IGF CultureWatch

The Ex-Gay Watch site notes that it has received a cease-and-desist order from Liberty Counsel, "a religious-right legal assault team based at Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Liberty University," for showing a parody of an Exodus billboard (here's the original, here's the parody by Justinsomnia).

The fundamentalist dream: no gays, and no free speech. And alas, in this disdain for expression they find objectionable, they reflect their mirror opposites in the speech-code obsessed, politically correct left.

On a brigher note, the NY Times considers the meaning of Brokeback parodies, such as those avaiilable here. No word on any suits.

Jon Rauch (who, among other things, is IGF's co-managing editor), dissects Stanley Kurtz's misuse of data to claim that same-sex marriage undermined traditional marriages in the Netherlands, leading to an increase in out-of-wedlock births. It gets technical, but you can read Jon's analysis first here, then a follow-up here, and a final retort here.

But the rank distortion on Kurtz's part really isn't surprising. As one of the comments to Jon's posting puts it, "The arguments against same-sex couples marrying legally are not based on reason or on data. When you have faith, anything will do to feed it."

In California, registered domestic partners (DPs) are subject to that state's community property laws, and may file their state tax returns accordingly. But as the San Jose Mercury News reports, the question of how to deal with federal tax returns has sown a great deal of angst and confusion.

The IRS, having waited until the middle of tax return season, has now issued a clarification, recognizing that "the California [Domestic Parntership] Act allowed registered domestic partners to file joint income tax returns for California state tax purposes and to be taxed in the same manner as married couples for state income tax purposes," but adding:

In our view, the rights afforded domestic partners under the California Act are not "made an incident of marriage by the inveterate policy of the State." The relationship between registered domestic partners under the California Act is not marriage under California law. ... Consequently, an individual who is a registered domestic partner in California must report all of his or her income earned from the performance of his or her personal services notwithstanding the enactment of the California Act.

That means no recognition of community property.

I guess the CPA lobby must be happy, since DPs will have to have their taxes done twice, using two separate sets of "books"-one that recognizes their financial union and one that pretends that they're just two economically unconnected entities.

This sort of federal nonrecogntion, an outgrowth of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), will only get worse as forward-looking states recognize gay couples' spousal relationships through DPs, civil unions, or marriages, while Washington resolutely digs in its heels.

More. Reader Dan Leer clarifies that DOMA would prohibit gay couples from filing joint federal returns even if states (such as Massachusetts) recognized them as wed. At issue in Calif. is community property:

Under long-standing federal precedent, state law determines the rights of persons to property and income and federal law determines the federal income tax consequences attendant to such rights. For more than a century, the federal courts have held that spouses who are resident in a community property state are not only permitted, but required, to report their shares of the community income on their respective individual income tax returns (if they file separately) without regard to which spouse actually earned the community income.

What the IRS has now concluded (in a Technical Advice Memorandum, which does not have the force of legal precedent) is that registered domestic partners cannot split their community income in this fashion-and not that they cannot file a joint return.

I believe that this flies in the face of well-established precedent to the contrary, but ultimately the courts will have to determine what the federal income tax law is as respects this issue.

IGF contributing author Jamie Kirchick writes in the Yale Daily News about his university's glee at landing the former Taliban spokesperson as a student. Comments Kirchick:

Don't expect a word of protest from our feminist and gay groups, who now have in their midst a live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever. They're busy hunting bogeymen like frat parties and single-sex bathrooms. The answer Hashemi gave five years ago when asked about the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan, "American women don't have the right not to find images of themselves in swimsuits on the side of a bus," is the sort of sophistry likely to curry favor among Yale's feminist activists, who make every effort to paint American society as chauvinistic while refraining from criticizing non-Western cultures. To do so would be "cultural imperialism," and we cannot have that at an enlightened place like Yale.

I personally want to know whether Hashemi supports the flattening of homosexuals via brick walls, which was one of the ways the Taliban dealt with gay men.

And so it goes at Yale, Harvard, and the other bastions of elite progressivism, dedicating to training the next generation of would-be apparatchiks and fascism-appeasers.

More. Critics have noted that Yale won't allow ROTC or even military recruiters on campus, but welcome a Taliban spokesperson into their community.
--Stephen H. Miller

IGF contributing author Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, marshals far too many facts to be easily dismissed. As Jonathan Rauch writes in his backcover blurb, "Some books are merely important. This one is necessary."

Among other issues, Bawer details a frightening rise of gay-bashings in Europe by Muslim immigrants, who cite their faith as their motivation-including a beating suffered by his Norwegian partner in Oslo. He writes:

"Soper!" ("Faggot!") the man shouted, charging at him. ... My partner got off at the next stop. So did the man, who leapt on him, kicking and punching. This was in a busy downtown square, crowded with people on their way to work; but although several passersby stopped to watch the assault, no one made a move to intercede. ...

