How the far left broke the gay settlement. And reignited homophobia.

Andrew Sullivan

Jun 23, 2023

Many, many moons ago, when I was a marriage equality pioneer and not a total pariah among the gays, I was asked to speak at the Human Rights Campaign Fund, as it was then called. Determined as ever not to read the room, I said (paraphrasing from memory): “The goal of any civil rights movement should be to shut itself down one day. And once we get marriage equality and military service, those of us in the gay rights movement should throw a party, end the movement, and get on with our lives.”

You can imagine how well that went down. And, sure enough, 30 years later, with marriage, military service and trans equality enshrined in the law, the HRC building now has a massive, six-story high poster hanging on it: “BLACK LIVES MATTER. TRANS BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

That tells us a bit about where we are today, and how we got here.

The point I was making in the early 1990s was that liberalism knows limits. A liberal politics does not seek to impose meaning on everyone; it creates the space for individuals to choose that for themselves. It doesn’t seek to deliver the truth about anything either; it merely provides the mechanisms for the open-ended pursuit of truth. A liberal politics will seek formal equality for members of minorities; but not substantive equality — what is now called “equity.” It would not require us to come to one, single understanding of reality; it would always allow diversity of opinion and encourage free debate. Live and let live. Remember that?

Technically speaking, that makes me a liberal conservative: accepting the reality of liberal modernity (even, in my own case, being happily at home in it), while seeking to limit its illiberal overreach and utopian ambitions. And that was what I tried to sketch out in Virtually Normal. It’s a book less about homosexuality than about politics itself. It’s about a politics of going this far — and no farther. From the NYT review in 1995:

Mr. Sullivan offers his own prescription for a “politics of homosexuality” that reconciles “the best arguments of liberals and conservatives.” It is a liberal stand, Mr. Sullivan argues, in that it puts a premium on individual liberty and equality before the law, but its requirements would apply only to government policies on homosexuality, avoiding “the regulation of people’s minds and actions” in the private sphere.

Homosexual citizens absolutely deserved equal rights, but the question of homosexuality itself would — and should — always be open to dispute and debate. Since a liberal society contains both fundamentalist preachers as well as lesbian atheists, it cannot resolve the core question. So it shouldn’t try. And it should celebrate, not bemoan, this ideological diversity.

I can see why the religious fundamentalists are queasy with the settlement that came from this. They have to live in a society that accepts civil marriages for couples of the same sex. The deal is that in return, they are free to deny the morality of such marriages, to reserve religious marriage to heterosexual couples, and not be forced to participate in any way. I can also see why queer theorists are queasy as well. They don’t like the heteronormativity of civil marriage, or the respectability politics that goes with it. But they in turn are free to live their lives as “queerly” as they want in society, to create culture that seeks to subvert and radicalize.

This, in the end, is my response to all the “slippery slope” arguments about gay marriage now being raised again on the right. There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides. From my liberal conservative perspective, the gay rights movement should have shut down in 2015 after Obergefell; and the trans rights movement should have shut down in 2020 after Bostock. Once gay men and lesbians and trans people achieved legal and constitutional equality, the fight was over.

But in the movement I was once a part of, many, of course, were not liberals, let alone liberal conservatives — but radicals, who reluctantly went along with marriage equality, but itched to transform society far more comprehensively. And these radicals now control everything in the hollowed-out gay rights apparatus. Their main ticket item is a law that would replace biological sex with gender in the law, and remove protections for religious liberty: smashing the liberal settlement. Combine that with acute polarization in the Trump era, and information silos, so that many gays get their sense of reality from MSNBC and Elton John, and you can see how the spiral into illiberal madness began.

And this is what I mean by “illiberal”: the use of public education, corporate power, and government fiat to enforce the postmodern doctrines of queer and gender theory; the suppression of debate; the abuse of science; and the deployment of children as weapons in an ideological campaign. (The right, in turn, is retaliating with its own deployment of state power, most visibly in Florida under DeSantis.)

When majorities supported gay couples getting married, they did not thereby support having their daughters forced to shower next to biological males in locker rooms, or compete with them in competitive sports; they did not support teaching kindergartners that their bodies have nothing to do with whether they are boys or girls; they did not support using unapproved drugs on troubled children to arrest their puberty, and sterilize them for life; and they did not support schools transitioning their children into the opposite gender without their knowledge.

They didn’t support these things because they have absolutely nothing to do with gay rights. And they didn’t support them because trying to abolish sex differences in society — differences that are among the most well-established facts of human existence — is insane. Sure, many Americans were and are open to helping transgender kids be accepted, to treating trans adults with sympathy and dignity — all the polls show that — but using the experience of this minuscule minority of humans as the default reality for all of us — and teaching that as fact to children — is not an example of inclusion. It is an example of a well-meant untruth, imposed by fiat. Of course we’ve seen a reaction.

And most who were persuaded to support gay equality did not believe that supporting gay rights meant endorsing anti-scientific piffle that sex is a “spectrum.” In a brilliant essay this week, Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja lay out the damage done by this illiberal movement to the core integrity of the scientific process, and it’s getting worse and worse: “Unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.”

For that matter, there is no good, scientifically sound evidence at all behind “gender-affirming care” for children. No solid evidence it reduces suicidality; no solid evidence it is “life-saving”; and truth be told, very little evidence for knowing whether it helps or hurts. Clinical experience and small selective studies just cannot substitute for rigorous research. We have none. But we have piles of evidence that mistakes have been made — in abundance.

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