IGF CultureWatch

There is more visceral media interest in our reaction to Jared Loughner’s heinous acts than there is in Loughner, himself.  It is worth our attention that our first instinct, after learning of the mass murders he committed, was to try and locate him on the political spectrum.

Part of that has to do with the fact that the primary target of his attack was a politician.  But there was something else at work as well: a need to view people as having and taking sides.

Rep. Giffords is a Democrat, and there can’t be much debate about the fact that a cadre of commentators on the left did what they could to locate Loughner on the other side – the right, and specifically, the Tea Party right.  If she was political, then there must be a political motive for the shooting somewhere.  Commentators on the right then needed to respond to these misguided efforts, and have done what they could to associate Loughner with the left, or more generally with the Democratic Party.

This is not exactly the kind of madness that Loughner suffers from, but it is the defining insanity of our time – the compulsion to understand people within categories.  In other contexts, we know this to be prejudice, but nothing is ever called prejudice when it is taken for granted.  Our political prejudices are so completely subsumed in our thinking that we don’t recognize them for what they are.

No one with the least amount of sense believes that Loughner acted for political motives.  Even the most herculean efforts to shoehorn his acts into politics needed to resort to the gymnastics of assigning blame to our political rhetoric, and the rhetoric’s effect on Loughner (and, necessarily, others).  There is little doubt in my mind that our political rhetoric is poisonous and unhelpful.  But only those who live and breathe in our rancid political culture could think that everyone understands the world this way.  Many Americans – maybe even a majority – partake of only enough political talk to get by, and ignore or shun vast swathes of it.

I suspect that these are the people who are abandoning the sides.  As Gallup has helped us understand, 38% of Americans identify themselves as independent of either political party, 7% more than the next leading brand.

It is the media’s tiresome and incessant need for “narrative” that helps to drive this movement.  The binary nature of the Democratic/Republican divide is invaluable in crafting stories that purport to explain our public life.  The drama comes from the divide, and the divide is endlessly exploitable by the press.  Because the parties need the press’s attention, the dramatic cycle is complete and self-replicating.

Except for the people who eventually weary of it.  While the political world is divided in two, the world Americans live in is neither binary nor so simplistic.  Drama and conflict are not always sufficient to truly understand things, and can, in fact, obscure more profound truths.  Sometimes, the effort we expend in trying to locate human beings on one side or the other, in order to better understand the narrative, wastes our time and leaves nothing but empty anger behind.

This site was started exactly because of that sort of problem.  The Democratic party’s impulse toward equality for lesbians and gay men was always decent and important.  Removing discriminatory laws from the books is the bedrock of our movement, and we now only have one left to go: marriage.

But after the laws that require discrimination are gone, Democrats still want to do more, to try and remove discrimination from the culture, itself.  That is a much larger, and more difficult task, and government’s role in it is not uniformly accepted.

On this point, the Independent Gay Forum was formed, both to question the reliance of lesbians and gay men on only a single political party, and to prod the Republican party on its unwillingness to address the simple issue of the existence of homosexuals and their role as citizens who are not heterosexual.  Should the law continue to ignore their existence?  Encourage their silence?  Punish them?

Neither party – neither side – was exactly right for us, as I’m sure neither party is exactly right for many people.  The binary political debate the nation was having about gay equality did not fit the more complicated facts and multiplicity of motives that exist.  And the disconnect could not be ignored.

I don’t expect all of those independent voters Gallup is tracking to go away soon.  I think they are now a permanent part of our politics, made more so by the parties, themselves, who find such a hard time even giving public acknowledgement of their existence.  But an awful lot of us just don’t feel a need to pick a side, and suffer the toxic effects of our artificially two-sided debate every single day.  We crave a discussion that is a bit more nuanced, and a lot more realistic.

I hope that’s what IGF provides.  Even when we irritate our own readers (and from the comments, it seems we do that a lot), we hope the irritation is welcome, and useful.

Jon’s post on the CPAC Crack-Up glosses over the most important part of this story: GOProud.  In fact, Jon doesn’t even mention them by name, referring only to “a gay Republican group.”

Credit where credit is due.  In the more than three decades of its existence the Log Cabin Republicans never provoked this level of anguish and inflammation in its party – or, more accurately, this level of public anguish and inflammation.  Log Cabin has been a private thorn in the party’s side since 1977, but up until now, the party has been able to brush them aside in its public pronouncements.

But it’s also true that Log Cabin has been something of a team player.  In contrast, GOProud is the Republican ACT UP.

