Author Archives: Stephen Henry Miller

The Last Holdouts

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Just a few scant years ago, who would have thought that marriage equality could be coming even to Mississippi? Not that the fight there is over. As The Clarion Ledger reports:

Same-sex marriages won’t be allowed in Mississippi while the state defends its gay-marriage ban, a federal appeals court said Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves on Nov. 25 overturned Mississippi’s definition of marriage as being only between a man and a woman, but he put his own decision on hold for two weeks to give the state time to appeal his ruling.

On Thursday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Mississippi cannot issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples during the appeals process. But the New Orleans-based court agreed to a quick process for considering the dispute over Mississippi’s definition of who can marry.

The paper also reports that:

Republican Gov. Phil Bryant said he voted for Mississippi’s constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and he “absolutely” still supports it.

“This is a constitutional issue with me,” Bryant told reporters Tuesday in Jackson. “You know, the people of the state of Mississippi vote to change a law, and then one federal judge can say, ‘Well, I’m going to overrule that.’ Then what good is the rule of law? What would be next? What if a judge said, ‘We think you ought to legalize marijuana.’ Then does that mean the laws of the state don’t exist anymore?

“So, this is a constitutional battle that I think you’re seeing waged all across the United States, is whether or not the people of a particular state, or the lawmakers that represent it, have the right to make certain laws,” Bryant said.

Recent months have seen a surprising number of conservative GOP governors and other officials acquiesce to the inevitable and accept, if not support, rulings favoring the freedom to marry (including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, among others). But the hard core of the social conservative base, exemplified in Congress by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and by governors such as Bryant and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, will man the guns of the last redoubt.

It matters not the Gov. Bryant’s argument is, well, specious, given that a key role of the judiciary is to overturn “democratically” passed laws that violate the fundamental protections of the federal Constitution. Ours is a republic of separate and distinct branches, some with the power to overrule others, and not a majoritarian dictatorship or mobocracy. Conservatives used to understand and defend that point, to the chagrin of progressives.

That the left often supports government overreach of dubious legality, and that these expansions of federal executive power do not involve the protection of fundamental liberties but far more often violate individual rights, confuses things. Fair enough, a pox on both partisan houses, as both left and right, conservatives and progressives, Democrats and Republicans are too often power-grubbing hypocrites, if not downright cesspools of corruption.

Nevertheless, recognition of the right to marry is coming, even in Mississippi, if not with a 5th Circuit ruling, then when the Supreme Court inevitably weighs in. And this expansion of liberty, despite the opposition of local majorities, is fundamentally and constitutionally sound.

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The Catholic Church’s Ongoing Marriage Muddle

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Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich, appointed by Pope Francis, has a softer tone in his opposition to gay marriage, but he lacked a convincing argument this week on CBS’s “Face the Nation” (view clip here, after ad) as he tried to explain the Roman church’s opposition to gay marriage because it’s necessary “to protect mothers and fathers who come together to continue the human race.”

When asked by interviewer Norah O’Donnell about gay parents, he returned to the need for “legislation that supports, protects and upholds those who take the risk to bring children into the world”, but not for gay couples who are raising children, because they are “not bringing children into the world to preserve the human race,” or at least are not bringing children into the world “through their own love,” which is what deserves the state’s protection.

Church representatives had an easier time when they could just declare homosexual relations a sin and be done with it. Instead, the kind of convoluted argument Archbishop Cupich puts forward is going to be increasingly unconvincing as more gay couples become parents, even assuming that one were to accept the view that childbearing is the only legitimate rationale for state-recognized marriage.

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Australia and Finland Move Forward

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On the international scene, there’s good news from down under: ruling Liberal party leaders will shortly decide whether to allow their members a conscience vote on a recently introduced marriage equality bill. As Reason reports:

“Want to hear a senator introduce legislation legalizing government recognition of same-sex marriage in a speech that also invokes the names of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwing von Mises? You’ll have to go to Australia for that, mate.”

