IGF CultureWatch

Two new polls released last Sunday show just about half of Massachusetts voters agree with the ruling by their highest court that the state's ban same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, while around 38% are opposed to gay marriage. That makes it a lot more difficult for anti-gay activists to charge that gay marriage is being forced on an unwilling populace.

Still, a recent nationwide survey shows that 59% oppose gay marriage while 32% favor it. Which is why it's not surprising, just disappointing, that the proposed anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution now has over 100 bipartisan sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives, according to the very anti-gay (but extremely multicultural) Alliance For Marriage.

Some good news: A few more straight conservatives are making the case for same-sex marriage. I particularly liked this piece from the right-leaning New York Sun, by R.H. Sager, who writes: "Marriage is a contract, it's a choice, it encourages stability. Conservatives like all of those things. Why not extend the institution?"

Moreover, other prominent conservative who haven't been stellar on matters of gay equality are now touting civil unions as an acceptable compromise, including Jonah Goldberg. He gets off this sharp observation:

It's a funny stalemate. The Republicans can't afford to be seen as too "anti-gay," lest the Democrats demagogue them with tolerant suburban voters, and Democrats can't afford to be seen as too "pro-gay" lest the GOP demagogue them in Southern and rural states. So both sides stand there, circling each other like sumo wrestlers, hoping the other side will make the first move.

And still other pundits of the right have come out against the Federal Marriage Amendment, including George Will and David Horowitz. Whether such defections will be enough to stall the support for amending the Constitution during the coming election year is as yet unknown.

The Marriage Ruling &

More Recent Postings

11/16/03 - 11/22/03

David Brooks, a fair-minded conservative who's now a columnist for the New York Times, penned this op-ed on The Power of Marriage. Taking a swipe at fellow conservatives, Brooks admonishes:

The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

And, taking a swipe at liberals, he declares:

When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote. Marriage is not voting.

Straight conservatives who support gay marriage -- now that's a force to be reckoned with!

Liberals for Undermining Traditional Marriage?

On the other hand, do we really benefit from arguments like Sociologist Says Gay Marriage Does Threaten Established Order, and That's Good?

Meanwhile, in a show of support for heterosexual marriage, both Menendez brothers have now gotten married while in prison for killing their parents.
--Stephen H. Miller

"This May Be Good for Marriage" writes liberal syndicated columnist Richard Cohen:

Now along come gay couples to rescue marriage from social and economic irrelevance, casting a queer eye on a straight institution. They seek it for pecuniary reasons -- issues such as estate taxes, etc. -- but also because they seem to be among the last romantics. (No shotgun marriages here.) The odd thing about the opposition to gay marriage is that if the opponents were not so blinded by bigotry and fear, they would see that gay men and lesbians provide the last, best argument for marriage: love and commitment.

Libertarian-minded columnist Steve Chapman argues that "Freedom Evolves in Surprising Ways":

When John Adams wrote the Massachusetts Constitution, which historian David McCullough says is "the oldest functioning written constitution in the world," he couldn't have dreamed it would someday be interpreted to sanction homosexual partnerships. At the time, Massachusetts made sodomy punishable by death. These days, however, not much is banned in Boston, or most other venues. --

On this and other activities once stigmatized as sinful, Americans are generally inclined to let freedom ring, even if they don't always like the results. John Adams and his fellow founders would be surprised, but when you decide to protect the pursuit of happiness, there's just no telling where it will lead.

On the other hand, fumes religious rightist Cal Thomas, the Massachusetts ruling:

...is further evidence that G.K. Chesterton's warning has come true: "The danger when men stop believing in God is not that they'll believe in nothing, but that they'll believe in anything."

Marriage was not invented by the Postal Service as a convenient way to deliver the mail. It was established by God as the best arrangement for fallen humanity to organize and protect itself and create and rear children. Even secular sociologists have produced studies showing children need a mother and a father in the home.

And, perhaps striving to be "fair and balanced," conservative Bill O'Reilly told his Fox News audience:

Personally I couldn't care less about gay marriage. If Tommy and Vinny or Joanie and Samantha want to get married, I don't see it as a threat to me or anybody else. But according to a poll by the Pew Research Center, only 32 percent of Americans favor gay marriage. And the will of the people must be taken into account here.

Some are predicting the culture war over gay marriage will become more heated than the abortion fight. Others say that aside from the religious right and the gay community, most Americans are just not emotionally invested in the issue. Keeping an eye on our national pundits will be one way to gauge if that's so.

Law professor Dale Carpenter, an IGF contributing author, answered questions from USA Today readers about what might happen next in light of the Massachusetts marriage ruling, and the transcript can be read online.

