AKA William

The Daily News reported a few days ago that prominent New York artist Maureen Mullarkey, 66, best known for her images depicting gay pride marches (you’ll probably recognize at least one of the works above), contributed to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign. That’s right – an artist who has made enormous amounts of money both from the gay people who sat for her and from the gay people who purchased her work, gave $1000 to help ban gay marriage in California. The Daily News questioned her questionable reasoning skills.

. . . outside her home in tony Chappaqua – the same town where Bill and Hillary Clinton live – she refused to discuss her donation last night. When asked how she could have donated money to fight gay marriage after making money from her depictions of gays, she just said, “So?”

“If you write that story, I’ll sue you,” she said.

Well, the hyprocritical former art critic, who once said that gay pride serves to remind us that “Dionysus is alive, powerful and under our own porch,” is speaking out about the hubbub surrounding her unfathomable donation. Mullarkey says today that she supported the measure because:

[M]arriage is the union of husband and wife – a premise so simple, so fundamental that nature and civilization itself both testify to the truth of it . . . Artists are not in the habit of imposing ideological conformity on one another or demanding it from others. Moreover, regard for individual gay persons does not require assent to a politicized assault on bedrock social reality and the common good.

I have never understood the argument that the history of a social construction is reason enough to support and promote its existence. By Mullarkey’s reasoning, slavery should still exist since it was a bedrock of human civilization. Women’s right to vote should not exist because until just recently, historically speaking, women did not have the right to vote.

And it’s funny (and, for her, accidentally ironic) that she separates “nature” from “civilization” when she says, “[M]arriage is the union of husband and wife – a premise so simple, so fundamental that nature and civilization itself both testify to the truth of it.”