Author Archives: Stephen Henry Miller

Embrace the Change

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From the Washington Post: Same-sex marriage gains GOP support.
Some of this is wishful thinking. Yet there is undeniably a shift occurring on the right as more limited-government (or at least anti-gargantuan government) conservatives come out and make the big-tent case that social issues are divisive. If they (we) become dominant, it will be the worst of all nightmares for the power-seekers of the command-economy redistributionist left.

The more we can change the perspective that gay equality is part and parcel of the broader and increasingly unpopular “progressive” agenda, the better placed we’ll be to wage the fight for legal equality after the Tea Party empowered GOP regains one or both houses of Congress this November, and then the presidency in 2012.

More. Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff takes aim at the LGBT anti-corporate activists who have targeted Target Corp. stores. He writes:

Locally, you’d be hard-pressed to find a prominent Maryland or Virginia Democrat who supports marriage equality. But that doesn’t stop our lobbyists from working hard to elect them. And re-elect them.

Why are we so quick to jump on a corporate boycott —even one targeting a high-profile gay-friendly business—yet when it comes to politicians, our advocates are just as quick to turn the other cheek?

Could it be that for many activists, it’s the progressive agenda (and its party) first?

Furthermore. From the New York Times:

[Paul] Singer a self-described Barry Goldwater conservative…has become one of the biggest bankrollers of Republican causes…. He is not new to fund-raising–he raised money for George W. Bush, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and, surprisingly, gay rights initiatives. …
Singer plans to hold a fund-raiser next month at his Manhattan apartment in support of the California lawsuit opposing Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage. Ken Mehlman, a former top Republican official who said this week that he was gay, will be one of the co-hosts.

Which is why things like Mehlman coming out are important; it’s part of the trend of more conservative money and support for gay legal equality. But instead of celebrating, LGBT progressives are fuming.

Still more. How big is the GOP tent? An online debate over at the New York Times.

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Better Late Than Never

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The Atlantic has a big story on former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman coming out and saying he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage. The Log Cabin Republicans issued this statement. But not everyone is so welcoming. Says blogger (and outer) Mike Rogers, “Ken Mehlman is horridly homophobic and no matter how orchestrated his coming out is, our community should hold him accountable for his past.”

Bush’s support during the Mehlman years for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage everywhere  in the U.S. was unconscionable, and I suspect Mehlman went along with Karl Rove, rather than being the instigator. Hold him accountable if you like. Other issues Mehlman is being targeted with helping to oppose include a federal hate crimes statute that includes gays and transgenders (now passed and signed by Obama) and the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which remains blocked in the Democrat-controlled Congress (despite enough GOP support to preclude a filibuster). There are plenty of principled gay libertarians who are against both these initiatives and they are not “anti-gay.”

If someone opposes legal equality, that is an issue. Failing to embrace the use of state power to supposedly make life better for gays is a debatable matter on which reasonable gay people can and will disagree. So on those initiatives, I’d cut Mehlman some slack.

If he now uses his influence to help change the GOP’s opposition to gay marriage, it would go a long way toward making amends.

More. John Aravosis blogs:

I hope someone at the DNC is starting to sweat. We now have the former head of the Republican party who is to the left of Barack Obama on gay marriage. There’s a virtual groundswell of senior Republicans coming out for marriage equality. It can’t be going unnoticed in the gay community. And while it doesn’t mean 70% of the gay vote will now go Republican instead of Democrat, it does mean that growing numbers of gays and lesbians will starting thinking of the GOP as a legitimate alternative to the Democratic party.

That’s a mite optimistic, but if the trend continues…. And it will be the only way to stop the Democrats from viewing gay voters as nothing more than a spigot for campaign dollars and volunteer labor.

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Rather a Reach

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Do you think opponents of gay marriage are reaching a bit to make their points? Check out this commentary Why Young Black Men Don’t Graduate in the Washington Times. It’s by Janice Shaw Crouse, executive director of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute. She writes:

A new report from the Schott Foundation reveals that just 47 percent of black male students earn a high school diploma on time. Ironically, this report came out shortly after Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled on Proposition 8 and homosexual marriage in California. If the statements on which Judge Walker based his ruling are “facts,” how do we explain what is happening educationally to boys in the black community, where a large majority are growing up without fathers?

Of course, Judge Walker might well agree that having two parents is better than one for raising children. But the points he made (and which Crouse quotes) were different ones, that “The gender of a child’s parent is not a factor in a child’s adjustment” and that “Having both a male and a female parent does not increase the likelihood that a child will be well-adjusted.”

Crouse twists and spins to make the same old argument that allowing gay people to marry is an assault on the heterosexual family unit, and that the absence of fathers in black homes leads to underachievement by young black men. So, ipso facto, Judge Walker’s ruling that gay people have a constitutional right to marry is so bad it’s keeping young black men from graduating!

