I.

On the cover of Michael Warner's new book stands a row of male dolls. Half of them are hypermuscular and dressed in leather: gay men, it seems. They are dressed identically; they stand in identical stances. Alternating with them stands another set of male dolls, also identical to one another, also posed in identical stances. These dolls, dressed in white dinner jackets, hold out their arms as if to escort a partner: grooms in a wedding, it seems. And it appears that the leather dolls are all set to march down the aisle with the dinner-jacketed dolls, in a same-sex wedding that is also a wedding of outsider status with conformity, the "pathological" with the "normal."

In this way, Warner's book wittily announces its theme: the tyranny of public conformity and the irrational desire for sameness, even among people who, as social outsiders, ought to know the damage that this kind of tyranny can inflict on others. Thus Warner pointedly suggests from the outset that even the intense desire of many gays and lesbians for same-sex marriage may itself be an example of this tyranny. To the aspiration to conformity and the domination of the "normal," Warner opposes a moral argument based upon an ideal of autonomy and liberty, and upon the idea that a democratic culture needs to encourage, not to stifle, innovations and deviations in living, in order to discover the most fruitful ways to realize its ideal of human dignity.

Thus, although this book is the work of a leading queer activist and a defense of a radical subculture, it is also a descendant of Mill's On Liberty, which similarly inveighed against the tyranny of public opinion in the name of liberty and of "experiments in living." And it has another surprising, and more recent, antecedent: Richard Posner's Sex and Reason, which argued, appealing to Mill, that our public policy in the area of sex should reject the politics of moralism and should protect all consensual adult relations from state interference. But Warner acknowledges the complexity and the messiness of sex far more effectively than the economistic Posner or the somewhat squeamish Mill. His case for autonomy is stronger for being written as if the author knows something personally about the subject.

Warner is known to the nonacademic world as the founder of Sex Panic!, a group of gay activists united to protest various policies of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the areas of sex-related zoning and public sex. But he is also a professor of American literature at Rutgers University, and the author of a fine book about print culture and the public sphere in colonial America, and the editor of the Library of America's anthology of American sermons. Nor is his relation to religion merely scholarly. A remarkable article that he wrote in 1993 began with the sentence, "I was a teenage Pentacostalist," and went on to describe his upbringing in that community and his education at Oral Roberts University.

Although it seems natural to think of the two parts of Warner's life as radically discontinuous--natural even to him, as he admits--he cannot deny that there are deep links between them. Both communities in which he has lived are marginal "outsider" communities, alienated from the dominant culture and spurred in no small part by anger against it. (Warner tells us of a mother who, abandoned by her husband, spoke in tongues while she vacuumed the shag rugs.) So Warner knows well what it is like not to be normal, and to be pilloried by the normal; he also knows what it is to take a profound pleasure in marginality, and to regard it as the source of a deep seriousness. There are dangers in such a romanticization, and Warner's book does not altogether escape them; but on the whole Warner is a deft and thoughtful writer who turns his own experience of the margins into a source of genuine understanding about America and its sexual politics.

Warner's target is what he calls the "politics of sexual shame." By this he means a politics in which people's general unease about the fact of sex gets translated into a comforting set of hierarchies that brand some people as good and healthy, and other people as bad and deviant, and then uses the force of public opinion and law to curtail the consensual activities of those who have been stigmatized. Such a politics of shame, Warner contends, is behind sodomy laws and many other rules through which a majority seeks to define its own sexual activities as superior. We might also call this a politics of disgust, in the spirit of Lord Devlin's famous defense of sodomy laws as legitimate expressions of a society's disgust for some of its members' practices.

Warner argues--like Posner in Sex and Reason, and like critics of Devlin such as H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin--that public policy should never be based on a moralistic desire to tyrannize over the consensual sexual activities of others. Instead, the goal of public policy in this area should be to protect people's "sexual autonomy" from the tyranny of an interventionist moralism. In effect, he advocates making Mill's "harm principle" into a legal standard: if an activity does no harm to non-consenting others, it should not be legitimate to regulate it by law. Unlike Posner, however, Warner does not pretend that his proposal is value-free. He insists (correctly, in my view) that his argument against the politics of shame and his defense of sexual autonomy is itself a moral argument.

