IGF CultureWatch

I've obviously been in a foul mood since Maine, and needed some good cheer. So Karen Ocamb's interview with Charlie Beck, the new chief of the L.A. Police Department couldn't have come along at a better moment.

As Stuart Timmons has documented, L.A. has a long history of pretty brutal police harassment against lesbians and gay men. That has been fading into the dustbin of history, and Beck embodies the view that is slowly but inevitably deflating our opponents.

Ocamb asks him, right off, whether he thinks sexual orientation is chosen or innate. His response is profound only because it's so matter-of-fact: "Sexual orientation is formed long before you have the ability to make a choice. I'm heterosexual and I never made that choice." He comfortably discusses an uncle who'd been with his partner for fifty years ("Imagine what they went through"), and chuckles about whether he should tell her how he voted on Prop. 8, ultimately saying, "I support gay marriage."

Compare those last four words with the hundreds it took poor Melody Barnes to almost confess the same sentiment in Boston. That is Maggie Gallagher's greatest challenge -- an emerging epidemic of common sense. Frank Schubert has been clear how hard he needs to work to create fear in his campaigns against us, and his partner, Jeff Flint, was brutally honest in confessing that even they're surprised at how easy it is for them to win, even when we outperform them, as we did in Maine.

But that's only because they can exploit existing prejudice, and eagerly do. We're the ones who have to fight uphill. Prejudice is what confounds common sense. Once heterosexuals can get past that - can see our sexual orientation as forming in the same way as theirs does ("I'm heterosexual and I never made that choice") the distortions that bias creates melt away.

Charlie Beck seems to have that common sense. Bit by bit, it's breaking out all over the country.

This is the last straw for me. I took Americablog's pledge.

Melody Barnes seems to be a shining example of the kind of person I expected Barack Obama to surround himself with when I voted for him for President. She is Obama's Senior Domestic Policy Advisor, and Director of his Domestic Policy Council. A tape of a speech she gave at the Boston College of Law included a response to a question about same-sex marriage. When the White House got the tape, they went through the Agonies of the Damned over two full days determining whether they'd let Boston College make it public or not. Eventually the White House saw that it would be futile to try and censor it.

Like the President she works for, and so many others in the administration, Barnes is articulate, humane, self-possessed, good-humored and exceptionally intelligent. But look at the damage done to all that because of the administration's decision to side with the Catholic Church and the National Organization for Marriage. I was going to say the administration is incoherent on same-sex marriage, but it is not - the Obama administration opposes our equality.

That prevents the most senior advisors like Barnes from issuing a simple declarative sentence - "I support same-sex marriage" - even when it is clear that is her position. Instead, when asked a direct question, she has to speak in the wild circumlocutions and detours that are now becoming characteristic of this administration on this topic:

"I guess I would respond in a couple of different ways. One, I appreciate, I really appreciate your frustration and your disappointment with the president's position on this issue. He has taken a position, and at the same time, he has also articulated the number of ways that he wants to try and move the ball forward for gay, lesbian and transgendered Americans, including signing the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, and a whole host of other things that we've started to do to model as a leader in terms of what the federal government is doing, as well as to encourage changes both in the military, in the workplace, and certainly with regard to hate crimes."

For the record, the President's position in same-sex marriage is this: "I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

While that is a position, it is not an argument. Rather, it is indistinguishable from the positions (not arguments) adopted by the Vatican and NOM - which is to say, it is unchallengeable in any civic forum. And it is intended to be unchallengeable in any civic forum. References to tradition and particularly sanctification have little purpose other than to short circuit any opposition - certainly any secular opposition, which is what the President was being asked about.

So when Barnes says . . .

"when I walk into the White House . . . I work to put all arguments in front of the president, [but] as you say, I also work for the president. And we have very robust policy conversations, very robust constitutional conversations with the White House counsel, and others about these issues, and we'll see what happens from there"

. . . it's hard to believe she's talking about same-sex marriage. What policy or "robust constitutional" conversation can you have with a man who tells all of the American people in response to a secular question that his religious beliefs say that marriage is "something sanctified between a man and a woman"?

The tragedy of this - for both the President and for us - is that he knows better, and we all know that he knows better. He is presiding over the historical turning point, not for gay rights in general, but for marriage in particular, and he is stuck in reverse. The President's opposition is giving support to the very people who hate him as much as they resist us.

