IGF CultureWatch

In response to a campaign asking PBS to let long-time “Sesame Street” roommates Bert and Ernie get married, the taxpayer-funded producers announced that:

“Bert and Ernie are best friends … Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics …they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”

Which came as news to blogger Julian Sanchez, who points out that many muppets of the opposite-sex variety often romantically date or pine for one another, and the Twiddlebugs muppets are a standard nuclear family. As Sanchez notes:

What all of these have in common is that they’re heterosexual couples. Because it’s regarded as the default, that “sexual orientation” is invisible. But, of course, it’s still there—and nobody imagines that simply depicting all these straight couples and families somehow counts as injecting inappropriate “adult” or sexualized material into a children’s show.

I doubt this is news to the clever producers at “Sesame Street,” however. More likely they’re dancing around the issue. To be fair, if Bert and Ernie got married there would be a huge brouhahah from the traditional values right, since PBS is a taxpayer-funded enterprise (that is, social conservatives have their money taken by the federal government and given to the producers, whether they like it or not). Since PBS has been long under fire for biased reporting favoring big government liberalism, a same-sex wedding could be the final straw.

Which is the problem with taxpayer-funded media; gay characters have proliferated on commercial and pay cable networks, including TV Land sitcoms, while children’s programming at liberal taxpayer-funded PBS remains in the 60s – big government is just dandy, but gays are in the closet.

What’s to say about the GOP debate last night? Romney further disgraced himself demanding that marriage be federalized; Huntsman defended civil unions and the rights of states to decide the issue but overall gave a lackluster performance. Paul was rambling. Santorum and Bachmann were evil. More from The Advocate.

Shifting gears but showing why the “progressive left,” despite its support for marriage equality, is a dreadful alternative, Barton Hinkle has a neat look at liberal apologists for the rioters in Britain.

Here in the U.S. we’ve just been through a budget showdown in which the side that wanted government spending to grow at a slightly less rapid pace than the other side wanted was denounced as terrorists in the literal sense. So far, none of those who called peaceful tea-party activists terrorists have flung the same accusation at the British rioters who have inflicted genuine terror. Interesting.

To be sure, those progressives seeking to understand what motivates the rioters in London do not actually endorse their behavior. They do not think individuals — no matter how aggrieved — should take it upon themselves to storm into other people’s shops and homes and “redistribute the wealth” as they see fit. After all: That, such progressives say, is government’s job.

More. Commenter “another steve” gets the point I was trying to make with this juxtaposition: “We have a choice of warmed over social democracy which has already crashed and burned in Europe, and social intolerance. We need to forge a new mainstream.”

From the Washington Blade: Debt Deal Could Jeopardize HIV/AIDS Funding. Yes, when it comes to the ballooning U.S. budget deficit, if you take entitlements off the table, as the Democrats demand, and rule out tax increases, per the GOP, then defense and so-called discretionary spending are going to take the hit.

In my view, big tax hikes would choke off what little recovery there is, draining money away from private sector investments where permanent, meaningful (not “make work”) jobs are created. That leaves entitlements, where the lion’s share of the unfunded deficit lives, and which keeps growing at an unsustainable rate. Medicare and Social Security will eventually have to be restructured and, to some extent, scaled back. But if Democrats run on “Mediscare” and dig in their heels, as it looks like they’ll do, the day of reckoning will only be delayed, and made worse. And discretionary funding, including HIV/AIDs and everything else, will by necessity suffer.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has joined fellow Republican social right-wingers and presidential aspirants Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum in signing a pledge to oppose same-sex marriage and defend the indefensible Defense of Marriage Act. The pledge is sponsored by anti-gay activist Maggie Gallagher’s National Organization for Marriage.

As CBSNews.com notes, Romney once upon a time made a very different pledge, promising he would be a stronger advocate for gay rights than his Massachusetts Senate opponent, Ted Kennedy. “We must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern,” wrote Romney, then.

Turner Classic Movies last night showed “Random Harvest,” the old Ronald Colman/Greer Garson classic about a man who, due to trauma, suffers amnesia and forgets who he was, and then years later bumps his head, remembers his former life, and forgets everything that happened in between (including marrying Ms. Garson).

Wouldn’t it be nice if Romney would bump his head and announce he hadn’t a clue who Maggie Gallagher is, and was again dedicated to ensuring equality for gay Americans.

It won’t happen, of course. And there is a decent possibility that Romney will be president in 2013, with a Republican House and Senate. That’s why making all possible inroads with libertarian-minded GOP congressmembers is crucial.

The AP reports, Gay Marriage: Awkward Issue for Some GOP Hopefuls:

“They see the polling — more and more Republicans are supporting gay marriage,” said David Welch, a former research director for the Republican National Committee. “It puts them in an awkward position with the younger members of the party and also with independents whose votes you need to win.”

Yes, it does. And it’s not going to get any easier (as evidenced by Gov. Rick Perry’s Texas two-step flip-flop, discussed by Jon in the previous post). Eventually, the cost of placating the hardcore socially reactionary base will outweigh the advantages of appealing to libertarian-minded young voters and independents.

