Some straight talk about gay marriage.

This should not be difficult for a nation whose creed ends in the line “with liberty and justice for all.”  However, the history of how we understand civil rights has been a process of  gradually coming to terms with the idea that “all” means “all.”

If I were to pose the question to my most traditional and conservative friends, “are you in favor of gay driver licenses, or gay passports” the answer would be “of course” with little or no hesitation.  I should make the matter even more simple by asking if you are in favor of “Citizen Marriage.” That is really the only relevant question.

Marriage is complicated.  It takes disciplined thinking to distinguish two spheres that we have collapsed together in the popular consciousness about marriage.  There is the civil sphere, and the spiritual, or “values” sphere.  We must separate these realms, if we are to be reasonable about this.  After I have made that point, I will make a rather radical suggestion to settle this matter equitably.

The marriage that is sanctioned and licensed by the state is not the same thing that is blessed as a sacrament by a church.  It sounds like it’s the same,  sure.  It uses the same name.  The legal union that is created by mailing in a marriage license, and that ceremony presided over by a clergyman. seem to have their origin in the same event.  But they do not,  And that is what makes it so difficult for us to see them as two distinct creations.

The marriage licensed by the state carries no requirement for any sort of faith whatsoever.  There is n or doctrinal or affiliation test.   That would be unconstitutional.   The matter, which is licensed by the state  is a legal union like a corporation, and from which flows certain rights and privileges (such as the right to inherit,  a  shared credit history, hospital visitation rights, insurance eligibility, etc).  Historically, the state that sanctions this union was entangled with, and in some cases was identical to the Catholic Church.  This is has never been the case in the United States of America. (see: Henry VIII….it’s a long story)  Though this is difficult for some to swallow, under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to the constitution, all rights extended to any citizen must be available to all citizens (like: no kidding).

It seems to me that part of the difficulty comes from the fact that the same word is used to describe both the legal union created by the state, and a spiritual union that may be created by a particular faith tradition.  Your religion, if you adhere to one, might have teachings, rules and doctrines concerning marriage, it’s function, and who is eligible to be married.  You have every right to teach and even enforce those rules inside the voluntary assembly of your congregation or denomination.  But in America, that dogma cannot be extended to apply to all citizens,  just members of your group!  
It should be clear to any reader of the Constitution that all rights are for all citizens, and that Church laws do not bind the State.   It has taken us some time to get here, but this is the essence of American democracy.  State: here.  Church: over there.  However, because there has been a mixing of these concepts in a “God and Country” stew that some of theologians call “American Civil Religion” it is hard for some to distinguish these very separate spheres.

For Christians, a particular sensitivity about marriage comes honestly.  In the New Testament,  scripture provides two central metaphors that stand for the relationship between humans and their Creator: father/son and bridegroom/bride.  The former is more familiar perhaps than the latter, where Christ is described as the bridegroom, and his church, the bride.  In the Roman, Orthodox and even Protestant Liturgical traditions, marriage is considered to be one of the sacred sacraments.  It is completely understandable that the faithful would not wish for their ancient traditions to be re-written by the evolving ideas  in one particular country.  However, even a cursory survey of Christian marriage customs in just this country over the last two hundred years will reveal a dramatically changing idea of what constitutes Christian Marriage.  It is not a static and unchanging thing, but has undergone considerable modification since the not too distant time when wives were considered property.

Many make religious arguments that marriage exists primarily for procreation.  And, certainly that has been a big part of the history of marriages over the eons.  But there has never been, and could never be a legal requirement that a marriage must produce offspring.  If that were true, older persons could not marry, and neither could those who are medically unable to conceive.  No one would approve of such a state exclusion.

In the case of same sex couples, a religious congregation can teach and enforce anything they wish about the appropriateness of such relationships, but only in the context of their own institution.  They cannot expect their ideas to trump the constitutional protections of rights and privileges extending to all citizens.