What is the shame all about? Warner says little here, but he makes it clear that he thinks we are all ashamed of our sexuality because sex represents a messiness, a lack of control, in human lives that anxiously strive for control and harmony. We could add, with Walt Whitman, that sex reminds us of the fact that we will decay and become part of the grass and the earth around us. Most of the time, of course, we would rather think that this will not happen, that we are pure spirits bound for eternity; and for this reason, too, the discomfort with a mortal and animal body elicits shame, a painful recognition that one has not reached a condition of invulnerability that one would very much like to attain.

Having a lot of shame about our own bodies--and disgust, too, a shrinking from contamination that derives from a deep ambivalence about our own animality and the animal secretions that are such a prominent part of sexual experience--we seek to render our bodies less disturbing; and this frequently involves projecting our own emotions outward, onto vulnerable people and groups who come to embody a shamefulness and a disgustingness that we then conveniently deny in our own person. This happens very young; children make "cootie catchers" and pretend to find disgusting bugs on the bodies of children who are a little bit different. But it is sex that most keenly provokes this troublesome dynamic.

Every society has its chosen "shameful" and "disgusting" sexual minorities who come to represent properties--stickiness, fluidity, sheer corporeality--that the dominant group would like to forget that it, too, possesses. Women play this role in more or less all cultures. But Warner is surely right in suggesting that this powerful emotional reaction to one's own perceived incompleteness is behind the virulence of much American homophobia, particularly when directed against gay men.

Warner does not expect that this shame and disgust will ever go away. (In this regard, the rhapsodic Whitman was too unrealistic: his paean to "the body electric" made the body so clean and unthreatening that it hardly seemed to be a body at all.) Warner asks only that we not make public policy in response to it, that we realize our own irrationality in these matters and decide to protect vulnerable others from its damages.

Warner makes two arguments, both of them Millean, one based on liberty and the other based on social advantage. Personal liberty (what Warner calls "sexual autonomy") is extremely valuable, and should not be curtailed where no harm to non-consenting others is at issue. This does not mean that we must refrain from making moral criticisms of them; it means simply that we not dragoon people into "normality" by legal restrictions. When we allow different groups more liberty to construct their own modes of sexual life, moreover, we are all likely to learn from these "experiments in living."

Warner's idea of sexual autonomy is underspecified. He makes it clear that sexual coercion should continue to be regulated by law; but he gives no hint of how he would resolve difficult cases. In his valuable book, Unwanted Sex, Stephen Schulhofer recently argued, for example, that the protection of sexual autonomy requires major changes in the law of rape. We need to protect people not only against physical force, but also against intercourse accomplished by threat or intimidation, and by the abuse of positions of authority. Schulhofer notes that a high school principal who said to a student "Pay me $500 or you will not graduate" would surely be convicted of a crime; but a principal who said "Sleep with me or you will not graduate" was acquitted of rape because the woman did not say "no." Extortionate offers should be criminal, Schulhofer argues, in sex as in other realms of life, whether we call such cases rape or criminal assault. And Schulhofer extends his analysis to a defense of sexual harassment laws in the workplace, and of professional bans on intercourse between doctors and patients, lawyers and clients.

Warner never wrestles with these difficult cases. Had he spent more time confronting a wide range of feminist writings, he would have had to face the fact that law does not just compromise sexual autonomy, it also protects it. A simple "get the state off our backs" position may look attractive when we are thinking about the sex lives of middle-class men, but it is clearly inadequate to deal with the situation of women and other vulnerable groups. There is no consent where there is pervasive intimidation and hierarchy.

When radical feminists say that rape and "normal" intercourse cannot so easily be distinguished, they mean that a pervasive asymmetry of power makes it difficult for consent to be genuine. Just how this idea should be recognized by law is the difficult matter; but surely we should recognize that many instances in which there is no "no" are not instances of genuine consent; and we should recognize, too, that certain laws that interfere with some allegedly consensual sexual relationships (sexual harassment laws in the workplace, for example) have enhanced sexual autonomy, and not compromised it. I wish I knew what Warner would say about these questions; he will have a viable proposal for public action only when he has sorted them out.

Another issue that will need to be faced in the working-out of these notions of freedom is the issue of material inequality. Any attractive norm of sexual autonomy ought to contrast autonomous choice not only with choice coerced by a criminal act, but also with choice coerced by economic necessity. Warner tends to group "sex workers" with middle-class queer men, and to think of both as people whose sexual autonomy would be enhanced by getting the state out of their lives. Well, maybe for some sex workers. But many of them "choose" a risky and unappealing way of life because they have no good economic alternatives. We should question whether "choice" in those circumstances is really choice.

