IGF CultureWatch

Obviously, Hillary Clinton will run on a strong gay rights/marriage equality platform, but it’s interesting to note how her views changed with the shifting political winds (a phenom that’s ubiquitous in politics). Of course, the rolling disaster of the Obama administration’s foreign policy might be more pertinent to her campaign.

More. Yes, ubiquitous. Wisconsin’s GOP governor (and presidential wannabe) Scott Walker puts his finger to the wind.

Furthermore. Andrew Sullivan observes about Clinton, “the idea that she has ever risked an iota of her own power to back the equality of gays and lesbians is preposterous.”

This is certainly not Lambda Legal’s finest hour, and it reveals a corrupt mindset that puts creating controversy for self-promotion—and perpetuating victimhood—above all else. Money quotes:

Even after being told how the restaurant handled the situation, Lambda isn’t backing down from the campaign. Instead the organization has dug in its heels. … Lambda is urging their followers to damage the reputation of a company that is recognized as an LGBT-friendly spot and hasn’t been proven guilty of any wrongdoing. …

“Lambda Legal has no obligation to investigate the allegations before doing media work or filling a case. That’s up to the [human rights] commission to decide,” said Dru Levasseur, Lambda Legal Transgender Rights Project Director. “The business’ reputation is not our concern.”

More. Mark Lees asks in the Washington Blade, “Can a business undo damage done by gay zealots?”

There’s one point of interest, even with the limited information we have, regarding David Brat and his Virginia congressional primary win over GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. What we do know about Brat and gays is that he’s not a foamer. The New York Times says that in a paper Brat authored a few years back:

Mr. Brat attacked the conservative right for championing individual liberty but campaigning against abortion rights, gambling and homosexuality. He criticized the left too, for being too coercive with social programs. “What is the root word for liberalism? (Answer: Liberty),” he wrote.

That passage was curious, since Mr. Brat ran on an unswerving anti-abortion position. I’m not sure how he feels now about gambling, and we’re looking for his position on gay marriage.

Brat has not used anti-gay bombast in his campaign, following the pattern of many other Republicans who might have been expected to do so. The tea party isn’t the religious right, although the religious right is represented among tea party activists. There’s a libertarian strain in the tea party that could be helpful in redirecting the GOP away from its dominance by the religious right, a fact obscured in by the media’s equation of the two in the service of progressivism.

Still, there’s no doubt that anti-immigration positions dominated Brat’s attacks on Cantor and are common among tea party activists. Many are saying (with some justification) that illegal immigrants have now replaced gays as the boogiepeople for the Republican right.

Except in Texas, of course, where gays remain as big or bigger a scapegoat as immigrants crossing the border without documentation. [And then there’s Gov. Rick Perry.] But as James Kirchick writes (in an article quoting former Log Cabin Republican leader Rich Tafel):

The longer Texas Republicans keep acting like Neanderthals, the greater the chances that the politically unthinkable might happen. “As state after state embraces marriage equality, the Texas GOP resembles the George Wallace Democrats’ response to racial equality in the 1960s, grabbing harder onto their bigotry based in the fear of America’s growing inclusion,” Tafel says. “Their right-wing bigotry is single-handedly doing what Democrats have been unable to do—move Texas from a red state to a blue state.”

More. David Boaz on Big Business Vs. Libertarians in the GOP, and why tea party candidates’ critique of crony capitalism is resonating with voters.

The LGBT campus ultra PC left versus the LGBT left, as a University of Chicago speech by Dan Savage is denounced as transphobic “hate speech” that should be banned.

Leftism continually mutates into more extreme forms, which then attack the previous standard as insufficiently purist.

More. Savage, it goes without saying, has nothing but contempt for gay Republicans. Elsewhere, he’s called them “house faggots.” That’s his real hate speech, not that it should be banned.

An optimistic viewpoint on the GOP and gay issues, via BuzzFeed: “While Republicans aren’t likely to join the fight for marriage equality en masse, the past week has shown that a growing core of the party is done fighting.”

Challenging the religious right so that Republicans again become the liberty party—as they were, historically, in the fight against slavery—is the way forward (and, let’s recall, southern Democrats were the party of Jim Crow, until Nixon’s “southern strategy” brought the “Dixiecrats” into the GOP). This will be a long effort, occurring throughout the states, as the fight in Texas shows. But generational change is coming.

