Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

After Dinner, the Fireworks


FACE TO FACE
Dan Savage, right, hosted in his home a debate with Brian Brown, left, on gay marriage. At center, the author, Mark Oppenheimer, moderated.
Stuart Isett for The New York Times


BEFORE THE STORM
From left, Brian Brown; Mark Oppenheimer, the author; Dan Savage; and his spouse, Terry Miller, enjoying dinner together before the debate, surrounded by Mr. Savage's collection of rosaries, an outsize piece of taxidermy and other, quirky, personal objects.
Stuart Isett for The New York Times


BACKYARD CHAT
Mr. Brown and Mr. Savage relaxing with drinks prior to dinner and the debate. The debate was set in motion by a series of public exchanges between the two men this spring.
Stuart Isett for The New York Times

By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Published: August 22, 2012

Seattle

THE ancient Greek symposium, which combined drinking with elevated discussion, was often held in a private house; at Parisian salons, conversation frequently took place in the bedroom. Once upon a time, intellectuals knew they could do their best thinking at home, not in a public venue, and that debate would be helped along by food and drink.

But is such gemütlichkeit possible in this country in 2012, when our young century has already been strafed by culture wars and juvenile attack ads? Last week, four of us put it to the test.

The Dinner Table Debate, as we are calling it, was set in motion last April, when Dan Savage, the sex columnist and originator of “It Gets Better,” an anti-bullying campaign, gave a speech to a high school journalism convention here, attacking the Bible [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/b/bible/index.html ] as the root of much anti-gay bullying.

We can learn to ignore the nonsense in the Bible about gay people the same way we have learned to ignore what the Bible says “about shellfish, about slavery,” he told them, referring to Paul’s injunction that slaves should obey their masters.

As some students walked out, Mr. Savage taunted them: “It’s funny, as someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed people react when you push back.”

Two weeks later, Brian S. Brown, a conservative Catholic who is president of the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay-marriage advocacy organization, issued a challenge [ http://www.nomblog.com/22457/ ] to Mr. Savage on the group’s blog: “You want to savage the Bible? Christian morality? Traditional marriage? Pope Benedict? I’m here, you name the time and the place and let’s see what a big man you are in a debate with someone who can talk back.”

On May 22, Mr. Savage responded in his weekly podcast [ http://www.thestranger.com/SavageLovePodcast/archives/2012/05/22/savage-love-episode-292 ], offering to hold the debate at his dining room table, in his home in Seattle. “Bring the wife, my husband will be there,” he said. “You have to acknowledge my humanity by accepting my hospitality, and I have to acknowledge yours by extending my hospitality to you.”

There would be dinner, with the debate to follow. That’s where I came in: a journalist with pro-gay sympathies, but a history of writing extensively [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/magazine/infidelity-will-keep-us-together.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all ] about both sides [ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/the_making_of_gay_marriages_top_foe/ ] in the marriage fight, I was chosen to moderate.

After some e-mailing back and forth, the three of us agreed on a date, Aug. 15, and Mr. Savage appointed a chef, his neighbor John Colwell [ http://cargocollective.com/johncolwell ], a heterosexual stay-at-home father of four and a gifted cook. I corralled a video crew, and began studying books on same-sex marriage [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/same_sex_marriage/index.html ] (Jay Michaelson’s “God vs. Gay?” and Maggie Gallagher and John Corvino’s “Debating Same-Sex Marriage,” among others). Then I booked a flight to Seattle from my home in New Haven.

LAST Wednesday, when I arrived at the Savage homestead, a small, plain-looking brick house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, the video crew was setting up. Mr. Brown had not arrived yet, but Mr. Savage already looked worried. “Can we talk out back?” he said.

At a picnic table in the backyard, he asked if I thought the debate should deal with what had happened in Washington. “What are you talking about?” I said. In transit, without access to TV or the Internet, I had not yet heard about the shooting of a security guard [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/us/family-research-council-shooting-possibly-driven-by-politics.html ] at the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council, the conservative Christian group. People were speculating that a gay man was the culprit. (A suspect has been arrested and is awaiting a hearing.)

