IGF CultureWatch

Connecticut has just codified its (already court-ordered) gay marriage with significant religious liberty provisions attached. Vermont did the same thing just days ago. So we can now say that coupling gay marriage with opt-outs based on religious conscience is a trend, if not a movement.

IGFer Dale Carpenter is guardedly positive about this development. Put me down as enthusiastic. What's being demonstrated here is that an Armageddon-like conflict between gay rights and religious rights not only can but will be averted. Indeed, is a win for both gay equality and religious freedom, and it douses the culture wars into the bargain. That's hitting the Trifecta.

In this article, I argue that America is getting gay marriage right by steering a moderate and incrementalist path forward, despite the best efforts of culture warriors and purists to conspire against the center. Vermont and Connecticut are more evidence that this is true.

BTW: IGF is proud to welcome Dale Carpenter as a blogger. He's so smart that every time I read him I think, "Thank God he's on our side."

You've probably heard that Steve Schmidt, the Republican political consultant who managed John McCain's campaign, told Log Cabin Republicans Friday he's for gay marriage, and that the party as a whole needs to stop making opposition to SSM a litmus test. But that bald statement of the point doesn't convey the rare beauty of Schmidt's statement of Republican, and republican, ideals. Take a few minutes to read the whole speech.

Marc Ambinder doesn't think Schmidt will get anywhere. But here's another sign of a change in the climate: National Journal's poll of "insiders" (political professionals) finds that 59 percent of Dems say the party should support gay marriage. Meanwhile,

Exactly half of the 104 Republican Insiders who were surveyed said that their party should oppose gay marriage. Another 37 percent said they thought the party should avoid the issue, and 8 percent said the GOP should actually support gay marriage. The remainder also gave scattered volunteered responses like leave it up to the states, accept it, or that the party shouldn't care it. That's a pretty close divide between the Republican Insiders who say their party should oppose gay marriage compared to those who say avoid or support it.

In other words, support for SSM is no longer a political third rail for Dems...and Republicans are growing uncomfortable with their opposition.

Maggie Gallagher and I have found something to agree on! In its legislation adopting same-sex marriage, Vermont included some quite substantial opt-out clauses for religious organizations. These are not merely gestural, as David Bankof notes. Like Maggie, I see this as a potential landmark.

Maggie sees significance in the fact that the gay-marriage movement-which she regards as a juggernaut bearing down on her civil rights-"permitted" religious-liberty protections. I'd put it a bit differently: this kind of live-and-let-live arrangement, while imperfect, benefits both sides.

David Blankenhorn and I argue for tying religious-liberty protections to federal recognition of gay couples because it's a way to expand the comfort zone of both sides: gay couples and families get many of the protections they need, religious objectors get legally assured room to dissent. Vermont signals the political viability and real-world relevance of this approach.

It also, by the way, shows that legislatures can do politics better than courts. But we knew that.

...in November of 1971, the federal personnel office wrote this letter to Frank Kameny, the pioneering gay-rights activist (still going strong, btw), in response to Kameny's protest of the firing of a gay federal employee named Donald Preston Rau:

The activities of sodomy, fellatio, anal intercourse, mutual masturbation, and homosexual caressing and rubbing of bodies together to obtain sexual excitement or climax are considered to be acts of sexual perversions and to be acts of immoral conduct, which, under present mores of our society, are regarded as scandalous, disgraceful, and abhorrent to the overwhelming majority of people. ...

Individuals who engage in acts of sex perversion and other homosexual acts...are not regarded with respect by the overwhelming majority of people. Indeed, some of the most extreme epithets of contempt and vituperation are popularly applied to persons who engage in such activities...

The letter goes on, and on, in that vein (the first page is here).

And today? On April 3, 2009 (the same day, as it happens, when Iowa's Supreme Court ruled for gay marriage), John Berry, an openly gay man, was confirmed to head that same federal personnel office. And the 1971 letter to Kameny is, literally, a museum piece: it's in the Library of Congress, along with the rest of Kameny's papers. No comment I could make could say more than that.

