IGF CultureWatch

On CNN's "State of the Union," National Security Adviser (and retired four-star general) James L. Jones argues puts a powerful frame around repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell:

I have served my country in uniform since 1967, and in that period, we covered racial questions, racial integration. We've covered the integration of women in the armed forces. People suggested that that would be a national security problem if we did both of those things. It turned out to be, as a matter of fact, a force multiplier by doing those things. People - and I grew up in a generation where they said if you integrate members of the gay community, that will be a national security problem. That will probably prove itself to be false as well.

Proponents of DADT are down to arguing, in effect: Why mess with a policy that works in time of war? As Daniel Pipes puts it, "Now is not the time for social experimentation in the armed forces." Jones has the answer: integration is not a distraction, it is a force multiplier. With those two words, "force multipler," the general has given pro-repeal forces a rallying cry. Let's shout it from the rooftops.

OK. It doesn't come much clearer than this. Family Research Council's Peter Sprigg says homosexuals should be menaced with arrest and imprisonment. Transcript and video here. We must not let the public forget that this ugly reality-they want to make us criminals-is what lies behind these guys' insistence that they mean us no harm.

I wish I could agree with my IGF colleague David Link that Brown v. Board of Ed, not Roe v. Wade, should be the governing precedent in the California gay marriage lawsuit-which, to remind ouselves of the stakes, seeks to impose same-sex marriage nationwide by Supreme Court order.

Alas, I cannot.

There are issues of constitutional law which come into my thinking, but let's set those aside. The more basic point is this: Just as abortion raises a fundamental question about the definition of a human person, so gay marriage raises a fundamental question about the definition of marriage. Obviously, I believe that a same-sex union can and should be regarded as a true marriage-but that is the question before the Court. In order to conclude that the unavailability of SSM deprives gay couples of an equal right to marry, the Court must conclude that a same-sex marriage is a marriage.

In Brown, no one disputed that an integrated school was in fact a school. In Loving v. Virginia, the case which overturned bans on miscegenation, some people said an interracial marriage was unnatural or immoral, but in 1967 virtually no one said it wasn't in fact a marriage. In those instances, schools and marriage were being hijacked for the extrinsic purpose of white supremacy. It was precisely because segregationists knew that an integrated school was a school, and an interracial marriage was a marriage, and for that matter a black vote was a vote, that they were so determined to exclude blacks.

(Thought experiment: imagine suggesting to a white supremacist in 1955 that blacks and whites would go to school together, sit side by side, study the same things, be treated identically-except that what blacks were getting would be called "training" instead of "education." No segregationist would have accepted that deal.)

The California gay marriage case is different. Remember, California offered (and still offers) civil unions which are marriages in all but name. In the separate-but-equal South, the intention of segregationists was to hide the reality of discrimination behind a mask of equality. In California, the public's intention was more like the opposite: hiding the reality of equality behind a mask of discrimination. All that the people of California were asking to do was retain the traditional definition of the word "marriage." They gave us everything else.

Of course, I think the people of California were wrong. I think gay couples deserve to the designation "married" and that the arguments for denying it to them are weak. David and I agree on that.

Where we disagree is over the unwisdom, as I see it, of the Supreme Court's imposing what a majority of Americans will regard as a new definition of marriage. That could cause a backlash which I think David is too casual about when he says, in effect, "They'll get used to it." Our marriages could end up in the political crosshairs for a generation or more. To tell all of America's voters that they cannot pause to think for a while before changing the very meaning (for most of them) of marriage strikes me as judicial brinksmanship of a dangerous order.

The case thus puts me in an awful bind. I can't decide which would be worse for gay equality: winning or losing.

In a recent newsletter, the National Organization for Marriage cites a new government study as evidence that gay marriage will hurt kids, because the research finds that kids suffer less abuse with married biological parents than with a single parent, a parent living with an unmarried partner, or a parent and step-parent.

They got it half right. Having two married biological parents is good for kids, and better than the alternatives the study examined. We here at IGF are all for it. But that doesn't make having, say, an unmarried mom and mom better than having a married mom and mom. As a correspondent points out:

Does NOM never, ever learn? These same figures indicate that for either two-adult family structure (both biological parents, or one biological and one step-parent) the chance of abuse to the child goes down drastically IF THE COUPLE GETS MARRIED. For the first kind of family, the risk drops 80 percent. For the second kind of family, the risk drops nearly 60 percent. Even for single biological parents, the child's risk drops by about 15 percent if that single parent finds and marries someone.

So they jump to the conclusion that if a child is living in a gay household, the way to protect the child is to NOT let the parent get married.

