IGF CultureWatch

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has an interesting analysis of the California appellate ruling striking down Prop. 8’s ban on same-sex marriage in that state.

The appellate ruling is stayed pending appeal to either a larger 9th Circuit panel or directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. In all likelihood, either the Supreme Court won’t hear the anti-gay appeal (which would restore marriage equality in the Golden State), or would hear it and uphold the 9th Circuit ruling in California (given that the appellate ruling is expressively tailored to track Justice Kennedy’s ruling in Romer), but not extend marriage equality throughout the nation. Or the High Court could rule against marriage equality and restore California’s ban.

The fact that the ruling is highly unlikely to result in a Supreme Court declaration of marriage equality throughout the nation is not a bad thing, given that an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment is still a possibility. I’d rather see the Supreme Court first strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, which would result in federal recognition of same-sex marriages in states where such marriages are legal. Then, in just a few more years, the nation will be ready for a ruling striking down anti-gay marriage laws and state amendments, and the backlash will be manageable.

Added. Jon Rauch shares his views in New York’s Daily News, Gay marriage ruling in California is politically shrewd. He explains “Why the 9th Circuit’s decision was so modest — and so clever.”

More. From Politico: “The White House brushed aside questions Tuesday about Obama’s view on the Prop. 8 decision, while also refusing to shed light on the state of Obama’s thinking on the broader issue.”

The president isn’t likely to spend any political capital going out a limb. Why should he, when the left-liberal gay establishment has already pledged its undying fealty (cough, HRC, cough). But it’s worth noting that this profile in noncourage comes after Obama took unpopular positions in favor of killing the jobs producing Keystone pipeline, which would have helped provide energy independence but was hated by Robert Redford and the left-environmentalist crowd, and after his administration interpreted Obamacare as requiring Catholic-affiliated institutions to buy and provide their employees with abortion-inducing drugs, an assault on Constitutional rights that delighted NARAL and the feminist left. But on marriage equality, Obama is still “evolving.”

Oh, those evil corporations. When they’re not oppressing the 99%, they’re … advancing legal equality for gay people. Oh, nevermind.

At the New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni writes that several large corporations, including Starbucks, Microsoft, and Amazon, have expressed public support for state initiatives to legalize same-sex marriage. Bruni observes:

“More so than politicians, corporations play the long game, trying to engender loyalty for decades to come, and they’re famously fixated on consumers in their 20s and 30s. They see support for same-sex marriage as a winner, something that will help with employee recruitment as well.”

Along the same lines, JCPenney has hired Ellen DeGeneres as its advertising spokesperson, hoping to project a more hip image to consumers. That’s social change!

More. On his Fox News show, Bill O’Reilly defends JCPenney’s hiring of DeGeneres.

Alas, David and I are never going to agree on the matter of forcing Catholic insitutions to provide contraceptive services to their employees, but I will respond to David, below, that I don’t consider Notre Dame University or Holy Cross Hospital (for instance) to be secular businesses – they are Church affiliated and view themselves as fulfilling a religious mission in the world (same for various Catholic charities).

Defending “contraception” is pretty easy – even if the issue is a government dictate that Catholic institutions buy condoms and IUDs for their employees. David avoids the uglier issue of abortion-inducing drugs. I would, too, if I were defending his position.

What next, forcing Jewish hospitals to serve their employees ham? Because we think ham is good for you and the kosher prohibition strikes us as superstition (and after all, we’re liberals and we know best)?

As for David’s contention “Insurance is a product, and people buy it.” Many employers self-insure – creating a set of benefits for their workforce with an insurance provider. Only very small businesses these days tend to buy insurance off the shelf for their workers. And it’s the employer who almost always still pays most (and sometimes all) of the premium.

I must respectfully disagree with David, below. In my view of things, using the blunt power of the state to force Catholic universities and hospitals to buy and provide their employees with free contraceptives, including morning-after abortion-inducing drugs, makes a mockery of religious liberty. And that’s regardless of the fact that most Catholics use and approval of birth control (many of whom may find contraceptives acceptable but don’t extend that view to the morning-after pill).

These institutions are Catholic, not secular, by their charters and in their running. And the church, rightly or wrongly, considers contraception and abortion to be sins. If the state can forced religious institutions to violate the tenets of their faith, then what can’t it do?

The road to the total state may be pleasing to those of the leftist persuasion (at least as long as they’re in charge), but it’s the antithesis of what America should stand for. A religious exemption is not too much to expect of a government that respects religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

A Washington Examiner column notes the following tidbit about one of Mitt Romeny’s biggest donors:

Hedge fund millionaire Paul Singer also gave Romney’s super-PAC $1 million in November. . . . But Singer’s biggest cause in 2011 was not partisan — he spent $1 million lobbying to legalize gay marriage in New York state. That puts Singer not only far to the left of the GOP base and Romney, but also to the left of President Obama, who publicly opposes gay marriage. Singer’s son married a man in Massachusetts. . . .Singer’s million-dollar check doesn’t suggest Mitt is pro-gay-marriage. . . . But it’s revealing that these are Romney’s biggest donors. At the very least, it highlights the difference between the GOP’s electoral base and its money base.

I guess it does.

Also worth noting briefly, this interesting profile in the Washington Blade of formerly closeted former GOP congressman Bob Bauman, whose view today is conservative-libertarian and a pox on both parties.

