IGF CultureWatch

Many with a libertarian bent will never forgive John McCain for his speech-muzzling "McCain-Feingold" law that served mainly to divert campaign financing dollars to even less visible pathways. Granted. But it's hard to argue with his recent call for the wayward GOP to return to limited government principles:

We were elected to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. We increased the size of government in the false hope that we could bribe the public into keeping us in office....

Americans had elected us to change government, and they rejected us because they believed government had changed us.

Such sentiments are particularly pertinent this week, as we mourn the loss of Milton Friedman, who shed light into the muck of left-liberal economic stagflation and showed how trusting people to make their own choices, rather than empowering government bureaucrats (and smug Ivy League elitists) to choose for them, leads to growth, prosperity and dynamism. Of course, many of us would also stress that freedom to choose for oneself extends beyond the marketplace and boardroom, and that limited government doesn't mean wielding state power to impose a moral regimen on the populace - lessons that social conservatives failed to grasp. (Friedman, himself, opposed the "war on drugs" and favored decriminalizing prostitution.)

Still, as congressional Democrats salivate at the thought of imposing their beloved price controls, wage schemes and trade barriers, Friedman's loss is most acutely felt.

GOP rightwingers hate Bush's nominee for Republican National Committee Chair, Mel Martinez, but so do (and understandably so) LGBT Democratic activists.

The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force's (NGLTF) post-election press release is How Will the Election Affect Sexual and Reproductive Rights?

The release is about a joint audioconference with feminist/reproductive rights groups, but it does beg the question: Do these feminist/reproductive rights groups give gay rights equal footing with their own core agenda? Answer: Are you insane?

Along with NGLTF, self-styled 'progressive' LGBT groups, including the Human Rights Campaign and even the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, use an abortion-on-demand litmus test for the candidates they endorse/fund- which allows them to eliminate gay-tolerant conservatives who are even mildly pro-life. When such candidates know they will be adamantly opposed by the leading national gay groups, what incentive do they have to moderate their views on gay issues?

Memo to LGBT progressives: not all gays are of like mind on abortion.

From analysis in the Milwaukee Sun Sentinel, on the Wisconsin vote (for Democratic candidates and the anti-gay-marriage initiative):

By putting the same-sex marriage and death penalty measures on the same ballot....Republican leaders in the Legislature ended up drawing the wrong type of voter to the polls-Democrats, especially conservative ones. Those people voted for the ballot proposals but against Republican candidates....

"It was a lose-lose situation," [U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Menomonee Falls Republican] said. "You had Reagan Democrats and socially conservative union members who wanted to vote yes and yes (on the referendums) and then voted for [Democratic Gov. Jim] Doyle."

But I kinda wish LGBT Democratic activists, who spend so much energy denouncing gay Republicans, would devote just a bit of their efforts at anti-gay Democrats (since, after all, it's their party that our national LGBT organizations work so tirelessly to fund).

According to CNN's exit polling, 24% of self-identified gays cast their votes for Republicans on Tuesday. In 2004, 23% of the gay vote went for Bush. Log Cabin stands alone in trying to leverage the power of this vote with a religious-right dominated GOP. But to groups like the Human Rights Campaign, which now sees its mission as electing liberal Democrats, these voters don't even exist.

From a Log Cabin post-election release:

GOP leaders lost sight of what brought our Party to power in 1994. Limited government, lower spending, high ethical standards and accountability, and other unifying GOP principles attracted a broad coalition of support including fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, mainstream Republicans, libertarians, and independents. Now we've lost the U.S. House because Party leaders turned their backs on the GOP's core principles and catered only to social conservatives.

Hard to argue with that.

