IGF CultureWatch

The Other "Religious Right". As of 6 p.m. Monday, the popular gay news site planetout.com had not listed the stabbing on Sunday of openly gay Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe by a religiously motivated Muslim under either "Today's Headlines" or "Hot Stories". But planetout did have room to regurgitate the fact that GLBT groups are "outraged" at Florida Gov. Jeb Bush over his off the cuff remarks this weekend regarding two women charged with fraud in connection with a foster child's disappearance ("Bet you don't get that in Pensacola," Jeb kidded a group of upstate legislators about the women, one of whom reportedly told co-workers to "Tell my 'wife' I've been arrested.").

I suspect planetout.com will get around to the stabbing, as will the typically "outraged" GLBT groups themselves, perhaps by the time you read this. After all, unlike gay but conservative Dutch political leader Pim Fortuyn, whose assassination by a leftwing animal rights activist earlier this year triggered no outrage whatsoever from GLBT movement groups, Delanoe is a socialist. Still, the delay may be evidence of how touchy and "controversial" it still is for some gay folks to deal with the fact of the virulently homophobic Muslim religious right.

Advocate.com, I should note for the sake of fairness, does lead with Paris mayor stabbed in antigay attack, although unlike some wire accounts the fact that the assailant was motivated by his devout Muslim beliefs is relegated to the final graph. Would they have done the same if Delanoe had been attached by a Christian religious rightist? Dream on.
--Stephen H. Miller

Arguments can be made on either side about the likely war with Iraq. However, it's regretful that the leadership of the Metropolitan Community Churches - the world's largest gay and lesbian Christian body - have issued a statement about Iraq that suggests American aggression is the true villain. Titled A Call for Peaceful Resolution to Conflict with Iraq,
the statement begins:

Today America and Britain stand poised to go to war against the nation of Iraq and its people. Over the past 12 years international policies toward the Iraqi government have vacillated between support for Iraq in its quest to suppress opposition forces to vilification of the Iraqi nation as the personification of evil.

We call upon all people of faith and people of goodwill everywhere, especially our sisters and brothers in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities who know first hand what it means to be vilified, labeled and violently attacked, and who also know how difficult it is to survive under such circumstances, to join with the friends and members of Metropolitan Community Churches to oppose any further acts of aggression against Iraq.

Well, excuuuse me. But even if the MCC elders don't believe Saddam Hussein's regime of mass murder and his attempts to stockpile weapons of mass destruction represent a threat to the world, do they really think it's the Iraqi people our government is vilifying so that they can be "violently attacked" in "further acts of aggression against Iraq"? I have seen nothing that seeks to degrade the long-suffering people of Iraq; it is clearly the totalitarian regime headed by Saddam Hussein that is being presented - with a good deal of hard evidence - as an ongoing threat. The goal is regime change, which would liberate the people of Iraq.

The left likes to claim that this will be a racist war because the Iraqi army is non-white (if Arabs are non-white, are Jews?). While MCC doesn't use that phrase, it lurks behind the charge that the war will be an attack against the Iraqi people, with a strained equivalence made to gay-bashing in the U.S. Give me a break.

MCC tells us the war will not "promote the equitable distribution of resources" and instead will "divert international attention and resources from more critical issues including world poverty, a rapidly deteriorating ecological destruction, and oppression of too many of the world's peoples." This is stale leftist cant, implying that the war wouldn't make the Iraqi people freer (and allow them to participate in the world's market economy, making them richer), but instead would lead to more oppression and poverty. "We must stand together unequivocally for peace," state the MCC elders. But there are times when passivity in the face of evil is not a righteous act.
--Stephen H. Miller

Oct. 3, 2002

More than two weeks after the error was first called to their attention, the Human Rights Campaign has finally corrected its online press release denouncing the nomination of Michael McConnell to the U.S. Court of Appeals. As I noted in my Sept. 19 posting In His Own Words?, HRC put quotes marks around a paraphrase of McConnell's remarks by a conservative group, making it seem as if the words are a direct quote from McConnell. HRC was immediately notified about their error, but waited more than two weeks to post a revision. "Mistakes made in this press release were corrected," readers are now told, with no further elaboration.

