, economic retaliation. She asks if this gives anybody "the creeps."

I'll admit that it does give me pause. But I also do not consider it to be an open-and-shut question. The idea that people can refuse to patronize those who support causes one finds to be abhorrent or immoral is pretty well-accepted in American politics. Focus on the Family and other such groups have called for boycotts of Ford, Disney, and Procter & Gamble, among other companies, because of perceived pro-gay policies. Many liberal groups have eschewed Nike products because of Sweatshop labor. And undoubtedly, the reverse is probably true as well: it seems clear that at least some people choose affirmatively to buy from a given company because s/he believe the company is aligned with his/her values. Is this any different? To some extent, economic revolt is one of society's greatest tools to rectify corporate and/or social injustices.

At the same time, like most tools it is one that can be used for good or evil. One can easily think of a southern shop owner in the 1960s, sympathetic to civil rights, but one who knew that if he served black customers, his white clientele would evaporate and go bankrupt. I won't pretend that this dilemma does not exist. It seems intractable to notate where ones rights as a free economic actor end and intimidation begins.

At the same time, one thing it clearly isn't is "terrorism," to quote the title from this wrong-headed and hyperbolic post. Worse, it seems to badly mischaracterize the pro-gay marriage position:

The battle for marriage is a battle for the future of our country. Those seeking homosexual marriage seek to hijack the family by reducing marriage to a sexual institution. Thus sex will have been exalted above the needs of children. When we refuse to honor marriage by making it a matter of sex, not love, we put children in harm's way. The exaltation of sex puts children in harm's way in one other manner as well: we destroy millions of them for the sake of unconstrained sexual activity through abortion.

For all the talk on how liberals are all about sex, sex, and more sex, it always seems to be the conservatives who bring it up. The liberal argument for gay marriage has two broad strokes to it. The first is that marriage is the uniting of two people who love each other and that it is unjust to exclude homosexuals from the institution. True, this unity probably will include sexuality, but like in any healthy marraige it will by no means be limited to it. The conservative obsession with gay sex seems more a product of a reflexive revulsion rather than any actual advocacy by marriage-equality advocates. The second, though, is expressly predicated on the best interests of children. This argument plays within the reality of children who are being raised by gay couples, and asks what is in their (the children's) best interests. The answer is clear: a stable environment where their parent's are in a socially sanctioned relationship and are backed by the state's full and unequivical support. It is clearly not that the state try to pretend these children exist, or worse yet, that these children should be stripped from their families in placed in a "better" heterosexual home. Such a belief is not "for the children," rather, it privileges a particular social ideology over the needs of individual children. To caricature the pro-equality movement as omitting the needs of children is a parody at best, and at worst it attacks the speck in gay couples' eyes while ignoring the log in its own.