Also, IGF co-managing editor Jon Rauch takes part in an online debate over the ruling, hosted on The New Republic's website.

The AP reports: "Massachusetts' highest court ruled Tuesday that same-sex couples are legally entitled to wed under the state constitution, but stopped short of allowing marriage licenses to be issued to the couples who challenged the law." (The entire opinion, including the dissent, is available online.)

Meanwhile, the AP continues, "The Massachusetts question will now return to the Legislature, which already is considering a constitutional amendment that would legally define a marriage as a union between one man and one woman." The state's powerful Speaker of the House, Democrat Tom Finneran of Boston, has endorsed the proposal. And so has GOP Governor Mitt Romney.

The worst outcome: Massachusetts amends its state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, and the ruling gives a huge push to efforts to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment now in Congress, which would amend the U.S. Constitution in the same permanently restrictive manner.
[Update: Given that it can take up to two years to amend the Bay State's constitution, expect opponents to put their effforts into amending the federal Constitution.]

The best outcome: Massachusetts passes a civil unions bill along the lines of Vermont's, granting same-sex couples all the state-granted benefits of marriage, and this passes muster with the Massachusetts courts.

Do I want gays to have the right to marry in the fullest sense. Yes! Do I think that, given the current political climate, court-decreed same-sex marriage will be overturned by elected legislatures and create a groundswell of reaction? Yes again. To paraphrase, "It's the 'M' word, stupid!"

The big picture. In the great, ongoing battle between conservatism and progressivism (ok, one could even say "dialectic," if you must), both sides hold a part of the truth. Conservatives aren't just reactionary nabobs; the truth they hold is that there are some essentials that, if tampered with, lead to chaos (e.g., the folly of "rational" socialism, which sought to replace age-old markets with central planning, and produced tyranny and poverty). Progressives, on the other hand, hew to the truth that times change and if society doesn't evolve to provide human beings with greater liberty and dignity, it will become corrupt and atrophy.

The American revolution was progressivism at its best; the French (Russian, Chinese, etc.) revolutions were progressivism at its worst, and showed the value in the conservatives' worldview ("go slow, don't alter the fundamentals, or at least be exceedingly wary about doing so").

Here we have two "truths," at war with each other. Right now, despite the rulings of some liberal justices, the nation is clearly not yet convinced that same-sex marriage wouldn't destroy an essential bedrock and lead to social breakdown. The best way to demonstrate that, on the contrary, it would be the sort of "good" progress that advances humanity is to let people get used to civil unions on a state by state level, starting where support for gay rights is already high.

Will liberal activists use the courts to overreach and produce a backlash that will set back gay marriage for a generation or more? Or am I being overly cautious and not giving enough credit to the cultural changes that have already taken root in this country? We'll soon see.

Wrong About Everything?

There were two declarations this past week from the nation's Roman Catholic bishops, as summarized in the following headlines:

• 
  
• U.S. Catholic Bishops Move to Reinforce Ban on Birth Control
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• Catholic Bishops Oppose Legalizing Gay Marriage

Guess which declaration is going to be given major play by conservatives (hint: it's not the one that might interfere with their personal lives!).

More Recent Postings

11/09/03 - 11/15/03

If nothing else, the pressure to hold up the promotion of Maj. Gen. Robert T. Clark to lieutenant general and commander of the Fifth Army, over charges that he ignored persistent anti-gay harassment on a base where a fatal gay bashing occurred in 1999, sends a strong message to the military. As the Washington Blade reports:

Gay groups have said Clark's inattention to anti-gay harassment at the base contributed to an atmosphere that led to the gay-bashing death of Pfc. Barry Winchell, 21. -- [The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network] has pointed to witnesses who testified"that Winchell had been subjected to anti-gay taunts and threats on the base for several months prior to the attack that led to his death. The witnesses testified that officers in charge of Winchell's unit failed to take steps to stop the harassment and that Clark should have intervened to address the harassment problem.

Clark will most likely get his promotion, but the months-long delay should put other military commanders on notice: tolerating attacks against gay servicemembers can be a bad career move.

[Update: On Nov. 18 the Seante approved Gen. Clark's promotion, but the vote represented (in the words of the Washington Blade) "a break from a longstanding Senate tradition of approving promotions for military officers by unanimous consent, without debate." Said an SLDN spokesperson, "Despite the disappointing vote, it's reassuring that we had an historic debate holding Gen. Clark accountable for his actions."]

Meanwhile, the rabidly anti-gay Traditional Values Coalition is running this delightful little piece on its website, Exposed: The Truth About Pfc. Barry Winchell. Could the culture wars get any uglier?

