IGF CultureWatch

Here's CNN's take on the sodomy law arguments presented before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. An excerpt:

States should not be able to single out one group and make their conduct illegal solely because the state dislikes that conduct, lawyer Paul Smith argued for the Texas men.

"There is a long history of the state making moral judgments," retorted Justice Antonin Scalia. "You can make it sound very puritanical," but the state may have good reasons, Scalia added.

"Almost all laws are based on disapproval of some people or conduct. That's why people regulate," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist added dryly.

Justice Stephen Breyer challenged Houston prosecutor Charles Rosenthal to justify why the state has any interest in peeping into the bedrooms of gay people.

I"m glad the article references the libertarian briefs against sodomy laws presented by the Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice. It also quotes from the Republican Unity Coalition's brief against the laws, which was written by IGF contributing author Dale Carpenter.

With little doubt, Rehnquist and Scalia will vote to uphold sodomy laws, probably joined by Thomas. Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and Stevens will find these archaic statutes unconstitutional. Kennedy and O"Connor, the two moderate conservatives, remain the wildcards. The decision is expected at the end of June.
--Stephen H. Miller

Check out Dahlia Lithwick's report in Slate on last week's sodomy law hearing before the Supreme Court. Here's a chilling exchange, given that the court's role is to protect fundamental liberties:

[Attorney Paul Smith, representing the gay couple convicted under Texas law] explains that the anti-sodomy laws have pernicious secondary effects (keeping gay parents from gaining child visitation or custody or employment, for instance) and Rehnquist wonders whether, if these laws are stuck down, states can have laws "preferring non-homosexuals to homosexuals as kindergarten teachers." Smith replies that there would need to be some showing that gay kindergarten teachers produce harm to children. Scalia offers one: "Only that children might be induced to follow the path to homosexuality."

Scary, indeed.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Lawrence v. Texas, regarding the constitutionality of state laws that criminalize same-sex sex and thus provide a rationale for denying gay citizens equal treatment by the state in numerous areas. I'll have more to say after I hear how the case was presented and how the Justices appeared to respond. For now, take a look at an interesting letter in our Mail Bag on whether or not Clarence Thomas's arguably libertarian leanings may come into play, and if not, why not.

On the other topic referenced above, I haven't had much to say about the war because I don't view it as a gay issue. But clearly, there are some pertinent angles, including the spectacle of some gay activists trying to show who can denounce American foreign policy most vehemently. But I don't want to forget the plight of our gay and lesbian soldiers, and so I offer this, from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which reports:

According to Pentagon statistics, during fiscal year 2002 the armed services reported 906 "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" discharges, down from 1,273 in 2001 and the fewest discharges since 1996. --

During any time of war or conflict, gay discharges have dropped. Gay discharges decreased during the Korean War, the Viet Nam conflict, the Persian Gulf War, and now again during Operation Enduring Freedom.

Which certainly begs the question of why the whole "lie and hide" charade isn't put to rest so that gay and lesbian service members can do the job their country needs them to do.
--Stephen H. Miller

IGF contributing author John Corvino is hitting the lecture circuit on the topic "What's Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?" Here's his upcoming schedule:

April 7 - Temple University, Philadelphia

April 8 - Penn State University

April 10 - Southwest Texas State University

April 11 - Southern Methodist University

April 17 - Muskegon Community College

For further information, contact him at j.corvino@wayne.edu.

By the way, aside from his heavy-hitting pieces on homosexuality and morality (noted top right on the IGF homepage), you can read Corvino's take on The Advocate's fall into irrelevancy, as evinced by that gay and lesbian newsmagazine's recent cover story innuendo about Supreme Court Justice David Souter. I especially liked this aside:

Are you surprised, by the way, that a gay-friendly justice [Souter] is a Bush Sr. appointee? Stranger things have happened. Consider that the late Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the magnificent dissent in Bowers, was appointed by Nixon, and that Justice Stevens, arguably the most liberal current member of the court, was appointed by Ford. By contrast, the author of the extremely homophobic majority opinion in Bowers, the late Justice White, was a Kennedy appointee.

