IGF CultureWatch

Many will never forgive his apparent lack of concern as so many perished from AIDS (though Deroy Murdock makes the case that much was actually being done), or that his administration helped legitimize the religious right as a political force. Still, his refusal to play the appeasement game brought down the Soviet Union and freed millions from totalitarianism, and his policies slowed the expansion of welfare-state paternalism and reversed economic stagnation here at home. A mixed legacy, as is so often the case.

Worth noting: the first openly gay couple spent a night together in the White House during Reagan's term. From a Washington Post story on March 18, 1984:

The Reagans are also tolerant about homosexual men. Their interior decorator, Ted Graber, who oversaw the redecoration of the White House, spent a night in the Reagans' private White House quarters with his male lover, Archie Case, when they came to Washington for Nancy Reagan's 60th birthday party -- a fact confirmed for the press by Mrs. Reagan's press secretary. Indeed, all the available evidence suggests that Ronald Reagan is a closet tolerant.

Deroy Murdock's column helps puts to rest the charge that Reagan harbored anti-gay animosity. He notes a Time magazine story in which Patti Reagan recalls "the clear, smooth, non-judgmental way" her father discussed homosexuality. Speaking of Rock Hudson, she says:

My father gently explained that Mr. Hudson didn't really have a lot of experience kissing women; in fact, he would much prefer to be kissing a man. This was said in the same tone that would be used if he had been telling me about people with different colored eyes, and I accepted without question that this whole kissing thing wasn't reserved just for men and women.

Deroy also reminds us that Reagan publicly opposed Proposition 6, a 1978 ballot measure that called for the dismissal of California teachers who "advocated" homosexuality, even outside of schools. His opposition was considered instrumental to the measure's defeat.

And Deroy quotes Kenneth T. Walsh, former White House correspondent and author of the biography Ronald Reagan, who wrote: "Despite the urging of some of his conservative supporters, he never made fighting homosexuality a cause. In the final analysis, Reagan felt that what people do in private is their own business, not the government's."

The anti-gay group Focus on the Family is up in arms over the fact that, in Montana, an evangelical church's tax-exempt status is being challenged after the church showed congregants a video simulcast called the "Battle for Marriage" and then circulated a petition at the event calling for a state constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriages. Similarly, an e-mail release from the anti-gay Family Research Council declared:

pro-homosexual advocates want to silence all churches and pro-family groups like FRC who are critical of the homosexual lifestyle. It has already happened in other countries where same-sex "marriage" has been legalized, and tomorrow it may happen to the Church in this country if it does not stand firm today. The intolerance of these left-wing extremists will roll right over our First Amendment rights unless we
respond vigorously. We will respond!

An even more hysterical account, from an evangelical news service, ran under the headline "LIBERAL HOMOSEXUAL RADICAL AGENDA, MAKING ITSELF KNOWN TO BE ANTI-GOD IN MONTANA."

Of course, to be fair, liberals never object to "peace" or civil rights political activism in churches, or when Jesse Jackson and others African-American politicians pass the hat for their political campaigns at Sunday services in black churches. Whether on the left or the right, if religious organizations want to behave like political action committees, they should not retain their tax-exempt status.

Bush's Beliefs: A Response

Commenting on President Bush's remarks cited in yesterday's item, "What Bush Believes," IGF contributing author Rick Rosendall reminded me of what he wrote in a Salon.com article last March:

After calling for a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage without once mentioning the dreaded words "gay" or "lesbian," President George W. Bush ended on a conciliatory note: "We should also conduct this difficult debate in a manner worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger. In all that lies ahead, let us match strong convictions with kindness and goodwill and decency." This reminds me of Dame Edna Everage, who, after saying something horribly cruel about her bridesmaid Madge Allsop, habitually adds, "I mean that in a nurturing and caring way."

This piece from Christianity Today about President Bush's recent get-together with religious editors and writers shows that he truly is committed to the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), and not just as a political ploy. His conservative religious convictions are deep and guiding. He also seems to realize that the FMA, for now, lacks sufficient grassroots support:

I will tell you the prairie fire necessary to get an amendment passed is simmering at best. I think it's an accurate way of describing it. ... I'm not sure people quite understand the issue yet.

