IGF CultureWatch

Lionel Tiger is always worth reading, as he points out the dangerous double-standards in academia and elsewhere toward boys and men. In his latest op-ed, he writes:

[T]he publicly financed educational system is at least 20% better at producing successful female students than male, yet hardly anyone sees this as remarkable gender discrimination. While there is a vigorous national program to equalize male and female rates of success in science and math, there is not a shred of equivalent attention to the far more central practical impact of the sharp deficit males face in reading and writing. . . .

When it comes to health status, the disparity in favor of women is enhanced by such patterns as seven times as much federal expenditure on breast cancer as on the prostate variety. And no one is provoked into action because vaunted male patriarchs commit suicide between four and 10 times as frequently as oppressed and brainwashed women. . . . There is scant acknowledgment that we face a generation of young men increasingly failing in a school system seemingly calibrated to female rhythms.

Hat tip to Instapundit, who also linked to this like-minded posting.

But you won't catch a single lesbigay group, so big on "coalition building" with abortion-on-demand feminist lobbies and all manner of leftwing causes, ever going to bat for boys.

More Recent Postings
12/11/05 - 12/17/05

IGF contributing author Rick Rosendall asked me to link to his column taking aim at a Chris Crain editorial I had praised (on why Washington, D.C.'s newly expanded domestic partner benefits shouldn't be available to brother-sister couples and similar combos). Says Rick:

In addition to being sensationalistic, Crain's latest charge is false and untimely. The provision allowing blood relatives to be domestic partners has been law for 13 years, and has stirred no controversy in that time.

You can make up your own minds.

I saw it last night (yes it's heartbreaking and haunting), with an all gay audience at a tiny theater in Washington's Dupont Circle, the only venue in town where it's showing.

Here's a reluctantly positive review, at least about the quality of the movie (with plenty of disclaimers about its morality), from Christianity Today. Catch the discussion questions at the end.

Still, that review is more supportive than this dismissive and petty one in the Washington Post, which labels the movie "a potential camp classic, larded with unintended humor" and a set-up for Saturday Night Live parodies. Here we see the typical straight response-and why, sadly, the movie won't attract a mainstream audience despite the truckload of awards it will win.

Another example, from Mickey Kaus over at Kausfiles, here ("I don't want to go see it. (Why? Sexual orientation really is in the genes. Sorry") and here ("If a gay man, say, goes to see 'Wuthering Heights,' there is at least one romantic lead of the sex he's interested in! In 'Brokeback Mountain,' neither of the two romantic leads is of a sex I'm interested in."). That about sums it up.

More: The New York Times' always mean-spirited Maureen Dowd, an oh-so smug liberal Bush-hater, penned a Saturday column (not available gratis online) that says:

Maybe it's time to take another look at that sway in John Wayne's stride. Everything will have to be re-evaluated "High Plains Drifter" now sounds like a guy who might get arrested in a bus station bathroom. And audiences may be ready for "The Good, the Bad and the Bad Hair Day."

She then goes into an attack against Republicans and the frontier myth, and concludes by returning to Hollywood and gays:

"King Kong is not as daring as it could be. Peter Jackson...could have made "Brokeback Island." Just picture it: Leonardo DiCaprio, blond, doe-eyed and smitten, curled in the ape's epicene yet hairy grip. Kong, swinging both ways."

Scratch a liberal, find a phobe.

Still more: Here's a tonic to some of the above-quoted poisoned pens, a Times' piece on what it's like for real gay cowboys, who affirm the film's truth. Writes Guy Trebay:

The light Ang Lee allows into the bunkhouse closet may shock those who like their Marlboro Men straight. But to gay men trying to forge lives in a world where the shape of masculinity is narrow, and where the "liberated" antics of the homosexual minstrels so often depicted on television can seem far off, the emotional privation and brutal violence of "Brokeback Mountain" seems like documentary.

Take that, MoDo.

Yet more still: Comments reader Another Jim:

When bush-haters Maureen Dowd and (as Steve recently posted) Al Franken let down their guard, out comes the sneering contempt toward gays.

