IGF CultureWatch

To the casual observer, the American Values Network (AVN) seems like a conservative Christian (some like to say “Christianists”) group. It’s currently involved in a campaign to attack the late novelist Ayn Rand as an “anti-Christian” atheist. That’s notable because, in addition to being an atheist, Rand was a leading proponent of free-market capitalism and limited government, and many of today’s leading conservatives, such as Rep. Paul Ryan, have cited her influence on their thought.

According to a press release from AVN:

Rand not only rejected Christ, but she condemned all those who believed in him and said his teachings were evil,” said Eric Sapp, Executive Director, American Values Network. “People of faith need to know what Ayn Rand believed and who her acolytes are in Washington so they can see how her teachings are being applied in government. Ayn Rand’s America is not one that good and decent people would want for their children.”

It notes that a memo from AVN provides:

a collection of Ayn Rand’s own teaching and statements about what the goals and purpose of her morality and thinking were—goals that stand in absolute contrast to Judeo-Christian morality and explicitly condemn the teachings of Christ. It also includes numerous quotes by Republican leaders and conservative pundits praising her, as well as Scripture references for the Bible’s teaching on the various subjects she addresses.

So, an internecine battle on the right? Not exactly. It turns out that the American Values Network is a Democratic front group. The head of AVN is a former Hillary/Pelosi staffer. Its National Advisory Committee includes Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and other Democrats. It’s their attempt to sow dissension “on the right” by setting the GOP’s socially conservative base against the limited government libertarians. And in doing so, they’re taking the side of “Judeo-Christian morality.” Nice work, eh.

A very nice profile of Redondo Beach, Calif., mayor Mike Gin, who is running for Congress, via the Washington Blade. The openly gay Republican would be the first person in a same-sex marriage elected to Congress if he wins:

“Certainly, we all need role models, and being gay and being married is just a part of who I am,” Gin said. “If somehow my election would provide some inspiration or maybe help a young person that’s very conflicted about being gay, then I think that’s a wonderful thing.”

An all-party primary is set for May 17.

Among the bills that Gin said he’ll support: the Uniting American Families Act, which would allow gay Americans to sponsor their foreign partners for residency in the United States, and repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

Gin has been endorsed by 10 current or former mayors in the South Bay of California and the Redondo Beach Chamber of Commerce. He is running with the vigorous support of Log Cabin Republicans, but (as I posted earlier), Equality California is trumpeting its support for Gin’s very left-liberal, straight Democratic opponent, naturally. Gin also is seeking support from the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, which to date (and to its continuing discredit) has failed to endorse him.

The Human Rights Campaign is declaring victory in its campaign to intimidate Washington, DC law firm King & Spalding into withdrawing from its agreement to represent the House GOP leadership in defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). King & Spalding partner Paul Clement, the former Solicitor General under George W. Bush, resigned from the firm in order to continue the defense of DOMA he agreed to undertake.

LGBT activists cheered; others warned of a New McCarthyism.

While I think there is great merit in the argument that people and organizations deserve the best representation they can procure even when (or especially when) they are unpopular, I’m not quite sure a law that the executive branch won’t defend is entitled to the same rights.

Nevertheless, there is something deeply disturbing about targeting not just the counsel of the opposition (King & Spalding) but also asking corporate clients to stop doing business with that firm (e.g., Coca Cola), as suggested in this report:

gay rights organizations including the Human Rights Campaign and the group Georgia Equality…planned an aggressive ad campaign, direct communication with the firm’s clients, and a diminution of its Corporate Equality Index ranking—the metric HRC uses to track corporate support for gay rights.

I believe the constitutional case against DOMA (section 3, non-federal recognition of state-authorized same-sex marriages) is sound and will eventually win the day. But strong-arming the opposition’s legal defense team and going after the firm’s clients is deeply disturbing.

Update: From Politico:

Attorney General Eric Holder is coming to the defense of former Solicitor General Paul Clement, after gay rights advocates criticized his decision to take on the defense of the Defense of Marriage Act in court. . . .

“In taking on the representation—representing Congress in connection with DOMA, I think he is doing that which lawyers do when we’re at our best,” Holder said during a roundtable with reporters at the Justice Department. “That criticism, I think, was very misplaced.”

Also on the marriage front… The claim by social conservatives that U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling against California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, should be thrown out because Walker recently disclosed he is gay and in a relationship is deeply offensive. As the Wall Street Journal reports:

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said that no U.S. court had ever ruled that a judge’s personal identity was sufficient reason for disqualification. “I think it is offensive to say that a judge can’t hear this case because he is gay or lesbian,” he said. “By that reasoning, a black judge couldn’t have heard challenges to segregation law.”

The libertarian Moorfield Storey Blog has an interesting, if long, post on a point that some libertarians don’t seem to get about prejudice when they suggest that if no physical injury is inflicted, bigotry isn’t a big deal. (Note I said “some” libertarians; others feel prejudice is indeed something to vigilantly counter, just not through the blunt instrument of government.)

