Author Archives: Stephen Henry Miller

Red State, Blue State

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“Despite skewing Democrat, LGBT people are flocking to red states,” reports the Daily Beast. The piece cites marriage equality nationwide and more accepting attitudes as a factor, but notes that this is reflective of wider national migratory patterns:

Specifically, it lines up with people—especially young people—choosing less to live in huge, expensive cities, which were traditionally friendlier toward LGBTQ individuals, and choosing instead to make lives for themselves in small and mid-tier cities in the middle and southern states. …

Smaller cities have shorter commutes, cheaper rent, and less competition for good-paying jobs. And a lot of smaller cities are investing in the kind of infrastructure (public transportation and amenities, walkability and density near city centers) that young people value.

Other reports on the migration pattern are more explicit in citing the economic vitality of Red states as compared to those long-governed by Democratic majorities. Stephen Moore writes at the Daily Signal:

They are leaving states with high minimum wages, pro-union work rules, high taxes on the rich, generous welfare benefits, expansive regulations to “help” workers, green energy policies, etc.

Similarly, blogger James Joyner notes in a Christian Science Monitor column:

Red states offer lower housing costs, lower taxes, and less regulation than blue states. That’s why so many blue-state voters are moving to the West or South. In the short term, the red states gain power. in the longer term, they change. … While the near-term political effect of this has been to increase the power of red states, the longer term impact has been to turn them into purple and even blue states

The concern is that the new migrants, attracted to superior economic conditions, bring along their left-liberal economic ideas and will proceed to vote for big-government Democrats in their new havens—after which they’ll wonder at the mystery of why the economies in those states will have begun to falter, too.

On a more optimistic note, many LGBT people may have felt it necessary to live in liberal states and cities but now have the freedom not to do so. A rising number of fiscally conservative gay voters would be a good thing.

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Free to Choose

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A gay and lesbian wedding expo in Salt Lake City is an example of how businesses are making it known they’re open to doing same-sex weddings, reports the Washington Times:

With a string quartet playing on one side of the exhibit hall and pop music on the other side, gay and lesbian couples chatted with businesses showing off fancy wedding cakes, fun photo booths and elaborate floral arrangements. Karl Jennings and Chris Marrano were looking for a cake baker and photographer for their June wedding. … “We know that whoever is here isn’t going to turn us away because we’re gay,” Jennings said. “It’s very relaxing and makes you want to give people business here. I want support people who want to support us.”

Which is good for same-sex couples, and good for business:

For wedding-related businesses, gay marriages represent a growth market. Gaining a toehold requires spreading the word you’re open to LGBT weddings – and not just doing it for the money, said Annie Munk, who along with her wife Nicole Broberg rents photo booths for weddings.

“Couples need to feel comfortable with the person they’re working with and know that’s not going to be any judgment, or awkwardness or whispering behind the counter,” said Munk, owner of Utah Party Pix.

And that’s how voluntary transactions are supposed to work in a free society. The role of government is not to force small business providers to engage in expressive services that violate their religious faith; it’s to ensure equality under the law, as the U.S. Supreme Court just did when it voted unanimously on Monday to reverse an Alabama court ruling that refused to recognize a lesbian’s adoption that was granted in another state.

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CPAC 2016: Progress on the Right

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Via the Washington Times:

The traditionalist and libertarian wings of the conservative movement have long disagreed on the issue of gay marriage, but an ideologically diverse panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday was able to find common cause amid the fault lines. …

Townhall.com’s Guy Benson and the Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro, both of whom support same-sex marriage, broke with liberals on whether dissenters should be forced to accommodate same-sex weddings such as by baking cakes, taking pictures or performing ceremonies.

At Townhall.com, Matt Vespa writes: CPAC’s Marriage Equality Panel, Something That Could Never Happen At A Progressive Conference:

Benson aptly noted that a panel such as this could never have been conducted at a left wing conference without boos, hissing, and other disruptive shenanigans.

And video here.

This “common ground” won’t please LGBT progressives, and many on the right support efforts by Ted Cruz and, to a slightly lesser extent, Marco Rubio, to roll back marriage equality. But the tenor and tone at CPAC is still progress, as is the fact that CPAC accepted the Log Cabin Republicans among the many official co-sponsors with a booth, which in years past was denied to both Log Cabin and the now-defunct GoProud at the behest of anti-gay conservatives at the Heritage Foundation and like-minded groups.