Liberal Party Prime Minister Tony Abott remains opposed to allowing gay people the freedom to marry (but will likely acquiesce to allowing a parliamentary vote). Also opposed to marriage equality was former Labour PM Julia Gillard, although she now says that gay marriage seems inevitable.

And more good international news. Finland is set to become “the last Scandinavian country in which gays and lesbians can legally tie the knot if the measure receives final approval,” the Washington Blade reports. And right on Putin’s doorstep, that’s sure to unleash fresh rage from Russia’s gay-hating despot, whose tyranny has driven many Russian gays to seek asylum in the U.S.

More. Putin surrounded by deviant nations! Poland gets its first openly gay mayor in elections with record number of LGBT candidates.

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Social Issues Polarization and Politics

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There is a similarity in the way that Obama has approached immigration and the Hispanic voting bloc, and his approach to gay issues—including “don’t ask don’t tell” repeal, the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and marriage equality—and the gay voting bloc. It boils down to this: Obama and the congressional Democratic leadership (Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi) will often not act when they can in order to maintain a campaign issue and mobilize the relevant bloc for the next election. But when Obama feels he is forced to act, he does so in a way that’s ensured to inflame polarization and partisanship, which he then attempts to use to his advantage.

On immigration reform, in 2007 Sen. Obama scuttled a comprehensive legislative deal worked out with John McCain and other immigration centrists in both parties, allowing him to use the issue in his 2008 presidential campaign. Then, having won the presidency and with his party in control of both houses of Congress, Obama, Reid and Pelosi did nothing for the next two years on immigration. Then they ran on the issue (albeit unsuccessfully) in the 2010 midterms. At which point the Republicans took over the House and blocked a somewhat bipartisan deal that had passed the Democratic Senate, as part of their own bloc pandering (for the anti-immigration vote).

Similarly, as I’ve blogged before, Obama and congressional Democrats did nothing to move ENDA out of committee during 2009-10, when in control of Congress. Nor did they attempt to put an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell” up until the very end of 2010, when LGBT activists (excluding the lapdogs at the Human Rights Campaign) and several LGBT progressive bloggers went ballistic, since it seemed likely the GOP would win the midterms.

The Democrats’ endgame strategy was to attach “don’t ask” repeal to a Defense Authorization bill they knew Republicans would be compelled to vote against, even if they supported ending the ban. Gays serving or hoping to serve their country would lose out, but the issue could be used to mobilize gay voters in the midterms. And if the GOP took the House, Republicans could then be blamed for keeping the ban in place (which the GOP leadership, alas, would do, placating their party’s social conservatives base).

At which point, thanks mainly to Senators Susan Collins, a Republican, and Joe Lieberman, by then an independent, a “clean” motion to end the military ban was pushed and passed, with a surprising amount of GOP support, but annoying the Democratic leadership that had wanted to stymie it.

As Collins aide Mathew Gagnon wrote:

The White House and Reid had decided that hammering home the “party of no” narrative and painting the Republicans as obstinate obstructionists was, to them, good politics. Since that wasn’t actually happening, they tried to make it appear that it was.

But Reid got outflanked. Collins, together with Lieberman, unexpectedly introduced a standalone bill to repeal don’t ask, don’t tell, intended to go around Reid’s roadblocks. After a great deal of lobbying to rally a number of other Republicans to support the bill — a necessary step to prevent a filibuster — the Collins bill eventually passed 65-31.

And that, of course, is just one example of the Obama way.

More. Via Edward Morrissey in The Fiscal Times:

The Obama administration and Democratic majority…agenda has focused on wedge issues that have little to do with the middle class, but everything to do with demagoguing for narrow activist interests. … Democrats could have produced a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2009-10 rather than Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, but chose to renege on Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge of making it a first-year issue.

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NOM’s Time Is Passed

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I think that Salon may be jumping the gun in declaring that the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage has “collapsed into debt“—it doesn’t take much money to fund a group that basically issues press releases and talks to the media, so I suspect it will be around to make mischief and get quoted. But NOM’s fortunes are clearly in decline as the freedom to marry advances without popular backlash, outside the diminishing fever swamps of the anti-gay right. Also, alienating bedrock Republicans by backing liberal Democrats over gay GOPers was just plain stupid.

