IGF CultureWatch

Long-time religious right activist Ralph Reed, who used to represent Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and now heads the Faith and Freedom Coalition, is urging Mitt Romney to adopt Rick Santorum’s scathing brand of social conservatism in order to win the White House. It’s not enough, apparently, that Romney is pro-life and supports the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment. Writes Reed in a Washington Post op-ed titled “To Beat Obama, Mitt Romney Must Channel Rick Santorum“:

[Romney’s] immediate task is to consolidate conservative support and unify the party. The best way to do that is to appropriate the best parts of Santorum’s message. Santorum follows the trailblazing evangelical candidates Pat Robertson and Mike Huckabee, who personified the rise and the maturation of social conservatives as a critical component of the Republican coalition. …

It’s a strategy that could only be cheered in the fever swamps of the religious right and among the Democratic left, who understand what a godsend it would be for Obama.

I’m reminded of Santorum’s remarks on losing a Midwestern primary to Romney that he (Santorum) still felt he was victorious because he had won the most conservative districts—as if failing to carry anything but the most conservative districts boded well as a strategy for winning a general election. But like the socialist left, the social conservative right lives in a fantasyland where the most ideologically pure are certain to be rewarded for their lack of messy ambiguity.

More. Romney’s promise to “champion a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman” doesn’t sit well with some of his largest donors.

The New York Times Magazine looks at the political prospects of the four Republican New York State senators who voted for marriage equality and provided the necessary margin for it to pass. “The four Republican apostates now had targets on their backs,” the Times reports. However:

…if you parse public opinion, you find the acceptance of gay marriage is not just growing; it is accelerating. This is driven, of course, by the overwhelming support of young voters, but also by white Catholics, who have grown more open-minded on gay rightss. …

Opponents of gay marriage used to hold their opinion more passionately than supporters. But as more Americans have openly gay children, siblings, friends and neighbors, the supporters feel just as strongly.

On the other hand:

African-American support for gay marriage has remained stubborn, hovering around 30 percent for years, for reasons of class and education and because of the centrality of church in their lives. According to internal memos of the National Organization for Marriage, the anti-gay-marriage lobby sees an opportunity to play on the fact that some blacks resent hearing gay marriage likened to their own civil rights struggle.

Interestingly, the article notes that the four senators:

are upstate guys, from struggling former mill towns and diminished Rust Belt cities. So while the senators’ political calculus differs from district to district, their experiences give us a glimpse into how this issue is likely to play out in “real America,” as conservatives are fond of calling it, and not just in the coastal metropolises. Which is why the fates of these four are being watched intently by national lobbies and wavering politicians across the country.

Their re-election would be a welcome sign of progress.

So reports the New York Times News Service. Yes, I know, it’s pressure from the anti-gay social conservatives that dominate the GOP that keeps Obama from banning anti-gay discrimination or supporting marriage equality—and it’s the reason why the Democrats failed to move forward with the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which never left committee when they controlled both houses of Congress for the first two years of Obama’s presidency, and why the Democratic leadership dragged its feet on repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” until the Log Cabin Republicans’ lawsuit (and an uproar from LGBT bloggers) forced a last-minute move.

But if that is the case, then really, wouldn’t it make sense to shift the focus to supporting, and electing, pro-gay Republicans, whereas the national strategy of making the major LGBT lobbies into fundraising arms of the Democratic Party is likely to produce just more of the same?

More. From the Washington Blade: “U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) expressed little interest Wednesday in advancing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the wake of an announcement from the White House last week that the Obama administration won’t take action against LGBT workplace discrimination at this time.” And why would he?

“Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires,” a series of psychology studies at the University of Rochester demonstrates. You’ll never get the homophobes to admit it, but as anti-gay paranoia wanes throughout culture and society, we should see a decrease in this kind of reaction formation.

James Kirchick takes note that the Seattle LGBT Commission had planned to meet with a group of Israeli students touring the U.S. under the auspices of the Alliance of Israeli LGBT Educational Organizations. “It would be hard for anyone, outside the confines of the gay-hating religious right, to find anything pernicious about such an endeavor,” Kirchick writes. Yet the Seattle commission canceled the meeting after a protest by an anti-Israeli “progressive” academic at Seattle University. “We weren’t prepared to handle the Palestinian question,” said the commission’s co-chair.