More. A choice in California, via the WSJ (firewalled, though). In the GOP gubernatorial primary:

Republicans are presented with starkly contrasting candidates in former Bush Treasury official Neel Kashkari, a son of Indian immigrants, and Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, who led the Minuteman campaign to patrol California’s southern border and has likened illegal migrants to jihadists. … Like a majority of Californians, [Kashkari] is also a cultural liberal. Yet this makes him more attractive to a large swath of voters who would never consider a candidate who opposes same-sex marriage and abortion. That includes many young people and Silicon Valley techies.

Mr. Kashkari is also focusing on economic opportunity, especially for the poor. The political rookie has reached out to voters in the rural Central Valley and inner-cities where he is making the case that broad-based economic growth and education reform can redress California’s inequality and poverty.

More, unfirewalled, via Businessweek.

Kashkari may not win Tuesday’s primary, but his views on gay marriage are the GOP’s only viable future And this isn’t.

Update: Kashkari wins the primary. The Washington Post suggests, “Kashkari won’t win this fall but he may well be the building block/new face that California Republicans badly need to begin the long climb back to relevance in the state.”

Added: The Wall Street Journal editorialized: “Most local Republican parties had endorsed Mr. Donnelly for his cultural conservatism and firebrand opposition to immigration. Mr. Kashkari, a son of Indian immigrants with a libertarian cultural bent, ran an insurgent campaign on jobs and education. He hopscotched from soup kitchens to Rotary Clubs promoting the GOP as a party of economic opportunity for all.”

And more good news from California, sure to leave LGBT lockstep Democrats fuming.

Update: I’m putting this letter to UVa’s “Daily Progress” at top because of it’s importance: “As a gay man, it is worth noting that not everyone in the LGBTQ community criticizes University of Virginia professor Douglas Laycock for his attempt to balance LGBTQ rights and religious freedom.” Indeed.

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As if any more evidence were needed of the illiberal mindset among progressives that’s spreading to (or is it from?) academia:

University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock, by most measures a liberal who believes strongly in the separation of church and state (and husband of UVa President Teresa Sullivan) is being castigated by LGBT activists because his legal writings support allowing religious exemptions for private citizens from actions that violate their religious beliefs, such as being compelled to perform services on behalf of same-sex weddings or to purchase abortifacient contraceptives for employees:

“His work, whether he understands it or realizes it or not, is being used by folks who want to institute discrimination into law,” said Heather Cronk, co-director of Berkeley, California-based LGBT activist group GetEQUAL. … GetEQUAL has launched a national e-mail campaign calling out Laycock for his role in shoring up the legal arguments of those who support “religious bigotry.” … “I think it would be really constructive for him to hear how his work is being used to hurt the LGBTQ community,” said [UVa fourth-year student Greg] Lewis [among those recruited by GetEqual to take up the cause].

The activists “also also submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking e-mails between Laycock and various right-wing and religious liberty groups.” As if that isn’t intended to have a chilling effect on legal theorists in academia who don’t draw appropriate conclusions.

Responded Laycock: “My position has always been that liberty in America is for everyone. … It’s for both sides in the culture wars. I believe that we should protect gays and lesbians in their right to live their own lives, including their right to get married, and we should protect religious conscientious objectors.”

Laycock co-filed an amicus brief in Windsor (discussed here) that urged that the Supreme Court “protect the right to same-sex marriage, that religious liberty is not a sufficient reason to deny the right, but that the Court must attend to the religious liberty conflicts that same-sex marriage may create for religious believers and organizations who object to facilitating such marriages.”

But such advocacy on behalf of the rights of religious dissenters marks him as an enemy of the people.

More. It wasn’t too long ago that the left was dismissive of conservatives who argued criticism of the Patriot Act (by those who saw it as a danger to civil liberties) would “give ammunition to America’s enemies,” in the words of John Ashcroft. These days, consistent defenders of individual rights (and that, sadly, no longer includes the ACLU) seem few and far between, and always subject to accusations of supporting our “enemies” of one sort or another.

Furthermore. Walter Olson’s take, at Overlawyered.com, describing the activists’ Freedom of Information Act hunting expedition as “trying to arm-twist a tenured, well-recognized scholar who takes a position that the Forces of Unanimity consider wrong.”

And here’s Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.

And Jonathan H. Adler: “You don’t start a dialogue with FOIA requests.”

Stephen L. Carter writes: “Laycock’s wrong is to have taken the position that there may be cases in which individual religious freedom should trump compliance with law—a view that, during Bill Clinton’s administration, was considered the liberal position in our politics.”

