Virtually Normal Andrew Sullivan

...Their failures entail fewer consequences for others...

...A good-faith attempt to enhance freedom for all by restricting the freedom of a few" ends, he argues, in reinforcing the very victim status that liberalism should be most concerned with eradicating for African-Americans, Hispanics, etc., as well as for homosexuals...

...Editor of the New Republic and an English Roman Catholic, Mr...

...And finally this: "Same-sex unions often incorporate the virtues of friendship more effectively than traditional marriages...

...When it comes to liberals, Sullivan expends much of his argument on the "illiberal" creation of affirmative-action programs...

...Sullivan, in commending the value of homosexual union, ends in poking holes in his own case...

...This final point reminds us that the argument about homosexuality between most homosexuals and most heterosexuals goes on even more intensely among homosexuals themselves...

...The prologue briefly recounts his own experience at uncovering and accepting that he is homosexual...

...Denying it to homosexuals is the most public affront possible to their public equality...

...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels The key word is argument, actually make that plural...

...Some of this is unavailable to the male-female union...

...the state has no role in promoting understanding or compassion or tolerance, as opposed to toleration, or indeed to celebrate one set of 'values' over another...

...Sullivan has written a book that will exercise the wits of editors, columnists, dinner-table dissenters, moral theologians, and all others who think that thinking matters...

...Certain necessary features of homosexual life lead to certain unavoidable features of homosexual character": mimesis, irony, and childlessness (which frees homosexuals and lesbians to serve in "broader parental roles...

...But then, why call it marriage at all...

...Pattullo, who counsel private toleration and public disapproval of homosexuality in order to discourage heterosexual "waverers" and protect the family...

...This unpretentious but honest approach contributes to the tone and spirit of the four chapters that follow...

...Sullivan argues that the military is a badge of citizenship and openly homosexual persons should be allowed to serve...

...here are four arguments about homosexuality that Andrew Sullivan engages with intelligence and vigor...

...In an exegesis of the words "pastoral" and "person" in the letter's title, Sullivan points out a shift in Catholic thinking, beginning with the acknowledgment in the 1975 statement that homosexuality may be part of a person's nature and not, as some prohibitionists think, the sinful inclination of heterosexuals to engage in homosexual acts...

...In other words, he refuses to stereotype homosexuality, his own or anyone else's...

...In this book at least, Sullivan wants to engage a political argument, not resolve the church's moral dilemma...

...Many U.S...

...He believes homosexuals or lesbians in same-sex unions can lead good lives, indeed, heroic lives, but that heroism, in some respects, derives from their differences from heterosexuals...

...Though some may read these chapters as a kind of intellectual game, Sullivan never strays far from the reality that this is a debate in which real lives and important values are at stake...

...To these core chapters, Sullivan has appended an opening and two closing chapters...

...And yes, homosexuals and lesbians will find themselves domesticating and even parenting...

...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal...

...What of gay marriage...

...Never has "The Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, been treated with such generous regard by someone who disagrees with its conclusion that a homosexual orientation is "an objective disorder...

...Course corrections are required as you read along...

...it is a social and public recognition of a private commitment...

...Our own nonfictional constitutional democracy, on the other hand, has a keen interest in the ends of marriage- in "licensing" men and women to form marriages into which children are born, cared for, educated, and raised to be good citizens, and in which a stable family provides material and spiritual resources for both its members and its community...

...Sullivan believes both groups have weak political arguments, some liberationists having none at all, so it is to conservatives and liberals that he turns for his real political debate...

...Sullivan writes: "Marriage is not simply a private contract...

...Some may find themselves irritated by his way of proceeding and yet instructed, even moved, by what he has to say...

...The antipo-litical politics of radical gay groups is an "attempt to subvert the established heterosexual order," in the name of a larger sexual revolution...

...But, argues Sullivan, once the church says concedes that a homosexual orientation is real, it is caught up in the dilemma of showing "how something that seemed to occur naturally could still be profoundly unnatural, and against the end of God's creation...

...whereas the last two chapters call them into question...

...It is lib-erationists and liberals that have dominated the latter debate...

...there is more likely to be greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman...

...A good liberal of the classic sort "refuses to see the state as a way to inculcate virtue or to promote one way of living over another...

...Indeed, homosexuals too have an interest in these ends...

...Turning to the liberationists (for whom homosexuality "is a construct of human thought, not an inherent or natural state of being" and for whom "there are no homosexuals, merely same-sex acts"), Sullivan links the ideas of Michel Foucault to the political dramatics of Act-Up and Queer Nation...

...Sullivan counter-argues with a conservative argument of his own: the increasingly public and political character of homosexual life has eroded the private-public distinction...

...Of course, "counter-intuitive" is not an argument, but an immediate cognition, in this case, that heterosexual and homosexual unions are radically different- dare I say, teleologically different...

