IGF CultureWatch

A spokeswoman for Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) tells the media that the senator "has no problem with gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender individuals." So not only does he assure us that his political positions (such as supporting sodomy laws) have nothing to do with actual people, he uses totally PC language to boot. Call it a victory for all those who've devoted their time and energy to making sure everyone - bigots included - gets their "inclusive" nomenclature correct.

More Hysteria on the Right.

The religious conservatives at the Family Research Council are spending the week exposing the Bush administration's ties to the homosexual agenda. Today's online installment - "Homosexual Lobby: Follow the Money" (which, apparently, leads to the Republican National Committee). The far right's paranoia mirrors the far left's dementia.
--Stephen H. Miller

Pennsylvania's GOP Senator Rick Santorum said some really stupid and nasty things about gay people in an interview with the AP, voicing support for sodomy laws and comparing homosexuality with polygamy, adultery, and incest. In response, gay groups across the spectrum denounced Santorum's remarks. The Log Cabin Republicans issued a press release (not yet online) that read, in part:

"There is nothing conservative about allowing law enforcement officials to enter the home of any American and arrest them for simply being gay". Mainstream America is embracing tolerance and inclusion. I am appalled that a member of the United States Senate leadership would advocate dividing Americans with ugly hate filled rhetoric," said Log Cabin Republican executive director Patrick Guerriero.

The Human Rights Campaign, the large gay liberal lobby, is much better at posting their press releases online. Theirs read in part:

"Sen. Santorum's remarks are deeply hurtful and play on deep-seated fears that fly in the face of scientific evidence, common sense, and basic decency. Clearly, there is no compassion in his conservatism," said HRC Political Director Winnie Stachelberg. "Discriminatory remarks like this fuel prejudice that can lead to violence and other harms against the gay community."

Regarding the latter, I prefer avoiding the all-too-common activist response of denoucing language as "deeply hurtful," along with assertions that "hurtful" language will lead to violence - the underlying premise for speech codes. What Santorum said should be strongly criticized because he's a senator who wants to deny gay people our fundamental civil liberties, not because he hurt our feelings.

The Fight to Serve.

From a report by San Francisco's KGO-TV:

On the frontlines of the war with Iraq there is something new among the rank and file - gays and lesbians fighting alongside Americans. Thirteen of the U.S.'s partners in Operation Enduring Freedom allow homosexuals to serve in the military. Still, the U.S. has a policy that prohibits soldiers from being openly gay. But that's not keeping them from serving "

And this Washington Post editorial reminds us of just how counter-productive the gay ban continues to be, as in the surreal, ongoing purge from the military of gay Arabic-speaking linguists.
--Stephen H. Miller

Recent Postings

04/13/03 - 04/19/03

"Queering the Schools" is the title of an article in the Spring 2003 issue of the Manhattan Institute's "City Journal," by Marjorie King. The Manhattan Institute is a conservative policy institute, but they're not rightwing nuts (they fed many reformist ideas to former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani), so it was dismaying to see an article with the tag line: "Gay activist groups, with teachers' union applause, are importing a disturbing agenda into the nation's public schools." The article has already drawn favorable comment from National Review online.

King blasts academic "queer theory" and Michael Warner, the Rutgers prof who says outrageous things about using "queer" sexuality to undermine the social order. But she then attacks high school gay-straight alliances as a plot to spread queer theory to susceptible teens. The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN) is portrayed as part of this conspiracy, as King writes:

Every course in every public school should focus on LGBT issues, GLSEN believes. A workshop at GLSEN's annual conference in Chicago in 2000 complained that "most LGBT curricula are in English, history and health" and sought ways of introducing its agenda into math and science classes, as well. (As an example of how to queer geometry, GLSEN recommends using gay symbols such as the pink triangle to study shapes.)

For the record, I think groups like GLSEN do good and necessary work for the most part, and I strongly support gay-straight alliances that offer refuge to gay students while promoting gay inclusion. I also favor requiring public schools to take reasonable steps to fight gay-bashing, as an appellate court recently upheld.