When we got to the police station, the officer on duty told us that the assailant and his wife were there already-and that the wife had accused my partner of attempted murder. This, he explained wearily, was a familiar tactic in the immigrant milieu: rushing to the police station to file charges against your victim before he can report you. We were outraged. But the cop shrugged it off and urged us to do the same.

And on and on, in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and throughout Europe, where attacks and intimidation are mounting rapidly, "while Europe sleeps."

The Right Side of the Rainbow blog links to a recent Mark Steyn column, which notes:

...radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond.

Steyn is a conservative, and the fight against Islamofascism may indeed make strange bedfellows of (some) gays and (some) conservatives (i.e., those who believe in conserving Western Civ.). But (some) social conservatives on the religious right may well envy what radical Islam has in store for the "perverts," while (some) gays on the anti-American, anti-Israel left will dream their sweet, false dreams of benevolent multiculturalism and moral relativism, until it's too late to save themselves.

Note: As requested, I've added some additional "somes" to the above.

More Recent Postings
02/19/06 - 02/25/06

Writing in the American Prospect, E.J. Graff breathlessly announces an exciting new strategy to energize the gay movement and the fight for marriage equality. Here it comes: "LGBT groups are helping to build a new progressive coalition from the ground up." Ta-da!

Sadly, it sounds like the "new strategy" is once again to practice diversity fetishism with an alphabet-soup-of-the-left project, which always does so well (not). If you believe that a grand coalition led by the likes of Urvashi Vaid (a blast from the past, see here) and built around efforts by the NAACP, the United Farm Workers, and "Asian American and Pacific Islander groups" will win over the suburban independents, enjoy your fantasy.

More. Reader Lori Heine commments:

We have not done ourselves any real favors by becoming so entangled with broad, Left-Wing coalitions. In my conversations with conservatives, I generally find these individuals less hostile to gay rights than they are to liberals in general. And they tend to stick all "liberal" issues together into one big, gooey, scary mess.

I believe we would get a better reception from those Right-of-Center, or even at the Center, if we made them deal with our own issue apart from any other. ...

Quite so, or at least ensure a real "diversity" of approaches, with frozen-in-time "progressives" outreaching to labor unions and racial-grievance collectors, while those of a more conservative or libertarian bent form alliances with their kindred spirits.

The New Yorker's Brokeback Bush and Cheney cover, that is.

I'm headed out of town to attend to family matters, so you won't have Steve to kick around (for a few days).

USA Today looks at the growing efforts to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children, which it labels "a second front in the culture wars" over same-sex marriage. Steps to pass laws or secure November ballot initiatives are underway in at least 16 states.

It could be that before too long, gays-especially couples-who are able to do so, really will have to relocate themselves to those states that don't trample them underfoot.

Reason Online responds, primarily by referencing Julian Sanchez's Reason magazine article on the growing fight. Sanchez suggests that opponents of gay adoption:

...visit Florida and ask a child in foster care which makes him feel more threatened: the thought of being raised by homosexuals, or the prospect of an indefinite number of years spent passing through an indefinite number of homes.

One of the Reason blog's readers disputes that the kids would choose the gay parents (I guess some probably wouldn't, depending on whether they're old enough to have imbibed schoolyard homophobia). Another reader paraphrases libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke along the lines of:

I am such an extreme Republican that I support gay marriage and adoption. If gay people get married and raise kids, pretty soon they'll be living in suburbs, driving SUV's and voting Republican.

Well, in another universe where Republicans where true to their own best values, maybe.

I'm glad former congressman Kweisi Mfume, one of the leading Democratic candidates for Maryland's U.S. Senate seat, has endorsed marriage rights for gay couples. However, his endorsement would be more likely to sway the uncommitted if his own record on marriage had been more, let's say, supportive (i.e., Mfume has fathered five children out of wedlock with four different women). His more recent behavior has also been less than exemplary on the marriage front.

True, Mfume is certainly less of a hypocrite than gay marriage opponents such as Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman who pushed the Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting federal recognition of gay unions, which led many to wonder which of his three marriages (via two divorces) he was defending. Still, supporters like Mfume aren't very likely to advance the cause.

More Recent Postings
02/12/06 - 02/18/06

The "Ask Amy" advice column receives a query from a Colorado woman who had a gay couple move in next door, and who was so shocked by witnessing a goodbye kiss one morning that (on the advice of her pastor) she circulated a petition urging that they refrain from such displays of affection. The woman can't understand why her gay neighbors took it personally.

This dovetails with the point Paul Varnell makes in his recent column, "The War on Gay Visibility."