IGF CultureWatch

The central deception fabricated against us in the SFMM ad, "They Said" is that while we promised we wouldn't push same-sex marriage on schoolchildren, we can't be trusted. Last time we deceived only adults, but this time it will be the children who will "suffer."

The use of children in modern American political campaigns to terrify parents about homosexuals dates back to Anita Bryant's campaign in the 1970s to withdraw gay rights in Dade County, Florida, though it has a more ancient pedigree. It is another example of adapting a malevolent prejudicial notion used to slander a different minority: Jews. It is the gay Blood Libel, though without claiming we actually kill children.

As Jon Rauch explains, the concern is not, in fact, with school curriculum; it is about gay marriage as a reality in the broader world today. But it goes further than that. Children don't know about the law governing marriage. Any same-sex couples, whether married, united in a civil union or simply living together with no legal rights present the same problem - children observe the world and ask questions.

It is unrealistic to believe children can be protected from television, movies, books, magazines, and the gay parents of their soccer teammates. School curriculum is formalized, and thus seems to be where anti-gay parents can exercise control. The use of the verb "push" four times in a 30-second ad inflames the sense that parents who want gays to remain in the closet have lost the upper hand.

What those parents really want is to prohibit any discussion of gay couples, period; and that has nothing to do with marriage or school curriculum and everything to do with gays abandoning the closet and being honest about themselves in the world at large.

The existing curriculum reflects the earlier world they are comfortable with, which is not neutral to sexual orientation. Children are regularly taught that princes can marry princesses, which is no more than a simple reaffirmation of heterosexual love and affection. Homosexuals are simply left out - they do not exist.

If that is all children learn, then they are, in fact, learning a kind of bias in their most formative years. This has never been intentional, since the vast majority of all children are heterosexual, and are learning about themselves. But they are also learning about the broader world, and what it includes. If they are prevented from learning that a prince (so inclined) can marry another prince (who is also so inclined) then they are learning that princes cannot marry other princes.

More to the point, those children who are, or may be gay, are learning something far more perverse about themselves - they are learning that the world does not include them. Again, this is not intentional, but as any adult homosexual can testify, it is as real as anything can be.

Invisibility always works against homosexuals who are, after all, seeking their place in the public world. When the debate is about children, that invisibility gets submerged in a non-sexual environment that, nevertheless, has very strong elements of future, developing sexuality running through it. Whether it's in the curriculum or not, children see heterosexuality everywhere. That is as it should be, since heterosexuals are everywhere. It would be preposterous to pretend that could ever change.

But it is wrong to prohibit - or think that anyone could prohibit - children from knowing that some people, and potentially some of them, will not be heterosexual. In public schools, or in any other forum, such discussions must be age appropriate, though. What teachers discuss in a second grade class is very different from classroom debates in high school.

But school districts are not running amok if some of them make a conscious, public decision to include books like King and King as one book among the thousands children will have access to. That book was turned into a wedge in California, where it was invoked to make it seem schools were "teaching" homosexuality. The book is subject to similar abuse now in Maine.

The fear this ad exploits is no more than that - an inchoate fear. It is an anxiety about homosexuality itself. But like all fears about minorities, it refuses to accept that it is not universal. That is the truth the ads for No on 1 so successfully express. As between these two messages, and these two strategies, I am proud to be associated with the one that depends, for its success, on appealing to what is best in our nature.

The latest ad from Stand For Marriage Maine is a political attack in the classic tradition of Lee Atwater's Willie Horton ad for the first George Bush, and California Governor Pete Wilson's infamous smear showing immigrants flooding across the border with a narrator intoning, "They keep coming."

Both of those predecessors worked. And both of the men they helped elect have lived to see the consequences of their appeals to prejudice eat away at the credibility of their party.

There is no candidate in Maine, though, nor is there technically any party. But there is a group of people whose lives and reputations are being dragged through the mud again, and who are being lied about.

That is the central irony of the ad. It claims to be about deception, but it is the ad, itself, which deceives.

It opens, over agitated music, with the narrator saying, "In the 2005 campaign, they said they weren't pushing for homosexual marriage, but now we know they were." Pat Peard is quoted, from 2005 saying, "It has nothing to do with marriage," followed by a video of Monique Hoeflinger in 2009 saying, "Literally, we launched this campaign back in 2005." The narrator then says, "Now they say they won't push teaching homosexual marriage to children in Maine schools," with a quote from Jesse Connolly, campaign manager for No on 1, "yet they are already pushing gay-friendly books in preschools, and hiring paid gay advisors in public schools. Last time, they deceived us [with a screen-covering graphic of the word "DECEPTION"], now it's our kids who will suffer. Vote Yes on Question 1 to prevent homosexual marriage from being pushed on Maine children."