But let's admit that well-intentioned efforts can, and sometimes do, cross the line into heavy handedness, telling students what to think and feel, not just how to behave civilly. Such tactics are a gift to anti-gay activists, who then brand all our efforts as part of an extremist scheme -- costing us credibility and making it harder to accomplish truly worthy goals, such as defending the rights of students to organize gay-straight alliances. Note: This does not mean that conservative attacks, such as the "City Journal" diatribe, aren't deplorable (author King, while focusing on activist excesses, shows she has no sense whatsoever how miserable life for a gay or lesbian high school student can be).
--Stephen H. Miller

The aptly named Stephen Funk is a gay Marine Corps reservist who, in consort with leftwing anti-war activists, held a press conference at the beginning of April to announce he was seeking conscientious objector status. Funk said he'd discovered "the military coerces people into killing" and "I believe that as a gay man"I have a great deal of experience with hatred and oppression."

Since being reported by the AP and other media, Funk's story has been used by some rightwing commentators to show that gays don't belong in the military. That logic, of course, is specious; one self-promoter -- who wanted military benefits as long as he wasn't required to keep his end of the contract and actually take up arms -- proves nothing about gay servicemembers in general. But it does show how activists on the left will use gays to advance their own political agenda, even when it undermines the ongoing fight for gay equality (such as the ability to serve one's country in the military, regardless of sexual orientation).

Reaching Out.

Speaking of the anti-gay right, several of the usual suspects are boiling mad that Marc Racicot, the chairman of Republican National Committee, addressed a meeting of the Human Rights Campaign, the Washington Post reports. Said Robert Knight of the anti-gay Culture and Family Institute:

"When you meet with a group that holds values that are antithetical to those of your base, you're sending the signal that your base is being taken for granted or is not respected -- that's what Mr. Racicot has done here. It would be like Al Gore meeting with the John Birch Society."

Well, they better get used to it - the GOP is in earnest about reaching out to ethnic minorities and gays, having realized (finally) that its base needs to expand if the party is to grow and thrive. In particular, Hispanics and (to a lesser extent) gays are seen as constituencies that could be attracted to the GOP's key themes of lower taxes and less regulation. Whether the anti-gay conservatives will stage an protracted fight over this remains to be seen.

Welcome to the 21st Century, Mr. Oliveri.

I like this local story from Hollywood, Florida about a city commissioner who failed to realize that gratuitous anti-gay remarks will now land you in hot water, politically speaking. Being forced to apologize by "outraged gay residents" -- and voters -- over his there-goes-the-neighborhood remarks linking gays and porn shops was proper comeuppance, and a sign of how those who fail to recognize the changed political landscape will find themselves blindsided.
--Stephen H. Miller

Recent Postings

04/06/03 - 04/12/03

In a timely column, IGF's Paul Varnell explains why we should "Bring Back Campus ROTC" despite the continuing opposition of many gay activists. He writes:

The idea of penalizing the military for its anti-gay policies seemed like a good idea at the time". But it didn't work. The military got along fine without ROTC cadets from liberal college campuses, the "full weight of academic moral disapproval" had as much effect as a BB gun against a tank-and the military has shown no sign of wanting to change its policy. It is time to recognize this and try a different approach.

But I won't hold my breath waiting for our cadres of on-autopilot campus activists to revisit any of their entrenched strategies and ideas.

Challenging Campus Orthodoxy.

On the other hand, Yale Daily News columnist James Kirchick shows there are at least some students willing to speak out against the collective mindset, in a column titled "Where Do Gays Belong on the Political Spectrum? Please Don't Say the Left.

Gay Marriage Gets Bay State Support.

The struggle for legal gay marriage throughout the U.S. will take at least another genereration, but the winds of change are being felt. The Boston Globe reports that 50% of Massachusetts residents now support gay marriage. When asked about legalizing gay and lesbian civil unions, 58% backed the idea. OK, this is maybe the most liberal state in the union except for Vermont, but it's still good news.

