IGF CultureWatch

He's our newest IGF contributor-an undergraduate and columnist at American University, both openly gay and openly Republican. "I have been discriminated against more by Democrats than by Republicans," he writes. Read it here. We suspect, and hope, we'll be hearing a lot more from Alex.

Read to the bottom of this New York Times story for a revealing tidbit. The Brits bar entry of a Dutch politician and provocateur on grounds that he offends Muslims. Yet they have admitted "several Muslim clerics from Arab countries with a history of inflammatory statements on terrorism, women's rights and homosexuality." Increasingly this seems to be the pattern in Europe. Fear, rather than principle, appears to be at work, and apparently homosexuals aren't scary. But then, that's how it always is with speech restrictions.

"The gay community's failure to show tolerance is costing it friends." That's the last, portentous sentence of this column by Debra Saunders. She's a gay-friendly center-right columnist who has supported gay marriage in the past. But she did a "slow burn" as gay-rights advocates and courts rejected civil unions and as Prop. 8 supporters faced public condemnation by name.

With all respect to Saunders, I don't think there has been a "post-passage campaign to intimidate Prop. 8 supporters," though there certainly have been nasty and objectionable episodes, recycled again and again in an example of plural anecdotes becoming a trend. To the extent that anyone is harassed for supporting (or opposing) a ballot initiative, the answer is not to lash out at gay marriage but to protect donors' privacy, as we do voters'. That case is well made here.

But never mind. The important thing here is that Saunders is a canary in the mineshaft. Let's be realistic, gay folks: marriage has been heterosexual since...forever. To denounce as bigots or haters those who are reluctant to change marriage's age-old boundaries-even if they support civil unions, marriage in all but name-is a moral overreach and a strategic blunder of the first order. We have enough enemies. Let's tone down the accusatory rhetoric before we alienate our friends.

Unlike, I sometimes feel, practically every gay or lesbian person in the country, I'm doing my best not to make up my mind about President Obama before he's been in office, say, a week. Given the scope of the economic and foreign-policy problems he's facing, I think it's silly to expect quick action on gay issues. In fact, our side should be hoping he remembers the lesson of Bill Clinton and takes time to build credibility and lay groundwork before tackling, say, gays in the military. I'm cautiously optimistic that having Rick Warren give the inaugural invocation was a shrewd way of reassuring the cultural center-right that subsequent gay-friendly policy changes won't augur a sharp left turn.

Still, it's useful to remember that, once upon a time, George W. Bush looked like a different kind of Republican, one who might bring gays into the Republican big tent. Remember the Republican Unity Coalition? It sought to make homosexuality a "non-issue" within the Republican Party, and Bush seemed receptive-until, as coalition founder and (former) Bush family friend and fan Charles Francis puts it in a Washington Blade article, the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in 2003. Then Bush's head spun faster than Linda Blair's and all bets were off. Writes Francis, who shuttered the RUC and wrote off Bush:

This was the beginning of a years-long failure and squandered opportunity for the Republicans, who sure lost me, and now, most important, wonder how they could have lost a whole new generation of Americans.

Bush never came to office expecting to slam the GOP's door on gay Americans for a generation. Events forced him to choose and he chose wrong. As former Bushie Pete Wehner points out, governing is harder than promising. We'll see.

Better late than never, a friend points out this "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America," published in October by James Dobson's Focus on the Family, and fairly broadly criticized at the time.

It's long and hysterical-another sign of how beleaguered the hard-core Christian Right is feeling. Still more revealing, I count 18 paragraphs on homosexuality and gay marriage, versus four on abortion (aka, from a pro-life point of view, murder of babies). I found no instances of the word "divorce." "Adultery"? You gotta be kidding.

This is the kind of anti-gay obsessiveness and upside-down prioritizing that Rick Warren and others of his ilk and generation are moving away from. The more I think about Obama's choice of Warren to lead the inaugural prayer, the more I like it. Culturally, the moment is right to reach out to reachable evangelicals and marginalize the hysterics and obsessives who have all but monopolized their movement. The cultural left doesn't understand the difference between Warren and Dobson, but evangelicals sure will. And they'll know Obama and Warren are publicly declaring Dobsonism obsolete.

My mind boggled when a friend assured me the other day that Rick Warren is James Dobson with a friendlier face. HRC doesn't go quite that far, but it does say this: "Rev. Warren cannot name a single theological issue that he and vehemently, anti-gay theologian [sic...Dobson is a psychologist; should HRC know this?] James Dobson disagree on."

True, Warren is a transitional figure, hardly what gay people would call enlightened. But he is no Dobson or Wildmon or Robertson or Falwell. He has tried to move the evangelical movement away from politics. He thinks too little about homosexuality, instead of obsessing on it. By mostly ignoring homosexuality, he puts it in reasonable proportion to other (as he sees it) sins-and, with the religious right, mere proportionality is half the battle.

It's worth actually reading the BeliefNet interview which has become the locus classicus for those who call Warren a hater. He calls same-sex marriage a redefinition on the same order as adult-child marriage. Obtuse, to say the least. He also says, "Civil unions are not a civil right." Meaning, he explains, that the constitution doesn't mandate them.