Which just shows how wrongheaded all the partisan pig-headedness over court appointments can turn out to be.

A Chance to Get It Right.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments this week on the constitutional permissibility of state laws that criminalize the way gay and lesbian couples make love, the indomitable Andrew Sullivan weighs in with a piece in the New Republic (available online at andrewsullivan.com). Sullivan reminds us just how heinous a ruling the high court came down with some 16 years ago when it last visited the issue, in the Bowers v. Hardwick case. Here he reflects on the views of then-Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Lewis Powell:

Burger dismissed any notion of homosexual orientation as a part of human nature and derided any comparison to private heterosexual conduct as absurd. "Are those with an 'orientation' toward rape to be let off merely because they allege that the act of rape is 'irresistible' to them?" Burger wrote in a letter to Justice Lewis Powell during the Hardwick deliberations. ...

When Professor Laurence Tribe, representing the plaintiffs, talked of the sanctity of a person's home being invaded by cops policing homosexual activity, Powell was offended. "I must say that when Professor Tribe refers to the 'sanctity of the home,' I find his argument repellent," Powell spoke into his Dictaphone as the case was proceeding.

As you wait for the Supreme decision, which isn't expected before late spring or summer, you can peruse some of the amicus briefs this go-round in the box located on the IGF homepage.

Gender-blind Bind.

The American Civil Liberties Union is opposing a Wisconsin bill that would allow health clubs to offer single-sex exercise activities or memberships. According to a roundup in the Washington Post (click and scroll down), the ACLU contends the measure would be "a severe setback to the civil rights movement." Apparently, exercising on a same-sex basis in equivalent to posting a sign that says no Jews or blacks welcome.

Of course, unlike racial or religious discrimination, there is a rational reason why some men and women might want to self-segregate when doing knee bends and thigh extensions, regardless of any argument on behalf of the right of association, which the ACLU apparently no longer feels merits protection. And yes, I realize these are commercial establishments. But unlike going out to eat at a restaurant or to shop at a store, you join a gym pretty much as you would a private club, and so the right of association ought to be respected.

Recent Postings

03/16/03 - 03/22/03

It was nice to see the New York Times, which rarely recognizes libertarians as distinct from both conservatives and liberals, run Linda Greenhouse's article "Libertarians Join Liberals in Opposing Sodomy Law." Greenhouse observes:

Although libertarian-sounding arguments were presented to the court as part of the overall debate over the right to privacy in the Bowers v. Hardwick case [when the Court last upheld sodomy laws], they were not the solitary focus of any of the presentations then. The Institute for Justice had not yet been established, and the Cato Institute, which dates to 1977, had not begun to file legal briefs. Whether the arguments will attract a conservative libertarian-leaning justice like Clarence Thomas, who was not on the court in 1986, remains to be seen.

Greenhouse also makes clear how opposition to gay marriage is driving conservatives to support government intrusion into the privacy of gay people's bedrooms.

This is another local story, but I think it represents something much larger. In a recent election for the Arlington, Virginia County Board, the Virginia Partisans Gay & Lesbian Democratic Club condemned GOP board candidate Mike Clancy, who was endorsed by the local Log Cabin Republicans, for inviting Virginia's Attorney General, Jerry Kilgore, to a fundraising event. As they wrote in their press release, "Partisans Call on Mike Clancy to Cancel Fundraising Event Featuring Anti-Gay Attorney General Jerry Kilgore":

Partisans President Josh Israel explained "This is tremendously disappointing and disturbing. While Mike Clancy talks about inclusion, it is clear that he is standing with opponents of equal rights. Attorney General Kilgore toes the line of the Family Foundation, the leading anti-gay group in the Virginia. They oppose non-discrimination, they do not believe in the Separation of Church and State, and they, like Mr. Clancy, vehemently oppose reproductive rights for Virginia's women.