In the meantime, reliable Bush-antagonist Michelangelo Signorile picked up the non-quote quote and used it to attack McConnell's nomination in his New York Press column. That's why misquotes are so dangerous; if not corrected quickly, they take on a life of their own. Now you can expect the false quote to be used again and again by gay rights advocates critical of McConnell.

My original posting was not an endorsement of McConnell (who has been endorsed, however, by the Log Cabin Republicans, the gay GOPers), but primarily a criticism of the misuse of quotes by HRC - which I view as a very serious matter, journalistically speaking. I was also critical of HRC's failure to note that McConnell had a few pro-gay notches (such as supporting the rights of students to form an official Gay-Straight Alliance at a high school in conservative Salt Lake City), and to note that while McConnell was part of the Boys Scout's legal defense, that many people also support the right of associations to control their own membership and leadership without necessarily being bigots or homophobes.

Nevertheless, this week the Independent Gay Forum received a rather impassioned letter from Wayne Besen, HRC's Deputy Director of Communications.

Besen writes that:

"Miller is correct to point out that in a recent press release the Human Rights Campaign directly attributed to U.S. Court of Appeals nominee Michael McConnell a statement paraphrasing one of his speeches. As the author of this press release I apologize for this mistake. However, I write to rebut Miller's characterization of McConnell's record and to re-affirm HRC's opposition to his nomination. We do not believe a mistake in punctuation resulted in any distortion of his record. Furthermore, we question the value of Miller's accusations attributing a sinister motive to HRC over an innocent typo."

In case there is any doubt, let me note that the quote marks above indicate that this is taken verbatim from Besen's letter; it is not a paraphrase by a person or group with its own agenda. To put words in someone's mouth they didn't utter, especially when the issue is as high-charged as whether a judicial nominee is anti-gay in his thoughts and emotions, as opposed to a believer in judicial restraint or even an advocate of some sort of equivalence for both religious conservatives and gays (however strained), is not simply "a typo" of no consequence. Quotation marks have a very specific and in some cases legal meaning, which everyone understands. To fail to correct this "typo" for several weeks, during a period when the media was initially focused on the nomination battle, is simply not acceptable.

Besen also writes:

"Miller should redirect his anger to criticizing those who truly threaten our liberty - the extreme right. Although fair criticism of GLBT groups is desirable and understandable, Miller's attacking GLBT groups for opposing a judicial nominee with a consistent anti-gay record is disgraceful and unconscionable."

Let me say this about that: Virtually all gay organization or news websites copiously cover the antics of the religious right; taking aim at the groupthink of the gay liberal-left is still fairly unique, and I make no apologies for marching out of lockstep. If Besen actually did welcome "fair criticism" he wouldn't be so furious that someone had actually dared to, well, criticize.

IGF has posted Besen's entire letter, so you can judge for yourself. Also, you should check out IGF contributor Dale Carpenter's latest Out Right column, defending McConnell. Dale, now a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, was a student of McConnell's and finds HRC's version of the man a gross distortion. Guess he can expect a little letter from HRC as well.

An Addendum. The McConnell nomination is also discussed by Hastings Wyman, who writes the syndicated Capital Letters column on politics and gays. Wyman writes: "On balance, given that one cannot expect Republican George W. Bush to nominate a lawyer with liberal credentials on social issues for a judgeship, McConnell probably isn't so bad." He also observes, "What is different about this nomination, however, is that even a Republican White House now understands that trying to win at least a modicum of gay support is an important part of the confirmation battle," and shows how this is, in itself, is a sign of progress.