I think these people are just haters of anyone who's not like them, and they've found it's profitable to unleash their hatred toward George Bush and conservatives. But their hearts are very dark.

Let's just say they're not nice people, despite their smug liberalism.

Author/blogger Chris Sciabarra has seen Brokeback Mountain and offers his view:

The film is heartbreaking. It is a testament to the damage that is done to human lives by self-alienation, repression, and fear, internalized homophobia and the pressure to conform to certain "roles" in society. It can be tender, sad, and funny. The performances are superb; the cinematography is gorgeous; the minimalist score is effective; the nature-backdrop is awe-inspiring.

Guess he liked it. But the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas wonders whether it's a gay movie at all, since it's not focused on sex or activism (just love between men). And at least some of the urban gay clubheads he quotes seem to think not.

The Human Rights Campaign and its lib-left abortion-rights allies have come out against the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. As with John Roberts, they have done so before a word of testimony has been given in the upcoming Senate confirmation hearings.

Alito has a scant record on gay issues, aside from two separate rulings on public school anti-harassment policies. In Saxe v. State College Area School District, he struck down one policy as too broad, noting:

There is no categorical 'harassment exception' to the First Amendment's free speech clause....When laws against harassment attempt to regulate oral or written expression on such topics, however detestable the views expressed may be, we cannot turn a blind eye to the First Amendment implications.

Free speech advocates supported the ruling, but it's what the gay groups are hanging around Alito's neck.

In another case, Shore Regional High School Board of Education v. P.S., Alito reversed a lower court in order to uphold the claim of a student regularly called names such as "faggot," "gay," and "homo" that he was not afforded appropriate protection from harassment.

Cut to the chase: these groups are opposing Alito because they think he'll rule to limit abortion on demand. Period.

I wonder about the practical effect of such intense and highly political opposition-including by Lambda Legal Defense, which may well be arguing gay rights cases before Alito and Roberts. When you assert firmly that they will "Roll Back Civil Rights Protections for the LGBT Community," you may have ensured you've made a self-fulfilling prophesy (hey, all the better for future fundraising!).

More: Or, as one of our readers puts it, the actual threat is to "9th-month, partial-birth, taxpayer-funded, abortion-on-demand for minors without parental notification." The NARAL crowd that the gay groups have joined with in "coalition building" represents a minority of American opinion, which consistenlty favors legal abortion with some limitations, weighing an individual's right to autonomy against the destruction of a living being (in some cases, moments before a live birth).

Joining our fight for legal equality to those demanding no abortion restrictions works against us with the very independents we need to win over.

Still more: Law.com on the liberals' strategy: "Transform Alito into Robert Bork by any means possible-whether the shoe fits or not."

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With sufficient funds from this drive, we'll upgrade (finally) to a professional content management system that will let us upload more articles faster (our wonderful but overburdened volunteers now must not only hard-code and perform numerous site tweaks for each article, but manually enter all the indexing instructions, too). We'd also like to improve our design, adding the ability to comment on articles. Then there are the server fees, and the cost of technical help and maintaining security (we were knocked out by bandwidth attacks earlier this year), along with other ongoing expenses.

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More Recent Postings
12/4/05 - 12/10/05

A New York State appellate court has struck down a lower court ruling that found a right to same-sex marriage under the state's constitution. The appellate court held that there was no such right and that the lower court had overreached into the realm of the legislature.

I wonder if the case had been about the rights of marriage, instead of marriage itself, if the outcome might have been different. In Vermont, most famously, the state's highest court found gay couples to be entitled to the state-granted rights and obligations that married couples enjoy, while leaving it to the state legislature to devise a means to grant those rights (which it did, via the then-novel idea of civil unions). But in New York it was all about the "M" word.

Yet progress rarely comes in such big steps, and we pay a price for the rejection of incrementalism (which, despite initial lesbigay activist opposition, recently brought statewide marriage rights to gay couples via civil unions in Connecticut as a result of legislative action not forced by a court ruling). The enactment of Britain's new Civil Partnership Act is another example.