Could there be a better example of the tightrope the Bush administration is walking in the culture wars than the president's letter congratulating the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church on its 35th anniversary -- the same week that he placated the religious right with his support for their "Marriage Protection Week" (while, in another demonstration of political maneuvering, remaining silent on the right's anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment -- the ostensible point of Marriage Protection Week)?

The Right to Dissent.

Andrew Sullivan spells out why the politically correct thought police are bad for gays.

Bad Publicity.

The Harvey Milk High students crime spree story got lots of media attention in NYC last week, and rightwing groups are already making use of it. This New York Post editorial calls for eliminating the school altogether, claiming that it fosters gay/straight segregation. Unanswered is whether these students were just a few bad apples, or whether lax administrators have let things get totally out of hand.

The following quip has popped up all over the Internet, with various attributions, and has also been published in several newspapers as a letter to the editor:

"The actions taken by the New Hampshire Episcopalians are an affront to Christians everywhere. I am just thankful that the church's founder, Henry VIII and his wife Catherine of Aragon, his wife Anne Boleyn, his wife Jane Seymour, his wife Anne of Cleves, his wife Katherine Howard, and his wife Catherine Parr are no longer here to suffer through this assault on traditional Christian marriage."

Quip Debate:A newly posted letter to the editor from Jeff McQuary takes exception. He writes, in part, "Henry is not the spiritual founder of Anglicanism. He was merely the political accident that made the (inevitable) spread of the Protestant Reformation to England happen at the particular moment it did."

A New Generation of Voices.

Eric Eagan, a young gay writer, explains his yearning for kids and normalcy in this Yale Daily News column. In the same paper, Jessamyn Blau explains why, in her view, being gay should not be equated with specific political views. Good to see that some Ivy Leaguers can think for themselves rather than just mouthing those same, old, tired PC platitudes!

Civil Rights, or Civil Liberties?

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has hired Massachusetts Democratic State Senator Cheryl Jacques as its new executive director. It would be good if she considers the advice provided by Andrew Rapp, the editor-in-chief of Boston's Bay Windows gay newspaper, last July 7 in an editorial headlined "How Now HRC" (no longer available online). Rapp wrote that the group has ineffectively pursued a traditional "civil rights" strategy focused primarily on passing a federal nondiscrimination-in-the-workplace law. But:

The recent victories of our movement illustrate that a more fruitful approach is one that emphasizes civil liberties. In the Lawrence decision, we won a meaningful "equal protection" argument that recognizes gay people as a class, but the much more sweeping win was the finding that all people are entitled to the liberty to have consensual sex in the privacy of their home. The Canadian courts"found that we are entitled to the liberty to choose our partners, regardless of sex.

We are best described as a group of people with a particular stake in expanding civil liberties, rather than a class of people seeking protections under the law. Now we are seeing that civil liberties approach is also more fruitful.

But can an organization as beset with inertia as HRC recognize its failures and retool its strategies?

"The Reagans" and

More Recent Postings

10/26/03 - 11/01/03

CBS's decision to exile its controversial miniseries on Ronald and Nancy Reagan to cable's "Showtime" has liberals crying "censorship." Of course, that charge more appropriately describes actions by government, not decisions by a private company responding, in its own best interests, to fears of bad publicity or boycott threats against its advertisers.

Liberal gay activists should know this, since they've use these tactics to perfection themselves. My message to liberals: live by the sword, die by the sword. I remember back in 1992 (I think) participating in a protest by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation against the movie "Basic Instinct," which hadn't yet been released and which none of us had seen -- but we were told it was full of hateful depictions of "killer lesbians" (a bit of an exaggeration, as it turned out). More recently, activists targeted "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger's syndicated TV talk show before its launch (see stopdrlaura.com) and Michael Savage's CNBC talk show, alleging that both of these "talents" had prior histories of anti-gay comments in other media. Following low ratings and advertiser flight, both TV programs were soon canceled.

The gay angle. Concerning the CBS miniseries, topic "g" played a big role: Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, executive producers of "The Reagans," are (according the Washington Post):

"well known in TV circles for their gay advocacy TV projects and remakes of old Broadway musicals. Those advocacy projects include the NBC film "Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story," which is based on the true story of an Army officer's legal challenge to her involuntary discharge after revealing she was gay, and the Lifetime movie "What Makes a Family," about a lesbian's fight to retain custody of the baby her late partner bore.