It is surely true that our society's unease about sex work is a result of the politics of shame; we do not extend the same anxious policing to boxing, or to risky types of factory work, or to any other dangerous and low-paid occupations to which working-class people with few skills tend to gravitate. But any politics of sexual autonomy will surely need to do more than to say "no shame here." It must ask also what material conditions are compatible with any meaningful type of human autonomy, and then seek to promote those conditions for everyone.

II.

Warner is preoccupied with the tyranny exerted over people's liberty by public opinion and its insistent demand for conformity. In America, he argues, this demand takes a particular form. We tell ourselves, and others, that what is best is "normal." Ever since data about sex began to be gathered, we have been anxious to reassure ourselves that in sex, as elsewhere, we are right in the statistical middle, and in no way strange or eccentric. Of course, this hunger for the mean is not confined to sex: but in the realm of sex it exercises a particularly tyrannical power over minority ways of desiring and acting.

Why, asks Warner, would anyone want to be normal? If normal means the middle of a statistical range, there is nothing so good about that: it is normal to have back pain, or bad breath. Yet we persuade ourselves, somehow, that "normal" in that statistical sense is the same thing as "normative," or the way things ought to be: being normal seems already evaluative, as if it gives those in the majority a license to look down on the minority, who are definitionally abnormal. (Mill made the same point about the slippery use of the term "nature," which somehow slides from "the way things usually are" to "the way things rightly should be.")

Warner thinks that people have simply confused the idea of the normal with the idea of the normative. Yet intellectual confusion is not the whole story here. Warner's analysis of shame suggests a deeper story. People want to be like others, especially in sex, because then they can feel that they are less naked, less shamefully exposed. There is indeed safety in numbers. Somehow the numbers--like a fig leaf--hide the disorder of our bodies from us, and make us feel almost as if we had no bodies. It is this denial of the corporeal that finds expression, I think, in the convention that everyone wear a dark suit in the workplace. In suits, men are robbed of their physicality by their conformity. And so, when women came into a previously all-male workplace, with their alarming legs and flowing hair and brightly colored dresses, they represented sex. By standing out, they reminded everyone else that they, too, are sexual beings, and so an anxiety, or even a panic, was likely to ensue, and frequently did ensue.

Much the same, Warner suggests, is true of the American public response to gay men, especially when they will not oblige by hiding their sexuality. They remind everyone, but especially heterosexual males, of this common but scandalous aspect of human life, of the unreason that we are all in together. And so they have to be scorned and downgraded by an appeal to the normativity of the normal.

But of course gay men are not themselves immune to this logic. They are no more daring, no more reconciled to their mortality and their physicality, than anyone else. (Remember those identical male dolls.) So it is not surprising that they, too, should yearn for a kind of normality--and Warner is at his most incisive when he documents the recent trend in gay journalism toward the pretense that sex is not really the issue, that being gay has nothing to do with sex. In a way, there is nothing wrong with the gay dream of ordinariness. There is dignity also in the ordinary. But the gay movement was once about social criticism and social change, about the rights and the benefits of genuine and irreducible otherness. And it is worse than disappointing when those who have opted for the safety of the normal turn around and throw shame on others who have not. Sadly, "[i]t does not seem to be possible to think of oneself as normal without thinking that some other kind of person is pathological."

In the remnants of defiant queer culture, by contrast, Warner finds a norm of dignity that makes a distinctive and worthy contribution to democracy. This is the Whitmanesque idea that human beings have dignity precisely in their mortality, in the disorder of their vitality. "If sex is a kind of indignity, then we're all in it together. And the paradoxical result is that only when this indignity of sex is spread around the room, leaving no one out, and in fact binding people together, that it begins to resemble the dignity of the human." Gay friendships, he argues, are based on a public acknowledgment that we have bodies that we do not altogether understand or control, and that this is a fundamental source of our equality and our characteristically human form of dignity. And these friendships need, for their flourishing, a public space within which to create their own public culture.

III.

All this is appealing, as far as it goes. The queer community is indeed conducting a Millean experiment in living, and it is precisely such experiments that a democracy committed to liberty and dignity should protect, hoping that it will learn something from them. Here again, though, I wish that Warner had engaged more with the predicament of women, for it would complicate his romantic picture of the scorned aspects of queer life.

