IGF CultureWatch

IGF contributing author Dale Carpenter, the Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, lets us know that video of presentations from the recent symposium Is Gay Marriage Conservative? can now be viewed online.

The symposium was held February 15 at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. The event aimed "to foster civil debate among conservatives and within conservative thought about gay marriage" and focused on "the underlying policy question of whether gay marriage is a good idea from a conservative perspective." As I previously wrote, it's the kind of open exchange of ideas between independent gay intellectuals and prominent conservatives that IGF loves to see, and that the "progressive" LGBT echo chamber organizations have long shunned.

Presenters included Dale, Jonathan Rauch, David Frum and Charles Murray, among others. Check them out!

And while you're in a video watching mode, be sure to spend some time with another IGF contributing author, Wayne State University philosophy professor John Corvino. John fequently debates representatives of the religious right before student audiences. Here, he presents a free 8-minute excerpt from his renowned lecture on the morality of same-sex love.

What's to say about Eliot Spitzer? If (a) he weren't married, and (b) he hadn't made an issue of cracking down on prostitution services, then I'd say it's nobody's business. But given his mendacity and hypocrisy, that's not the case.

The Washington Examiner does a nice job of comparing Spitzer's imbroglio with other politics and prostitution scandals, which highlights the extent to which prostitution stings have become a favored device in the politics of personal destruction toolkit.

That's another reason why (and again, leaving aside Spitzer's mendacity and hypocrisy), making the purchasing of sexual pleasure illegal opens the door to selective prosecutions and other bad things. Regulate it as might be necessary for health and safety, zone it away from the kiddies, and tax it like other businesses, says I.

The arrangements for the rendezvous at a Washington hotel were caught on a federal wiretap recording last month and laid out in legal papers that reveal the intricacies involved in hiring a $1,200-an-hour call girl and sending her to D.C. from New York.

How nice that the FBI has nothing better to do than elaborate surveillance operations aimed at prosecuting consensual, commercial relations involving adults. What's terrorism, after all, compared to illicit nookie?

You know, if you're a porn director starring in your own films, you can pay a professional to have sex with you and as long as you film it for commercial sale it's all (still, thankfully) legal, despite the efforts of the Meese Commission. How inane does that make our prostitution laws look?

More. Andrew Sullivan picks up on the same theme.

More still.

Client #9, also known as Eliot Spitzer, enthusiastically enlisted in a crusade for tougher anti-prostitution laws and specifically for steps to raise the penalties for "johns" who patronized the women involved. The campaign bore fruit, and in his first months as Governor signed into law what advocates call "the toughest and most comprehensive anti-sex-trade law in the nation". Among other provisions, the law "lays the groundwork for a more aggressive crackdown on demand, by increasing the penalty for patronizing a prostitute, a misdemeanor, to up to a year in jail, from a maximum of three months." (Nina Bernstein, "Foes of Sex Trade Are Stung by the Fall of an Ally", New York Times, Mar. 12). (via Overlawyered.com)

And reader "Avee" comments:

Yes, the FBI may have initially been following a suspicious money transfer in Spitzer's private accounts. But once it became clear this wasn't about corruption or terrorism, but purchasing commercial sex, they continued with the wiretaps and surveillance. So Steve still has a point about the FBI misdirecting its resources at prostitution.

Furthermore. Alan Dershowitz agrees it was entrapment:

Once federal authorities concluded that the "suspicious financial transactions" attributed to Mr. Spitzer did not fit into any of the paradigms for which the statutes were enacted, they should have closed the investigation. It's simply none of the federal government's business that a man may have been moving his own money around in order to keep his wife in the dark about his private sexual peccadilloes.

As [the Wall Street Journal] has reported: "It isn't clear why the FBI sought the wiretap warrant. Federal prostitution probes are exceedingly rare, lawyers say, except in cases involving organized-crime leaders or child abuse. Federal wiretaps are seldom used to make these cases . . ."

And Nora Ephron observes:

This is the problem these guys get into: they're so morally rigid and puritanical in real life (and on some level, so responsible for this priggish world we now live in) that when they get caught committing victimless crimes, everyone thinks they should be punished for sheer hypocrisy.

But they shouldn't really. It's one of the things you have to admire about Senator Larry Craig: he's still there.

Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (based in New Orleans) became the first and only jurisdiction in the country to recognize an individual's right to bear both arms (in a 2001 case) and to purchase adult toys "designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs." The latter case involved a Texas statute that criminalized the promotion and sale of sex toys. As the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro explained:

"The Fifth Circuit's analysis correctly rests on the Supreme Court's 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, which found that Texas's anti-homosexual sodomy statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment right to engage in private intimate conduct. Put simply, there is no state interest compelling enough to overcome the individual right to freedom in the bedroom.