The Moorfield Storey blogger addresses a typical libertarian, whom he terms “Calvin:

For a libertarian Calvin, it is pretty simple and easy. He sees a minority upset by the use of bigoted words and he laughs it off with remarks about “sticks and stones” and how they don’t break your bones. Gay kids across America were subjected to those words and killed themselves when they couldn’t take it anymore. Not Calvin; he was unlikely to be targeted merely because of who he was.

I imagine the impetus for this post was basketball superstar Kobe Bryant being fined $100,000 by the NBA last week for calling a referee the “f” word (and then some). Graying rocker Ted Nugent, now a right-wing (not a libertarian) columnist in the Washington Times, penned a defense of Bryant that declared, “Mr. Bryant committed this egregious verbal foul because he used a word demeaning to homosexuals, the most protected class of people in America.”

As the Moorfield Storey Blog states:

What makes the situation worse for the libertarian Calvin, is there are conservative Calvins who sound just like him. The libertarian Calvin (LC) may not be bigoted against minorities, while the conservative Calvin (CC) may be. Unfortunately when they speak they speak the language…minorities listening to the LC can’t tell how he differs from the CC. Individuals victimized because of who they are, hear the same comments coming out of both groups. And thus the libertarian stereotype, that we are just conservatives, but “more so” lives on, perpetrated by our own actions.

Which is an unwelcome outcome that some of our fellow libertarians, in making the case for limited government, may want to ponder.

More. And then there are government actions that chill the blood of many libertarians, like this Canadian prosecution for insensitivity: “Lesbian Insult Gets Comic Fined.”

Added. Man Arrested in UK for Singing “Kung Fu Fighting”.

Still more. Not now, but someday? The Wall Street Journal reports:

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson…is jumping into the 2012 Republican presidential race, adding variety to what already promises to be a crowded field. The two-term governor, who left office nine years ago after proudly vetoing 750 pieces of legislation, promises to run a long-shot campaign heavy on libertarian themes of limited government and personal freedom. …

A Johnson campaign will differ sharply in content and tone from that of other Republican contenders. He opposes U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but favors work visas for the 11 million illegal workers now in the U.S. He supports gay marriage and abortion rights, while advocating a balanced budget and a sharp reduction in government regulation, taxes and spending.

Conservative (and not very gay friendly) columnist Thomas Sowell nevertheless scores some sharp observations about the current campaign against school bullying. While not mentioning gay youth (prime victims of harassment, intimidation and violence), he is otherwise correct in noting:

The courts have created a legal climate where any swift and decisive action against bullies can lead to lawsuits. The net results are indecision, half-hearted gestures and pious public pronouncements by school officials, none of which is going to stop bullies.

When judges create new “rights” for bullies out of thin air, just as they do for criminals, and prescribe “due process” for school discipline, just as if schools were little courtrooms, then nothing is likely to happen promptly or decisively.

If there is anything worse than doing nothing, it is doing nothing spiced with empty rhetoric about what behavior is “unacceptable”—while in fact accepting it.

If public schools aren’t allowed to enforce discipline and to actually punish bullies, then much of the anti-bullying rhetoric is just hypocritical posturing. And legislative mandates that schools “teach tolerance,” when they can’t teach kids to read and write, don’t inspire confidence. (School choice and private school vouchers, providing an actual incentive for public schools to get their act together as they compete for students, just might. At least victims, like Kurt on “Glee,” could flee their tormentors.)

The Human Rights Campaign’s castigating the House leadership for spending $500,000 (and probably much more) to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court cases where its constitutionality is being challenged strikes me as proper. But the group’s criticism of the law firm of King & Spalding for taking the House’s case to defend the constitutionality of DOMA is somewhat grayer. While I don’t know that I would want to hire the firm that’s fighting against my rights, all sides deserve an advocate and I don’t fear a strongly argued case that makes clear what the constitutional issues are.

Update: King & Spalding feels the pressure and withdraws. Firm Partner Paul Clement, a former Solicitor General, resigned in order to continue the defense of DOMA he agreed to undertake. LGBT activists cheered; others warned of a New McCarthyism.

I wish the House wasn’t pandering to social conservatives in holding hearings on the legality of President Obama’s decision not to have the Justice Department support DOMA in court. But I question how constructive HRC’s attack on the hearings (“fixated on beating up on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans”) will be. Democrats are able to call witnesses, too, if they so choose, I believe, so wouldn’t it be more productive to show up and make the best possible case?

More. In an earlier post I praised the administration’s decision to belatedly, after two years, stop defending DOMA in court. As I asked then:

Will the LGBT Obama partisans…who for the past two years have assured us that Obama had no choice but to defend DOMA against legal challenges, that he was legally obligated to order his Justice Department to do so, and who maintained that position by dismissing those of us who pointed to contrary precedents, now admit they were wrong?