Think, for example, about pornography. In Warner's argument, the availability of sexually explicit materials is simply one of the freedoms that the experimenters want to have, and should have, as a part of their rebellion against the tyranny of the normal. Indeed, Warner pays pornography the compliment of portraying it as the opposite of the normal, as a kind of bad outsider other, in danger of being suppressed. But think about it from the viewpoint of many women, and things get terribly complicated. For the depiction of women in most pornography made for men is just an aspect--and a very powerful aspect--of the tyranny of the normal.

There is nothing rebellious or experimental about this sort of pornography. It is just the old message of male domination, made powerful by being packaged as a masturbatory aid. Men learn that women are objects for men's use and men's control; and many women, in the pornographic view of the world, even love abuse, and cry out ecstatically when they are beaten up. In short, pornography normalizes a very old way men have of viewing women: no subversive outsider, but the most inside of the inside, the sweat-stained leather armchair in the old boys' club.

If, then, you are a feminist interested in rebellion against the tyranny of the normal, it is by no means obvious that you will want to go along with Warner and seek the easy availability of sexually explicit materials, making no distinctions. You will first want to make, morally, a number of distinctions within the category of the sexually explicit; and you may even feel that here, again, legal interference with liberty might support sexual autonomy rather than undermining it. At any rate, the argument will have to be joined.

Even in the world of gay male pornography, Warner needs to argue that something like this is not the case. Male norms of objectification and domination are very powerful; it would be surprising if queer culture had simply thrown them off. After all, adult queer men are, almost all of them, brought up to be heterosexual men; it would be startling indeed if they had not internalized the norms of "straight" culture regarding women and the use of people as things. But then these norms might work their way into gay pornography in ways that would call for analysis and criticism, at least moral criticism.

It is wrong to congratulate oneself on the happenstance of statistical conformity, and still more wrong when that self-congratulation demeans and diminishes others. But the sheer rebelliousness of queer culture hardly guarantees that it does not contain pieces that tyrannically re-enact the normal. What makes Warner think that the queer community has been successful in liberating itself from the all-too-familiar patterns of domination and subordination that characterize the normal? So what we need is a more complicated argument. We need an argument for which autonomy is not just a matter of freedom from restriction--at least if it is to be connected, as Warner wishes, with equality and dignity.

IV.

Warner draws from his general analysis a number of implications for public policy. One of his primary targets is the zoning policies of Mayor Giuliani. By restricting the places where sexually explicit materials may be sold, he argues, Giuliani has fractured a fertile and highly democratic gay public culture that focused on the street scene of the West Village. Now rich gays frequent expensive private clubs, while poorer gays go to the dangerous areas around the docks where these materials remain publicly available.

Thus, in Warner's account, the democracy of gay male culture has been undermined in the name of public disgust and shame. These are plausible examples of the divisive and cramping effects of a politics of shame, although, once again, Warner's arguments about pornographic materials lack complexity. But Warner's longest chapter, and the one that will surely bring him the most criticism from within the gay community, is his attack on the idea of same-sex marriage. Since there is likely to be a very heated debate about his position, it is important to be precise about what his argument is.

Warner's basic claim is that it is a mistake for the lesbian and gay movement to devote so much of its energy to seeking marriage rights for same-sex couples. Several distinct arguments support this conclusion. First, he argues, working for marriage rights is a deflection of valuable resources and energy away from causes that are both urgent and possible: AIDS prevention and education, and general non-discrimination in housing and employment. Indeed, there is no reason to think that the marriage struggle is winnable any time soon, so it may well be that a lot of money and time is being wasted.

But Warner also makes two deeper and more controversial arguments, closely connected. The first is that pushing for marriage rights unthinkingly validates the social status quo, when we should really be thinking hard about what living arrangements we want to support with what forms of state action. The second is that the status of marriage, as it exists in American society, is inherently discriminatory and hierarchical, defining some couples as worthy and thus defining other couples as less worthy. The two arguments are closely linked because Warner believes that a more reflective and experimental approach to the bundle of political privileges currently associated with marriage would be likely to disaggregate them, and that disaggregation would produce a less hierarchical state of affairs.

Marriage, as it currently exists in America, is not just a sentimental matter. It is also a large bundle of privileges and statuses, in areas including taxes, inheritance privileges, child custody, spousal support, courtroom testimony, hospital visitation, medical decision-making, immigration, and burial. To seek marriage as a right is not just to seek a public space within which to say "I love you." It is to seek that entire group of privileges, and thus to support the normative way of bundling them together.