(Hat tip to Charles Francis of the Kameny Papers project.)

It gets better: Via email, Frank Kameny explains that this case was part of litigation which, in 1973, produced a court order that led to the lifting of the federal gay-employment ban in 1975. He says he was told by a government official, "'The government has decided to change its policies to suit you,' which I have always cherished."

Frank continues:

In the 1960s [John W.] Macy's CSC [the Civil Service Commision, antecedent of today's Office of Personnel Management] would not even meet with us, to discuss these issues, until we picketed them on June 25, 1965. But they remained adamant, as the Library of Congress letters show.

I had thought that the issue of gays in government was long nicely settled and behind us. But now - to have an openly gay man appointed as the successor, several steps removed, to Macy and Hampton [Macy's successor]!!! They must be turning over in their graves. And I feel truly vindicated beyond anything I might ever have expected or imagined. It's like the perfect, contrived happy ending to a fictional fairy tale. It's too perfect to be true in reality. But there it is.

No, wait, it gets even better:

Berry has personally invited me to be present at his swearing-in.

Words fail, except to say: Thank you, Frank.

Can gay-marriage proponents and religious conservatives strike a bargain? David Blankenhorn and I proposed federal civil unions with a religious opt-out last month in a New York Times article, and recently we got a chance to try it out at a Brookings Institution panel.

Representatives of the Human Rights Campaign and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations didn't sign on the dotted line (not that they were expected to). But neither did they slam the door. And the give-and-take over the meaning of civil rights and the limits of compromise was fascinating. Listen to an audio podcast or read a transcript here.

This just in* from Pew: 56 percent of mainline Protestants think homosexuality should be accepted. That's Episcopalians/Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians. And here's a pleasant surprise: 40 percent of Baptists.

To be sure, evangelical acceptance remains low, at 26 percent. But the days of the cobra-mongoose relationship between Christianity and homosexuality are ending faster than even many of us appreciate.

* Actually, it's 2007 data. What would the numbers look like today?

As part of an interesting exchange with Deroy Murdock, who wonders why social conservatives fuss so much more about gay marriage than about websites that openly facilitate adultery, Maggie Gallagher sez:

...in the last five years, unmarried childearing has resumed its inexorable rise. 38 percent of all babies are born out of wedlock, which implies probably more than half of women who become mothers for the first time do so while not married. Is it mere coincidence that this resurgence in illegitimacy happened during the five years in which gay marriage has become (not thanks to me or my choice) the most prominent marriage issue in America - and the one marriage idea endorsed by the tastemakers to the young in particular?

From the National Marriage Project's latest (February 2009) "State of Our Unions" report, here's the trend in out-of-wedlock childbearing, 1960-2006.

Can you spot the effect of same-sex marriage?

Incidentally, "State of Our Unions" is an invaluable annual publication, which deserves more attention. If you look through the charts linked above, you'll find a mixed picture where the health of marriage is concerned. One trend, however, stands out as really dramatic since 2000, and that's the huge rise in heterosexual cohabitation.

As Figure 13 shows, the number of unmarried cohabiting opposite-sex couples living with one or more children has increased 60 percent since 2000 (!). Also up, though only mildly, is the percentage of high-school seniors saying that having a child without being married is "experimenting with a worthwhile lifestyle or not affecting anyone else" (Figure 17).

The two best ways I can think of to encourage cohabitation's emergence as the cultural equal of marriage are to (1) tarnish marriage as discriminatory in the minds of the young, which is what excluding gay couples from marriage is doing, and (2) turn same-sex couples who have kids into walking advertisements for out-of-wedlock parenthood, which is what excluding gay parents from marriage is doing.

More... A foretaste of what will happen if marriage is defined as that form of union which excludes gays: in California, two college students are launching an initiative effort to end marriage discrimination by ending civil marriage, replacing it with civil partnerships for all couples.

Here's a TV ad called "Hope," from the Equality California people, who are already preparing for a rematch on marriage. And here's why I think it's potentially important.