Needless to say, the view that many of Obama’s supporters took then sounds eerily similar to the position that the House GOP is now taking—and that the pro-Obama folks are excoriating.

The anti-gay religious right claimed “religious discrimination” when Wal-Mart fired an employee who verbally harassed a lesbian co-worker, screaming at her that she was “going to hell.”
The Seventh Circuit has now upheld the firing.

Wal-Mart, by the way, also should be free to fire a gay or lesbian employee who yells at a conservative Christian co-worker and calls her a “bigot” for attending a socially conservative church. But if and when such a case arises, would anyone be surprised if the gay employee were to claim “anti-gay discrimination”?

A report in Newsweek shines a light on “a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault.” Jesse Ellison writes:

While many might assume the perpetrators of such assaults are closeted gay soldiers, military experts and outside researchers say assailants usually are heterosexual. Like in prisons and other predominantly male environments, male-on-male assault in the military, experts say, is motivated not by homosexuality, but power, intimidation, and domination. Assault victims, both male and female, are typically young and low-ranking; they are targeted for their vulnerability.

A key argument by those opposed to letting open gays serve in the military was that it would lead to sexualized barracks (often with the none too subtle invoking of gays as sexual predators). In all likelihood, having open gays around will decrease the incidents of male-on-male sexual assault. Reporting and follow-up measures being put in place measures to protect straights from gays will have the effect of protecting both gays and vulnerable straights from the assaults of twisted, hetero bastards.

Related: The GOP’s House hearings this week on the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”—a sop to the anti-gay right—failed to produce the bang the bigots were looking for.

“The whole thrust of the training is you’re supposed to go on treating everybody like you’re supposed to be treating everybody now—with dignity, respect and discipline,” [Secretary of Defense] Gates said.

Well, treating everyone with dignity, respect and discipline certainly would be a step forward!

University of Missouri law professor Thom Lambert takes aim at the claim by University of Pennsylvania law professor Tobias Wolff (writing at the Huffington Post) that gays should support labor union stances (or, as Wolff puts it, “Pushing back against the current assault on American workers should be one of the highest priorities of the LGBT community today—fully on a par with the effort to secure employment discrimination protections or relationship rights”).

Prof. Lambert responds:

If an expression of support for gay rights and the provision of benefits to gays were enough to create a “reciprocal obligation” to provide support, gay people would have to spend all their time pushing causes!

Which might be fine with Prof. Wolff, as long as they were progressive causes (Lambert notes that Wolfe is not demanding that gays endorse a BP plan to limit liability for oil spills, although BP is on the Human Rights Campaign’s list of “top businesses that support equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees”).

Concludes Lambert:

So, if you’re a gay person and you think collective bargaining by public sector unions is bankrupting state and local governments while fattening the civil service class, go gripe about it to your Republican neighbor over a beer. In doing so, you’ll be promoting the sort of social change that will ensure real equality for gay people in the future.

More. Dale Carpenter blogs:

Wolff’s argument comes from a long political tradition, going back at least to the 1950s, which maintains that gay rights are inextricably tied to a host of causes supported by self-styled progressives—everything from abortion rights to various left-wing revolutionary movements. Lambert is part of an emerging group of dissenters from the dominant progressive tradition in gay politics. It includes people who support gay rights but also support the rights of the unborn, oppose gun-control legislation, want taxes kept low, think social welfare programs are wasteful and counter-productive, doubt the value of national healthcare programs, and so on. They may be wrong about any or all of these things, but it is hardly obvious that sexual orientation—either as a matter of principle or as a matter of political strategy—should dictate the stands they take.

The Republican Party as a whole is not supportive of gay equality. You might think that would lead LGBT political groups to try to increase the number of pro-gay (and openly gay) Republican office holders, who once elected would be in a position to change the party. Alas, that’s not the case.

Take the Victory Fund. Its stated mission is “To change the face and voice of America’s politics and achieve equality for LGBT Americans by increasing the number of openly LGBT officials at all levels of government.” But the group has long had a virtual litmus test against pro-life gay candidates, which (with rare exception) has excluded endorsements for gay Republicans. Robert Turner, president of the D.C. chapter of Log Cabin Republicans, argues “being pro-life is not bad for the gay cause” and is urging the Victory Fund to “Get rid of the pro-abortion plank in your vetting process and move on.”

Another case in point; Just this week Equality California (EQCA) endorsed Democrat Debra Bowen for Congress. She’s a pro-gay liberal, but also running for the seat is popular Republican Redondo Beach mayor Mike Gin, who is openly gay and married (yes, to a man).

You’d think sending him to Congress would convey a powerful message to the GOP and be a significant step toward changing the party’s anti-gay stance. But fealty to the Democratic Party remains the top priority of a great many LGBT activists, whose worst fundraising nightmare is a GOP that isn’t adamantly anti-gay.

More. Log Cabin Republicans are “Proud to Support One of Our Own, Mike Gin, For Congress.”