Politics & Public Opinion

Freedom Ascendant, and Under Siege

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No doubt 2014 is the year the tide was turned on marriage equality and there is no going back (take a look at Freedom to Marry’s map of the states at year-end). Up next is 2015, when the assumption is the Supreme Court will rule in favor of a nationwide constitutional right for gay people to marry.

As the Washington Blade reported this week in noting that the Supreme Court declined a request by Florida’s attorney general to stay marriage equality there, after a district court ruled in favor of it:

The refusal from the Supreme Court to stay same-sex marriages in Florida is noteworthy because although justices have denied similar requests to halt same-sex marriages in Alaska, Idaho, South Carolina and Kansas, they’ve never done so before in a state where a federal appeals court has yet to rule on the issue. The decision with regard to Florida could be a sign the Supreme Court is ready to rule in favor of nationwide marriage equality no matter what the federal appeals courts decide in the interim.

Expectations can be disappointed and hopes delayed, or dashed, but the signs look good.

This being IGF Culturewatch, let us again note that there is an authoritarian shadow that’s attached itself to the fight for the freedom to marry, and that is the desire by some to force conservative Christians to provide services to same-sex weddings, which they feel is a violation of their freedom not to be forced by the state to engage in activity that violates their religious beliefs. This is part of a wider, uglier spirit of the age, described in Politico by Flemming Rose:

…the grievance lobby has succeeded in shifting the fulcrum of the human rights debate from freedom of speech to the necessity of countering hate speech; from the individual pursuing individual liberties to the individual being aggrieved by the liberties taken by others. That shift becomes counterintuitive, the logic increasingly absurd. Those aggrieved by free speech are defended, while others whose speech is perceived as offensive to such a degree that they are exposed to death threats, physical assault, and sometimes even murder are deemed to have been asking for it: “What did they expect offending people like that?”

Freedom to marry is a culture-shifting advance forward, but it is not the only freedom that matters. For a sense of this, here’s a look by the Mercatus Center at California that’s not quite up-to-date but you get the gist (the status of freedom in the other states can also be viewed).

Here’s to a new year that will advance liberty for all.

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The Victory Fund’s Spurious ‘Bipartisanship’

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Chuck Wolfe, outgoing president of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, in an interview with Metro Weekkly, has some decent things to say about the need to support LGBT candidates in both parties, such as “if I have an opportunity to put an openly gay person or an out lesbian in the Republican caucus who can speak up inside that caucus meeting I’m going to do it.” But then he reaffirms the Victory Fund’s litmus test to only endorse candidates who are thoroughly pro-choice on abortion, which has eliminated a good many gay Republicans from receiving Victory Fund support.

And, of course, the Victory Fund bent knee to LGBT left and union activists by refusing to support San Diego’s Carl DeMaio this year in his race for Congress, which he narrowly lost after LGBT Democrats unleashed a slew of last-minute dirty tricks.

No surprise there, since former George W. Bush press secretary Dana Perino revealed that in DeMaio’s 2008 race for San Diego mayor, “The Victory Fund not only declined to endorse DeMaio, it’s common knowledge in San Diego that it then gave his confidential campaign information to the Democrats and bragged about it.”

Sorry, Chuck, but bipartisanship doesn’t mean soliciting money from gay Republicans as well as Democrats. Either you’re bipartisan in offering support to qualified candidates who can win, or you’re not, and Victory Fund isn’t.

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No, This Issue Is Not Going Away

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The New York Times takes a look at the simmering issue of local authorities forcing small business owners to sell their services on behalf of gay weddings, or else. And the hurt feelings of high-minded LGBT customers who can’t abide allowing service providers not to be forced to bend knee to them. As David Boaz tweeted:

The conservative Christian site Shoebat.com, in turn,

decided to call some 13 prominent pro-gay bakers in a row. Each one denied us the right to have “Gay Marriage Is Wrong” on a cake and even used deviant insults and obscenities against us. One baker even said all sorts of profanities against Christians…

The libertarians at Reason.com put this in perspective:

Shoebat is kind of his own worst enemy in trying to perform this experiment. … But while it would have been better for a more articulate person to have performed this experiment, it’s instructive nevertheless. If bakers are a “public accommodation” as is argued, there’s no reason for them to refuse to make these cakes or cookies or what have you. The bakeries would not be saying “Gay marriage is wrong.” They’re just selling a cake to somebody who believes that. Just as making a gay wedding cake is not an endorsement of gay marriage. It’s just fulfilling a customer’s orders.

To which I’ll add, progressive authoritarians who think this issue is settled, and that those who are appalled by what’s happening should just let it go, because when progressives are giving the orders people should do as they are told, will see that this is very far from over. Worse, that it will continue to besmirch the right, proper and still ongoing effort to secure the freedom to marry.

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Marriage: A 2016 Non-Issue?

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Don’t look for culture war arguments in Campaign 2016, says Michael Barone:

I don’t think you’ll hear much about it in the 2016 campaign. The reason is that opinion on it cuts across party lines. More than any other issue I can remember, it splits Americans along lines of age. Elderly voters tend to oppose it, though by significantly smaller margins than in the past. Young voters tend to favor it by increasingly large majorities.