From an annual study of how incoming college freshman view things:

Even though the percentage of incoming freshmen who identify as conservative has stayed relatively stable, those students and the rest of their peers are shifting away from hard-line conservative stances on issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, marijuana legalization and affirmative action. … The rise in the number of students who support same-sex marriage is the biggest shift in this year’s survey. At 71.3 percent, the percentage of incoming freshmen who agree either “somewhat” or “strongly” that same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status is up “a remarkable” 6.4 percentage points from two years ago, the report says. While support is more common among women (77.3 percent), it’s increasing faster among men (64.1 percent).

They are the future.

(Hat tip: Walter Olson)

Christie nominates two for state Supreme Court, including gay African-American mayor:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced he is nominating Bruce Harris and Phil Kwon to the state Supreme Court. If confirmed, Harris would be the third African-American justice and first openly gay justice and Kwon would be the first immigrant and first Asian-American justice. . . . Steve Goldstein, the chief executive of Garden State Equality, a gay rights organization, said he was stunned when Christie called to tell him about the imminent nomination of Harris, 60, a graduate of Yale Law School. “As I told the governor right then and there, you could have picked me up off the floor,” Goldstein said.

The GOP will either follow Christie’s direction (and eventually embrace marriage equality, which Christie opposes), or it will continue getting beaten by Democrats who appear tolerant and liberal as they suffocate economic growth.

One takeaway from the GOP South Carolina Primary, won handily by Newt Gingrich: the religious right’s support for distant-third runner-up Rick Santorum proved not to amount to much, despite a high number of evangelicals in the state. Iowa increasingly appears to be an outlier.

As John Avlon writes at the Daily Beast, “If evangelical leaders can’t get their chosen candidate a victory here, where can they do it? … the idea of a mass-mobilizeable, single-issue voter is increasingly a myth perpetuated by special-interest activist groups who are literally invested in the idea.”

Still, Avlon notes, social conservatives

“have certainly been successful in getting Republican candidates to conform to their policy positions. Despite the fact that 70 percent of Republican primary voters say that fiscal issues are the basis for deciding their vote—just over 20 percent say social issues are the defining issue in 2012—this GOP field is as far to the right on social issues as any in the party’s history.”

Gingrich may hold the same anti-gay positions as Santorum, but as of now there’s no love lost between the serial philanderer and the religious right. The same is true of Romney, who still is viewed with suspicion by evangelical leaders.

We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out in terms of the religious right maintaining its dominant position within the party.

Ex-wife says Gingrich wanted ‘open marriage,’ was the campaign story of the day. The GOP presidential candidate’s second ex-wife said he asked for an “open marriage” in which he could have both a wife and a mistress. Gingrich denies the specifics, but the adulterous mistress is now the third Mrs. G.

Added. One man, one wife, one mistress (at a time); otherwise, it’s a slippery slope to who knows what!

Also surfacing: reports that Rick Santorum’s wife, when in her 20s, had an affair of many years with an abortion doctor/father of six (who delivered her as baby!). Candidate Santorum dismisses the charges without quite denying them.

It’s all just further moral hypocrisy by those who belittle committed same-sex relationships as unworthy of recognition and equal treatment under the law.

More. Santorum attacks Romney’s judicial appointments in Massachusetts for being too pro-gay:  An excerpt:

Two of Mr. Romney’s nominations for judgeships in Massachusetts, Stephen S. Abany and Marianne C. Hinkle, were well-known as advocates for special protections for homosexuals. What about the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion? What assurances did the governor receive that these nominees would “only follow the law”?

Kind of makes Romney seem not so bad (relatively speaking).

From the Wall Street Journal, Hope Dims for an Evangelical Pick. Good. The odds are about even that the Republican nominee will be able to unseat Obama. Romney is flawed, but if we’re rolling the dice, better that Romney should land in the Oval Office than an anti-gay equality, anti-personal liberty (anti-free-trade, anti-right to work) zealot like Santorum, or an anti-gay equality, anti-free market, deranged egomaniac like Gingrich.

Political analysts also indicate that the odds of the GOP taking control of the Senate are high as well. So, given that there is at least a strong possibility that the Republicans will control the presidency, House and Senate next year, I wonder if our leading gay lobbies are engaging in contingency planning the way that successful business do, mapping out strategies for various likely (or at least possible) developments over the near term.

The largest and richest LGBT national lobby, the Human Rights Campaign, is in the midst of selecting a new executive director to replace the departing Joe Solmonese. It would be nice to think that, maybe this time, they won’t reflexively go with another leftwing Democratic operative who is uninterested in reaching out to libertarian Republicans (and couldn’t speak their language of personal liberty if he was), and who showed himself to be unwilling to pressure Democrats to spend political capital on our behalf even when they controlled both houses with a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. And that goes as well for the future HRC leader’s willingness to hire lobbyists who aren’t died in the wool Democratic partisans.

If HRC sticks to its old game plan and the Republicans take congress and the White House, that won’t necessarily be bad for HRC (think of the fearsome fundraising pitches they’ll send out); it will, however, prove terrible for those interested in advancing gay liberty and legal equality, or playing defense against rollbacks where equality has hitherto advanced.

More. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer writes:

after a quarter-century in the wilderness, [Ron Paul is] within reach of putting his cherished cause on the map. Libertarianism will have gone from the fringes — those hopeless, pathetic third-party runs — to a position of prominence in a major party. … Paul is nurturing his movement toward visibility and legitimacy.

The movement for gay equality should be able to make common cause with the movement for greater individual liberty. If it can’t because fealty to big-government leftism is seen as a higher goal, that would be an immense lost opportunity.