The rhetorical device in the ad is the oldest in the book: the vague, undifferentiated they. This is the fundamental element of which prejudice is made. All of them have a connection which others are not privy to, and (of course) they have an agenda.

I don't know Pat Peard, or Monique Hoeflinger, or Jesse Connolly. Perhaps they have, in fact, all coordinated their comments. But if so, that circumstance, which is central to understanding the slur in this ad, is never documented. Rather, because all of them are supportive of gay equality (Connolly is not even gay), the ad's dark tones invoking what "they have been telling us imply the connection as necessarily existing.

That paves the way for the central claim of "DECEPTION." Normally, it is individuals who deceive, saying one thing and meaning something else. Proving that takes substantiation, but it is something well within the realm of human behavior. The burden of proof is just about short-circuited when you are claiming a group of people have been involved in deception. Different people in different contexts say a multitude of different things. That is exactly what happened here, as GoodAsYou explains. Once you've taken the first step of assuming they have a unified agenda, then it's ludicrously easy to find documentable statements from different individuals in different contexts that can be woven together to demonstrate - conclusively, to people who want to believe it -- a lie.

That unitary vision of a minority group is practically the definition of prejudice. Members of minority groups have to fight to establish their identity against that sweeping, reductionist thinking. Whatever legitimate differences there are in the struggle of African-Americans and homosexuals for their equality, it is this damaged notion that makes both struggles necessary.

Ads like this invoke - rely on - the subliminal provocation of such convictions.

Frank Schubert, who is running the campaign responsible for this ad, swears he will not engage in gay-bashing, and will, in fact, do everything he can to make sure it doesn't happen. If the premise at the heart of this ad is not actual gay-bashing, it is certainly indistinguishable from a straightforward appeal to people's worst instincts. That has precedent in recent American politics, and a tainted history of success.

it is a stark contrast with the No on 1 campaign, which has avoided these low-road tactics with uniformly positive, decent and honest ads. The people of Maine will have to determine which of these courses in most consistent with their vision of civic life in their state.

"The secular arguments against gay marriage, when they aren't just based on bigotry or custom, tend to be abstract in ways that don't find purchase in American political discourse. I say, 'Institutional support for reproduction,' you say, 'I love my boyfriend and I want to marry him.' Who wins that debate? You win that debate."

Ross Douthat is both right and wrong about who wins that debate. Yes, we win it in the long run. But to get to the long run you have to go through the short-term. And we definitely didn't win the debate in California -- or 29 other states.

What Douthat describes is the simple humanity of our appeal. We aren't asking for anything abstract at all. What is esoteric or obscure about connecting love and marriage? Who doesn't understand that? But look at the lengths our opponents go to to counter that simple truth.

So why do we lose debates, in the concrete form of very consequential (to us) elections? Because of what Douthat buries in a subordinate clause. What secular arguments against gay marriage are anything other than ". . . just based on bigotry or custom"? There are certainly arguments about children and religion, but they aren't arguments against gay marriage, they're arguments against homosexuality in the common world. The most vocal opponents of same-sex marriage find homosexuality an intrusion into a worldview that has no place for anything other than heterosexuality. That's a worldview that used to be all but universal, but it isn't any more. Marriage is the only respectable arena left where people can express their distaste for lesbians and gay men who don't have the good taste to pretend they are straight. The closet is closed for business; lesbians and gay men are on television and in government and business and sports; some of them live right there in the neighborhood and their children go to school and play soccer. All of that is done.

Marriage is the only part of the civil law where prejudice still has some hold, where ancient misunderstandings retain their bite. Every time someone has the conversation Douthat describes, we can win another voter or two. But if he has any doubt about how hard our task is (and has been for decades), he should ponder this thought, which he expressed to the Observer:

"Mr. Douthat indicated that he opposes gay marriage because of his religious beliefs, but that he does not like debating the issue in those terms. At one point he said that, sometimes, he feels like he should either change his mind, or simply resolve never to address the question in public."

