A friendly IGF colleague e-mailed to say I"m wrong and GLAAD's right this time about Mike Savage (see my March 5 posting), and that after reading GLAAD's indictment he'd happily boycott anybody who advertised on the show, too.
I responded that even if you don't buy Savage's claim that he's not anti-gay but a libertarian on sexual matters and his assertion that GLAAD distorted his comments (despite how ugly the quotes appear to be), I'd still argue that what GLAAD's doing isn't right. If you consider Savage an outrageous homophobe, then argue against him, expose him, convince the public to turn away from him and bring his ratings down. But threatening his sponsors is a cheap shot, a tactic we all condemned when it was used by the religious right against gay-positive TV shows.
By the way, I failed to convince my colleague but another associate says she came across an ironic quote on a conservative website, about Martin Sheen complaining that anti-war actors are being "blacklisted" while there's a campaign on to get Savage off the air.
A Right to Censor?
Here's a scary take from New Zealand's Dominion Post on where clamping down on the expression of anti-gay views could take us. A parliamentary committee wants censorship laws changed so evangelical Christian videos critical of homosexuality can be banned. A New Zealand Court of Appeals decision had upheld the right the Christian group, Living Word, to distribute the American-made videos, citing the freedom of expression clause in New Zealand's Bill of Rights Act.
A Labour party committee chairwoman called the court's decision
"unacceptable" because it had the effect of allowing "hate speech"
to be expressed. But Stephen Franks, a spokesmen for the
libertarian group Act NZ,
labels the committee's report an attack on free speech. As the
Dominion Post reported:
"A vibrant free society needs robust debate on every issue," Mr Franks said. "Censorship is justified when it is about putting age ratings on films or stopping child pornography but not when it tries to close down debate on issues that people feel strongly about."
The NZ government has no fixed opinion on the committee recommendation, said a spokesmen, who added (according to a paraphrase by the Dominion Post) that he was "conscious of the need to balance censorship with the right of free speech," as if they were both positive social values!
When you snuff out your opponent's rights, those same rights won't be there when you happen to need them.
Gays are Good for the Heartland.
As reported earlier this month
in the Omaha World-Herald, James Clifton of the Gallup Corp.
shared this advice on the use and misuse of polls:
"A good leader will change peoples' minds" and explain their reasons when they disagree with the public, he said, "but you can't do that when you don't know what people are thinking." He cited the state's 2000 ban on gay marriage as a way the state hurt its economic prospects and "made ourselves a joke."
"A leader's responsibility is to educate," said Clifton. "I don't believe that our leadership thought that (banning gay marriage) was a good idea." Large corporations consider issues of employee quality-of-life -- such as whether gay employees will feel comfortable -- when deciding where to expand their operations, he said.
As an aside, I don't agree with much that Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, stands for, but his willingness to vigorously defend same-sex civil unions is certainly praiseworthy. Getting at least some conservatives to join in supporting gay "family values" will have an even greater impact on the debate.
Proud To Be Contrary.
Florence King, a long-time columnist at Bill Buckley's
conservative National Review, wrote in a piece for her
hometown newspaper, the Fredericksburg
(Virginia) Free Lance-Star, that "Being both a lesbian and a
conservative is supposed to be impossible, but even my different
drummer hears a different drummer." For example:
I can't, for the life of me, understand why gay people should want to marry and raise children unless, under their bravado, they are tractable conformists who have succumbed to conservatism's incessant mantra of "family values." -- The same-sex marriage and adoption movement is putting a strain on my lesbianism and providing me with a whole new set of cringes as I witness the ordinariness and grubbiness overtaking today's lesbians as they try to "mainstream" what used to be a good old-fashioned perversion.
It's interesting that King, who has a large conservative
following, strikes a number of chords in this piece reminiscent of
leftwing criticism of gay assimilation into the mainstream. I don't
agree with the anti-assimilationists, but hey, I'd never try to
stop them from expounding their views.
--Stephen H. Miller
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