IGF CultureWatch

David Boaz blogs at Cato@Liberty:

Whatever the merits and popularity of the specific [gun control] measures that went down to defeat in the Senate on Wednesday, I think the Establishment fails to appreciate the depth of American support for the Second Amendment. NPR and other media have lately noted a growing libertarian trend in American politics. That’s not just about taxes, Obamacare, marijuana, and marriage equality. It also involves gun rights. …

If political scientists Herbert McClosky and John Zaller are right that “[t]he principle here is that every person is free to act as he pleases, so long as his exercise of freedom does not violate the equal rights of others,” then we can expect Americans to cling to their gun rights for a long time.

And then there’s this from the liberal New Republic:

Congressional consideration was also delayed by gun control proponents’ insistence on a ban on assault weapons. … Even if the law could be passed, it wouldn’t have made any dent in gun violence statistics because these guns are rarely used in crime. Focusing on assault weapons played right into the hands of the NRA, which has for years been saying that Obama wanted to ban guns. Gun control advocates ridiculed that idea—then proposed to ban the most popular rifle in America.”

Next up, attempts to ban pressure cookers.

Bruce Bawer’s latest look at the warped world of LGBT academia, in this case CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). Read it and weep for what kids in college are being taught.

Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff finds more signs of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s decent into rank Democratic partisanship. He writes:

This misguided strategy of turning LGBT rights into a partisan issue and the LGBT movement into a wing of the Democratic Party is as much a mistake today as it was 20 years ago.

That’s what I’ve been saying.

James Kirchick has more to say about GLAAD’s decline into irrelevance.

Shifting gears a bit, today Britain is saying farewell to Margaret Thatcher, and here’s an interesting look at how the former prime minister—no friend of gay rights—expanded economic freedom and by doing so created the underpinning for increased social freedom. As well as a view of Thatcher as “gay icon.”

The left is again disgracing itself by celebrating her demise.

Via Salon, Paul Ryan to GOP: Don’t abandon abortion fight:

The two issues have long been linked, but it seems likely the two will cleave apart from each other in coming months as mainline Republicans moderate themselves on marriage but remain committed to the fight against abortion. That was the general consensus among activists we spoke to at CPAC, the annual gathering of conservatives in March, where many seemed ready to embrace marriage equality, but thought abortion was still a critical issue for the GOP. Even many pro-gay conservative activists, like GOProud founder Jimmy LaSalvia, are pro-life.

Progressives and party operatives will hoot, as usual, but there are a great many of us who fervently support marriage equality and are not pro-choice on abortion, or are at least equivocal (e.g., first-trimester vs. late-term, especially partial-birth murder of the kind defended by Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius). The hegemonic liberal media has long failed to report abortion horrors such as this, to its continuing and utter shame. More here.

At the Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens offers A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage (behind the subscription firewall, alas, as it should be widely read). Stephens writes:

As conservatives debate the subject of gay marriage, maybe they should pause to consider their view about the other kind of gay marriage. You know the one: He works mind-boggling hours and only comes home once his wife is sure to be asleep. He beams at the sight of an old college buddy. Two years into the marriage, she starts murmuring to her closest friend that he just isn’t very interested in her, that way. Five years later he starts acting out in odd ways when he drinks. And he drinks a lot. …

I have a crazy theory; see if you agree. It’s that gay people generally want to lead lives of conventional respectability. So much so, in fact, that many are prepared to suppress their sexual nature to lead such lives. The desire for respectability is commendable; the deception it involves is not. To avoid deception, you can try to change the person’s nature. Good luck with that. Or you can modify a social institution so that gay people can have what the rest of us take for granted: The chance to find love and respectability in the same person. …

[A photo of a gay couple at their wedding shows] a picture of happiness, respectability and pride. Does that look like the end of Western Civilization? Or does it look like the fulfillment of America’s basic promise, the pursuit of happiness, honest, unembarrassed, at nobody else’s expense? Don’t you prefer it to a picture of the other kind of gay marriage—you know, the one of the groom with the faraway gaze, the bride with that look of anxious foreboding?

More. Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics to Richard Rodger’s music, “We’re Gonna Be All Right.” Near the end, the battling pair shift from reflecting about themselves to remarking on troubled couples they know: “Sometimes she drinks in bed. Sometimes he’s homosexual. But why be vicious? They keep it out of sight. Good show, they’re gonna be all right.” Or not.

Furthermore. Similarly, from the Washington Post, My father’s gay marriage:

Gays have always been able to marry. But I fail to see how society is strengthened when they are forced by convention to marry someone whose body is unattractive to them, whose voice isn’t what they want to hear in the morning or whose touch may be as grating as sand in the bed.

But because there are many truths, there’s this rejoinder as well.

