Politics & Public Opinion

ENDA Is Passé

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Openly gay Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) hopes to get half the members of the House to sign a discharge petition that would force a vote on a revised Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The reformulated ENDA would limit the current bill’s exemption for religious organizations, including religiously affiliated private schools and charities. The narrowed exemption might apply only to ministerial positions, which would be a deal-killer for many/most of ENDA’s current House GOP co-sponsors, and I suspect also some Democrats. And although ENDA already was passed in the Senate, with revised language it would stall there as well during reconciliation.

The dilemma: Without a sharply curtailed exemption, many LGBT activists have announced they will no longer support ENDA.

In short, ENDA still is likely to be on a road going nowhere, although the discharge petition endeavor will try to mobilize LGBT voters in the midterms (it’s also supported by openly gay GOP congressional candidates Carl DeMaio and Richard Tisei).

Despite these efforts, ENDA increasingly seems like inside beltway baseball for politicos and activists; it’s no longer generating any real interest among gay voters, whose passion is directed toward marriage equality.

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Dinner with Log Cabin Republicans

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Tonight I attended the Log Cabin Republicans’ Annual Spirit of Lincoln dinner in Washington, D.C. Guests of honor I spotted at the reception or dinner included Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), along with openly gay congressional candidates Carl DeMaio (Calif) and Richard Tisei (Mass.) I chatted with tax activist Grover Norquist (always affable) and journalist friend James Kirchick. Texas Log Cabin folks at my table entertained with tales of battling against their hidebound state party.

Tom Wahl, Jr., the chairman of the Liberty Education Forum, spoke of working to change opposition to gay legal equality in the deep south and elsewhere, Republican to Republican—a campaign I believe will be more effective than a more highly publicized effort being undertaken by an LGBT progressive organization.

The first keynoter was supply-side economist Larry Kudlow, who talked about Reagan’s embrace of big-tent Republicanism, and why we need to make the case that unshackling American enterprise from excessive taxation and regulation is good for middle and working class Americans. He called for passage of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (I wonder if he knows many leading LGBT activists are now against ENDA because of its exemption for religious organizations). Then Mary Cheney spoke movingly about the necessity for marriage equality, and why we will not have true equality for LGBT Americans until both parties are onboard, and signs that this is now happening thanks to the efforts of Log Cabin Republicans and others working within the GOP.

Giving credence to Cheney’s view, in the Washington Examiner Carmen Fowler LaBerge, who “advocates on social issues from a Christian conservative position” announced “I’ll probably get myself in trouble — but I’m going to do it anyway: I think there’s a growing consensus that the culture war on marriage has been lost.” Other articles have noted that “culture war” issues are now working in Democrats’ favor.

What can’t go on forever won’t, and the GOP’s opposition to full legal equality for gay people, including the freedom to marry, is one of those things.

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Primary Night

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Openly gay business professor Dan Innis has lost his GOP primary bid to represent New Hampshire’s first district. In Massachusetts, scandal-tarred Democratic incumbent Rep. John Tierney was defeated in the Democratic primary, which means openly gay GOP Republican challenger Richard Tisei is now much less likely to prevail in the general election (although it would be nice to see the Human Rights Campaign endorse him, given no Democratic incumbent in the race and no prospect of the Democrats reclaiming the House).

That leaves San Diego’s Carl DeMaio as the openly gay GOP congressional candidate with a real shot at winning. DeMaio, of course, is not backed by either HRC (which is loath to support any Republican, whether gay, gay-supportive or otherwise) nor the Victory Fund (which did support Innis and Tisei).

DeMaio, while serving on the San Diego city council, spearheaded public pension reforms detested by government employee unions, which seems more important to LGBT “nonpartisan” but progressive groups then his support for marriage equality, or even his pro-choice stance on abortion (another Victory Fund litmus test). Log Cabin Republicans, however, are energetically working on his behalf.

