IGF CultureWatch

There’s been much mischief made of late by critics of the “Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent” statement that I and other nonleftist gay writers (among others) recently signed, linking it to a supposed defense of all manner of anti-gay or otherwise scandalous misbehavior.

The statement argues, among other points, that it’s wrong to pressure companies to fire executives because they don’t personally support marriage equality. It was a response to boycott threats against Mozilla that led to the forced resignation of CEO Brendan Eich over a $1,000 contribution he gave several years ago to support California’s Prop 8 initiative (through which a majority of Californians banned state recognition of same-sex marriage, until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise).

That doesn’t mean boycotts are never justified; some certainly are, while others are an overreaction, or may be purely unjustified. And some are arguably justifiable but still very bad strategy if the goal is to build a broad majority consensus for gay legal equality.

From what I’ve read, for instance, I wouldn’t give my business to nor oppose the boycott of the Beverly Hills Hotel, owned by the Dorchester Collection, which is owned by the Sultan of Brunei. The sultan, who is dictator over his realm, recently moved to institute Sharia law there, which calls for stoning to death gays and adulterers, among others.

The sultan’s ownership is a few steps away from direct, but the nature of his evil actions is so great that it calls for a strong response. If enough pain is exerted, the Dorchester Collection may sell the property, or the sultan might even sell the Dorechester Collection. It’s probably folly to think that the sultan will stop persecuting gays and others, however. Also, we should at least be mindful that hotel employees, through no fault of their own, could be out of a job while the point is being made.

Of a different magnitude altogether is the ginning up of a boycott threat that led HGTV (the home and garden network) to cancel an upcoming flip your house show with the brothers David and Jason Benham, over their conservative faith-based opposition to the homosexual “agenda” and abortion.

This is somewhat akin to the recent “Duck Dynasty” controversy, which engendered such a backlash that family patriarch Phil Robertson was restored to the show despite his faith-based opposition to homosexuality. That show is all about the Robertson family and its personalities, so I didn’t have an issue with people telling A&E they no longer wanted to watch the brood (if they ever had). Whereas the Benham brothers show, “Flip it Forward,” was to be about helping “lower-income families purchase fixer uppers and transform them into dream homes.”

That’s a difference. And even if you think the brothers’ views are beyond the pale, they’ve gone from being just two of the many, many, home fixer-uppers and house flippers that populate HGTV to being a culture war cause celebre, “swamped with media requests for interviews.” CNN being just one example.

Recent weeks have seen former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice’s withdrawal as commencement speaker at Rutgers University following protests by leftwing faculty and students over her role in the Iraq War, and Brandeis University’s decision to cancel Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s honorary degree because leftwing faculty and students protested her impassioned criticism of Islamic brutality against women. As Ruth R. Wisse notes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “those who admit no legitimate opposition to their ideas feel duty-bound to shut down unwelcome speakers.”

These actions by universities surrendering to activists of a totalitarian bent who want to keep students from hearing viewpoints with which they disagree (legitimate opinions, even if debatable) is the company with which gay rights supporters are now being compared.

More. With hindsight, I’d now say the “Duck Dynasty” boycott call was inappropriate and, ultimately, counter-productive. Exposure, criticism, and the resulting plunge in ratings would have been a more judicious and adequate response than pressuring A&E to order Phil Robertson off the show, and would have avoided the network’s subsequent retreat in order to placate socially conservative viewers and fans (which many/most of the protestors never were).

Boycott threats work both ways, and often backfire by turning their targets into victims of the politically correct thought police. And thus do rightwing ideologues become free-speech martyrs (Chick-fil-A being another case in point).

Furthermore. As if to demonstrate the above, when the controversy erupted SunTrust Banks pulled all of its listed properties with the Benham brothers—provoking a predictable backlash that led to the bank’s reversal, announcing: “SunTrust supports the rights of all Americans to fully exercise their freedoms granted under the Constitution, including those with respect to free speech and freedom of religion.”

I tend to agree with Walter Olson’s support for Justice Kennedy’s decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway, on allowing ministers to give sectarian prayers when ceremonially opening town council meetings. But whether one accepts Justice Kennedy’s reasoning or not, I think it’s positive that he’s seen as independent enough to side with the court’s conservatives in opposition to the liberal bloc, and not just on business issues. It makes his past and future decisions in support of gay legal equality all the more influential.

That’s to say, from a broad perspective it’s good that gay equality isn’t seen only as an issue that big-government progressives support.

On a separate matter somewhat related, the week saw another nasty little homophobic attack on openly gay GOP congressional candidate Carl DeMaio by progressive gay activists that backfired, tripping up DeMaio’s Democratic opponent. Apparently John Aravosis of AmericaBlog doesn’t like gay Republicans who are in the closet, and really hates gay Republicans who are not in the closet.

