Author Archives: Jonathan Rauch

‘Tea-Baggers’ in Texas

by on

A  footnote to David’s post on the hysterically anti-gay, and anti-limited-government, 2010 Texas Republican Party Platform:
 
“Joe My God” characterizes the platform as “tea-bagger influenced.” I’ve been doing a deep dive on the Tea Party, and this seems wrong, and another example of a knee-jerk anti-Tea Party reflex that will do gays no good at all.
 
When I talk to Tea Party people, they are firm on eschewing the social issues, which they regard—rightly, imho—as snares and delusions that Republican politicians have used to distract conservative voters from GOP complicity in ever-expanding government. Tea Partiers tell me they have wised up to the fact that politicians use the social issues to divide the country and empower themselves.
 
I talked to three leaders of the Dallas Tea Party, and they were very much on that page. Typical comment (from a Dallas TP leader): “We do not touch on social issues. We believe the biggest danger to our country is the fiscal irresponsibility that’s going on in Washington.”
 
And I was pointed to this interesting fact: Tea Partiers recently kicked out a Schlaflyite culture warrior as state party chair, replacing her with a fiscal-conservative lawyer who de-emphasized social issues. In fact, this was done at the very same state GOP convention that adopted the rabid anti-gay platform—which apparently was recycled from 2009.
 
So the real story seems to be, if anything, a swerve toward the libertarian branch of the Texas GOP (though this article sez it’s too early to be sure).

I don’t know much about Texas state politics, but the more I see of the Tea Party, the more convinced I am that it is good for gays, not because it is pro-gay (its members are mostly socially conservative) but because it is anti-anti-gay. To whatever extent they succeed in shredding the overdrawn “moral values” political credit card, more power to them.

48 Comments

Corvino v. Douthat

by on

Ross Douthat tries a new(ish) argument against gay marriage. John Corvino takes it apart. Same problem as always (sigh). Just saying marriage is good for this or that straight need doesn’t show it can’t accommodate gays as well.

Look, guys. Let’s say it’s a given that shirts were designed for people with two arms. Great! So does that mean one-armed people should be forbidden to wear shirts? That one-armed shirt-wearers will somehow wreck the ideal of shirtiness, and we’ll lose the very concept of the shirt?

Let’s say mouths were invented for eating. If not for eating, there would be no mouths. Great! So should we forbid the use of mouths for talking, lest everyone get too confused about what mouths are really for?

That kind of argumentation wouldn’t get past a high-school logic teacher. Yet it remains a commonplace in the gay-marriage debate. Sometimes I wonder whether SSM opponents would have anything left to say without it.

Corvino puts it well (but read the whole thing):

In order to make his position plausible, Douthat would need to show that the stakes are so radically different for gays or lesbians that any form of marriage that includes this small minority can no longer do the requisite work for (fertile) heterosexuals.

But at this crucial point Douthat’s argument becomes hopelessly vague. He simply asserts that extending marriage to same-sex couples would weaken its ability to address the thick “interplay of fertility, reproductive impulses and gender differences in heterosexual relationships,” but he never explains why or how this would happen.

This is not an argument: this is a panic.

20 Comments

The Radical Gay Rights Ruling

by on

For all its morally admirable qualities, Judge Walker's ruling sets the cause of marriage equality crosswise with moderation, gradualism and popular sovereignty. Which, in America, is a dangerous place to be. (Link to article at the New York Daily News)

6 Comments

The Tea Party Paradox

by on

Since about 2006, the leading political growth category in the U.S. has been conservative independents. But this rightward trend has focused on economic and regulatory issues; on social issues, independents show little or no rightward movement. (Link to article at NationalJournal.com)

17 Comments

Why Mike Huckabee Should Never Be President

by on

Belatedly, I'm just now catching up with remarks that former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee made in April to Michael Tracey, a college journalist and a student at the College of New Jersey. Belatedly or not, those remarks deserve comment, because what they say about Huckabee's character is not pretty.

True, what Huckabee says about gay marriage isn't new, for him. But just listen to the way he says it.

You don't go ahead and accommodate every behavioral pattern that is against the ideal. That would be like saying, well, there are a lot of people who like to use drugs, so let's go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, so we should accommodate them.

The gay marriage debate has been going on for well over a decade now. Yet Huckabee makes clear that he has not given the subject a moment's thought, beyond his initial, frozen-in-amber reaction-one which consists not of a reasoned argument but of a tone of contempt. As if it were self-evident that gay relationships are the moral equivalent of drug abuse. As if it were obvious, with same-sex marriage now six years old in Massachusetts and legal in five states (plus DC), that recognizing committed gay relationships must lead to every other random, bizarre change anyone can think of.