And I mean that in a literal sense.  GOProud is unleashing power.  Republicans have spent a lot of political energy in the last decade trying to finesse and manage their religious problem, while benefiting from it electorally.  The religious wing of the party expects all people who call themselves “conservatives” to share their abhorrence of and intolerance for open and honest homosexuality.  The party has given them lip service; pledges and resistance to progress, and even a couple of outspoken backbenchers who show all the signs of being true believers.

They also gave them Texas.

But no political party can live with intolerance indefinitely; compromise always creeps in, and the world outside the party can’t be denied for long.  Lesbians and gay men aren’t going away, and it’s hard to maintain the closet as an institution if they keep refusing to cooperate.  Today, there are simply too many examples of decent, moral, public and powerful homosexuals to sustain the notion that “they” are evil or harmful or much of anything other than fellow citizens, friends, coworkers, neighbors and family members.

Republican leaders have suppressed their party’s best instincts about this for too long, and GOProud is, as ACT-UP did before it, unleashing the power that’s been there all along.  GOProud can be as juvenile and theatrical as their predecessors, but they are also, like ACT-UP, a deeply serious group – as this reaction to their existence shows.

Maybe the timing is better for them than it ever was for Log Cabin.  Or maybe Log Cabin’s political strategy wasn’t what was needed to blow up the party’s entrenched hypocrisy.  But either way, GOProud is now forcing their party to have a public conversation about a fundamental question that has been kept at the margins: What would Republican conservatism look like if it weren’t anti-gay?

That won’t be resolved at CPAC.  But it’s a question whose resolution will affect a lot of people, gay and straight, Republican and Democratic.

Has anyone got a more blinkered view of gays in the entertainment industry than Ramin Setoodeh?  Last year, for reasons that escape me, he decided that Sean Hayes shouldn’t be playing the lead in Broadway’s Promises, Promises because Hayes is gay.  Worse, Setoodeh thought it was a good idea to share that insight with the whole world.

You’d think that experience would have taught him a lesson, but he’s now back claiming that not only do audiences not “see” gay actors in straight roles, but that Hollywood won’t even let gay actors play gay roles.

Given the economy in California, it’s possible (I suppose) that TV doesn’t count as “Hollywood” anymore, but anyone who saw the Emmy awards last year might have noticed that one category alone — Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series — had nominations for gay actors playing straight, gay actors playing gay and a straight actor playing gay.  Yes, the straight actor won, but does anyone at all think this Hollywood has any problem with any qualified actor playing gay roles?

Whatever it is Setoodeh is qualified to write about, gays in the entertainment industry seems not to be it.

Stephen Miller joins what is turning out to be a much larger, and enormously welcome conversation over gay rights that has been too long in making it to the public stage.  He says the Christianist rebellion against the conservative CPAC is a “Welcome Winnowing” of the right from the conservative movement.  Karen Ocamb asks the obvious related question from the left:  “Will LGBT progressives be able to work with Log Cabin Republicans in 2011?”  And Jonah Goldberg in the LA Times is dumbfounded to learn there are non-leftist homosexuals.

But it’s best to let the Christianists speak for themselves, and I think Joseph Farah of World Net Daily sums it up quite clearly:

Purge is not a bad word. It simply means, according to the dictionary definition, “to rid of whatever is impure or undesirable; cleanse; purify.

As I was listening to Handel’s glorious “Messiah” over Christmas, the phrase, “And we shall purify. . .” struck me, for the first time, as terrifying.  Something that is a necessary task in chemistry and the hard sciences is transformed, in human desire and behavior, into horror-ridden moral crusades.  Whether someone wants to purify a group of humans for religious reasons, racial ones or political ones — or any combination of those — there are no means to that end that are not gross, shocking, sometimes obscene, and at their worst, naked terrorism.

The Republican Party has given aid and comfort to people who want to cleanse the world of homosexuality.  All of their studiously loving words cannot hide that simple wish.  The GOP has been able to finesse this decay for long enough, and now faces an internal conflict that not even Ronald Reagan could manage.

The Purists are awake and active.  And I can’t see a Republican leader on the horizon who can even begin to handle them.

The National Organization for Marriage has every right to get itself into a tizzy over the juvenile and vulgar ad from a group calling itself FCKH8.  But I’ll tell NOM the same thing I’ll tell FCKH8:  You’re not ever going to stop people from using vile and offensive language — at least not in a country with a first amendment.  So stop it.

