IGF CultureWatch

Bill Browning writes on the Huffington Post that the left’s “One Nation” march on Washington included LGBT progressives groups such as GetEqual, Human Rights Campaign, Stonewall Democrats and others. But, Browning relates, in an email to him Lt Dan Choi of GetEqual reported on the reception the group got as they carried signs with the faces of six LGBT youth who recently died by suicide:

We attended the “One Nation” progressive march on Washington today and were met with mixed reactions by “progressives.” All we intended was to bring visibility to the recent gay suicides. Some remarked: “Yeah…If y’all just stop killing yourselves, and turn to God…” and “You guys are stupid.”

Asks Browning:

Why wasn’t the LGBT community front and center as part of the progressive community? Because, as we’ve seen with the current crop of “progressive” leadership—both inside and outside of the administration—our rights are not a priority for our friends and natural allies. We are the group that is always the easiest to lop off when the going gets tough—when people start to feel “uncomfortable.” We are the group that gets “support” if we’ll promise to keep our mouths shut…

LGBT organizations that purport to represent us and our issues signed on to this march to increase our visibility and support among progressives—even though some of these same orgs refused to even add their name to a list of orgs supporting the National Equality March. I hope they’re satisfied with the results they got.

As long as progressive LGBT “leaders” view themselves as Democratic party operatives first and foremost, that’s not going to change.

More. How “liberal litterbugs” trashed the Mall. Blogs Jenny Erikson:

What a sad day. The left can’t get people to an event without bussing them in and making sure their bosses cross their names off the list. The left can’t make their own signs, they have to be handed flashy manufactured ones. The left can’t even get people to respect the National Mall, a place that deserves reverence. The left can’t get a group of people that claim to care about the environment to, you know, actually care about the environment.

I overheard one of the attendees talking to a park ranger. “I just don’t understand,” he said, “Why is there so much trash? I heard there wasn’t any at that Beck rally … How did they do it?”

From the AP:

[New Jersey Gov. Chris] Christie is among those who argue that Republicans can succeed when they focus on fiscal conservatism, often at the expense of focusing on key social issues, whereas former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee energize the party’s religious and socially conservative base. Palin and Huckabee have been in Iowa recently, as has Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenti, who courts that same base.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, of course, is another fiscal conservative who famously called for “a truce on social issues” (read: abortion and gay bashing). Yes, he added, “until the economic issues are resolved,” but a GOP president elected without making promises to the religious right, and in fact elected by downplaying social issues, won’t be indebted to them. That’s the fight, and it’s for the soul of the New GOP.

Jim DeMint, old school gay-baiter and never going to change. But he’s the past, not the future.

More. Because this is my post and it generated lots of bitingly negative comments, I’m going to highlight a response defending me by commenter avee:

It strikes me there is a certain purism among critics of Miller’s post. Miller makes the point (perhaps too broadly, but it’s a blog post, not a white paper) that a number of leading Republican presidential contenders are asking for a tone-down on social issues, and that this is significant. His critics blast him because these same leading GOP contenders are still not as good as liberal Democrats on gay issues, and therefore nothing has changed and we should all only support liberal Democrats.

Change is incremental, and failing to encourage small steps that can lead to bigger steps is a losers game — it’s the game of Democratic party fundraisers in LGBT-activist clothes. For my part, I’m tired of reading gay media articles that state (1) Gays are in big trouble if (or, more accurately, when) Republicans make big gains in November, and (2) offering no strategy other than going down with the Democratic ship.

Of course the critics weren’t persuaded, but neither do they have a convincing response to point (2) above.

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz blogs, Krauthammer Misreads History:

Charles Krauthammer calls same-sex marriage “the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history.” Really? . . . I would suggest that the truly radical redefinition of marriage is the revolution over the past generation in the idea that people should marry before they cohabit or have children. . . .But like socially conservative politicians, Krauthammer is not about to confront his friends, colleagues, and fans by denouncing that radical redefinition of marriage.

