I spoke with [NOM's] 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.”Actually, Mr. Brown, for normal human beings, knowing someone gay, meeting their children, breaking bread in their home, does change them. It's the human element that informs our understanding. Forget gay. Knowing your adversary, period, makes a difference for normal people. And if you're not a hateful, hate-filled, automoton, it's bound to affect you in some way.
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, 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.
I think of Thomas Hardy's poem I read in high school, "The man he killed." Granted, Hardy still killed his adversary in the poem, but at least he thought about, was touched by, the man's humanity. The self-proclaimed agent of God had no such introspection, no such empathy. No humanity.
Dan Savage proved himself not only to be the better man at the table, he was the only man at the table.