Ignoring the Pope.

The Vatican's latest anti-gay tantrum, describing homosexuality as a condition "without any social value" and claiming that people with "profoundly disordered minds" are responsible for legalizing same-sex marriages, got virtually no play in the media. The ongoing coverup of pedophilia scandals and the Pope's vocal opposition to liberating the people of Iraq have strained the church's standing among political conservatives and weakened Rome's ability to present itself as a moral authority while promoting an agenda of benighted bigotry.
--Stephen H. Miller

As British troops take control of Basra, Andrew Sullivan asks sardonically:

How did [the British] manage not to collapse as a military force? After all, they allow openly gay soldiers in their units, thus undermining unit cohesion, destroying morale, wrecking troops' privacy and making it impossible to fight. A miracle against all the odds, I suppose.

No doubt.

A Homophobic Spotlight.

This Denver Post column is about how an hourly employee at Kaiser Permanente was told he couldn't appear in a local stage production of the gay-themed holocaust drama "Bent" on his own time. Kaiser Permanente isn't going to like the bad publicity, and I'd wager the woman who made the decree is soon set straight (so to speak). Corporate foolishness like this can seldom survive press scrutiny and public exposure in a market economy.
--Stephen H. Miller

Jay Leno's joking about a male-to-female transsexual has the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) in high dudgeon, planetout.com reports. The transsexual activists criticized the Tonight Show host for "prime time dehumanizing of transsexuals," adding that "Destroying the positive impact our community makes, simply for the purpose of gratuitous laughter, serves to objectify transgender people and crush their hope."

Leno's offense was in reference to a male-to-female transsexual recently honored as Woman of the Year in San Francisco. Leno joked that the California Assembly "awarded a man who had a sex change as its Woman of the Year. When he accepted the award, he said there was a part of him that didn't want to accept it, but that's gone now."

Now, I admit Leno should have said "she" rather than "he." But were Leno's remarks really "dehumanizing"? Being ribbed by Leno is arguably a sign of your identity group's acceptance into pop culture, that you're no longer unmentionable. Moreover, the facts of what happens during a sex change operation are always going to make a lot of people queasy; jokes such as Leno's are a way of acknowledging this with humor.

But even if you think the joke offensive, the tone of the activists' protest statement is overwrought and counterproductive. For instance, NTAC goes on to claim:

"Violence like the type [murdered California transsexual Gwen Araujo] experienced is the end effect of the sort of dehumanizing treatment of transgender people that NBC has displayed with their choice of programming and Jay Leno's choice of seemingly harmless humor."

Exaggerated hyperbole of the type NTAC displays is what causes people to dismiss activists as ideological dogmatic grievance collectors, rather than people whom it might be worthwhile to talk with.

Oh, and NTAC also wants conservative commentator Michael Savage's MSNBC show taken off the air, in case he should say something offensive about transsexuals on his show (which, to date, has not mentioned gays or transsexuals).

Book Review: Bean Ball

Billy Bean, the former major league baseball player who came out of the closet a few years ago, now tells his story in Going the Other Way, just published by Marlowe. He says he's much happier living quietly in Miami with his partner than he ever was playing the game he loved while staying in the closet. Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda used to call him "Billy Bean, Billy Bean, the boy of every girl's dream." And judging by the cover picture, the dream of a few boys as well. But he also describes Lasorda's homophobic jokes in the locker room, even while Tommy's own son was dying of AIDS.

The emotional high point of the book is the day that his first lover, Sam, collapsed in their San Diego home. Although Sam had AIDS, he had not seemed to be at such risk. Billy raced him to the hospital and insisted that "I AM his family." But Sam died about 6 a.m. After which Billy went home and called his mother--who thought Sam was just a friend. Mom came over to console him, still unaware of the depth of his loss, and urged him to pull himself together and get down to the 11 a.m. City Hall celebration for the team. After the event, he drove a teammate up to Anaheim for that night's game, ran out of gas on the way, got to the game late, got a hit, and then got sent down to the minors--about 28 hours after he first found Sam in distress, and all without having a single friend or family member who knew what he had lost.