How many lesbians or gay men can even imagine what a luxury it would be to be able to avoid addressing this question in public? As a heterosexual in good standing, Douthat has that option. But every heterosexual who exercises it casts a potent kind of vote in favor of the status quo, which works for them but not at all for us. Having all of those conversations, all of those debates, is no easy thing for us, or for heterosexuals. But we have no other tool to achieve the simple equality that we deserve.

(H/T Andrew)

Andrew thinks the Pope's merger talks with anti-gay Anglicans are "almost baldly political." I'd go with "dangerous."

First, this takes the Vatican's prior acceptance of married clergy from other denominations one giant step further then the church has ever gone; the Pope is actively recruiting now. I'm not sure how he'll deal with any Anglican female clergy members, though I'm not clear how many ultra-conservative Anglicans would have gone down that road. But setting that aside, this new welcome mat to a denomination that has never had a rule requiring celibate clergy exposes the church's fundamental cynicism on this archaic and harmful doctrine.

But the most interesting question for me is whether these hybrid Catholics will be more or less observant of rules like the contraception ban -- even for married couples -- than existing Catholics are. This is where the moral rubber meets the road. If the Vatican really means it when it says sex that is not open to procreation is a sin, even within heterosexual marriage, actively opening the church to denominations that aren't so morally punctilious seems to be an admission that the principle, if not the Pope, has no clothes. Does he expect Anglicans to give up contraception?

No one could reasonably think that. Even Catholics don't follow this absurd urging from the unmarried clergy. This is about -- it is only about -- filling the ranks with more explicitly homophobic members. Conservative Anglicans have lived with both married and female clergy for decades now. They have lived with reproductive choice, and never even had to think about a ban on contraception. It is gay equality that they cannot accept.

The Vatican is certainly welcome to these new believers, if that's what they can be called. But like the Republican party before it, the church will soon learn how hard it is to deal with people you are encouraging to exercise, and take pride in, their unchecked prejudice.

I stick by my limited gratitude to the White House for its oblique but helpful statement about state referenda on gay equality, and specifically (kind of) marriage.

But I'm nobody's fool. President Obama is, today, headed to New Jersey to help out Jon Corzine in a very hotly contested race that could go either way. It's not a national race, or a national issue. It's just the sort of thing polticians do in cases where their considerable presence can help in very close elections.

I wouldn't ask the President to actually speak in person in Maine (even if it's just a little further up the East Coast from New Jersey) or Washington (clear out here in the West Coast). But both of these races are at least as close as the NJ governor's race, and in one sense there's more at stake. Jon Corzine's race is of interest mostly to Jon Corzine and, indirectly, to the Democratic Party -- but only indirectly. If we lose the extremely close elections in Maine and Washington, after having lost in California, it will energize the right wing across the country more than anything else I can imagine.

On many other issues, the White House has been able to manage the right wing attacks. But not on gay equality. He has told us what we want to hear (kind of) but a speech to HRC is very different from a statement directly to voters in Maine and/or Washington. Again, he's given us a tool to use to counter the damage his existing words caused, and that's good. But the new polls are showing these races neck-and-neck, and getting people to the polls will be the deciding factor. As I've argued, the 3% or so of us who are homosexual will certainly go to the polls in those states, as will a certain number of supportive heterosexuals. But an awful lot of them don't have enough of a direct interest in the ballot initiatives to drive them to vote. Our lives and equality are at stake, but not theirs.

That is a message the President can make to voters better than we ever could. It is the one extra thing we need most from him.

I feel I have to apologize to Maine for what they're going through. Not the election itself, which is something Karl Rove's strategy of anti-gay state constitutional amendments guarantees other states, too, will have to face. Maine's voters could be the first to affirm equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, but they won't be the last by any means.

No, I ought to apologize because the politics of California's education system has now infected a perfectly innocent state. When the anti-marriage side hired California's Schubert Flint Public Affairs to handle the Yes on Question 1 campaign, they inadvertently guaranteed that our unusual education politics would come as part of the deal.

As he did in California, Frank Schubert can't stop trying to scare people with horror stories about how grade-school kids will learn about gay marriage. That question arose naturally in California, where our state Education Code does, in fact, mention the teaching of marriage and family life. We've been fighting battles over this for so long now that we take it for granted. When Schubert brought up public schools here, no one batted an eye. Of course some people would be worried about what schools would be teaching kids about marriage. We've been fighting battles like that since sex education first came up in the 1960s.

