IGF CultureWatch

Every time I think I have reached the limit of my disappointment in John McCain, he manages to push the envelope.  With this morning’s appearance on Meet the Press, he has achieved a level of disingenuousness I didn’t think was humanly possible.

David Gregory naturally asked McCain about DADT repeal.  McCain first takes a side swipe at the fact that the results of the military survey were prematurely leaked, as if that somehow affected what they show.  Perhaps what was leaked is not, in fact, accurate.  If that’s true, a lot of folks will be red-faced, and should be.  But if the results are as advertised, the fact that they came out early, and without authorization, doesn’t change the answers. The primary danger of leaking the results is to make it a bit harder for politicians, and the politically inclined military brass to spin the answers.  That’s not a dangerous matter of military strategy, it’s an unfortunate problem of political inconvenience.

But McCain’s main missing of the point is that the leaked study is flawed because it examines how to implement repeal of DADT, not what its effects on military readiness and morale would be.  Now certainly the President was clear that he was interested in a study that would help implement repeal, rather than decide whether to repeal or not.  But the survey asks every question – and then some – that anyone in authority would want to have answered if they needed a baseline assessment for dealing with the presence of openly homosexual troops in a military that, like the country at large, is overwhelmingly heterosexual.  The answers reveal how many are ready to know which of their comrades are homosexual (instead of going to all the trouble of guessing), and who is going to drag their feet, be a problem, or need special attention.  A bigger number of gay opponents would suggest a bigger problem.  And I can’t imagine a survey that would be better designed to serve that purpose; in fact, I believe it seemed almost designed to elicit anti-gay responses.

So the obvious came as a surprise to me, that our predominately young military is not unlike the general population in its positive-to-neutral sentiments about homosexuality.  McCain, along with some other top military leaders, seems to be hoping that there would be more anti-gay feeling among the troops, and is disappointed.  The 70% of the military who either support lesbians and gay men or find nothing worrisome, is almost exactly the same level of support that DADT repeal shows in surveys of the rest of the country.

Which shifts the focus to the 30% in both the general and military populations who continue to oppose homosexuality and homosexuals.  Since they are not a majority – not even close — the question is whether (and how) to deal with them.  Up until now, as a large majority, they’ve had their way with a policy that makes homosexuals, not them, the problem.  Now that’s turning around, and I’m sure it’s hard for them.  Fortunately, they have friends in high places.

McCain is providing his small band of resisters with aid and comfort.  Those of us who used to believe he was a moderate, rational Republican have seen him becoming nearly maddened by DADT repeal, to the point of declaring that he would stand alone to filibuster against it.  Watch his cold, cheerless laugh on Meet the Press.

Closer to home, the horrifying evidence of fairness among the troops has caused him to pull in the reins on his wife, who doesn’t strike many people as a woman who would take naturally to that.  Cindy McCain’s participation in the NOH8 campaign has been a small political miracle of open tolerance in a world of political spouses who find it more amenable to toe the party line — at least until it’s safe, as with Laura Bush, whose gentle common sense on gay rights was never allowed to surface during her husband’s presidency.

John McCain cannot make his thirty percent into fifty, but the magic of politics is that they might be just enough to continue to hold back an inevitable change a bit longer. That is why his wife’s silence is valuable.  She has been helping gain supporters for equality, while her husband is dedicating himself to not losing more of his misguided followers.  He’s only got one more victory in front of him, while all of hers are in the future.

Jason Cianciotto at Box Turtle Bulletin diagnoses the problem of bullying, finding support from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s language in the Colorado Amendment 2 case.  Anti-discrimination laws that don’t specifically enumerate sexual orientation do, in fact, send the message that government approves — or at least doesn’t disapprove — of those who think heterosexuals are superior to lesbians and gay men.  The government’s neutrality about anti-gay discrimination is clearly a contrast to its explicit position on race and gender discrimination.  Cianciotto urges government to be more explicit in prohibiting anti-gay discrimination, particularly in schools.

But this diagnosis misses the disease.  After the upheaval of the civil rights movement — and by that, I  include feminism — our laws are now overwhelmingly consistent in being race and gender neutral.  Law is the government speaking at its loudest, and it is clear to anyone who listens that our laws may not discriminate in those areas.

In prominent contrast, our laws are entirely schizophrenic when it comes to sexual orientation.  Two areas of law — marriage and the military — expressly demand discrimination against open lesbians and gay men.  Unlike the silence of many anti-discrimination laws, this is active inequality.

Does anyone think bullies don’t notice this?  Whatever else they may or may not know about the law, they certainly know that lesbians and gay men are fighting hard and loudly for marriage equality, and are having a hell of a time getting laws changed.  Even in states like California where the law is quite clear that some measure of equality is required for same-sex couples, marriage is still out of reach.  Our laws prohibiting other kinds of anti-gay discrimination — including bullying — send a message that is directly contradicted by other laws.