A positive sign: Monica Wehby, a Republican Senate candidate in Oregon, unveils a TV spot highlighting her support for marriage equality. It’s “a reflection of the rapidly shifting politics of the issue,” says Politico.

[Site redesign – thanks to our volunteer help! Comments should now be back, with new posts to come later this week (busy, busy) – Stephen H. Miller.]

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Numbers Racket

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A report last week from the Department of Health & Human Services/Centers for Disease Control finds that only 1.6% of Americans identify as gay or lesbian and 0.7% identify as bisexual, meaning just 2.3% of the population identifies as LGB (T’s were not included). The findings are based on data from the 2013 National Health Interview Survey.

In past years, such low numbers would result in considerable pushback from LGBT activists, who have long bandied about the figure of 10% for gay America, citing Kinsey’s research in the 1940s, to the consternation of social conservatives. Others have put the number at around 5%, and indeed exit polling typically places the self-identified LGB vote around that figure.

Maybe because the new stats come from the Obama administration, the response has been…crickets. Or maybe with victories coming so quickly on marriage equality and given Obama’s new executive order on nondiscrimination among federal contractors, the numbers game just isn’t that important.

But 1.6% seems way out of whack with everyday experience, even with the expectation that gay people gravitate to larger cities in big numbers. Are people lying to government survey takers? Or to themselves despite their sexual behavior? And do we in fact go to the polls in numbers far out of proportion with Americans overall? Perhaps better analysis will be forthcoming.

More. The Washington Post quotes a few spokesfolk at second-tier and regional LGBT groups who take issue with the survey’s low LGB count, while the Human Rights Campaign says the number isn’t important.

Furthermore. I just came across these lessons about sex from big data at Time online:

3. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
Like any good data scientist, Rudder lets literature—in this case, Thoreau—explain the human condition. Rudder cites a Google engineer who found that searches for “depictions of gay men” (by which the engineer meant gay porn) occur at the rate of 5% across every state, roughly the proportion of the world’s population that social scientists have estimated to be gay. So if a poll shows you that, for instance, 1% of a state’s population is gay, the other 4% is probably still out there.

4. Searches for “Is my husband gay?” occur in states where gay marriage is least accepted.
Here’s a Big Data nugget you can see for yourself: Type “Is my husband” in Google, and look at your first result. Rudder notes that this search is most common in South Carolina and Louisiana, two states with some of the lowest same-sex marriage approval rates.

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The ENDA Brouhahah, Again

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Major LGBT rights and progressives groups, including Lambda Legal and the ACLU, have withdrawn their support for the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that seeks to ban workplace discrimination against LGBT workers in the private sector, because ENDA includes a broad exemption for religious organizations, including religiously affiliated hospitals and charities, for instance. The act passed the Senate last year, when it was supported by these same groups, despite the religious exemption.

But after the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, finding that closely held businesses run by their owners on religious principles (but not necessarily religiously affiliated) need not be forced to purchase certain contraceptives for their workers, the left has found an issue.

ENDA, of course, appears to have no chance of being brought up in the GOP House, and the House is going to stay GOP controlled for the foreseeable future. So much of this is about ensuring that the president’s upcoming executive order banning anti-LGBT discrimination among federal contractors doesn’t provide a religious exemption, except perhaps to houses of worship, and some would probably not want to see even that.

I don’t think business owners should be forced by the state to violate their religious consciences, and I am even more wary of the state telling religious organizations who they can hire, fire, or promote to leadership. But the issue becomes clouded when these organizations accept taxpayer money to serve the state.

Nevertheless religious organizations, or even private companies that can demonstrate they are run on religious principles, represent a tiny fraction of the workplace. And much of this controversy feels manufactured with the aim of inducing a certain amount of politically useful hysteria on the left.

