IGF CultureWatch

Paul Varnell's column in the Chicago Free Press, like so much quality journalism these days, has fallen victim to the budget ax.

Paul was the founding editor of IGF, back in the 1990s, and his columns have been a mainstay of our site. His sane yet passionate pieces in the Free Press and, before that, the Windy City Times modeled a calmer, more rational kind of writing and thinking at a time when so many gay voices were shrill and doctrinaire. And it seemed there was nothing that Paul couldn't write elegantly about.

The Chicago Sun-Times has a lovely appreciation of Paul's work by Neil Steinberg.

Paul tells Steinberg: "It was my identity, and I felt I was doing something worthwhile by trying to be calm and reasonable." We hope Paul finds a new outlet. He's still needed.

So now it's official: Opponents of gay marriage in Maine do not just want to block gay marriage. They want to use the law to force all discussion of gay marriage out of the schools. In other words, they demand to turn the public schools into closets.

This was always implicit in the logic of their anti-SSM message, which is, as far as it goes, unassailable. 1) Legal gay marriage will make married gay couples more visible and grant them full legal equality. 2) Gay couples' heightened equality and visibility will increase the likelihood that gay marriage would be discussed in schools, even though marriage isn't in the Maine curriculum.

Of course, if gay marriage can be discussed despite not being in the curriculum, it can also be discussed despite not being legal in Maine. Its existence in Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Hampshire might come up in the classroom, for example. So the logical consequence is: 3) The only way to protect schoolchildren's ears from mention of SSM is to censor it.

Don't take my word for it. Here's what a "Yes on 1" official says:

Mutty said gay-marriage supporters had the chance to prohibit the teaching of same-sex marriage in schools when they drafted the legislation.

"They had ample opportunity to blunt our concerns by expressly prohibiting same-sex marriage from being discussed in public schools, but they did not do so," he said.

The Maine campaign, then, is not about preventing gay marriage. It's about preventing discussion of gay marriage. But why stop at "expressly prohibiting same-sex marriage from being discussed in public schools"? How about domestic partnerships? Why, isn't the very existence of homosexuality too controversial for children's ears? How about textbooks and-hey!-library books mentioning gay marriage or gay couples? Hadn't they better be banned?

I would thank Mr. Mutty for clarifying the underlying radicalism of his cause. Let's call him on it.

(Hat tip: KC Johnson.)

The latest "Yes on 1" ad, just released by supporters of the Maine initiative revoking same-sex marriage, strikes me as so misleading, and so tangential to marriage per se, as to amount to little more than a naked pitch that gays will recruit your kids-the anti-gay "blood libel."

In a Sept. 18 memo, Maine public officials and law professors responded effectively to the substance of such ads (which, of course, really have not much substance to respond to): Marriage is not taught in the Maine curriculum and won't be soon; Maine has good religious-liberty protections in existing law; the cases misleadingly cited by SSM opponents have nothing to do with marriage per se (they're anti-discrimination cases). It's a fine letter. Everyone should read it.

But here's the political problem we face in Maine and California and, we can be confident, elsewhere. We are asking for full legal equality and, where education is concerned, we still have not figured out how to defend it. As the new ad makes pretty brazenly clear, what our opponents are really saying in their ads is: "Gay marriage will make it legally and morally harder for schools to condemn or ignore same-sex marriage, to teach that straight families are superior to gay ones, and to ignore and stigmatize homosexuality generally."

There's no denying that measures advancing gay equality in law, culture, and society will, other things being equal, advance gay equality in schools. If we cannot figure out how to defend that core proposition to voters, we're going to lose.

So what's my bright idea? I'm working on it. But I suspect the answer will be in the nature of a positive, forthright, non-defensive message about the value of teaching kids that discrimination is wrong and that everyone deserves a family. "Liar liar pants on fire" looks to voters like an evasion.

Whether adding robust (as opposed to paper-thin) religious-liberty exemptions to Maine's gay-marriage law would have kept that law off the ballot is dubious, at best. But there maybe something to suggestion-made here (PDF) by Prof. Douglas Laycock, a gay-marriage supporter-that adding those exemptions now might take some steam out of the anti-gay-marriage initiative. Since reasonable and robust religious exemptions make sense anyway, this should be tried.

Another group of legal scholars weighs in for them here (PDF).

A persuasive rebuttal: K.C. Johnson, a Brooklyn College historian, Maine native and voter, and co-author of a book on the Duke lacrosse fiasco, offers this reply to my post (excerpted, with his permission, from a longer email):

I just read the Wilson group's letter to Gov. Baldacci, and write to express my dismay at its timing-and your suggestion that Baldacci and the legislative Dems should consider adopting it at this stage of the campaign.

I suspect [that] the Yes on 1 effort will use the Wilson letter to revive their theme that the state will see a flood of lawsuits if Question 1 is rejected. That the Wilson group's letter acknowledged that their original missive had been misinterpreted in Yes on 1 advertisements but still felt compelled to send another letter, at the height of the campaign, strikes me as disturbing.

I also found absurd the Wilson group's claim that if only the state legislature had adopted their suggestions in the spring, the resulting campaign would have been more "civil." Since Yes on 1 seems entirely responsive to NOM and the state Catholic Church--both of which would have opposed gay marriage anyway-it's hard to imagine the provision's adoption making any difference in the tone of the campaign. Indeed, the provision is irrelevant to the education argument that's been at the heart of the Yes on 1 campaign.

