Politics & Public Opinion

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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Privacy As The Enemy

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Sally Ride is an American hero.  She is also an icon for women’s equality.

And, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, she is the absent heroine of the gay rights movement.

That is not necessarily damning.  There’s only so much one human being can do with her life.

But I don’t want to let Ride get off as easily as the media is allowing.  The New York Times obituary is typically lazy:

Dr. Ride was known for guarding her privacy. She rejected most offers for product endorsements, memoirs and movies, and her reticence lasted to the end. At her request, NASA kept her illness secret.

There are different kinds of privacy.  Resisting the commercial temptations of fame is not the same thing as keeping the fact that you have cancer a family matter.  And neither of those is the same as staying in the closet.

Ride was born into the two revolutions that directly affected her life: women’s equality and gay equality.  She took up one of those revolutions, and rejected the other.

Her life’s work was to make sure girls who were interested in science would not feel the pressure she faced to repress that inner drive.  She was instrumental in helping to change that, and the world is better for her accomplishments.

But the gay rights revolution was not her thing.  Even those of us who pay close attention had no idea she was a lesbian, much less a woman who had maintained a 27 year relationship with another woman.

No one has an obligation to be politically active.  Vito Russo, in the new HBO documentary about his very politically active life, articulates the point well:

This is a good question: What makes people political in their lives?  The world is full of injustice.  Some people it bothers, some people it doesn’t. Me, it bothers.

The injustice of gay inequality, and particularly the injustice of the closet did not bother Ride.  Or, maybe more accurately, it did not bother her enough to do anything with the public side of her life to try and change it.  She simply accepted the closet, and took advantage of the work that others were doing on that front in order to live in a not-very-public-but-not-entirely-private lesbian relationship.

She shares this approach to the gay rights revolution with Mary Cheney.  They are among the free-riders of this struggle, letting others do the fighting.

The psychological damage that cultural homophobia did to those of Ride’s generation cannot be underestimated, and maybe her passivity can be forgiven or excused or pitied.  In the world she grew up in, that brand of privacy was often the only natural protective device that those who lacked Russo’s political spirit and intolerance of injustice had.

But it’s time to retire privacy as the Get Out Of Politics Free Card.  Fear can still justify the closet in many places and circumstances.  So can personal economic strategy, I suppose.  But not privacy.  That cramped isolationism is exactly the thing we are fighting.  It’s a form of self-indulgence at best, and more often it’s just shame.  We should draw a distinction between external forces that make coming out problematic, and internal ones that are corrosive remnants of an older view of homosexuality.

Even heterosexuals are lining up to support our equality today.  Ted Olson and David Boies, Lady Gaga and Brad Pitt, Ben Cohen and Scott Fujita are on the front lines of our battle.  The bar should be extremely high for any of us to remain aloof from our own fight for our own self-worth.  Every homosexual does not need to be out in the streets if they are not politically inclined.  But that’s not a matter of privacy, it’s a matter of preference.  It should go by its right name.

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Privacy, Silence, Neutrality and Anderson Cooper

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I am as glad – and grateful – as anyone for Anderson Cooper’s non-coming-out coming out.  There are some lessons in this story worth talking about.

People who know Cooper seem to agree with him that he was not really in the closet except with respect to the general public.  That is a telling fact.  As the walls of the closet have come down on the private side of people’s lives, there is still that remaining door that can be opened or closed to the public.  The people we know on our side of the door – the private side – are far more likely today to know we are homosexual than they ever have been.  Cooper enjoyed that private side of the closet with his family and friends.

But Cooper is not like the rest of us (and not just in what he does for a black t-shirt).  For those of us without a public face, the need to come out or not to others – to decide whether to open that door — is a recurring issue; we are always meeting new people, and regularly face the problem of how much to reveal to whom, and in what circumstances.

People like Cooper who have a large public reputation have to deal with this a little differently.  Word spreads about the famous, particularly about something as personal and controversial (or at least pretty interesting) as homosexuality.  News of my homosexuality never hit Twitter; it never really achieved a threshold of being news.  For Cooper, opening that door once to a world that knows him as a personality pretty much brings him out in toto.  There will still be pockets of cluelessness, but for the most part, this is a one-time deal for someone of Cooper’s stature.

The Entertainment Weekly story that got this story moving makes the point that it’s possible for even celebrities today to come out without its being a big deal, and Cooper’s example contradicts that (in the short term, since it was kind of newsish) but reaffirms the larger point, having such a short shelf-life.  Writing this post all of two days after Andrew Sullivan broke the story already feels like I’m stretching it out.

But that’s where the political aspect of sexual orientation comes in.  For me, when it comes to sexual orientation and politics, I was born this way.  It has taken me a long time to accept that some people – a lot of people – are not born political, or at least don’t take to politics naturally.  I see a need for lesbians and gay men to take political action, but as people who are more activist than me can tell you, it’s always been an uphill battle.

Cooper reports on political stories, but as a journalist he should not be an activist.  As a gay man, that puts him in a difficult spot.