It is no pleasant thing for me to have to endure NOM’s relentless obliviousness, just as I’m sure it’s tough for them to have to suffer being called haters by enthusiastic twentysomethings, and now, even some of their kids.  But that’s part of living in a country that established from the start the invaluable notion that the individual freedom to speak one’s mind is one of the most important fundamentals of a society where the government derives from the consent of the governed.  People are a varied and messy lot, and while we can be managed a bit, we can’t be controlled.  There will always be people of strong feeling who feel no obligation to manners and social restraint.

Dealing with other people’s bad habits is one of the things that demonstrates true civility.  And while ceaseless complaining isn’t exactly uncivil, it’s certainly unseemly.  That’s what this whole skirmish boils down to, unseemly whining by NOM and FCKH8.  Once you get past the hyperobvious fund-raising potential for both groups in complaining about the other’s rhetoric, you really aren’t left with very much of substance.  FCKH8 undermines a sound theme of tolerance with its brash and rude intolerance.  NOM, I’m afraid to say, has lost any claim to respectability, but it’s probably best to leave them alone in their ever-shrinking world.

We’re near Christmas, and I’d much rather focus on real things and honorable emotions.  To all men and women of good will, have a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!

There’s no shortage of commentary and analysis about the repeal of DADT, so I’ll just add a brief thought.

A number of people showed amazing, active leadership to get this done.  Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Murphy in the House, Dan Choi and all the folks at Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen; even Lady Gaga deserves a tip of the hat.

But I want to say a word for a different kind of leadership, the kind that takes place out of the limelight.  Barack Obama, in particular, gave us several measured and tailored statements of support, none of them exhibiting the kind of inspiring rhetoric that will live on in the history of political oratory.  He has taken no end of criticism for failing to live up to his self-description as our “fierce advocate.”

But as the Rolling Stones observed, you may not always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.  What we should have learned from Bill Clinton’s spectacular failure on this issue is that a large component of vitriolic unfairness is built into it, and can and will be exploited easily enough.  When Clinton promised he would resolve the problem of gays in the military with the stroke of a pen, he gave Sam Nunn an engraved invitation to visit those infamous submarine bunks, and paved the way for Republicans to invoke the most fearsome set of showers since World War II.

This is the kind of political problem that can best be solved more indirectly.   There was no doubt about the public support for repeal, and while there was concern about how the troops would view it, that turned out to be based on the same wishful thinking by the right as everything else in the area of gay equality.  But even in the face of genuine popular support, the equally genuine, gut-level ugliness of the minority also has to be negotiated.

That is Obama’s real triumph, and he proved to be quite right about how you approach the problem.  Rather than offer up the moral leadership of the presidency as a target, and risk yet another failure, he allowed the focus of the animosity to diffuse, letting the political poison seep out in less toxic doses.

That’s not the kind of celebrity leadership that makes a president a short-term hero to a constituency group, and leaves nothing but moral victories in its wake – if a president is lucky enough to get even one of those.  It’s a brand of political leadership that is antithetical to our desire for immediate gratification, but is better for our long-term health.  Andrew Sullivan has called this Obama’s Long Game, and that gets it exactly right.

Harry Reid was complicit in this strategy to get us what we needed, not merely what we wanted.  Reid doesn’t have the oratorical gifts Obama has, but he doesn’t need them.  There are times when I wish Reid could give a speech with the conviction that Newt Gingrich had.  But Reid’s low blood-pressure style is what allows him to get the results that Gingrich could only promise in his failed House leadership.

There are a lot of different styles of politics, and despite what the media and the spokespeople would like us to believe, there is an enormous amount of politics that takes place quietly, thoughtfully and without fanfare, until the fanfare is actually warranted.  That is how the embarrassment of DADT was ultimately removed from the law.

May its slander rest in peace.

Let me put it this way.  After today’s 250-175 vote in the House to repeal DADT (the second time the House has passed repeal this session), and Olympia Snowe’s newly announced support for repeal in the Senate, it would be a failure of epic proportions if the bill does not get approval from the Senate and make its belated but no less welcome appearance on Obama’s desk.

We are dealing with politics here, and anything is possible.  But right now, the naysayers are the ones who have the most to worry about.

An important but unacknowledged figure in gay rights just passed from the scene.  In 1976, Adele Starr founded the LA chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.  Five years later, she became PFLAG’s first national president.  Karen Ocamb has a nice overview of Adele’s public life, summed up in this wonderful quote:  “We did it out of love and anger and a sense of injustice, and because we had to tell the world the truth about our children.”