Last week's issue of Time magazine had, buried in a long piece about American Taliban John Walker Lindh, a suggestion that "Taliban Johnny" had shared a gay relationship with a Pakistani businessman named Khazar Hayat. Here's how it was picked up and sensationalized by the New York Daily News in a piece titled: Bizman: Lindh was my gay lover:

John Walker Lindh's "dangerous journey" into Islamic militancy was cemented by a sexual relationship with a Pakistani businessman who guided the American Taliban turncoat toward schools that fueled his hatred for the United States, [Time] magazine reported yesterday. "It was the beginning of the dangerous journey, the first jaunt, the pleasure journey," Mufti Mohammad Iltimas Khan, a spiritual adviser, said of Lindh's encounter with the businessman.

Time's actual article, The Making of John Walker Lindh, had this to say:

Hayat met Lindh and took him on a tour of various madrasahs, searching for the perfect one from Karachi in the south to Peshawar in the northwest. The young American rejected them all and preferred remaining at Hayat's side. He helped Hayat at his store, a prosperous business dealing in powdered milk. Hayat, who has a wife and four children, says he had sex with Lindh. "He was liking me very much. All the time he wants to be with me," says Hayat, who has a good though not colloquial command of English. "I was loving him. Because love begets love, you know."

But something about this doesn't seem to gel, since earlier news reports had noted Lindh's rejection of his gay father as morally corrupt. Soon after, CNN weighed in with this take, in Pakistani man denies having sex with Taliban American:

Hayat, who said Walker Lindh stayed with him about a month, denied having sexual relations with the young American. "That's nonsense," he said. "We never had any such relationship." Lindh's lawyers deny that their client engaged in any homosexual relationships.

I don't know what the truth is, but it seems like Time's reliance on evidence such as Hyat's fractured English was probably suspect.

Interestingly, while Time was quick to publicize a gay allegation for Lindh, the New York Times treaded a bit too carefully when it came to discussing the homosexual orientation of a true hero. In a Sept. 20 piece titled Killed on 9/11, Fire Chaplain Becomes Larger Than Life,
Daniel J. Wakin writes this of Father Mychal Judge, the New York Fire Department chaplain who perished shortly after administering last rites to a firefighter inside the burning World Trade Center:

Many Roman Catholics find in him a positive, indeed shining, example of a priest at a time when the priestly image is suffering from the sexual abuse scandal in the Church. Another group has publicly sung Father Judge's praises since his death: gay rights advocates. Some have spoken openly about what they say was his homosexual orientation, and the former New York City fire commissioner, Thomas Von Essen, said that Father Judge had long ago come out to him. Still, the presence of the gay issue has caused some rancor among other friends, who resent what they say are attempts by the gay rights advocates to use Father Judge to further their agenda. [italics added]

And later:

Father Judge's name is also invoked by gay rights advocates, who maintain that the priest's sexuality was an important part of his make-up as a man and a priest.

Some of Father Judge's friends, however, are angry by what they see as opportunism by some gay rights advocates. These friends emphasize that any sexual orientation that he may have had is irrelevant. Some are hostile to the suggestion he was homosexual.

Actually, quite a number of Father Judge's gay friends have said that he was very much at ease with his homosexual orientation (though no one, as far as I know, has said he was sexually active). Moreover, Father Judge worked with the gay Catholic group Dignity, and marched in the alternative St. Patrick's Day Parade. However, at a time when some in the Vatican hierarchy are calling for purging homosexually oriented priests, the presence of the saintly but gay Father Judge is clearly causing some grief, and much denial. But unlike the shaky case for John Walker Lindh's bent, the evidence is straight-forward (so to speak) about Father Judge. Regardless, many will continue to have difficulty viewing sanctity and homosexuality as coexisting together.
--Stephen H. Miller

True Diversity. Check out veteran gay journalist Rex Wockner's current Wockner Wire opinion column at planetout.com. Rex takes aim at the idea that gays should be defined as creatures of the left merely because of our sexual orientation. He writes:

"The success of the gay movement has created the situation of bourgeois and ordinary and even conservative gays and lesbians becoming the majority of out, proud American homos.

