IGF CultureWatch

As President Bush again panders to the religious right on the Federal Marriage Amendment, in the conservative Washington Times Bruce Fein chides his fellow conservatives for supporting an amendment that nationalizes marriage regulation in order to ban not only state courts, but democratically elected state legislatures, from favoring same-sex marriage. It's a viewpoint that honest federalist conservatives should take seriously, but many won't.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops again endorsed the amendment, while a coalition of liberal religious leaders weighed in against it.

John McCain, who has called the amendment un-Republican, was very impressive-and sharp as a whip- Wednesday on Larry King. He spoke movingly about why he gave the same speech about reconciliation at both Liberty U. and the New School, and on the need to restore civility among those with whom we disagree politically (as he does with the religious right). McCain also said, sadly, that when he spoke about the death of an old friend with whom he had reconciled, some of the protesting students at the New School laughed. He lamented how they would be the poorer for refusing to listen to those with whom they disagree.

When Larry asked if he "supported gay rights," McCain answered "Yes, sir" but not gay marriage (no, he's not going to go to the left of Clinton and Kerry). But he affirmed he will vote against the FMA because "I believe the people of Massachusetts should make their decision, and others. I think it's up to the states to make those decisions. And by the way, that's the federalist approach." To which I can only reply, "Yes, sir."

More. Conservative pundit Maggie Gallagher, a vocal opponent of marriage equality, takes aim at McCain, writing, "McCain leaves himself with a position on gay marriage that is virtually indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton's."

That's close to the mark, but judging from some of the McCain-bashing comments to this item, don't expect gay "progressives" to give the senator any credit. Sadly, a gay-welcoming GOP appears to be the worst nightmare of some gay Democrats.

Washington Blade editor Chris Chrain on Howard Dean's "gay lapdogs":

Rather than actually defend gay families and make the case for gay marriage, [the Human Rights Campaign] is stuck in a three-year strategy of arguing that the American people don't-and shouldn't!-care about marriage equality for gay couples.

"Voters want candidates focused on soaring gas prices, a health care crisis and national security," [HRC head Joe] Solmonese says in the release, "not putting discrimination in the United States Constitution."

What sort of gay rights strategy is it, when the attention of Americans is focused on our issues, to argue that our rights aren't important, and refuse to engage our opponents in the debate over our equality?

It only makes sense if your foremost mission is to be Democratic Party operatives, and certainly not to advance the fight for gay equality on a nonpartisan basis.

In response to Crain, the Blade ran an op-ed by Mark Kvare of the National Stonewall Democrats, who warns that we by gosh better not make Howard mad:

If I'm Dean, chair of the party, I just got a lot less interested in putting myself out there in the future for a community that turns on me...the moment I enter hostile territory in an attempt to expand our electoral chances.

I guess all those gay dollars and hours of volunteer labor don't actually count for much, do they? Criticize Dean for sucking up to Pat Robertson and you risk being punished like the ungrateful uppity outsiders you are.

John McCain may have called Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance," but students there lent a respectful ear when McCain recently addressed them. Yet when the senator spoke at the opposite end of the political spectrum, at New York's New School University, the students threw a tantrum and did their utmost to express their contempt-which is, of course, what they do best.

What more can one say about the smug, superior, privileged denizens of the campus left, who most clearly don't believe in open debate, since their favorite tactic is either to bar alternative opinions from their campus fiefdoms or, if that fails, to drown them out with catcalls? It's the intolerant, infantile behavior that keeps the heartland voting for cultural conservatives.

Unlike my partner, I haven't been a fan of NBC's "Will & Grace" for many a year. Sidekick Jack McFarland (played by Sean Hayes) was, to me, the ultimate gay Stepin Fetchit, despite his accolades from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. And the show's fawning before pop celebrity guest stars made my skin crawl.

But W&G was once kinda sorta ground-breaking for network television, successfully featuring a gay character in a title role. The Washington Post's Hank Stuever presents some interesting parting shots, including his observation that "Marcia Brady got more on-screen action in five seasons of 'The Brady Bunch' than Will Truman got in eight."

In a widely reprinted AP story, Laura Bush says of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment:

"I don't think it should be used as a campaign tool, obviously. ... It requires a lot of sensitivity to just talk about the issue-a lot of sensitivity."

But the same article quotes Sen. Bill Frist as claiming, once again, that "marriage is under attack in this country," and saying he will defend the amendment to Dick Cheney, who opposes it. I guess Frist thinks he has more influence with the veep than Cheney's own daughter. So much for family values!

Let's hope and work toward the day when more Republicans with stand with the first lady and vice president, not the president or, especially, foot-in-mouth Frist.

Update. HRC has a press release trying to play Laura against Frist. But it wasn't too long ago the HRC was criticizing Laura and taking issue with her call for a national discussion on gay marriage-which others righitly recognized as a hint she wasn't with the president on this one.

