Non-Spousal Rights (or, Brotherly Love).
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that, in responding to a
Log Cabin Republican questionnaire, Bill Simon, the GOP's candidate
for California governor, came out in favor of domestic
partnerships, gay adoption, and the executive order protecting
state employees. He's against gay marriage. And even on
partnerships, he"d prefer that they not be defined specifically to
recognize same-sex relationships. Here's how he put it:
"Let's not premise this thing on having the government go in your bedroom," Simon told a caller on the Ronn Owens KGO radio show. "What happens if my brother and I . . . why couldn't we be domestic partners, if we both lost our wives?" Asked by Ownes if he was proposing such laws for incestuous relationships, Simon said definitively he was not -- but for "any people who want to have a special relationship and set it forth in a contract, I'd look at that."
That's weak, or course. At best, domestic partnerships should be a stop gap that provides an avenue for same-sex couples to obtain something approaching spousal rights, while denied full equality to enter into marriages. As IGF contributor Jonathan Rauch and others have noted, opening up DPs to relationships that don't aspire to be spousal is to weaken the concept that spouses deserve special recognition and reinforcement. "Roommate rights," or recognizing a son and his widowed mother, or two siblings, as somehow "spousal," is nothing less than a frontal assault on the idea of spousal uniqueness -- all in order NOT to recognize gay partners as deserving the dignity of spouses.
Having said this, however, I"d argue it is still progress that
Simon, as a candidate of the GOP rightwing, has come as far as he
has. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan supporting gay adoptions, or
any kind of partnership rights?
Better Off Dead? Harvard Law School, threatened with losing the millions of dollars in government funding that Harvard University as a whole receives, has agreed to finally allow the U.S. military to recruit on its campus. Originally banned in the Vietnam era, the military was kept away more recently to show the law school's opposition to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. True, "lie and hide" is unjustified and odious, but at a time when we are fighting against a worldwide terrorist network that wants to murder as many of us as it can, is it too much to expect the eggheads get their priorities, well, straight? Yes, keep up the lobbying against "don't ask." But keeping the military from recruiting the best and the brightest (that is, working to weaken the military) was politically perverse. That Harvard had to be financially blackmailed into letting the military recruit says volumes about the myopia of the liberal-left elite.
Community, Heal Thyself. There's a scathing
attack on gay life, not from the religious right, but from a gay
talk-show host and writer named Charles Karel Bouley II, in
The Advocate:
It's 2002 and gay men are still drugging themselves silly, having unsafe sex, and turning themselves into living Billy dolls. If the religious right has a preconceived notion of who and what gay people are, maybe it's because we have fed it to them.
I can't say I agree with all of his rant. If the gay left revels
in its antipathy to middle-class normality, Bouley goes to the
other extreme and apparently sees no shadow whatsoever in suburban
conformism. But he does score some points, especially about drug
use and unsafe sex 20 years(!) into the age of AIDS. In any event,
it's refreshing to see someone insist that we take responsibility
for how we're perceived, rather than simply blaming the "bigots"
for every negative image of gay folks that still lingers in the
heartland.