Kirchick points out “the not-insignificant point that Israeli society doesn’t sanction the torture and murder of homosexuals, whereas Palestinian society—like the vast majority of Arab and Muslim societies—does.”

President Barack Obama has now shared with us his view of the Supreme Court’s role, which is to uphold laws that are passed democratically by Congress, and that for the court to overturn such a law would be “unprecedented” and “judicial activism.”

As the Washington Post reports:

President Obama challenged the Supreme Court on Monday to uphold his administration’s sweeping health-care reform legislation, arguing that overturning the law would amount to an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” of judicial activism. …

Obama questioned the authority of the nine-member panel of unelected justices to reverse legislation that was approved by a majority vote in Congress. … “I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint—that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law,” Obama said during a Rose Garden news conference. “Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

Obama added:

“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

In reality, the bill was pushed through the House by Democratic leaders on a narrow vote of 219-212, not winning any Republican support. Even if it were relevant, “strong majority” is not only a lie, it’s a stupid lie.

Of course, he’s being mendacious and hypocritical (evidently, our great Constitutional scholar-in-chief has never heard of Marbury v. Madison, or so you might think). But even so, putting forth this argument will come back to bite “progressives” — such as when the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage, which actually was passed by Congress with big (and bipartisan) majorities and signed into law by President Clinton, comes before the High Court.

More. David Boaz blogs at Politico:

It’s striking to me how the liberals and Democrats on this panel are bending over backward to defend the president’s strikingly inaccurate statement. … Everyone who observes the Supreme Court – every constitutional law professor, every reader of newspapers – knows that it’s just nonsense to say that it would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step” to “overturn a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

More. Conor Friedersdorf writes at The Atlantic:

President Obama’s recent remarks notwithstanding, it isn’t as if the left wants a Supreme Court that consistently respects legislative majorities. The iconic decisions of the Warren Court, Roe vs. Wade, and efforts to extend marriage rights to gays are all premised on the notion that striking down popular laws is sometimes a worthy enterprise. Nor is the left going to champion fidelity to the text of the Constitution as it was understood at the time of the country’s Founding. And as Lawrence v. Texas shows, liberals are comfortable celebrating when longstanding precedents are overturned ….

Except when they’re not.

And from conservative columnist Byron York:

A decision on DOMA, which has not yet arrived at the Supreme Court, lies in the future. But if those arguments come when Barack Obama is president, perhaps DOMA’s defenders will remind the administration of the president’s respect for duly constituted and passed laws.

Furthermore. In the comments, “another steve” responds to criticism of this post from our loyal left-liberal readers:

It’s just nonsense to say the president’s remarks were taken “out of context.” They weren’t very long, you can read them in all the major papers. And many liberals immediately defended them, until the party’s talking points changed.

Finally, from the Washington Post fact checker: “It’s clear that Obama’s ‘unprecedented’ comment was dead wrong, because the Supreme Court’s very purpose is to review laws that are passed by the nation’s democratically elected Congress — regardless of how popular or well-intentioned those laws may be…. “

Via Real Clear Politics.

I think if President Obama came out as gay, he wouldn’t lose the black vote,” a cheerful Van Jones told MSNBC this afternoon. “President Obama is not going to lose the black vote no matter what he does,” he added.

Jones seems to recognize that homophobia is a factor in the black community, but goes on to dismiss its impact (and then, to be fair, he defends marriage equality, which few Republicans would do). Still, the linkage of “coming out as gay” and “no matter what he does,” with all that chortling between Jones and the MSNBC gang, is more than a little unsettling.

David Boaz blogs “Conservatives Shift on Gay Marriage.” Well, OK, it’s mainly about Britain’s Conservative Party, which is leading the charge for same-sex marriage in the U.K. But Boaz notes that, here in the U.S., “Republicans too know that ‘young urbanites’ are overwhelmingly supportive of marriage equality, and they don’t want to lose a whole generation.”