Then he adds:

It's essential that those who articulate the position that defends traditional marriage as the only definition of marriage do so in a compassionate way. I like to quote [from the Bible's book of] Matthew, that you know, I'm not going to try to take a speck out of your eye when I've got a log in my own. You know what I'm saying. And therefore, this dialogue needs to be a dialogue worthy of a nation and worthy of a debate over a constitutional amendment. And it's a very important discussion. And it's one that should not be politicized.

But of course, if you're pushing for a constitutional amendment, it can't help but be "politicized," can it? Bush's position is at best muddled -- not the hate and animus of the hard-core religious right, but still a severely misguided sense of the federal government as defender of traditional morality. (Thanks to IGF's Mike Airhart for the heads up)

In a posting on his Overlawyered.com site, Walter Olson (who is also IGF's webmaster and a contributing author) takes aim at the new Virginia statute that declares null and void not only civil unions but also any "partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage"

Taking issue with National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru and other conservative pundits who defend this indefensible statute, Olson writes that couples who have a Vermont civil union "might be in for a very rude surprise after their I-95 accident when Virginia treated them as legal strangers for purposes of hospital visitation and the like." Moreover, since at least one of the measure's sponsors has said he hopes the law will invalidate guardianship arrangements:

children who had lived uneventfully for years with the surviving female partner of their deceased mother in New Jersey or California might be subject to being seized and handed over to the Virginia social service/foster care bureaucracy because the family was so ill advised as to attempt a vacation trip to Williamsburg or Mount Vernon.

Olson also reminds us that "Virginia is the only state where companies not large enough to underwrite their own insurance policies are prohibited from offering domestic partner benefits," and that "it is perhaps needless to add that Virginia's powerful religious-right lobby has vocally supported that prohibition." Yet supposedly mainstream conservatives still refuse to condemn these dangerous and damaging statutes that erode fundamental contractual rights.

They Can Have Mississippi.

This isn't new, but it's a hoot. A reader points out a website, www.christianexodus.com, is from a group of fundamentalists preaching secession from the United Sates to oppose the nation's embrace of gay marriage and abortion, banning school prayer, and other abominations. They note on their "Plan" page
that the three states under consideration, due to their relatively small populations, coastal access and Christian-conservative citizenry, are Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. Guess they never heard that the civil war kind of settled the issue of whether states can secede. And how in the world did they overlook Virginia?

A column by anti-gay pundit Pat Buchanan, published in Saudi Arabia's Arab News newspaper, is titled "What Does America Offer the World?" Buchanan writes:

When Bush speaks of freedom as God's gift to humanity, does he mean the First Amendment freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, a book considered blasphemous to the Islamic faith? If the Islamic world rejects this notion of freedom, why is it our duty to change their thinking? Why are they wrong? ...

A society that accepts the killing of a third of its babies as women's "emancipation," that considers homosexual marriage to be social progress, that hands out contraceptives to 13-year-old girls at junior high ought to be seeking out a confessional -- better yet, an exorcist -- rather than striding into a pulpit like Elmer Gantry to lecture mankind on the superiority of "American values."

Somehow, echoing back to the Arab world the view that American liberty is merely an excuse for corruption and decadence seems a new low, even for a genuinely vile pig like Buchanan.

More Recent Postings

5/23/04 - 5/29/04

As to the Islamic mullahs' remarks about gays, quoted in the post immediately below, Andrew Sullivan comments in his 5/26 blog:

What staggers me is how silent the gay establishment is about these obscenities. If a religious right figure had said them, there would be hell to pay. But the multi-culti left still has a stranglehold on official gay discourse and won't condemn Islamist bigotry. Why not? These mullahs are fanning the flames of anti-gay violence with literally incendiary rhetoric. Burn gays? Yep, that's what the cleric said.

Staggering, indeed. But that's exactly the mindset of "our" movement's leaders.

From JohannHari.com, here's an interesting look at gays and Islam (brought to our attention by Walter Olson). An excerpt:

Dr Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of North America, says "homosexuality is a moral disease, a sin, a corruption... No person is born homosexual, just as nobody is born a thief, a liar or a murderer. People acquire these evil habits due to a lack of proper guidance and education."