Washington Blade editor Chris Crain rightly takes aim at a Washington, DC, partnership bill just passed by the city council that would extend partnership rights and obligations to any two people, including brother and sister, so as to be "nondiscriminatory." The problem: instead of offering gay couples a limited step forward toward equality until such a time as marriage is accessible, it fulfils the worst nightmare of our critics by creating a "marriage lite" for straights that's a step down in terms of the traditional legal commitment (plus introducing a weird incest kind of blood relationship thing).

Sounds like Crain might have read this column of mine from back when, arguing that domestic partner benefits for gays are at best a stopgap measure (I'd now say incremental step), and offering such benefits to unmarried heterosexuals might in fact contribute to family breakdown by discouraging fully committed relationships.

You have to feel just a mite sorry for Ford Motor Co., which is trying to assert that it just happened to decide to pull ads for its Jaguars and Land Rovers from the gay press after meeting "several times" with the anti-gay American Family Association (which was threatening a boycott over the company's "support for the homosexual agenda"). The AFA wanted Ford to go a lot farther and, for instance, stop sponsoring gay pride events. So you can see how the company sort of said, "We won't do that, but we'll give you something." The fact that its Volvo brand will continue to advertise in the gay press shows just how finely they were trying to split hairs.

Now, the Human Rights Campaign and its allies are threatening counter-moves against Ford. That's fine. But the fact is that the AFA claims "3 million supporters" and the HRC claims "600,000 members," and both figures are wildly inflated. However the AFA managed to get to Ford dealers in the South and scare them a bit, which is why Ford (which is about to eliminate some 30,000 jobs to stave off bankruptcy) felt the need to capitulate just a little.

But if you're a company whose founder urged Hitler to find a final solution to the problem of world Jewry, you might take a bit more care about even symbolic acquiescence to organized bigotry.

Update: I may have let Ford off too easy. WardsAuto.com (as cited by the Washington Blade) reports that as part of the agreement between the AFA and Ford, Volvo ads will no longer be tailored to gay consumers and Ford agreed not to sponsor any future gay events. The worst thing about such cave-ins is that they embolded the bigots to go further and up the ante next time.

Update: Ford relents, at least on the ads.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday about whether it should overturn a law allowing the federal government to withhold grants from universities whose law schools bar military recruiters from their campuses. Opponents of campus recruiting argue that that (take a breath) just because their schools accept federal money does not give the federal government the right to withhold that money if the schools discriminate against the federal government's military recruiters because those recruiters discriminate against gays.

Interestingly, the anti-recruiters and their gay activist allies cite the Supreme Court's ruling in Boy Scouts vs. Dale (which they strongly condemned at the time), holding that a private organization has the right to exclude those deemed contrary to the organization's values. Another case cited allowed organizers of a St. Patrick's Day parade to exclude a gay-identified contingent.

Reportedly, even some of the liberal justices seem dubious of the claim that the federal government could not chose to withhold its grants, although the libertarian Cato Institute argues that expressive rights shouldn't be curtailed by a limited degree of government support, for either Harvard, the Boy Scouts, or St. Patraick's Day organizers.

But regardless of the merits of the legal arguments, gay opposition to military recruiting is awful politics, sending a message that gays seek to weaken the military during a time of war.

I can't think of a less effective way to achieve an end to the military's anti-gay ban. And I have no doubt that officers drawn from Harvard, Yale and other elite universities (particularly their law schools) would be the most likely to move the military to a more accepting position. But then, many who oppose recruitment on campus, I firmly believe, are using the gay angle as a pretext-if the military accepted gay recruits, they'd still be fighting against recruitment because they see Iraq as Vietnam and America as the enemy of world peace and oppressor of third-world peoples. And gay activists who don't share those leftwing views have none the less proved themselves willing dupes for that cause.

Update: George Will notes, correctly, that "Schools eager to ban military recruiters from a few hours of access to students who want to meet them have faculties that expose students to a one-sided bombardment of political views." And other liberal campus hypocrisies.