IGF CultureWatch

How many times can you find the complete phrase "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender" in this short mission statement? Even worthy activism is made to sound like merely a politically correct exercise by this sort of ritualism.

Worse, the LGBT mantra assumes that important issues of identity and strategy have been resolved in favor of some mythic "LGBT community." This side steps a number of still highly debatable matters, such as whether bisexuals face discrimination only when they are perceived as gay-acting. And while transgendered individuals certainly endure prejudice and oppression, the issues confronted by those who range from heterosexual cross-dressers to post-op folks now legally the opposite gender of their birth (and thus who, for instance, can gender-appropriately marry) may be so different from the issues that confront gay people that assuming LGBT singleness becomes stunningly inappropriate.

But if you listen to mainstream LGBT organizational voices, those questions are settled and the matter closed.

Hans Johnson and William Eskridge look at The Legacy of Falwell's Bully Pulpit:

Gay advocates, gradually realizing that they could not beat him through vehemence alone, learned to seek out religious spokespeople, cultivate multiracial alliances and trade diatribe for discipline so as to use Falwell's polarizing statements to gain moderate supporters.

Hmm. Seems to me there is still far more diatribe than discipline among many gay activists, and Soulforce aside, too little reaching out to religious folks (or, for that matter, people of color) who aren't also lefties. Still, as Johnson and Eskridge correctly observe:

By speaking about gay people as outsiders, and even as disease-bearing strangers, he forced many Christians to look honestly at their congregations and reexamine the premise of their faith. By casting gays as threats to the survival of families, he forced parents, siblings and relatives of all kinds to reassess what values bind them together and how they care for one another.

And, from Ann Coulter, just what you'd expect.

What Giuliani could mean for the GOP: A best case scenario, via The New Republic's Thomas B. Edsall:

What if we are witnessing not Rudy moving toward the rest of the Republican Party, but rather the Republican Party moving toward Rudy? What if the salience of a certain kind of social conservatism is now in decline among GOP voters and a new set of conservative principles are emerging to take its place? What if Giuilianism represents the future of the Republican Party?

That's a lot of "what ifs," to be sure. But Edsall argues:

It isn't just average voters who are driving this shift; many members of the GOP elite-whose overwhelming concern is cutting taxes, a Giuliani forte-would privately welcome the chance to downplay, if not discard, the party's rearguard war against the sexual and women's rights revolutions. Much of the Republican Party's consulting community and country club elite always viewed abortion and gay rights as distasteful but necessary tools to win elections, easily disposable once they no longer served their purpose.

Well, disposing of GOP gay-baiting would be nice, but the nominating convention and election are a long ways away and it's unclear whether Giuliani, authoritarian personality streak and all, will blow this chance to save the GOP from itself.

Via columnist/blogger Ryan Sager: "The Republican presidential candidates have started to weigh in on the death of Jerry Falwell, noted bigot."

The archly conservative Washington Times covers the debate on same-sex marriage between David Blankenhorn and "open homosexual" Jonathan Rauch (the print issue ran a big picture of the latter on page 2). Excerpt:

At the [Ethics and Public Policy Center] event, Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar at Brookings Institution and writer for the National Journal and Atlantic monthly, said Mr. Blankenhorn's arguments "lift the debate" but are ultimately flawed.

"I see same-sex marriage as flowing quite naturally and gracefully into what marriage has become today and indeed should be today: a commitment by couples to each other and their community-underscore 'and their community'-to care for each other and for their children, including non-biological children," said Mr. Rauch, an open homosexual who wrote the 2004 book "Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America."

"The kind of institution we want," he says, "includes public vows, in-laws, medical obligations and yes, divorce. Marriage is very hard to get out of and should be."

Marriage, Mr. Rauch says, has four essential social functions: the rearing of children; providing a transition to stable domestic life for young adults, particularly men; providing a "safe harbor" for sex; and providing lifelong caregivers for each other.

All homosexual unions meet three out of four of these goals, and homosexual couples with children meet four out of four goals, he says.

"Gay couples and the kids they're raising won't disappear," adds Mr. Rauch. If homosexuals cannot participate in the institution, the nation runs a great risk of increasing its number of nonmarital families and of marriage becoming stigmatized as discriminatory.

"In my view, the best way to encourage marriage is to encourage marriage," he says.

Is the religious right deflating? I doubt it, but this piece in the Miami Herald sounds an optimistic note. Some analysts see:

a crumbling conservative Christian base deflated by ethical scandals in the Republican Party, the Democratic victory in the 2006 congressional elections and- perhaps most significantly-a split between the old guard and new leaders over where to go from here. An increasingly vocal branch has called for expanding the platform to include global warming, HIV/AIDS and poverty.