Sheikh Sharkhawy, a cleric at the prestigious London Central Mosque in Regent's Park, compares homosexuality to a "cancer tumor." He argues "we must burn all gays to prevent pedophilia and the spread of AIDS," and says gay people "have no hope of a spiritual life." The Muslim Educational Trust hands out educational material to Muslim teachers - intended for children! - advocating the death penalty for gay people, and advising Muslim pupils to stay away from gay classmates and teachers.

But some gay people like Ali have begun to contest this reading of Islam. There have been a small number of groups for gay Muslims over the past 20 years, and their history is not encouraging. A San Francisco-based group called the Lavender Crescent Society sent five members to Iran in 1979 after the Islamic revolution there to spur an Iranian gay movement. They were taken straight from the airport to a remote spot and shot dead.

Meanwhile, "progressives" flock to Michael Moore's demagogic propaganda and congratulate themselves for their insight into how the U.S. is the source of evil in the world.

Last week Gallup released new poll findings showing that support for both gay marriage and civil unions had edged upward. The polls show:

a modest increase in the number of Americans who support giving gay couples some of the legal rights that heterosexual couples enjoy. The public is about evenly divided on a law that would establish gay civil unions with some of the same rights that marriages have, and it remains more opposed than supportive of giving gay marriages the same legal status as traditional marriages. However, for both proposals, there is somewhat greater support today than there was several months ago.

The light advances as the darkness recedes, at least somewhat.

More Recent Postings

5/16/04 - 5/22/04

Did gay marriage destroy heterosexual marriage in Scandinavia, as anti-gay pundit Stanley Kurtz claims? A resounding "no" comes from M.V. Lee Badgett, writing at Slate.com:

Reports of the death of marriage in Scandinavia are greatly exaggerated; giving gay couples the right to wed did not lead to massive matrimonial flight by heterosexuals. ...

No matter how you slice the demographic data, rates of nonmarital births and cohabitation do not increase as a result of the passage of laws that give same-sex partners the right to registered partnership. To put it simply: Giving gay couples rights does not inexplicably cause heterosexuals to flee marriage, as Kurtz would have us believe.

So there. Also, over at MarriageDebate.com, Barry Deutsch argues that around the industrialized world the state of gay rights correlates with fewer abortions, with pro-gay countries like the Netherlands, France and Germany having very low abortion rates. He speculates that more sexually liberal attitudes are associated with both gay-friendly laws and widespread use of contraceptives, which would account for the correlation. But don't expect anti-abortion conservatives to go for that one.

Cal Thomas, one of the most widely circulated
religious-right columnists, seems ready to admit defeat on
same-sex marriage. In his latest column he bitterly laments what this nation has come to, then writes:

"'Pro family' groups have given it their best shot, but this debate is over. They would do better to spend their energy and resources building up their side of the cultural divide and demonstrating how their own precepts are supposed to work. Divorce remains a great threat to family stability, and there are far more heterosexuals divorcing and cohabiting than homosexuals wishing to 'marry.' If conservative religious people wish to exert maximum
influence on culture, they will redirect their attention to repairing their own cracked foundation."

Can't argue with that. As columnist Max Boot writes in an L.A Times piece headlined The Right Can't Win This Fight:

"Faced with virtually inevitable defeat, Republicans would be wise not to expend too much political capital pushing for a gay marriage amendment to
the Constitution. They will only make themselves look 'intolerant' to
soccer moms whose views on this subject, as on so many others, will soon be as liberal as elite opinion already is."

Be prepared for continuing shifts in both public and elite opinion - for the next few years, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

(Thanks to Walter Olson for the heads up.)
- Stephen H. Miller

Warning: Litigation Ahead

I was just reading about individual retirement accounts. It seems there is something called "Spousal Exceptions to Minimum Distribution Rules," which means that a surviving spouse can roll a late spouse's IRA over into the survivor's account, and withdraw these funds over his or her life expectancy -- maximizing the benefit of the tax-deferred (or tax-free, with a Roth IRA) compounding. Yet another of the myriad ways in which legal marriage is treated as "the real thing." But will Massachusetts same-sex couples be able to claim such benefits, in light of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal recognition of state-sanctioned gay marriages? The road ahead is going to be extremely litigious, it seems.