More. John Kasich tells businesses why they shouldn’t discriminate against gay people. It sidesteps the constitutional, and moral, issue of forcing independent business providers to engage in expressive behavior regarding same-sex weddings that violates their religious convictions, which may put me and fellow libertarians to the right of Kasich. Not that Kasich’s position will appease frothing-at-the-mouth Dan Savage.

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Transgender Locker Room Use: The New Line in the Sand

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The New York Times is being disingenuous in talking about issues involving transgender-identifying high school students in terms of “bathrooms and other facilities” and then barely naming those other facilities so as to focus on restrooms. USA Today is a bit more honest in referencing “bathrooms and locker rooms,” since the issue here—and the impetus behind the discussed state legislation—is more about locker rooms and showers than restrooms, although restroom fears were used effectively in the defeat in Houston of an anti-discrimination provision.

I don’t believe activists are going to win public support for students who are physically male using the girl’s locker room and shower facilities, or who are female using the boy’s facilities. In this case, providing alternative private changing/showering facilities is not “just like segregation,” but a reasonable accommodation. The Obama administration, by threatening schools that want to provide such reasonable accommodations, is making matters worse.

It’s also likely that drawing a line in the sand around locker room use in public (including schools) and private facilities is going to sink future LGBT anti-discrimination efforts, which used to be focused on employment, once upon a time. That, along with the addition of “public accommodations” in a way intended to force small businesses to provide expressive services to same-sex weddings despite religious objections.

But the defeat of future anti-discrimination measures will allow LGBT activists to continue claiming victim status and keep the money rolling in from the faithful, who are told the equivalent of anti-LGBT Jim Crow is just around the corner.

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This Should Not Happen in America

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Via the Washington Times, New York farm owners give up legal fight after being fined $13,000 for refusing to host gay wedding:

The owners of a New York farm fined $13,000 for declining to host a same-sex wedding on their property have chosen not to appeal a court ruling against them, bringing an end to the high-profile legal battle after more than three years.

The [state Division of Human Rights] fined the Giffords $10,000 for violating the state Human Rights Law and ordered them to pay $1,500 each to Melisa and Jennifer McCarthy for “the emotional injuries they suffered as a result of the discrimination.”…

The Giffords argued that they would host wedding receptions, parties or other events for same-sex couples, but the court said that their “purported willingness to offer some services to the McCarthys does not cure their refusal to provide a service that was offered to the general public.”

LGBT progressives cheer and pat themselves on the back, while they sneer at those who cling to their guns and their religion—and then wonder how it could possibly be that Donald Trump seems poised to become the next president.

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Courting Backlash

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From Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal:

There is something increasingly unappeasable in the left. … We can’t just have court-ordered legalized abortion across the land, we have to have it up to the point of birth, and taxpayers have to pay for it. It’s not enough to win same-sex marriage, you’ve got to personally approve of it and if you publicly resist you’ll be ruined. It’s not enough that we have publicly funded contraceptives, the nuns have to provide them. …

If progressives were wise they would step back, accept their victories, take a breath and turn to the idea of solidifying gains…. Don’t make them bake the cake. Don’t make them accept the progressive replacement for Scalia. Leave the nuns alone.

Progressives have no idea how fragile it all is. That’s why they feel free to be unappeasable. … They think America has endless give. But America is composed of humans, and they do not have endless give.

Isn’t that what we’re seeing this year in the political realm? That they don’t have endless give? And we’ll be seeing more of it.

It’s a good summation of the present predicament.

Obviously, economic malaise—a decade of slow or no real economic growth—is a driving factor in the angry dissatisfaction among working and middle class voters, fueling the hysteria over immigrants taking American jobs that Trump and others have so effectively exploited. But the cultural factors Noonan points to are real and shouldn’t be dismissed.

More. Also in the WSJ, Gerald F. Seib writes: “Some of these [Trump] voters appear new to the GOP, but many have been bouncing around in the party, lured in over the years by their differences with Democrats on cultural issues. … The voters Mr. Trump has pulled together in winning New Hampshire and South Carolina and coming in second in Iowa is a coalition of the economically and culturally alienated….”

Along similar lines, Brendan O’Neill writes in the U.K.’s The Spectator: “America’s new elites, fancying themselves superior to the rural, the old, the religiously inclined and the rest, have increasingly turned politics into something that is done to people, for their own good, rather than by people according to their moral outlook. And then they wonder why people go looking for something else, something less sneering.”

