No voice (2 December 2009)

Amidst another disappointment in the fight for equality, the question that should be asked is not whether gay marriage is a legitimate demand. The apologies issued by Senate Republicans about "wrong timing" effectively blind us to what the New York defeat signifies. What is at stake is not only the invisibility or inexistence of queer legal identity but the perversion of our political voice. At a time when the advocates of "gay rights" seem to be most vociferous, so too their opponents who consistently demonstrate themselves to be the more powerful voice. This is indicated not only in the fact that the bill was defeated despite the fact that the great majority of discussion on the floor was voiced by proponents of the bill but that our politics renders the legitimacy of our cause unintelligible. Queer identity is always beholden to heteronormative terms: it will never be "the right time". The injustice here is not that a recognizably legitimate demand has been denied but that the demand is not even recognized. What today's defeat signifies is that the demand itself cannot be heard, for justice is self-compelling to those who have ears to hear. When the very possibility of articulating the right of gay marriage is undermined as a "political risk", this constitutes not only a denial of that right but the impossibility of even recognizing that it is a right.

When the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference says that today is "a victory for the basic building block of our society", we learn three things. First, that we still believe that the political can be derived from the biological--which is precisely the logic of European fascism. Second, that "the family" is baldly asserted to be among the conditions of economic reproduction--and that this fact should be not only a political but of a moral value. Third, that the fundamental values of our culture remain essentially anti-liberal--and that the avatars of this antequated moralism continue to patrol the border. The very articulation of our demands will always be on their terms: as long as marriage continues to be not only defined but thought heteronomatively, the very term "gay marriage" will remain, quite literally, unintelligible and we will never have a voice that is our own but always spoken through the voice of another.