Democratic homophobic insinuations against DeMaio are nothing new, again demonstrating that Gay Republicans Who Might Win Drive LGBT Democrats Berserk.

More. And they just keep coming. Contra HRC’s Fred Sainz’s partisan assertion otherwise, “To say that Carl DeMaio was anything but 100% on board with the campaign to defeat Prop 8 is an outright lie,” says Arlon Staggs, former Steering Committee member of HRC’s San Diego Chapter.

Furthermore. The Washington Blade looks at gay Democrats critical of the Victory Fund’s endorsement of Richard Tisei, an openly gay Republican running for Congress in Massachusetts. Tisei, unlike DeMaio, met all the Victory Fund’s litmus tests, both stated (opposed to any restrictions on abortion) and unstated (not provoking the ire of government employee unions by favoring public pension reforms). The critics’ beef, ultimately, is over the Victory Fund being even the least bit nonpartisan rather than what HRC has become, a Democratic party fundraising auxiliary.

The truth, the truth, what is the truth? Gawker claims:

In the summer of 2013, according to multiple sources with knowledge of their exchange, [Fox news anchor] Shepard Smith approached Fox News president Roger Ailes about publicly coming out. The newly attached anchor was eager, at the time, to finally acknowledge his sexuality. “It’s time,” he told Ailes and other colleagues. “It’s time.” Instead, Ailes informed Smith that the network’s famously conservative audience would not tolerate a gay news anchor. Ailes’ answer was definitive: Smith could not say he’s gay.

In response, Smith and Ailes issued an angry denial, calling Gawker’s allegations “100% false and a complete fabrication,” and arguing much of the “evidence,” which came from anonymous sources, doesn’t add up. Elsewhere online are even stronger responses from Smith.

Given the ceaseless attacks on Fox News from left-liberal partisans, I’d need more to convince me that this isn’t just another hatchet job.

The United Church of Christ in North Carolina is suing to overturn that state’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Specifically, the Tar Heel state outlaws clergy performing same-sex marriages (which, in any event, are not recognized by the state):

As part of the state ban, it is a Class 1 misdemeanor for a minister to perform a marriage ceremony for a couple that hasn’t obtained a civil marriage license. In addition, the law allows anyone to sue the minister who performs a marriage ceremony without a license.

The law certainly seems to infringe on the rights of religious denominations and their clergy to perform rituals of their choosing, although whether that argument will led the courts to overturn the ban on state recognition of these marriages is less certain. Still, it’s an interesting development.

Gawker looks at The Sad Truths Behind the L.A. Party Scene That Took Down Bryan Singer.

I don’t know if the rape accusations directed at director Bryan Singer and others at what’s described as a fairly routine Hollywood pool party orgy have any merit. And it should go without saying that straight Hollywood bigwigs have been accused of rape (often involving underage victims) from Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle through Roman Polanksi and beyond. Still, the description of cute young things being rounded up by professional procurers to be sex party bait for big name Hollywood directors and producers, and agreeing to do so in hopes of getting a bit part that could (but almost never seems to) lead to a big break, is, in fact, very sad.

Why would we think that gay power players, in Hollywood or elsewhere, should be less amoral than their straight counterparts (although it would be nice if, somehow, they were)?

Californian Carl DeMaio has an excellent shot at being among the first openly gay Republicans to be elected to Congress. But as I’ve said before (and to the annoyance of the partisan lock-step brigade, will keep saying), successful openly gay Republican officeholders are LGBT progressives worst nightmare.

As noted in this report by Foxnews.com:

DeMaio has been the target of homophobic attacks. But where are those attacks coming from? It’s not always from the far right social conservatives you’d expect; rather, it’s been from DeMaio’s left—the liberal and Democrat-affiliated groups that you’d think would be proud that an openly gay successful businessman has decided to run for office.

One false attack drew the attention of the San Diego Ethics Commission. An anonymous left-wing group funded a SuperPac and sent mailers of DeMaio Photoshopped next to a drag queen to neighborhoods with a majority of elderly and African-American voters, knowing that such a photo would depress support for DeMaio. That was so egregious and false that the group was fined by the city’s Ethics Commission, but even after that, and with his 100 percent voting record with the LGBT community, the Left still didn’t speak up to defend him. …

As the race heats up and DeMaio gains in the polls ahead of the Republican primary on June 3rd, the LGBT groups have gone from silence about his candidacy to actively working against him.

What would be the impact if one, two or even three openly gay Republicans were elected to Congress in November (counting Richard Tisei in Massachusetts and Dan Innis in New Hampshire), as now seems possible? It could hasten the inevitable sea change within the national GOP on gay issues.