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Wrong Direction

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The liberal New Republic provides a timeline showing Obama’s support for gay marriage back in 1996 when running for Illinois state senate (his statement at the time: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages”) and then his subsequent move up the political career ladder and away from marriage equality, instead favoring civil unions for gays and holding that marriage is reserved for heterosexuals. Said presidential candidate Obama:

What I believe is that if we have strong civil unions out there that provide legal rights to same-sex couples that they can visit each other in the hospital if they get sick, that they can transfer property to each other. If they’ve got benefits, they can make sure those benefits apply to their partners. I think that is the direction we need to go.

As if hospital visitation and easier property transfer is what marriage is essentially about! Elsewhere in the New Republic, the magazine’s executive editor Richard Just calls Obama out on this non-profile in courage. Some of the NR’s commenters defend the president, saying marriage is a state, not federal, issue (sounding like Republicans!), and ignoring that it’s a federal law (the Defense of Marriage Act) that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage even after states have extended legal equality to gay people.

Yep, Republicans are worse. But all politicians elevate the will to power over principle, and treat the stances they take as a means to an end (their own advancement). The liberal ones are just fancier in their footwork. The lesson is to push back and make it cost them not to deliver—and that means playing hardball.

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Our New Design

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Yes, we’ve redesigned the site! Sorry if some comments were lost in the changeover. We’re still learning the new interface, so blogging may be slow for awhile. Hope you like the new look.

(We know that author names have been jumbled and that many of the posts below do not have a correct byline. We’ll try to fix these glitches ove the weekend). Update: bylines are fixed.

More. Some comments that the system thinks might be spam are not posted. These are manually reviewed, but may explain why comments don’t appear. This is,  however, necessary to avoid spam. I’m told we may have to put back the “enter these letters” box in order to avoid spam as well. We’ll monitor and see. Likewise, the request to enter your email is to foil spammers.

All artice content is still on the site and searchable. We took off the “search by category” buttons because we figured most people are comfortable just searching by key words. We may look into putting it back, however.

We decided to treat content as content, and move away from article vs. blog distinction.  Actually, we decided to stop posting articles in whole because it was labor intensive, and the articles are online elsewhere. Instead, we’ll be linking to articles of interest using shorter blog posts, along with longer and more substantive blog post.

The new interface has a few glitches that we’ll try to iron out. But all told,we’re very happy with it. We hope you’ll warm to it as well.

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Marriage and Constraint

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Here's another conservative (or, in this case, neoconservative) case for gay marriage, from neocon Joshua Muravchik:
A substantial fraction of people feel carnal affinity exclusively or primarily with individuals of the same sex. Insofar as their sexuality is to be channeled it cannot be toward the goal of procreation. If society has a general interest in the constraint of the sexual instinct, then it has an interest in encouraging long-term monogamous relations regardless of whether one ostensible purpose is to bear offspring. ... The claim that we defend marriage by disallowing it to homosexuals is a non sequitur. Could it not equally be argued that we reaffirm the importance of marriage by making it available even to couples who have not traditionally had this opportunity?
And a libertarian argument (no talk here of "constraint of the sexual instinct") from Sheldon Richman:
Marriage has never been exclusively about procreation. If that were so, couples that were infertile, elderly, and uninterested in having children wouldn't have been allowed to get married. Many other values have been at the core of marriage: economic security, love and emotional fulfillment, and more.
Richman also takes on the objection that courts shouldn't overrule public referendums or legislatures, explaining:
It seem clear that if government exists, then there is nothing wrong with courts thwarting the public or the legislature when either oversteps the limits we hope are set for government and violates liberty.
Neo-cons and libertarians don't agree on much, so it's interesting to see these two finding their own way to argue in favor of same-sex marriage. In other words, marriage equality-it's not just for progressives.

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Targeted Protests

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I can understand why Target Corp. would want to donate to politicians who support a pro-growth agenda and oppose the sort of job killing regulations, confiscatory taxation and anti-growth spending that aims to grow unionized government at the expense of the private sector. Unfortunately, many fiscal conservatives are also social conservatives and oppose legal equality for gay people.

That may describe Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, a Republican who, as a legislator, supported amending the state consitutution to ban same-sex marriage. When Target donated to an independent political fund supporting Emmer (Best Buy did so as well), activists groups went into protest mode, including the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Moveon.org. According to one gay media report:

Activists angry at Target for supporting an anti-gay marriage gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota are pressing on with their protests after the company apologized.

The Minnesota-based retail giant apologized last week for contributing $150,000 to MN Forward, an independent political fund supporting anti-gay Republican Tom Emmer. Emmer clinched the GOP nomination for Minnesota governor Tuesday.

In a memo to employees, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel wrote that he continues to believe that a "business climate conducive to growth is critical to our future," but added he had not anticipated how the donation would affect its employees. "And for that I am genuinely sorry," Steinhafel wrote.