Most Democratic politicians favor same-sex marriage. But they don’t want to risk losing the support of elderly and many churchgoing black voters who oppose it but would otherwise support them. Most Republican politicians oppose it. But they want the votes of many Millennial generation voters who consider it a no-brainer. These splits affect primary as well as general election electorates.

So both parties are in the position of the legendary old-time politician who said, “Some of my friends are for the bill and some of my friend are against the bill, and I’m always with my friends.”

While obviously liberal Democrats have been readier to support marriage equality than conservative Republicans, few would have predicted the general silence from the mainstream GOP on this issue as of late.

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Payback Time, Again

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Equality Virginia, the commonwealth state’s marriage equality lobby, can claim a role in bringing the freedom to marry to all Virginians. Kudos all round. But now, what will they do? I know! Force bakers and photographers to accept gigs that they would rather turn down. That’ll show ‘em.

This week, the group sent out a fundraising letter stating:

While we celebrate marriage, opponents of equality are doubling down on intolerance—doing their best to push Virginia backward, and trying to…use the upcoming General Assembly session to ensure that “the rights and freedoms of those who disagree with the redefinition of marriage are treated equally and not discriminated against in their religious practice, education, business, or employments.”

“The situation is urgent,” the letter declares.

Along the same lines, the Washington Post “Civilities” advice column recently ran a letter about New York state innkeepers who were fined $13,000 by the state:

I am writing about the New York state couple who refused to allow a lesbian couple to use their farm for their wedding. As a gay man who recently married, I’m troubled by this situation because I find that too many gay people who say they are being discriminated against are not willing to see that others have different beliefs and values, especially when it comes to marriage rights. In planning my own wedding, I had only one bad experience when a vendor said it would not cater to my husband and me; I took my business elsewhere. As bad as this sounds, I believe that business owners should have the freedom to choose whom they serve…

Post columnist Steven Petrow responded, indignantly: “Of course, it’s a shame that not everyone in your shoes gets to celebrate with their second-choice of vendors.” He continued:

Frankly, I wasn’t surprised to see some columnists’ blowback against the lesbian couple or New York’s $13,000 penalty against the innkeepers…. I was surprised, though, by the large number of my LGBT Facebook followers who seemed to share that view. One gay man posted: “Why ruin someone else’s livelihood, when you still found another venue, still got married, and are still just as happy?” And this from a lesbian reader: “Let us not start becoming bullies after everything we fought for….

Clearly my sympathies lie with the McCarthys [the lesbian couple], not the farm owners. I can only imagine the hurt and humiliation the couple felt when they were turned away, and I applaud them for not taking the insult quietly.

To which the Cato Institute’s David Boaz tweeted, “Let’s go around fining everyone $13,000 to show the need for tolerance.”

As I’ve said before, whether you think government should force small businesspeople to provide services for religious ceremonies they feel violate their religious beliefs has all to do with your concept of individual liberties, and whether these are fundamental rights of individuals or are gifts for the state to bestow as progressive elites decide is fit, and holding that the right not to act is no right at all. For those in the latter camp, there is just no convincing them that this is all so very wrong.

More. Making A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage. It isn’t helped when the secondary message is that we have no tolerance for religious dissension.

Furthermore. Welcome, Huffington Post readers and viewers from other links. Also check out our most recent postings.

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Spot On

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Just because it’s fun, and true, here’s a link to our friend James Kirchick’s latest take-down of the rich, powerful and corrupt: The Rise and Fall of Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge, America’s Worst Gay Couple.

Just one of the article’s pertinent observations:

One suspects that had this couple been heterosexual and conservative, the initial media attention would not have been quite so toadying. We would have no doubt been treated to endless stories about how a “rapacious” “right-wing” millionaire, who had done nothing to earn his fortune, set out to destroy one of liberalism’s great institutions all the while enabling his power-mad spouse to “buy” a seat in congress. But everything about the Hughes-Eldridge pairing militated against such a portrayal. The prospect of a fresh-faced, conventionally liberal, gay couple hit every media sweet spot.

More. The Washington Blade takes on Hughes. The story is really one about factions of the left duking it out, the parvenue progressives vs. the Old Guard.

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Social Issues Polarization and Politics

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There is a similarity in the way that Obama has approached immigration and the Hispanic voting bloc, and his approach to gay issues—including “don’t ask don’t tell” repeal, the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and marriage equality—and the gay voting bloc. It boils down to this: Obama and the congressional Democratic leadership (Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi) will often not act when they can in order to maintain a campaign issue and mobilize the relevant bloc for the next election. But when Obama feels he is forced to act, he does so in a way that’s ensured to inflame polarization and partisanship, which he then attempts to use to his advantage.

