The making of gay marriage’s top foe

Today Salon.com is running my profile, the first ever written, of anti-gay-marriage activist Maggie Gallagher. It begins this way:

In September 1978, Yale freshmen would not have voted Maggie Gallagher the member of the Class of 1982 most likely to get pregnant before graduation. Gallagher was the third of four children from a close family in Portland, Ore. When she was young, her parents, a financial planner and a housewife, had been active in their local Catholic parish, and Gallagher and her siblings spent some years in Catholic elementary school. As Gallagher got older, her parents began to drift away from the church, and Gallagher’s mother became something of a spiritual seeker (“She once took me to an Up With People concert,” Gallagher now recalls, ruefully.) But Gallagher herself moved to the right in high school. Like many precocious girls, she fell for Ayn Rand’s novels, including “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” and for Objectivism, Rand’s capitalist, acquisitive philosophy. (Gallagher’s other formative influence was the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.) When she got to Yale, she only gingerly embraced the secular mores, the drinking and the drugs and the hookup culture, that defined life on liberal campuses in the late 1970s. She tried marijuana once and did not like it. She smoked cigarettes but, afraid of becoming addicted, never inhaled.

The making of gay marriage’s top foe

Today Salon.com is running my profile, the first ever written, of anti-gay-marriage activist Maggie Gallagher. It begins this way:

In September 1978, Yale freshmen would not have voted Maggie Gallagher the member of the Class of 1982 most likely to get pregnant before graduation. Gallagher was the third of four children from a close family in Portland, Ore. When she was young, her parents, a financial planner and a housewife, had been active in their local Catholic parish, and Gallagher and her siblings spent some years in Catholic elementary school. As Gallagher got older, her parents began to drift away from the church, and Gallagher’s mother became something of a spiritual seeker (“She once took me to an Up With People concert,” Gallagher now recalls, ruefully.) But Gallagher herself moved to the right in high school. Like many precocious girls, she fell for Ayn Rand’s novels, including “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” and for Objectivism, Rand’s capitalist, acquisitive philosophy. (Gallagher’s other formative influence was the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.) When she got to Yale, she only gingerly embraced the secular mores, the drinking and the drugs and the hookup culture, that defined life on liberal campuses in the late 1970s. She tried marijuana once and did not like it. She smoked cigarettes but, afraid of becoming addicted, never inhaled.

Beliefs, beliefs, “beliefs”

Here is the Beliefs archive, so that you can find all of my columns. But while we're at it, here are two recent ones.

First, from last Saturday, is my column about a student studying for an M.A. in counseling who wanted to avoid patients in same-sex relationships; her Christian faith prevented her from affirming such clients, she said. The column is here, but this excerpt gives you the gist:

Ms. Ward referred questions to her lawyer, Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advocacy organization. Mr. Tedesco said that “if referrals are acceptable, including for many nonreligious-based reasons, they can’t deny someone who has a religion-based need to refer.” He said that Ms. Ward was not singling out gay men and lesbians, and that she would also refuse to affirm heterosexuals who sought counseling about their adultery.

“Does it require a Jewish counselor to affirm the religious beliefs of a Muslim client?” Mr. Tedesco asked. He noted that the American Counseling Association allows its members to choose not to work with terminally ill patients considering end-of-life options. That proves, he said, that counselors are sometimes allowed to refuse to treat clients because of a fraught ethical question — so why not when the question is sexuality, and the counselor is Christian?

What many of the briefs fail to investigate is the role of the counselor or therapist. Is it to “affirm” the client’s beliefs, or to offer support and guidance, even to clients whose practices one may find distasteful or morally wrong? Daniel Mach, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a brief in support of Eastern Michigan, said that the canons of the profession rightly put the needs of clients ahead of the sensibilities of counselors.

“Nobody should be forced to change her religious beliefs or be punished for her faith,” Mr. Mach said. However, he said, referring a client to another counselor is not a neutral act. He pointed out that high school counselors may be the only compassionate adults available to gay, bisexual or transgender youths, and that turning away such a youth in crisis “could be devastating.”

And then here is my column from two weeks earlier, about the increasing aversion, among many evangelical Protestants, to birth control. Good quotation:

The Republican presidential field has produced a lot of babies. There is Mitt Romney, father of five sons. Ron Paul, an obstetrician by training, is also a father of five, and his campaign Web site credits him with bringing 4,000 babies into the world. Newt Gingrich and the recent dropout Rick Perry have only two children each, but Rick Santorum, who has said contraception is “not O.K.,” has seven children, and so does another former candidate, Jon M. Huntsman Jr.

And so far as I can tell, evangelical Christians in South Carolina, who will most likely constitute a majority of voters in Saturday’s primary, don’t think this über-fertility is at all strange. Support for Mr. Santorum may show that Protestants are no longer as troubled by the Roman Catholic objection to birth control.

Certain religious groups tend to have large families, whether for reasons of religious observance, as with some Jews, or because it is culturally approved, as in Mormonism. But 50 years ago, large families were unusual in evangelical Protestantism. A Santorum-size family would have been seen as a marker of exotic, sinister religiosity. Big families were stigmatized: they were for immigrants and Catholics, or for the rural poor.

The Opus Dei school beloved of Rick Santorum

More from my piece in The Times here.

Anne Frank lives upstate...

...in this new novel, by Shalom Auslander, that I review here.