Further Paterson-blogging

[Alyssa]

Today's New York Times has a good short history of the Governor's history on gay rights in the wake of his decision to declare that New York will recognize the marriages of gay couples who get hitched elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, this anecdote leads the piece:

When David A. Paterson was growing up and his parents would go out of town, he and his little brother would stay in Harlem with family friends they called Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald.

Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald, he said, were a gay couple, though in the 1960s few people described them that way. They helped young David with his spelling, and read to him and played cards with him.

“Apparently, my parents never thought we were in any danger,” the governor recalled on Thursday in an interview. “I was raised in a culture that understood the different ways that people conduct their lives. And I feel very proud of it.”

It's always interesting to hear about the personal places that politicians' stances come from. That this story illustrates a pretty basic principle--that people who get to know gay people usually end up supporting their rights to live in full equality with everyone else--doesn't make it any less compelling.

Comments

Go and read the article. This guy is a beautiful human being.

Posted by Eduardo | May 30, 2008 11:34 AM

Basic principle, not principal. Leave the misspelling for Matt. You couldn't possibly exceed his accomplishments in that domain.

Posted by THS | May 30, 2008 11:39 AM

I read the article and I am a bit disturbed that his rationale for a unilateral Executive policy shift is that he had gay babysitters.

Posted by A bit frightened | May 30, 2008 11:45 AM

I read the article and I am a bit disturbed that his rationale for a unilateral Executive policy shift is that he had gay babysitters.

Posted by A bit frightened | May 30, 2008 11:46 AM

Conversely, it's also interesting how people who get to know gay people can also seemingly maintain anti-gay positions (at least in public). Like Dick Cheney. Or, the politician might actually be gay and yet amazingly defend pro-family horse shit to the end of the earth. Like Daniel Craig.

So, my suspicion is that an awful lot of politicians have completely partitioned their personal lives and even their personal opinions from their political, public persona. It's not always the case, and it's probably a bit different from one issue to the next, but it is interesting how the whole thing sometimes seems like a total charade that has no connection to the real world.

Posted by Brent | May 30, 2008 11:50 AM

**Oops, I meant Larry Craig.^

Heh.

Posted by Brent | May 30, 2008 11:52 AM

Daniel Craig in only gay in Larry Craig's dreams.

Posted by too many steves | May 30, 2008 12:00 PM

How much did too many steves pay Brent to feed him a setup line like that?

Whatever, the trophy for the thread is clearly tms's.

Posted by roac | May 30, 2008 12:10 PM

Re Brent

How about Charlie Crist and Rick Perry?

Posted by SLC | May 30, 2008 12:11 PM

I have some friends who have known my son since he was born. They had a house in the woods with a large garden and pond that my son always enjoyed visiting. He even insisted on burying a dead pet on their property. Then, in third grade, when kids started calling others gay as a put down (my son didn't seem to know what it really meant), I explained that our friends were gay.
He's never used the term gay as a put down since because, as he explains it, it doesn't make sense that way.
The put down for Larry Craig isn't that he's teh gay. It's that he's a self hating hypocrite. He's sad too though, in a pathetic way.

Posted by carsick | May 30, 2008 12:14 PM

Well, I tend to not be very happy that what it takes for people to care about equal rights for other kinds of people is to have had a personal and positive relationship with those other kinds of people. That's just a slightly generalized version of self-interest.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | May 30, 2008 12:16 PM

Re: a bit frightened

On a similar note, I'm horrified that the rationale for both voter- and legislature-initiated policy decisions on the same subject is that they think their magic imaginary protector says gays are icky.

Posted by Adam | May 30, 2008 12:24 PM

Brent:

Actually, Dick Cheney has not, to my knowledge, taken anti-gay positions. I think his line about gay rights was "freedom means freedom for everyone". When he has endorsed the Administration's position, he has made it clear that he personally disagrees with it.

There's many reasons to consider Cheney an odious human being, but this isn't one of them.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 30, 2008 12:26 PM

If you haven't checked up on what's happening in New York, it's important to note that: (1) After the was elected governor, Spitzer introduced a bill to legalize marriage (though he said at the time, not to encouragingly, that he didn't think it would pass). (2) The lower house (majority Democratic) passed the bill. (3) the bill has languished in the state Senate (majority Republican, of course, and ruthlessly run by Joseph Bruno). (4) The Republican majority in the senate has been sinking, and it's at least possible that the Democrats could take over this fall. (5) Bruno is now expressing outrage at what Paterson did. But, if he's so outraged, why doesn't he bring the bill up for a vote soon?

All that aside, Paterson's one of the good guys, and he deserves kudos for all this. How many other Democrats can you think of who have decency and courage to stand up and do the right thing?

Posted by K | May 30, 2008 12:33 PM

Dilan, his endorsement of the Administration's hideous Constitutional ban position is anti-gay. Yes, he's more or less admitted that he only endorsed it as such because he's just being a nice VP and doesn't want to make it a big deal. But, in explaining that, he still only asserts his personal opinion as: leave it to the states. That's still on the anti-gay side of the fence.