I support religious exceptions-although not the Wilson group's assertion that these exceptions could, in some circumstances, apply to government employees-for political reasons. But given the way this particular campaign has turned out, I don't think there's much evidence that things would have been any different if the law profs' recommendations had been adopted, and the timing of this current batch of letters strikes me as highly unfortunate.

Over at Newsweek.com, IGF contributor Jamie Kirchick points out that the appointment, in Germany, of the world's first openly gay foreign minister presents a historic opportunity to embarrass the world's leading homophobes.

After he takes the helm of the Foreign Ministry, [Guido] Westerwelle ought to kick off his tenure with a tour of the world's most homophobic nations, speaking about the horrific ways in which these regimes treat their gay citizens.

Or, failing that, just raising the issue would make a difference. "Hillary Clinton and her predecessors Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice have given great rhetorical and symbolic force to the cause of female equality during their tenures." Let's hope for the same symbolic advocacy from Westerwelle.

Daily Kos posts poll numbers from Maine: If the vote to revoke gay marriage were held there today, we'd lose by two points, 46-48. Given that more people tend to vote against same-sex marriage than admit in polls they'll vote against it, the real gap is probably more like 5 or more percent.

No news in the finding that women and younger people are more supportive of same-sex marriage, but look at the partisan breakdowns. Our problem can be summarized in one word: Republicans. Democrats favor SSM by a two-to-one margin (60-30). Independents favor it by seven percentage points (52-45). But Republicans are overwhelmingly, crushingly opposed, 74-20-and their combination of solidarity and intensity swings the whole equation.

This intensity gap explains why, as two political scientists, Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips, found recently [PDF], policy tends to be more conservative on gay marriage than the voters prefer-not, as conservatives often insist, more liberal.

It also underscores the importance of targeting persuasion relentlessly to the political middle. Forget about preaching to the converted. Another five percentage points or so of independents changes the game. That's the challenge.

In a recent blog post, I took note of a column in which Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune writes that I, among other gay-marriage advocates, "forthrightly asserted that granting gays access to matrimony will have no discernible [social] impact." My quote:

"I wouldn't expect much effect on the social indicators that would be visible to the naked eye," said Jonathan Rauch.

In my book and elsewhere, of course, I've argued that same-sex marriage is more likely to strengthen the culture of marriage than weaken it, and that shutting out gays, far from being risk-free, would be likely to redefine marriage as a civil-rights violation.

In order not to appear any more inconsistent than I actually am, I want to put on record the whole paragraph that I sent to Chapman:

Hi Steve. SSM directly affects only a small number of couples, so direct effects on the non-gay population are likely to be small. Cultural effects-e.g., bolstering the norm of marriage vs. normalizing alternative family structures-are indirect and distinguishing signal from noise would be hard. So I wouldn't expect much effect on the social indicators that would be clearly visible to the naked eye.

I'm not sure why Steve edited out the word "clearly," which made the point a bit, um, clearer: direct, immediate impacts of allowing gay marriage will be small, because so few couples are directly involved. Indirect effects, ramifying through the culture in the form of, say, increased (or decreased) support for the norm of marriage, may be quite large over time. But it's hard to trace these indirect cultural influences with any specificity, or to know what would have happened under some alternative scenario. Identifying them will require some fairly sophisticated research (thus: "not clearly visible to the naked eye").

So, don't get me wrong: either allowing or banning gay marriage will probably have some effects on heterosexual behavior. But the obvious effects will be small, and the larger effects won't be obvious.

Don't miss Ryan Sager's post (especially the graphs) on the chasm between younger and older people on gay marriage. Citing a new paper by academics Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips, he sez:

If people over 65 in each state made the laws, zero states would have gay marriage; if people under 30 made the laws, 38 states would have gay marriage.

Also must-read: In the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman wonders why the same folks who predict social catastrophe if gay marriage is allowed refuse to make specific, testable predictions.

I have a strong suspicion that both sides of the debate are right. The supporters of same-sex marriage are right in predicting that it will have no bad side effects. And the opponents are right not to make predictions.

Here's a flip-flop to welcome. In its original brief in a California lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, the Obama Justice Department adduced a bevy of standard anti-gay-marriage arguments to defend DOMA's constitutionality-including the old standby that restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples isn't discriminatory because, after all, homosexuals can have opposite-sex marriages too.

Now, in its latest reply brief, the administration switches tack. It states unequivocally that the ban on gay marriage is a form of discrimination, as IGF contributor Dale Carpenter notes over at Volokh.com. And although DOMA passes the so-called rational basis test (ergo Congress had the power to enact it), it's not rational because banning gay marriage is rational (it isn't), but only because Congress is entitled, for the time being, to leave the issue to the states. There's no attempt to characterize DOMA as anything but discriminatory and unjustified.

Unlike some gay-marriage advocates, I believe that DOMA is, in fact, constitutional, in the sense that Congress has the power to enact it. I also believe, however, that setting up a federal definition of marriage at odds with those of (now) six states is bad policy. So, second time around, Obama gets it right.

And better late than never. Dale concludes:

While gay-rights groups complain that the DOJ is continuing to defend the constitutionality of DOMA, and are understandably disturbed by the still-unabandoned arguments the DOJ made back in June, they should be delighted by the turn taken in this reply brief. It will serve the cause of SSM in state and especially federal courts for years to come.