The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family by Dan Savage

Author:Dan Savage
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: 2005) # Language: English # ISBN-10: 0525949070 # ISBN-13: 978-0525949077, # Hardcover: 336 pages # Publisher: Dutton Adult (September 22, gay marriage
Published: 2011-12-05T02:59:11+00:00

B L U E

about moving to Canada I think, “Yeah, right: You’re moving to Canada. Say hello to Tim Robbins for me.”

But I don’t have that reaction when I hear a gay person threaten to move to Canada. When a gay or lesbian person threatens to move to Canada I think, “I’m right there with you, pal.” For us, the move to Canada—home of legal gay marriage, edible tofu scrambles, snowboard-sculpted butts, and decriminalized marijuana—isn’t an overreaction to George W. Bush’s re-election. American liberals may be blue, but American gays and lesbians are a deeper, darker shade of blue. Living in a country with a two-party system in which one of the political parties—the one that just so happens to control all three branches of the federal government and dominates the supposedly

“liberal” mainstream media—“activates” its base by beating up on us year after year has left American gays and lesbians feeling battered and imperiled. Straight liberals are blue; gays and lesbians are black and blue.

It’s not just exhaustion that has many American gays and lesbians eyeing the exits, but a real fear of where the Republican right’s never-ending campaign against gays and lesbians will ultimately lead. Republicans tell their religious supporters that the existence of gays and lesbians is a threat to the American family, western civilization, and, as influential conservative Christian leader James Dobson claimed,

“the survival of the earth.” We’re godless commies, marauding Visi-goths, and global warming all rolled up into one great big mirrored disco ball.

You typically hear one of two things when you press a Dobson supporter about the threat that homosexuality supposedly presents to the planet. “The practice of homosexuality is potentially lethal to the human race,” Rev. Rolfe F. Westendorf wrote in The Northwest Lutheran, a religious paper. “It is activity which precludes the possi-

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bility of procreation. Hence, if everyone were gay, the human race would be finished in fifty years.”

The assumption at the base of the “if everyone were gay . . .” argument is a compliment, if a back-handed one. People like Dobson and Westendorf apparently believe that homosexuality is so tempting that pretty soon no one is going to want to be heterosexual. A sane person might think that the long, sordid history of heterosexuality, and the current human population of six billion, is all the evidence we need that human beings will never tire of heterosexual sex, but not Dobson or Westendorf.

And what of all those straight people out there who live near, work beside, and hang out with gays and lesbians for years without ever succumbing to our charms? I’ve shared an office with a straight guy for eight years, and he’s still sleeping with women; according to New York magazine, straight women are still finding husbands in Manhattan; and the last time I was in San Francisco, I actually saw a man and a woman making out in a cab.

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