IGF CultureWatch

James Kirchick writes for The Tablet about how Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in NYC, the prestigious LGBT synagogue, is now run by a virulently anti-Israel faction that has brought a large number of straight anti-Zionists (mainly left-feminists) into the congregation. This has occurred under the leadership of Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum who, along with her partner, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, make up a formidable leftwing power couple. As one departing member put it, Kleinbaum is “essentially delivering Hamas propaganda” from the pulpit. That’s deeply depressing but the answer is for those of good will to form their own gay congregation that does not preach the left’s dogma of Israel hatred. And the sooner the better.

Back in the ’80s, in the pre-Kleinbaum era, I attended a service at Beit Simchat Torah. It was deeply moving and spiritually uplifting. How sad that this is no longer true.

More. “Alvie” comments:

Bringing in a large number of straight anti-Zionists from NYC’s leftwing feminist community falls under the typical pattern of subverting institutions in order to take them over and redirect them to serve the “progressive” cause. The Presbyterian church is experiencing something very similar — a majority of Presbyterians are not anti-Israel, but its leadership council is now run by anti-Zionists who support a boycott of the Jewish state (but not of the anti-gay Islamic dictatorships that target Israel, natch).

Furthermore. Via Michael Gerson’s Aug. 28 column in the Washington Post:

In a recent essay, Matti Friedman, a reporter for the Associated Press in Jerusalem between 2006 and 2011, recalls being forced to weave a different story: of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimhood. He says his editors consistently spiked reporting inconsistent with this narrative, even when it included major news (such as details of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s peace offer). …

Friedman blames this “severe malfunction” of journalism on the resurgence of an old pattern. Historically, Jews have been a stateless entity on which people have projected their anger and resentments. With the advent of a Jewish state, those projections are focused on Israel, which gets disproportionate (and disproportionately hostile) attention as the embodiment of colonialism and nationalism — things that European and American liberals find offensive.

“You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on,” says Friedman. “The descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were — the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country.

Via Reason: Libertarians, Gay Marriage, and Freedom of Association. It’s subtitled, “How the same right allows for both same-sex marriage recognition and refusing to sell gay couples wedding cakes.”

Progressives and conservatives won’t get it.

You’d never guess it from the liberal media/blogosphere echo chamber, but social conservatives increasingly feel alienated from the GOP as the party distances itself from culture war issues (at least outside of Texas and the fervid mind of Michele Bachmann). As the Washington Post reports:

Many social conservatives say they feel politically isolated as the country seems to be hurtling to the left, with marijuana now legal in Colorado and gay marriage gaining ground across the nation. They feel out of place in a GOP increasingly dominated by tea party activists and libertarians who prefer to focus on taxes and the role of government and often disagree with social conservatives on drugs or gay rights. …
The disconnect between social conservatives and the GOP has become a “chasm,” said Gary Bauer, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 and is now head of the Campaign for Working Families. …“Values voters have been treated as the stepchildren of the family, while the party has wanted to get on with so-called more electorally popular ideas,” Bauer said.

Interestingly, the paper notes the antipathy social conservatives feel toward tea party activists (whose concerns focus on over-reaching government). If all you read are progressive diatribes, you would necessarily think “tea party” and “social conservatives” are one and the same.

More. Maryland’s gubernatorial race is a case in point:

Republican Maryland gubernatorial candidate Larry Hogan on Friday said his position on marriage rights for same-sex couples has “evolved.”… Hogan said marriage rights for same-sex couples, extending in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants and other social issues “are really decided in Maryland.”

“They have no part in this campaign whatsoever,” he said. “We’ve been completely focused on the issues that all Marylanders are focused on right now, and that’s economic issues.”

Furthermore: Cuyahoga County Republicans welcome Gay Games to Cleveland. As I’ve previously noted, it was reported that the Texas GOP’s rearguard anti-gay antics were a factor in costing Dallas the 2016 GOP convention, which is going instead to gay-welcoming Cleveland.

