Dear Camille...R.S.V.P.

Several readers have asked me whether Camille Paglia ever responded to the email I sent her on "gay marriage" (see December 10 post). Well, not directly, but she does address her views in her most recent Salon column.

I may be an atheist, but I respect religion and certainly find it far more philosophically expansive and culturally sustaining than the me-me-me sense of foot-stamping entitlement projected by too many gay activists in the unlamented past. My position has always been (as in "No Law in the Arena" in my 1994 book, "Vamps & Tramps") that government should get out of the marriage business. Marriage is a religious concept that should be defined and administered only by churches. The government, a secular entity, must institute and guarantee civil unions, open to both straight and gay couples and conferring full legal rights and benefits. Liberal heterosexuals who profess support for gay rights should be urged to publicly shun marriage and join gays in the civil union movement.

In their displeasure at the California vote, gay activists have fomented animosity among African-Americans who voted for Proposition 8 and who reject any equivalence between racism and homophobia. Do gays really want to split the Democratic coalition? I completely agree with a hard-hitting piece by the British gay activist Mark Simpson (which was forwarded to me by Glenn Belverio), "Let's Be Civil: Marriage Isn't the End of the Rainbow." Simpson, who has been called "a skinhead Oscar Wilde," is famous among other things for a riveting 2002 Salon article that put the term "metrosexual" into world circulation. I appreciate Simpson's candor about how marriage is a very poor fit with the actual open lifestyle of so many gay men, which is far more radical. Marriage may be desirable for some gay men and women, but at what cost? Activists should have focused instead on removing all impediments to equality in civil unions -- such as the unjust denial of Social Security benefits to the surviving partner in gay relationships.