So, the Catholic Church, or the Southern Baptist Convention or Saddleback Church is not the State of California, or The United States of America.  It is reasonable for Churches to have and maintain their own values, ceremonies and traditions. But it is not reasonable for them to expect California, or Massachusetts, or the Federal government to rewrite it’s laws to be consistent with their doctrines and dogma.  And, they may not do this no matter how frothy the popular sentiment might be.

Your Archbishop may well refuse to marry a divorced person.   A state could have such rule.  An Orthodox Rabbi may not agree to perform a mixed marriage, and, if that is the teaching of his congregation.  But we may never expect that these religious teachings should dictate who should be able to get a marriage license from a window at City Hall.  Religious teachings are the realm of religious institutions; they simply cannot be propagated by the state.

Think of it this way;  to the Christian, water and wine are, when sanctified by ceremonial action, sacred sacraments, which are “outward, visible signs of inward spiritual grace.”  Well and good.  But could Christians try to pass legislation requiring that water and wine must be used for no other purposes?  Of course not.  It is no different with marriage.

We must acknowledge together that marriages is indeed a-changin’.  For good or ill, “serial marriage” is the norm today.  The modern idea of a marriage consisting of romantic soul mates who both work to bring in incomes would not have occurred to the new testament writers, or even the founding fathers.  What is meant by “traditional marriage” today,  is a very recent rendering of the institution.

Okay, I am getting repetitive.  But I feel like I must to underline what should be simple, but, alas seems muddled to many of my dear conservative friends.

So, to once and for all tear these two overlapping realms assunder, I am suggesting a possible solution.  Because the mingling of these two coterminous concepts are difficult to disentangle in the popular imagination, I will offer this simple, though radical proposal (no pun intended).  I propose that the State get completely out of the marriage business once and for all, and that henceforth, all the licenses issued by all states be changed to read: “Civil Union” instead of “marriage”.  This should apply to everyone.  Let us take the word marriage completely out of governmental jurisdiction.

Let it mean whatever it means to you,  guided by your own philosophies, or the doctrines of the spiritual tradition to which you subscribe.  Let the Roman Catholics teach what they wish and conduct marriage ceremonies for only those who meet their requirements.  Let the Baptists marry in their only those who adhere to their teachings.  But let them have no say over who gets to shell out forty bucks at the courthouse.

In America, rights and privileges that are available to once citizen, or group of citizens, must be available to all citizens.  Period.  We recall how difficult it was for us to come to understand that our constitution would mean suffrage for females.   It was very difficult for this nation to accept that the right to free assembly must apply also to people of color.   It may be tough for some to admit that all the rights that are available to them, must be also be extended to fellow citizens who happen to be gay, lesbian and transgendered persons.  And when that right is marriage, I can understand how that may a real stretch for some.  They will get over it.  They have no choice.

While they may teach their children whatever form of discrimination seems right and just to them, they simply may not deny other citizens their constitutional protections.  It’s just that simple.

The American story is still being written, and it is a story of a country struggling, as a woman struggles with the pain of child birth, to grow into fully living out it’s own creed.

All means all.  That is all.

Rush Limbaugh destroying the national conversation.

Rush Limbaugh is getting a lot of promotional help these days, though he does not need it, from the preposterous suggestion that he is the new head of the Republican party. This makes about as much sense as suggesting that Kieffer Sutherland should head the CIA. You do know that Jack Bauer is just a character on a television show, right? Just as Rush Limbaugh is a character invented by a radio deejay who had to reinvent himself as a talk show host many years ago.

Mistaking Limbaugh for an actual political authority is not much different from thinking Stephen Colbert is actually a conservative talk show host. You see? The media fun house mirror has distorted our perceptions beyond belief. And, in this confusion, former top forty deejay Limbaugh is in a real way responsible for the complete breakdown of civic discourse in America.