Below is a hopeful sign, despite the frenzied demonization of Tea Party activists by the hardcore, spendaholic left:

Sal Russo, a strategist for the Tea Party Express, said the movement’s followers are primarily concerned about the size and cost of government and have diverse views about social issues.

“We have libertarians who support same-sex marriage, and Christian activists who adamantly oppose it,” he said.

Last week, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law SB 48, which requires that social science instruction in California schools include the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons to the history of the state and nation. The bill had been strongly opposed by California’s Catholic bishops and the religious right. But that doesn’t automatically mean its passage was wise or that it was the right battle to pick at this time.

Immediately after the bill was signed (it’s set to take effect in the 2013-14 school year), opponents launched an effort to collect signatures for a ballot referendum to overturn it. That means another protracted and expensive battle that could very well, at the polls, result in a setback for gay rights advocates. A big reason why is that a lot of parents are likely to see the new mandate as a politically correct effort by Sacramento to placate activists representing a favored Democratic constituency, at a time when the state’s schools are having difficulty teaching the basics of reading, writing, math and history. That’s a persuasive argument to have to defend against.

The 2011 Education Week/Pew Center on the States’ Report Card on School Performance gives California schools a grade of “D-” for K-12 achievement, ranking the state 46 out of 51 states plus D.C. (The state’s overall grade, taking into account factors such as school financing and teacher credentials, is a “C,” for a somewhat better but still mediocre rank of 30.) Given this record, it’s likely the Golden State’s public schools will be as unsuccessful teaching gay history as they have been at teaching everything else, so the upside is rather minimal. The downside is to give the gay struggle for legal equality another distracting and unnecessary sideshow.

Here’s an interesting article from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which holds that “There’s no need to sacrifice free speech for a campus to be accepting of LGBT students.” Prohibiting speech deemed to be “unwelcoming” of LGBT students really isn’t a good idea.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal writes of the bluster against marriage equality in New York by the anti-gay National Coalition for Marriage (NOM) that:

the language [on a NOM-affiliated website] implies that the Legislature acted illegitimately when it “imposed same-sex marriage on New York with no vote of the people.” Such a vote is not part of the ordinary procedure for enacting legislation in New York, and it is misleading to pretend otherwise.

Taranto also describes a NOM demonstration he observed in New York:

Most interesting, it was a very diverse crowd–we’d say a quarter to a third black, with lots of Hispanics. That’s not really surprising. Notwithstanding their tendency to vote for Democrats, blacks and Hispanics tend to hold conservative views on so-called social issues. As we noted in November 2008, exit polls showed that black Californians backed Proposition 8 by 70% to 30%. . . .

It may turn out that yesterday’s diverse crowd represented the religious right of the future. If so, it will be interesting to see how the left tries to counter it. Maybe Thomas Frank can publish a book called “What’s the Matter with Harlem?” or Barack Obama can deliver a disquisition on African-American bitter clingers. We suspect minorities would find such condescension as off-putting as whites do.

No doubt they would.

More. NOM blogs in response to Taranto that “There will be an election in 2012, in which we will find out if Republican elites are right they can pass a gay marriage bill in NY without consequences.”

To which Taranto replies:

Imposing “consequences” on “Republican elites” is a perfectly legitimate goal. But to the extent that that is the objective of the “Let the People Vote” effort, it reinforces our view that the effort is deceptive.

The number of gay people who can legally wed in the U.S. today (albeit without federal recognition) has effectively doubled, given that New York’s population is roughly the same as the combination of the five other states (and DC) where same-sex marriage was already legal.

This political column in the Washington Blade caught my eye. It’s an endorsement of Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley’s run for the U.S. Senate, noting that Berkley is a strong advocate of gay rights. Also in her favor, according to columnist Peter Rosenstein, “Shelley Berkley understands how bad the Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) budget is for her constituents and seniors everywhere.”

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t disagree more. The waste, abuse, fraud and over-utilization in government-run Medicare is unsustainable, and Ryan’s plan is an important and courageous step to bring this overspending under control. While the columnist suggests that Berkley has other ideas on fixing Medicare, as with her fellow Democrats she has failed to spell them out while Demonizing GOP cost-controlling efforts. Berkley’s track history, in fact, casts doubt on whether she would favor any approach other than upping taxes, as a comment on the Blade piece (not from me) points out:

Berkley has a 100 percent pro-gay record. Great! Meanwhile, according to National Taxpayers Union, last year she voted 96 percent in favor of big spending. We have a $1.5 trillion deficit and a $14 trillion national debt because of people like her. So if I’m gay AND a taxpayer AND concerned about the looming debt disaster, should I support people who are spending us into bankruptcy?

So there you have it: good on gays, terrible on the #1 issue confronting the nation: the future of American economic solvency through reducing the exponential growth of government spending. But this is the choice gay voters typically face since gay equality was subsumed under the grand coalition of the left.

More. This Washington Post national debt chart says it all.