OK, still more. I didn’t really intend to “invisibilize” bisexuals and I do believe, to a large extent, in the Kinsey scale. So yes, bisexual men are going to be able to have marriages with women that can’t be characterized as “quiet desperation” even if they sometimes seek sexual relationships with other men. But for gay men (Kinsey 5+) married to women, it’s a different story.

Jon Rauch favors a federalist approach to both gay marriage and marijuana legalization:

That some states could try same-sex marriage without betting the whole country reduced the stakes and contained the conflict. States’ experiments with gay marriage educed valuable information about its real-world consequences, or lack thereof, allowing for a better-informed, more rational debate. …

State leadership on marijuana policy has all of the same advantages as on marriage. It contains conflict by reducing the stakes; educes knowledge about what happens if marijuana policy is changed; and allows incremental adjustment to social change. For the federal government, yielding some measure of control over marijuana policy to the states is not a threat; it is an opportunity to manage change and preserve options. Painting federal policy into a corner serves no one, not even drug warriors.

The good, the bad, and the pragmatic.

One the one hand, Michigan Republican won’t resign after calling gays ‘filthy’ on Facebook. And on the other, Gay marriage could be ‘gateway’ issue the GOP needs.

It may take one more presidential defeat with support for the party from voters under 30 in freefall before the GOP will stand up and say “good riddance” to the Bauers and Huckabees.

The Supreme Court hearings on same-sex marriage this past week brought a flood of media coverage, along with widely reported very positive poll numbers showing that 58% of Americans now favor marriage equality, and some 80% of those ages 18 to 29, including a majority of young Republicans. It feels like a turning point (here’s an analysis by Nate Silver). A growing number of Republicans are realizing they’re on the wrong side of history.

So there’s reason to be reasonably optimistic (i.e., Cato legal analyst: DOMA is dead). The odds, say court-watchers, strongly favor a slim majority overturning DOMA’s prohibition on federal recognition of same-sex marriage (Justice Kennedy, citing federalism, joining the four liberal justices, citing equal protection). The court looks poised to decide it shouldn’t have bothered hearing the California Proposition 8 case, leaving in place the district court ruling restoring marriage equality in the Golden State (one day we may know why they took this one when a majority felt the “standing” of those defending Prop. 8 was so problematic; did Scalia insist he have a chance to express his disdain, again, for the idea of rights for homosexuals?)

The big disappointment for some was the extremely narrow chance that the court, with Kennedy as the swing, might have used Prop. 8 to invalidate all state measures against same-sex marriage; maybe even to have ruled that, as Loving vs. Virginia made mixed-race marriage the law of the land, Hollingsworth v. Perry would do the same for same-sex marriage: legal everywhere. And listening to renowned lawyers Ted Olson and David Bois, who argued for just that, it even seemed believable, for a moment. But that day of full legal equality is now years away.

However: If one year ago gay Americans were participating on a game show and the host said, “Congratulations! You’ve just won the restoration of marriage for gay people in California and, in the bonus round, the elimination of DOMA’s prohibition on federal rights and benefits in those states where same-sex marriage is legal. Now, do you want to risk it all by rolling the dice in the All or Nothing round, with the chance of winning marriage equality throughout the nation, or step back and take your winnings. What will it be?”

I think we’d be very happy to take what we’re (likely) to get, for now. And then continue the hard work for marriage equality, focusing on both parties, tomorrow.

More. I very much liked this rejoinder from a pro-same-sex-marriage Christian, who truly understands the gospel message. But oh, the hateful comments from his reactionary, use-the-state-to-beat-down-the-sinners co-religionists. Jesus weeps.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Several justices sharply challenged the Obama administration’s handling of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Some questioned whether the court should be hearing the case at all. …it wasn’t clear whether the justices believed they were free to rule on the merits of the case, amid questions about the legal standing of the parties.

The Obama administration said in 2011 that it believed the law was unconstitutional, but it has continued to enforce it while the case has worked its way through the courts. That stance drew sharp questioning from Chief Justice John Roberts. He told government lawyer Sri Srinivasan, the principal deputy solicitor general, that the government’s actions were “unprecedented.” To agree with a lower-court ruling that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional and yet enforce the law while seeking Supreme Court review “has never been done before,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

Justice Kennedy cited what he called the questionable practice of presidential signing statements, in which presidents sign a law but simultaneously issue statements that they consider parts of it unenforceable or unlawful. If a president doesn’t think a law is constitutional, he shouldn’t sign it, said Justice Kennedy. He added that the same principle perhaps applied in this case.

Based on the arguments, it seems that if the court can agree the parties have standing, Kennedy is poised to join the equal-protection liberals and strike down, on federalism grounds, the section of DOMA forbidding federal recognition of same-sex marriages in states where they are legal.

But what an irony if the court decides not to rule because of the Obama administration’s contradictory behavior of enforcing the law but refusing to defend it in court—a strategy meant to do the least political damage among religiously conservative voters (and yes, that includes many anti-gay African Americans) and LGBT activists by parsing the difference.