IGF CultureWatch

I'm not a lawyer, but it does seem that doubts are rising over the lawsuit by the national office of the Log Cabin Republicans seeking to overturn the "don't ask, don't tell" military gay ban without any named plaintiffs, when there is already a competing suit underway by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Team regarded as far more promising, on behalf of 12 gay men and women expelled from the military (see the Washington Blade's "Experts Fault Log Cabin Lawsuit").

Meanwhile, Gay Patriot West asks why the national LCR is suing the Bush administration instead of working to find ways to work with the GOP, and to promote the GOP among gays, which might help distinguish the group from all the other liberal gay advocacy lobbies.

I've been busy preparing for the holidays, but here are a few links from fellow like-minded bloggers that are worth a surf:

Rich Tafel on why Only donors can hold gay organizations accountable.

Gay Patriot on why faster "red state" population growth should factor into gay political strategies (but isn't).

Boi from Troy on Arnold's call for a more inclusive GOP.

Right Side of the Rainbow on Same-sex marriage and the "hate" canard.

"Lawpsided" - humorously - on the Alabama book-burying brouhaha, or why "Reading is for sissies!"

Check 'em out! And take a look at our own John Corvino's response to a critic, in our mailbag.

The Social Security Administration, in its zeal to deny recognizing gay couples, has rejected marriage documents issued for heterosexual couples in four communities that performed same-sex weddings earlier this year, reports the AP (citing a New York Times story).

The agency is rejecting all marriage certificates issued in New Paltz, N.Y., after Feb. 27, when the town's mayor began marrying gay couples. Certificates issued during the brief periods when Asbury Park, N.J., Multnomah County, Ore., and Sandoval County, N.M., recognized gay marriages are also being rejected.

According to the report:

Susie Kilpatrick, 30, of New Paltz, said the local Social Security office told her that no marriage documents issued after Feb. 27 could be used to establish identity because of the gay marriages that took place.... Kilpatrick said her marriage certificate was rejected when she went to get a new card earlier this month so she could take her husband's name.

"What concerns me is that the certificate is the only way to prove that we're married," [she complained]. "If something happens to us, or some other couple from New Paltz, we can't prove we're married. We would not be able to draw benefits."

Welcome to our world, Susie!
--Stephen H. Miller

Update: The Social Security Administration issues an apology - for confusing the Town of New Paltz with the Village of New Paltz!

Cathy Young, writing in the Boston Globe, takes a look at how "Antigay Bigotry Is Tainting the GOP." Of Gerald Allen, a Republican representative in Alabama's legislature who wants to ban books with gay content from his state's public libraries, suggesting "we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," Young comments, "If this guy didn't exist, a left-wing journalist would have to invent him as a walking stereotype of a 'red-state' bigot."

Of attempts by right-wingers to roll back domestic partner benefits, Young writes:

The attempt to legalize same-sex marriage through judicial fiat and civil disobedience was, it is increasingly clear, a bad idea. However, if conservatives want to show that it's possible to be against same-sex marriage but also against intolerance and discrimination, they're not doing a very good job so far.

Both the left and the right have their contingents of haters, and if I don't cover the rapid-right extremists in the GOP as often as some would like, it's because that's about all that most "mainstream" gay news websites do cover. The truth is, the rational right plays a vital role in this country, keeping the left from going too far with its hubris for social engineering. But trusting either the left or the right to defend the full range of individual liberties and personal freedoms is a dubious proposition, which is why gay engagement with and participation in conservative circles, even when not welcomed with opened arms, remains so necessary.
--Stephen H. Miller

Update: For a humor break, read "Lawpsided" on the Alabama brouhaha, or why "Reading is for sissies!"

More Recent Postings
12/12/04 - 12/18/04

The proposed reform of Social Security puts a bright light on the battle lines within the gay community. Last week, the liberal Human Rights Campaign flirted with endorsing personal Social Security accounts (which gay partners could bequeath to one another). But having ignited the wrath of the gay left, HRC quickly retreated, proclaiming it actually has "no position" on the issue, reports the Washington Blade. That didn't protected it from attacks by left groups such as the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and its allies, which again condemned HRC for merely considering working with Republicans on a GOP initiative.

Nevertheless, the Blade notes that openly gay Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) is a leading backer of personal Social Security accounts. And the paper reports that reform is being supported by the Log Cabin Republicans:

"Social Security reform is and continues to be a significant part of Log Cabin's legislative agenda," said LCR spokesperson Christopher Barron. "Most Americans support allowing gays and lesbians to share in Social Security reform," Barron said. "We will be engaged in this debate because the reality is the Congress is going to have a dialogue on this important issue."

This declaration of support is certainly welcome, though you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of that position, or support for any GOP initiative, on the LCR's website.

Finally, the Blade also has the good sense to quote IGF contributing author David Boaz of the Cato Institute:

Boaz said the current Social Security system was designed in the 1930s for married couples with wives who did not work. Single mothers or same-sex couples were not contemplated by the creators of a system that now fails to meet the needs of a changed society, Boaz said.

"Social Security reform and choice will help gays," he said. Added Boaz, "You can say that gay groups should stay out of issues like Iraq or Social Security. But gays should not oppose something just because a grand coalition of the left opposes it."

But the gay left remains adamant in demagoging against reform. Note to NGLTF: the present system will go bankrupt; there is nothing in Al Gore's "lock box" but a mountain of slips marked "I.O.U." that future taxpayers will be forced to pay (and pay...and pay....). And because they won't want to pay the lion's share of their earned salaries to support the elderly, the future of tomorrow's seniors will be bleak indeed without personal accounts that the government can't raid at will.