"The screeching, dogmatic leftoids who long dominated American gay public discourse are not merely in retreat, they have become mostly irrelevant. Witness the obsolescence of the inflexibly leftist National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), once the dominant force in American gay activism. --

"I have spent 23 years poking around the gay universe, including the online gay universe for the past nine years, and I can say, without hesitation, that the vast majority of gays and lesbians these days have little in common with the dogma of NGLTF and movement wonks of that ilk. All the leftoid gays are still out there but, in the meantime, everybody else came out of the closet and completely buried them numbers-wise."

I couldn't agree more. As I once again witnessed this weekend the mobs of (mostly) student leftists staging their anti-capitalist, anti-American, window-smashing, police-taunting tantrum in our nation's capital, I was saddened to see, in at least one TV news report, a group brandishing a gay rainbow flag. How sad that these people think the (mostly) free economic system that made possible the social liberation of gay people is "the enemy."

Yet beyond the hot house of campus LGBT politics and its spawn -- the professional activists who dominate the "progressive" LGBT movement -- you"ll find the majority of gays and lesbians. And the future belongs to them.
--Stephen H. Miller

Biting the Hand that Could Save Them. A frightening piece on how the high-pressure anti-market demands of AIDS activists has contributed to a big falloff in the number of new AIDS drugs in development -- AIDS Activists Hinder Their Cause " can be read via a link to the international edition of the Jerusalem Post (and was brought to our attention by Andrewsullivan.com). The author, Roger Bate of the organization Africa Fighting Malaria, reports that:

There are between 5% and 30% fewer anti-AIDS drugs in development than there were a few years ago". Companies producing anti-AIDS drugs were developing fewer products than in the late 1990s. The reduction found was almost a third lower in 2001 than in 1998.

And one likely cause? According to Dr. Des Martin, president of the South African HIV Clinicians Society:

"Among several reasons, the threat of generic competition and attacks on multinational companies could be behind the recent decline in HIV anti-retroviral compounds," [Dr. Martin] says. The latter point is one that the pharma industry apparently does not want discussed widely.

However, admits one drug industry executive:

"we have lost the battle with the activists, and now the market is less profitable. The result is that we are spending less R&D time on anti-retrovirals. Why bother to innovate these products when any advance will not be profitable?"

Actions DO have consequences, and attacking the engines of innovation because they"re driven by (gasp) the profit-motive may have deadly consequences.
--Stephen H. Miller

Sept. 19, 2002

The Human Rights Campaign, the big Washington-based LGBT-rights lobby, has joined the fray with civil rights and feminist groups in opposing the nomination of Michael McConnell for the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Log Cabin Republicans, meanwhile, have met with McConnell and endorsed his appointment.

Arguments can be made either way about McConnell. Many gay activists will not forgive that he was an integral part of the Boy Scouts" legal battle to exclude gay scoutmasters (a battle which the Supreme Court gave to the Scouts, ruling that a private association has a constitutional right to choose leaders who agree with the organization's goals).

What is not acceptable, however, is the distortion in HRC's anti-McConnell release, attributing words to McConnell that he never said. Here is an excerpt from HRC's press release:

McConnell's role in the Boy Scouts of America v. Dale lawsuit demonstrates hostility to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. -- The McConnell brief suggests that the Scouts' policy of excluding gay men is comparable to its exclusion of alcohol or substance abusers from leadership positions.

"But prevailing in their [the Boy Scouts] constitutional battle might prove to be a Pyrrhic victory," McConnell warned at a June 2, 2000, colloquium on evangelical civic engagement. "Unless the Boy Scouts can win public sympathy and not be seen as irrationally bigoted, they could become cultural pariahs and viewed in the same way as 'the Nazis in Skokie.'
"The Scouts would then face overwhelming pressure to change their policies regarding homosexuals," continued McConnell. "On the legal front, moreover, the Scouts' traditional ties with schools, national parks, and the military are in jeopardy. Scout supporters must go on the offensive, to highlight the intolerance of gay-rights activists." -- HRC website, all quote marks as in the HRC release

Pretty bad, right, except these words, despite HRC's quote marks, aren't exactly McConnell"s. They"re from a paraphrase of what McConnell said, in the newsletter of a conservative religious policy institute. Here's the relevant excerpt from the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Note the LACK of quotes in the original, which indicates a paraphrase:

But prevailing in their constitutional battle might prove to be a Pyrrhic victory, McConnell warned. Unless the Boy Scouts can win public sympathy and not be seen as irrationally bigoted, they could become cultural pariahs and viewed in the same way as "the Nazis in Skokie." The Scouts would then face overwhelming pressure to change their policies regarding homosexuals. On the legal front, moreover, the Scouts' traditional ties with schools, national parks, and the military are in jeopardy. Scout supporters must "go on the offensive," McConnell counseled, and highlight the intolerance of gay-rights activists. -- Ethics and Policy Center website

Is this a big deal? I think so. Attributing words directly to someone when they"re not really their words is pretty serious, especially when trying to decide if a viewpoint is based on a belief in governmental neutrality regarding moral issues, or rank bigotry. Maybe what McConnell actually said was just as bad, but I don't know (and, after reading HRC's attack, neither do you).

McConnell has opposed adding gays to legislation that protects racial and religious minorities from job discrimination, as HRC notes. But he did support a Salt Lake City ordinance that would have prohibited discrimination based on "lifestyle" and other non-job-related factors. He also defended a Gay Straight Alliance club in Salt Lake City when it was banned from a high school, arguing it had the same rights as other groups to meet on campus under the 1984 Equal Access Act. That's not to say that HRC, as a lobby that puts gay anti-discrimination statutes at the top of its agenda, shouldn't oppose him. But neither should they distort who he is, or what he actually has said.

"Smackdown" Smacked. Some e-mailers have written to say they found the "we"re not gay, it was just a put on" conclusion to World Wrestling Entertainment's "Smackdown" gay wedding to have been quite gay-negative, and ditto the crowd's reactions. What can I say, I based my item on the Washington Post's coverage. Does this mean you can't believe everything you read in the papers"?

Prime-Time Quotas? The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation reports that:

The number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender characters appearing this fall on primetime network television has declined by almost two-thirds compared to the 2001-02 television season". The Fall 2002 season includes only seven lesbian and gay characters in primetime -- all of whom are white. There are no bisexual or transgender characters. Last year, 20 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) characters regularly appeared on network television.

Proclaims GLAAD's Scott Seomin:

"The diversity of the gay community cannot be conveyed through seven characters, especially when all of those characters are white. This is not merely about the decreasing number of gay and lesbian characters on TV. It is about the total lack of people of color, bisexual and transgender portrayals on network television."

Now, I"m all for more gay characters on the tube. But there's something about GLAAD's rhetoric that's unsettling. For one thing, there's no recognition on GLAAD's part that TV programming decisions are driven by ratings, not by a central planning committee made up of homophobic whte male racists. In the wake of the success of "Will & Grace," there was a big jump in the number of gays on TV. It was TV's typical copycat phenomenon. But many of the new shows bombed in the ratings -- not because they had gay characters, but because they weren't very good.

Should GLAAD be encouraging more gay stories on prime-time television? Absolutely. But failing to understand what caused the gay surge and subsequent decline, playing the race card at a time when there are more black characters than ever, and righteously declaring the need for transgenders of color all comes off as just more stale activist rhetoric.
--Stephen H. Miller

A Sham, but Not All Bad. A bit belatedly, here's last week's Washington Post take on World Wrestling Entertainment's "gay wedding" storyline between pro-wrestlers Billy and Chuck. Yes, it turned out to be as phony baloney as everything else in pro wrestling. But as reporter Hank Stuever points out, the absence of anti-gay invective, or overt audience hostility, says more about gay progress in the American heartland (those "red state" folks) than the decision by the elite New York Times to include same-sex commitment ceremonies among its Weddings announcement.