Except for the gay-bashing, that expanded platform sounds rather lefty.

The Senate has yet to act, but the administration may be signaling its intent to veto this bill. Dale Carpenter's take, at The Volokh Conspiracy:

Andrew Sullivan, who like me opposes hate crimes laws as a general matter, complains that Bush's [expected] veto of this bill represents a double-standard under which gays are just about the only commonly victimized group left out of the special protection federal law already provides....

The problem with this criticism, however, is that the bill does much more than simply add "sexual orientation" to the existing federal law on hate crimes passed in 1968.... The bill considerably expands federal jurisdiction over hate crimes in general, for all categories, by eliminating the current requirement that the crime occur while the victim is engaged in a federally protected activity. That jurisdictional limitation has kept federal involvement very limited in an area where state authority has traditionally reigned....

The veto of an amendment merely adding sexual orientation to existing federal law would pretty clearly reflect an anti-gay double-standard. A veto of this much more comprehensive bill does not.

Log Cabin has a different view, praising the bill and noting its bipartisan support. (Aside: why is Log Cabin still unable to post a press release on its website the same day they email it out far and wide?)

And Jamie Kirchick weighs in.

An emerging federalist consensus: The bill raises a number of concerns, none of which seem central to its opponents on the anti-gay right to whom Bush may feel he needs to pander. For them, the key point is not the expansion of federal jurisdiction; it's gay inclusion and terrors relating to the normalization of homosexuality.

In the latest gay scandal, John Browne, the heretofore closeted head of oil giant BP, resigns for (among other transgressions) the misuse of company assets on behalf of his former boyfriend. The scandal brings to mind the resignation of New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey.

Openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson announces his impending civil union, sure to further inflame anti-gay Episcopalian/Anglican reactionaries, as Nigerian Bishop Peter Akinola, who wants gays imprisoned for socializing together, visits the U.S. to "bless" anti-gay break-away churches and install his puppet bishop over them.

Meanwhile, James McGreevey is taking steps to become an Episcopal priest.

Openly gay Rep. Barney Frank has a strong record in support of what might loosely be called cultural or lifestyle libertarianism (my phrase, and yes, I know sexual orientation isn't a "lifestyle"), on issues such as gay marriage, gambling and medicinal marijuana. But as the Cato Institute's David Boaz blogs, Frank's other causes revolve around support for greater government economic intervention.

"Liberal" used to mean support for free markets, and still does in Europe. But not in America, where liberals remain deeply suspicious of free economic decision-making. As Boaz writes of Frank:

This year, as Financial Services chairman, he's demonstrating his interventionist tendencies as well as his sometime libertarian instincts. He wants to push all workers into government health care, to regulate corporate decisions about executive compensation, to put more obstacles in the way of free trade across national borders, to keep Wal-Mart from creating an internal bank clearinghouse to hold down its costs. Not to mention expanding anti-discrimination rules to include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

American liberals' seem to believe that the economy needs the firm guiding hand of highly intelligent, morally righteous officials such as themselves. That's a carryover not from the classical liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, but from later European socialist philosophies that were noticeably "illiberal" on the issue of individual freedom as opposed to the "rights" of the collective.

Yet, as Boaz notes, Frank told a journalist: "In a number of areas, I am a libertarian. I think that John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' is a great statement, and I was just rereading it." Comments Boaz:

Would that the Republicans who once took Congress on the promise of "the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money" also reread (or read) "On Liberty" and take its message to heart. And would that Barney Frank come to realize that adults should also be free to spend the money they earn as they choose and to decide what contracts, with foreign businesses or local job applicants, they will enter into.

A coalition of conservative African American pastors is lobbying Congress to vote against a bill that would extend federal hate-crimes laws to cover gays, the Wash Post reports. I've often heard that homophobia in the African American community is a sign that GLBT groups need to do more "outreach" and be more "inclusive" toward racial minorities, and that we need to start by confessing our own racism. But you never hear that homophobia among white evangelicals is, say, a sign that gay groups need to reach out more to those people. So why are African American homophobes simply misguided while white homophobes are routinely characterized as "evil"?

Speaking of church-inspired homophobia, another Wash Post story looks at anti-gay religious rightist John Arthur Eaves running for governor of Mississippi. The catch: he's a Democrat. In fact, Eaves is wrong about everything, favoring a bigger spending, more intrusive government that also discriminates against gays. The paper reports:

An Eaves victory would also be a shot across the bow to the Democrats' liberal base, raising the question of how far the party is willing to go in jettisoning its support for abortion rights, gay rights and a high wall of separation between church and state for a chance at electoral success [in the South].

With all the money that gays give to the national Democratic party, it will be interesting to see if this new, localized "Southern strategy" is allowed to take hold.