But the fit is awkward in Maine. As anyone can see in this press conference by the Speaker of the Maine House, and its former Attorney General, education in Maine is a local affair, and state law has nothing to say about teaching marriage. The current state Attorney General was unambiguous about that fundamental fact, and seems flabbergasted that the idea would even occur to anyone.

Schubert is not one to worry about the reality-based world, though. If scaring parents worked politically in California, he'll give it a whirl in Maine, too.

But the No on 1 campaign hasn't let itself get bamboozled. Schubert may not understand Maine - or need to -- but people who actually live there, and get elected there, and teach there, do. And all of them know that when it comes to marriage, Maine's schools are subject to powerful and sensible local control, with no directives from the state.

This is a senseless argument, and a cruel tactic, and Maine's voters are only suffering through it because it worked for Schubert in California. Well, Maine ain't California, and I wish the state's voters well in making sure Schubert learns that lesson.

(H/T to Pam's House Blend)

It looks like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is ready to declare outright war on whatever believers still inhabit the pews. Their pastoral letter on marriage will be debated formally next month, but a preview is available. I've long since left the Catholic church (I can only take so much), but even if I were a heterosexual whose interests the church purports to protect, I think this would be the final straw for me.

The church is nothing if not consistent on sex (bad in general, good if it's "ordered" toward procreation), but this time out the Bishops seem comfortable squarely placing heterosexual couples who use contraception in the same moral position as same-sex couples. In fact, this letter may be the first time I've heard church officials explicitly employ the same language about married couples using birth control as they use about homosexuality. The letter describes contraception as an "intrinsically evil action." That's very close to the language they use about homosexuality. In fact, I think we're only "intrinsically disordered," without the "evil." The National Catholic Reporter (which is independent of the church) cites surveys showing 96% of married American Catholics use birth control, which is "within a margin of error of complete unanimity."

Is the American church ready to show American heterosexuals the same level of condescension they have previously reserved for us? That's up to them, of course. And I could be wrong about this, since I'm no expert on Catholic theology.

The condescension and theological arrogance of writing -- and thinking -- like this may be the biggest problem the church faces. Pastoral letters and other pronouncements from the Vatican seem to make a conscious effort to come from a world that Catholic believers don't live in, or maybe even recognize. As the bishops pontificate (you should pardon the word) in plummy grandiloquence about "the language of the body" and the "unitive" nature of marriage, you can almost feel the defensiveness from this famously unmarried and theoretically celibate clergy. Be sure to check out the part of the letter where the bishops explain why the Bible's description of Eve as a "helpmate" to Adam not only doesn't mean she was intended to be his inferior, but take their paternalistic case of nerves one step further to argue that the Bible also uses the original word translated as "helpmate" ("ezer") to describe God, himself. You can almost hear them cheering on Catholic women with a hearty but very self-conscious, "You go, girl!"

While the bishops and the Vatican indulge themselves in their pomposity, American Catholics continue their lives in the reality-based world. In addition to those who use contraception (i.e. pretty much everyone), 45% of American Catholics support same-sex marriage - in fact, Catholics have the highest support of any denomination; a full 62% of them support civil unions.

Ironically, that's probably a tribute to the church, itself, which has a history of social involvement, justice and intellectual engagement. Those things have taken a backseat to foolish and pedantic imagined consistencies on sex these days, but perhaps believers are willing to forgive even this and hope that it, too, will pass.

The pastoral letter will probably not change any minds. But then, it's not really intended to. That, in fact, may be the biggest problem my former church faces.

I'd like to speak up in favor of the White House statement on the two anti-gay referenda. It is easy to be cynical about the statement, and there is certainly no shortage of evidence to support cynicism. But it will help.

Here is the statement:


"The President has long opposed divisive and discriminatory efforts to deny rights and benefits to same-sex couples, and as he said at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, he believes 'strongly in stopping laws designed to take rights away.' Also at the dinner, he said he supports, 'ensuring that committed gay couples have the same rights and responsibilities afforded to any married couple in this country.'"

Andrew may be right that the President is not putting his weight behind us in either Maine or Washington, but the politics of this issue is not so straightforward. This one's a bank shot.

Obama is not going to support gay marriage yet. End of sentence. There is no rational or moral reason for his position, and he knows enough not to even try to offer one. It's an assertion without a foundation, and one that more than half of all Americans continue to believe.