Rich Tafel tells Harvard Divinity School: “The biggest issues for evangelical voters are economic. … Beyond economic issues, they have a deep-seated fear they are losing their religious liberty and country. … Add to that secular activists who are using their power to force issues on evangelicals, and it makes that narrative very real. Religious liberty is the phrase you are going to hear more of. There will be strong pushback on some social issues, like gay marriage, because of the overreach of the secular left.”

Furthermore. From Tom Nichols at The Daily Beast, How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump:

Gay marriage is a good example. Liberals wanted gay marriage to win in the Supreme Court, and it did. Leftists wanted more: to silence their opponents even after those opponents completely lost on the issue. Ugly language that good liberals would normally deplore emerged not in the wake of defeat, but of victory: actor and gay activist George Takei, for example, actually called Justice Clarence Thomas a “clown in blackface” and said Thomas had “abdicated” his status as an African American. That’s heavy stuff, and it would likely scan better written in Chinese on a paper dunce cap. …

I will vote for a third candidate out of protest—even if it means accepting what I consider the ghastly prospect of a Clinton 45 administration. But I understand the fear of being silenced that’s prompting otherwise decent people to make common cause with racists and modern Know-Nothings, and I blame the American left for creating that fear. …

American liberals, complacently turning away from the excesses of the left and eviscerating their own moderate wing, have damaged the two-party system to the point that an unhinged billionaire demagogue is raking in support from people who are now more afraid of leftists controlling the Justice Department than they are of Putin or ISIS.

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Kasich: For the Future

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In a better world, Ohio Gov. John Kasich would be the GOP front-runner. For a Republican, he’s a sign of where the party should be heading: Via NBCNews.com:

Kasich spoke to large crowds of college students, and found himself pressed on gay marriage by a student during a town hall at Michigan State University. The student identified himself as a “staunch Democrat—always have been, always will be” before Kasich jokingly told him, “well that’s a good open mind. You don’t know that.” The student identified himself as gay and told Kasich he “faces discrimination daily and weekly,” and wanted to know the candidate’s views on same-sex marriage and LGBT protections under the law.

“If I see discrimination in anything, like I said earlier, I’m willing to do what I can,” Kasich said. “Whether it’s executive order or legislation. That’s fine with me. As for marriage equality—let me be clear I’m for traditional marriage but I’ve been to my first gay wedding. … And I had a great time. …

The student pressed back, “I don’t think that’s enough for you to say you’ve been to a gay wedding.”

“Well, we’re not changing any laws,” Kasich told him. “We’re not changing. We’re not going to allow discrimination on this.”

Compared with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, the tone and substance is markedly more inclusive and in favor of maintaining equal treatment under the law.

But this isn’t a better world; not yet. And Cruz may be surging. Update: Or not, that poll now seems like an outlier and the Trump phenomenon shows little sign of abetting.

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What Success Looks Like

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Via the Washington Post, 2016 could be a very difficult year for LGBT activists:

Less than eight months after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, LGBT advocates are on the defensive, playing whack-a-mole with a massive number of bills in state legislatures they say are meant to peel back LGBT rights…. Religious exemption and bathroom bills are leading many of those legislatures’ agendas….

Among the litany of horrors listed in this article, which draws on the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign as its primary source: state-level proposed legislation allowing clergyman not to perform same-sex weddings (a right they already have), allowing religious exemptions for small businesses that don’t want to provide services to same-sex weddings, and allowing schools and businesses to maintain shared same-sex restrooms (often with private facilities for those who identify as, but have not transitioned to, the opposite sex).

If these efforts are the nightmare scenario being used by the Human Rights Campaign to drum up support and fundraising, then things look pretty good for LGBT people.

Now, it’s not that some of these proposals aren’t offensive political posturing (while others, I’d argue, simply reaffirm constitutional liberties). But the one area that could truly be rights-denying would be state attempts to allow government officials to refuse to provide marriage licences to same-sex couples. However, that’s not being seriously considered; what we see instead are a few state proposals to allow individual officials to excuse themselves from issuing licences as long as the office itself makes licences available to all couples.

As I’ve noted before, government officials are responsible for following the law of the land, even when doing so is at odds with their own religious beliefs. They are public servants, not private, self-employed service providers. So codifying these opt-outs can be constitutionally dubious, although one might think informal arrangements or reassignments within county and state offices handling these issues might suffice.

More. Not mentioned in the article, which appeared prior to Justice Scalia’s passing, are some GOP presidential contenders (most emphatically Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) pledges to appoint justices who would roll back the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in favor of marriage equality nationally. In that event, each state would be able to approve or deny the rights of same-sex couples to wed. Legal experts and Court-watchers think overturning Obergefell is highly unlikely—opponents of unrestricted legal abortion nationally have been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade for decades. But it shouldn’t be dismissed as impossible and is a legitimate reason for those supporting equality under the law to oppose such candidates.

