SO LONG

Maggie Gallagher Accepts Defeat on Marriage

maggiedomarulingGet ready for the shock of a lifetime: we actually kind of respect Maggie Gallagher. No wait really! Hear us out!

Sure, she’s clearly wrong about marriage equality. And she’s said some pretty lousy things about LGBTs. But she’s unfailingly honest, ambitious, and funny when she wants to be. She’s sort of the Sue Sylvester of Marriage Equality.

Now Maggie has a new interview with the Huffington Post where she basically accepts that her side has lost (without conceding that they were wrong) and talks about the future. So, where can we worry about Maggie popping up next?

Well, she doesn’t seem to have made up her mind yet. “I have a lot more freedom now to figure out what I want to do with the next 20 years of my life,” she tells Lila Shapiro.

For the last few years, Maggie’s been a leading voice against marriage equality, and that industry’s rapidly shutting down. But her motivations were noble: strengthening families, supporting children, reducing unhealthy relationships. Those are all very worthy goals! May we suggest that Maggie explore those avenues? If she’s still concerned about raising happy kids in stable homes, there’s still plenty of work to be done to reduce divorce rates.

She also offers this:

“It is not just a matter of making some gay couples happy by providing benefits to help them live their lives with no consequences for anyone else. It’s a broad cultural shift redefining not only the place of gay people in society but of traditional religious believers as well. And also of what marriage is and what it means.”

This is what makes our respect for Maggie so frustrating: it’s a correct observation, and well written! She’s quite right! And yet the conclusion that she comes to is the complete opposite of ours. Maggie looks at this phenomenon and shakes her head in disapproval; we see and breathe a sigh of relief.

But then she also sometimes makes dumb statements. We kind of suspect she knows that what she’s saying is wrong, because she’s a smart woman, and there’s no way she can actually believe some of the things she says. For example, she says in the interview that heterosexual procreation is being “discarded,” which, come on, obviously it isn’t. There is room for making babies the old-fashioned alongside marriage equality, and Maggie must surely know that.

In the end, she says that she feels good about the work that she’s done over the last few years, despite having been on the losing side. And that’s all any of us can really hope for out of life, isn’t it?

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