IGF CultureWatch

This is a bit inside-the-beltway, but the fact that the very socially conservative (oh, let's just say reactionary) Washington Times is abandoning some of its most egregious anti-gay stylings (using "homosexual" instead of gay; placing scare quotes around the "m" word in "homosexual 'marriage'") signifies something.

Real advances for gay legal and social equality come not just when the convention-abandoning left "progressives" move on (sometimes to positive effect, sometimes destructively and hubristically), but when the hidebound, clinging-to-tradition, puttin'-on-the-brakes other leg of the national psyche advances, albeit much more slowly, in the forward direction. That's why while the Democratic nominees clearly far outpace the GOP on matters gay (at least rhetorically), the fact that McCain is somewhat of an improvement over Bush (i.e., as when he called the proposed federal anti-gay marriage amendment "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans") still registers as important.

More. Scott Tucker, communications director for the Log Cabin Republicans, makes the case that if you happen to be gay and Republican, you can feel comfortable voting for John McCain.

Furthermore. Jonathan Rauch shares his thoughts in For The GOP, A Tonic Named McCain.

The attorney general of Israel ruled last week that gay couples will be allowed to jointly adopt children that are not biologically linked to either partner. Menachem Mazuz announced that there was no legal basis for differing treatment of gay couples to straight couples.

Meanwhile, is there any doubt about how, in a future Palestinian state, gays will be treated? If not subject to execution as in Iran, they'll certainly be subject to arrest, as in Egypt. (Awhile back, Paul Varnell wrote about the persecution of gays by the Palestinian Authority, as did Jamie Kirchick.)

But try telling that to San Francisco-based QUIT! (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism). Or, for that matter, to those Methodists and Presbyterians who urge divestment from corporations doing business in Israel - a stance that joins old-time Christian anti-Semitism with progressive scape-goating of the Jewish state (and yes, I'm sure some of their very best friends in the anti-globalization league are from families of the Hebrew persuasion).

One hopeful sign: Gay Middle Eastern bloggers in countries including Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain and Morocco are risking their liberty and lives to speak out.

In Virginia, some public school educrats are making sure that the threat of a lesson in tolerance toward gays and their families remains firmly in check:

A children's book about two male penguins that hatch and parent a chick was pulled from library shelves in Loudoun County elementary schools this month after a parent complained that it promoted a gay agenda. The decision by Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III led many parents and gay rights advocates to rush to the penguins' defense.... The book, "And Tango Makes Three," by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, draws on the real-life story of Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in New York. It also appears to make a point about tolerance of alternative families.

School authorities in the Old Dominion might ponder this tragic cautionary tale from California's public school hell:

Ventura County prosecutors charged a 14-year-old boy with the shooting death of a classmate Thursday and said the killing in an Oxnard classroom was a premeditated hate crime....
[C]lassmates of the slain boy, Lawrence King, said he recently had started to wear makeup and jewelry and had proclaimed himself gay. Several students said King and a group of boys, including the defendant, had a verbal confrontation concerning King's sexual orientation a day before the killing.

I recognize there is no direct link between these stories, but they do, once again, raise issues regarding life (or death) for gay students in "public" schools, where children without parents of independent means (or the willingness to devote a substantial part of their savings to private education) will find themselves trapped.

And, being government schools, they are always going to be subject to political whims. Pro-gay progressives can go too far in trying to incorporate lessons into the curriculum that parents of conservative religious faith will consider an assault on their values. On the other hand, where social conservatives hold sway, even the hint of recognition toward "alternative" relationships and families can be forbidden. Such obtuseness doesn't always lead to hate-motivated murder, it just adds to the general climate of gays being treated as "queer" and unworthy of legal or social equality.

Probably, only when we end government discrimination against gay relationships (the marriage ban) will government schools stop treating gays and our families as something unsavory.