It says everything that the most articulate president in my lifetime - on the most controversial issues like race, the Middle East, war, and all the rest - is reduced to verbal sputters and clichés on gay marriage. That's all there is on the other side - on his side; if there were anything reasonable to argue, he'd have done so.

This has to be hard on his own conscience; he has to know that his opposition to equality will stain his legacy. But it is our lives - and the hopes we had - that he is playing with here. And it is decent people like Melody Barnes whose best is being corrupted and tortured to serve the Administration's retrograde cynicism.

Sadly, the President's party has to follow his lead. That's why I had to take the pledge, and I urge others to do so. The President is encouraging a rot in his own party, the same rot of prejudice that is invigorating the worst of the Republicans, and terrifying their best.

That is not what I voted for, and I cannot possibly support it.

Twenty years ago, New York's highest court ruled, in Braschi v. Stahl Associates that a same-sex couple could be treated as a "family" under New York's rent control law. This was a landmark decision because at the time same-sex couples had virtually no legal recognition of any kind in New York - or any other state's - law.

I know about this because I helped Tom Coleman do legal research for a brief in Braschi that helped situate gay couples in the broad term "family" as we had just done the prior year in passing the first domestic partnership ordinance in Los Angeles. After the 1989 decision, we had every reason to believe New York would beat California in enacting statewide domestic partnership, and ultimately to marriage.

Two decades later, New York state not only does not offer domestic partnership to its homosexual citizens, it seems to have rejected any compromise other than full marriage rights, and doesn't seem interested in any political middle ground.

I hope they know what they're doing. Perhaps all the news reports are wrong, and they really do have the votes this time for full marriage equality. That would be terrific. Or perhaps they don't want to dilute the issue, keeping the arguments clearly focused on what really matters in the long-term.

But if they can't get marriage, how much longer will they leave New York state's same-sex couples with legal protections not that much different from their counterparts in Mississippi? Even New York City's same-sex couples can only claim domestic partnership rights that that include vendors licenses and visitation in NYC's prisons. One of the most vibrant gay communities in the entire world seems content, in 2009, with fewer legal rights than couples in Hawaii. Or Vermont. Or Maine.

If they pull this off, it'll be a tremendous, and long-overdue victory. But if they don't, they're making it look like the legacy of Stonewall is to do nothing but stonewall.

This story about the last-minute Democratic National Committee emails to Maine voters begging them to help out Jon Corzine in New Jersey(!), and failing to mention the referendum in their own state is, I'm afraid, a cautionary tale about the naivete (or just wishful thinking) of minority groups who depend on a single party.

Of course the DNC is going to want to help their party members, and Jon Corzine was Exhibit A of those in need; he couldn't have been more pathetic if he'd been holding a sign saying "Will Govern For Food."

In contrast, Question 1 - and, in, fact, our fundamental legal equality - was and is not a Democratic Party issue, no matter how much we try to will that into being. No matter the odds, no matter the long-term harm (and this election did us some very serious long-term harm), gay marriage in particular is electoral Kryptonite. When our marital rights are on the ballot we can count on Democrats for a laurel and hearty handshake, and a nervously articulated prior commitment elsewhere.

Why we believe otherwise is a mystery. The Democratic Party, and the President, himself, made it very clear that when it comes to elections about our rights, we're on our own. Which is not to say Democrats are our enemy, or anywhere near as harmful to our equality as the near-death wing of what was once the Republican Party. We may very well be able to squeeze some bills out of Congress, like ENDA, and that's not anything we could expect from the other party.

But on gay marriage, both parties are in perfect alignment -- with each other, and with the religious right -- wishing (and praying) it would go away.

Here's a video I'm afraid we'll be seeing more of - a young man from Massachusetts fired from his job for objecting to a coworker's announcement that she was going to marry her same-sex partner.

The key legal issue (like that matters) is whether he is correct that she was harassing him throughout the day, or whether he is offering a self-serving version of events. Either could be true. I'm skeptical that his employer would have fired him for a single incident like this on a single day, but those are questions to be investigated (not like anyone will care). He could be right that the coworker was taunting him.

But two things about the video jumped out at me. First, and overwhelmingly, I was struck by how immediately his joy at a coworker's happiness turned into sour judgementalism. Are his religious beliefs really so harsh that they have this effect on his normal human emotions, ecstatic for his co-worker one moment, and disgusted the next? Is it the role of religion to transform the joy we feel for other people into an emotional menace?