But he also says he does not oppose California's domestic partner law (which is a civil union law, whatever the statutory name). And he says it's a "no brainer" that divorce is a bigger threat to family than gay marriage. And that the reason gay marriage gets so much more attention than divorce is because "we always love to talk about other [people's] sins more than ours."

Of course he is an evangelical preacher and he does think that homosexual relations are a sin which should not be dignified with public sanction. But he represents a major step forward over the generation before him (as the generation after him is better still). I hope that, beneath the denunciations, the folks on our side understand this.

Everyone, and by that I mean every person in the United States if not the world, should read this seminal speech given by Frank Kameny in 1969. It surfaced recently among his papers in the Library of Congress and constitutes his statement on behalf of a gay man, Benning Wentworth, who was appealing the denial of a security clearance by the Defense Department.

We throw down the gauntlet, clearly, unequivocally and unambiguously. We state for the world, as we have stated for the public, we state for the record and, if the Department forces us to carry the case that far, we state for the courts that Mr. Wentworth, being a healthy, unmarried, homosexual male, 35 years old, has lived and does live a suitable homosexual life, in parallel with the suitable active heterosexual sexual life lived by 75 percent of our healthy, unmarried, heterosexual males holding security clearances; and he intends to continue to do so indefinitely into the future. And please underline starting with the word "and intends to do so into the future". Underline that, please, Mr. Stenographer.

To read this visionary speech and realize that not even 40 years have passed is to marvel at this country of ours. And at our good fortune in having Frank Kameny among us.

I'm told, by the way, that Benning Wentworth is still alive and well. Hats off to him, too. Imagine the courage it took for an open homosexual to stand up to the Defense Department in 1969.

In California, spontaneous protests over the passage of Prop 8 continue to swell. Now there's talk of a national protest, though whether this amounts to anything remains to be seen. This is starting to look important.

I share some of Dale Carpenter's reservations about the optics of protesting against churches. But I wonder, hopefully, whether we're seeing a gay political awakening on the gay-marriage front.

For one reason, I'm so very, very tired of hearing from our opponents that gay folks don't really care much about marriage anyway. For another, the civil-rights era in the marriage struggle is ending.

The civil-rights model tried to separate marriage from the political process, because we didn't have nearly enough straight support to win. That left our opponents with the political field to themselves while we busied ourselves in the courts. Not any more. We now have enough straight allies to win, long-term, in the political arena.

To judge from the protests, that's where we'll be going. Goodbye Thurgood Marshall, hello Martin Luther King. Goodbye Lambda Legal, hello ACT-UP. Sure, more love, less anger than in the AIDS days. But the protests, provided they are peaceful and don't turn hateful or anti-religious, point the way forward.

A friend in California writes:

The battle now is purely one in the culture. Against every instinct of our framers, we now have to fight for our rights (or this one, at least) in the political arena itself. That means the protests are the leading edge now, not the courts.

If more gay people in California and elsewhere draw that lesson from Prop 8, our loss won't have been in vain.

Digesting the bitter Prop 8 news, I'm disappointed and sad to have lost gay marriage in California. The adoption of a constitutional ban there has set back the cause by years. What's more frustrating, though, is what I'm hearing from people on our side. "This just shows why civil rights shouldn't be put up for a vote." Or: "We lost this one, but there are other courts to try." To me this translates as: "We're determined not to learn from defeat."

Not just one defeat. On gay marriage, we're now zero for 30 on state constitutional bans. Think about that. Has any other political movement in the history of the United States compiled such an unblemished record of total electoral annihilation? An introspective movement should be doing some fundamental rethinking at this point.

My suggestion: Rethink, first, the wisdom of mindlessly pushing lawsuits through the courts without adequately preparing the public. The result is gay marriage in two states-one of which, Connecticut, would soon have had it anyway-at the cost of a backlash which has made the climb much steeper in dozens of other states, and which, in some states, has banned even civil unions. The California debacle is particularly stinging. We already had civil unions there, and we were only one Democratic governor away from seeing those converted legislatively, hence less controversially, to marriages. First rule of politics: if you're winning anyway, don't kick it away.

Rethink, second, the strategy of telling the public that we're entitled to marriage by right and that anyone who disagrees is a discriminator or, by implication, a bigot. Some portion of the public, let's call it a third, agrees with that proposition, but a third isn't enough. As Dale Carpenter points out, another, let's say, third loaths homosexuality, but they're not winnable. The key is the middle group, people who oppose anti-gay discrimination but see gender as part of the definition of marriage, not as a discriminatory detail. We're going to have to persuade these people that gay marriage is a good idea. We're going to have to talk about gay marriage instead of changing the subject to discrimination. Bludgeoning them with civil-rights rhetoric isn't going to work. Not if it failed in the country's bluest state in a bright-blue year.

The gay marriage issue is not going to be decided over the heads of the American people, and no amount of comparing it to Brown vs. Board of Education or any other dubiously relevant precedent will change that. Too many gay heads are too strategically locked into a litigation-based mindset that has become counterproductive. Too many people forget that Martin Luther King was a persuader, not a litigator, and that the real breakthroughs came through Congress, not courts.

Addendum: A useful emendation here. In a perverse way, it cheers me up a bit to know that, pre-Prop 8, California was not as close to SSM as I thought.

More: A silver lining in Arizona, courtesy of commenter Throbert...