IGF CultureWatch

OK, addendum to my last post: Now it’s officially a big deal.

The Heritage Foundation has joined the social-conservative boycott of the Conservative Political Action Conference, reports The Washington Times. The casus belli is CPAC’s willingness to let a gay Republican group participate in the confab. Here’s an amazing quote:

“The rather arrogant treatment of social conservatives by libertarians is troubling,” said Mr. [Andy] Blom [of the American Principles Project].

So it’s “arrogant” for libertarians to ask conservatives to share a room with homosexuals? Whereas, I guess, dictating terms to the whole conservative movement is…humble?

Unlike other CPAC boycotters, Heritage regards itself as a big-tent patron of the whole conservative movement—a conservative uniter, not a divider. I doubt Heritage would have joined the boycott if it weren’t under severe pressure from the cultural right.

Anyway, whether Heritage jumped off the fence or was pushed, it has been forced to choose between its libertarian and social-con impulses. So, folks, it’s official. The battle is joined. The Manhattan Declaration has gone operational.

The real purpose of this campaign is to read libertarians the riot act and put them back in their place, which was worrying about taxes while social-cons handled “values” (abortion and gays). My guess is that libertarians will back down in the face of social-cons’ threat to split the movement. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Maybe the anti-gay right’s plan to boycott the Conservative Political Action Conference is an isolated squabble. No big deal, says Dave Weigel. Maybe, but I don’t think so. I’ll agree with Jennifer Rubin: this is a fairly big deal, a sign of what life will be like for the right now that homosexuality is a wedge issue among Republicans.

In October of 2009, a group of social conservatives issued something they called the Manhattan Declaration: a not-very-veiled threat to split the conservative movement if it tried to soft-pedal abortion and gay marriage. Just weeks later, a gay Republican group called GOProud showed up at CPAC, causing a rupture between libertarians and social conservatives. Meanwhile, the Tea Party movement was entering conservative politics as a major disruptive force on the libertarian side. Though socially conservative in their views, Tea Partiers want to put economic issues first and see social issues as divisive distractions.

So now GOProud is back for Round Two, and a cluster of social-cons, including the Family Research Council and the National Organization for [read: Against Gay] Marriage, have drawn what they call a “line in the sand” against participating in CPAC if GOProud is there, which it will be.

Weigel and others are right to say that these tiffs are not uncommon on the right (or, for that matter, on the left). But it’s not the particular tiff that’s important here. Here’s the problem: conservatives’ hostility to homosexuality isolates them politically from the rest of the public, and the anti-gay consensus is fracturing even on the right (44 percent of Republicans say homosexuality should be accepted by society).

Translation: an issue which once divided and dispirited the Democratic coalition while uniting and energizing conservatives now cuts the other way. It’s a wedge issue against the right. Not just temporarily, either.

That’s why, despite my prediction (never have I been happier to be wrong!), Republicans couldn’t hold ranks last month over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It’s why the House GOP will make its stand in 2011 not on social issues but on spending cuts, which may not enjoy broad public support but which do, at least, unite rather than divide conservatives.

And it’s why the latest GOProud/CPAC tiff is not just a bad moment in a happy marriage. The anti-gay right is losing its grip, but it won’t surrender without a fight, and the fight it promised in the Manhattan Declaration is under way.

I have a new article in The Advocate making an argument that a lot of gay folks will disagree with. The “nut graf”:

We—gay Americans and our straight allies—have won the central argument for gay rights. As a result, we must change. Much of what the gay rights movement has taken for granted until now, and much that has worked for us in the past, is now wrong and will hurt us. The turn we now need to execute will be the hardest maneuver the movement has ever had to make, because it will require us to deliberately leave room for homophobia in American society. We need to allow some discrimination and relinquish the “zero tolerance” mind-set.

Check it out. And some of the comments frame the debate very nicely. Here’s Rob:

Does ANYBODY think for ONE SECOND that blacks, or jews, or women would shy away from standing up to people who only partially saw them as equal?! Hell no. They all have zero tolerance and relentlessly stamp out even the smallest ember of hate or bigotry.

Replies Bill:

I’m certainly all for getting equal rights as quickly as possible, but I don’t see the advantage in frightening those who tentatively support us into some sort of backlash. … Nobody likes to be threatened or bullied, and straight people are no exception. If we’re really beyond the tipping point, let’s not make the mistake of alienating those who support us with unwarranted hostility.

IMHO, this is the most important debate the gay-rights movement needs to have. What do you think?

Back in 2006, when John McCain was still John McCain, he said that the time to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would be when military leaders called for repeal. Then, when military leaders called for repeal, he demanded a full study of the consequences.

Now the study is done and the military leadership still wants repeal, and McCain has moved the goalposts. They need to think the matter over another year. Then we can talk.

PolitiFact.com excavates the record and rates McCain’s position a “full flip-flop.” What a shabby sunset to a great career. And what a sad comparison to the man whose Senate seat McCain occupies, a fellow named Barry Goldwater.

If you have any lingering doubt that anti-gay sentiment is becoming isolated in the Republican Party—and that the GOP is drifting toward cultural isolation as a result—check out this new election post-mortem from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Democracy Corps (PDF). Go to page 39, a chart titled “Opposition to homosexuality drops sharply,” and you see that the share of Americans saying homosexuality “should be accepted by society” has risen from only half in 2004 to a solid 56 percent majority this year. (Gallup confirms the trend.) Only a third of respondents—just one in three!—say homosexuality “should be discouraged.”

