IGF CultureWatch

The Washington Post has a scary look at the Christian right, profiling Tradition Values Coalition leader Lou Sheldon and his equally hateful (if more polished) daughter, Andrea. Here's how they and their allies view things:

"Pearl Harbor," [Lou Sheldon] says, surveying Tuesday's front pages. "What Pearl Harbor did to American patriotism, May 17 should do to the Christian level of awareness."

Many evangelical leaders saw May 17 as a kind of Armageddon. James Dobson of Focus on the Family said, "Barring a miracle, the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble." R. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention compared the day to Sept. 11, 2001, and called it a "moral disaster."

But when confronted with the unexpected lack of passion by the evangelical grass roots over this matter, and congressional momentum for the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment that seems to be "fizzling," Sheldon obfuscates:

[O]nce gay couples start coming home from Massachusetts and demanding recognition of their marriages by their own states, Sheldon figures America will wake up. "It's a sleeping giant out there," he says. "We're talking about tens of millions of people. And when they wake up I feel bad for the homosexuals."

An ugly sentiment, just as you'd expect.

The Family Research Council issued a statement in support of the proposed anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment, headlined "FRC Calls on Congress to Defend Marriage and States' Rights," claiming it's necessary to amend the federal Constitution "to protect state marriage laws." But that's simply a lie. They're not seeking to "defend states' rights." They want a uniform national definition of marriage -- theirs -- to be imposed on all states. It's real chutzpah to say that nationalizing marriage law and overturning at least one state's marriage measure (in Massachusetts) and quite possibly Vermont's civil union law as well, is "defending states' rights."

Another FRC release makes clear that its motivation is anti-gay animus and homophobia, plain and simple:

"If we do not immediately pass a Constitutional amendment protecting marriage, we will not only lose the institution of marriage in our nation, but eventually all critics of the homosexual lifestyle will be silenced. Churches will be muted, schools will be forced to promote homosexuality as a consequence-free alternative lifestyle, and our nation will find itself embroiled in a cultural, legal and moral quagmire."

The ex-gays at Exodus International go even further, as they chime in with "the legalization of same-sex marriage is a deathblow to children."

Meanwhile, the "mainstream" conservative Heritage Foundation, which enjoys close links to the Bush administration, has plastered its home page with a plethora of anti-gay marriage/pro Federal Marriage Amendment columns -- as if the lead item on the conservative agenda were to rewrite the nation's most sacred document, imposing one federal standard that forces states to exclude gays from marriage. And the culture warfare goes on, and on.

Much media coverage and opinion sharing on the first day of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. Andrew Sullivan is in fine form with this op-ed in the NY Times. An excerpt:

"It's hard for heterosexuals to imagine being denied this moment. It is, after all, regarded in our civil religion as the "happiest day of your life." And that is why the denial of such a moment to gay family members is so jarring and cruel. It rends people from their own families; it builds an invisible but unscalable wall between them and the people they love and need. ...

"I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents' or my brother's or my sister's. It's hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound."

The AP reports that opponents of allowing gay couples to wed say their motive isn't based on hatred. But fundamentally, they believe that gay people are radically inferior to themselves, and that we sully and besmirch their marriages by claiming a right to our own. And that dismissive antipathy may be even worse than outright hate.

On Monday, May 17, Massachusetts becomes the first U.S. state to officially recognize same-sex marriages -- so watch the religious right become increasingly intemperate.

Here's an interesting piece from the Alliance for Marriage. Note the language -- Massachusetts is set to "invalidate" its marriage laws, apparently by not excluding same-sex couples. It's as if the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education (which celebrates its 50th anniversary on May 17) invalidated public education by not allowing states to exclude students on the basis of their race.

Also worth noting is the way the Alliance for Marriage and other religious right groups now have thoroughly incorporated the whole multi-culti look of the left. By the way, Alliance leader Walter Fauntroy, you may remember, is the same anti-gay African-American clergyman who helped lead the rally last August in Washington marking the 40th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. As Rick Rosendall reminds us, at the same rally National Gay & Lesbian Task Force head Matt Foreman deliberately avoided any mention of the gay marriage fight, so as not to be rude (or worse, I suppose, racially insensitive) to the homophobes on the podium.

Finally, don't put too much stock in the Alliance's claim of mounting support for a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. It reamins extremely unlikely that such a measure would get out of congress, although it may be put to a vote this year to give the religious right a "scorecard' to take into the elections. Much more probable, however, is that a growing number of states will experience "gay panic" and pass state-level laws and amendments against gay marriages.

Expect the years ahead to bring only small pockets of marriage equality, but given time these scattered lights can grow and overwhelm the darkness of fear and prejudice that would keep us forever separate and unequal.

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5/09/04 - 5/15/04

Anti-gay activist Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute (an affiliate of Concerned Women for America), calls the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal the result of a "perfect storm" of perversion in American culture. And you know who is responsible, don't you:

Where did those soldiers get the idea to engage in sadomasochistic activity and to videotape it in voyeuristic fashion? Easy. It's found on thousands of Internet porn sites and in the pages of "gay" publications, where S&M events are advertised alongside ads for Subarus, liquor and drugs to treat HIV and hepatitis.

Yes, homosexual perversion has corrupted our fighting men and women. But then Knight goes off on a really strange tangent:

We were told that men "marrying" men and women "marrying" women is inevitable - not only for America, but for the world. Imagine how those images of men kissing men outside San Francisco City Hall after being "married" play in the Muslim world. We couldn't offer the mullahs a more perfect picture of American decadence.