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Marriage and the State

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R. R. Reno, who edits First Things, a journal for very serious religious conservatives, proposes separating religious marriages from government-sanctioned civil marriage, as a protest against state recognition of same-sex marriage. The government would do its thing, and ordained ministers would do their thing, but ministers would no longer operate as agents of the state when it comes to performing marriages.

Some libertarians have long supported “privatizing” marriage, which would remove government from the marriage-sanctioning business altogether, making civil marriage a contract agreed to between the parties (the enforcement of which, if disputed, would fall to government to adjudicate, as with other contracts)—a somewhat different and more radical idea.

Although Reno’s First Things argument is based on animus toward equality for gay people under the law, I don’t know that it’s a terrible notion in and of itself. Religion is always stronger when it is freest from government’s command.

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Changing Times

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David Lampo writes in an op-ed in The Hill:

In short, there is not a shred of evidence that the Republican sweep was motivated in any significant way by the recent court decisions that have made same-sex marriage legal in 33 states and the District of Columbia. The response to these developments on the part of most voters, including Republicans, has been a collective yawn.

And in those blue states where Republican candidates won unexpectedly, it was their support for gay rights that made them acceptable to enough Democrat voters to win their races.

Another political sign: Republican Congressman replacing Michele Bachmann names gay marriage supporter his chief-of-staff . (The post is from a conservative, anti-gay-marriage website, which obviously disapproves.)

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Young Voters: Socially Liberal, Less Democratic

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“The GOP gained young voters, but only because it lost the culture war,” is the call-out quote (print edition) summing up this New York Times op-ed by Mark Bauerlein, senior editor of the conservative religious journal First Things. He writes:

Exit poll data show that young voters backed House Democrats 54 percent to 43 percent, half the advantage of 2006 and two percentage points lower than in 2010. …

It’s not that [young voters] have become less socially liberal; it’s that social conservatism is a paper tiger. Liberalism has won so handily in the culture and courts that it no longer serves as a rallying cry. …

When it comes to young voters, liberal politicians are victims of their culture-war success. They have pressed a laissez-faire posture in moral and private matters, and have won. But millennials have adopted not the posture of their liberal elders that fostered group identity (be it “union member,” “disenfranchised minority” or “F.D.R. Democrat”), but a soft libertarianism that makes individual preference king. …Once social conservatism was defeated, the set allegiance to Democratic campaigns was bound to erode.

I’ve said before that the victory (or, at least, clearly approaching victory) for the freedom to marry would save Republicans from themselves. And that appears to be playing out.

More. From The Atlantic: Republicans Are Driving the Momentum for Gay Marriage.

Furthermore. It’s not inconsequential that the favorability of the Democratic Party is at a 20-year low, having sunk below Republican Party numbers. “The GOP currently has an image advantage over the Democratic Party,” according to Gallup, although “neither party is held in particularly high regard.”

More again. Another reason for the shifting political tides: Democrat Voters Confused: “I Didn’t Realize I Would Be The One Who Was Going to Pay For It Personally”

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The Once and Future Clintons

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This New York Post op-ed on gays and the Clintons is a few weeks old, but it’s solid:

As author and academic Nathaniel Frank explains, “Clinton will go down in history as the only president who signed … federal laws mandating discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans.” Yet this Saturday in Washington, DC, the same Bill Clinton will be welcomed as keynote speaker at the 18th annual national dinner of the Human Rights Campaign—America’s largest LGBT rights group.

Calling him a “transformational leader for our nation and the world,” HRC president Chad Griffin has said he’s “thrilled” Clinton will once again appear at the sold-out black-tie event.

Griffin and HRC take hackery to new levels. And please, spare us all the “yeah, well Republicans are worse” meme that some commenters think is just oh so clever, as if that were an all-purpose redemption card for vile Democrats.

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