...Obviously this does not exhaust the meaning of marriage, nor do exceptions (childless couples) or failures (a high divorce rate) refute its ultimate purpose...

...In such a fictitious state, perhaps marriage licenses should not be issued at all, to anyone-heterosexual or homosexual-since by definition the "liberal state" has no interest in preferring marriage, or in recognizing something as nebulous and value-laden as "personal integrity...

...and at times, among gay male relationships, the openness of the contracts makes it more likely to survive than many heterosexual bonds...

...In the American context, of course, the politically strongest prohibitionists are not proponents of the natural law but Protestant fundamentalists whom Sullivan writes out of the public forum with a scriptural exegesis that literal-minded, and some other, readers of the Bible are not likely to find convincing...

...In the United States then, a marriage license is not a prize for good citizenship, not a recognition of personal integrity, not a symbol of equality...

...In the final chapter, "What Are Homosexuals For...

...Stability and fidelity-yes, these are good things...

...Here Sullivan surveys the views of Oxford natural law philosopher John Finnis and Harvard psychologist E.L...

...The prohibitionist view, for example, is represented by the Vatican's 1975 and 1986 statements on homosexuality...

...Since, in that view, sexual orientation is not an innate characteristic, but a choice, these groups' "deployment of shock," in desecrating churches and outing closeted gays, repudiates the idea that a polis has anything at all to say about homosexuality...

...But does this constitute marriage...

...But when President Bill Clinton pressed the issue, Congress and the military handed him an apparently unworkable compromise, "Don't ask, don't tell...

...Same-sex marriage is deeply counter-intuitive for most people and it is hard to imagine the argument that will overcome this...

...Sullivan delineates and argues with four approaches to the array of issues surrounding homosexuality: "prohibitionist," "liberationism" "conservative," and "liberal...

...loses his acumen in setting forth a political justification, even failing to distinguish the very different political and moral provenance of the two issues...

...and again, the lack of children gives gay couples greater freedom...

...There is an eccentric congruence between some liberationists and some prohibitionists over whether people choose to be homosexual, but each advances a strong and generally opposed moral position...

...The inconsistencies of these final chapters notwithstanding, Virtually Normal is a book to take seriously...

...Sullivan, here directly arguing in favor of gays in the military and gay marriage (and divorce...

...It is most engaging at those moments when the agonistic stance of the debater shifts to reveal a man who like the rest of us is trying to understand "how we as a society deal with that small minority of us which is homosexual...

...Thus, Ratzinger says, homosexual persons deserve the church's pastoral care...

...The pain of the homosexual experience requires that kind of catharsis to be healed...

...Sullivan disclaims an identification between these approaches and any particular groups, but his well-drawn examples give substance to his points...

...while the debate between homosexuals and heterosexuals often takes place on the terrain of prohibitionists and conservatives...

...Though that sounds more libertarian than liberal, Sullivan acknowledges that the liberal tradition has advanced the cause of "minorities...

...Add to that the same-sex segregation in friendships and socializing he describes...

...With that, the issue departed the realm of political policy, as such, leaving it to the courts and to a constitutional or, perhaps as with abortion, a pseudo-constitutional resolution...

...The appearance of military force is usually congruent with the state's emergence and with its continued existence...

...Sullivan believes the "liberal state" should license homosexual unions...

...The conservative argument-and the one that seems most fully to reflect Sullivan's own sparring partners-is not, he cautions, that of right-wingers or prohibitionists, but of a species of liberal who accepts the premises of the liberal state (liberty, pluralism, freedom of speech and action), while seeing politics as a process that gives preference to some cultural and moral values over others...

...But his "liberal state" is a rhetorical fiction, a polity concerned not with ends but with means that will insure individuals the equal opportunity to pursue their own ends...

...Wouldn't prenup-tial agreements and domestic partnerships, which Sullivan argues against, better convey the contractual underpinnings of his liberal state...

...The family precedes and transcends the state...

...liberals...

...American readers will be distracted by his British spin: What he calls conservative would accurately describe many U.S...

...conservatives, especially those on the right, would more likely call themselves prohibitionists...

...Today this kind of declaration is de rigueur- from whence does he speak?-but here it is made with discretion and a disarming refusal to pronounce on the origins, percentages, characteristics of gay men or women...

...As such, it is the highest public recognition of personal integrity...

...Part of Sullivan's achievement in Virtually Normal lies in his coherently rendering each of these four positions with their best, not their weakest, arguments...

...It is the hope and provision for future citizens...

...conservatives, therefore, ought to work "toward an alliance with conservative trends among homosexuals" precisely in order to protect the social fabric of society...

...For Sullivan, however, the real lesson of the civil rights movement "was not its panoply of complicated and cumbersome laws," but a demonstration of the value of individual virtue: "It is courage that gets noticed, and courage that changes the world...