Legal Commentary

I was also struck, though, by the juxtaposition of this conference with another one that I had attended in the very same room less than a year earlier. That was a conference called ?Stonewall at 25,? celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising that began the modern gay rights movement. That meeting, too, had a political agenda, defending gay rights, less than 10 years after the Supreme Court had declared in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) that the states had the power to criminalize homosexual sex.

The second time, there was a weird feeling of déjà vu. Each time, I could feel the group?s sense of being a besieged minority, trying to defend values that were misunderstood and despised by the larger world. Each time there was a palpable feeling of relief at for once being in a room of like-minded and sympathetic people. (As I said, I kept quiet at the abortion conference.) I was struck by the thought that both groups were right to feel its minority status, but that each group was mistaken to the extent that each tended to view the other as paradigmatic of the dominant point of view that they were struggling against. Of course, neither is dominant, and both remain marginal.

I came away feeling that both groups were good, decent people, and that we ought to find some way for both to be able to live in the same country. That?s more easily done with respect to gay rights than abortion, since the only way to end the alienation of the pro-lifers is to massively invade the autonomy of other people. But I came away with a sense of tragedy about my conflict with them.

Father Neuhaus gave the closing address at the abortion conference. I remember being struck by his eloquence, even though I disagreed with nearly everything he said. His view of the world wasn?t mine; his views on abortion and homosexuality struck me as bizarre, but he did as good a job as anyone has of making me understand what those issues look like from that political perspective. I particularly remember being struck by how he addressed the palpable sense of frustration in the room. I?m pretty sure that these are nearly his exact concluding words: ?We should not mourn, rather we should be glad that we are not God. We should be glad that God is God.? In front of an audience that was inured to political defeat ? the 20th anniversary of Roe v. Wade had just passed ? he aimed to forestall despair, and I thought that this was a lovely way of putting his point, one that connected even with an agnostic like me. I was glad that he was there, and I?m sorry he?s gone now. Writing from the other side of the cultural divide, I am grateful for adversaries who are thoughtful and articulate, and I?ll miss him.

Full post as published by Balkinization on January 10, 2009 (boomark / email).