Remember Stalin? Zimbabwe's President (via rigged elections) Robert Mugabe has put in place a terror-driven land expropriation policy that has spread famine across his country, formerly a food exporter. He has also, notoriously, declared homosexuals "lower than dogs and pigs" and recently launched a campaign against "sexual perverts," avowing that gays have no rights at all. AllAfrica.com reports (via the Zimbabwe Standard) that "Mugabe has, in the past few years, openly paraded his deeply entrenched hatred for homosexuals, attacking them relentlessly"" So, why were members of the New York City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus giving him such a warm reception last week? "I"m honored to host him," said Councilman Charles Barron, as quoted in Newsday. Can you imagine the outcry if it had been conservative council members who had hosted a rightwing, rather than leftwing, dictator with such a murderous and homophobic record?

Autopilot Activism. The Commercial Closet site has a good piece on the refusal of some die-hard lesbigay activists to give up their boycott against Coors Brewing Company. Coors has just launched a new print campaign to once again highlight its gay-positive policies:

Titled "Real History," the ad features a triangle with a list of the company's gay rights accomplishments including: adopting an inclusive non-discrimination policy in 1978, adding same-sex partner health benefits in 1995 and other milestones. Another ad to appear in January will feature six openly gay employees.

As the article notes, the roots of the trouble go back to a broader union boycott in the early 1970s. But while the union boycott ended long ago, and coalitions have been formed with Hispanic and African-American groups, Coors remains dogged by gay activists who, once having sunk their teeth into the company's skin, refuse to ever let go. Their main beef is that some Coors family members give money to conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation. But from what I can see, these are center-right conservative groups, and not the hard-core homo-haters of the religious right. Rather, it's as if the activists simply are unable to rationally revisit any stance once taken. That's one reason I tend to characterize them as "reactionaries," even though they like to call themselves "progressives."

I should note that not all activists are still in the anti-Coors camp; even the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign have accepted funding from Coors in recent years -- and been denounced for it by those even further to the left.
--Stephen H. Miller

Fiendish Floridians? According to a press release from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:

"In 2000, African Americans in southern Florida were denied the right to vote and to have their votes counted. In 2002, the gay and Jewish communities are facing the same inexcusable fate," said Lorri L. Jean [NGLTF's executive director].

While irregularities have been reported in precincts countywide, Miami's Jewish and gay communities have been disproportionately hit by voter machine malfunction and other irregularities. -- "How many times must historically oppressed communities be denied the right to participate in elections under the watch of Jeb and George W. Bush?" demanded Jean.

Years ago, there used to be a joke about a hypothetical headline in the old (and, at the time, left-leaning) New York Post: "New York Destroyed; Blacks, Jews Suffer Most." The penchant to claim the mantle of victimhood seems to know no bounds on the left. In fact, the well-reported voting problems in Florida's Dade and Broward counties (that's Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, respectively) have been attributed to the county officials in charge of elections, and these officials are, as it turns out, DEMOCRATS.

Think, for a minute, about NGLTF's suggestion that the brothers Bush managed to pinpoint the precincts with a majority of gay or Jewish votes, and then to arrange for election workers in those exact precincts to be slovenly or ill-trained, and for the expensive, new electronic voting machines to be improperly hooked up -- all in order to undermine the traditionally liberal vote. I mean, just how efficiently fascistic do they really think the Republicans are?

NGLTF's concern was stoked by a ballot initiative from the religious right, which sought to overturn Dade County's gay rights ordinance. Says the NGLTF release:

"In some precincts, there was no ability to vote on any initiatives. In others, voters have complained that when they voted NO on the anti-gay ballot measure, YES votes appear to have registered instead."

Can you spell P-A-R-A-N-O-I-A?

As it turned out, the repeal effort failed 53% to 47%, despite the great GOP conspiracy, and the gay rights measure will stay on the books. As reported by the Miami Herald, racially speaking, the strongest support for keeping the gay rights measure, by far, came from non-Latin, non-black voters (in other words, the white electorate), which voted 73.7% to 26.3% against repeal. Among black voters, the vote was just barely against repeal, 55.5% to 44.5%. And finally, among the heavily Cuban Hispanic voters, the majority favored repealing the gay rights law, 63.2% to 36.8%. Guess that's why NGLTF wasn't concerned about voting foul-ups affecting that minority group.
--Stephen H. Miller