IGF CultureWatch

A leader of a major Palestintian terrorist group cited gay Israeli soldiers as a factor that shows Israel can be defeated militarily.

Abu Oudai, chief rocket coordinator for the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank, hailed Hezbollah's performance in the war in Lebanon and said in an interview with World Net Daily, "If we do [what Hezbollah accomplished], this Israeli army full of gay soldiers and full of corruption and with old-fashioned war methods can be defeated also in Palestine," the Israeli website Ynetnews reports.

Think about that the next time you see American leftists marching in solidarity with Israel's enemies.

California's anti-gay GOP state legislators are once again shaming themselves, and this time opposing a tax cut to boot. Here's hoping Gov. Arnold does the right things and signs this bill letting domestic partners file joint state tax returns-giving committed gay couples the same tax break that hetero married couples get when they file jointly.

The new Pension Protection Act the president just signed is a good law, ensuring that employers adequately fund traditional pensions if they offer them to workers, and improving the flexibility of 401(k)s. It's the sort of common-sense bill that usually goes down in partisan wrangling, but enough horse-trading was done to achieve a good measure of bipartisan support, despite vehement union opposition.

The Human Rights Campaign likes the bill, too, so we are in rare agreement. But it's interesting to note that HRC praises it because of a provision it supported that will allow anyone to inherit a 401(k) nest egg without immediately paying taxes on the windfall, a benefit that in the past was reserved for spouses.

HRC frames this as a victory for domestic partners, and it can be construed as such. But only in the sense that your cousin Joe, or your home health aide Bessie, or your best friend Ryan from college, can now be left your 401(k) without having to cash it out and pay taxes. In other words, a former benefit of marriage has now been made generally available to any non-spouse.

If we can't achieve spousal recognition for gay couples (either via marriage or federally recognized civil unions), then such "victories" may be the best we can do. And I don't want to suggest that this won't be helpful for gay partners (as well as for cousin Joe). It's just not the kind of "milestone in the ongoing fight for the rights of gay and lesbian couples" that makes me want to celebrate.

SteveS comments:

Where's the gay left and HRC on eliminating the estate tax? They're nowhere to be found because it cross-pressures their other positions and allegiences.

I've tried to get some HRC-type gay activists in Florida to bring pressure on Sen. Nelson to support repeal of the estate tax, pointing out the benefit that would mean for gay couples to pass along high-priced homes and other assets to the survivor tax free as hetero couples can. The thought had never ocurred to them and they figured that something must be wrong with it if they thought long and hard enough. Finally they said that they were opposed to incrementalism. Evidently they wanted the whole enchelada or nothing. A great example of being slaves to doctrine and group-think rather than working to achieve the achieveable.

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, one of the preeminent lesbian cultural gatherings, not only bans women who weren't born women (that is, male-to-female transgendered women), but in a new wrinkle, reports the New York Times, is also saying keep out to "transmen" who are either females transitioning to males or (increasingly) adopting male personas without genital reassignment. So now, the only ones welcome through the gates are "women born as women and living as women."

If any other group discriminated against the transgendered in so blatant a fashion, wouldn't the p.c. police be out in droves?

Limited blogging through next week due to a family health situation. But I wanted to note Jonathan Rowe's take on the latest calumny from anti-gay crank Paul Cameron and his admirers in Christian-right media.

Unrelatedly, more signs that the Human Rights Campaign has abandoned any pretense of being nonpartisan, with its membership in America Votes, a coalition of the left that mobilizes voters for a full range of big-government, take-your-money schemes.

"Less than a week after becoming the 170th member of Congress to affirm that his office does not discriminate in its employment practices based on 'sexual orientation or gender identity and expression,' U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., on Wednesday rescinded his signature on the diversity statement," gay.com reports.

Santorum's signature came after a meeting between the senator and GenderPAC volunteers, who got Santorum to pose for a picture with them (and just what must he have been thinking!). A copy of the senator's statement was faxed to GenderPAC on Aug. 1, and the signature was confirmed the next morning by Santorum's openly gay communications director, Robert Traynham.

But the next day, Santorum faxed GenderPAC a new statement that read in part, "To be clear, my office has not adopted the proposed 'diversity statement' nor the agenda of your organization. ... My name should no longer be reported as having adopted the 'diversity statement.' "

What happened? All too predictable criticism from Santorum's Christian right base, such as this missive from the Agape Press blog:

What does Rick Santorum have to gain by placing his John Hancock on this statement? ... why would Santorum sign a propaganda pledge that bestows legitimacy to a cause Santorum has long fought? Why bolster your opponents at a time when you have them on the ropes? Why let the enemy impose his will on you?

Thus even this obviously disingenuous political feint toward the center gets quashed by the Republican theocratic right.

This attack parody aimed at Joe Lieberman, "Joe and Dub's Fabulous Wedding," trots out a slew of anti-gay stereotypes to demean its target. Sample lyrics: "pansies up and down the aisle," "their Fairy Tale wedding," "afterwards there was dancing, possibly more prancing" - plus the Village People! It's featured at the Huffington Post, the same "progressive" site that showed Lieberman in blackface. (But hey, they can't be bigots; they're on the left!).

Here's hoping Lieberman, now running as an independent, and trounces Lamont in November.

