IGF CultureWatch

There are some interesting things in E.J. Graff's New Republic column on why nearly one in four gay voters chose Bush (online, but only for New Republic subscribers). She writes:

Bush winning 23 percent of the gay, lesbian, and bisexual vote isn't all that surprising. And the inclination to find it surprising rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the gay and lesbian community.

LGBT voters aren't like any other interest group. Aside from being attracted to the same sex, we have nothing in common. And I mean nothing: not our color, religion, region, culture, community, class, educational aspirations, or politics....

The Rapid City, South Dakota, lesbian moms whose idea of a big Friday night is to get all dolled up for the greyhound races and a meal at Denny's simply do not have the same political point of view as Dupont Circle lobbyists or Berkeley activists. This becomes clear when you break down gay votes by region. In the South, for instance, 32 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters went for Bush; in the East, a far less surprising 8 percent did.

The heart of the matter, I think, is whether being gay is your primary cultural identity or just one aspect of who you are. Or maybe gay GOP voters just felt Bush was the better choice for the nation overall, and took Kerry at his word that there was "no difference" between his opposition to gay marriage and Bush's.

More Recent Postings
11/14/04 - 11/20/04

Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer takes issue with the view that moral values in general, and gay marriage in particular, played a major role in Bush's re-election -- the conventional wisdom now being peddled by Karl Rove and the religious right on one hand, and liberal Democrats on the other. Krauthammer focuses on liberals, characterizing their response to Bush's victory as follows: "You never lose because your ideas are sclerotic or your positions retrograde, but because your opponent appealed to the baser instincts of mankind." And he observes of the celebrated exit poll query:

The way the question was set up, moral values was sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues.... "Moral values" encompasses abortion, gay marriage, Hollywood's influence, the general coarsening of the culture, and, for some, the morality of pre-emptive war.

The fallback is then to attribute Bush's victory to the gay marriage referendums that pushed Bush over the top, particularly in Ohio. This is more nonsense. George Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1 percent nationwide. In Ohio the increase was 1 percent -- less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.

While Krauthammer's target is the liberal media trying to paint Bush voters as homophobes, his critique also works as a convincing rebuttal to Karl Rove's contention that the GOP owes anti-gay-marriage evangelicals mightily for Bush's victory.

More Recent Postings
11/14/04 - 11/20/04

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has "reaffirmed" its partisan decision to oppose the re-election of pro-gay Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) who, in the words of the Washington Blade, "is a co-sponsor of federal hate crimes legislation; he opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment, backs the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and has been a strong supporter of increasing HIV/AIDS funding."

One reason HRC gives for fighting Specter's re-election (and thus alienating themselves from the incoming chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee): although his office bars discrimination against gays, he failed to adopt "a voluntary, written policy adding gender identity to sexual orientation as a non-factor in employment decisions in his Senate office."

And how many millions of dollars did gay donors unload on Cheryl Jacques this year, so she could drive around in one of her "George Bush, You're Fired" trucks and pretend she wasn't completely without a clue?

More Recent Postings
11/07/04 - 11/13/04

A thoughtful column by Debra Saunders, posted at the conservative townhall.com site:

In 2000, I voted against Proposition 22 [an initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California] because I believe in the benefits of marriage, for gays and straights. But the reaction to this election chills me and makes me wonder if it makes more sense for advocates to push for civil-union legislation now, and marriage later, when the public is ready.

It doesn't help when advocates demonize those who hesitate to change laws that have existed for a long time and that shape American families. It doesn't help when they blame Bush voters for sentiments also shared by Kerry voters.

Indeed, it doesn't.

More Recent Postings
11/07/04 - 11/13/04

I don't even know how to begin to parse this latest paranoid rant from playwright and gay activist luminary Larry Kramer (published on the blog of one of his fans), who believes "from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine." Read it for yourself if you get off on this sort of self-victimizing and opponent-demonizing. But it made me feel all clammy, like listening to a religious fundamentalist talk about the secret and nefarious gay agenda to take over the world. An excerpt:

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a Richmond lawyer who called himself a centrist, was secretly commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Congress to write a confidential plan on how to take back America for the survival of the free enterprise system. Not democracy. Free enterprise. Barry Goldwater had lost, Nixon was about to implode, Vietnam had sucked the nation's soul dry, the cabal saw their world unraveling. They saw the women's movement, black civil rights, student war protests, the cold war. They saw the world as they knew it coming to an end. ...