Of course it seems wrong for opposite-sex couples to have the opportunity to get this bundle when same-sex couples do not. But Warner argues that what all of us should really seek is the regrouping of the entire set of privileges. There is no good reason why they should all be bundled together. Numerous European nations have been disaggregating them in various ways, with success. The Scandinavian countries have created registered domestic partnerships that have many of the privileges of traditional marriage. France has recently given legal recognition, in areas of property, inheritance, and care, to a wider range of living arrangements, not all of them based upon a sexual bond. (And India, I can add, gives government support to women's collectives, which promote women's employment opportunities, emotional solidarity, and shared child-rearing.)

Warner plausibly holds--here agreeing with Posner--that we should stop and think, learning what we can from these experiments, rather than jumping on the marriage bandwagon and cheering for an institution that does not, after all, have such a good record when we consider issues of sex equality (and, we might add, of child sexual abuse). Warner is aware of the argument that gay marriage itself is a radical experiment that may well revolutionize all marriage; but he is skeptical about such an outcome, holding that it is at least as likely that non-conforming styles of life will be dragooned by the institution of marriage into conformity with previous norms. Warner also plausibly holds that we should in any case prefer a disaggregated solution to the problem of marriage, because the traditional bundling of privileges tends to stigmatize people who, for whatever reason, do not want to enter, or cannot enter, the preferred kingdom. I think that these are excellent arguments, though I am not optimistic about our nation's willingness to deliberate seriously about the alternatives that other nations have embraced.

But isn't love an argument for marriage? Here Warner is tough with those who romanticize traditional marriage. Love, he points out, has been regarded, in large parts of the Western tradition, as a profoundly antinomian emotion, and not very comfortably at home with a settled arrangement such as marriage. What people who romanticize marriage are really after, Warner suspects, is something more like safety and insulation.

Insofar as a long romantic tradition does see marriage as a natural fulfillment of love, there is a peculiar paradox involved: marriage consecrates a love that represents itself as pure spontaneity, and offers a way for lovers to ally themselves with the dominant social order while still having the satisfaction of seeing themselves as daring protesters against all laws. There is nothing wrong with this very human tendency to want to have it both ways--but one's all-too-human insecurity is rarely a good source of law.

Warner is himself a peculiarly American kind of romantic. Just as he suggests that authentic love is radically antinomian, and that religions are at their most interesting when they set themselves against the dominant norms of society, so he sometimes suggests that all selves are authentic only if they are continually being remade. He ended his Pentacostalist article with this statement about minority religions: "They tell you to be somebody else. I say: believe them." In this spirit, earlier in the article, he admitted to a lack of sympathy with anyone who does not want to engage in ongoing experiments in living:

I have never been able to understand people with consistent lives--people who, for example, grow up in a liberal Catholic household and stay that way; or who in junior high school are already laying down a record on which to run for president one day. Imagine having no discarded personalities, no vestigial selves, no visible ruptures with yourself, no gulf of self-forgetfulness, nothing that requires explanation, no alien version of yourself that requires humor and accommodation. What kind of life is that?

This same impatience with the absence of experimentation occasionally mars his book. There is sometimes a tone of disdain and superiority toward those who want to live routine lives, even when they do not try to impose their ways on others--as if those men who are at home "cooking for their boyfriends" are somehow less worthy of respect than those who make the rules up as they go along. Although Warner's most powerful position is an attack on all kinds of repressive "normalizing," at times he seems to "normalize" experimentation and to look down on conformity.

But most people need routines and even conformity, most of the time; and every person needs, at the least, a lot of parts of life that are not being called into question at every moment. In this sense, we all have to be married--to a job, a workout schedule, a daily routine of eating and washing, a breakfast cereal, a world of stable physical objects. Habit dulls perception and hobbles thought, but we need a lot of habit in order to live. Otherwise we would die from the pain of seeing.

If there are some people who find improvisational lives more tolerable than others, they should not look down on those others who cannot stand so much uncertainty. And really, isn't the queer life itself a kind of habit? Aren't people married to that life, as others are married to their domesticity? A little more gentleness toward humanity on Warner's part would not be amiss.

Still, to dismiss Warner's challenge on this account would be a mistake. For what Warner's book finally demands of us is not the chimera of romantic or existentialist self-invention. What it demands is genuine reflection. If we cannot dissociate ourselves from our patterns of desire and approval, including our desire to conform--and Warner knows that for the most part we cannot--we can at least think, and we can at least criticize, rather than just falling mindlessly back on the old ways and scorning those who are different.

