Free Our Divided Political Heart by E. J. Dionne Jr.

freedom but also by powerful demands for remaking and perfecting the American community—and for extending the obligations (and not just the rights) of democratic citizenship. The preaching of Martin Luther King Jr. made sense to millions of Americans because King rooted what he said in the nation’s Founding documents and also in Scripture. The civil rights movement was always more than just a quest for individual rights. It was also a demand for civic inclusion. The movement did not simply defend Americans who had been deprived of justice for more than three centuries; it made a case for transforming the entire nation. “ The end is redemption and reconciliation ,” King declared at the beginning of his ministry in 1957. “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.” King painted a picture of African Americans enjoying the rights they deserved, but also of a country that had decided to live differently, a republic that would fulfill its destiny of full equality. His goal, he declared most famously in 1963, was “ to speed up that day when all of God’s children , black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” For King, freedom and community were inseparable.
    And so it has been in the movement for gay and lesbian rights. Consider its core demands of recent years: for equal treatment within the United States military, and for equal rights to marriage. Could there be anything more civic, more republican in the oldest sense of the term, and more communally minded than a demand for equal opportunity to
sacrifice
for the nation? This was a demand not for equal employment opportunities on Wall Street or in corporate management but for an equal opportunity to serve and to defend the liberty of the whole country. There was a wise intuition here: if gays and lesbians were willing to risk their lives for the nation, how could the nation then deny them equal treatment? It was exactly what African Americans said after World War II, after so many in their communities had sacrificed and died. But more than shrewdness was involved. Gays and lesbians understood that full civic equality, an equal opportunity to serve the common good, was an essential component of equality in all other respects.
    Similarly, the demand for marriage equality was neither an obvious next step for the gay rights movement nor universally popular among supporters of homosexual equality when it first arose, as Andrew Sullivan, one of the earliest advocates of gay marriage, learned in the sometimes bitter polemics among gays and lesbians. Jonathan Rauch, another early supporter, observed that “ Egalitarians of a more radical stripe initially took a dim view of gay marriage, regarding it as capitulating to bourgeois norms, which gay people were supposed to be challenging.” Same-sex marriage, he added, “is particularly hard to pin down. You can see it as incremental or radical, as communitarian or egalitarian; you have four permutations to choose from. I see it as incremental and communitarian.”
    As Rauch argued, demands for gay marriage arose from a 1960s-inspired “liberationist” ethic of equality. But the cause drew strength from another tributary within the gay rights movement. “The new century brought to the fore a generation of younger gay people who, like their straight peers, had all too often learned the importance of marriage from the mistakes of their parents,” he wrote. “The result was an intense grassroots demand for the institutional protections and tools that go with marital
responsibilities
.” Rauch then offered this telling observation:
    Note how different these two streams are : one is fundamentally egalitarian and liberation-minded; the other fundamentally