We sincerely hope that inviting this extremist to headline his fundraiser was an oversight on Mr. Clancy's part. If he doesn't share the views of Attorney General Kilgore, Pat Robertson, and the Family Foundation, we call on him to cancel it immediately."

The release was prominently featured in the issue of the Washington Blade newspaper distributed just before the election, which Clancy lost.

But get this: at the Clancy fundraiser, Kilgore met with Log Cabin representatives and stated, for the first time, that his office does not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. You might think that such a statement doesn't amount to much, but it led the state's rightwing Family Policy Network to issue their own critical press release titled "VA Attorney General Kilgore Woos Homosexuals" (it's not online yet, but see the similarly themed "Republican Party of VA Assists Radical Homosexual Activists"). According to the Family Policy Network:

Despite tremendous success in courting pro-family voters over the years, the Virginia Republican Party continues to flirt with activist homosexuals in an attempt to expand its political base. The most recent event wherein an otherwise conservative Republican leader sought to appease homosexual activists involves state Attorney General Jerry Kiglore. --

Six leaders of the so-called "Log Cabin" homosexuals met with Kilgore recently in what they called their first "official" meeting with the state's top Republican. The homosexual activists boast that Kilgore promised them "he does not believe in discrimination against anyone and said that his office does not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation."

(For Log Cabin's take on the Kilgore meeting, see "Log Cabin Meets with Kilgore: First official contact with AG")

Of course, if the Democratic critics had their way, board candidate Clancy wouldn't have invited Attorney General Kilgore to his fundraiser, and Kilgore wouldn't have met with the Log Cabin representatives, and the religious right wouldn't have been so unhappy about the outcome. But, once again, meaningful dialog between gays and conservatives is the last thing in the world that many "progressives" want to see happen.
--Stephen H. Miller

Some timely points are made by student William Goodwin in this March 13 column for the University of Southern California's Daily Trojan newspaper, "Palestine's oppression of gays should not be ignored."

The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, known more colloquially as "Virginia Tech," has unleashed a storm of controversy over recent actions by its governing board. As the Washington Post reported, Virginia Tech's board voted to (1) end race-based preferences (i.e., affirmative action) in admissions, hiring, and financial aid, (2) eliminate a policy of barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, and (3) bar advocates of extreme political views (that is, who espoused breaking laws) from speaking on campus, in the wake of a controversial talk by a militant "Earth First" activist.

Not surprisingly, most liberal groups have condemned the board's actions -- although if a conservative speaker had triggered the ban on espousing extreme views, I somehow doubt these groups would have found that to be unwarranted.

Some of us, however, happen to oppose both discrimination based on sexual orientation and all discrimination based on race, including the "reverse" discrimination of race-based preferences. Thus, we break with both the pro-preference liberals and the anti-gay right in arguing, consistently, that individual merit or need, and not group membership, should be what matters.

As kind of an odd twist that shows how things aren't always so black and white, or straightforward, or (gee it's getting hard to find a nondiscriminatory metaphor), Virginia Tech's board, at the same time it eliminated its anti-discrimination policy for gays, announced the hiring of a lesbian professor, Dr. Shelli Fowler, to fill a one-year position at the university. This comes less than a year after the board declined to approve Dr. Fowler's contract for a permanent faculty position. The case is a bit convoluted, since Dr. Fowler's original job offer was tied to the hiring of her partner, Dr. Karen DePauw, as a graduate dean. This then triggered anonymous anti-gay e-mails to board members, leading to the revoking of Dr. Fowler's job offer -- whew.

Virginia's statewide gay lobby, Equality Virginia, put out a press release that praised the hiring of Dr. Fowler but criticized the ending of Virginia Tech's affirmative action program. At least as posted on the group's website as I write this, there is -- remarkably -- only criticism of Virginia Tech's ending of its affirmative action program, and no mention of its eliminating the anti-discrimation policy based on sexual orientation!

Savaged Again.