Relatedly.Via David Lampo at the Daily Caller: Why Republicans Should Pray The Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage:

In short, all but the true believers realize the war has been lost. Unfortunately, those true believers are still the loudest voices in the Republican Party, the ones who write its platform and set its agenda. With them as the face of the party, 2016 presidential candidates who want to grow the party and expand its reach (think Rand Paul or Paul Ryan) will have a very difficult time doing so.

Yes indeed.

While world attention is focused on the Middle East, we shouldn’t forget that in Iran and elsewhere being gay is a capital offense. Via the Daily Beast:

The tragic hanging of two “sodomites” in Iran may seem, in theory, like an obvious cause for U.S. concern and U.S. action. … Yet in practice, those most attentive to LGBT concerns may be the least eager to pick this fight.”

There are some interesting political double shuffles going on as well. The article notes:

When Iran persecutes gay people, conservatives in the United States suddenly become enamored of gay rights—and bash the Obama administration for not doing enough to defend them.

But certain liberal bedrocks, fearing the appearance of hawkishness, have kept mum or worse. Some observations (from earlier this year) on the matter, from Legal Insurrection.

Israel, of course, remains the only Middle Eastern state where gays can live their lives freely.

More. And here at home: Sanitizing terror: Has the press distorted Islamic radical’s crusade against gay men? Clearly so.

It’s easy to second-guess the arguments lawyers make in high profile cases, and while that’s pretty much what I will be doing, I want to make clear that the arguments made in favor of marriage equality at the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals this week were very good.

But an important colloquy could have gone better, in my opinion, and since we haven’t heard the last of it (there are many, many more cases still pending), I wanted to add my own thoughts about how to think about the question.

It was about a case I’ve mentioned before. Mark Joseph Stern at Slate describes what happened, focusing on the swing justice at the Sixth Circuit,  Jeffrey Sutton:

In a 1972 case called Baker v. Nelson, the Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to Minnesota’s gay marriage ban “for want of a substantial federal question”—that is to say, the court didn’t see a constitutional flaw in the ban. The case was decided through a summary affirmance of a lower court ruling, meaning the justices didn’t hear arguments or write a real opinion. But a summary affirmance is generally considered to be binding precedent on lower courts

You might think that Justice Anthony Kennedy would confront Baker—the only Supreme Court precedent to deal directly with the merits of state gay marriage bans—when he overturned DOMA. But instead, he ignored it, perhaps in an effort to leave the whole question of state-level bans for another day. Every district court that has since struck down these bans worked around Baker by citing a somewhat ambiguous loophole: A summary affirmance might not be controlling precedent when it has since been undermined by “doctrinal developments.”

The question for Sutton, then, is simple: Does the trio of great gay rights cases (Romer, Lawrence, and Windsor) render Baker’s holding completely moot? Or does Baker remain binding precedent? Sutton seemed to lean toward keeping Baker on life support for now and letting the Supreme Court pull the plug, noting, “Even when you see one line of cases crumbling, lower courts aren’t allowed to infer, and anticipatorily overrule, this other line of cases. So as a matter of hierarchy, aren’t we stuck with Baker?”

But then Sutton seemed to walk back his statement, musing that “the legal reasoning in other cases”—Romer, Lawrence, and especially Windsor—were “totally inconsistent with Baker.” At the end of his colloquy on the topic, he seemed a little stumped, and more than a little frustrated.

Judge Sutton had a sound legal argument for following Baker, but he was missing the forest for the trees because, at exactly that moment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was hearing appeals in six cases from four states.

In 1973, it was possible for the highest court in the land to say that they could not see a federal question in a case where two men were denied the right to marry one another. In contrast, whatever else can be said in 2014, there is no doubt at all that there is a very prominent federal question about that subject. If there were not, then what on God’s earth was the Sixth Circuit doing? Not a single one of the challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage have been filed and left to gather dust. Serious lawyers with serious clients have answered every one of those complaints. While it is possible to debate the merits of their arguments, they are making serious arguments about something even they view as a serious question.

Stated another way, Baker is incompatible with the very fact that these cases are now before the courts. Of course there is a federal question today. Whatever else can be said about the presidential value of summary affirmances in general, the premise of the affirmance in Baker was based on premises about sexual orientation that have no continuing validity at all.