And just where is this opposition to homosexuality concentrated? Turn the page (to page 40) for the answer. Among Democrats, independents, and swing voters, majorities all agree on the acceptability of homosexuality, by whopping margins of 39 percent, 31 percent, and 27 percent, respectively. Republicans, however, stand strikingly apart from the consensus, with 55 percent of them frowning on homosexuality. In other words, if being anti-gay is your thing, there is only one place you can go to find a like-minded majority. (And, even there, 44 percent say homosexuality should be accepted.)

In the future that is coming right now, it is disapproval of homosexuality, not homosexuality itself, that mainstream culture regards as morally deviant. To the extent that Republicans cling to anti-gay postures (hat tip to Prez O for the piquant verb), they will turn off the independent and swing voters without whose support they cannot win national elections. On the other hand, with nowhere else to go, anti-gay social conservatives will fight all the harder to preserve their veto over GOP acceptance of gay equality. That’s why they’re going to block repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the Senate: to show they can.

I’m tempted to say, “Be my guest, guys.” The best they can do is delay DADT repeal, probably not for long, and that will come at a cost to their party’s cultural credibility. Anti-gay conservatives are becoming to the GOP as McGovernite liberals once were to the Democrats: an albatross.

Over at his blog, Rick Sincere has a perceptive takedown of former Sen. Rick Santorum’s recent lip service to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Worth reading.

Santorum, you may recall, is a socially conservative Republican who representated Pennsylvania for two Senate terms before being defeated in 2006. More than that, though, he wrote one of the most articulate and thoroughgoing modern critiques of the very libertarianism that Goldwater and Reagan championed. 

In his 2005 It Takes a Family—a good book, by the way, worth reading and taking seriously—Santorum argues that the family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society. Conservatism, consequently, should focus primarily on supporting families, not on shrinking government. And indeed, as I pointed out back then, Santorum found all kinds of ways to make government bigger. “With It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the Left, but from the Right.”

In 2010, Santorum’s felt need to pay homage to two politicians whose worldview he has opposed—while suggesting that in 1964 Goldwater was not a libertarian!—is another example of why social conservatives are feeling uncomfortable in this Year of the Tea Party.

With his customary elan and good humor, John Corvino dissects the peculiar logic of a recent National Review cover editorial insisting that marriage is “for” one thing and one thing only, which is, um, “mating,” which implies that paraplegics, like gays, can’t possibly marry, in any meaningful sense of the term, so the law shouldn’t let them.

Or something like that. No, it didn’t make sense to me, either.

I believe that same-sex marriage will prevail. The main reason is not that younger people are more friendly to the idea, though that’s certainly important. Demography isn’t necessarily destiny. Nor is the reason that cultural liberalism is on the march. After all, the younger demographic is turning against abortion, where the harm done to the third party is obvious.

The real reason is that, to a growing number of people who take a common-sense view of marriage (e.g., marriage is a good thing whether you can have kids or not) and who are not burdened with superstitious ideas about homosexuality, the arguments against gay marriage just don’t make sense. NR’s editorial is a case in point.

Good news, everyone: things are infinitely better at the Family Research Council!

In a landmark New York Times op-ed piece back in 1994, David Boaz pointed out that the self-allegedly pro-family organization’s publications included more items on homosexualty than on family structure, parenthood, and teen pregnancy combined. And, yes, “There was no listing for divorce.”

Well, Boaz has just taken a look at a recent batch of FRC issue briefs. He counts seven papers on abortion and stem cells (which, whatever you may think about them, are not breaking up families), five on gays and gay gay marriage (ditto), and—drum roll, please—ONE on divorce.

Look at the bright side. One is infinitely better than zero. At this rate, in 2026 FRC will have two papers on divorce. In 2040, they’ll have three! By about 2100, they may be half as ready to talk about divorce as to blame gays for the country’s family problems. I don’t know about you, but I’m holding my breath.

I can recommend, sort of, that you read National Review’s recent cover editorial, “What Marriage Is For” (online, “The Case for Marriage“). It’s a good example of how not to make a case.

The article is a mass of non sequiturs. It assumes that if marriage is “for” something—regulating procreative sex—then using it for anything else must be “against” marriage, which is like saying that if mouths are “for” eating, we mustn’t use them for talking or breathing. It claims (conjecturally) that marriage would not have arisen if not for the fact that men and women make babies, from which it concludes that society has no stake in childless marriages.

It argues that marriage, and a culture of marriage, are good and important, a point on which thoughtful gay-marriage advocates enthusiastically agree. But, of course, our whole argument is that including gays won’t stop marriage from doing the good things it now does, and will probably strengthen marriage and the marriage culture. Maybe we’re wrong. But the editorial doesn’t even bother to engage. It proceeds as if “gay marriage is bad” follows obviously from “straight marriage is good.”

Confronted with the obvious fact that no society has ever excluded sterile heterosexual couples from marriage, and that excluding them would be absurd, the editorial simply baffles. “An infertile couple can mate even if it cannot procreate.” It can mate? If “mate” means “have heterosexual intercourse,” the argument merely assumes the conclusion, and “procreativity” has gone right out the window. The article notes that the inclusion of sterile straight couples does not prove that marriage “has nothing to do with” procreation. Right! But it also does not prove that marriage has only to do with procreation. In fact, it quite strongly suggests the contrary.

I could go on. The public, thank goodness, is thinking more seriously and clearly about marriage than are the editors of National Review, which is why the public is coming around.