Author Archives: Stephen Henry Miller

ENDA Is Passé

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Openly gay Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) hopes to get half the members of the House to sign a discharge petition that would force a vote on a revised Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The reformulated ENDA would limit the current bill’s exemption for religious organizations, including religiously affiliated private schools and charities. The narrowed exemption might apply only to ministerial positions, which would be a deal-killer for many/most of ENDA’s current House GOP co-sponsors, and I suspect also some Democrats. And although ENDA already was passed in the Senate, with revised language it would stall there as well during reconciliation.

The dilemma: Without a sharply curtailed exemption, many LGBT activists have announced they will no longer support ENDA.

In short, ENDA still is likely to be on a road going nowhere, although the discharge petition endeavor will try to mobilize LGBT voters in the midterms (it’s also supported by openly gay GOP congressional candidates Carl DeMaio and Richard Tisei).

Despite these efforts, ENDA increasingly seems like inside beltway baseball for politicos and activists; it’s no longer generating any real interest among gay voters, whose passion is directed toward marriage equality.

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Dinner with Log Cabin Republicans

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Tonight I attended the Log Cabin Republicans’ Annual Spirit of Lincoln dinner in Washington, D.C. Guests of honor I spotted at the reception or dinner included Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), along with openly gay congressional candidates Carl DeMaio (Calif) and Richard Tisei (Mass.) I chatted with tax activist Grover Norquist (always affable) and journalist friend James Kirchick. Texas Log Cabin folks at my table entertained with tales of battling against their hidebound state party.

Tom Wahl, Jr., the chairman of the Liberty Education Forum, spoke of working to change opposition to gay legal equality in the deep south and elsewhere, Republican to Republican—a campaign I believe will be more effective than a more highly publicized effort being undertaken by an LGBT progressive organization.

The first keynoter was supply-side economist Larry Kudlow, who talked about Reagan’s embrace of big-tent Republicanism, and why we need to make the case that unshackling American enterprise from excessive taxation and regulation is good for middle and working class Americans. He called for passage of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (I wonder if he knows many leading LGBT activists are now against ENDA because of its exemption for religious organizations). Then Mary Cheney spoke movingly about the necessity for marriage equality, and why we will not have true equality for LGBT Americans until both parties are onboard, and signs that this is now happening thanks to the efforts of Log Cabin Republicans and others working within the GOP.

Giving credence to Cheney’s view, in the Washington Examiner Carmen Fowler LaBerge, who “advocates on social issues from a Christian conservative position” announced “I’ll probably get myself in trouble — but I’m going to do it anyway: I think there’s a growing consensus that the culture war on marriage has been lost.” Other articles have noted that “culture war” issues are now working in Democrats’ favor.

What can’t go on forever won’t, and the GOP’s opposition to full legal equality for gay people, including the freedom to marry, is one of those things.

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Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate

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A Michel Lind hit piece at Salon against libertarian investor Peter Thiel suggests, among other very bad things, that he’s anti-gay. Lind writes:

Peter Thiel wouldn’t be on any publication’s list of leading “public intellectuals” if he were a failed investor who worked in obscurity at a law firm or investment bank and, in his spare time, wrote defenses of anti-gay slurs and denunciations of female suffrage and endorsements of seasteading for the libertarian intellectual ghetto.

The evidence for the anti-gay charge? Lind quotes from a Fortune article:

In 1995 he and Sacks published a book called The Diversity Myth, in which they argued that in the campus context, “those persons complaining about oppression are generally not the ones to have experienced it firsthand.” In one disturbing passage they come to the defense of a law student friend who in 1992 had shouted an antigay slur outside the cottage of a gay resident fellow as a protest against campus speech codes. The authors argue that the law student’s near-universal execration afterward, official and unofficial, was disproportionate to his offense.

What Lind somehow fails to mention is that Thiel has long been openly gay, a rarity in the top echelons of Silicon Valley. In fact, this very morning on CNBC he was asked, as an openly gay man, about the lack of openly gay CEOs in America (he said times were changing and we’d be seeing more). But that wouldn’t fit into Lind’s, or Salon’s, anti-business, anti-libertarian, anti-anti-left narrative.

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Primary Night

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Openly gay business professor Dan Innis has lost his GOP primary bid to represent New Hampshire’s first district. In Massachusetts, scandal-tarred Democratic incumbent Rep. John Tierney was defeated in the Democratic primary, which means openly gay GOP Republican challenger Richard Tisei is now much less likely to prevail in the general election (although it would be nice to see the Human Rights Campaign endorse him, given no Democratic incumbent in the race and no prospect of the Democrats reclaiming the House).

That leaves San Diego’s Carl DeMaio as the openly gay GOP congressional candidate with a real shot at winning. DeMaio, of course, is not backed by either HRC (which is loath to support any Republican, whether gay, gay-supportive or otherwise) nor the Victory Fund (which did support Innis and Tisei).

DeMaio, while serving on the San Diego city council, spearheaded public pension reforms detested by government employee unions, which seems more important to LGBT “nonpartisan” but progressive groups then his support for marriage equality, or even his pro-choice stance on abortion (another Victory Fund litmus test). Log Cabin Republicans, however, are energetically working on his behalf.

A positive sign: Monica Wehby, a Republican Senate candidate in Oregon, unveils a TV spot highlighting her support for marriage equality. It’s “a reflection of the rapidly shifting politics of the issue,” says Politico.

[Site redesign – thanks to our volunteer help! Comments should now be back, with new posts to come later this week (busy, busy) – Stephen H. Miller.]