Of course, if Emmer were a Democrat who opposed gay marriage it's doubtful that HRC would be targeting Target, given that HRC has itself supported the campaigns of candidates such as Virginia's Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat who favors keeping "don't ask, don't tell," as well as a great many Democrats who oppose gay marriage to varying degrees. Maybe HRC should target itself?

That being said, it's probably good to send a message that businesses that donate to candidates opposing legal equality for gay people are going to be held to account. Whether the protests should continue after the donors subsequently apologize, in an effort to get them to cough up more funds for LGBT groups and their favored causes and/or to keep activists in the news and gin up their fundraising operations, is debatable.

On that matter, consider that the gay conservatives at GOProud are out and proud about violating the boycott by LGBT activists and unions of the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego. Doug Manchester, the owner of the hotel, was a financial supporter of California's anti-gay-marriage Prop. 8. Manchester subsequently issued a statement saying "I am sorry for the pain and conflict I have caused and would like to take this time to apologize, clarify my views on the matter and share some background on Hyatt's long-standing and commendable support of the GLBT community" (it's quoted in the link above).

Again, I think there is value in protesting businesses that support opponents of gay equality. But at this point, GOProud believes the ongoing boycott has all to do with unions opposing the fact that Manchester's hotel remains non-union, and I suspect the group is right.

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The New Roe v. Wade?

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In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Berkeley law professor John Yoo takes issue with Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling that California's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. Yoo says that he favors gay marriage as a matter of policy, but that:

Federalism will produce the political durability that supporters of gay marriage want. If states steadily approve, a political consensus will form that will be difficult to undo.

Consider, by contrast, abortion. Roe v. Wade (1973) only intensified political conflict at a time when the nation was already moving in a pro-choice direction. That decision...poisoned our politics, introduced rounds of legislative defiance and judicial intervention, and undermined the neutral principles of constitutional law.

I don't disagree that relying on courts, rather than the political process, to advance our rights carries the risk of a backlash, and certainly Jon Rauch strikes a similar note in his recent column on the California ruling.

But I suspect abortion and marriage equality really don't resonate on the same level among most conservatives, apart for the hard-core religious right. Consider Glenn Beck's interview with Bill O'Reilly (discussed in my last post), in which Beck refused to label gay marriage as a threat and quoted Thomas Jefferson that "if it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me." But when O'Reilly asked him about abortion, Beck responded, "Abortion is killing, you're killing."

For most people who oppose marriage equality, their unease over giving a stamp of approval to gay relationships (and by that they mean gay sex) just isn't in the same league with stopping the abortion mills that result in the murder of unborn babies, sometimes just before birth and at taxpayer expense.

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Changing Times

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Last year, conservative superstar Glenn Beck said some truly stupid things about gay marriage, such as claiming it would lead to polygamy. Which is why it is so startling now to hear him refuse to condemn gay marriage, even as Bill O'Reilly tried to bait him into doing so:

O'Reilly: You are ignoring the profound change in the American family. ... Do you believe that gay marriage is a threat to the country in any way?

Beck: A threat to the country?

O'Reilly: Will it harm the country?

Beck: [Mockingly] Will the gays come and get us? I believe that Thomas Jefferson said if it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me....

O'Reilly: So you don't. That's interesting. I don't think a lot of people understand that. ... Ok, gay marriage to you, not a big threat to the nation.

Beck has become more libertarian as he educates himself, and apparently now sees attacking gay marriage as needlessly divisive. A growing number of conservatives (though clearly not Bill O'Reilly and Cal Thomas) recognize that beating the anti-gay drum drives away independents whose support is needed to roll back the gargantuan, deficit-skyrocketing (see here and here) expansion of government (and government mandates) under Obama, Pelosi and Reid. And that's a positive development.

More. David Boaz cast as critical eye on Cal Thomas and his fulmination against freedom.

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Gay Marriage Fight a Setback for Transgenders?

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There is a sad story in the paper about a transgender woman in Texas, Nikki Araguz, who is being barred from collecting the death benefits of her husband, a firefighter killed in the line of duty. Her late husband's mother is arguing that Ms. Araguz was born a man and that since Texas defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the marriage is void and she has no rights to spousal and survivor benefits.

In many jurisdictions transgender people are legally the sex they've transitioned to and have been able to marry someone of the (now) opposite sex. What's interesting about this story is that a transgender activist is decrying the confusion between the rights of transgenders and the fight for marriage equality for gays:

Shannon Price Minter, legal director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, said the national push for gay marriage has unintentionally hurt transgendered people and resulted in cases like this.

"I think it's very unfortunate that, perhaps because of the visibility of lesbian and gay couples seeking marriage, that transgendered people have been caught up in that frame and have been hurt by that and have actually, in some respects, are more vulnerable now than they have been in the past," he said. "I think it's really only in the past few years that we see pretty ugly cases like this coming up because people are, I think, exploiting homophobia."

Okay, but who was it that insisted that transgender people be conflated with gays and lesbians under the LGBT rubric, if not transgender activists?

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