IGF CultureWatch

Now that Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., has introduced a bill in the House to equalize the tax treatment of health benefits for domestic partners, the HRC is singing its praises. But when Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., the measure's lead senate sponsor, tried to introduce it in that chamber as an amendment to the minimum wage bill, gay groups did the bidding of their party and were resolutely opposed (Log Cabin aside). Even now, notice that the HRC release makes no mention of Smith or any Republican supporters.

This bill is important because while the heterosexual spouse of any employee can get employer-provided health care without being taxed, a same-sex domestic partner (or spouse in Massachusetts) must pay full taxes on the value of the health benefit, typically amounting to over $1,500 in taxes annually just for average benefits. Too bad some LGBT advocates think partisanship is more important than passage.

Chris Crain looks at Out magazine's cover story on the gay celebrity glass closet. Writes Crain:

Clearly the celebrity treatment of homosexuality has trended along with society's acceptance of gay people. The days of Ellen (and even Rosie's) big coming out party already seem dated. The ho-hum reaction to T.R. Knight ("Grey's Anatomy"), Lance Bass (N Sync) and Neil Patrick Harris ("Doogie Howser, M.D.") isn't just due to their B-list status. As America cares less, so will celebrities.

And someday, both Jodie Foster and Anderson Cooper will ride that wave, and no doubt receive courage awards from gay rights groups when they finally do so.

While pampered U.S. celebrities worry about the career ramifications of being honest, in Saudi Arabia "sodomy" is punishable by death, as noted in the Atlantic's interesting report on gay life in the fundamentalist kingdom (where, yes, gay life does exist). Even there, "Vibrant communities of men who enjoy sex with other men can be found in cosmopolitan cities like Jeddah and Riyadh. They meet in schools, in cafes, in the streets, and on the Internet."

At The New Republic, IGF contributing author James Kirchick blogs in praise of IGF contributing author Richard Rosendall, who is working to shed light on the politically correct hypocrisy and mind-numbing ineptitude of blame-America-first international LGBT watchdog groups.

The New Hampshire House has approved a bill recognizing "spousal unions" for same-sex couples. If the measure becomes law, the Granite State would be the sixth to give gay couples state-recognized marital benefits and responsibilities, and the third to do so legislatively without a court decree forcing their hand.

IGF contributing author Dale Carpenter, blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, ponders:

Some interesting questions to ask presidential candidates campaigning in New Hampshire and who've said they favor "civil unions," but not "marriage": Do you favor "spousal unions" for gay couples that give them all the rights and responsibilities of marriage but aren't called "marriages"?

And what if we take it the next step and called them "marital unions" but not "marriage"? This will test just what it is people think is at stake in the use of language to describe gay families.

Here's the AP on Where states stand on same-sex marriage.

Perhaps as important (some would argue more so) then the legislative advancement of government-recognized spousal relationships (and accompanying government-provided benefits) are changes in the cultural sphere. And one undeniable signpost that's now been passed is this one, as reported by Reuters: Disney opens 'fairytale weddings' to gay couples:

The Walt Disney Co. has changed its policy to allow same-sex couples to have "fairytale weddings" at its U.S. resorts. Disney previously allowed gay couples to organize their own weddings or commitment ceremonies at rented meeting rooms at the resorts, but had barred them from purchasing its fairytale wedding package and holding the event at locations at Disneyland and Walt Disney World that are set aside specifically for weddings....

The "lavish wedding" option also includes a ride to the ceremony in the Cinderella coach, costumed trumpeters heralding the couple's arrival, and attendance by Mickey and Minnie Mouse characters dressed in formal attire.

Disney has come under fire from religious conservatives, including the Southern Baptist Convention, who have accused the company of promoting a gay agenda.

Chalk up another victory for capitalism as a force that quite rightly rejects discrimination as a detriment to an expanding profit base! But it's no joke: the more that the major nongovernmental institutions of civil society recognize gay unions as equivalent to marriages, the harder it becomes, in the long-run, for government (which is, clearly, not swayed by the profit motive but is responsive to organized reactionary voting blocs) to maintain its discriminatory policies.

