IGF CultureWatch

On the website of the free-market Ludwig von Mises Institute, Gardner Goldsmith argues Don't Let Government Define Marriage (Or Optimal Child-Rearing Environments). Favorite part: even accepting debatable assertions about the most-advantageous family arrangement for kids, the amendment ought to frighten anyone concerned about liberty:

Proponents of legally or constitutionally codified heterosexual marriage ... claim that by legalizing only "one man - one woman" marriages, they promote the optimal conditions for the upbringing of a child.

But that begs the question: by only legalizing the optimal, do they agree that anything suboptimal should be illegal? If the conditions for raising a child vary, and run along a continuum from the worst (say, being raised by coyotes in the forest) to the possible optimal (being raised by loving, talented, brilliant millionaires) would those who could run government determine that anything below the millionaire level was suboptimal and therefore illegal? Would one have to undergo a wealth and intelligence test before being married, because marriage could lead to childrearing, and that child could possibly be raised in a suboptimal environment? The standard is arbitrary, and dangerous to a free society.

"Conservatives," Goldsmith writes, "used to have a reputation for being skeptical of government." Indeed.

The Anglican Communion is considering "temporarily" banning gay bishops and same-sex blessing ceremonies for the sake of "unity" between liberal, western churches and their deeply homophobic, mostly African brethren (who have also found a smattering of allies in Europe and America). Draft church legislation would urge dioceses to refrain from choosing bishops "whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church."

Meanwhile, the American Episcopalians have elected a female presiding bishop, which also is making the reactionaries furious (although, in this case, the Archbishop of Canterbury is pledging his support).

At some point, the Anglicans will have to decide if they prefer unity (that is, communion) over Christ's message of love and inclusion. It really shouldn't be a difficult choice.

Update. Despite some premature reports, the news doesn't sound good. Blogger Father Jake has the story: Episcopal Church Bows to the Idol of Communion: Embraces Bigotry.

Update 2. The Presbyterians, too, affirm they won't ordain non-celibate gays. But the church's righteous lefty leadership urges divestment from Israel in support of Palestinian terrorists.

The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has a new politically correct obsession, declaring that:

The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Asian-American community is under-served, under-researched and under-studied.

Well, the gay Asian-Americans I know don't feel particularly under-served in relation to the rest of us, and neither do they lament that they're "under-researched and under-studied."

Last fall the Arcus Foundation awarded NGLTF a $2 million grant, augmented by an additional $1 million from Arcus founder and president Jon Stryker.

The executive director of the Arcus Foundation, incidentally, is Urvashi Vaid, former head of NGLTF, whose book Virtual Equality is an argument against "the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian liberation" and a call for further alliance-building with the left. It's also replete with criticisms of "gay conservatives," among whom she lumps Jonathan Rauch, Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan, Paul Varnell and yours truly. (For more about Vaid, check out my column from a few years back, Who Stole the Gay Movement?)

Incidentally, along with its LGBT focus, the Arcus Foundation's other chief concern is great apes. But I must protest-the foundation is impermissibly excluding and thus further marginalizing the dolphin community.

The Advocate reports that an anti-gay congressman has stripped funding for L.A.'s Gay and Lesbian Center from the federal Transportation, Treasury, Housing, and Urban Development bill. Anti-gay animus is bad, but just where in the Constitution is it a role of the federal government to fund local gay centers? And let's just leave aside the fact that L.A. has its own vibrant and wealthy gay community. This little story sums up so much about what's wrong with the political situation in Washington.

Not about the above, but still regarding Republicans and Democrats, Right Side of the Rainbow ponders, "I can't be the only one who feels trapped between the unprincipled and the psychotic." Can you guess which is which?

The current cover of The New Yorker. Surely this doesn't help (the cause of gay marriage, that is).

A piece mostly critical of the ex-gay movement. On the website of the socially conservative National Review! Some truths just can't be denied forever, I guess.

It also shows that progress can be made when encountering the right, albeit slowly.

Yet with a few notably exceptions (e.g., Soulforce), too many LGBT "progressives" consider conservatives (all conservatives, whether religious fundamentalists or not) a lost cause. They won't deign to debate, much preferring to hold rallies amongst their own in order to better express their rage (and to collectively affirm their moral superiority). They're as benighted as they imagine their opposition to be.

Some odds and ends from here and there.

Michael Bronski continues to make his case for left-wing alliance building. But despite Bronski's pretense that this is all new and ground-breaking, his strategy has been tried (and tried) and failed. The reason is that those groups on the left that Bronski still sees as a progressive vanguard are, in fact, profoundly backward-focused (to the heyday of the '60s and early '70s), pro-"liberation" but obsessed with enforcing political correctness and dreaming of a more powerful, controlling and intrusive big government (with themselves, naturally, as the guiding apparatchiks). That's not "liberation," it's a nightmare, and the overwhelming majority of Americans recognize it as such.

