Zero-Sum

In the gay marriage wars, the winner takes all.

There’s a certain Seinfeld episode some of you will remember, but some of you won’t. It’s mostly forgettable, but it’s lived on in the cultural consciousness thanks to a subplot where Kramer participates in an AIDS walk. (This was 1995, when AIDS was becoming fair game for something besides melodrama.) Kramer is very proud of himself for doing this walk. Some people just “wear the ribbon,” but not Kramer. Kramer walks his walk. Today, we imagine Kramer would be that guy tweeting about those losers who do nothing but update their profile pictures instead of getting out there and doing something.

But Kramer gets to the AIDS walk and finds out that, in fact, everyone is expected to wear the ribbon. When he refuses it, the woman offering it to him is confused. Everyone wears the ribbon. He has to wear the ribbon. Finally, mustering all his righteous indignation, Kramer leans in and says, “You know what you are? You’re a ribbon bully.” Then he walks away while she continues to scream “Come back here and put this on!”

If you know the episode, you know how this ends. If you don’t, I’ll let you watch it.

A friend was recalling this episode in the wake of the NHL brouhaha over Ivan Provorov’s rainbow jersey. He could just as well have posted the clip last summer, when the ribbon of the hour was rainbow logos on baseball uniforms. The application is evergreen. Granted, Provorov and the Tampa Rays refused to wear their “ribbons” on more principled grounds than Kramer’s “This is America and I don’t have to wear anything I don’t want to wear!” Though it must be said that Kramer’s argument remains perfectly valid.

There’s more than one kind of ribbon, of course. Sometimes it isn’t something you wear. Sometimes it’s something you’re being asked (“asked”) to make—a cake, for example. Or, alternatively, a cake.

I link there to news of Christian baker Jack Phillips’ recent court loss, after being hounded over a period of years by an individual who explicitly demanded a “gender transition cake.” When Phillips refused, he was taken to court, for the second time. Conservatives quick to celebrate his first narrow legal victory will need to take stock, soberly, of what this new loss signifies. It is yet another reminder of what has always been true, however much some will try to deny it: This is a zero-sum game.

Tish Harrison Warren, an ordained Anglican, protested this was not the case in a New York Times essay last December. She begins with warm words for her gay married friend, saying she’s happy for the benefits Obergefell gave him, but cautiously goes on to argue that it would still be preferable if gay couples didn’t hound sincere Christian bakers, web designers, etc. Please. Asking nicely. If they would be so kind. As it turned out, the gay people in her comments section were not so kind, to the point that comments had to be closed.

As a small aside, Tish specifically mentions hospital visitation as an area where her friend was able to have “peace of mind” post-Obergefell, where previously he was worried (with no evidence) that a certain Catholic hospital might separate him from his partner in a medical emergency. Those interested can browse some archived 2010 testimonials here, where some claimed that even with all their legal documentation in order, individual hospitals could still impose separation. Sometimes a hospital wasn’t even consistent with itself—one lesbian woman reported that she was separated despite having the right paperwork, but in the comments, a gay man reports no conflict at the same hospital. It’s noted that fear of lawsuit hung behind much of this in a pre-Obergefell landscape, as hospitals didn’t want to get in the crosshairs of blood family if an unrelated lover made a major medical decision. My comment to all that is that such things can be sticky, but where discrimination was imposed in defiance of proper documentation, it does appear unjust. And of course, rigid “family only” policy for visitation should have been amended for all sorts of situations where the people immediately closest to an individual aren’t blood relatives or a spouse. But the implicit argument here seems to be, “As long as gay couples weren’t legally married, individual hospitals had wiggle room to be sporadically discriminatory. Therefore, you must support legalized gay marriage as top-down preventative, else you’re a bigot.” Which is not a serious argument.

Back to Tish’s hypothetical pluralistic vision, there are others who would say they share it, except from the opposite side. More than once in recent years, I’ve seen openly gay voices—the ones I affectionately think of as the “what’s all this?” gays—register loud disapproval of the “rainbow bullies.” Gay marriage architect Andrew Sullivan was out there himself back in 2014, suggesting magnanimously that everyone “leave the fundamentalists and bigots alone.” Today, he still celebrates what he built. He just doesn’t celebrate all these unnecessary add-ons.

