I've been meaning to comment on the ongoing debate between The Fool, Chris Geidner, and Irishlaw with regards to New Jersey governor McGreevey's resignation. I haven't had time, and don't really now. But I find myself drawn to the rather irrational lengths to which particularly Chris will go in order to defend a man who is at the very least an adulterer. If I were looking for a standard-bearer for my cause, I'd hope to find one who could hold it a bit higher.

Writing about adultery is difficult. Whether one is gay or straight, adultery is a very human, very common sin. Desire's chains have bound the heart at least as long as poetry, and brought low the most noble of souls of both history and literature. (Guinevere, anyone? Or even Lancelot, though he was not technically an adulterer.) It is hard to be too condemning: there but for the grace of God go I, after all.

Nonetheless, understanding is one thing. Excusing is quite another. And Chris, in one of his normal diatribes, declares that he is doing nothing of the sort, following such a declaration with paragraphs of mitigation:

I do not at all think his adultery can be written off, however, as the same as a heterosexual man cheating on his heterosexual wife with another heterosexual woman. This is not because gay relationships are somehow different, but rather that the reasons -- as many former spouses of gay people could discuss -- why a closeted gay man cheats on his wife are different.

Ahem. Hogwash. The reason that a homosexual man commits adultery is the same reason that a heterosexual commits it: he wishes to sleep with a person who is not his wife. That desire, for whatever reason, is all that is necessary, and excursions into the heart of the adulterer are not only fruitless--I certainly cannot speak for those feelings--but irrelevant. True, Chris will dress this up in a lot of language about "truth" and who McGreevey "really is," but these are merely exercises in begging the question.

And the sad bit is that this is hogwash of a sort which infantilizes homosexuals. A bit later, Chris continues:

Rather than writing about honesty, Tony writes about a man and "his particular sexual inclinations." This is a demeaning statement. He's gay. We're not talking about some fetish he has or some annoyance with the children that puts on damper on some wild sexual romps. . . . Tony, however, would erase all that and diminish it to a fetish. He writes that "whatever his particular sexual inclinations, he made a promise and he [should] stick with it because there's children involved." Tony feels the best way to raise children is by lying to them in order to make it "easier" for them.

Well, first, I should point out that anyone looking for parenting advice from this site or any comment I've made anywhere on the web should seek elsewhere: my total experience with children extends to one rather awkward evening baby-sitting which convinced me to learn computing as an alternative method of teenage employment. I know nothing of the best way to raise children, nor did I purport to do so: I leave that to experts, which apparently includes Mr. Geidner.

Nevertheless, whatever Mr. Geidner's parenting skills, he lives in a world ontologically impoverished, a world in which no space exists between a fetish and a fundamental truth. As in so many cases, his argument rests upon the assumption that "McGreevey is gay" describes some fundamental truth about the man beyond the fact that he has desires and acts upon them. As I've argued before, this confusion is useful because it allows one to make comparisons between sexuality and truly immutable characteristics like sex and gender.

Homosexuality is not a fetish, nor would I ever describe it as such. Like any expression of desire, it's a complex mix of emotion and longing, one made yet more difficult by cultural disapproval. Concession can be made to all of this without ever running past the most salient of convictions: that man is a creature who may--and should--control his desires, and be held responsible for his actions when he fails to do so.

This is the crux of the argument between IrishLaw, a devout Catholic on the one hand, and Chris and the Fool on the other. She's stated the obvious facts: he was married, he made a vow, and whatever his reasons, passions, predilictions, or subsequent desires he should live with the consequences of it. As she points out: "Would the Times have credited the gov with 'uncommon grace and dignity' if this were a plain ol' sex, fundraising and dirty politics scandal?" The point is not who he wishes to sleep with, but that he's married. As many a wag has observed, sex and marriage often have little to do with one another.

(And yet the Fool misreads IrishLaw almost completely. [1] "Thus, she seems to recognize a difference between McGreevey' situation and "plain ol' sex". It doesn't make much sense to recognize different degrees of infidelity if their is no difference in their application." But of course, she's done anything but. She's recognized that other people believe there is a difference, not at all the same thing.)

Chris (and to a lesser extent the Fool) don't wish to excuse him for what he's done, but to praise his 'honesty.' First of all, honesty when one is backed into a corner is not honesty at all: it's merely damage control. But leaving that aside, they're both willing to give McGreevey a pass on adultery because, if I may quote another philanderer of some note, "It is beyond my control." [2] Marriage, you see, was "a promise that was at odds with [McGreevey's] very being" (Chris) and homosexuality is "an extenuating circumstance." (Fool)

The sad bit is that if one really wants to speak about equality, this talk doesn't help. Chris, a tireless advocate for homosexual marriage, is willing to take the bonds of marriage less seriously simply by taking homosexuality too seriously: what he calls a matter of the very core is--if you look at it another way, something "beyond his control." On the other hand, IrishLaw is merely stating that marriage is a serious commitment, and whatever the 'extenuating circumstances' might be, they do not allow for the breaking of a solemn oath, upon which a family has been built. The truth is that McGreevey is married, and that truth occasionally requires sacrifice. To Chris, this is a lie: homosexuality is the all-pervading truth, and all else is shades of meaning of varying degree.

If anything is "demeaning," that is. Homosexuals, whatever their desires, are no less moral actors than anyone else. If a man enters into a marriage--even if it is against his own sexual urges--he's made a promise to another. Despite homosexuality, he has no greater excuse for infidelity than the man who marries a woman other than his love for the sake of family; or the man who discovers his soul-mate ten years after entering a loveless marriage; or even a woman cut from the fabric of a Bovary. To say this is not to denegrate homosexuality as a fetish. To say otherwise is to treat desire as an object of idolatry.

(Before anyone gets bent out of shape about the title, it's a reference to C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man, which makes a similar argument about responsibility outside of this context.)

[1]: May I just say that this is one reason I dislike anonymity among law bloggers? Writing "Chris says Tony believes X" is one thing; writing "the Fool misreads IrishLaw completely" lends the entire venture the air of some fantasy roleplaying game, and simply sounds inelegant.

[2]: Dangerous Liasons, John Malkovitch as Valmont. Valmont is ending things with an innocent married woman he's used and seduced, and claiming that his change of affection is not something for which he can be held responsible. Frankly, one of the most horribly rakish things ever said in a movie.