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should talk about it over dinner, then not deal with it during the debate itself.”

Terry Miller, Dan’s spouse, came out to offer me a drink. I eagerly accepted.

From then on, I did not stop drinking. It started with Terry’s Mai Tai, as Mr. Miller named his fabulous rum drink, and continued with the red wine that Mr. Brown politely brought when he arrived without his wife, who was pregnant with their eighth child, and then the white wine that Mr. Colwell provided to accompany dinner. (For those who are curious, we ate Northwest sockeye salmon with Washington sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes and new-potato gnocchi; dessert was roasted peaches with an oat-and-almond crumble.)

But even if I was no longer sober by the end of the meal, I still managed to exert enough discipline to hold the debate to an hour. It was dispiriting, but in an instructive way. Here were two Catholics — Mr. Savage born to the faith, Chicago Irish, the lapsed son of parochial schools; Mr. Brown of Quaker ancestry, but a Catholic since college, with a convert’s zeal — who could agree on nothing and could effect no change of heart in each other. They disagreed over whether Mr. Savage had the right to insult the Bible in front of high school students; about whether the New Testament endorsed slavery; and about whether the recent study by Mark Regnerus [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/health/study-examines-effect-of-having-a-gay-parent.html ] and its controversial conclusions about gay parents had any merit. (The hourlong debate [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG804t0WG-c ( http://www.youtube.com/user/DinnerTableDebate ) (below; a short excerpt separately embedded in the original)] can be seen on YouTube.)

Every time they disagreed, I drank some more.

I probably should not have expected anything else. Mr. Savage thinks religion is at best pointless, at worst malevolent. Mr. Brown believes that the truth of Catholicism should be apparent to anyone capable of reason. These are not compatible ways of seeing. And the homey setting did little to raise the level of the discourse. (Although Mr. Savage’s kitschy collection of rosaries hanging on the wall behind us at dinner did introduce an amusingly sacrilegious note to the proceedings.) If the two men could agree on anything, maybe it would be that they shouldn’t have to agree.

Several days later, I asked Mr. Savage, Mr. Miller and Mr. Brown how they thought the debate had gone. (DJ, Mr. Savage and Mr. Miller’s 14-year-old son, ate with us but left before the debate, so I didn’t bother him with questions.)

Mr. Miller pronounced the entire night a waste of time. “Brian’s heartless readings of the Bible, then his turns to ‘natural law’ when the Bible fails, don’t hide his bigotry and cruelty,” Mr. Miller wrote in an e-mail. “In the end, that’s what he is. Cruel.”

I spoke with Mr. Brown by phone, and he seemed to agree that the setting had made little difference. “There’s this myth that folks like me, we don’t know any gay people, and if we just met them, we would change our views,” he said. “But the notion that if you have us into your house, that all that faith and reason that we have on our side, we will chuck it out and change our views — that’s not the real world.”

As for Mr. Savage, he felt that being on his home turf had actually worked against him. “Playing host put me in this position of treating Brian Brown like a guest,” he said. “It was better in theory than in practice — it put me at a disadvantage during the debate, as the undertow of playing host resulted in my being more solicitous and considerate than I should’ve been. If I had it to do over again, I think I’d go with a hall.”

It was my hope, of course, that Mr. Brown might witness a sane, functional, happy family in a bourgeois home, and consider it as another piece of evidence, something more for reason to operate on. Indeed, Mr. Brown’s former ally, David Blankenhorn [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/opinion/how-my-view-on-gay-marriage-changed.html ], the founder of the Institute for American Values, recently changed his views on same-sex marriage — in part, he said, because he listened to the stories of gay parents.

So perhaps all is not lost. Salonnières, next time let’s meet at my house. Or better yet, in my bedroom, like the Parisians. We’ll send my three daughters to the basement, calm the two dogs with juicy bones and relax with my wife’s vegetarian cuisine, some stiff gin and tonics, and three stationary cameras.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/garden/dan-savage-and-brian-brown-debate-gay-marriage-over-the-dinner-table.html

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