Now perhaps he's only right of center on this and not extreme right because of his daughter. Or perhaps he's incapable of having a strong public opinion on anything not oil/energy or national security-related. Or perhaps it's a little of both. But, I do have to wonder what his daughter thinks to herself when her father won't explicitly and publicly support her equality... because I do get the impression that he really wouldn't blink if gay marriage were legal everywhere tomorrow. Yet Cheney the VP can't be bothered to be anything but wishy washy on the issue despite what Cheney the father might really think.

Posted by Brent | May 30, 2008 12:51 PM

"I was raised in a culture that understood the different ways that people conduct their lives."

Yeah, like we're all from a culture that just wouldn't have a clue about that. Wasn't the 90s buzzword, "pluralism." Even though I attended the Clinton's "model pluralistic learning community," I still get diversity and multiculturalism mixed up with pluralism. Without the Clintons though, I just wouldn't understand any of it. Here's to the different conduct of Aunt Hillary and Uncle Bill: http://theseedsof9-11.com

Posted by Peggy McGilligan | May 30, 2008 12:57 PM

"But, in explaining that, he still only asserts his personal opinion as: leave it to the states. That's still on the anti-gay side of the fence."

I think that's an overstatement.

It's utterly amazing that I could find myself defending Cheney in any context whatsoever, to any degree, considering that I think he's evil incarnate. But while I don't agree with the "state's rights" doctrine, and believe it's usually just a facade behind which hides reactionary views, I don't think it is in essence anti-progressive and I don't think that subordinating gay rights to it, hoping that they are achieved via the state level, is an inherently anti-progressive and anti-gay position.

Indeed, what's happened in Massachusetts and California and now in New York are examples of how the states can be more progressive than the national government, which has passed the DOMA, after all.

Obviously, the historical record doesn't look favorably at state's rights with regard to civil rights. But I don't think the doctrine is inherently anti-gay and thus I don't think it's fair to claim that Cheney is necessarily anti-gay because of it.

The big question, though, is what Cheney has to say about the civil rights laws of the 60s. Does he disavow those and claim that the issue should have been left to the states? I doubt even he would say that today, at least in public. So if he's unwilling to take this position on race, then why is he willing to take this position on gay rights?

Posted by Keith M Ellis | May 30, 2008 1:24 PM

I read the article and I am a bit disturbed that his rationale for a unilateral Executive policy shift is that he had gay babysitters.

That's just not what it is. It's the narrative within which he came to hold the views he does.

Paterson says that he is "proud" to come from a background in which differences were respected and valued - he could also not be proud of it - that pride is a statement of principle. But that pride is related to his narrative, to where he comes from.

The supposedly rational disdain for narrative reflects a failure to understand how moral reasoning actually works. Reading Paterson's discussion of his own history as a rationale unencumbered by moral reasoning is both ludicrously unsympathetic to an impressive man and anthropologically indefensible.

I also like this short discussion from the article:

Some lawmakers said they particularly admired Mr. Paterson’s position on gay marriage because it would have been easy for him to let the issue rest once he became governor. “I just think it shows the steel in his spine,” said Assemblyman Micah Z. Kellner, a Democrat who represents the Upper East Side. “He knows he is now the governor of all people in New York State, gay and straight.”

Mr. Paterson said he does not see his support for gay marriage as an issue of political fortitude, but rather something more human and almost reflexive. “All the time when I’d hear Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald and my parents talk, they were talking about the civil rights struggle,” Mr. Paterson said. “In those days, I knew I wanted to grow up and feel that I could change something.”

The idea that Paterson is the governor of New York, and thus the governor of all the people, gay and straight, reflect a deep and profound humanism, a desire to recognize the dignity of all people even as lines are being drawn between the truly human and the infrahuman. New York is lucky to have him.

Posted by DivGuy | May 30, 2008 1:25 PM

Man, that is some serious derangement linked to at 12:57. As one would expect from the post.

Posted by roac | May 30, 2008 1:38 PM

I'm horrified that the rationale for both voter- and legislature-initiated policy decisions on the same subject is that they think their magic imaginary protector says gays are icky.

At least those methods are democratic.

Posted by Pluralism and tolerance mean democracy | May 30, 2008 1:42 PM

I think that if I were going to conclude that natural reason, Holy Scripture and 2,000 years of unbroken and consistent church tradition were all wrong on the subject of homosexuality, I would have some better grounds for such a conclusion than 'I had a gay babysitter growing up.'

Modern American civilization is so deeply wrong about so many other great moral issues that it's difficult for me to see why I should accept its claim to be right on this one, especially when accepting that claim means denying the witness of the apostles and church fathers for two thousand years.

Posted by Hector | May 30, 2008 3:27 PM

This seems like such an obvious thing. For those who don't know their history, back when interracial marriages were illegal in many states (and that was well within the lifetimes of a lot of Americans), it was common for states which did not allow them to nonetheless recongnize interracial marriages which had been done in other states where they were legal.

Simple precedent. Hardly ground-breaking. Not to put down Paterson for doing it, but it wasn't something that required a leap into the legal unknown.

Posted by wj | May 30, 2008 3:37 PM

At least those methods are democratic.

His methods are democratic as well. He is using the powers he has been authorized as the executive to have.

Posted by RY | May 30, 2008 5:59 PM

bans on gay marriage are nothing like bans on interracial marriage how dare you equate the two

Posted by that is not civil rights | May 31, 2008 12:08 AM