This was the birth of what is now called the vast right wing conspiracy. ... Under the supervision of some of the richest families in America, that plan has been followed faithfully since 1971 and it has resulted in these past years of horror and the re-election of George Bush. Nine families and their foundations, all under the insistent goading of Joseph Coors, have financed much of this.

That's right, economic freedom is our real enemy!

More Recent Postings
11/07/04 - 11/13/04

On his website, former Log Cabin Republican leader Rich Tafel, now president of RLT Strategies, urges the gay community to rethink old tactics. He writes (in an excerpt from an op-ed he penned last month):

How have gays come so far in the popular culture, yet lost ground politically? What strategy could we employ that could end this trend? ...

During the past decade our political strategy has been: "Elect more Democrats, defeat more Republicans." This strategy hasn't worked. The fundamental problem with it is that the same voters who embrace us in the pop culture have voted to increase Republican control of their Governorships, the House, the Senate and the White House.

Given this failed partisan strategy by gay lobbyists (and, though he doesn't say it explicitly, in light of Log Cabin's public criticism of Bush during the recent campaign), Tafel asks:

Who in the gay community will be at the table with the White House and Congress to insure gay and lesbian American's concerns are included? When social conservatives push to lift those protections in a second Bush Administration who will lobby the Administration on behalf of the gay and lesbian community?

And, even more fundamentally:

Our national [gay] organizations must change our political debate from good versus evil to terms of those we've educated and those we've failed to educate, which forces us to take responsibility for our own lack of progress. Instead of figuring out how to win over our opposition, we generally demonize them for being cold hearted, intolerant or stupid. We need to spend less time preaching to our choir of supporters and more time figuring out how to win over our opposition.

Tafel also writes, "I personally think gays should be pushing for civil unions, something that the President supports," rather than outright marriage.

Writing at Slate, Paul Freedman argues in The Gay Marriage Myth that terrorism, not "moral values" (and, in particular, not gay marriage) elected Bush:

The evidence that having a gay-marriage ban on the ballot increased voter turnout is spotty. Marriage-ban states did see higher turnout than states without such measures. They also saw higher increases in turnout compared with four years ago. But these differences are relatively small.

BoifromTroy also picks this up and adds his two cents, suggesting that liberal Democrats are trying to blame gays for their loss rather than their selection of a lousy candidate (making gays, as he puts it, "the new Ralph Nader"), while conservative Republicans just want to blame gays.

There's some truth that the ambiguous "values" exit poll question is being spun mercilessly by both sides (hey, I would have said "moral values" were important, too!). But the fact that the Democrats are so quick to scapegoat us should be a warning sign to the "one party's all we need" partisans.

The much bigger issue is the triumph of the statewide gay-marriage-banning initiatives, which swept to victory even in liberal, Kerry-voting Oregon, and the widespread antipathy it reveals toward gay marriage �?? regardless of the issue's arguable role in Kerry's ("The president and I have the same position, fundamentally, on gay marriage. We do") defeat.

More Recent Postings
11/07/04 - 11/13/04

A week after the election, the Log Cabin Republicans' Patrick Guerriero has issued a thoughtful assessment of mistakes made by gay activists and what must now be done. It's well worth reading. Here are some excerpts:

As we judge who our friends and opponents are in Congress we should think twice about labeling party-line procedural votes and refusal to sponsor our legislative priorities as anti-gay. We can and must speak out against anti-gay legislation, hate speech, and anti-gay votes. But we should attempt to do so without burning every bridge and without demonizing those who we need to educate and work with in the years ahead. When our most reliable friends are up for re-election, they deserve our community's full support even when they are Republicans.

That, of course, is a jibe at the Human Rights Campaign, which worked to defeat Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter despite his long record of supporting gay equality. The release continues:

And, President Bush has won a clear and decisive popular vote and electoral college victory. He is our nation's duly elected leader and we must find a way to work with him and his administration over the next four years.

