The XX Factor: What women really think.

E.J. Graff Sends in This Post

My apologies, all, for being late with this. I'm en route to San Francisco for the wedding of dear friends—two fabulous and widely, deeply loved women—who've been together for 26 years. (It'll be my first Chinese wedding banquet!!) I dearly hope and pray that California voters will on Nov. 4 see fit to approve their marriage rights—and to say yes to recognizing many more such joyous marriages.

And so thank you, Abby, for noting how odiously Palin used the word tolerant in the debate. When Palin used it to talk about gay folks, she tensed up and all but wrinkled her nose, as if smelling something disgusting. In fact, although she briskly announced that she and Biden agreed, her entire way of answering the same-sex marriage questions were in very careful code that made clear how far apart she and Biden actually are.

I don't have a transcript here, but as I remember it, she carefully said that she wouldn't oppose hospital visitation or "private contracts" but that she opposed "redefining" the "traditional definition" of marriage as between one man and one woman. Now, let's leave aside both the tautology and the simple falsity of that statement; marriage has never been one static thing, but has been constantly shifting to suit each era and class, as I discovered when researching my book What Is Marriage For? More important here, though, is that Biden signaled he would support civil unions, domestic partnership, and possibly some now-banned federal recognitions like allowing an American to sponsor her foreign-born female beloved for immigration, say. (Now they'd have to move to Europe or Canada to stay together.) Most of the developed world, and some underdeveloped parts of the world, now have these interim recognitions. The U.S. anti-marriage movement has used state marriage bans to also try to erase these intermediate statuses—saying that any state recognition of a same-sex pair (even sharing health insurance benefits) is a redefinition of "traditional" (by which they mean "recent" or "conventional") marriage.

Biden was announcing, generously and enthusiastically, his support for these ABM (anything but "marriage") measures. Palin was signaling her opposition to any such things that governments might do to allow two people of one sex to honor their bond—and doing it in a way that only very attentive pro-gay and antigay folks would notice. Very smart. And not very nice for my dear California soon-to-be-newlywed long-coupled friends.