On immigration reform, in 2007 Sen. Obama scuttled a comprehensive legislative deal worked out with John McCain and other immigration centrists in both parties, allowing him to use the issue in his 2008 presidential campaign. Then, having won the presidency and with his party in control of both houses of Congress, Obama, Reid and Pelosi did nothing for the next two years on immigration. Then they ran on the issue (albeit unsuccessfully) in the 2010 midterms. At which point the Republicans took over the House and blocked a somewhat bipartisan deal that had passed the Democratic Senate, as part of their own bloc pandering (for the anti-immigration vote).

Similarly, as I’ve blogged before, Obama and congressional Democrats did nothing to move ENDA out of committee during 2009-10, when in control of Congress. Nor did they attempt to put an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell” up until the very end of 2010, when LGBT activists (excluding the lapdogs at the Human Rights Campaign) and several LGBT progressive bloggers went ballistic, since it seemed likely the GOP would win the midterms.

The Democrats’ endgame strategy was to attach “don’t ask” repeal to a Defense Authorization bill they knew Republicans would be compelled to vote against, even if they supported ending the ban. Gays serving or hoping to serve their country would lose out, but the issue could be used to mobilize gay voters in the midterms. And if the GOP took the House, Republicans could then be blamed for keeping the ban in place (which the GOP leadership, alas, would do, placating their party’s social conservatives base).

At which point, thanks mainly to Senators Susan Collins, a Republican, and Joe Lieberman, by then an independent, a “clean” motion to end the military ban was pushed and passed, with a surprising amount of GOP support, but annoying the Democratic leadership that had wanted to stymie it.

As Collins aide Mathew Gagnon wrote:

The White House and Reid had decided that hammering home the “party of no” narrative and painting the Republicans as obstinate obstructionists was, to them, good politics. Since that wasn’t actually happening, they tried to make it appear that it was.

But Reid got outflanked. Collins, together with Lieberman, unexpectedly introduced a standalone bill to repeal don’t ask, don’t tell, intended to go around Reid’s roadblocks. After a great deal of lobbying to rally a number of other Republicans to support the bill — a necessary step to prevent a filibuster — the Collins bill eventually passed 65-31.

And that, of course, is just one example of the Obama way.

More. Via Edward Morrissey in The Fiscal Times:

The Obama administration and Democratic majority…agenda has focused on wedge issues that have little to do with the middle class, but everything to do with demagoguing for narrow activist interests. … Democrats could have produced a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2009-10 rather than Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, but chose to renege on Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge of making it a first-year issue.

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NOM’s Time Is Passed

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I think that Salon may be jumping the gun in declaring that the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage has “collapsed into debt“—it doesn’t take much money to fund a group that basically issues press releases and talks to the media, so I suspect it will be around to make mischief and get quoted. But NOM’s fortunes are clearly in decline as the freedom to marry advances without popular backlash, outside the diminishing fever swamps of the anti-gay right. Also, alienating bedrock Republicans by backing liberal Democrats over gay GOPers was just plain stupid.

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Changing Times

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David Lampo writes in an op-ed in The Hill:

In short, there is not a shred of evidence that the Republican sweep was motivated in any significant way by the recent court decisions that have made same-sex marriage legal in 33 states and the District of Columbia. The response to these developments on the part of most voters, including Republicans, has been a collective yawn.

And in those blue states where Republican candidates won unexpectedly, it was their support for gay rights that made them acceptable to enough Democrat voters to win their races.

Another political sign: Republican Congressman replacing Michele Bachmann names gay marriage supporter his chief-of-staff . (The post is from a conservative, anti-gay-marriage website, which obviously disapproves.)

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Young Voters: Socially Liberal, Less Democratic

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“The GOP gained young voters, but only because it lost the culture war,” is the call-out quote (print edition) summing up this New York Times op-ed by Mark Bauerlein, senior editor of the conservative religious journal First Things. He writes:

Exit poll data show that young voters backed House Democrats 54 percent to 43 percent, half the advantage of 2006 and two percentage points lower than in 2010. …

It’s not that [young voters] have become less socially liberal; it’s that social conservatism is a paper tiger. Liberalism has won so handily in the culture and courts that it no longer serves as a rallying cry. …

When it comes to young voters, liberal politicians are victims of their culture-war success. They have pressed a laissez-faire posture in moral and private matters, and have won. But millennials have adopted not the posture of their liberal elders that fostered group identity (be it “union member,” “disenfranchised minority” or “F.D.R. Democrat”), but a soft libertarianism that makes individual preference king. …Once social conservatism was defeated, the set allegiance to Democratic campaigns was bound to erode.

I’ve said before that the victory (or, at least, clearly approaching victory) for the freedom to marry would save Republicans from themselves. And that appears to be playing out.

More. From The Atlantic: Republicans Are Driving the Momentum for Gay Marriage.

Furthermore. It’s not inconsequential that the favorability of the Democratic Party is at a 20-year low, having sunk below Republican Party numbers. “The GOP currently has an image advantage over the Democratic Party,” according to Gallup, although “neither party is held in particularly high regard.”

More again. Another reason for the shifting political tides: Democrat Voters Confused: “I Didn’t Realize I Would Be The One Who Was Going to Pay For It Personally”

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