So I guess we're also being blamed for offending the Islamic fundamentalists who sponsor worldwide terrorism. But one could guess that the mullahs and Knight are really brothers under the skin.
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Eugene Volokh, who teaches law at UCLA and spearheads the popular "Volokh Conspiracy" blogsite (basically libertarian-conservative), takes on the recently enacted Virginia law that forbids recognition of any "private contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage." Quite rightly characterizing this as an assault on the right of contract, Volokh writes:

"What's the harm of two people of the same sex promising each other that they'll share property, or support each other? The ability to make legally binding contracts...is the power to plan for the future with confidence -- to defer short-term gratification today with the expectation that one will get benefits over the long term. Contract law is premised on the recognition that this power is valuable both to the individual and to society ... and on the recognition that it is generally best to let people decide for themselves the proper terms of the contracts..."

Volokh also recently took on anti-gay marriage polemicist David Frum,
who asserts Massachusetts same-sex marriage would force other states to recognize gay unions. Vokokh, an expet in constitutional law, puts Frum in his place.

By the way, isn't it interesting that some conservatives oppose any state being allowed to recognize same-sex marriage for fear that all states would have to recognize it, and then support a federal constitutional amendment that would forbid any state from recognizing such marriages (so much for states' rights!).

A Boston labor union representing some 6,000 members has amended its benefit plans to exclude gay married couples from receiving health and pension benefits, evoking fears that this could set a dangerous precedent for other unions and employers throughout Massachusetts, reports the Boston Globe. Trustees and administrators of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103 issued a clarification of the phrase "dependent spouse" to mean "a person of the opposite sex." The move effectively denies gay married couples the same benefits other married couples receive under the union's pension plan, health plan, and deferred income benefits.

Says union administrator Russell F. Sheehan, "I'm sure we have plenty of gay members, and that's OK. They shouldn't have expected benefits if they knew their plan." The Globe story adds that "Sheehan brushed aside any suggestion that the step could be discriminatory and stressed that his union is free to extend benefits as it sees fit." No, not discriminatory at all. It's not like they're real married couples, is it?

The Washington Post, a bit late on the draw (as were gay organizations) on Sunday ran a strongly worded editorial against the recently enacted Virginia law banning not only recognition of gay marriages and civil unions, but any private contracts that seek to bestow marriage-like rights between same-sex couples. The full extent of this extremist lunacy is just now becoming evident to many. But how did this thing pass with no attention from either the media or activists? (As noted in an earlier posting, Virginia's main gay rights group was hesitant to push the state Democratic Party to oppose the measure, for reasons still largely unexplained.)

The silver lining, as the Post editorial notes: the law is so bad, it may eventually prove an embarrassment even to its backers in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy and still in rebellion against modernity.

In Massachusetts, anti-gay groups have asked a federal court to block the legalization of gay marriage next week, arguing that the state's highest court violated the U.S. Constitution with its landmark November ruling. The nonprofit Liberty Counsel (sort of an anti-Lambda Legal Defense) and its allies filed the case on behalf of Robert Largess of Boston, vice president of the Catholic Action League, who apparently believes that allowing same-sex couples to marry would be an impermissible violation of his civil rights. Go figure.

As quoted by the AP, legal expert Shari Levitan called the motion a "Hail Mary pass," saying, "I think the significance of this is not the case itself but that it highlights such strong emotions. People are willing to go to the mat with any argument to push their claim." We certainly do drive them up the walls, don't we.

Meanwhile, the AP also reports that the seaside gay mecca of Provincetown will issue out-of-state same-sex couples marriage licenses in defiance of Governor Mitt Romney's residency edict (based on a resurrected anti-miscegenation law), likely setting the stage for another round of gay marriage legal -- and political -- battles.

The Washington Blade has one of the better roundups on Iraqi prisoner abuse. A recent letter chides us for not doing more about the scandal, and I hope our IGF writers will give it the sort of thoughtful analysis this story calls for. In the meantime, I'll just say that the events at Abu Ghraib prison -- where Iraqi prisoners were photographed naked, forced to simulate gay sex, and otherwise humiliated and abused -- exposes many levels of sexual twistedness all round: The U.S. military, whose guards (and possibly prison administrators) consider gay sex the ultimate in humiliation/emasculation, and the Iraqi insurgents/terrorists, who consider gay sex the ultimate in humiliation/emasculation. As one prisoner who was stripped told the Associated Press (this from the Blade account), "They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman."

At this point, we have pictures (and admissions by the U.S. military) of such things as prisoners being striped, posed as if having gay sex, forced to form a naked pyramid, being tied up and pulled on a leash, and being forced to crawl naked along the floor. This is abuse and mistreatment, to be sure, but is it "torture," as some in the media and the anti-war camp have labeled it (e.g., Seymour Hersh's "Torture at Abu Ghraib" in The New Yorker)?

Well, if some of the accusations, to date unsubstantiated, about actual sodomy/rape or even murder prove true, then yes, it's torture. But if it's being stripped and posed and forced to crawl, then I think the use of the word "torture" also signifies on the part of the media (and some war critics) the view that being forced to simulate gay sex is the very worst than can be done to a man -- apparently equivalent to the actual physical torture that Saddam inflicted year after blood-curdling year on innocent dissidents in the same prison. (Again, I say this about the events we have proof of -- not the as of now unproved allegations).

More Recent Postings

5/02/04 - 5/08/04