Fidelity Month and the World’s Most Unqualified Marriage Experts

Stop trying to make "Straight Pride" happen and worry about not cheating on your wife maybe.

Every June, conservatives discover a terrible injustice.

Not poverty.

Not healthcare.

Not childcare costs.

Not the fact that buying a house now requires the combined income of a surgeon, a software engineer, and whatever dragon currently sits atop a mountain of gold.

No.

The real crisis facing America is apparently that gay people are existing too publicly.

This year Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared June “Fidelity Month.” Other conservatives have promoted alternatives such as “Nuclear Family Month” and “Strong Families Month.” Representative Andy Ogles decided subtlety was overrated and celebrated by posting that homosexuality has no place in America.

Every year it is the same ritual.

Pride Month begins.

LGBTQ people celebrate surviving another year.

And conservatives respond as though someone has broken into their home and stolen heterosexuality.

As a lesbian historian, I have to admit that I find this fascinating.

Not because I object to fidelity. Fidelity is great. I am broadly in favor of not cheating on your spouse. I am also broadly in favor of returning shopping carts, using turn signals, and not microwaving fish in office break rooms. These are all admirable goals that make you a baseline not horrifying human being.

What I object to is being lectured about fidelity by people whose political movement has spent the last fifty years producing enough infidelity scandals to fill an entire wing of the Library of Congress.

That is the part I cannot get over.

For decades conservatives have insisted that they are the guardians of marriage. They built an entire political identity around the claim. Feminists were threatening marriage. Working women were threatening marriage. Birth control was threatening marriage. Gay people were threatening marriage. Gay marriage was definitely threatening marriage. Drag queens were threatening marriage. Somewhere along the line, I suspect a Labrador retriever and an improperly folded fitted sheet were probably accused of threatening marriage too.

The point was always the same: conservatives stood between civilization and collapse.

The rest of us were the barbarians at the gate.

Which would perhaps be more convincing if so many of the self-appointed guardians of marriage did not keep getting caught with their pants down, setting fire to their own marriages.

Take Newt Gingrich, one of the architects of modern conservative politics. Gingrich spent years positioning himself as a champion of family values and moral responsibility. During the Clinton impeachment proceedings, he helped lead the moral outrage over Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. The problem was that Gingrich himself was engaged in an affair during roughly the same period.

Now, to be fair, hypocrisy is not a crime.

If it were, Washington would look like the aftermath of a particularly aggressive police raid.

But there is something uniquely impressive about standing on a soapbox to condemn infidelity while simultaneously participating in it. It takes a level of confidence normally associated with people who attempt to pet wild bears or claim they could win in a tennis match with Serena Williams.

Then there is Mark Sanford, who somehow managed to turn an affair into one of the greatest accidental comedy routines in American political history. When the South Carolina governor disappeared for several days in 2009, his staff explained that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. It was a wonderfully wholesome explanation. Rugged. Outdoorsy. Virtuous.

Unfortunately, Sanford was not hiking the Appalachian Trail.

He was in Argentina visiting his mistress.

Most political scandals fade into obscurity. Mark Sanford’s became folklore. To this day, “hiking the Appalachian Trail” remains one of the funniest euphemisms in American politics because it perfectly captures the sheer audacity of the lie.

And these are not isolated examples. They are part of a much larger pattern. Again and again, some of the loudest voices warning Americans about moral decline have demonstrated a remarkable inability to follow the standards they insist everyone else should live by.

If Mark Sanford’s contribution to political history was turning an affair into a geography lesson, former Senator John Ensign demonstrated that family-values hypocrisy could be every bit as spectacular without requiring an international flight. Ensign built much of his public identity around conservative Christian values and traditional marriage. Then it emerged that he had been carrying on an affair with the wife of a close friend and campaign aide. The scandal spiraled into ethics investigations and accusations of attempts to conceal the relationship, ultimately helping to bring an end to his Senate career.

And look, politicians cheat. Politicians have always cheated. If infidelity disqualified someone from holding office, Congress would occasionally resemble a ghost town. The issue isn’t that John Ensign had an affair. The issue is that John Ensign belonged to a political movement that spent decades insisting that its authority rested on protecting the sanctity of marriage. When you appoint yourself the nation’s marriage counselor, people are naturally going to notice if your own relationship advice appears to consist primarily of “do as I say, not as I do.”