I talked the other day with a California-based political consultant who explained that the problem we faced with Proposition 8, and other anti-gay-marriage ballot fights, is that short-term tactics and long-term strategy work at cross purposes. In the short term, the election outcome is decided by a narrow group of swing voters, and these folks are turned off by appeals that feature gay people or gay couples (especially with kids). But running vague, de-gayed ads that appeal to this group means we never make the positive case for marriage, which is the key to moving public opinion and mobilizing support in the longer run.

The answer? The time to educate the public on gay people and families is when we are not fighting a ballot initiative. Now, in other words.

Raising dollars for strategic advertising outside the context of a political campaign can't be easy, especially in a huge media market like California's. Whether EQCA's campaign is affordable or sustainable is an open question. But the good news is that we are learning. And our strategic message, with its appeal to love and commitment and inclusion in the American dream and of course fairness, is a formidable weapon, when unholstered.

Here's another gay-marriage compromise proposal. David Blankenhorn and I proposed one last weekend, and I'm heartened by the broad discussion it has engendered. I'm even more heartened by the emergence of a second, quite different, approach.

The authors, Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis, propose creating a federal civil-union status that would be open to all couples who can't legally marry-including couples, such as sisters, who can't legally have a sexual relationship. That way, the government would continue to formally recognize only one kind of sexual union, man-woman marriage. In exchange, "revisionists" (gay-marriage supporters) would agree to live with the Defense of Marriage Act, which says that the federal government will recognize only man-woman couples as marriage.

So we'd go from today's world, where one side demands full marriage rights and the other side rejects even minimal recognition of gay couples, to a world where same-sex couples got federal civil unions-which they'd have to share with a few nuns and aging sisters-but gays agreed not to ask for more from Washington. States, presumably, could continue to tussle over gay marriage, but the federal debate would be over.

There's much to think about here, but one practical question strikes me as a likely show-stopper: How could any agreement not to pursue changes in DOMA bind future activists and politicians? A gentlemen's agreement wouldn't be enforceable, and a constitutional amendment would be both difficult as a political matter and unacceptable to SSM advocates, who will see it as writing inequality into the Constitution-the nuclear option, from our point of view.

That's just a first-blush reaction, though. I think the most important thing about Anderson-Girgis is its willingness to reach out and try to do something for same-sex couples, as well as something to mitigate the culture wars. It should be welcomed by SSM advocates as a good-faith gesture, and it deserves to be broadly and respectfully discussed. And it's another sign that maybe, just maybe, the ice is beginning to thaw around the frozen gay-marriage debate.

Worth reading-and pondering: the two political consultants who steered anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 to victory in California, Frank Schubert and Jeff Flint, explain candidly how they did it. Some points of note:

1) The "yes" side won because it set the terms of the argument. By focusing on education and gay marriage supporters' (alleged) arrogance, they defined the battle as being about gay intolerance (ramming SSM down schools' and voters' throats) instead of about tolerance of gays. The anti-8 side never effectively responded. Instead it denounced the "yes" ads as unfair.

2) A decisive moment toward the end-"the break of the election"-was an own-goal that the pro-gay side scored against itself. "In what may prove to be the most ill-considered publicity stunt ever mounted in an initiative campaign, a public school in San Francisco took a class of first graders to City Hall to witness the wedding of their lesbian teacher. And they brought along the media." Yes-as Schubert does not say-the field trip was egregiously misrepresented by the pro-8 forces. But it was an own-goal nonetheless.

3) The pro-8 forces were so sure that the antis' effort to portray opponents of same-sex marriage as bigots and discriminators would backfire that they didn't even bother to respond. They were right.

I've been arguing for some time that we will not win marriage by dismissing opponents as haters and contrary arguments as proof of bigotry. We must make a positive case and respond frankly and respectfully to opponents' qualms. We must be prepared for the obvious attacks, instead of believing that justice will prevail. Above all, we must not talk to the voters as if we were entitled to their support ("Don't put rights up to a vote," etc., etc.). If you don't believe me...ask Frank Schubert.