But we have two very close elections to worry about now. One is in Maine with California's Frank Schubert at the helm again trying to terrify voters about gay marriage. Schubert is as savvy and dangerous a political flack as exists, and he'll use anything to win - including Obama's on the record statement to Rick Warren expressing his personal belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Obama is not going to take back his statement to Warren. But when the White House says, in an official statement, that Obama believes "strongly" in stopping laws "designed to take rights away" (as Maine's referendum is), our side is no longer defenseless when and if Schubert tries to use the President's words against us.

It is not perfect, and it is not what we need most. But it is more than the nothing Obama gave us in California.

And it is a little more than that in Washington State. A contemporaneous statement of his support for our equal rights will go a long way to help us approve Referendum 71. While the opposition is doing everything it can to make that election, too, about same-sex marriage, it is not. Washington's legislature has been working incrementally to make domestic partnership there more equal to marriage, and passed a law that does exactly what the President said - and now says again - that he supports. Again, it is not perfect, and it is not what we need most. But it is not nothing, and our side will be able to use the President's words, dated this month.

I fully understand and share the frustration of people who want more from the President. The nation has changed since Bill Clinton was in the White House. But we can't forget the fundamental lesson from the 1990s: When it comes to gay rights, it's not the principle that is most potent, it's the backlash. Clinton did not want to sign either DADT or DOMA (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). In both of those cases, he was dealing with incendiary reactions to pro-gay statements. And both were compromises to proposals that would have been worse: a complete ban on gays in the military and a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage.

The nation has moved a lot on DADT and civil unions. But it hasn't moved enough yet on marriage, where 53% of Americans still haven't come around. They will. I, too, would like to see Obama lead the nation into its best instincts on this issue rather than follow its worst.

But if we can win in both Maine and Washington, I think we will have turned a corner. Obama's statement does help us some in both states, and we should use it for all it's worth.

With all due respect to Barney Frank, enough with the NRA comparisons.

In defending his dismissive remarks of the National Equality March, Frank has said we should follow the example of the most effective lobbying group in the country - the National Rifle Association - and do our lobbying work at the district level. The NRA doesn't hold marches, and, according to Frank, we shouldn't waste our time either.

Barney's wrong. First, this obscures the fact that lesbians and gay men are a very small minority. U.S. gun ownership runs between 21.6% and 50%. Every one of those people has a very direct interest in gun laws. You can't fairly compare their numbers to the 3-5% of gays and lesbians in the country. While we have an ever-increasing number of supporters who are willing to vote for our equality, their interest is indirect: justice and fairness for their friends and family, and maybe even in general. That is a tribute to them and to generations of lesbians and gay men who took the risks of coming out to try and persuade them.

What Frank assumes is that, like NRA members, our supporters would also have the single-minded dedication we do, in every congressional district in the nation, to put unified and unceasing pressure on members of congress.

There are places in the country where that might happen. But that's the second reason the NRA analogy is wrong. Those people overwhelmingly live in places were we already have the congressional support we need. It is exactly in the places where we need the help that we would have the fewest straight supporters to do what the NRA does.

That is the paradox of being, not just a minority, but an extremely small minority in a democratic nation. No one but us actually experiences the day-to-day effects of discrimination, and because we are all part of the larger public, it is hard to get our unique but intense problem onto the national agenda for a sustained period of time. A national march does that for a day or two, but already the media has moved on to - what are for them - more important issues to the public at large.

When our problems are national in scope (as they are with DADT and DOMA) we have to do things nationally to call attention to the problem. Barney Frank's prescription presupposes support in places where we need it the most and have the hardest time getting it.

It's enough to make reasonable non gun-owners mad enough to go out and join the NRA.

Despite good financial news from the Maine campaign for our equality, the storm clouds are gathering, in the form of "Fog."

This video from Focus on the Family (courtesy of GoodAsYou) lays out the red carpet for Maine ads using President Obama's personal belief that marriage is between a man and a woman against us.

As I said earlier, if Obama wants to help us in this single state -- Maine -- he doesn't need to ask Congress for a thing; though permission from Rahm Emanuel is probably at least as hard to come by.

But it is not entirely a matter of Obama helping us. He is on the record in a way that can and will hurt us. If he says nothing about Maine, then his comments to Rick Warren can accurately and honestly be used, as they were in California, to help convince moderate voters to repeal equal marriage rights. This is not a national issue, and he is not the President of Maine. But his lack of clarification is his consent to the anti-equality campaign to use these existing remarks as is.

The President knows this. He is the only person who can do anything about it. His silence here would be his most eloquent refutation of his expressed good intentions. That is so clear, even Focus on the Family can see it.