Yet even here, “let the states decide” is a noticeable advancement over advocating to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage across the nation.

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Toxic Politics About to Get Uglier

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The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a jovial homophobe, will make an already toxic electoral season worse. From all indications, there will be no move by the Senate to confirm Obama’s forthcoming nominee, making the Court a central issue in both the primaries and the November election.

Already, the GOP presidential contenders who’ve specialized in pandering to the worst instincts of their party’s social conservative base (primarily though not exclusively Cruz and Rubio, among those left standing) are pledging to put forward, if elected, a nominee who will roll back Obergefell, the ground-breaking decision in favor of marriage equality. But that’s a zero-sum change, since Scalia was the most adamant voice attacking the idea that same-sex couples’ relationships could be worthy of recognition, as he did earlier when he bitterly condenmed overturning the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act. Of course, Court-watchers are also looking to future replacements, including octogenarian liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others.

(Chief plaintiff Jim Obergefell takes the high road, tweeting “Thank you for your service to our country, Justice Scalia. Condolences to your family and friends.”)

Obama will likely nominate someone who is unacceptably liberal to the GOP senate but not obviously extreme (“Political calculation also militates in favor of nominating someone whose leftism isn’t obvious,” the Powelineblog predicts). But recognizing the likelihood that the next president is going to make this call, Hillary and Bernie will duke it out over who will push for a hard-core progressive.

Regardless, Obama’s nominee (or Hillary’s, or Bernie’s) will be good on LGBT legal equality while in favor of running roughshod over other liberty rights (second amendment, commercial political speech, freedom from state coercion, religious dissent….).

Meanwhile, many expect the fight will bring a halt to any bipartisan cooperation that Congress might have been able to achieve this year.

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The Dichotomy

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Milo Yiannopoulos, a young gay conservative Brit and anti-political-correctness provocateur, and the student protesters at Rutgers. NJ.com reports:

“In my view, anybody who asks for a trigger warning or a safe space, should be immediately expelled” [Yiannopoulos said].

The audience loudly applauded his statement.

He said such reactivity merely demonstrates that those students “are incapable of exposing themselves to new ideas.”

“They are demonstrating that they are incapable of engaging in a humble pursuit of knowledge,” he said.

At which point, a woman yells from off camera, “This man represents hatred!” They also started chanting “Black lives matter.”

The video then pans to one side of the auditorium where two students appear to smear fake blood on their faces.

The evocative display was met with loud applause.

Members of the audience in support of Yiannopoulos booed and started chanting, “Trump, Trump, Trump!”

The protesters also splattered their fake blood, Breitbart reports:

the progressives stormed out of the auditorium, leaving a trail of red paint for the janitors to clean up.

Walls, seats, and doors were also vandalised by the protesters. Peaceful attendees who had come to hear a speech instead found themselves splashed with the fake blood. At least one attendee was allegedly assaulted by a protester, who covered him in red paint.

The rise of authoritarian-progressive political correctness, which seeks to stop the expression of ideas its adherents dislike, is met with support for Donald Trump. It’s action/reaction, and represents the sad state of left-dominated academia. It does not bode well for the country.

More. And in Britain, Peter Tatchell: snubbed by students for free speech stance:

The emails from the officer of the National Union of Students were unequivocal. Fran Cowling, the union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) representative, said that she would not share a stage with a man whom she regarded as having been racist and “transphobic”.

That the man in question is Peter Tatchell – one of the country’s best-known gay rights campaigners, who next year celebrates his 50th year as an activist – is perhaps a mark of how fractured the debate on free speech and sexual politics has become.

In the emails, sent to the organisers of a talk at Canterbury Christ Church University on Monday on the topic of “re-radicalising queers”, Cowling refuses an invitation to speak unless Tatchell, who has also been invited, does not attend. In the emails she cites Tatchell’s signing of an open letter in the Observer last year in support of free speech and against the growing trend of universities to “no-platform” people, such as Germaine Greer, for holding views with which they disagree.

Cowling claims the letter supports the incitement of violence against transgender people. She also made an allegation against him of racism or of using racist language. Tatchell told the Observer that the incident was yet another example of “a witch-hunting, accusatory atmosphere” symptomatic of a decline in “open debate on some university campuses”.

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