There's not much politics in the book, and gays may think it has too much baseball and too little sex. Let's just hope that baseball fans think it has just the right amount of baseball and not too much gay sex. If so, they'll get a good sense of what it's like for an all-American boy who loves baseball to struggle with living in the closet. And we can all be glad that, in the end, he seems to be living happily ever after.

As gossipy news stories speculate about the sexual orientation of current and retired ballplayers, and the Broadway hit Take Me Out dramatizes the topic, Bean provides the inside track on how the sports scene is, and isn't, changing.

Corvino's Rainbow Tour

Reminder: IGF contributing author John Corvino's national lecture tour is underway. His IGF bio page provides his schedule.
--Stephen H. Miller

Recent Postings

03/30/03 - 04/05/03

On April 1, the Senate confirmed former Colorado solicitor general Timothy Tymkovich for the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Unfortunately, they weren't April fooling. As I wrote back on Feb. 19 and Feb. 22, former Colorado solicitor general Tymkovich defended that state's 1992 Amendment Two, banning legal protections based on sexual orientation. He also was harshly critical of the Supreme Court's ruling in Romer vs. Evans that Amendment Two violated the constitution's equal protections guarantees, and that gay citizens can not be singled out as a class for special discrimination by the state based solely on popular prejudice. In other words, there must be a convincingly rational basis when the state treats gays differently from heterosexuals.

Tymkovich wrote that Romer illustrated "judicial histrionics," adding that it was "merely another example of ad hoc, activist jurisprudence without constitutional mooring." His nomination was opposed by both the Log Cabin Republicans and the Human Rights Campaign.

So did Democrats launch a filibuster like the one that's kept Miguel Estrada, a judicial nominee with no anti-gay record, from becoming an appellate judge? Hardly. The Senate confirmed Tymkovich 58-41.

Covering the Culture Wars.

A new book, "Irreconcilable Differences? Intellectual Stalemate in the Gay Rights Debate," by Thomas C. Caramagno provides much food for thought as it examines the rhetoric used on both sides in gay rights battles over the years. Caramagno, an academic at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, writes:

What has happened to the "debate" in "the gay rights debate"? Why does each side resort to moral condemnations and demonizing stereotypes instead of extended, useful dialog?"Oversimplifying each side's agenda and membership obscures important ideological distinctions within the "gay communitiy" and anti-gay rights groups.

Caramagno delves into the great divide with a good deal of thoroughness and has produced a valuable resource, although at $64.95 it's rather pricey. Also, I wish he hadn't fallen into the trendy trap, born in academia, of referring to "LGBTs" as if this designated an actual class of being.

Update:The author e-mailed to say there is a paperback version for $24.95.
--Stephen H. Miller

While some anti-gay social conservatives are trying to accommodate to a likely Supreme Court ruling against same-sex sodomy laws, others are digging in their heels. In the former camp, William F. Buckley sees the handwriting on the wall and, in his March 28 column titled "No Gay Things Allowed?" opines that:

It would be nice if Texas simply repealed the law [against homosexual conduct], and let Lambda's clients go back to their practices undisturbed.

It ain't gonna happen, but it's nice to see Buckley admit that same-sex sodomy laws should go, even if his motive is fear that a Supreme Court ruling premised on equal protection grounds will have a positive impact on extending gay equality greater than simply making these archaic statutes vanish.

On the other hand, Christian conservative Cal Thomas is adamant that sodomy laws are necessary to preserve a moral universe. He writes in his March 28 column "Law, Liberty and License":

Once sodomy is made legal, what's next? -- Pedophiles who wish to have sex with children assert they should not be prohibited from doing so as long as the child "consents." There is a movement within psychiatry to have pedophilia removed from the shrinking list of "deviant" behaviors, as was done with homosexual practice. What is to prohibit them from doing so if pedophiles testify their fulfillment is being denied, and they feel discriminated against for practicing what, to them, is normal?