A lot of politically active lesbians and gay men resent celebrities who are privately lesbian or gay, but have not opened the public door.  We have an enormous public relations job to do, and need all the help we can get.  That is one of the things that animated the movement to out politicians and celebrities – the idea that they had an obligation to use their public face to help us all gain equality.  The worst of the worst were the ones who worked against legal equality, but the desire for even neutral or supportive public figures to come out – or be dragged out – came from the mathematical problem of being a minority in the first place.  We start out with numbers that are staggeringly against us in a democracy, and then have the additional problem of members of our group who won’t even admit they belong.

Cooper seems to have struggled with that.  He mentions “the unintended outcomes” of maintaining his privacy, and says he may have given the impression that he is trying to hide something that makes him uncomfortable, ashamed or afraid.  His coming out was intended to – and does — clarify any misimpressions.

But those misimpressions are, and always have been, a perfectly natural consequence of silence.  If about 95% of the population is heterosexual, and someone doesn’t positively identify as homosexual, is it unreasonable for people to assume that individual is straight?  The open discussion of homosexuality over the last quarter century or so changes the bet somewhat, since silence now looks more telling, when it isn’t downright implausible.  Yet many people still cling to the fig leaf of privacy as if it were without consequence.

In this impressive compilation of Cooper in the field, one quote stood out: “Journalists don’t like to become part of the story, but unfortunately they have been made part of the story. . . . “  That, I am afraid, is true of sexual orientation as well.  Our inequality is embedded in the status quo that recognizes only heterosexual relationships, and if we say or do nothing, we are part of a story that tolerates and accepts our second-class status.  We cannot get out of that story, or create a more appropriate status quo unless we act, unless we speak, unless we stand up as lesbians and gay men.

The false neutrality of silence is clear in this story about Jitters and Bliss Coffee.  The company claims to be neutral when it comes to marriage.  They say they don’t have a public position on the matter, and “respect the views of all their customers.”  To demonstrate that neutrality, they joined up with the National Organization for Marriage to offer NOM members a non-Starbuck’s coffee option, since Starbuck’s has taken a position supporting marriage equality.

That is the neutrality of the status quo, being nakedly manipulated to preserve itself.  Our silence, their silence, anyone’s silence is a vote for NOM, is a vote for the bias and prejudice that are woven into the fabric of current law.

In this politicized environment, privacy equals silence, and silence equals — well, not death anymore, but certainly some spiritual damage.  That was the unholy balance that Cooper upset.  Neutrality is a primary virtue of the journalistic profession, but when “neutrality” means “the status quo,” and if the status quo is, itself, biased, then neutrality is not neutral.  Anderson Cooper’s coming out helps expose that truth.

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Chess

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The sound you hear is Jay Carney breathing the world’s deepest sigh of relief.

For him, the squirming and hedging and sweating are over.  The President is on record supporting same-sex marriage.  There is an answer now to the question.

Yes, it’s Obama’s personal view, and yes, he’s said he supported same-sex marriage before, and then wandered afield.  But when you’re in any other political office, you can take positions that might play out differently when you’re being asked about the question in the presidential arena.  Ask Mitt Romney about health care.  Or anything.

Of course I think Obama did the right thing morally.  But for those of us who enjoy the chess of politics, I also think it was exquisite strategy.  First, after the loss in North Carolina, Obama’s campaign had a convention to worry about.  In that place and with that political context, any fudging on the bottom line would have been unacceptable to a lot of conventioneers at best, and could have led to some very ugly protests inside and/or outside the convention hall.

That’s taken care of now.  The only possible protests left will come from the motley, disgruntled religious types, who aren’t part of Obama’s base, and don’t figure into a winning electoral strategy for him.  Those protests, if they happen, now come under the heading of So What?

And that leads to the bigger point.  This is fine politics because it boxes Romney in with the worst part of his party.  Karl Rove poisoned the well on this issue, and now Obama is making Romney drink, and drink deeply.

Which Romney promptly did, and from a bigger cup than Obama could have hoped for.  Romney said he is not only opposed to same-sex marriage, but to any legal recognition of same-sex couples that approaches marriage equality — just what the worst part of North Carolina gave a big thumbs-up to.

How can Romney now appeal to the 2/3 of Americans who can no longer abide the complete exclusion of same-sex couples and their families from the law?  What he is stuck with are the politically tone-deaf, like the American Family Association and the Catholic League, who are so blinded by full marriage equality that they can’t see. . . um, straight.  Their hysteria increases in direct proportion to the growing support for full marriage equality, and for the middle ground of civil unions.  They are now 2/3 of the way to Spinal Tap’s famous eleven.

There are, of course, a lot of other issues, and an eternity until the election; lots of things are possible.  But on this issue, Obama just made his life a whole lot easier, and Romney’s a lot more difficult.  Obama has made it clear that he wants no part of the religious right’s intolerance on sexual orientation.  That’s a political strategy, and it’s a defensible moral stance.  But most of all, it’s got to be nice not to have to pretend you need the kind of votes that Bryan Fischer and the sadly devolved offspring of Billy Graham have to offer.

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