Politics & Public Opinion

Politics as Blood Sport

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We’ll see how this pans out. I do know that the anti-gay right and the “progressive” gay left (especially) would do anything—yes, anything—to keep openly gay Republican Carl DeMaio from being elected to Congress from San Diego. And he had been leading in the polls.

DeMaio calls himself a proud gay American, but he earned the everlasting ire of the left when he spearheaded efforts by the San Diego City Council to reform bloated public employee pension obligations. The unions and their LGBT-left allies went bonkers.

As noted here (and I’m not apologizing for citing a Fox News columnist):

One false attack drew the attention of the San Diego Ethics Commission. An anonymous left-wing group funded a SuperPac and sent mailers of DeMaio Photoshopped next to a drag queen to neighborhoods with a majority of elderly and African-American voters, knowing that such a photo would depress support for DeMaio. …

The Victory Fund, which is a group that says it supports any openly gay candidate, first told him that he couldn’t win when he was considering running for mayor in 2008 against the now disgraced former winner of that contest, Bob Filner.

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. The Human Rights Campaign also has declined to endorse DeMaio in either his mayoral or congressional race.

And this: Screens Smashed, Cords Cut inside DeMaio’s Campaign Office.

And this. “The post on the freshman Democrat’s campaign site referred to DeMaio, a gay Republican, as a ‘Mary.’ … a staff member uploaded the post about a week ago from the liberal website AmericaBlog…”

So unless these allegations are shown to have substance, I’ll remain skeptical.

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Saving the GOP from Itself

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Back in January, Virginia’s GOP Senate candidate Ed Gillespie told the Washington Times why he opposes same-sex marriage:

“My faith also teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman. In fact in the Catholic church it’s not just a teaching, it’s a holy sacrament just like communion. I believe that as well.”

On the day that the Supreme Court let stand the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals decision overturning Virginia’s ban on gay marriage and clerks began issuing marriage licenses in the Old Dominion, Gillespie told an interviewer he has “always felt that this is a matter for the states to determine. I don’t believe that the federal government should set policy relative to marriage. I think the states should. And, obviously, given the court’s ruling, it is the law of the land today.”

I realize he’s not saying he supports marriage equality, but the shift in tone is significant. He’s making it clear it is now, for him, a non-issue, Whereas before he felt compelled to run on his opposition to marriage equality citing his religious faith, he is now indicating it has become a done deal.

As I’ve said before on this blog, the best thing that could happen to Republicans would be for the Supreme Court to take marriage off the table, as it’s now done in 11 more states (albeit by ruling not to review appellate decisions that upended state marriage bans).

Opposition to marriage equality only pays off with the GOP’s base of older social conservatives; in general elections, support for the freedom to marry now favors the Democrats. Most GOP candidates and would-be candidates know this and must be relieved that the Supreme Court (as the appeals reach their end) is giving them a pass.

More. Our friend Dale Carpenter (who once blogged here but abandoned us for The Volokh Conspiracy just because they have exponentially more readers) explains why marriage equality will not provoke the unending resistance that abortion has engendered:

I remain convinced that even Americans who fervently oppose same-sex marriage now will see a profound difference between allowing someone to marry another person and allowing someone to abort an unborn child. We aren’t likely to see protests blocking access to marriage-license bureaus or sidewalk counselors trying to talk gay couples out of marrying. Even if you oppose same-sex marriage as a matter of religious belief, you can get along in a nation that allows it in a way that you can’t really ever make peace with what you believe is killing innocent children.

Which is also why Republican politicians (no, not all, but including legitimate conservatives like Ed Gillespie) are going to be willing to let it go.

Furthermore. I just caught up with Jennifer Rubin’s Washington Post column from Oct. 7. She quotes an AP report about the reaction by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a conservative, public union fighting Republican who is seeking re-election in November and could run for president in 2016 if he prevails:

“For us, it’s over in Wisconsin,” said [Walker], whose state’s appeal was among those the court declined with a two-word order, “certiorari denied” — meaning the lower court’s ruling stands. … “To me, I’d rather be talking in the future now more about our jobs plan and our plan for the future of the state,” Walker said. “I think that’s what matters to the kids. It’s not this issue.”

The column notes that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), “the favorite of religious conservatives,” responded with a vow to introduce a constitutional amendment designed to prevent “the federal government or the courts from attacking or striking down state marriage laws.” But Cruz and his sort are becoming outliers who pander to a narrowing base. If you’ve lost Scott Walker, it’s over.

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Let’s Go to the Stats

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Pew Research takes a look at public opinion in the U.S. regarding homosexuality as sin, same-sex marriage, and requiring businesses to provide services to gay weddings.

The big news is that support for same-sex marriage has fallen from 54% last year to 50%. Says Pew:

It is too early to know whether this is an anomaly or the beginning of a reversal or leveling off of the growth in support for same-sex marriage widely observed in polls over the past decade.

This was noted, accurately, by the Wall Street Journal’s law blog, and for ideological purposes by by the National Organization for Marriage.

But for me, a more troubling finding is that 50 percent of all Americans consider homosexuality to be a sin, up from 45 percent last year. This mini-backlash (if that’s what it is) may be related to judicial victories for marriage equality in appellate courts, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, and perhaps to local rulings that small business owners must bake cakes and photograph gay weddings even if they have religious objections to these assignments and would prefer to let their competitors take these gigs.

In other words, some of the backlash may be an inevitable result of progress toward equality under the law, and some may be self-inflicted by activists who would violate others liberty in order to compel ideological conformity.

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Marriage Politics

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“[S]everal forces, political as well as demographic, may converge to render a presidential candidacy by [Rob] Portman, the Ohio Republican U.S. senator, as at least nominally viable,” writes Stephen Koff, Washington bureau chief for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. About a potential run by Portman, one of a handful of GOP congressmembers who support marriage equality, Koff observes:

Key to this is the fact that a Portman candidacy could align with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that would end the legal and constitutional fight over same-sex marriage. Such a ruling could come by next summer, well before the Republican voters go to the first 2016 caucuses and primaries. …

Patrick Egan, a New York University political scientist who has studied public opinion and gay and lesbian issues in politics, said, “My sense is that in their heart of hearts, Republican Party leaders would very much like to see the issue of gay marriage taken off the political agenda for 2016 and beyond.”

A credible run by Portman would signal a profound shift in the GOP. However, as Koff noted, that would be predicated on a Supreme Court ruling that takes marriage off the political table. But last week, liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that if the appellate circuits keep finding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage (albeit in decisions that are invariably stayed), then there is “no need for us to rush.”

That could mean several years delay as each of the circuits address the issue. So, ironically, supporters of marriage equality (as opposed to those who would like to keep the issue brewing as a culture war hot point, for political mobilization purposes), should be hoping that the Sixth Circuit (covering Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee) breaks ranks and upholds state bans on same-sex marriage, as law professor and IGF contributing author Dale Carpenter writes it seems poised to do. That would create a split among the circuits that would dramatically hasten the Supreme Court’s ruling on the matter.

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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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