More. Some politicos tell me that, at least before this latest contretemps, ENDA had enough GOP support in the House to pass if the leadership would allow it to be brought up for a vote. But that’s conditioned on a broad exemption for religiously affiliated organizations. So apart from pressuring Obama not to provide a meaningful religious exemption in his executive order, another result of the LGBT and progressive groups withdrawing their support for ENDA, as currently conceived, is to ensure that it has no chance of passing the House even if brought forward, thus keeping the issue of a “pure” ENDA alive for another round of Democratic electioneering and fundraising.

ENDA, it should be noted, languished in committee when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during the first two years of the Obama presidency (2009-10), even as it appeared Republicans were likely to retake the House in the November 2010 midterm election, during which the party appealed to gay voters for funds and support (wait for it) in order to pass ENDA in the next Congress. Yes, kiddies, it’s all about politics and mobilizing the base, and always has been.

Furthermore. As the Washington Post article linked to above reports, the Human Rights Campaign is the outlier among LGBT groups, maintaining its support for a passable ENDA with a religious exemption clause. HRC very much wants, eventually, to claim a victory for ENDA, its top legislative agenda item. Other LGBT groups with rival fundraising operations, however, don’t see their interests aligned with passage anytime soon.

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Back to Basics

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Same-sex marriage came and went in the US Supreme Court, and the the most reactionary Republican dominated state legislatures responded by — passing new laws restriction abortion.  While the high court was deliberating a case challenging the power of Congress to prohibit or punish same-sex marriage under state law, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, South Dakota and Indiana were all exploring creative ways to provoke the high court to revisit Roe v Wade.

The lack of an outcry about U.S. Windsor is partly due to the fact that the opinion left those states’ anti-marriage laws intact.  But the renewed focus on abortion and Roe, at a time when the highest court in the land was setting down a marker about marriage equality suggests something else is at work.

That something else can be seen in the non-reaction in California to the opinion overturning the notorious Prop. 8. In 2000, California voters passed Prop. 22, an initiative statute prohibiting same-sex marriage, with 61% of the vote.  The state Supreme Court overturned Prop. 22 as a violation of the state constitution in 2008, which prompted Prop. 8, an initiative that amended the state constitution itself to prohibit same-sex marriage.  Prop. 8 got a little over 52% of the vote, but a win is a win.

So California’s voters must be furious about the decision in Hollingsworth v Perry, right?

If so, it’s hard to see.  Less than two days after the ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals took the final step to permit same-sex marriages again in California, and while a very few of the usual suspects showed their faces to television cameras at the subsequent marriages throughout the state, there are no signs of outrage among the voters whose will was thwarted.

Opposition to same-sex marriage is different from opposition to abortion.  There is a real and substantial moral question with abortion: At what point does human life begin?  In the 40 years since Roe, that moral question has remained alive and vibrant, and the constitutional argument about abortion has seldom flagged.  Moral feelings about abortion start strong and tend to stay strong.

Not so for same-sex marriage, where moral feelings may have started strong, but have weakened substantially over time.  The moral consensus around same-sex marriage was collapsing even before the Supreme Court weighed in.  With each new iteration of the issue, voters see less reason for opposition, more reason in the arguments made for equality.  The moral argument against same-sex marriage is no more than the moral argument against non-procreative sexual activity; once heterosexuals can see their own procreative sexual desires in the broader context of a world in which procreation is controllable, the idea of sex for other reasons — pleasure, relational intimacy, emotional bonding or just for the hell of it — moves homosexuals from their historical outsider status to a proper role as fellow members of the human family.  Procreation is a good thing, but it is not all that sex is for.

The shift back to abortion for the old guard of the GOP is some evidence that this cultural shift on same-sex marriage is taking hold.  It is harder and harder to argue against the images of joyous couples getting married, and now joyous heterosexual friends and family are joining in the celebrations.  Connection and inclusion are moral instincts, family imperatives, that it takes an effort to deny.

There is still a strong sense that abortion is worth the effort.  For a small minority, the fight against same-sex marriage will continue to be a priority.  But the continent on which they once stood is becoming more of an island every day.