Dan Blatt (aka Gay Patriot West) responds to critics who defend certain activists' refusal to debate gay marriage and want him to shut up about it. Dan does a great job of making it clear why this is such a significant failing.

Off topic, but another indication of what's so wrong with the left, check this out.

Steve Chapman, a libertarian-minded syndicated columnist, explains why Conservatives Are Losing on Gay Rights:

more than half of Americans endorse either gay marriage or civil unions, which are marriages in all but name. Two states (Vermont and Connecticut) have legalized civil unions, without attracting 1 percent of the attention that has gone to Massachusetts. Once considered a radical step, this has taken on the look of a soothing, sensible compromise. ...

A more telling sign is the huge shift in opinion on discrimination. ... That evolution suggests attitudes on gay marriage are likely to grow more positive, not less. The battle for tolerance has largely been won among young people, who will be guiding policy in the not-too-distant future.

He also points to an interesting, and welcome, fact about opposition to gay adoptions:

Growing tolerance presents a huge obstacle to another cause of social conservatives. Earlier this year, they were trumpeting a multi-state push to ban adoption by same-sex couples-to prevent homosexuals from "experimenting on children through gay adoption"...

It seemed a shrewd and logical follow-up to the state-by-state offensive against gay marriage. Since Florida was alone in explicitly outlawing adoptions by same-sex couples, the opponents of gay adoption thought they had a target-rich environment-not to mention a winning issue with voters.

But they had a little problem launching the campaign. Kent Markus, director of the National Center for Adoption Law and Policy at Capital University Law School in Ohio, says that in state after state, "it peeked above the surface and got knocked right back down. Nothing has gained any momentum anywhere in the United States."

Time is on our side, which is why running to liberal courts to mandate full marriage equality-which in many states has provoked support and passage for anti-marriage (and anti-civil union) state constitutional amendments-is not a good strategy. Allowing the democratic (small "d") process to work through representative institutions will assure us eventual victory, without provoking a premature backlash that will freeze in place statewide marriage bans for generations to come.

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy website. law professor Ilya Somin argues the federalism case for gay rights, finding that while the federal government has been actively harmful to gay legal equality, real progress has been made in at least some individual states and these can, over time, serve as models for others. He writes:

gays can succeed politically at the local and state level because 1) they tend to be concentrated in a few specific areas, magnifying their influence, 2) those areas will tend to be places where antigay political forces are comparatively weak, and 3) in such relatively tolerant locations, a higher percentage of the already large gay population will be out of the closet and able to participate in pro-gay political action.

Concludes Somin:

there are important lessons here for both the gay rights movement (which should be more wary of the growth of federal power than many of its members seem to be), and for our broader understanding of the relationship between federalism and minority rights.

The vote against cloture (that is, voting not to allow a Senate floor vote) was 49 to 48 with 3 abstaining or absent. Paul Varnell argues it would have been better if Democrats and moderate Republicans had allowed a floor vote, where opposition to the amendment would have been greater. But keeping the vote on "procedural grounds" allows some to say they didn't actually vote against the amendment while in fact voting against the amendment. And thus the issue goes away for the time being, with limited political capital spent.

The Wall Street Journal makes some good points in today's editorial opposing the amendment. I don't buy their criticism that Lawrence, in abolishing sodomy laws (which the Journal editors favored getting rid of) used language that was too sweeping and thus encouraged state judges to mandate same-sex marriage. But the editors are on the mark when they write of the marriage amendment:

The Founders left such thorny social issues to the states precisely to allow the democratic give and take that can reach a rough consensus, as well as adjust as social mores change....

As for liberals, they might consider that their best chance to change minds is through open state debate, not coercive courts. Polls show Americans are becoming more comfortable with civil unions and other gay rights. In fact, the best thing gay activists could do for themselves at the federal level would be to support repeal of the death tax, since under current law gay couples often lack inheritance rights. That would accomplish more than anything that will emerge from this week's political spectacle over amending the Constitution.

But such thinking outside the lib-left box remains unlikely given the current crop of gay leaders.

More. David Boaz suggests that the amendment's supporters are being disingenuous in claming they did better this time than in 2004. He also writes:

Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter voted for cloture in 2004, though he would have voted against the amendment itself; this year he voted against cloture and quoted two Cato publications in his Senate speech. Judd Gregg [also] joined his New Hampshire colleague John Sununu in voting for federalism over centralism.

He concludes, "Given that younger voters are much more supportive of same-sex marriage than older voters, it seems unlikely that support for an amendment will grow in future years."