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Remembering Joan

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I found this video of the late Joan Rivers discussing her mortality with daughter Melissa surprisingly moving.

Rivers was a Republican, and as her friend Peggy Noonan explained, this is:

…always a surprising thing in show business, and in a New Yorker, but she was one because, as she would tell you, she worked hard, made her money with great effort, and didn’t feel her profits should be unduly taxed. … Mostly she just couldn’t tolerate cant and didn’t respond well to political manipulation. … She was socially liberal in the sense she wanted everyone to find as many available paths to happiness as possible.

Rivers was, throughout her career, gay supportive, and The New York City Gay Men’s Chorus performed at her funeral.

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Battle Lines

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Judge Richard Posner, appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981, wrote the unanimous decision on behalf of a three-judge panel of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, striking down state bans on same-sex marriage in Wisconsin and Indiana. This line from Judge Posner is echoing all over the blogosphere:

“Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.”

Given that two other federal appeals courts have struck down bans in Virginia and in Utah and Oklahoma (both decisions stayed pending appeal), “The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the gay marriage issue during its coming term, which starts in October and ends in June 2015,” reports Reuters.

On the other side, this week Federal District Judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana upheld that state’s ban on same-sex marriage, giving an indication of the hoary old arguments that the anti-equality side will marshal before the highest court. To wit:

“This Court is persuaded that Louisiana has a legitimate interest … whether obsolete in the opinion of some, or not, in the opinion of others … in linking children to an intact family formed by their two biological parents.”

[Our site is having issues with the comments feature, which may not be viewable/usable. We are volunteer-run, and hope to get this fixed as soon as possible.]

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Hell Freezes Over

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Organizers of the NYC Saint Patrick’s Day Parade announced they will, for the first time, allow a gay-identified group to march under its own banner in 2015—OUT@NBCUniversal, an LGBT support group at the company that broadcasts the parade. Actual gay Irish groups can apply to March in 2016, but whether that means their applications will be accepted wasn’t entirely made clear.

Still, it’s crack in the wall, and one achieved in no small major by corporate sponsors exerting pressure on the parade organizers, who have close ties with the New York archdiocese. As the Washington Post reported:

Guinness’ parent company said, “We are pleased to see that the various parties are making progress on this issue.” It said it was open to talking with the organizers about supporting the 2015 parade.

NBC, whose local affiliate has been televising the parade since the 1990s, would not confirm reports that it had threatened to drop coverage over the issue of gay participation. But it said NBC executive Francis Comerford, a member of the parade committee, helped with the agreement to include OUT@NBCUniversal.

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Increasingly Indefensible

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From Gay City News, on this week’s U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals hearing on same-sex marriage bans:

One suspects, however, that [Indiana Solicitor General Thomas M. Fisher and Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Timothy C. Samuelson ] did not count on getting the sort of tough cross-examination they got from Richard Posner, the most senior member of the panel who was appointed to the court by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Posner, a father of a school of legal analysis known as the law-and-economics movement and a devoted empiricist, actually mocked the arguments he was getting from the state attorneys, though observers following the trend of marriage equality decisions over the past year might have predicted this result in light of his record of relentlessly pursuing facts and logic in his decisions. Referring to data showing that about 250,000 children nationwide are living with gay adoptive parents—about 3,000 of them in Indiana, he noted—Posner pressed Fisher to explain why Indiana would deny those children the same rights and security of having married parents that are accorded to the adopted children of married couples. The Indiana solicitor general could give him no real answer.

The report concludes: “The Seventh Circuit seems clearly poised to join the Fourth and the 10th in ruling for marriage equality.”

More. Slate has audio excerpts.

Furthermore. Bart Hinkle writes, with a wink, For Straight Marriage, the End Is Near. Apparently, Phyllis Schlafly agrees.

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On Campus, Absence of Due Process Extended to Gays

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Rape and lesser incidents of sexual misconduct on college campus must not be tolerated, but false accusations without due process for the accused, often leading to sanctions or being expelled and a public record that can’t be challenged, are not justice. That’s been true of male-female student relationships on campus (where charges often follow sex that occurred while both individuals were inebriated or stoned), and now it’s been extended to gays, as the Washington Post reports about a case at Brandeis.

The charges here, however, involve a couple that dated for two years and, after the breakup, one accused the other of violations such as staring too much at him while he was undressed in the bathroom, and kissing him while he was asleep and thus unable to consent (did I mention this was a two-year relationship)?

The accused, who was not entitled to legal counsel, was sanctioned by university officials but not expelled. But “he is incensed that his life was turned upside down with what he believes was flagrant disregard for his due-process rights. And he worries about how the sanctions might affect his future.” The accuser “is outraged that the university did not expel his ex-boyfriend.”

The Post reports:

The current and former college students describe themselves as victims of false accusations amid a national campaign — led by the White House — to stamp out sexual violence on campuses. While the federal push to increase awareness of sexual assault is aimed at keeping students safe and holding the nation’s colleges and universities accountable, some of the accused say the pressure on their schools has led to an unfair tipping of the scales against them.

Maybe these incidents should be left to the judicial system when there is evidence of an actual crime. Otherwise, students should learn they are expected to take responsibility for their actions, including bad relationship decisions and morning-after regrets.

More. “Wink” comments:

So many microaggressions! This article should have had a trigger warning. I feel violated and plan to sue.

Furthermore. From Philadelphia Magazine: “The battle over what constitutes sexual assault on college campuses is reaching new levels of absurdity.” You think? But don’t try to tell that to Sen. Claire McCaskill.

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