Second, his repeated argument in the first two-thirds of the tape warning people in other states about how they, too, could suffer this kind of joy-deficit if their state passes same-sex marriage completely dissolves before our eyes when he intently criticizes the employee training tape about expressing opposition to someone of the same-sex making a pass at you. If that's actually what the tape says (and this seriously undercuts his credibility, in my eyes - I honestly can't imagine this not falling under the rubric of sexual harassment, at least if it were repeated) then his concern about gay marriage laws is the smallest part of his concern. As with so many other arguments purporting to be about same-sex marriage, the real concern he has is with open homosexuals in the workplace he shares with them. And if he thinks stopping gay marriage will halt that, too, he has another think coming.

Again, I doubt any of this will actually matter as the tape make the rounds of the right wing sites. But I couldn't help noticing.

A lot of people are pondering the state of gay marriage in the wake of our loss in Maine. But I think Tuesday's election results should get us all thinking about a more important, and much deeper storyline: the state of anti-gay prejudice. The full results of the off-off-year election show that after literally centuries of predominance, anti-gay prejudice is seeing its final days.

The loss in Maine actually makes that point. While the conventional wisdom characterizes it as a "stinging setback for the national gay rights movement" - and that's from our friends at the NY Times -- that's correct only if you think gay rights equals marriage. Marriage is the only issue we lose any more, so of course it presents a tantalizing story for the mainstream press, who get to sympathize with us while just doing their job reporting the news of our incomprehensible political impotence.

But on Tuesday in barely noticed elections elsewhere in the country, we won voter approval of (1) domestic partnerships in Washington; (2) an anti-discrimination ordinance in Kalamazoo; (3) an openly gay city council president in Detroit; and (4) an openly lesbian mayoral candidate in Houston. That seems to say something about the state of anti-gay prejudice in this country.

The Kalamazoo election was particularly telling and anachronistic; it's something we just don't see much of any more, an attempt to take away simple non-discrimination protection. And nearly 62% of voters chose to keep it in place. That's some evidence of how deeply into the mainstream of this country's politics gay acceptance has moved. Somehow, I'm not thinking Kalamazoo's gay community is feeling a stinging setback.

Marriage is not just an outlier, it is the only outlier. The fringe of the right will complain about any legal protections for lesbians and gay men, but they can't put together a majority on any issue except for full marital equality. An enormous majority of Americans even support repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, though political cowardice on that issue still lingers in Congress -- the same cowardice that got us the policy in the first place.

This chart shows that more than a majority in virtually every state, including the ones with the most anti-gay sentiment, supports employment and housing protection, hate crimes laws and health benefits for homosexuals. The trailing issue in all states is always marriage, with majority-plus support in only six states.

In short, these are hard times for homophobes. That's why gay marriage is such a satisfying issue for the ones who are left. It is the only issue where they can rouse up enough residual bias against gays among otherwise fair-minded people to win an election.

And the importance of that last word cannot be overemphasized. It is direct elections where anti-gay prejudice about marriage can best be exploited. This may be the most toxic consequence of Maine. It is a warning shot to legislatures to avoid exercising their best judgment about fairness for gay citizens. The anti-gay bias that short-circuits rational debate in the electorate at large will make legislative action futile, so don't even bother to try.

As I argued before, I would like nothing better than to have a full discussion among the electorate on the merits (or flaws) of the public policy issue of gay marriage, but neither Maine nor California took advantage of that opportunity; at the least, it was offered by one side, but was of little interest in the other side's strategy. The anti-marriage campaigns were about anything but gay marriage.

If there's any doubt about that, compare the arguments in these campaigns to the arguments the right makes in court when trying to defend exclusionary marriage laws. No responsible lawyer could argue to a court (without worrying about sanctions) that gay marriage will force schools to teach children about homosexuality in the second grade, nor can a lawyer try to scare a court with images of kids reading books like King and King. Lawyers have to focus on the issue before them in their briefs and arguments in court, because courts are forced to assess the rationality of the arguments before them, and have to explain themselves in written opinions. There is no room in court for the political slurs that make up anti-gay marriage electoral campaigns. The best the right can do in court is arguing about procreation, deference to the legislative branch (an argument I wouldn't expect them to make in the future -- at least not with a straight face) and the will of the people. Not a word about second graders.