That’s how Carl Paladino of New York, and Barack Obama of the White House can both say, apparently without irony or shame, that they are 100% for gay equality, except for marriage.  I can’t speak for others, but the equality that matters most to me is equality under the law.  That’s the guarantee that’s promised so publicly above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Laws that prohibit heterosexuals from discriminating against lesbians and gay men don’t mean anything until laws that, themselves, discriminate against lesbians and gay men are removed from our books.  Until that happens, heterosexuals and homosexuals alike will get the same, consistent message from government — that it’s all right to be a little suspicious of the faggots and the dykes.

What anyone does with that, of course, is not the government’s fault.  How could it be?

Timothy Kincaid provides a good rundown of the latest numbers from the Pew Research Center on support for gay marriage.  42% support, 48% oppose.

As always, the story isn’t in the numbers, themselves, but the trend.  The chart he provides shows support flipping around, but generally moving upward, even at the lower levels of support among Republicans. Nate Silver’s now-infamous graph of the polling on this question since 1988 illustrates the bigger picture.  As Kincaid points out, Pew shows that, for the first time in their polling, opposition to same-sex marriage falls below a majority.

As we know from DADT, even a huge popular majority won’t necessarily result in political victories on an issue where the discussion is still so poisoned by fear and misunderstanding.  That is how prejudice short-circuits politics.

But what I can’t help noticing in the Pew numbers, and what Kincaid is so smart to  have pointed out, is that even among the groups whose fear and loathing of us taps directly into the mother lode of prejudice, there are green shoots of actual, bona fide support.  And not just for a compromise measure like civil unions, but full-on marriage equality.  It’s easy to vilify white evangelicals or “Southerners” or the elderly as bigoted and stubborn.  But within all of those groups, we still have some very real, if invisible, support.  And that support is up.

The growth of small numbers is easy to ignore.  But it’s in those groups where we most need the support to grow.  Those are seeds, people.  Let’s cultivate them.

Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project is as fine a public service as anyone has put together for gay and lesbian youth — and no government needed.

But am I the only non-youth who spends time watching the videos when I need to cheer up?  I spend more hours than a reasonable adult should reading the misinformation, innuendos, distractions, forgeries, slanders, deceptions and flat out lies that are cast into the universe of discourse about us, and I’ve found a quick visit to the YouTube channel is an excellent tonic.

Thanks, not only to Savage, but to everyone who’s contributing these wonderful little truths.

Jonathan Rauch has written two very insightful articles for the National Journal about the Tea Party; one focusing on its leaderless anti-organization, and one examining its effects on national politics and particularly the Republican Party.

In looking for precedents to the leaderless group, Jon misses what I think is one of the most relevant, and obvious examples: ACT-UP.  Formed formlessly well before the internet, ACT-UP wasn’t an organization, it was an impulse, a reaction against a deadly status quo that wasn’t being reacted to by anyone else.  Like the Tea Parties, its fury came from what everyone else was just taking for granted.  Its variant affiliates across the country all had the same animating spirit, but acted up in their own unique ways.  No one led ACT-UP.

Also like the Tea Parties, ACT-UP had more than its share of members addicted to a theatrical style that crossed over into parody and sometimes developed into actions that were fully offensive.  The 1989 invasion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during mass still stands as one of its signature delinquencies.

But in the end, ACT-UP was successful beyond anyone’s imagination in actually changing federal bureaucracies for the better, and that will remain its legacy – one the Tea Party should take very seriously.  Major protests at both the FDA and the NIH, along with sustained follow-up work, led to changes in focus on HIV, and long-term advances in compassionate use of experimental drugs, as well as other institutional innovations that made the bureaucracies more humane and actually helpful.  Government changed because of ACT-UP.

The Tea Parties have a more developed infrastructure, but they also have a bigger and more diffuse target – fiscal sanity in a political environment that can’t envision ever spending less.  That’s an ambitious undertaking

But the Tea Parties have one other big difference from ACT-UP: a hungry pack of national politicians eager to speak for them.  That would be an advantage for any traditional organization, but as Jon notes, the internal contradictions of the Republican party, first synthesized by the sheer magic of Ronald Reagan, and held together ever since by duct tape and Krazy Glue are splitting back into their component and inconsistent parts: the religious right and the small government faction.

You can see the problem as the American Family Association’s increasingly deranged Bryan Fischer tries to co-opt the Tea Party Express’s Amy Kremer.  She is as candid as one can imagine when she tells him that she has to disappoint him.  If the Tea Party were to include the religious right’s social issues, “this movement is going to fall apart.”

That’s sticking to your guns, but it’s no small fact that she was, at the time, attending the Values Voters Summit.  Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally at the Lincoln Memorial was a religious revival under a Tea Party tent.  Despite Kremer’s protestations, she, no less than any current Republican leader, will have to deal with what Karl Rove hath wrought.