Still more. Shame on gay couple Charlie Craig and David Mullins for not respecting the rights of other people. Baker Jack Phillips now will “no longer make any wedding cakes. He said he would be fine selling cupcakes for a birthday party for someone who is gay but added, ‘I don’t want to participate in a same-sex wedding.’” The state has moved in and “ordered the baker to submit quarterly reports about the customers he refuses to serve and retrain employees to serve everyone,” which he was already doing; it was participating in a same-sex marriage that he chose not to do. For authoritarians, such a chose is verboten.

With so much happening so fast on the marriage front (see below), it’s time to start a new post rather than continually adding to the previous one.

So let’s take a moment to note something truly momentous: According to the latest from Gallup, same-sex marriage now enjoys 55% overall support in the U.S., and a whopping 78% support among under-30s. And even 42% among those 65+.

Among party lines:

Democrats (74%) are far more likely to support gay marriage as Republicans are (30%), while independents (58%) are more in line with the national average. Though Republicans still lag behind in their support of same-sex marriage, they have nearly doubled their support for it since Gallup began polling on the question in 1996.

The GOP is where the work most needs to be continued, which means (progressive partisans, cover year eyes!) working to elect openly gay and gay-supportive Republicans. These three openly gay GOP congressional candidates would make a great contribution to that cause.

[Added: DeMaio’s campaign office vandalized; power cords cut and liquids poured into the computers. Very nice.]

More. Pennsylvania’s GOP Governor Tom Corbett announced he won’t appeal the district court ruling (which effectively brings marriage equality to the keystone state), joining GOP governors Christie (N.J.), Martinez (N.M.) and Sandoval (Nev.) and earning praise from the American Unity Fund, a PAC dedicated to making a conservative case for “the cause of freedom for gay and lesbian Americans.”

Furthermore. Via ThinkProgress: Pennsylvania Just Legalized Same Sex Marriage and Rick Santorum Has Nothing to Say:

But some Republican strategists suggest that Santorum’s choice to remain silent is indicative of the GOP’s decision to de-emphasize its rhetorical opposition to gay rights in an effort to attract younger and more moderate voters.

“The push for same-sex marriage nationally is moving much faster than many in the Republican Party, including Rick Santorum, ever thought it would,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told ThinkProgress. “And now the GOP is trying to internally rectify the changing landscape because their position hurts them primarily with voters under 40; those same voters they need in the tent if they want to win the White House in 2016.”

As the Washington Post reports:

Fifty-seven years after federal troops escorted nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High School as a white mob jeered, Arkansas again finds itself in the center of a debate over civil rights. This time, the issue is gay marriage, but the 1957 desegregation crisis still casts a shadow.

Followed by: Judge strikes all Arkansas bans on gay marriage.

Update. Marriage equality in Arkansas again is stayed.

Virginia, which gave rise to the Loving decision in which the Supreme Court eventually overturned state bans on mixed-race marriages, is another deeply symbolic venue that is seeing judicial progress.

As we’ve noted before, comparing the fight for same-sex marriage equality with the fight to allow mixed-race marriages makes many religious conservatives, and many African-Americans, exceedingly angry. In the National Journal, Ron Fournier describes some of these fault lines and notes, optimistically:

It’s easy to demonize conservatives and Christians. It’s harder to recognize that faith is a stern master, especially among African-Americans whose animus toward homosexuality runs deep. We should know by now that social change takes times, but the American public tends to eventually get things right.

Finally, a look at the state-by-state battle lines as of today, and the timeline of events that brought us here.

More. Dale Carpenter blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Counting both federal and state court decisions, [Oregon is] the 17th consecutive judicial win for same-sex marriage advocates the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor last summer. …

It’s probable that this long string of judicial victories for same-sex marriage will come to an end in the near future, perhaps in a circuit court. It’s also likely that the issue will end up in the Supreme Court in the next couple of years. Same-sex marriage will come to that Court, when it does, with a momentum that could not have been imagined when it began in the United States ten years ago this month.

It’s a marriage-go-round of rulings:

Here’s the Oregon decision by district court judge Michael J. McShane. The conclusion is very moving.

And a judge appointed by George W. Bush just overturned Pennsylvania’s marriage equality ban, ending his opinion by stating, ‘We are a better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history.”

We can certainly take a moment to celebrate along with Michael Sam:

…the University of Missouri football player who came out as gay in February, three months in advance of the NFL draft, was drafted this evening by the St. Louis Rams. He reacted the way any athlete would: by kissing his significant other. …

If Sam—picked 249th overall, despite being the SEC Defensive Player of the Year—makes the team, he will become the National Football League’s first athlete to play while openly gay.

In recent years the SEC Defensive Player of the Year has been among the top draft choices, whereas Sam was picked very late, in the final round, revealing the struggle continues. Still, some didn’t expect him to be picked at all, so this is indeed an historical marker.

