Republican Senator Rob Portman has a gay son, and as a result he has come down firmly in support of gay marriage:
Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years.
This is an unequivocally good thing. If nothing else, it reveals not only that gay marriage is on the right side of history, but that gay rights activists are winning a war which as recently as eight years ago they were losing. And yet. As Jonathan Chait notes, the Ohio Republican’s conversion reveals as well an implicit moral failing of which Portman is apparently unaware, and that plagues the conservative movement writ large:
Portman ought to be able to recognize that, even if he changed his mind on gay marriage owing to personal experience, the logic stands irrespective of it: Support for gay marriage would be right even if he didn’t have a gay son. There’s little sign that any such reasoning has crossed his mind…
It’s pretty simple. Portman went along with his party’s opposition to gay marriage because it didn’t affect him. He thought about gay rights the way Paul Ryan thinks about health care. And he still obviously thinks about most issues the way Paul Ryan thinks about health care.
Indeed, consider Portman’s testimonial. He was against gay marriage because he believed that marriage “is a sacred bond between a man and a woman.” But then he discovered that one of his children was gay, and like any good father, he wanted all of his children to be happy. And so… presto! Conversion. What may get lost here – but what absolutely should not be lost here – is that Portman is effectively confessing to being comfortable with other people’s unhappiness. He was totally fine, in other words, with government preventing gay people from leading “happy, meaningful lives with the people they love” until one of those people happened to be his son.
This is what Mark Schmitt calls (H/T Scott Lemieux) the “Miss America compassion.” Portman’s experience reflects not a genuine conversion but a tacit admission, common among conservatives, that unhappiness is fine so long as doesn’t get too personal:
What has always bothered me about such examples is that their compassion seems so narrowly and literally focused on the specific misfortune that their family encountered. Having a child who suffers from mental illness would indeed make one particularly passionate about funding for mental health, sure. But shouldn’t it also lead to a deeper understanding that there are a lot of families, in all kinds of situations beyond their control, who need help from government? Shouldn’t having a son whose illness leads to suicide open your eyes to something more than a belief that we need more money for suicide help-lines? Shouldn’t it call into question the entire winners-win/losers-lose ideology of the current Republican Party? Shouldn’t it also lead to an understanding that if we want to live in a society that provides a robust system of public support for those who need help — whether for mental illness or any of the other misfortunes that life hands out at random — we will need a government with adequate institutions and revenues to provide those things?
Let me be very clear. I think it’s completely understandable for someone who once supported abstract arguments about the sanctity of “traditional” marriage to confront the intellectual and even moral bankruptcy of those claims once the question became personal – once, say, that person’s son came out of the closet. But that isn’t happening here. Portman isn’t confronting the moral bankruptcy of his previous position. He isn’t even admitting how now, if his son decided on second thought to marry a woman, that he would still back gay marriage tomorrow: for him, this is less about the moral rightness of the position than it is about the fulfillment of his family’s happiness.
And that’s just not the way this is supposed to work. Politicians are supposed to think in utilitarian ways. They’re supposed to work for their constituents. They’re supposed to work towards achieving societal happiness, not just their own. That, anyway, is what the Founders wanted: they were republicans with strong ties to the Scottish Enlightenment, after all.
I fundamentally reject modern conservatism not because I believe small government is wrong, per se, but because it rejects empathy as a matter of principle. Even now, Rob Portman is denying that this is about anything more than his family’s happiness. But that, in my opinion, is a betrayal of founding ideals. It’s also a shocking betrayal of human decency. We are better than that, or at least I still think we are.
But I guess I’m old fashioned that way.
UPDATE: Also, this.