In 1959, a liberal journal of opinion published an essay on racial matters that created quite a stir. The editors of the magazine were outraged by the article, delayed it for a year and only agreed to publish it alongside lengthy rebuttals from its staff. In the following issues, the controversy spiraled. The editors, however, defended their decision forthrightly: "We publish it not because we agree with it," they wrote of the piece, "but because we believe in freedom of expression even for views that seem to us to be entirely mistaken ... we feel it is a service to allow this opinion, and the rebuttals to it, now to be aired freely." The magazine was Dissent. The author of the offending article was Hannah Arendt.

I'm glad someone published the exchange, because, all these years later, it makes for riveting reading. The article's core contention is that the freedom to marry whoever one wants is one of the most fundamental political rights a liberal society offers. It is not a detour from civil rights, not a special right, not an attempt to revolutionize society, but the bedrock of civil equality. Without it, the equal protection of the law is a sham. Take it away, Hannah:

The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin color or race" are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs.

Arendt was as politically incorrect in her day as she would be in ours, of course, but her muscular liberalism contains a wisdom that still, I think, has resonance for both race and emotional orientation. Her point is that liberalism's pursuit of equality should end in the public sphere. If it meddles in the "social sphere," it destroys both itself and the freedoms it was designed to protect. And what she meant by the social sphere is even broader than what many conservatives defend today. Arendt argued that parents should not be forced to send their children to an integrated public school if they didn't want to. She clearly would have opposed laws against workplace discrimination. And heaven knows what she would have made of affirmative action.

But, as a true liberal, she believed in the right to marry. It's a strange paradox, this, and one worth reiterating. Marriage is a formal, public institution that only the government can grant; and yet it is also the most intimate and private of things, its meaning separate for each couple, its power a function of all those things--passion, jealousy, love, fidelity--that the cold, liberal state can never fully evoke. As such, it does what so few other things can: transform the private world by a public act. It is the intersection of the citizen and the person; the place where our public duties meet our deepest emotional needs.

So when this institution cut through the barrier of race, none of Arendt's precious liberalism was compromised, but the world changed. It changed without infringing on anyone's liberties, without spending anyone's money and without setting up any government program. And yet it's arguable that this simple act did more to proclaim our racial equality--and deepen our racial dialogue--than any other measure this century. Along with full voting rights and military integration, it was a cold, public act. But, unlike both of them, it also touched the human heart. It made the most important day in most people's lives a celebration not simply of love and family, but of country and civil equality.

That is why it is so central to homosexual equality. Homosexuality, at its core, is about the emotional connection between two adult human beings. And what public institution is more central--more definitive--of that connection than marriage? The denial of marriage to gay people is therefore not a minor issue. It is the entire issue. It is the most profound statement our society can make that homosexual love is simply not as good as heterosexual love; that gay lives and commitments and hopes are simply worth less. It cuts gay people off not merely from civic respect, but from the rituals and history of their own families and friends. It erases them not merely as citizens, but as human beings.

This was Arendt's point, too. Others were terrified of the consequences of such an idea. David Spitz argued in the same issue:

To fight now, as a matter of first principle, for the repeal of anti- miscegenation laws is, I believe, to give strength to the very contention that is most frequently, and by all accounts most tellingly, employed by those who resist the repeal of segregation laws--namely, the contention that this is but a device to promote sexual intercourse among the races.

Today, some gay leaders (and panicked Clintonites) similarly urge playing the issue down, for fear of backlash. But Arendt saw that they still didn't get it. In an icy response to Sidney Hook's argument that he preferred "equality of classroom" to "equality of bedroom," Arendt wrote that "by calling abrogation of racial legislation the equality of bedroom' (I did not believe my eyes), Mr. Hook reveals very clearly how little he understands human dignity, however much he may be concerned with social opportunity."

Her insight, of course, eventually became a commonplace, as the civil rights movement helped melt the interracial taboo. The process of integration--like today's process of "coming out"--introduced the minority to the majority, and humanized them. Slowly, white people came to look at interracial couples and see love rather than sex, stability rather than breakdown. And black people came to see interracial couples not as a threat to their identity, but as a symbol of their humanity behind the falsifying carapace of race.

It could happen again. But it is not inevitable; and it won't happen by itself. And, maybe sooner rather than later, the people who insist upon the centrality of gay marriage to every American's equality will come to seem less marginal, or troublemaking, or "cultural," or bent on ghettoizing themselves. They will seem merely like people who have been allowed to see the possibility of a larger human dignity and who cannot wait to achieve it. For better or worse. For richer or poorer.