That enormous distance between the arguments made to courts about gay marriage and the obfuscations used in political campaigns says a great deal. I do not ever expect to have the kind of thoughtful discussion in public that courts are required to have. But, the very fact we can't have a public discussion about gay marriage when gay marriage is the issue might suggest, to reasonable people, that there may be something underlying the anti-marriage forces besides a desire to do what's best for the public weal and what's fair for a minority. Contra Rod Dreher and others, 31 wrongs do not make a right.

Maine was an extremely hard loss. But Washington looks to be a solid victory, and Kalamazoo was a blow-out. The gay rights movement is hardly on the ropes in this country, and our opponents should be taking little comfort from their ability to deny us this one right.

I don't usually think of George Will as someone who misses the point. Even when he is wrong about something, he usually understands and can articulate what is at the heart of the debate. That's one of his particular virtues.

So I was more than just disappointed in his column this morning about the election in Washington State. Reading his column makes it seem as if Washington's electorate is voting on a referendum to disclose the names of petition signers. Will offers one offhand sentence to mischaracterize the election ("The referendum is on a new state law that some say establishes same-sex marriage." Yes, "some" say that - the proponents), but virtually every other word in his column is about a completely tangential lawsuit that is pending in the courts.

Will, of course, has no obligation to write about the subject of the actual election two days before election day -- though people could certainly be forgiven for thinking that might be what the column is about. What is most confounding is that the tone of the column is so characteristic of the core tactics of the anti-gay side. Its premise is right out of the 99 and 44 one hundredths percent of Pure Fox News that is not news: The liberals are out to get decent conservatives in this country: "It is time to speak up about thuggish liberalism," he writes in the final paragraph.

Well, maybe it is. Writers on this site can speak from experience about such thuggery. But Washington is having an election, not about thuggery, but about whether to approve a legislative proposal to correct a history of injustice to same-sex couples, an imperfect one that attempts to give them everything but marriage. The opponents cannot tolerate such equality, and lacking real arguments, want to talk about anything but marriage: implicating gays in the recruitment (if not actual molestation) of children; insinuating that religion would somehow be undermined by domestic partnership; and now distracting the voters from the actual subject by focusing them on the privacy rights of petition signers.

Two days before the election, Will has added his considerable voice to theirs in preventing voters from focusing on the issue before them in the referendum. The press keeps presenting these elections as being about gay marriage. But once again, we're seeing how little interest the right has in having that discussion.

Jim Burroway has an excellent post at Box Turtle Bulletin on the contrasting messages in the Maine election: Frank Schubert's ugly, fear-inflected slurs against marriage equality (when he even bothers to address marriage, which isn't very often), vs. our hopeful appeals to the better angels of the electorate.

Jim is worried that this is a recipe for us losing, and he has a point. Schubert has worked hard to create doubts among many moderate heterosexuals about what would happen if same-sex marriage were legalized. These are fraudulent doubts, but they are nontheless effective ones.

Jim's concerns about our response are well-taken, but he doesn't offer a better strategy for us. I think that's because there isn't one.

Here is the gist of his analysis:

". . . people don't see how same-sex marriage will impact them and their families - especially not enough to pay attention to the issue and go out and vote in an off-year election on someone else's problem. . . . So how do you fix it? Change the topic from something nobody personally cares about to something everyone cares about."

In both California and Maine - and in Washington, which keeps getting left out - the other side appeals to education as the primary self-interest that heterosexuals care about. As Jim notes, there simply isn't much reason for the 95-97% of Americans who are heterosexual to care about same-sex marriage, but everyone (even us!) cares about education.

But it's not just "education" that is being appealed to; it is centuries of prejudice about the "Homosexual Menace" when it comes to children. The savvy characters running the anti-marriage campaigns know enough to finesse their leverage of prejudice. But when you start insinuating that legalizing homosexual marriage will lead to second graders learning about gay sex, it's hardly accurate to claim your argument is a high-minded one about education.

That is why fear works for the other side. That gut-level dread and misunderstanding is exactly what we have spent generations trying to erode in people's consciousness. The other side is not interested in conscious thought, they're manipulating unarticulated bias, which they get to take for granted as part of their voters' psyche.

We don't have any similar bias to work with. Or even rational fears. The only thing we have in our toolbox is what is best about people: their sense of justice, understanding and fairness about how majorities can advantage themselves, even without meaning to disadvantage a minority. As I was reading Jim's piece, I kept wondering what kind of campaign we would run if we tried to emulate Frank Schubert's tactics. We just don't have the fundamental material to work with - accumulated prejudice - that he has.