While a number of people have disagreed with my criticism of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's strenuously lobbying advertisers to keep off MSNBC's "Savage Nation" talk show, hosted by controversial conservative Michael Savage, I was glad (so to speak) to see that the Washington Blade's Chris Crain penned an editorial that also raised questions about GLAAD's action. He writes:

It's one thing to pressure a network to keep dangerous "expert" misinformation off the air, it's quite another to use "political correctness" to silence a loud-mouthed foe. -- The best response to simple-minded bigotry of the type spouted by the "idiot Savage" is more speech, not less.

Some, of course, contend that GLAAD is simply informing advertisers about Savage's past comments so that they can choose not to advertise. Grow up! The threat to label advertisers as "anti-gay," or even to organize "the GLBT community" to boycott their products, is behind the ad cancellations. If you want to defend intimidating advertisers, fine, but let's be honest about what's happening here.

Conservatives Coming to Terms.

Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg writes in his syndicated column about his meeting with leaders of the Human Rights Campaign, the large Washington-based lesbigay lobby. Says Goldberg:

For many conservatives, there's a no-surrender attitude toward anything remotely gay. Some religious conservatives write off gays as abominations with the same gusto that some gays invoke bigotry. But even among more secular conservatives, the right has its own version of "don't ask, don't tell." Conservatives don't see and don't hear. "

[C]onservatives rightly criticize male promiscuity." But at the same time, we tell homosexuals that the only universal institution successful at civilizing men in this regard -- marriage -- is forever closed to them. Talk about a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't scenario. This is why I favor some form of civil union for same-sex couples".

This, I"d argue, is an example of how -- slowly -- progress gets made through dialog with conservatives.
--Stephen H. Miller

Recent Postings

03/09/03 - 03/15/03

IGF's own Jonathan Rauch is featured in yet another newspaper story from the heartland about the Pink Pistols, local gay gun groups that Jonathan has championed. This time up, it's a March 8 report in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which tells us:

"Despite the argument that gun ownership will deter gay bashing, some gay shooters said it can be hard to be out of the closet as a gun owner in a gay community where the most vocal voices tend to be liberal and ambivalence toward guns may be higher than in society as a whole. -- At a recent meeting of the group, other gay shooters agreed that guns can be the self-defense measure that dare not speak its name.

No surprise here, since no one ever said going against the grain was easy. Significantly, however, the story notes:

For the gun community, a nontraditional group like Pink Pistols can break down the stigma of firearm advocates as right-wing, angry, white males dressed in camouflage fatigues...

Translation: Gay support is a positive for gun-owners' image. Talk about coalitions!

Ad Attack.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is continuing its efforts to intimidate advertisers into dropping their spots on CNBC's new "Savage Nation" talkshow, hosted by bombastic radio personality Michael Savage, as recounted in this press statement. Meanwhile, writing in the New York Post, Adam Buckman comments:

Savage"didn't make any obscene gestures, jump up and down, foam at the mouth, or expel hot steam from his ears. I expected to see all of that and more, judging from the hysteria. "

I haven't caught it, but the show airs on Saturdays from 5-6pm. Catch it if you want to make up your own mind, while you can.

Holocaust Denial.

Believe it or not, anti-gay Republicans can sometimes be so ludicrous that they embarrass at least some of their fellow GOPers, as described in this look at Minnesota state Rep. Aaron Linder, from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Linder triggered a storm of controversy when, among other things, he expressed the view that gays were not victims of the Nazis, and instead were themselves Nazis:

"I'm not convinced that they were persecuted," [Linder] said, suggesting that the main gay participants in the Holocaust were Nazi concentration camp guards. That contention, he added, is laid out in a book called "The Pink Swastika," which he hasn't read but is trying to lay his hands on.

Responded GOP Governor Tim Pawlenty, "I oppose any efforts to rewrite history to exclude homosexuals or any other minority group that suffered as victims of the Holocaust."
--Stephen H. Miller

A friendly IGF colleague e-mailed to say I"m wrong and GLAAD's right this time about Mike Savage (see my March 5 posting), and that after reading GLAAD's indictment he'd happily boycott anybody who advertised on the show, too.