This sort of hysterical hyperbole shows the desperation of the religious right. Thomas is especially upset with Republicans who favor a gay-inclusive party, and complains that:

Former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal on March 26 in which he argued in favor of the "gay rights" position opposing the Texas law. Simpson said "the proper Republican vision of equality" is "live and let live." Simpson thinks that laws against homosexual practice "are contrary to American values protecting personal liberty..." What Simpson argues for is not liberty but license.

Thomas is a regular panelist on CNN's "Reliable Sources" talkfest. Funny, isn't it, that GLAAD isn't trying to get Thomas kicked off the air (not that I'd favor that), while conducting an ongoing national campaign to intimidate the sponsors of MSNBC's weekly talkshow hosted by Michael Savage, who may be an opponent of gay activists and gay rights legislation, but describes himself as a libertarian on matters of sexual morality?

Family Values.

An op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post reveals how sodomy laws impact gay lives. In "About Fairness and My Family" Linda Kaufman writes:

We decided to expand our family four years ago. My partner, Liane, and I knew we could provide a loving home for another child in need. And my son particularly wanted a brother. Then we ran into a 211-year-old law prohibiting private sexual intimacy between consenting adults in the commonwealth of Virginia -- a law that is used mainly against lesbians and gay men.

Reading her story, you realize just how fundamentally immoral are social conservatives who would argue in favor of retaining these anti-gay statutes.
--Stephen H. Miller

Recent Postings

03/23/03 - 03/29/03

Both the liberal New York Times
and the conservative Christian Focus on the Family
predict the Supreme Court will strike down same-sex sodomy laws, but not statutes that apply to both same-sex and opposite-sex sodomy. Four states, including Texas, specify that only same-sex couples are forbidden to engage in these acts while heterosexuals are free to do so. Nine other states forbid "deviant" sexual practices whether engaged in by straight or gay couples.

While it would be best if all bedroom laws regarding private, adult consensual sex were found constitutionally impermissible, I'm not in the camp that sees striking down only the same-sex laws as a setback. Extending the principle that, under the constitution's equal protection guarantees, gays can't be singled out for special discrimination without a rational, or perhaps even a compelling, reason to do so would take us further along the road toward true equality under the law. It would even provide justification for overturning the remaining sodomy statutes state by state if it could be shown that, in practice, they are only used against gays. So while conservatives would claim getting rid of the laws in just four states as a partial victory, it could lay the groundwork for the ultimate defeat of all laws that relegate gays to the status of second-class citizens.

Why I Support School Choice.

A chilling case from Arkansas on what can happen when public school teachers and administrators are bigots. After 14-year old Thomas McLaughlin of Jacksonville, Arkansas was overheard telling a fellow student he was gay, administrators called his mother. An assistant principal then made him read aloud a Bible passage condemning homosexuality. Here are the local reports from the Arkansas Times and the North Pulaski Leader (yes, it's also all over the gay press, and in the New York Times).

A personal aside: As a kid in Ohio in the early sixties, a teacher once demanded that I eat bread during Passover before letting me leave the lunchroom, while all the other teachers -- including my own -- sat at the teacher's lunch table, averting their eyes to this scene. So I know a little something about public school bigotry.

Good for Me, But Not for Thee.

Norah Vincent, a past IGF contributing author, weighs in on why the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is wrong to try to silence TV host Michael Savage. The title of her L.A. Times column:
'Rights Just for Us': The Gay Left's Self-Serving Agenda. She writes:

GLAAD's Web site is a classic display of the gay left's endemic schizophrenia and myopic selfishness. At the top of the page, the group urges constituents to agitate... on behalf of gay rights to privacy. Immediately below, it applauds its own devious attempt to deny Savage his right to free speech.

Hardcore!

Fantasy Island?

The Advocate has an article about travel to Cuba
which, strangely enough, encourages readers to visit the country "before it becomes like every other tourist destination" (i.e., before it's freed from Castro's tyranny).