Bart Hinkle takes note that the libertarian Cato Institute “has done a great service by filing a brief in Virginia’s gay marriage case that makes a conservative argument for the liberal position” favoring marriage equality. He writes:

But what of tradition? Traditionally, marriage has meant the union of one man and one woman. Well, Cato retorts, “no tradition can supersede the Constitution.” That is a direct quote from Justice Antonin Scalia in a 1990 case. A nice touch. Cato goes on to cite several other cases, all making the same point as Scalia did. “If a so-called tradition or history of discrimination were sufficient to justify perpetuating the discriminatory practice,” writes [Cato’s Ilya Shapiro], “our public schools, drinking fountains, and swimming pools would still be segregated by race. . . . Carving out of the text of the 14th Amendment an exception for traditional forms of discrimination would have strangled the Equal Protection Clause in its crib.”

Virginia enacted its marriage amendment specifically to prevent gays and lesbians from exercising a liberty exercised by straights. As Cato’s brief makes abundantly clear, it is precisely the sort of state-imposed discrimination against a caste of people the 14th Amendment was written to prevent.

The brief, filed jointly by Cato and the Constitutional Accountability Center, can be read here. An overview by Cato’s Ilya Sharpiro’s can be read here.

Jonathan Rauch blogs, “Lots of people compare the opposition to gay marriage and the resistance to interracial relationships. It’s a flawed analogy. Here’s why.” Excerpt:

I recently talked to a gay-rights organizer whose job includes building support for marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws in conservative states….When I asked if the analogy to racism was helpful, she groaned. No analogies are helpful, she replied, but this one is especially counterproductive. People snap into a defensive crouch and shut down. No one will trust or talk to someone who calls them, in effect, a racist, the worst thing you can be in America. Winning converts, finishing the fight, she said, requires taking people on a journey toward seeing marriage and homosexuality in a new light. It’s a process, and an accusatory approach aborts it.

A public statement, “Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent: Why We Must Have Both” has been posted at Real Clear Politics, with a number of prominent signatories. The statement is premised on the following declaration:

“We support same-sex marriage; many of us have worked for it, in some cases for a large portion of our professional and personal lives. We affirm our unwavering commitment to civic and legal equality, including marriage equality. At the same time, we also affirm our unwavering commitment to the values of the open society and to vigorous public debate—the values that have brought us to the brink of victory.”

For me, this is the heart of the matter and our central disagreement with the self-appointed enforcers of orthodoxy:

“We should criticize opposing views, not punish or suppress them.”

It won’t convince the heresy hunters who believe you win when you silence your opponents by threatening their livelihood, but they’re a lost cause and an embarrassment to the enlightenment values of classical liberalism. For those who support gay legal equality but might be misled by “progressives” into thinking that shouting down your opposition wins the debate, we hope it will provide some intellectual clarity.

More. Rick Sincere links to a variety of blog posts referencing the statement.

And this, from Conor Friedersdorf.

I don’t always agree with Andrew Sullivan, but he is spot on in calling out a truly repugnant “history” of the gay marriage fight that serves, in Sullivan’s words, as a “cringe-inducing hagiography” of Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the Democratic Party’s LGBT fundraising auxillary.

The book Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality,” by Times reporter Jo Becker, was excerpted in the paper’s Sunday Magazine. As Sullivan noted in a series of posts, the book ignores the groundbreaking work on marriage equality by himself, Bruce Bawer, Evan Wolfson, and others (some conservatives, some progressive Democrats), in order to portray HRC as the vanguard force for historical change, under Griffin’s wise leadership. For instance, Sullivan writes:

For Becker, until the still-obscure Griffin came on the scene, the movement for marriage equality was a cause “that for years had largely languished in obscurity.” I really don’t know how to address that statement, because it is so wrong, so myopic and so ignorant it beggars belief that a respectable journalist could actually put it in print.

He observes:

If you woke up after a long sleep in 2009, and suffer from total memory loss, it makes some sort of sense. But if you know anything about the subject or any history before 2008 or know anyone in the movement before then or even now, this book is as absurd as it is stupid. And no lies and spin from Becker about what she actually wrote will change that.

And he cites, among others also taking issue with Becker and the Times, an analysis by Hank Plante regarding:

…how Becker’s attack on everyone in the movement apart from Griffin is just an extension of Griffin’s own contempt for the two decades of staggering progress that made his unseemly credit-grabbing possible.

The point is not just extremely bad political journalism (which I expect from the New York Times these days), but the utter self-serving mendacity of HRC (ok, I expect that as well).

On a happier note, a further sign of changing times—and the sort of development that’s becoming much more common, often despite (rather than because of) party hacks like Chad Griffin: Lawyer who defended Calif. gay marriage ban plans daughter’s gay wedding. Let’s celebrate those who truly have brought about the extraordinary advances for marriage equality.

More. The Washington Blade reports on the controversy.