In the early seventies, I had the pleasure of working in the hallowed halls of some of America’s big time pop music radio stations in major markets like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Top Forty is a genre that no longer exists. Rush Limbaugh was a radio jock trying to get there too. He used the air name “Jeff Christy,” and was……well, just not really major market material. At one point, he got out of radio entirely for a Sports Marketing job. But radio was in his blood, and he found his way back into broadcasting as a talk show host in Sacramento.

Though Rush Limbaugh is his real name, The Conservative Blow Hard persona was a character he created, largely to play against his expectations of “liberal Northern Calfornia.” Contrary to popular myth, California is not a liberal monolith; the Golden State give birth to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the John Birch Society, for crying out loud! Confounding the expectations of most media observers, the Bombastic Right Wing act worked. However, in time, El Rushbo forgot that it was just a character. He became it. Or, it became him.

Radio personalities understand this all too well. (Just ask Howard Stern’s ex wife Alison.) Radio performers often use their own name, and the on air persona they create is, in fact, based on their own personality, but writ large, with some new fictional elements, and other parts of their actual life edited out. Even though “that radio guy” has the same name as your own, and is similar to you in many ways,  it is in every sense a character you have written and developed over time.  It is a role which you play on the air every day, but which is most definitely not you.

An actor in a play or a film knows very well where the character ends and he, the actor begins.  He takes of the makeup and costume, resumes the use of his own name (unless, perhaps he is a graduate of the Actors Studio, and a Stanislavski student, but I digress).  For the radio personality, the line is blurred.  Soon, the vast majority of the world you live in relates to you as this character. He is the one who gets the accolades and praises if you are successful. He is not you, but, who would blame you for preferring to be him?

In the early eighties, I was an on air talent in Houston. The once dominant but now declining AM station that employed me assigned me to experiment with reinventing the call in talk show format at night. The ratings were so low, there was nothing to lose. At that time, talk shows were mind-numbingly boring, all public affairs-ish and shades of grey. My program director charged me with applying all of the tricks and techniques of radio showmanship to this moribund genre to see if we couldn’t make something happen. I achieved a small measure of success.

But I observed something curious. People assumed that since I had a talk show, that I must “be something.” At that time, the few talk shows around were hosted by actual experts in some field. But I was shocked at how often I was mistaken for being someone whose opinions might actually matter. I would get a call from someone who identified themselves as, say, the director of the Rice University International Symposium on Middle Eastern Affairs. She would be inviting me to be a guest speaker at their big annual event featuring PHD’s and Foreign Policy experts. “Well, er, okay.” I said. “But, do you guys know who I am? You guys know I am just a disk jockey…..right? And that my hair is down to my ass, and I am typically wearing a Foghat tee shirt and cut-off jeans?” “Oh, Mr. Weaver, you are just being modest,” they would say. No, I  wasn’t. “Look, I’m telling you the truth here, I’m just a disk jockey, who dropped out of college when he no longer needed the draft deferment.” They were not having any of it. “But, Mr. Weaver, we listen to your program all the time, and we greatly respect your keen insights. We realize that the self depreciation is just part of your charm, which is why we would value your participation so very much.” Yikes. They were buying my act!

That is exactly what happend to Jeff Christy, er, I mean…Limbaugh. His audience thought he really was that guy. And pretty soon, he forgot that he wasn’t. While I was doing talk radio, I also discovered that thoughtful consideration of both sides of the issue, did not make for compelling radio. The middle road may be the most reasonable approach to a particular idea, but it does not make the phones ring. I discovered that when I would extend the logical extreme of a viewpoint and exaggerate it for the sake of irony, the phones would explode. The audience did not perceive the irony. Phil Hendrie built a career around this observation. It made for entertaining radio. But when the audience does not understand that you are doing parody, you have a dilemma. Either go back to the bland, or you start building credibility for something that you know is not truthful. What’s more, the more extreme I became the more free media publicity my show would get. A dozen television and newspaper feature stories were done on me. And then the station manager started lobbying for me to make my parody bits into a full time format.

