Pandering to the Right. Here's another sign of how backward we remain on the subject of legal marriage for gays and lesbians. Just as Canada embarks on a path that's expected to lead to legal same-sex matrimony, Congress members who represent the GOP's anti-gay wing, led this time by Louisiana's David Vitter, are again trying to block funding for Washington, D.C.'s domestic partners law (Congress has the final say so over the district's appropriations). This attempt to mobilize the religious right before November's elections isn't expected to prevail, and openly gay Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz), who previously succeeded in getting the appropriations committee to remove language against the D.C. partners law, is again working to ensure that this latest bit of anti-gay pandering comes to naught.
The sooner this mischief bites the dust, the better for the GOP
all round. For what does it profit a party to appeal to the
religious right and lose the moderate suburbanites who would like
to vote Republican, but fear joining a party that
countenances bigotry?
Paglia Takes Aim. Author Camille Paglia is a free-thinking socially libertarian lesbian and longtime critic of the lesbigay left's rigid orthodoxy (which she terms "gay Stalinism"). In a new FrontPage Magazine piece titled The Gay Inquisition, she responds to attacks against her and other non-leftists by the Village Voice's Richard Goldstein.
Paglia, who sometimes falls into the same kind of overly
personalized sneering that her leftwing nemeses specialize in,
nevertheless hits the nail on the head when she writes:
"There have been seismic shifts in feminism and gay politics over the past decade. My wing of pro-sex feminism has triumphed, and gay life in general has become more integrated with mainstream America. The fire has gone out of activism, since we are in a period of negotiation rather than confrontationalism in social-policy issues. Communication lines between gay and straight have opened dramatically, except in the most retrograde patches of religious fundamentalism. Hence the small cells still stoking their fury in feminism and gay activism are mostly fanatics--those who are still nursing childhood wounds and who cling to "the movement" as a consoling foster family. They are harmless, except when impressionable young people fall under their spell: their parochial jargon and unresolved resentments stunt the mind."
If only we could put all the leftwing "queer theorists" and all the rightwing family values moralists in a room together and let them luxuriate in their mutual fanaticism while the rest of us get on with our lives.