It would at least be consistent if they used this data to say gays (and singles and steps) shouldn't be allowed to care for kids in the first place. But that's not Maggie Gallagher's position! She acknowledges that the parenthood is OK, but is just against protecting the kids.

For years, opponents of same-sex marriage have traded on a non-sequitur: if SSM is not optimal, then it should not be legal. If you believed that, though, you would have to ban marriages that create step-families, which lots of evidence shows are not as good for kids. Thank goodness, the real world doesn't work that way.

The extraordinary Frank Kameny, whose stubborn activism in the face of fierce repression did so much for gay rights, emails movingly about his attendance at the swearing-in of David Huebner, the new openly gay ambassador to New Zealand Samoa. Excerpted with Frank's permission...

I was invited by the White House, and attended, a ceremony on Friday afternoon December 4, which, at the time and even more so in retrospect, left me feeling deeply touched, satisfied and comforted. On two major levels this would have been so utterly beyond even being imagined when I became involved a half-century ago that I felt that comment would be in order. And so I thought I might share it. Unlike the Salahis, I WAS invited by the White House and my name WAS on the guest lists at the doors.

The occasion was the swearing in of David Huebner as Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Huebner is a 49-year-old prestigious, very openly gay attorney. He is white. His partner of some 20 years, Duane McWaine is a medical doctor-psychiatrist. He is black. Numerous members of both Huebner's and McWaine's extended families were present and visibly cheerfully comingled.

The actual formal swearing-in was done by Vice President Biden. I had been assigned a seat in the front row center. As he came by, Biden recognized me from previous encounters, greeted me effusively, and told the mothers what I was "an important person."

Biden then gave a very nice speech, emphasizing diversity as doubly manifested by Huebner and McWaine. In the course of it, he suggested that since McWaine, like ambassadorial spouses generally, was going to have to put his own professional practice on hold while he accompanied Huebner, perhaps a compensatory salary ought to be paid to ambassadors' spouses.

On both counts - racial and gay - this would have been totally beyond inagining back in the 1960s, when I began agitating. So while we have a way to go - all is certainly not yet aright - we have certainly come a very, very, very long way in what, from an historical standpoint, is a rather short time. I'm sure that I won't be around to see the final resolution of these issues - if they are ever totally resolved, -- but many of you will certainly see us even closer to resolution than we are now. Work hard and be persistent and patient.

Gay IS Good. And the only race is the Human Race. Pound away at those and never compromise, however slightly.

James Oaksun, a Maine-based libertarian activist and analyst, has published what strikes me as an astute analysis of what went wrong for same-sex marriage advocates in Maine. It's available, in PDF format, here.

Like me and others, he argues that the pro-gay-marriage side must get beyond defensiveness and evasion on the schools issue, and he offers an interesting suggestion for taking the bull by the horns."Perhaps the framing is to talk about what modern society asks the schools to do. Educate, yes. But also prepare the leaders of tomorrow to function collaboratively in a diverse society. The reality of life is, yes, there are gay people and they are not going away."

Not bad. My own first-cut thought about a non-defensive message was "teaching kids that discrimination is wrong and that everyone deserves a family."

Time for some focus-group research?

In any case, it's good to see recognition spreading that, like it or not, we can't talk about same-sex marriage without also talking about teaching same-sex marriage.

Memo to the anti-SSM right: having picked this fight on education, be prepared to lose it. Sooner or later, teaching about gay marriage won't seem so scary. Your ads may even help normalize it.

I mean, if Californians are serious about protecting marriage, why stop at banning gay marriage?

An activist calls their bluff with a satirical initiative campaign that just might get on the ballot.

And the ad is funny.

Conditioning humanitarian aid, including health assistance, should always be a last resort. However, when a country that receives hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. HIV/AIDS assistance gets busy publicly vilifying homosexuals and even threatening to put them to death, hasn't the last resort been reached?

Charles Francis thinks so. He is an openly gay former member of the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS who thinks it's time to draw a line:

American lawmakers are asked to appropriate billions of dollars through the PEPFAR program to many of the countries now escalating anti-gay rhetoric into a verbal assault with threats to imprison gay Africans and NGO workers. A growing number of PEPFAR countries are considering legislative proposals to criminalize homosexuality with a death penalty, enact bans on homosexual organizations and to imprison homosexual citizens....

This is a critical juncture for PEPFAR before the world community. Will we stand by and let national governments scapegoat a sexual minority for HIV/AIDS while receiving major funding for AIDS relief? Will the U.S. fund radical, anti-gay prevention programs that could become a model for other parliaments and governments?

Read his open letter to the Global AIDS Coordinator here.