Judge Sutton could ultimately decide that Baker has not been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. As Dale Carpenter points out, that would actually be the least harmful loss for us, since it would require only about a paragraph of text in the Sixth Circuit opinion (about as much as the Supreme Court devoted to the Baker affirmance). The opinion would not need to go any further than saying “We are bound by Baker unless and until the Supreme Court overturns it.”

But that is to ignore what is right in front of the court’s nose. Something much more consequential than the Supreme Court has overtaken, if not overturned Baker. What was unimaginable to the courts then is common discourse now. Every court that has heard the argument over same-sex marriage knows for a fact that Baker v Nelson is a nullity.

Via Reason:

A Denver [gay bar catering to Bears] has been cited by the state’s Division of Civil Rights for discrimination because it refused to let a gay man dressed in drag enter. …

You know what gay people love? Having the government tell them how their various subcultures work and think on the basis of talking to a bunch of people at a bar and looking at pictures. … And to the extent that there are social rifts between various parts of the gay demographic, nobody should want the state government policing how they should be interacting with each other.

The report concludes:

This case is a good demonstration as to why it’s so important to hold a hard line on the right to freedom of association. The Wrangler should have the right to pursue whatever customer demographic it wants for its bar.

Agreed.

More. “Alvie” comments, perceptively:

The most sought-after clubs in NYC and other big cities have a guy outside who selects who gets past the rope and is allowed to enter, based on how they’re dressed and how they look. The only reason this jerk can sue the Wrangler is because he’s claiming sexual orientation/gender identity discrimination, which is a protected class under local statute. But as the story notes, he’s not actually transgendered—just a jerk who wants to sue and use the state to make others do his bidding.

Yes, these laws can be and are abused.

Many Democratic candidates “aim to match President Obama’s feat in 2012, when the incumbent used topics such as same-sex marriage and contraception as weapons to offset his vulnerability on the economy,” reports the New York Times, adding:

Democrats profit politically — among young voters, college graduates, single women, blacks and Latinos — from the sense that they welcome these cultural shifts while Republicans resist them.

“That’s why people are voting for us these days — not for our economic prowess,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster.

Indeed.

This, however, is encouraging:

The pro-gay marriage group Freedom to Marry will hold a series of meetings in Iowa this week aimed at encouraging young Republicans to run for slots as delegates to the national 2016 convention to try to impact the party platform. …

“We want for the presidential process in 2016 [that gay marriage will] be an issue nationally that Republicans are debating,” said Tyler Deaton, the campaign manager for the Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry effort. He added, “Our intention is to bring a record number of young delegates to the convention … and make some history.”

Good luck to them.

In the Aug. 4 issue of The New Yorker, Michelle Goldberg provides a fascinating look at a subset of radical feminists, the self-described “radfems,” who are regarded by other feminists and transpeople as TERFs (which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”).

The radfems bar transwomen from their events (including the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) and seek to exclude them from womens’ spaces, including restrooms and lockerrooms. Worse, the radfems point to certain ex-trans (or “detransitioners”) who once identified as transgender but no longer do, as evidence that transgenderism isn’t about intrinsic gender identity but is a further manifestation of male privilege.

For instance, Goldberg cites radfem theorist Sheila Jeffreys who:

calls detransitioners…“survivors,” and cites them as evidence that transgenderism isn’t immutable and thus doesn’t warrant radical medical intervention. (She considers gender-reassignment surgery a form of mutilation.) “The phenomenon of regret undermines the idea that there exists a particular kind of person who is genuinely and essentially transgender and can be identified accurately by psychiatrists,” she writes. “It is radically destabilising to the transgender project.” …

Explaining female-to-male transition is fairly easy for her (and for other radical feminists): women seek to become men in order to raise their status in a sexist system. Heath Atom Russell, for example, is quoted as attributing her former desire to become a man to the absence of a “proud woman loving culture.”

But, if that’s true, why would men demote themselves to womanhood? For reasons of sexual fetishism, Jeffreys says. She substantiates her argument with the highly controversial theories of Ray Blanchard, a retired professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and the related work of J. Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University.

The radfems view of being transgendered seems eerily similar to what social conservatives believe about homosexuality—it’s an unhealthy deviation that people should be steered away from and not an intrinsic aspect of who someone is.