More. David Boaz blogs in greater depth about Michael Sam and the Cost of Discrimination.

Furthermore. Eurovision’s transgendered winner, Conchita Wurst, also should be noted, especially for the Russian response.

Still more. Wesley Pruden of the conservative Washington Times must think this is very clever. He writes:

“Mr. Sam, who is finishing his education at the University of Missouri, knows a lot more than how to sack a quarterback. He knows how to suck the last few kilobytes out of his 15 minutes of fame. … Now that hype and hysteria has become the lingua franca of the age, Michael Sam, like everyone else in the tower of babble, whistles it fluently. You just put your lips together and blow.”

There’s been much mischief made of late by critics of the “Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent” statement that I and other nonleftist gay writers (among others) recently signed, linking it to a supposed defense of all manner of anti-gay or otherwise scandalous misbehavior.

The statement argues, among other points, that it’s wrong to pressure companies to fire executives because they don’t personally support marriage equality. It was a response to boycott threats against Mozilla that led to the forced resignation of CEO Brendan Eich over a $1,000 contribution he gave several years ago to support California’s Prop 8 initiative (through which a majority of Californians banned state recognition of same-sex marriage, until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise).

That doesn’t mean boycotts are never justified; some certainly are, while others are an overreaction, or may be purely unjustified. And some are arguably justifiable but still very bad strategy if the goal is to build a broad majority consensus for gay legal equality.

From what I’ve read, for instance, I wouldn’t give my business to nor oppose the boycott of the Beverly Hills Hotel, owned by the Dorchester Collection, which is owned by the Sultan of Brunei. The sultan, who is dictator over his realm, recently moved to institute Sharia law there, which calls for stoning to death gays and adulterers, among others.

The sultan’s ownership is a few steps away from direct, but the nature of his evil actions is so great that it calls for a strong response. If enough pain is exerted, the Dorchester Collection may sell the property, or the sultan might even sell the Dorechester Collection. It’s probably folly to think that the sultan will stop persecuting gays and others, however. Also, we should at least be mindful that hotel employees, through no fault of their own, could be out of a job while the point is being made.

Of a different magnitude altogether is the ginning up of a boycott threat that led HGTV (the home and garden network) to cancel an upcoming flip your house show with the brothers David and Jason Benham, over their conservative faith-based opposition to the homosexual “agenda” and abortion.

This is somewhat akin to the recent “Duck Dynasty” controversy, which engendered such a backlash that family patriarch Phil Robertson was restored to the show despite his faith-based opposition to homosexuality. That show is all about the Robertson family and its personalities, so I didn’t have an issue with people telling A&E they no longer wanted to watch the brood (if they ever had). Whereas the Benham brothers show, “Flip it Forward,” was to be about helping “lower-income families purchase fixer uppers and transform them into dream homes.”

That’s a difference. And even if you think the brothers’ views are beyond the pale, they’ve gone from being just two of the many, many, home fixer-uppers and house flippers that populate HGTV to being a culture war cause celebre, “swamped with media requests for interviews.” CNN being just one example.

Recent weeks have seen former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice’s withdrawal as commencement speaker at Rutgers University following protests by leftwing faculty and students over her role in the Iraq War, and Brandeis University’s decision to cancel Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s honorary degree because leftwing faculty and students protested her impassioned criticism of Islamic brutality against women. As Ruth R. Wisse notes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “those who admit no legitimate opposition to their ideas feel duty-bound to shut down unwelcome speakers.”

These actions by universities surrendering to activists of a totalitarian bent who want to keep students from hearing viewpoints with which they disagree (legitimate opinions, even if debatable) is the company with which gay rights supporters are now being compared.

More. With hindsight, I’d now say the “Duck Dynasty” boycott call was inappropriate and, ultimately, counter-productive. Exposure, criticism, and the resulting plunge in ratings would have been a more judicious and adequate response than pressuring A&E to order Phil Robertson off the show, and would have avoided the network’s subsequent retreat in order to placate socially conservative viewers and fans (which many/most of the protestors never were).

Boycott threats work both ways, and often backfire by turning their targets into victims of the politically correct thought police. And thus do rightwing ideologues become free-speech martyrs (Chick-fil-A being another case in point).

Furthermore. As if to demonstrate the above, when the controversy erupted SunTrust Banks pulled all of its listed properties with the Benham brothers—provoking a predictable backlash that led to the bank’s reversal, announcing: “SunTrust supports the rights of all Americans to fully exercise their freedoms granted under the Constitution, including those with respect to free speech and freedom of religion.”