On a much larger scale, this is what happened to Limbaugh.  I will give the devil his due however; as a broadcaster, Rush Limbaugh is a master showman, using all the tricks of the radio man’s art. Gordon McLendon, the Texas broadcast legend who was one of my great mentors would be proud of him. But Rush’s success has almost completely destroyed our ability to have a constructive national dialog about policy.

The rhetorical technics Rush uses are primarily hyperbole and characterization. You simply take your opponent’s ideas, caricature them until they are a complete misrepresentation of their actual views. You insist always, that your opponent actually represents the most extreme fringe faction of people who hold their beliefs, then demonize them as being the personification of evil. Not just wrong, but evil. And the root of all evil. Then you stick with that position, repeat it relentlessly and never, ever waver. Never back down. Never apologize. You are always 100% confident that your opponent is wrong, and self consciously evil.

This makes sense for a radio man, trying to create a consistent share of mind for his “brand.” His “position” must be absolute, and without nuance. Just like the radio station whose slogan was “All News – All the Time,” Rush had to be “All Conservative Blowhard – All The Time.” The radio consultants told him he hard to repeat his core branding position every seven minutes, because that is how often the audience turned over. This is a great way to position a brand, but a bad way to have a serious discussion about important national issues, which are always full of nuance.  It produces heat, but no light.

This is the problem we are struggling with as a nation trying to make sense of some extremely complex problems.  As Rush became hugely successful in national syndication, radio consultants reduced his act to a formula which was imposed on almost all other talk hosts around the country. And, when Cable News Networks had a bunch of hours to fill, they simply imitated the Rush Limbaugh format on Television. Over a dozen or more years, this has changed the way we discuss issues, and it does not serve us. What was once constructive deliberation, now resembles the WWE.

The Republicans demonize the Democrats as being “Socialists”, when they are the ones who vastly increased the size of government and federal power. They accuse the Democrats of being the “Tax and Spend” party, even though they are the ones who put an unnecessary trillion dollar war on the national credit card, and passed out billions to Wall Street with no strings attached. But by repeating the old argument ad infinitum, it persists. You see, this is the top forty radio dictum of “Play the Hits” that they learned by imitating Limbaugh. Those arguments won for them in the past, so the strategy is to simply keep repeating them over and over, like the Classic Rock stations keep playing “Stairway to Heaven” over and over.

Limbaugh has taught the Republicans to continue to call the Democrats “the party of big government.” Actually the truth is, the conservatives won that argument many years ago. Even progressives don’t want the government to be big; they just want it to be effective. But the Right learned Rush’s deejay lessons well; when you have a hit record, you just keep playing it, over and over again. And of course, it must be added that it is not only the right that has reflexively used these rhetorical blunt instruments. The Limbaugh scorched earth style of engagement has infected and demeaned the entire national conversation, including, sometimes, that emanating from center left. This has to change.

We are in a worldwide financial emergency. For survival’s sake, we have to stop looking at everything in terms of the political chess game. We have some really big national problems to grapple with. Like it or not, our elected representatives are going to have to find a way to reinvent the way capitalism works. Our political and economic system is not ideologically pure; it is a hybrid of individualistic and collective elements. The tension between the two will always be with us, and is in fact the genius of American politics.  Continuing to demonize the other side as being evil extremists is simply not going to fix anything. The solutions we end up with will be somewhere between the forty yard lines. We cannot expect our short term emergency solutions to be ideologically pure.

Rush Limbaugh is a compelling radio character. His pig headed consistency is a brilliant example of effective radio branding. But you have to stop taking the things he says seriously.  He is a cartoon! An entertainer! And we as a nation must learn to have a national dialog about public policy that involves listening, cooperation, collegiality and compromise.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Jeff Christy had made it to WLS or KFRC, undoubtedly his dream stations, back in the mid seventies. The world we live in might well be a much more civilized place.