Zadan and Meron worked on those projects with Hollywood heavyweight Barbra Streisand, whose husband, James Brolin, was cast to play the president in "The Reagans." Streisand, an outspoken liberal, was not involved in the CBS miniseries but weighed in yesterday with a lengthy statement on her Web site titled "A Sad Day for Artistic Freedom."

One of the more controversial scenes was one in which the president was shown saying to his wife, "They that live in sin shall die in sin" when addressing the AIDS crisis. The quote, the filmmakers conceded, was fictitious, according the New York Times.

The strangest gay angle. A story at newsmax.com is headlined "CBS Nixed 'Reagans' Following Letter From Rock Hudson's Ex-Lover." Yes, it claims that "CBS's decision to pull the plug on its miniseries "The Reagans" came on the heels of a letter to the network from Rock Hudson's ex-lover [Marc Christian], who complained that the film's portrayal of the 40th president as a virulent homophobe was false." The letter was made public by Christian's friend, conservative and openly lesbian commentator Tammy Bruce.

Now back to the 'censorship' issue. The fights taking place on college campuses over speach codes and the like have some bearing here. A USA Today story, "On campus: Free speech for you but not for me?" reports that:

On campuses large and small, public and private, students describe a culture in which freshmen are encouraged, if not required, to attend diversity programs that portray white males as oppressors. It's a culture in which students can be punished if their choice of words offends a classmate, and campus groups must promise they won't discriminate on the basis of religion or sexual orientation -- even if theirs is a Christian club that doesn't condone homosexuality.

The Seattle Times reports, for example, how a peaceful protest against racial preferences was shut down. Other, similar accounts of hostility toward free speech -- from both the left and the right -- abound in the new book "You Can't Say That!: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscirmination Laws" by David Bernstein. The book deals briefly with how attempts by gay activists to suppress the speech of their opponents can subsequently be used by anti-gay activists to suppress what they find to be offensive gay materials.

What's it all mean? Liberals and conservatives, gays and anti-gays, should be fully free to criticize each other's views, books, movies and miniseries. That's democracy. But if either side is going to turn to advertiser boycotts, or try to preemptively block the publication or viewing of materials they find either "hateful" or "offensive," they should be aware that such tactics are only legitimized to be used against them in the next battle. That's not censorship, but it's how the culture wargames are now being played.

Update: GLAAD, having perfected the advertiser-boycott-threat strategy against ideologically suspect programming, now joins the liberal chorus denouncing CBS's decision to pull "The Reagans." Couldn't you guess?

The Next Generation.

A new Gallup poll of 18- to 29-year-olds has some good news:

Young Americans are substantially more likely than older Americans to support marriages between homosexual couples -- 53% vs. 32%, respectively. This greater acceptance of gay and lesbian rights among young Americans has been a consistent finding in Gallup Polls for a number of years.

But this generation is not more "liberal," politically speaking. Nearly half (45%) say they are politically independent, with the remainder more likely to identify themselves as Republicans (30%) than as Democrats (24%). Also, "By a margin of 82% to 58%, young Americans are much more inclined than older Americans to support a proposal that would allow people to put a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts that would be invested in private stocks and bonds." Yes, the future may well be ours! (thanks to andrewsullivan.com for the original link)

Sunday's consecration of openly gay Episcopalian Bishop V. Gene Robinson, despite the vehement opposition of "traditionalists," is a milestone, and cheers to Bishop Robinson for refusing pleas that he step aside for the sake of "unity" (i.e., so that supporters of anti-gay discrimination in both the U.S. church and the worldwide Anglican Communion shouldn't be so upset). Placating proponents of prejudice is the last thing any religious denomination ought to do, and shame on those who think "unity" is more important than righteousness. Would they have urged northern-state Baptists in the 1860s to accept slavery least the southern-state Baptists take offense and schism (which, of course, they did)?

The anti-gay American Anglican Council, a network of churches and church officials moving to break with the denomination over Bishop Robinson's consecration, issued a statement saying "heresy has been held up as holy" and that "blasphemy has been redefined as blessing." They added, "The arrogance of the leaders of the Diocese of New Hampshire and the Episcopal Church is nothing less than stunning."

No, it's the arrogance of this anti-gay council that is stunning, and their belief that blind obedience to tradition should take precedence over the expanding revelation of human dignity.

One of the AP stories noted,

"Though there have been gay bishops in the past, all were closeted when they were elevated to their posts. Robinson has been open about his 14-year relationship with his partner throughout the process in which he won election to the new post."

And this is precisely what has so upset the "traditionalists" -- that gay people should no longer be shamed and shunned and forced to lie and hide. What a dark and evil faith these folks adhere to. And how, well, unchristian.

More Recent Postings

10/26/03 - 11/01/03