Lesbians and gay men weren’t the only ones who needed to learn to come out of the closet; so did our parents and families, who were often even more embarrassed about homosexuality than we were.  But honesty and unconditional parental love were part of Adele’s nature, and she had an unparalleled ability to talk to other parents who felt their worlds had been turned upside-down.

It is ultimately arithmetic that secures her place in our history books.  We are not just a minority, we are an extremely small minority, no matter how you slice and dice the numbers.  It took us generations to begin to assert our own self-respect, but that is not nearly enough to change the history of misunderstanding that nearly all cultures have built up around homosexuality.  We also needed the support of our families and friends.

That was the bulk of the task we faced back in the post-Stonewall 70s, and Adele Starr stepped up to the plate, not only for her son, Phillip, but for all of us.  At LA’s gay rights parades of the time, PFLAG was always greeted with the biggest and most heartfelt cheers.  Their presence with us was simply joyous.  The gay rights history books will not be complete without a full accounting of PFLAG.

I know how inspiring Adele was to me in LA as we were working on the early ordinance on domestic partnership in the mid-80s, but I am sure there were people like here in cities across the nation.  Parents like her were as much the pioneers in their world as we were in ours, and maybe a little bit more so.  We had our own mountains of prejudice to fight against, but try to imagine what it must take for a parent to reject their own child.  That was what PFLAG was fighting.

Adele Starr isn’t with us any more, but her work isn’t anywhere near done.  There are still parents who find their own sons and daughters repugnant because of the child’s sexual orientation.  Adele and PFLAG showed by example that love can dominate that unnatural and destructive set of feelings.  We shouldn’t, for a second, forget how important that is to us.

Yesterday’s defeat of a vote on the Defense Authorization bill – which included repeal of DADT among hundreds of thousands of other items – is instructive to those who criticize lesbians and gay men for going to the courts to overturn laws passed in the normal democratic process.

DADT, in its molasses-like demise, is subject to anything but a normal democratic process.  To be fair, the entire lame duck session resembles ordinary democracy only in the sense that it is conducted by people who have been duly elected.  But any semblance of process, due or otherwise, is lacking.  Where else but in the United States Senate would the entire country take it for granted that a 57-40 vote in a 100-member body would be a defeat?

But the central point is more particular than mere complaints about the vagaries of Senate procedure.  As Robert Caro discussed in comprehensive historical detail in Master of the Senate, the filibuster and cloture rules have been around to be abused since the very early days of the Senate, and some leaders, like Lyndon Johnson, were able to keep the bills running on time.  Just because the rules are more abused now than at any time in history doesn’t make them any more unfair to anyone, including lesbians and gay men.

No, the singular problem for DADT, as for any law that alienates a specific minority, is how the accumulation of bad feelings about the minority garble and twist the discussion.  Just this week, yet another respectable poll of the American people showed a solid 2/3 who not only support repeal of DADT, but would, themselves, vote for it if asked.  Since 2005, the percentage of support has been at 60% or more.

But when Senator Harry Reid called for the premature, losing vote yesterday, his frustration was palpable.  A senior Senate aide described the problem.  While Reid and Senator Susan Collins had finally agreed to four days of debate, and an amendment process satisfactory to Collins, she was not the only relevant senator:

“It would have been much more than four days,” the aide says. “Her suggestions were flat out unworkable given how the Senate really operates. You can talk about four days until the cows come home. That has very little meaning for Coburn and DeMint and others who have become very skilled at grinding this place to a halt.”

The minority Republicans in the Senate were and are so obsessed with the problem of open homosexuals in the military, that they are not only willing to block a vote on funding for the nation’s entire military, they have done their part to hold it up until this late date even though the prejudice they believe they are protecting is on life support, not only among the voters, but even in the military, itself.

But Republicans are only part of the larger problem.  I cannot speak to Reid’s actual concern about how the Senate’s proceedings would be gummed up, but it’s not really Harry Reid’s rights that are at stake here.  The inconveniences of a leader and his institution are problems of an entirely different species from the problems faced by a woman who is afraid to tell her friends in the military who they should contact if she is killed in fighting.

Would it really have been so bad for the Senate to call the GOP’s bluff on this?  The prospect of Senate Republicans pontificating on gays in the military for four days or more is a soul-chilling prospect, but maybe that’s what the nation needs.  They have no new substantive arguments to make — they never really had any to begin with.  Their rearguard action on this lost cause might just need its Waterloo, to  finish it off once and for all.