Syndicated, openly gay columnist Deb Price predicts that the "millennial generation" (Americans born between 1985 and 2004) will usher in legal approval of same-sex marriage:

Even two years ago, 15-to-25-year-olds favored gay marriage by 56 percent to 39 percent, according to a national survey by the University of Maryland's youth think tank, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE at civicyouth.org).

"Each generation has come of age being considerably more tolerant and become even more so," says CIRCLE Director Peter Levine, who tracked attitudes of generational groups over time.

"This youngest generation is very tolerant, a very large group, and they have turned around the voting decline in the first election in which they could vote. If you put all that together, it spells a huge change in gay rights-and one not very far off," he adds.

Will this generational change of attitude last? Some studies suggest people tend to become more conservative as they age. But from what I've read, this often means that many on the left in their teen and young adult years come to realize, through experience, that the solutions promised by big-government social programs not only don't materialize, but that social engineering has counter-productive results-providing long-term betterment only to those politicos who appropriate tax dollars to expand their power bases.

That young, gay-friendly Americans will become gay-intolerant in large numbers as they grow older seems less likely, although if some activists continue to cement the (mis)perception that gay legal equality is part and parcel of left-liberalism's big-government, redistributionist social agenda, it could happen.

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Gay Democratic partisan Wayne Besen writes, "I never thought I'd say this, but I agree with Alan Keyes when he said Mary Cheney is a 'selfish hedonist,' " Besen, some may remember, is a former Human Rights Campaign spokesperson.

Meanwhile, Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee, instead of defending the rights of gays to marry, tells Pat Robertson's 700 Club he agrees (and so does the Democratic Party) that "marriage is between a man and a woman." To its credit, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force couldn't stomach this. We'll see if it provokes any ire over at HRC, which is happy to endorse Democrats who oppose gay marriage-as long as they're pro-choice on abortion.

This Wall Street Journal column looks at the death and life of Newark, N.J. Under the former, now-thankfully ended regime of Mayor Sharpe James, the city pursued a failed strategy of promoting big public projects and drowning would-be private start-ups in red tape. Add to that mix a hefty does of anti-white race-baiting and you've got a mixture for urban stagnation and decline.

The column quotes Prof. Richard Florida, who makes the case for reviving cities by attracting the "creative class" of energetic people and unleashing their entrepreneurial energies:

"There were lots of mayors like James who said, 'I'd rather keep my power base than build my city,'" says Mr. Florida. "Jane Jacobs told me the problem is that these cities are run by squelchers." By that she meant politicos who try to stamp out anything they can't control. They love big public projects, but private enterprise makes them nervous. Meanwhile the professional planners on public payrolls are squelchers of a different sort. They keep trying to remake cities in their past image.

"They're not going to bring back suburban, middle-class families to Newark," Mr. Florida says. "What you can bring in is young singles, the gay community and empty-nesters who are looking to be closer to an urban center."

It's another indication of how the interests of gays should align not with stultifying, backward-looking big-government liberalism but with the spirit of market-based initiative and dynamism. If only we hard a political party that was pro-market and pro-gay.

Harper's magazine has outraged fellow liberals by publishing an article claiming that testing AIDS drugs in Africa is evil because drug companies are evil and, in fact, invented the false idea of AIDS so they could poison people and get rich.

As this critique in the Columbia Journalism Review's online daily suggests, it's the paranoid anti-capitalist/anti-global-economy thesis of Hollywood's "The Constant Gardener" meets AIDS denialism. What's scary is that if it weren't gay lives that could be imperiled by this nonsense, how many more anti-corporate "progressives" (gay or otherwise) would find such scape-goating conspiracy theories right up their alley?

I wasn't able to attend the recent Log Cabin Convention in Washington, D.C. But from what I've heard and read, it seems many of the right notes were struck.

LCR President Patrick Guerriero stated:

On the days that I have disagreements with people like Jerry Falwell, I'm reminded that I disagree more with [House] Democratic leader] Nancy Pelosi on a hundred different issues.

Now, if the GOP were monolithically under the religious right's thumb (which some Democrats want to believe, but isn't true), I might take issue with Guerriero. But the job ahead is to build on party principles that support individual autonomy and thus restore the GOP to its roots as the party of liberty, born as the Democrats mobilized to defend the expansion of slavery and, later, Jim Crow segregation.

At the LCR confab, particularly inspiring were remarks by Britain's Alan Duncan, an openly gay Conservative member of parliament, who declared:

It's the duty of the state to intervene when two people hate each other, not when they love each other.

The British Conservatives (with some exceptions) have been far more willing than their U.S. counterparts to reach an accommodation with the fact that gay people exist. It shows that opposition to the concept of ever-bigger, more-intrusive government as the solution to all ills, and support for the legal equality of gay people, are not inherently exclusive. In fact, in a better world, Dick Cheney's stated belief that "freedom means freedom for everybody" (which daughter Mary Cheney again referenced during her chat with Diane Sawyer) would truly once again be the party's guiding principle.