Of course, in a zero-sum game, they are not unnecessary. They are all part of the game plan.

Lest I’m misunderstood, I don’t question the sincerity of the “what’s all this?” gays. I appreciate their outrage. We coexist. In some ways, now that so much is moot, we can do business. I would simply remind them, when they lament “the death of pluralism” in this area, that pluralism has been dead a long time. It died the day Kim Davis went to jail.

When Warren’s essay ran, there was an essay by ordained Episcopalian Steve Paulikas that showed up as a “related” op-ed. It’s quite the little read. It makes the case that the freedom to enter a same-sex marriage is its own kind of “religious freedom.” When the designer and the baker and the candlestick maker plead this cause, Paulikas will turn it right back on them. For he, too, is a religious man. He, too, has religious rights— including but not limited to his “God-given right” to marry another man.

This is sophistry. But sophistry which, paradoxically, reveals something true. True in the sense that Paulikas exposes what both Tish Warren and the “what’s all this?” gays fail to grasp, in all their reasonable hypothetical pluralist negotiating. He has grasped that this is not, fundamentally, a political war. It’s a religious war.

Then of course comes the question, and the attending debate: Is it a civil war within one religion? Or a clash of two?

This past week, we watched a battle play out on another front of this war across the Atlantic, as the Church of England’s General Synod convened for a bruising round of arguments and counter-arguments before passing the motion to sanction new “prayers of blessing” for gay couples. As many on both sides have observed, this is peak Church of England fudge, simultaneously drawing the ire of conservatives and liberals. But the liberal outrage has been transparently performative, amounting to a child’s complaint that the family van isn’t hurtling to its inevitable destination fast enough. At Synod, an amendment to the motion narrowly passed that “officially” reaffirmed the Church’s traditional doctrine of marriage. But even this minimal request met with vocal resistance from a variety of vicars and bishops.

There was also a narrowly failed attempt to radically accelerate the timeline for a debate over full gay affirmation, from five years in the future to this July. Opposing the motion, pastor Ed Shaw exemplified the sort of muted conservative response that’s allowed the revisionists to dominate so thoroughly. He said that while he opposes equal marriage, he still “look[s] forward to the day” when the woman proposing the motion can get married in her own local Anglican church, according to her “conscience.” All he wants is “negotiated settlements” that will ensure it won’t happen in his church. He holds out hope that “somehow,” some way, they can all “remain united” as Christian believers, despite their “irreconcilable differences.”

This is doctrinally incoherent, but it’s also pragmatically naive, because the zero-sum game will play itself out here, as well. Already, it is clear who holds the reins of power. As conservative rector Vaughan Roberts pointed out in a Wednesday speech, there’s good reason for Church of England chaplains with a traditional view to fear for their jobs. Looking to the future, one could also add that it’s clear what sort of up-and-coming younger clergy will or won’t be made to feel welcome as the years wear on and older conservative priests slip away. This is certainly the future that gay married vicar Charlie Bell is looking forward to. As he writes here, this is “all about power.” Quite.

Of course, we Americans have seen our own version of this movie already play out in the decline of the Episcopal church, which is now the church of Steve Paulikas. We know how this will end. We know how it must always end, when one religion goes to war with another.

And still the bishops have droned on and droned on with their assurances that “disagreement doesn’t have to lead to division or conflict,” pointing people to “the pastoral guidelines,” dressing up their speeches with the sort of pietistic fluff that made a young reader of mine cringe when he sat through a recent Oxford Union debate. I should note that he is not a Christian, nor a conservative. These things are not preconditions for detecting BS. A working BS detector will do.

But whoever was running the live feed for the Synod let the mask slip a bit, after the vote was taken and the prayers of blessing were approved. In the lower right-hand corner, if you were paying attention, you would have noticed the sudden appearance of a rainbow flag.

And indeed, if you were to take a walk down the street in New York, as I’ve done, you’d see more than one historic church building with such a flag fluttering in the breeze. A flag of conquest, willingly though it may have been planted.

But behind all such flags is the empty space, the vacant pew left behind by those who were unwilling. Those who could not stay. Those who would not wear the ribbon.