That is, in fact, the dilemma any very tiny minority with a long history of being misunderstood has in a majoritarian culture. Burdened with all those harmful stereotypes, and lacking any constitutional protection against laws that single them out, a minority's only remedy is an appeal to the majority to move beyond the stereotypes, the little formless fears. If there is some way to present that as involving the self-interest of the majority, I would dearly love to know it.

Perhaps I'm being too narrow in my thinking, and I'm certainly open to suggestions. But the only two heterosexual self-interests I can think of are both weak tea. The first is that heterosexuals have an interest in protecting themselves from being deceived by people who are in the closet. Marriage is the arena where the closet becomes the most potentially dangerous for heterosexuals. Don't ask, don't tell works well enough when people are single, but if the gold standard of heterosexuality is entering into a marriage, then heterosexuals have a self-interest in making sure we are not deceiving both ourselves and consequently, them. But try making a 30-second spot out of that.

The other heterosexual self-interest is the purely political one of reasonably-minded people protecting themselves from the aggrandizement of the religious right. As I've argued, I think it is in the President's self-interest to make sure we win both of these elections, because losses will energize some of his most virulent opponents. But he's being advised by a lot of very smart people, and he doesn't seem to see this as worrisome.

And that leaves us where we started. We simply don't have anything bleak or cynical to use in these campaigns. That is certainly a weakness in a political campaign where the other side does have those tools. But we can only work with what we have. We can't run a negative campaign because we don't have anything for people to vote against.

The elections in Maine and Washington are less than a week away; it is now Go Time, or, in the language of politics, GOTV Time. That stands for Get Out The Vote, and it has never, to my mind, been more important for us.

Since we are not yet believed to be entitled to the promises of the federal constitution's Equal Protection clause, we have to do exactly what the framers never intended - fight as a very small minority in the political arena for our equality. This is regrettable, but it is a fact.

Another fact is that our opposition has a very well-established GOTV infrastructure. It's their churches, and it has proved to be amazingly successful for them. While some churches support our equality, we simply have nothing of equivalent size or consequence on our side. We have to rely on thousands and thousands of individually motivated people.

The final fact is that we don't have fear on our side. Scaring voters is a time-tested means of getting them to the polls, and our opponents have followed the script to the letter. All we have is hope and faith in the good will of our supporters and particularly the undecided voters who hold our equality in their hands. While hope was a guiding theme of the last presidential election, Barack Obama's political cynicism has held sway when it comes to us, undercutting this theme, at least when it comes to gay equality. He's going to make us do this on our own.

So let's.

Over the next six days, the campaigns in Washington and Maine need simple things from us. You can call voters from your own phone for an hour or two - they'll have a list of known supporters that just need to be urged to get out to the polls, or send in ballots through the mail. That will be supplemented in both states by boots on the ground, but these calls really do make a difference. More important, the lack of them can be fatal. Just a couple of hours of your time will really help.

And, of course, both campaigns will need money. The end of the campaign is when we need to be most nimble and responsive (Second-graders are now being trotted out again, learning all about gay sex - in the second grade! And that's in an ad that says people want to be supportive of us.). Both campaigns have shown that they are spending our money extremely well and responsibly. I've been proud to give to them both, and I urge you to do the same.

Each campaign is winnable - or losable. Whether we like it or not, we have to fight for our equality, and these elections are critical. After a long string of losses, including the stunning one in California, we need to prove - to ourselves, and to our disbelieving President - that the landscape really is changing. We are the change, or can be.

Here's the site for Washington.

And here's where to go to help in Maine.

This is not good.

No. It's worse than not good. It's miserable. I've tried to be as generous as I can to the Administration in its political struggle with a morally clear question: equality for gay couples. While the criticism was most prominently used about Afghanistan, if you want to know what dithering looks like, try to draw a straight line graph through the White House positions on same-sex couples.

And now, a week before a critical election we might just be able to win, Attorney General Eric Holder goes right into Maine and says -- directly to Maine voters -- that he and the President really don't much care, one way or the other, how the election comes out.

I'll say it again: If the right wins either or both of these elections, it will energize the worst elements of the very faction that is most harmful to the President, himself. Even if he doesn't want to help us explicitly (and it's now clear he does not), is that really the outcome he wants?

Let me offer a draft for the next White House statement about Question 1 in Maine and Referendum 71 in Washington -- or whatever the next gay marriage equality battle turns out to be: "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"

H/T to KC Johnson