I don’t know what to make of this, and perhaps author Goldberg doesn’t either. But it’s evidence of how those who take a militant stance on behalf of remaking society beyond oppression often, on inspection, are revealed to have their own deep-rooted prejudices. That’s a good lesson to remember.

On the other hand, organizing to deny the radfems the right to hold their own meetings and events by threatening to boycott commercial venues also seems intolerant on the part of trans activists. What’s needed are dialogue and efforts at education and understanding, not attempts at suppression coming from both camps.

The Daily Caller looks at How Republicans Can Win Millennial Voters:

And that thing people keep saying about how Republicans can’t win young people if they’re anti-gay? It’s worse than you think. …
So yeah, social issues have to go, but that’s not all. You’ve got to do more than keep talking about how capitalism will save the young if they just give it time. This generation wants to see results. Literally. When it comes to government spending, they don’t care how they get jobs, so long as something works. … And if you want to sell them on limited government, here’s a tip: Offer concrete proposals for limiting it.

Also, from The Hill: Lobbyists Quietly Advise GOP on Gay Marriage shift:

“I have had meetings with some of the most rock-ribbed social conservatives in Washington,” said Gregory Angelo, the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. “A lot of them see the writing on the wall, they see the direction the country is headed.”

A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this year showed that more than 60 percent of Republicans under the age of 30 support gay marriage; 43 percent of those aged 30–49 were in favor.

Many Republicans will never evolve. But the party will, and probably sooner than many think. The lack of high-level response from party leaders to Obama’s executive order on anti-discrimination, or to recent appellate rulings on marriage equality, is one indication.

On a separate tangent (because it’s not enough for its own post), the idea that gays should rally to the defense of the Export-Import Bank (taxpayer dollars indirectly subsidizing selected private companies, referred to by some as crony capitalism or corporate welfare) because Obama appointed a gay man to run it and its critics include tea party activists, is beyond ludicrous.

“Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) trotted out her customized views on gays and American culture,” blogs Erik Wemple on the Washington Post site. And though it was not his aim, he shows why she’s the gift that keeps on giving to the LGBT left. That is, her bigotry works to discredit the legitimate concerns some of us have raised about over-reaching by LGBT progressives in a way that constrains rather than expands individual liberty.

To start with, here (as related via Wemple’s posting) is what Bachman recently said:

This is an effort [by gay activists] to have government coerce, force speech and behavior. And it’s being pushed and advocated by the gay community. This is their ultimate goal. It’s to not allow for diversity of opinion on this issue … I believe that we’re going to see coming an effort for multiples in marriage. … I think they want to legalize that. I think also they want to abolish age-of-consent laws, which means . . . we would do away with statutory-rape laws so that adults would be able to freely prey on little children sexually. That’s the deviance that we’re seeing embraced in our culture today.

I’m not going to waste time pointing out the hallucinatory bigotry in those last charges. But as I said, the ugliness of her prejudice makes it much more difficult to engage in constructive criticism of the sort that Damon Linker recently provided. Linker is the author of The Theocons, a critique of the religious right. Recently he wrote:

Liberals usually pride themselves on defending minority rights against the tyranny of the majority—and above all when the tyranny threatens to become more than metaphorical through the use of the coercive powers of the government. Yet when it comes to the rights of religious traditionalists, many liberals seem indifferent, and more than a few seem overtly hostile. …

When the theocons threatened to turn secular liberals into a persecuted minority, I objected. And now, with gay rights activists treating social conservatives like heretics and federal regulators threatening to force religious traditionalists to violate their consciences, I’m doing the same.

“But you’re saying we need to tolerate the intolerant!” — I see that objection every time I write something critical of liberal dogmatism and bigotry.

To which my stock response is: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying — because that’s what liberalism is, or should be, all about. Toleration is perfectly compatible with — indeed, it presupposes — disagreement. That’s why it’s called tolerance and not endorsement or affirmation.

This is similar to points made by George Will.

Unfortunately, tirades such as Bachmann’s make having any kind of honest conversation about the LGBT movement treading beyond working for equality under the law into, well, something else entirely, much more difficult.