Avee comments: "The oh-so-smug and morally superior left is quick to reach for anti-gay and even anti-black tropes (Condi Rice as Aunt Jemima)." Quite so.

From Ilya Shapiro at TCS Daily:

Lamont adviser Jesse Jackson said in an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times Monday that "A loss for Lieberman would be a win for progressives." Jackson went on to fault his party's putative Vice-President ... for "embracing key elements of the conservative agenda," including questioning certain excesses of affirmative action and supporting cuts in capital gains taxes that have ushered in a new class of investors.

Such arguments expose the nasty truth at the heart of the modern "Party of Jefferson": You have to embrace the entire Democratic catechism (abortion on demand, racial preferences, etc.) or risk banishment from this "party of inclusion."

And James Pinkerton writes, on "heretics" and "infidels":

Lieberman had not only to be defeated, but to be crushed and vilified. Which he was. Lieberman supporter Lanny Davis detailed in the pages of The Wall Street Journal all "the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle" that poured down on his candidate, including scurrilous anti-Semitism.... So far, at least, the "infidels" in this particular Demo-drama, aka the Republicans, can sit back and enjoy the heretic-burning show.

Meanwhile, the gay left's John Aravosis of blog America believes the imminent threat of mass murder by Islamofascists is just a great big pro-Republican, anti-Lamont conspiracy:

And isn't it queer that the emergency is declared within a day of Republican party leader Ken Mehlman launching an all-out offensive against Democrats following Joe Lieberman's loss in Connecticut, an offensive in which Mehlman, the White House and Republican operatives are claiming that Democrats no longer care about national security or the war on terror.

No, this is not a parody.

Virginians, who will vote this November on a constitutional amendment excluding any "unmarried individuals" from "union, partnership or other legal status similar to marriage," live with an untested 2004 law prohibiting "civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage."

Gay couples now fear (with some justification, say some family-law attorneys) that their shared ownership of homes and businesses could be cast in doubt if a state court feels the underlying contracts too closely mimic the intent of marriage. So it's no surprise that gays are beginning to flee the Old Dominion, reports the Washington Post:

...even though it is more expensive to live in the District or Maryland, where taxes are higher than in Virginia. One former Virginian who moved to the District was shocked to face a $14,000 recordation tax on the purchase of a $650,000 condo; the same tax in Virginia would have been less than $1,000, Johnson said. The buyer proceeded with the sale anyway.

People are not solely motivated by economic ends (although they are more so than liberals will admit); nevertheless, Virginia has succeeded in making even the confiscatory, redistributionist mecca of D.C. appear to be a more rational economic choice for gay people.

More. The Outright Libertarians blog has words of warning using the example of Alabama, which wasted millions on a failed campaign to attract Silicon Valley firms. A first-hand description of one unsuccessful pitch:

The Alabama rep was furious. "You're saying we have to accept that lifestyle to get investment," he fumed. He didn't understand that not harassing or targeting gays is not "accepting a lifestyle," but rather following the dictates of the Bill of Rights.

He insisted that Intel, Apple, AMD, Hewlett-Packard and other companies could simply force their employees to move to Alabama - he wasn't aware that most of the top marketing, strategy, design, engineering and finance people at all of those companies have standing offers for employment at competitors which they could take at any time.

He then insisted that the companies could move their heterosexual-only employees to Alabama. Ignoring the absurdity of such a proposition (can you imagine the HR implications?), he didn't understand (or care to understand) that often, gay employees are the decision-makers in such a scenario and would never go for it.

Priceless.

From U.S. World & News Report, For Gays, New Math: Rethinking Tactics After a Series of Setbacks:

The losses may have been self-inflicted. ... Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force acknowledges, "Our legal strategies got ahead of our political strategies."

Gee, when I said that, some were quick to express their indigation.

More. Trying a different strategy in Colorado: a gay-supported constitutional ballot initiative to secure domestic partnership rights.

This New York Times piece by Jane Gross looks at gay man who marry women and have furtive relationships with men on the side:

They spend decades denying their sexual confusion to themselves and others. They generally limit their encounters with men to anonymous one-night stands and tell all manner of lies if their wives suspect.

What's interesting is that, as Gross points out:

…so-called "Brokeback" marriages have hardly disappeared, as many experts assumed they would, even in an age when gay couples, in certain parts of the country, live openly and raise children just like any family.

Internalized homophobia, guilt, and fear of life outside the culturally enshrined heterosexual norm are still potent forces.

Another article of interest, from the London Times, looks at sexual fluidity. Matther Parris argues that sexuality often doesn't fit neatly into the categories of "gay" and "straight":

I think a substantial preponderance of men are more heterosexual than homosexual, but scattered fairly evenly between 100 per cent and half-and-half; and that the smaller number who think of ourselves as gay are likewise quite evenly distributed along the spectrum from the halfway point.

That's seems a bit too fluid to me, and I think Kinsey was probably right that toward the ends of the spectrum sexual orientation is pretty well fixed and in no sense a "choice." Still, Parris may be right when he notes:

... we who call ourselves gay know well that most men who call themselves "bisexual" are more gay than straight, but afraid or unwilling to say so. But what we overlook is that for every gay posing as a bisexual, there are probably a dozen bisexuals posing as straight.

And in a better world, of course, all that posing wouldn't be necessary because (among consenting adults) who you love and how you build a life together just wouldn't make any difference.