New York Times reports on the problem with marriage

Urseberry pointed me to this piece in the July 30th New York Times Style section by Anemona Hartocollis (who, by the way has written several other pieces for the Times on LGBT issues).

An excerpt:

To these activists, the fight for gay marriage is the mirror image of the right-wing conservative Christian lobby for family values and feeds into the same drive for a homogeneous, orthodox American culture. The Stonewall confrontation and early gay rights movement, after all, was about the right to live an unconventional life, and to Mr. Dobbs and others like him, marriage is the epitome of convention.

While I am always wary of any coverage in non-queer media about conflicts within the LGBT community or any marginalized group (too often it becomes a way for the privileged and those uninvested in struggles of that group to delight in the infighting), the Times article seems... not horrible. There's even mention of this rather interesting development, a sign that a broader non-binary idea of family and love is making its way into "respectable" politics (although the word "strategic" is a little troubling to me):

...some 250 academics, celebrities, writers and others, including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine, Armistead Maupin, Terrence McNally, Holly Near and Cornel West, signed a manifesto called “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships.” It calls for the legal rights and privileges of marriage to be extended to arrangements like extended families living under one roof, and close friends in long-term caregiving relationships.

It's not all ponies and sunshine, however. I do think that the article should have gone further to establish that there is still plenty of common ground uniting the advocates and opponents of same-sex marriage within the LGBT community. Also, the ending is a bit of a random non sequitur, signalling to me that the journalist didn't quite get the nuances of the issue, but wanted to end the piece with a bit of local flavor - after all, this is the Style section:

Then there are those gay men who find themselves embracing marriage in spite of their iconoclastic temperament. Florent Morellet, the French-born owner of Restaurant Florent in the once-raunchy meatpacking district of Manhattan, had a commitment ceremony in 1988 with his partner, Daniel Platten. Mr. Platten died in 1994 and Mr. Morellet says he is at a stage in his life when he is looking for a monogamous relationship.

Yet, influenced by French attitudes toward erotic life, he does not subscribe to the American ideal of marriage as a narrowing of sexual opportunity. “In France, which is nominally a Catholic country, adultery is actually an equal opportunity,” he says. “Women have almost as much adultery relationships as men.”

Quoi?