A nice overview by former Log Cabin spokesman Kevin Ivers on John McCain's plusses and minuses for gays. Excerpt:

He stood with gay Republicans against the ugly tactics in South Carolina in 2000 and the early pandering by the 2000 Bush campaign to anti-gay groups. He voted against the FMA in the Senate, and spoke against it on the Senate floor, but he also voted for DOMA, against ENDA, supports "don't ask, don't tell" and backed the Arizona anti-gay marriage referendum (but so did John Kerry back such a measure in 2004).

He led the fight…to repeal the repulsive Dornan Amendment, which sought to create witchhunts to drive soldiers out of the military who tested HIV positive after enlistment and cut off all their benefits.... And when I raised "don't ask, don't tell"...he had the same political (almost Hillaryesque) answer: "When General Colin Powell says it's time to repeal it, we can do it." ...

He already went to Liberty University a long time ago, and much like he did at CPAC last week, he didn't give them anything other than very polite attention and a restatement that he is who he is, take him or leave him.

Ivers concludes, "Conviction, politics, bravery, skittishness-all rolled up in one." But still, he represents a huge step forward for a GOP standard-bearer.

More. Comments reader "Avee""

gay issues have fallen off the radar...because the Democrats think Obama and/or Clinton should not be pushed for any kind of real commitment to advancing gay equality other than feel-good rhetoric, and Republicans realize it's probably futile to try to press McCain for anything (other than continued opposition to the federal marriage amendment, which does put him ahead of W.)

I agree. Without a GOP nominee who is shilling for the federal marriage amendment, gay issues will be all but unheard this go round.

A caveat. If the Senate's Democratic leadership finally allows the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to come to the floor (it passed the House last fall), it could cause a ripple. The closer it is to November, the more likely President Bush will feel compelled to veto it, so as to keep already alienated social conservatives from sitting out the election. Which may explain why Senate Democratic leaders are waiting to move the bill-helping ensure a veto keeps gays on the reservation.

Update. Well, it's getting pretty obvious just how ugly and below-the-belt the "progressive" left media is going to get in order to elect their new messiah, isn't it.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and self-described "hairy leftie," endorses sharia law (death penalty for homosexuals if taken literally) as a dual legal system for Britain. Last year he called for suspending the consecration of openly gay priests and blessings of same-sex unions in order to placate African-Anglican bishops who support making "any public expression of homosexual identity a crime punishable by five years in prison."

Cry for Britain, and pray that the U.S. Episcopal Church breaks free.

More. Yes, he's backtracked somewhat given the flood of angry reactions. But as Bruce Bawer has noted so well, there's a clear trend-especially in Britain and Europe-for the left to sacrifice gays upon the pyre of multiculturalism.

Here's a well-reasoned argument against taxpayer-funded sharia arbitration courts in the U.K.

Still more. From the Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Williams appears to be suggesting some form of "Shariah lite," as if one could pick the bits of Islamic jurisprudence that might be acceptable in Western democracies and reject the rest. That's an awfully slippery slope."

And from a related WSJ op-ed: "One thing is certain. A constitutional and legal system that does define rights based upon community identification, rather than individual citizenship, will not be democracy as we have known it."

In dropping out of the presidential race, Mitt Romney told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC):

The development of a child is enhanced by having a mother and father. Such a family is the ideal for the future of the child and for the strength of a nation. I wonder how it is that unelected judges, like some in my state of Massachusetts, are so unaware of this reality, so oblivious to the millennia of recorded history. It is time for the people of America to fortify marriage through constitutional amendment, so that liberal judges cannot continue to attack it!

Romney, like many anti-gay social conservatives, conflates having a mother and father (a good thing, but having two parents of whatever sex to share the responsibility is what studies show is important); state courts deciding that state bans on same-sex marriage violate equality under state law for same-sex partners (personally, I think the legislative route is strategically more effective); and his support for amending the U.S. Constitution to permanently ban state legislatures and courts as well as the federal government from ever recognizing same-sex marriages. (Romney also declared that "tolerance of pornography" is linked to "out of weblock" births).

As I've pointed out before (but believe it's important enough to keep repeating), McCain's view has been different. And in his remarks before CPAC, he didn't grovel but admitted there were areas where he and hard-core social conservatives would disagree.

As Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, tells The Politico:

People seem to be looking for candidates who can govern. We are through with simply appealing to the base. McCain is trying to reach out to independents, weak Republicans, weak Democrats and conservative Democrats to put together a new governing coalition that is less confrontational.

And that's good for us all.

Jamie Kirchick takes a look at the legacy of Matt Foreman, the departing head of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and explains why "NGLTF is redundant at best and counterproductive at worst." Kirchick observes:

There is, of course, nothing inconsistent with being gay and liberal - the same can be said of being gay and conservative, but that's a point neither NGLTF nor its ideological allies would ever concede - yet the group's crucial error is the conflation of liberalism with the very notion of gay rights itself. ...

NGLTF peddles a pernicious discourse purporting that the gay people who oppose their agenda are rich white men suffering from false consciousness.

It's a chord that the gay left strikes endlessly whenever its approach is challenged (and often in comments by our critics), which serves to derail any debate about actual ideas and strategy.

(And for the record, IGF's contributing writers are predominantly academics, think-tankers and gay/small-publication columnists-not exactly swimming in wealth.)

For the most part, I agree with much of the political assessment in For gay GOPers - now what?, by former Log Cabiner Kevin Ivers, now among the bloggers at Citizen Crain. Except for the last paragraph, where he flirts a bit with the idea of some gay Republicans supporting Obama. I just don't get the swooning. Obama as Orator-in-Chief I could maybe go along with, but his voting record in the Illinois state legislature and during his brief tenure in the U.S. Senate fully justifies his support by Ted Kennedy and MoveOn.org. He wants to unite left and right, black and white, gay and straight, blue and red, in order to…pass the same old stale, left-liberal bigger-government, more power to Washington agenda.

I distrust charisma, especially when it's not accompanied by a record of leadership and competence. Count me out.

More. Bruce Bawer tells Why I Haven't Caught Obama Fever.

Also worth reading (though published last year), David Ehrenstein's Obama the Magic Negro. (Ehrenstein, a former writer for The Advocate, is black.)

Rick Rosendall strongly disagrees (in our comments), and makes his case for Obama here.

And a clear-eyed Obama analysis by Fred Siegel in City Journal: "[W]hile he has few concrete achievements to his name, he does have a voting record that hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left and Right." Hardly, indeed, but man can he make the crowds swoon.

Just to recapitulate (but it's timely to do so now), here are my thoughts on John McCain. And let me add that my opinions are mine; they do not represent the diverse views of IGF's many independent contributing authors, who speak for themselves:

(From A Few Political Thoughts): An upsurge for Giuliani...whatever his others failings, would have sent a message that the GOP nationally was prepared to embrace socially tolerant views. Huckabee and Romney at the forefront would send the opposite message, that hardline social conservatism is not going to give way in the Grand Old Party. John McCain comes out better than midway between the two-he opposed the federal anti-gay marriage amendment but supported a state amendment in Arizona (which, as it turned out, was the first in the nation to be defeated at the polls). In the past, he has called the leaders of the religious right on their intolerance, but this time round seems to have concluded that such honesty was a strategic mistake. Still, he's not really one of them, and they know it.

And:

(From Lies of the Times): Out of the presidential contenders who were serving in Congress in 2004, the only one who did risk political capital by speaking out forcefully and eloquently against the federal marriage amendment was...John McCain (CNN.com's coverage is here; read it).

More. I agree with Kevin Ivers that because Giuliani "by any reasonable account was the biggest gay rights supporter to ever have a decent shot at the GOP nomination," he was the most ferociously opposed by gay Democratic activists (remember this?). Much better for the one true party that the GOP should nominate the most homophobic candidate, rather than the least, after all.

As for McCain, I do think it's significant that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and friends are in a rage over his ascendancy. The hard-edge of social conservatives on the cultural right (allied with, although distinct from, the religious right) may at long last be in retreat. McCain, despite his flaws, represents the more tolerant center-right of the party. If he could move the GOP overall in that direction, gay Americans (if not gay Democratic hacks) would benefit enormously.