Huckabee also speaks up for Arkansas's ban on adoption by same-sex couples, as if same-sex parenting were a radical experiment. It never really was, but in 2010 anyone who reads a newspaper knows that thousands and thousands of kids have been successfully raised by gay couples, and there is no evidence that the kids are disadvantaged (see, for example, this article [PDF]). Which, by the way, is not true of kids adopted and raised by single individuals, which Arkansas and every other state allows. And is also not true of kids raised in foster care, the likely alternative for some kids when gay adoption is banned.

In 2000, these "I can't be bothered to think about it" responses were merely lazy. In 2010, they show deliberate refusal to even entertain the moral case that Huckabee's gay and lesbian fellow-citizens are making. All he is really saying here is, "I couldn't care less. Get off my planet."

Truly contemptible, though, is this: when, inevitably, Huckabee's words were noticed and he took some flak, he attempted to blame the young journalist for "grossly" distorting his views. In fact, Huckabee was quoted accurately and in context, as Tracey's rejoinder, and the audio of the interview, made clear. (Rachel Maddow plays choice excerpts.)

So supplement the word "contempt" with another, "cowardice." And remember the name of that young journalist, Michael Tracey, whom I met at a conference the other week and who is off, I hope, to a great career-having already launched a campus magazine.

More: In a recent New Yorker article, Huckabee is asked if he wouldn't be curious to know whether same-sex marriage has positive or negative effects kids and society. He replies, "No, not really. Why would I be?" And then...he laughs.

Couldn't be much clearer than that. Same-sex marriage. Real-world effects. Lives of children and gay people. All...a joke.

140 Comments

A ‘Kagan Doctrine’ on Gay Marriage

by on

Elena Kagan seems to be saying that protecting minority rights is the Supreme Court's job description, but also that a civil rights claim doesn't automatically trump majority preferences. This is something absolutists on both sides of the gay marriage debate don't like to hear. (Link to New York Times column)

1 Comment

‘Tea’ Is for Tolerance

by on

The new chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party has one word for social conservatives: goodbye. She is telling Bay Windows, a gay newspaper, that gay marriage and other social issues are going on the back burner, presumably because they're losers. MassResistance, a virulent anti-gay group, is appalled.

That was in April. Today, the New York Times reports that overturning same-sex marriage is getting no traction as a campaign issue in Iowa, where a state court ordered SSM a year ago.

And National Journal has a poll of Republican political consultants and insiders in which half say the party should "downplay" the issue of gays in the military. With 13 percent calling for repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, that leaves only 31 percent who want to take a stand against open gays in the military. "This is going to happen, and Republicans don't want to look intolerant going into fall elections," says one typical insider. Another: "This issue will not help drive voters to the polls."

And there's this perceptive comment: "The Democrats and independents fleeing Obama are social liberals shocked by the administration's war on business. We would do well not to remind them why they once rejected the GOP."

Back in November, a group of social conservatives, led by Robert George, issued something called the Manhattan Declaration-a veiled threat to split the Republican party if it did not continue to put abortion and SSM front and center. But what Grover Norquist has been saying appears to be true. The energy behind the Tea Party represents a shift away from Jerry Falwell as well as a backlash against Barack Obama.

It's a mistake for gays to assume that the Tea Party movement is our enemy. More likely, it will help pull the Republicans off our backs.

Addendum: Thanks to the reader who points out that the Mass. GOP chair's comment is from April 2009, not two months ago. I should have caught that.

7 Comments

Do ‘Family Values’ Weaken Families?

by on

Massachusetts, original U.S. home of same-sex marriage, has the country's lowest divorce rate-a fact we same-sex marriage proponents aren't shy about pointing out. But that's just part of a pattern. Across the board, core red/conservative/Republican states have significantly higher divorce rates and teen-pregnancy states than core blue/liberal/Democratic ones.

Coincidence? Probably not...

5 Comments

Don’t Hold Your Breath

by on

In a recent newsletter to supporters (which I can't find online), Brian Brown, the executive director of the anti-gay-marriage National Organization for Marriage, writes:

Stopping the legal deformation of marriage is one key step, as is protecting the ordinary civil rights of voters, including religious people and communities. But the end game for us in this fight for marriage is something quite different: transmitting a marriage culture to the next generation. That means creating an America in which each year more children are born to and protected by their mother and father united in a loving, decent, average good-enough marriage.

Hey, I know! How about a state-by-state campaign to revoke no-fault divorce? That would be a good way to transmit a marriage culture and have more children protected by mothers and fathers in an "average good-enough marriage."

What? You don't think NOM will campaign against no-fault divorce?

Don't be so cynical. They just haven't gotten around to it yet.

77 Comments