Sadly if predictably, seven of the eight ballot referendums amending state constitutions to bar same-sex marriage (and, in some cases, civil unions and spousal-like agreements) easily passed, included in heavily Democratic-voting states. Anti-gay amendments sailed to victory in Virginia, Colorado, Idaho, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, and liberal-leaning Wisconsin (where voters overwhelmingly re-elected a Democratic senator). Only Arizona (where voters re-elected a Republican senator) looks poised to be a bright spot. It's a sign of the still-potent backlash against judicially mandated same-sex marriage and civil unions, with much braying by GOP social reactionaries and mostly silence from the leaders of the self-styled party of inclusion. Too bad.

Pa. Sen. Rick Santorum is gone gone gone from the Senate, which is good. His House counterpart, Colo. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, managed to hang on and spew forth for another two years. That's bad.

I doubt that new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi [and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] will try to put through the full agenda their left-liberal supporters expect-everything from barring funds for the war in Iraq to transgender anti-discrimination legislation. But pro-growth tax cuts will expire as new fees are levied, the minimum wage will be dramatically hiked (hope you're not a small business owner!), trade barriers set up and counter-productive redistributionist schemes championed. Pro-market initiatives for entitlement reform are now off the table, and routine matters will henceforth get bundled up with regulatory expansion (and more power to the apparatchiks) to get passed. Too bad.

But the worst of the anti-gay stuff will also be tabled. That's good.

While I'm not looking forward to a House led by Nancy Pelosi (all but certain) or a Senate led by Harry Reid (a 50/50 chance), I am certainly looking forward to the defeat of Sen. Rick Santorum (all but certain), the Senate's leading opponent of gay legal equality, and maybe even Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (she's just over 50% in the polls), the lead sponsor of anti-gay legislation in the House.

Columnist Maggie Gallagher recently wrote, "If Rick Santorum loses, nobody in Washington will ever want to lead on the gay marriage issue again." Well, that's probably overly optimistic, but it's a nice thought anyway.

Trendwatch. In other news, Neil Patrick Harris, who rose to fame in the early '90s as Doogie Howser, M.D., has come out. Harris currently stars the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, where he plays a womanizer. And as noted last week, T.R. Knight, who plays George on ABC's Grey's Anatomy, become the first gay man to publicly come out while appearing on a top-rated television show. Let's hope this signals a shift away from Hollywood's traditional dependence on lying and hiding about being gay.

Evangelical leader quits amid male escort's allegations. What's to say? So many lives so painfully repressed and contorted, due to societal and internalized homophobia. For how many more generations, I wonder.

More. Truly pathetic, "Evangelist Admits Meth, Massage, No Sex."

Still more. "I am a deceiver and a liar," Haggard announced in a letter to his church. "There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life."

The phrase "internalized homophobia" gets tossed around a lot, but it is real--and very, very destructive.

Virginia Sen. George Allen's desperate promotion of that state's anti-gay-marriage/anti-civil-union/anti-partnership-contract referendum may backfire, but not in the usual way. According to the archly conservative Washington Times, in Marriage Measure May Turn on Allen, those who are stirring the pot of anti-gay animus in the hopes of getting conservative Republicans to the polls on Nov. 7 are actually helping to bring out anti-gay (but Democratic voting) African-Americans, who will support the amendment but vote for Allen's Democratic challenger, Jim Webb.

Camille Paglia on the Foley scandal:

Foley is obviously a moral degenerate, and the Republican House leadership has come across as pathetically bumbling and ineffectual. But the idea that this is some sort of major scandal in the history of American politics is ludicrous. This was a story that needed to be told for, you know, like two days.

. . .The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election seems to me to have been a big fat gift to Ann Coulter and the other conservative commentators who say the mainstream media are simply the lapdogs of the Democrats. Every time I turned on the news it was "Foley, Foley, Foley!" -- and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points.

. . .I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. . . . Gay men through history have always been more vulnerable to public hysteria than are lesbians....

Not only has the public image of gay men been tarnished by the over-promotion of the Foley scandal, but they have actually been put into physical danger. It's already starting with news items about teenage boys using online sites to lure gay men on dates to attack and rob them. What in the world are the Democrats thinking? . . . You'd expect this stuff from right-wing ideologues, not progressives.

And she's absolutely right.