I just wanted to mark the tragic death of 18-year-old Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after his roommate, Dharun Rav, helped by fellow freshman Molly Wei, reportedly set up cameras in Celmenti’s dorm room to secretly transmit over the Internet a streaming video of Clementi engaged in sex with a male student, as the New York Post reports. The moral corruption of Clementi’s tormentors speaks for itself.

More. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie calls the freshman’s death an “unspeakable tragedy” and says he can’t imagine how the two students accused of secretly filming Clementi can sleep at night.

In a related way, this story of a state of Michigan assistant attorney general using his blog to vilify and harass a gay University of Michigan student leader is another portrait of moral corruption.

Evil is real in this world. While government has a role in protecting citizens from violence, neither of these cases involved physical attacks. It is society—families and civilized communities—that have to teach young people that wanton cruelty is not “funny” and cool, a message they’re not getting from their adult-excluded tribal social networks. And it’s society—and, ultimately, the electorate—that has to say that bigotry and fanaticism by government officials is beyond the pale and won’t be tolerated.

More. For those following the Michigan story, updates here and here.

The battle for the soul of the Republican party being waged between social vs. libertarian conservatives will likely be the central gay rights battleground for the next few years, as this Washington Post story makes clear. A pity so many partisan progressives seem to want to declare that battle lost from the get go.

More. The Advocate asks: “Two competing fund-raisers were held Wednesday night in Manhattan, one chock-full of conservatives and another laden with liberals. But which one did more to advance LGBT equality?”

Furthermore. Hard to disagree with this viewpoint, also from the Washington Post:

In the ’90s, the gay rights movement got in bed with the Democrats financially, according to [Paul] Yandura, who worked on LGBT issues for the Clinton White House, and the results have been scant ever since.

“You end up worrying more about what stature you have in the administration and in Democratic leadership and within the social world of Washington than you do about wanting to get equal under the law,” says Yandura, who often hosts out-of-town GetEQUAL organizers at his home in Columbia Heights. “Once you’re at a high-level meeting, it’s them telling you what’ll happen, and if you fight that, you’ll never come to another one.”

I’m not a big “L” Libertarian Party guy, but I think LP Chairman Mark Hinkle put it very well in his outreach message to disenchanted gay voters:

“Exit polls indicate that Democrats get over 70% of LGBT votes in federal elections. Those voters must really love the Democrats’ rhetoric, because they certainly aren’t seeing any action.

“President Obama and the Democrats had almost a year of complete control of the federal government: the Presidency, the House, and a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate. They could have repealed ‘don’t ask don’t tell.’ They could have gotten rid of the Defense of Marriage Act. But they didn’t do either of those things.”

Would a Republican-controlled Congress have “done any of those things”? Not on your life. But what if the Democratic leadership had been willing to negotiate support for any of these initiatives with GOP moderates in exchange for things they would want (tort reform, for instance). But there was no will to go there.

From AP: “‘The whole thing is a political train wreck,’ said Richard Socarides, a White House adviser on gay rights during the Clinton administration.” Hard to disagree. At one time, the bill to overturn “don’t ask, don’t tell” had several Republican sponsors. But when push came to shove, we didn’t even keep the two Maine moderates, Collins and Snowe (here’s the cloture vote). Talk about pulling a defeat out of the jaws of victory.

McCain disgraced himself. But Socarides is right to fault the Democrats’ strategy. And whose bright idea was it to highlight Lady Gaga at a pro-repeal rally the day before the vote? It’s the kind of “let’s just speak to each other and our allies on the left” foolishness that shows a disdain for even bothering to try to reach out to the opposition.

In retrospect, waiting for the military report, due by the end of the year, would have taken away a crutch some socially moderate Republicans used to vote down repeal. Holding a lame-duck vote after the election might also have been a better way to go. But what’s done is done, and the struggle will have to carry on in the next Congress, with a much larger number of Republicans onboard (with some chance of another vote this year, after the military report is released). Either way, the Democrats-only strategy will be an even bigger failure if that’s all we’ve got.

More. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin says Harry Reid set up the vote to fail. He blogs:

The sixty votes needed to break the filibuster had already been lined up, but that was before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to limit debates and votes on amendments. That led to a collapse in support in ending the filibuster. Servicemembers United, which has been campaigning for DADT’s repeal, saw through Reid’s political posturing.

There are going to be a lot of political postmortems on this one.

Furthermore. Shikha Dalmia, a senior analyst at the libertarian Reason Foundation, blogs ObamaCare’s First Major Casualties: Gays and Aliens.

This is very telling: The Washington Blade’s top story this week is about the DC mayoral Democratic primary, which incumbent Mayor Adrian Fenty lost to City Council Chair Vincent Gray. The story is headlined: “Activists hail Gray’s stunning win over Fenty.” The subhead (at least in the print version): “But mayor carries precincts with high concentrations of LGBT voters.”

That is, gay voters went one way, while the city’s “progressive” LGBT activists went the other.

In a nutshell, Fenty and Gray are both liberal African-American Democrats, but Fenty challenged the entrenched unions by supporting modest school reforms, which included firing teachers who failed to meet basic performance standards. That infuriated the teachers’ union, which strongly backed Gray, as did the rest of the public sector employee unions. Sadly, despite improved student test scores (and lower crime) under Fenty, Gray won the day.

LGBT “progressive” activists are joined at the hip with public sector unions and other elements of the “progressive” statist, entrenched big government coalition. Gay voters, however, cast their votes overwhelmingly for Fenty. This is a local story, but this November, and in November 2012, American voters will, I believe, rise up against not just ineffective big government, but the entrenched power of public sector unions, whose members’ salaries and benefits (that is, for federal and state and local workers), paid by taxpayers, are now far in excess of what taxpayers themselves earn for the same jobs in the private sector, not to mention the near-impossibility of firing public sector workers despite their lack of performance.

LGBT activists are showing that they will be on the wrong side, fighting tooth and nail to defend the privileges of their Service Employee International Union allies, and that’s not going to be good for gay people.

More. From Michael Barone, Public Unions vs. Gentry Liberals:

“Gentry liberals and public employee unions were allies in the Obama campaign in 2008. But now they’re in a civil war in city and state politics. This raises the question of whether the Democratic Party favors public employee unions that want more money and less accountability, or gentry liberals and others who care about the quality of public services. Right now the unions are winning.”

That would seem to mirror the split between gay voters and LGBT progressive activists over public union power.

Furthermore. From Reuters: “Now that most European countries are burdened with high deficits and debt mountains due to the financial crisis, the ‘big government’ left is not seen as offering a credible answer to the question of where and how to shrink the state. In many countries, public employees are the biggest bloc of socialist party members and constitute a brake on reform.”

There, as here.

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz expects tea-party congressional freshmen to push for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, not an amendment to ban gay marriage. “I don’t think there’s likely to be a lot of social activism coming out of them,” he tells the Wall Street Journal.

More thoughts from Boaz on the tea partiers, here.

There’s no question that the tea party patriots have focused like a laser on Washington’s fiscally unsustainable course. Could that change? The Journal notes, “82% of tea-party supporters interviewed said they oppose gay marriage, compared with 74% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats, according to a Zogby International poll.” On the other hand:

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted in June found that just 2% of those identified as tea partiers put social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage at the top of their priority lists for federal action. By contrast, 29% chose job creation and economic growth at the top, and 25% picked the deficit and government spending.

Engagement and dialogue with the tea party movement, rather than rank attacks from the LGBT left is the better way to help ensure that they don’t shift gears and make common cause with the cultural warriors.

More. Just received a fundraising letter from the Human Rights Campaign that attacks the Tea Party movement, without citing any evidence of the Tea Partiers’ anti-gay activism. For HRC, it’s all about supporting the Democratic Party.