As reported in DC's The Examiner, Washington leads the nation in the percentage of adoptions by gay parents:

Nearly a third of adopted children in the District of Columbia live with gay or lesbian parents, according to a new study, for a higher percentage than any of the 50 states.... Of the District's 2,649 adopted youth, 758, or 28.6 percent, live in same-sex households, the study found....

The report, a combined effort of the D.C.-based Urban Institute and the Williams Institute UCLA School of Law, found gay and lesbian parents are raising 4 percent of all adopted children in the country. Roughly 100,000 foster children await adoption, the study reported, and 2 million members of the gay and lesbian population are interested in becoming adoptive parents.

Yet religious reactionaries and their political allies want to outlaw adoptions by same-sex couples and would especially like Congress to bar the practice in its semi-fiefdom, the nation's capital. That this would deprive hundreds of children of their parents is, to them, less important than upholding the hallowed ideal of hetero supremacy.

This April Fool's parody hits the nail on the head because you read and and think, if only. Would that the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest and richest lesbigay(&trans) lobby, had the sense to take such a logical step. But these partisan poobahs seem far less interested in advancing gay equality through broad political outreach then they are in being good party players, getting pats on the back from the liberal Democratic elite who rule their social circles. Alas, like the man who tried to walk using just his left leg, they've spent the last decade doing little more than spinning around in circles, moronically chirping "George W. Bush, You're Fired!" while dreaming of appointments as midlevel outreach apparachiks in the hoped-for Clinton restoration.

More. Andrew Sullivan isn't letting up his critique. Good for him.

And for those who wonder what a bipartisan approach to gay equality might look like, the Gill Action Fund here gives an indication. (There's more about them here.)

Writing in The Politico, a Washington paper, Peter Berkowitz of George Mason University School of Law asks:

Is conservatism, as led by a tax-cutting, crime-fighting, socially liberal big-city blue-state mayor, about to remake itself by reclaiming the center of American politics? Or is it about to collapse from the combined force of its internal contradictions...?

That, of course, is one of the big question posed by the Giuliani campaign.

Berkowitz continues, providing some political theory context:

Modern conservatism derives above all from Edmund Burke, the great 18th-century Anglo-Irish orator and statesman. Burke was a lover of liberty and tradition who saw a great threat to liberty in the tradition-overthrowing forces unleashed by the French Revolution. He was solicitous of established ways but acutely aware that the preservation of liberty required "prudent innovation" in response to the constantly changing circumstances of political life....

[But] There is no settled recipe, and there are no fixed proportions, for determining the prudent innovations that balance liberty and tradition.

In a nutshell, then, the challenge is to increase liberty without falling prey to the left's siren call of "remaking society" by pursing utopian social engineering that leads, in fact, to nightmarish dystopias.

Berkowitz concludes: "The competition and conflict that is developing among the leading conservative candidates should prove invigorating, not only for conservatism in America but for the nation as a whole." We shall see if the Republican party is capable of supporting a conservatism that prudently expands the scope of individual liberty, or falls back on rigid defense of traditional social norms that exclude recognizing legal equality for gay people.

It's hard to take veteran gay activist Larry Kramer seriously when he says things like, "I believe that Ronald Reagan is responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler." Or when he luxuriates in victimhood by proclaiming, "I wish I could make all gay people everywhere accept this one fact I know to be an undisputed truth. We are hated."

The gay enragee has re-emerged into the spotlight with a highly publicized "open letter" in the Los Angeles Times and a speech at New York's LGBT Center (here's a video).

Kramer has accomplished much good, often despite himself, co-founding Gay Men's Health Crisis and even ACT UP (which, in the early days, brought much needed attention to the AIDS crisis despite some woefully wrongheaded attacks). But he has never understood that a case has to be made for changing society, that the need to make radical alterations cannot simply be assumed, with all who oppose such transformations labeled "haters" or "murderers."