That should be obvious, but it's not to partisan gay lobbyists and, until today, it wasn't clear Log Cabin realized it. And it would have been even better if LCR could have found some part of Bush's GOP agenda to praise (social security reform? health savings accounts? the war on terrorism? anything?).

We must accept that sometimes we cannot always do what feels good in the short term. Sometimes we have to do what is pragmatic and what will aid our battle over the long term.

Which is what maturity - a trait too often lacking among the activist vanguard - is all about.

More Recent Postings
11/07/04 - 11/13/04

Perhaps it was morally right to adopt a strategy of using state courts to gain full marriage equality, damn the consequences, but in retrospect there was little real debate within what's called the gay "community" about the risks of going for full marriage, rather than spousal rights through civil unions.

From the AP (via the Washington Blade):

German lawmakers expanded the rights of same-sex couples last week, allowing registered domestic partners to adopt each other's children and making rules on splitting up and alimony similar to those for heterosexual marriages.

That's the incremental approach that got the Netherlands and Belgium from civil unions/partnerships to full marriage -- but not in one, judicially degreed swoop. It's the path we were on in this country, state by state, until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's marriage ruling, followed by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's high-media (but legally vacuous) gay marriage decree.

As good as those developments felt, they were seen as a radical slap in the face by the conservative U.S. electorate, which differs markedly from Canada, where judicially ordered same-sex marriage is not, apparently, provoking a comparable backlash. But in this country, the slew of state amendments banning gay marriage -- and in several cases, now even civil unions -- shows that we've reaped the whirlwind.

From liberal Tina Brown's Washington Post column:

On Wednesday morning, even the gay editors of liberal upscale magazines were prepared to tell you that if there's one person who should get a big bouquet from Karl Rove it's Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, aka Mrs. [columnist] Anthony Lewis, who forced her state to authorize gay marriage.

From a Wall Street Journal editorial:

Having ignored the 11 state gay marriage initiatives before Tuesday's election, our friends in the mainstream media now can't talk about anything else. They seem astonished that even voters in Oregon and Michigan, states that President Bush lost, supported traditional marriage by landslides.

Will we have a wide-open debate about strategy now? In the wake of last week's electoral losses, activists' are pledging a new round of lawsuits to overturn what the voters decreed. Will these suits focus on the civil unions bans while working to educate the country on marriage rights? I doubt it.

[Update: A reader responds, in our mailbag.]

More Recent Postings
10/31/04 - 11/6/04

Writing in the well-respected Washington Monthly, columnist Kevin Drum argues that in retrospect "the most important event of the campaign" was:

the Massachusett's Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage. The result was nearly a dozen initiatives across the country to ban gay marriage and a perfect wedge issue for Republicans.

Over at one of my favorite sites, Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling writes:

Although I take a liberal attitude toward gay marriage, I do believe that the Massachusetts Supreme Court need not have found a right to gay marriage in that state's Constitution. The Democratic Party reaped the whirlwind from that exercise in judicial activism.

And at The Agitator site, libertarian blogger Radley Balko concurs.

Gay activists who bellow that those who voted to ban gay marriage are all "bigots" and "haters" don't get it. Most of those voters are work-a-day folks who fear same-sex matrimony is an invitation to moral anarchy. We can say that's misguided, but it's just not the same thing as rank bigotry. And given the overall state of the culture, which is far ruder and cruder than ever, the fear that things are spinning out of control is not that hard to fathom.

What's needed is education over time, and probably the incremental steps of domestic partnerships and civil unions -- contrary to the Massachusetts court's radical judicial decree.

But gay activists still think filing lawsuits, regardless of popular opinion, is that path to victory. On the heels of the 11-state defeat, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force leader Matt Foreman issued a statement saying:

The results underscore why we have a Bill of Rights -- because it is always wrong to put basic rights up to a popular vote. ...In the end, we know the Bill of Rights will guarantee every American the freedom to marry. ...This is only one round and when the fight is over, complete equality for gay people will be the only side left standing.

The courts do have an important role in guaranteeing legal equality. But at the same time you can't just steamroll over popular opinion or (as I think Foreman does) dismiss it contemptuously and say only court rulings matter -- because in the end judges are either elected or appointed by those who are elected. And Big Daddy Government isn't going to do the job of reaching hearts and minds for us.