Then there is Larry Craig, who spent years supporting conservative social policies and opposing LGBTQ rights before becoming nationally famous for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with his legislative accomplishments. Craig’s arrest in an airport bathroom became one of the defining political scandals of the 2000s, not because it involved a policy dispute or corruption investigation, but because it once again exposed the strange tendency for some anti-LGBT politicians to find themselves at the center of exactly the kinds of stories they had spent years condemning.

And honestly, by this point we’re not even talking about individual politicians anymore.

We’re talking about an entire ecosystem.

The televangelists deserve their own chapter.

Jimmy Swaggart built an empire warning Americans about sin, immorality, and the decline of traditional values before finding himself embroiled in prostitution scandals. Ted Haggard rose to become one of the most influential evangelical leaders in the country and a prominent opponent of LGBTQ rights before a scandal involving a male escort brought his career crashing down.

These were not obscure figures operating on the fringe of conservative politics. They were some of the most visible and influential voices in the family-values movement. They made careers out of telling Americans who should marry, how they should behave, what counted as morality, and which relationships were acceptable.

At a certain point, this stops looking like a collection of isolated incidents and starts looking like a recurring franchise.

The names change. The details change. The press conferences change. The apologies change. But the basic structure remains remarkably consistent. Someone spends years warning America that moral decay is coming from feminists, gay people, secularists, reproductive rights advocates, or whatever group conservatives happen to be panicking about that week. Then, sooner or later, that same person ends up standing behind a podium explaining why the standards they demanded for everyone else should not be applied quite so strictly to them.

That is what makes Fidelity Month so unintentionally funny.

What makes this pattern so revealing is that it never seems to change the underlying conservative story about marriage.

When a family-values politician gets caught having an affair, nobody concludes that heterosexual marriage has failed as an institution. Nobody suggests that straight people should lose the right to marry. Nobody writes think pieces wondering whether opposite-sex attraction is compatible with stable family life. Nobody spends the next thirty years insisting that heterosexuality itself is a threat to civilization.

Instead, we are reminded that individuals are complicated. People make mistakes. One person’s bad behavior should not be used to condemn an entire group.

And that would be a perfectly reasonable position if conservatives applied it consistently.

The problem is that they don’t.

For decades, LGBTQ people have been expected to answer not only for our own relationships but for the perceived consequences of our existence. Gay marriage was supposedly going to destroy marriage. LGBTQ visibility was going to undermine families. Pride itself was presented as evidence of social decay. While conservative politicians, pastors, and pundits were treated as individuals responsible only for their own choices, queer people were treated as representatives of an entire category of humanity.

That double standard is the entire game.

The irony becomes even sharper when conservatives complain that Pride Month gives LGBTQ people some kind of special recognition. Pride did not emerge because queer people wanted a parade. It emerged because queer people were denied things that everyone else received automatically. People lost jobs, homes, custody of their children, military careers, legal protections, and relationships because of who they loved. Pride exists because exclusion created the need for visibility.

Straight people never needed a Pride Month because straight people already had the culture.

They had the television shows.

They had the movies.

They had the churches.

They had the schools.

They had the politicians.

They had the advertisements.

They had the tax code.

The nuclear family was not some forgotten institution struggling for recognition. It was the centerpiece of twentieth-century American life. For generations, American culture celebrated heterosexual marriage so relentlessly that it became less of a family structure and more of a national mythology.

Which is why these annual attempts to invent alternatives to Pride Month always feel so strange. They are presented as celebrations of marriage, fidelity, and family, but they arrive wrapped in resentment that LGBTQ people are being acknowledged at all. The message is never really “let’s celebrate strong families.” The message is “why are we talking about gay people?”

And after decades of warnings that LGBTQ people would destroy marriage, the historical record is difficult to ignore. Marriage equality arrived. Society survived. The institution of marriage survived. The republic survived. The lesbians bought houses. The gay men got married. The bisexuals continued explaining bisexuality to confused strangers.

The only thing that consistently struggled under the weight of all those dire predictions was the credibility of the people making them.