I responded that even if you don't buy Savage's claim that he's not anti-gay but a libertarian on sexual matters and his assertion that GLAAD distorted his comments (despite how ugly the quotes appear to be), I'd still argue that what GLAAD's doing isn't right. If you consider Savage an outrageous homophobe, then argue against him, expose him, convince the public to turn away from him and bring his ratings down. But threatening his sponsors is a cheap shot, a tactic we all condemned when it was used by the religious right against gay-positive TV shows.

By the way, I failed to convince my colleague but another associate says she came across an ironic quote on a conservative website, about Martin Sheen complaining that anti-war actors are being "blacklisted" while there's a campaign on to get Savage off the air.

A Right to Censor?

Here's a scary take from New Zealand's Dominion Post on where clamping down on the expression of anti-gay views could take us. A parliamentary committee wants censorship laws changed so evangelical Christian videos critical of homosexuality can be banned. A New Zealand Court of Appeals decision had upheld the right the Christian group, Living Word, to distribute the American-made videos, citing the freedom of expression clause in New Zealand's Bill of Rights Act.

A Labour party committee chairwoman called the court's decision "unacceptable" because it had the effect of allowing "hate speech" to be expressed. But Stephen Franks, a spokesmen for the libertarian group Act NZ, labels the committee's report an attack on free speech. As the Dominion Post reported:

"A vibrant free society needs robust debate on every issue," Mr Franks said. "Censorship is justified when it is about putting age ratings on films or stopping child pornography but not when it tries to close down debate on issues that people feel strongly about."

The NZ government has no fixed opinion on the committee recommendation, said a spokesmen, who added (according to a paraphrase by the Dominion Post) that he was "conscious of the need to balance censorship with the right of free speech," as if they were both positive social values!

When you snuff out your opponent's rights, those same rights won't be there when you happen to need them.

Gays are Good for the Heartland.

As reported earlier this month in the Omaha World-Herald, James Clifton of the Gallup Corp. shared this advice on the use and misuse of polls:

"A good leader will change peoples' minds" and explain their reasons when they disagree with the public, he said, "but you can't do that when you don't know what people are thinking." He cited the state's 2000 ban on gay marriage as a way the state hurt its economic prospects and "made ourselves a joke."

"A leader's responsibility is to educate," said Clifton. "I don't believe that our leadership thought that (banning gay marriage) was a good idea." Large corporations consider issues of employee quality-of-life -- such as whether gay employees will feel comfortable -- when deciding where to expand their operations, he said.

As an aside, I don't agree with much that Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, stands for, but his willingness to vigorously defend same-sex civil unions is certainly praiseworthy. Getting at least some conservatives to join in supporting gay "family values" will have an even greater impact on the debate.

Proud To Be Contrary.

Florence King, a long-time columnist at Bill Buckley's conservative National Review, wrote in a piece for her hometown newspaper, the Fredericksburg (Virginia) Free Lance-Star, that "Being both a lesbian and a conservative is supposed to be impossible, but even my different drummer hears a different drummer." For example:

I can't, for the life of me, understand why gay people should want to marry and raise children unless, under their bravado, they are tractable conformists who have succumbed to conservatism's incessant mantra of "family values." -- The same-sex marriage and adoption movement is putting a strain on my lesbianism and providing me with a whole new set of cringes as I witness the ordinariness and grubbiness overtaking today's lesbians as they try to "mainstream" what used to be a good old-fashioned perversion.

It's interesting that King, who has a large conservative following, strikes a number of chords in this piece reminiscent of leftwing criticism of gay assimilation into the mainstream. I don't agree with the anti-assimilationists, but hey, I'd never try to stop them from expounding their views.
--Stephen H. Miller

Recent Postings

02/04/03 - 02/05/03

02/23/03 - 03/01/03

02/16/03 - 02/22/03