I wish the Tea Party well, if they’re really serious about smaller government.  I hope they can do better in dealing with the problems of politicized religion than the GOP has.  But it’s a heavy lift.

Keep your eyes on the prize, Tea Partiers.  Silence = Debt.

This video is making the rounds, and deservedly so.  It’s a pretty amusing parody of the “No homo” tick hip-hop invented to defend itself against The Gay.

But it’s got more going for it than that.  What makes it both funny and pointed is that it shows how closeted gay men are as irritating to heterosexuals as they are to homosexuals.  We all have a direct interest in making sure that people don’t delude themselves about their own sexual orientation.  Straight is cool, gay is cool, bi is cool (if confusing); but for God’s sake, man, figure yourself out.

And the video is especially timely because its humor comes from the same tortured logic that gave us Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  The delusion of mostly older heterosexuals, and mostly men, is that if only gay men could “keep quiet about it” everything would be OK.

“No homo” is risible in the hip-hop world because it is such a lame attempt to acknowledge that some relationships and interests of heterosexual men are non-sexual but can look a little iffy.  That “if” only matters when there is a stigma about being gay, a stigma that has historically been able to drive homosexuality into the netherworld of the closet.  As that stigma recedes (and it is), the feints and jabs at its fading shadow look more pathetic – and sillier.

DADT is not just some military policy based on that stigma, it is a piece of social engineering designed to hold up the eroding barricades of prejudice in that small part of the world where prejudice can actually be enforced every day.  But in the end it is just another limp cry of “no homo,” this time in a uniform.

We can laugh about that in the civilian world.  But in the military, DADT has real consequences, both for national security and for the lives of the men and women whom the law requires to lie, every day, every hour, every minute.  This not only undermines their lives, it makes the military look as duped and misfocused as the laughable character in this video.

There may still be vestiges of the stigma against homosexuals left among a number of younger military personnel.  We’ll see when the results of the military’s survey come out (and hopefully we’ll be able to discount for the biased structure of the questions; the survey looks like it was intended to goad the most anti-gay answers out of the respondents).  But at its worst, that survey would only show us that a lot of military folks believe some things most of the rest of us just find pretty funny.

Unlike “No homo,” DADT is a dead serious matter.  They are similar only in this: No one benefits, and problems arise when we urge or demand that people deny the truth about themselves.

The Usual Suspects have made the Usual Statements about the new court opinion concluding that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is unconstitutional.  The gays, including the Log Cabin Republicans (who brought the suit) think it’s great, and the Christianists think it’s a horrible act of judicial overreach.  The political universe remains in balance.

To that, I’ll add my own entirely predictable comment.  Whether you agree with the opinion or not, yet another judge has spent a lot of time listening to the evidence of one side, and doing her best to balance that against virtually no evidence on the other.  As in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the side supporting a law that openly discriminates against lesbians and gay men relies on a majority vote and pretty much nothing else to justify exclusion of an extremely small minority.

In the 85 page DADT opinion, there are 54 pages devoted to laying out the evidence that DADT is unconstitutional.  Weighing against that is a vote of Congress, ratified by a president’s signature.  No judge would or should take that lightly, but neither is a judge obligated to ignore what the law actually does.  And once again, a court has found that the hard evidence of unconstitutionality is more compelling than the vaporous political pretexts rationalizing a majority’s prejudices.

Did the court blithely dismiss concerns of national security?  Well, the administration defending the policy doesn’t think that’s at issue, and the court quotes the Commander in Chief to that effect.  So it’s unfair and incorrect for anyone to criticize the court for ignoring such concerns.

But in the end, everything returns to politics.  And congressional repeal of DADT is exactly what lesbians and gay men, and their allies, are vigorously pursuing.  But the problem of politics, the fundamental lack of rationality that drove passage of this miserable law in the first place, still plagues the Senate.  Harry Reid is not unaware of the evidence the court considered here, and found convincing.  He knows that 80% of Americans now say they support repeal of DADT.  I would not be surprised to learn that 80% of Senators think repeal is probably the right thing to do.

But the fear, the sheer panic that some people still feel about homosexuals, remains the decisive factor in any politician’s calculation.  It takes more than courage to get past that very irrational and very real fact; it takes independence.  Court after court after court is now exercising its constitutional independence, and after laying out all of the real evidence, the genuine facts, they are more consistently finding that our politics still is not ready to face up to its obligation to ensure the equality of homosexual citizens, which means the courts have to correct the deficiency.

The Senate now has to confront a double challenge to its political fears.  It has a public vote of confidence larger than any I’ve seen on any other issue in modern times, and it has a court decision saying that fairness is constitutionally required.  Is the Senate really willing to let the incoherent distress of about 20% of our population continue to form the basis of an unconstitutional, unpopular and unwise policy of naked discrimination?