IGF CultureWatch

We've posted Paul Varnell's intriguing column tracing the Vatican's latest attacks on homosexuality to Freud's views. Hopefully, if we receive enough contributions-and please contribute if you haven't-we can shift to a design that incorporates a comments area for all our articles as well as for this blog (which now sits on an entirely different platform).

Anyway, I would take issue with the notion that Freud in a larger sense has been debunked (do we no longer accept the subconscious, or the meaning of dreams?), although on certain points he's been revised and expanded upon. And his "Letter to an American Mother," which gets Paul's ire up, is actually a surprisingly accepting view of homosexuals, especially given the time (there's a link to letter text in the article, so readers can judge for themselves).

Two headlines from this week's Washington Blade: Gay, AIDS groups oppose Alito and Bush declines to name [openly gay D.C. Attorney General Robert] Spagnoletti for judgeship. Only in lesbigay political never-never land would gay activists think they can vehemently oppose all of the president's judicial nominees, and then expect he should reward our community by appointing a gay judge.

I sometimes think gay activists are the only people in D.C. who don't have a clue how politics works-or, more depressingly, they do know but care more about being on the left and losing (which is actually better for their fundraising efforts), then making progress.

More: From reader Curtis:

Bush doesn't owe the critics of his judicial nominations anything, that's for sure. And LCR's failure to support his re-election pretty much rules them out as effective lobbyists.

So Bush gets a free ride with all those gay Bush voters who have no institutional lobbyist in Washington.

Gay activists to Bush: We will never, ever, EVER support you. Now, here's what we want!

Exactly.

Congrats to the happy couple. As the NY Times reports:

The most striking thing, in fact, about the people gathered along the streets of Windsor today for Sir Elton John's civil partnership ceremony with his boyfriend, David Furnish, was how little they appeared to care, one way or the other, about the couple's sexuality....

Although the legislation stops short of calling the new arrangement marriage...it does give gay couples legal rights similar to those of married people on matters like inheritance, immigration and pensions, as well as responsibilities in areas like child-rearing.

But here in the U.S., for both advocates and opponents, all that seems to matter is keeping it about the "M" word.

Author Annie Proulx had this to say in a recent interview with the AP:

AP: Have you gotten any response from gay organizations?
Proulx: No. When the story was first published eight years ago [in the New Yorker], I did expect that. But there was a deafening silence. What I had instead were letters from individuals, gay people, some of them absolutely heartbreaking.

Guess gay groups have been too busy honoring "Jack" from Will & Grace!

Meanwhile, the anti-gay Traditional Values Coalition quotes "ex-homosexuals" condemning the movie and encouraging closeted and married (to women) gay men to stay with their wives. Says one:

"Believe me, we can sadly expect to see a lot more men like former Governor Jim McGreevy of New Jersey not only resigning from their jobs, but from their wives, children and families."

But as I read on another list in response to the TVC, "it doesn't occur to these people that a better way to prevent cases like McGreevey's is not to pressure gay people into straight relationships in the first place, but instead to support them as they are."

No, it wouldn't occur to them. Not for a second.

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.

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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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