Neither Reid nor Obama nor Collins nor anyone else in the Senate has any personal stake in this fight.  Their speeches are speeches, not the real life conflicts that lesbians and gay men have to confront every hour and every day.  It is the heterosexual Senate’s luxury to be able to put off equality until a more convenient time.

We suffer that luxury.  But it is not our only choice.  The courts exist in general, and the equal protection clause exists in particular, precisely because majorities don’t have a personal interest in a minority’s disabilities under the law.  Some members of the majority may have the principles of a Joe Lieberman or a Patrick Murphy, but they can also cater to the distortions of prejudice, even when that status quo is dying.  Majorities can even sometimes sacrifice their own interests (such as a defense authorization bill) because of their perverted views.

Perhaps Reid knows what he is doing.  I still think this can get done.  But yesterday’s political convolutions are a compelling argument for courts to have the final say on some issues.

Last Thursday, John McCain said repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is “obviously a transcendently important issue.” (The quote is at the 47 minute mark.)

What if it isn’t?

I don’t mean to say that equality isn’t important – even transcendently important.  I obviously think it is.

But what if the goal of repeal, and maybe even the goal of equal rights in general, is to reduce the amount of time, effort and resources so many people believe we have to spend discriminating?  What if our whole movement is ultimately about reassessing whether it’s not just fairer, but easier all around if Americans could view homosexuality as not such a big deal?

There is more than a little evidence in the Pentagon survey to suggest that we have hit and passed just that tipping point.  The enormous percentages of troops who have actually served with someone they believe to be homosexual and don’t see what all the fuss is about attest to a truism that is nearly a cliché in movies: The ragtag bunch of misfits who bring their peeves and prejudices to their unit find that the only way to survive this man’s army is by working together.  Unit cohesion isn’t a prerequisite to cooperation, it’s a result of it.

McCain and others seem irritated that only 28% of troops responded to the survey.  They argue that 72% of troops believed the fix was in, and couldn’t bring themselves to provide their own answers.

That’s a bit of a stretch.  Do they really believe there is so much cynicism among the young troops?  Could it be that some of our elder statesmen are attributing their own world-weariness to a different generation?  Given the potency of anti-gay sentiment among those who still harbor it, it seems unlikely that troops who had the opportunity to be counted on the earth-shattering question of vile tolerance would stand down.

As the report’s authors testified, a 28% response rate is more than statistically sound, fully consistent with prior military surveys, and is light years beyond the infinitesimal samples who are polled by very smart professionals in the political world on every subject under the sun, with degrees of accuracy that sometimes approach mysticism.

McCain cannot seem to accept that the world might have changed around him, and that the transcendent importance he attributes to sexual orientation isn’t so widely shared any more.  And the context of the hearings couldn’t better illustrate the disproportion of the obsession with homosexuality.  However important – or not – DADT is, is funding the nation’s entire military really the secondary consideration?  Yes, attaching repeal to the funding bill was a political move — big surprise.  But it’s political mostly in the sense that it illuminates the self-indulgence of politicians who are hellbent on catering to a dying prejudice.

To McCain, it is the status quo – the institutionalization of prejudice – that is transcendently important.  He is defending DADT as if it were a principle, rather than a political compromise that no one liked in the first place, but everyone could agree on in order to extricate Bill Clinton from his failed political promise to gays.  That promise proved to be premature for our politics, and the military has had to live with DADT’s bizarre strictures ever since as penance for Clinton’s sins.

The politics of 1993 have dissipated, and that’s helped a new generation see the eccentricities and outlandishness of this policy, whose sole premise is the virtue of lying.  There is an enormous chasm between the people who can shake their heads at that absurd notion and the ones who embrace it, and feel pressed to defend it to the death.

There is good reason to believe the troops are ready to move past the Byzantine machinery of this particular prejudice, which their elders wasted so much time on.   Even McCain has no substantive arguments left, and has to resort to creaky process complaints: We need more studies, we have to have be able to propose amendments, Harry Reid is so darn mean to us!

McCain may still be able to prevail on this unheroic course.  Delay is the last refuge of a political scoundrel, and Washington is full of political scoundrels of both parties.  But if McCain is able to eke out some sort of success on his self-imposed mission, it will not be a victory for anyone, himself included.  The change he fears has already happened, and all that’s left is to remove a dead body from the statutes.  It’s mostly gone from the troops, and from the culture.  All that’s left is the complaints of the losers.