Because the 11th Circuit last year upheld a similar Alabama "obscene device" statute, Shapiro says that "the Fifth Circuit's decision now squarely opens up a 'circuit split,' which means the issue is ripe for the Court to take up next term." Here's hoping the highest court in the land follows the Fifth Circuit and decides that adults are entitled to possess both handguns in the home (in a case now before the Supreme Court) and sex toys.

And here's another look at how liberty and sexuality stand together. Jamie Kirchick writes in the New Republic of how gay porn actor and director Michael Lucas, who is a Jewish Russian immigrant, has run afoul of the politically correct academic crowd because of his unbridled condemnation of homophobia and anti-Semitism in the Islamic world. This particularly brouhaha erupted after Stanford University's student government asked Lucas to host a lecture on sexual health, which caused other students to protests against the invite. Responded Lucas, "It totally escapes me how gay people can side with burqa-wearing, jihad-screaming, Koran-crazed Muslims."

Kirchick admits that Lucas is often over the top (forgive me), but I like this quote from the story:

"He's from the East Coast," says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News. "Us people on the West Coast are more laid back."

More on gun rights. The Pink Pistols' brief is the lead for the Washington Post story on amicus briefs in the Second Amendment case now before the Court. (IGF contributing author Dale Carpenter helped write the brief.)

More on Jew-bashing + gay-bashing. The most recent in an ongoing series of attacks in France.

Europe capitulates, again. A gay Iranian teenager faces deportation from Britain and execution in his home country after a Dutch court refused to hear his asylum claim.

Commenting on this week's oral arguments in the marriage case before the California Supreme Court, Dale Carpenter writes:

if gay-marriage litigants do lose the case, the loss may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for the gay-marriage movement as a whole. On the one hand, a pro-SSM ruling from the California high court would lead to a state-wide voter initiative to amend the state constitution to ban not only gay marriage but legislatively created civil unions as well. Nobody knows how that vote would turn out, but I would not be confident of a victory for gay marriage. That has always been a serious risk of this California litigation.

On the other hand, a ruling that leaves the issue to the state legislature (which has twice voted to recognize gay marriage) and the governor (who has twice vetoed gay-marriage legislation, deferring the issue to this litigation) will mean that this issue will be resolved democratically.

We've been through this before: either you believe that gay marriage is a new civil right that should be enforced by the courts, or you believe that (with the sole exception of uber-liberal Massachusetts) it's counter-productive to achieve a court victory that creates a voter backlash, enshrining a ban on legal recognition of gay unions into state constitutions. It then follows that giving the electorate a few years to get comfortable with civil unions is the best path to securing eventual marriage equality.

Quite unrelatedly, the Washington Post looks at Hillary's gay supporters in Texas, some of whom find Obama's lack of actual experience troubling.

On the other hand:

[Clinton supporter] Gribben, 64, gives a short history lesson and names all of Clinton's contributions to the gay community. She was the first first lady to march in a gay pride parade. She's fought for more HIV funds. She wants to repeal "don't ask, don't tell," though it was her husband who signed the controversial military policy toward gays. She's for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and supports civil unions.

To which could also be added, "although her husband signed the Defense of Marriage Act (and bragged about it in his re-election ads on radio in the South)."

The Cato Institute's David Boaz, author of The Politics of Freedom, looks at the legacy of William F. Buckley, the founder of modern conservatism as an intellectual and political movement "dedicated to individual liberty, limited government, the U.S. Constitution, federalism, the free-market economy and a strong national defense." But, as Boaz writes:

The conservative intellectual movement abandoned its limited-government roots. The neoconservatives, who drifted over from the radical left, brought their commitment to an expansive government intimately involved in shaping the social and economic life of the nation.... The religious right demanded that government impose their social values on the whole country.

These are among the contradictions that confront conservatism today-and "liberalism" has its own fair share, with dedication to civil liberties clashing against its support for expansive government in all its guises, including stifling economic regulation, high taxes, mandated group-based preferences, and (increasingly) counter-productive trade tariffs, along with blocking school choice.

The world is full of grays, and Buckley's religious and generational-based opposition to gay legal equality has to be tempered with his laudable opposition to the expansion of communist totalitarianism around the globe and moves toward socialism in the U.S. It remains for today's defenders of liberty to forge a coherent politics that brings together economic and personal freedom, both at home and abroad.

More. In another recent post, Boaz asks why conservatives now support laws against discrimination based on some characteristics (e.g., race, religion) but not based on others (e.g., sexual orientation). Not so surprisingly, turns out "It's not a matter of logical categories."

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.