 

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Bad Religion

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The GOP is in a pickle.  You can only finesse extremists for so long.

Republicans are furiously trying to downplay the social issues that are so deeply important to their Christianist base; first because Romney has so firmly come down on so many sides of them, and it’s hard to keep the true believers focused on the right answers he’s given; but even more because the party leaders know that this whole religious thing is ready to collapse.

There are plenty of religious moderates in both parties, and they’re not the problem.  The problem is that the GOP has been actively courting the know-nothings, the ignorant, the crackpots and screwballs who take pride in their shallow thinking and insensitivity.  And now that they have these folks as a critical part of their voting base, they are stuck with loser candidates like Todd Akin, Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell and others.

The Democrats clearly have their shallow and insensitive interest groups that need hothouse political care, but there is a very big difference.  Labor, environmentalists, women’s groups, etc., are all motivated by narrow self-interest – exactly the kind of self-interest this nation’s founders anticipated and even expected.  No nation or system of government known to them was without factions, and their sensible response was to provide as many checks and balances on those factions as they could reasonably imagine.

They saw religion, though, as a special case.  The founders not only provided for the free exercise of religion, but also the prohibition on government establishment of religion.  That is because of the special factionalism and intensity that religion inspires.  The establishment clause not only protects government, itself, from religious fanaticism, it protects religions from one another, as well.  Any religion that could take hold of the levers of political power could far too easily use it against unbelievers or heretics.  The Puritans fled to this country for exactly that reason.

But there is no establishment clause for political parties, and the GOP has unwisely cultivated conservative religion, in particular, without understanding its inherent political pandemonium.

It is one thing to oppose abortion as a moral matter.  But in the 21st Century, it is something else entirely to take the position that contraception is the same moral issue.  The fine theological gradations necessary are not just inconsistent with American values, they are antithetical to them.  And just as a matter of raw politics, the use of contraception by American women at some point in their life is within the margin of error of being 100%.  The Vatican can get away with taking a position that only a fraction of its followers take seriously; it’s much harder for an American political party to pull that off.

It is that sophistry of the unsophisticated that got Todd Akin where he wound up.  The debate over “legitimate” and “illegitimate” rape is bad enough.  But let’s not forget that he really did say he thinks women’s bodies can make a moral judgment along those lines, and “shut down” the bad pregnancies.  This from a man who represents Republicans on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

There is a good, even a respectable debate to be had over abortion, but these folks prevent Republicans from engaging in it.  Party leaders were virtually unanimous in trying to get Akin to leave the race precisely because they do not want to have the debate on these terms.

And that’s also true of same-sex marriage.  The crude, hollow stereotypes that drive the GOP’s anti-gay voters short-circuit any responsible debate over equality, so the GOP prefers to ignore the issue, and cut it off as quickly as possible when it comes up.  Silence isn’t just golden, it’s an imperative.

But as with the relationship between abortion and contraception, there is a growing sense among even voters who instinctually believe that full marriage is wrong that the moral argument is nuanced.  But that sentiment is shut down to cater to the least common denominator thinking of the religious extremists.

As the party censors itself, it simultaneously alienates socially and morally reasonable voices, and makes itself look ridiculous.  That is what Log Cabin exploited with the party’s platform. Yes, they got rolled.  The paper-thin, entirely non-specific language about  how “all Americans” have the right to be treated with “dignity and respect,” is hard to square with the platform’s proposed language calling for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, unless you can respectfully and with dignity deny people equality.

But being in the room makes a difference.  The anti-gay forces had to directly face the people they want to discriminate against, and Log Cabin looked back.

Moreover, the contrast with the Democrats for reasonable Americans is now that much starker.  The GOP was right, strategically if not morally, to want to avoid the social issues in this campaign.  They’re not a winner for the party any more.  But the party fought hard for those conservative religious voters, and got what they wished for.

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