Nevertheless, the gay left continues to treat any attempt to think outside the traditional liberal-left box as heresy that must be stomped out quickly and completely.

Walter Olson, at his overlawyered.com site, takes apart social conservative David Frum's distortion of a contentious custody fight between two former lesbian partners, one now an "ex-gay."

The Dec. 16 Wall Street Journal (online for subscribers only) covered attempts to put ROTC programs and military recruiters back on Ivy League campuses. As the Journal reports:

Few debates better demonstrate America's cultural divide. Harvard's faculty, which voted to expel ROTC amid antiwar sentiment in 1969, now objects to the military's practice of prohibiting openly gay soldiers....

Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz says faculty and students generally support Harvard's stand, while alumni -- and much of the public -- don't understand why the university would want to distance itself from the armed forces.

And then there's this revealing note:

At Harvard, the top-ranking Army cadet this semester [he trains at MIT] is senior Elliott Neal.... He says fellow Harvard students often treat him as a curiosity. "Gosh, you don't seem like you want to shoot people," Mr. Neal, 21, recalls being told recently.

I, too, wish the military would drop its retrograde, counter-productive anti-gay policy. But in the post Sept. 11 world, treating the U.S. military as if it were an entity we'd be better off without is worse than delusional. And if gay-tolerant Ivy League students are dissuaded from being recruited into the military, how is that going to help make the military more gay receptive?

Worse, the anti-ROTC position leads to gays (and gay-supportive straights) being viewed as reflexively anti-military. That's about the worst public relations message to send to the "red states" I can imagine.

Former Log Cabin Republican leader Rich Tafel, writing in National Review Online, understands what the current LCR leadership doesn't - that gay Republicans are generally supportive of the Bush administration while disagreeing with the president on gay marriage. That's why Bush's percentage of the overall gay vote declined only slightly (from 25 percent in 2000 to 23 percent this go round), while his total number of gay votes actually rose substantially - despite Log Cabin's "non-endorsement" and criticism of the president.

I think it's important to note the venue here - National Review is to the political right what the Nation is to the left. But reaching out to this audience is exactly what the current Log Cabin leaders ought to be doing, but aren't - working to find common ground with Republican conservatives who have been traditionally gay-unfriendly.

I think Tafel is on the mark when he observes:

Now that the election has passed, the part of the gay community that has built a movement on the demonization of Republicans will not engage in self-reflection. It will tell its followers that George W. Bush won because he gay-bashed. This will only convince the administration that it has nothing to gain from engaging the gay community in dialogue. A rigid standoff will ensue, and the gay community can look forward to four more years in the wilderness.

Given that Kerry/Edwards endorsed amending state constitutions to ban same-sex marriage, the gay liberal/left's partisan strategy of voicing no criticism of the Democrats should be viewed as bankrupt. Meanwhile, however, Log Cabin's current Washington leadership seems incapable of finding any GOP initiative they're willing to support.

Memo to LCR Executive Director Patrick Guerriero and Political Director Chris Barron: Even the liberal Human Rights Campaign is risking the wrath of the gay left by considering support for private social security accounts. If you can't find anything that the Bush administration is doing that you can get behind, then it's time for you to go.

Two op-eds from gay-sympathetic straights come to differingt conclusions on the state of the gay rights fight. In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Dimitri Vassilaros catalogs the string of defeats gays encountered in 2004 and says, "To paraphrase Kermit the Frog, it's not easy being gay.... The news lately has not been very good for non-heterosexuals." But writing in his widely syndicated column, Michael Kinsley finds that:

Gay civil union, itself a radical concept from the perspective of just a few years ago, has widespread support outside of liberal circles. The notion that gay relationships should enjoy at least some of the benefits of marriage...is probably a majority view.

Today's near-universal and minimally respectable attitude - the rock-bottom, non-negotiable price of admission to polite society and the political debate - is an acceptance of gay people and of open, unapologetic homosexuality as part of American life that would have shocked, if not offended, great liberals of a few decades ago such as Hubert Humphrey.

Of course, both perspectives are true - gays have made great strides in the long march toward equality and sufferred devastating politic defeats. That's the oddity of our times, highlighting the challenge of recognizing and moving beyond the failed strategies of the recent past.

More Recent Postings
12/12/04 - 12/18/04

Responses to my Dec. 7 posting, both in that item's comments area and on our letters page, take me to task for conveying Abner Mason's claim that George W. Bush supports civil unions and that gay activist badly missed the boat when they failed to capitalize on it. While it's true Bush actually said he's not against states passing such recognition, let's note that on Good Morning America he explicitly criticized his own party's platform for opposing civil unions, and that he said on the Larry King Show: "If [states] want to provide legal protections for gays, that's great. That's fine." I'd say that's a tilt at least arguably to the left of neutral.

On the other hand, it's true the Federal Marriage Amendment that Bush supports bars "marital status or the legal incidents thereof" from being conferred on same-sex couples, although whether the amendment only limits judicial "conferring" of such "incidents" is murky (and perhaps intentionally so).

Nevertheless, Bush's saying that civil unions are OK was still an opening that gay activists should have promoted to defeat state initiatives that banned both gay marriage and civil unions, and for dialoging with Bush about the apparent inconsistency in his civil union statements and his support for the FMA. Instead, activists in knee-jerk fashion condemned Bush's remarks and continued to chant, like petulant 3-year-olds, "George W. Bush, You're Fired!"

Well, it didn't work out that way, did it? And now there is no dialogue with the party in power to speak of. Sorry, folks, but this was an opportunity missed and our activists (including Log Cabin Republicans' Washington leadership) need to be called on the carpet.