But when (or whether) the GOP can move forward by doing both what’s right (the principle of equal freedom under the law) and politically pragmatic (appealing to the center) in the face of intransigent opposition by the Santorum social right, whose activists still dominate GOP presidential caucuses, remains to be seen.

More. From Politico, Republicans Retreat on Gay Marriage:

Just a few years ago, House Republicans were trying to etch their opposition of gay marriage into the Constitution. Now? They’re almost silent. …

It’s not like the GOP has become a bastion of progressiveness on gay rights, but there has been an evolution in the political approach — and an acknowledgment of a cultural shift in the country.

And the article notes this:

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released earlier this month showed a 9 percent increase in support for gay marriage among Republicans to 31 percent. Support among 18-to-34-year-olds was nearly 70 percent, according to a 2011 Washington Post/ABC News poll.

And so the wind blows.

Jonathan Rauch explains why Rick Santorum’s beliefs on privacy are deeply troubling, to say the least. He writes:

Defending sodomy laws, Santorum didn’t make the usual half-hearted point that the laws were rarely enforced. He came out swinging. Homosexuality is among behaviors that are “outside of traditional heterosexual relationships” and therefore “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family.” People have no right to engage in such behaviors, even in their own homes.

Rauch then asks,

If the state can’t be trusted to regulate our markets, can it really be trusted to regulate our morals? By way of an answer, return, for a minute, to Houston in 1998. According to “Flagrant Conduct,” a fascinating and important new book by University of Minnesota law professor Dale Carpenter, what really happened in Lawrence’s apartment that night, though shocking, won’t surprise many gay Americans. Lawrence and Garner were not having sex when the cops arrived. …

Two officers freely admitted to Carpenter that their disgust at homosexuality was a factor in the arrest. Nothing new there. Sodomy laws in practice had nothing to do with the enforcement of virtue, and everything to do with the arbitrary use of state power against gays. Before Lawrence, many police departments treated baiting and entrapping homosexuals as a kind of sport.

Back to Santorum, Rauch observes:

He can’t revoke privacy, which the country prizes, and he probably can’t be president. But his ascendance could—and, by rights, should — break the already strained alliance of libertarians and social conservatives on which the post-Reagan conservative movement is built.

For more about Carpenter’s book on Lawrence v. Texas, here’s a link to the San Francisco Chronicle’s review.

Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn discusses “The Gay Alternative to Obamacare,” by which he means GOProud’s critique of the Democrats’ signature power grab. McGurn writes:

Gay Americans understandably chafe at the way the tax code discriminates against them with regard to health insurance. If you are heterosexual, the insurance provided your spouse by your company is treated as a benefit—which means it is untaxed. If, by contrast, you are gay, the insurance provided your spouse or partner by your company can be treated as income—which means taxed.

And then he observes:

Yet with one notable exception, most gay organizations nevertheless continue to argue for solutions that expand the federal government’s role in health care and leave the employer privilege intact. The exception is GOProud, a pro-free market, pro-individual liberty, pro-limited government coalition of gay conservatives and their allies. This group argues that the problem with our tax code isn’t just that it discriminates against gays. It’s that it discriminates against every American who doesn’t have his or her health insurance through an employer.

The folks at GOProud aren’t asking for special treatment. To the contrary, they want a system in which all health-care consumers are treated equally. They argue that this requires a thriving national marketplace for individual insurance…

The point being:

“When the left does identity politics, they simply craft special policies that benefit particular groups,” says [GOProud’s Executive Director Jimmy] LaSalvia. “We’re about explaining how limited government and policies that treat everyone equally might benefit some people in unique ways. As conservatives, we need to do a better job of letting particular groups know how they would benefit from this approach.”

The statist left, including LGBT “progressives,” sees big government control as a way to eventually ensure equality, as long as progressives are calling the shots (and when they’re not and the mega-state falls into the hands of social conservatives, well, too bad). The libertarian view is that it’s better to reduce the role of government and allow free people to make their own decisions via voluntary contractual relationships within a free market system.