More Kramer:

"We must cease our never-ending docile cooperation with a status quo that never changes in its relationship to us. We are cutting our own throats raising money for Hillary or Obama or Kerry or, God forbid, Giuliani, or anyone until they come out in full support of all the things I am talking about..."

While it's refreshing (and somewhat rare) to see Democrats held to the same standard that their party's gay activists routinely hold Republicans to, the idea that it must all be Now, that there can be no forward if incremental steps toward progress, is in its own way frighteningly totalitarian.

If society readily accepted fundamental transformations without struggle, we'd be in a constant state of revolution, and revolutionary terror. That sort of upheaval and the tyranny that (not always, but often) follows, would be our daily fare. Resistance to demands to alter the social fabric, even to the over-reaching and often counter-productive social engineering of the welfare state, is a societal self-defense mechanism.

This is especially true of demands for change made by those who think that the purity of their rage is testament to the rightness of their cause.

Of course we must fight for gay equality, and often that requires expressions of great passion. And some of our opponents are, in fact, motivated by an ugly animus (while others shamelessly see gay-baiting as their path to power). But demonifying all who oppose gay equality based on conservative impulses is not a successful strategy. Rather, working to enlighten a majority- demonstrating, over and over again until the message gets through, that gay equality is not destabilizing toward families and society, but actually makes both stronger-is a painstaking but necessary requirement.

It is just not enough to base our identity on victimhood and expect that this will move us toward our goals, no matter how much we "act up."

More. It's not about Larry Kramer, but George Will writes today on how political rage has become pandemic. "Today, many people preen about their anger as a badge of authenticity: I snarl therefore I am. Such people make one's blood boil."

Sweden prepares to move from civil unions to full marriage equality. I've long said that civil unions, once accepted, can't help but be a preliminary to same-sex marriage-something that the religious right has long noted. But some gay activists take the view that we must move from no partnership rights to full marriage in one step by the decree of liberal courts, despite the opposition by a majority of a given state's electorate.

That's not a prescription for progress, but for the kind of backlash that leads to amendments barring marriage equity for at least a generation.

Self-defense ruling update. Gay liberals aren't happy as a libertarian gay activist fights for our right to self-defense.

The nation is seeing an increasingly polarized debate on how-if at all-government (that is, "public") schools should discuss homosexuality, reports the Washington Post:

In most of the country, the trend in sex education is toward "abstinence only," which dictates that sex outside of marriage is wrong and potentially dangerous. Such programs tend to bypass homosexuality, except to characterize gay sex as a public health risk....

SIECUS [the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S.] counts nine states that require "something negative" if sexual orientation is taught, such as characterizing homosexuality as unacceptable behavior.

The Post goes on to note that:

the federal government...since the mid-1990s has required a strict abstinence-only approach as a condition for substantial federal funds. Such programs, the government says, should endorse sex only in the confines of marriage, one reason they tend to skirt homosexuality.

And yet polls show only a quarter of Americans deem homosexuality and sexual orientation inappropriate topics for sex education, while a majority think schools should teach what homosexuality is (but not whether it is right or wrong). Given the lack of "school choice" in public education, that's probably the best common standard we can hope for, and one that is still much better than the "gays as health risk" view taught with the government's blessing in certain locales.

Public schools cannot help but be creatures of government, and increasingly it's the federal government that calls the curriculum shots. This means common sense, factual teaching falls by the wayside. While a few liberal districts go out on a rope (and risk federal funding) by teaching tolerance, many more treat homosexuality as beyond the pale.

Now, if education were privatized and government provided, say, tuition vouchers instead of buildings and (overstaffed) bureaucracies, there would still be a wide divergence on how homosexuality was taught. But at least the negative, "abstinence outside marriage" (and no marriage for immoral gays) view would not be coming directly from government educrats.

More. The Cato Institute makes a similar point in Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict: "Such clashes are inevitable in government-run schooling because all Americans are required to support the public schools, but only those with the most political power control them."