IGF CultureWatch

The Republican National Committee released a sweeping report aimed at revitalizing the party following its losses last November, noting that:

For the GOP to appeal to younger voters, we do not have to agree on every issue, but we do need to make sure young people do not see the Party as totally intolerant of alternative points of view. Already, there is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays—and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be.

If our Party is not welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out.

This has not gone down well with many. Conservative columnist Byron York comments:

That is not a flat-out declaration that the RNC supports gay marriage— but it’s pretty close. In addition, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, in introducing the report Monday, said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, had “made some pretty big inroads” into broadening the party’s appeal by declaring support for gay marriage last week. Again, the report’s position puts the RNC in danger of a breach with key grass-roots supporters.

That’s mild compared to what Rush Limbaugh had to say:

If the party makes [gay marriage] something official that they support, they’re not going to pull the homosexual activist voters away from the Democrat Party, but they are going to cause their base to stay home and throw their hands up in utter frustration.

Thus the battle lines are drawn, with action and reaction from the party. But who would have thought that the RNC itself would ever have taken such a bold step—not the LGBT progressives, who have written off the party as hopeless.

Sen. Portman’s dramatic reversal. Now all we need is 40 more Republican senators’ sons to come out.

In other news, CPAC may have banned GOProud, but its clear which way the wind is blowing.

More. Jennifer Rubin writes: “the question is not whether the GOP comes to terms with gay marriage, but when and how many elections it will lose along the way.” Indeed.

Furthermore. Via Michael Barone: Support for same-sex marriage crosses party lines. Or at least it now could, if there were a will to engage with libertarian conservatives rather than to just raise money for Democrats.

Still more. Again, via Jennifer Rubin:

Thirty years after Ronald Reagan was president, Republicans are still running on a tripartite alliance of social, fiscal and foreign policy conservatives. Alas, such candidates run on a myth; that coalition has splintered and what will replace it is far from clear. . . .

One approach would be to become the reform party on entitlements, education, health care, employee unions and even the Pentagon while being agnostic on social issues. Or the party could go fully libertarian leaving hawks and social conservatives adrift but gaining urban and suburban professionals and social liberals. Another formula would be to embrace pro-life, pro-immigration, strong-on-defense conservatives with a Tory welfare state that loses business conservatives but takes on working class and minority voters.

This battle must be engaged. Too bad the largest LGBT lobbies are cocooned up with their Democratic party commanders, working to keep the GOP as anti-gay as possible (e.g., HRC’s backing Democrats running against openly gay and gay-supportive Republicans).

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York asks, Will GOP’s new vision be shaped by Paul or Rubio? He reports that when they spoke this week at CPAC, Sen. Mario Rubio told Republicans “we don’t need a new idea” and declared that “traditions— traditional marriage, traditional values—are still good.”

In contrast, Sen. Rand Paul told the audience, crowded with his enthusiastic young supporters, “The GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered,” and that “Our party is encumbered by an inconsistent approach to freedom. The new GOP, the GOP that will win again, will need to embrace liberty in both the economic and personal sphere.”

Rubio comes out of the party’s social conservative wing, while Paul’s base is the smaller but faster-growing libertarian wing nurtured by his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, who opposed the anti-gay federal marriage amendment and supported allowing gay people to serve openly in the military.

Paul has not endorsed marriage equality, but it’s clear his vision is one that gay equality advocates could work with. The battle in the GOP is now engaged.

Meet the new pope, same as the old pope:

Amid changing mores on sexuality, including same-sex marriage, Francis’ traditional views have clashed with cultural changes in Argentina. Before the nation legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, Francis called it a “destructive attack on God’s plan.”

In my view, declaring that you know “God’s plan” and that love and marriage for gay people isn’t part of it is the worst kind of blasphemy. Blind guides and pharisees still hold sway over the church of Rome.

An honest look at the Clinton administration’s support for the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, from former head of the Human Rights Campaign Elizabeth Birch:

…in the middle of my testimony before Congress on the constitutionality of this horrible law, the Clinton Justice Department, then headed by Janet Reno, had a letter delivered to the committee stating that, in the opinion of the Justice Department, DOMA was constitutional. (I was cut off mid-sentence as one of the more extreme house members read it aloud into the room with glee.)

…beyond signing the bill into law, the 1996 Clinton campaign decided to run ads on Christian radio bragging that DOMA had become the law of the land. …it was the president himself who wanted to run them and asked in anger whether he had any say in the matter.

President Clinton took DOMA out of play by announcing quickly he would support it and signed it into law near midnight on Sept. 21, 1996. … The Clinton campaign went on to use the LGBT community like a cash machine for reelection.

It’s all politics. And all politics is by its nature corrupt.

At the Daily Caller, Jamie Weinstein has now suggested a couple of times that Republicans speak out against the horrendous gay-suppression bill in the legislature of Uganda:

Why doesn’t a conservative GOP senator — or senators — pick up the cause and speak out strongly against this human rights travesty, demanding that the Uganda parliament reject the bill lest there be penalties?

Maybe this would help the GOP with the gay community by showing that just because conservatives generally oppose gay marriages, they are not indifferent to violence against gays around the world. Maybe it wouldn’t help. But at the very least, it would be the right thing to do.

Aside from the intrinsic merit of this idea, I agree with Weinstein that it would be good politics — many moderate voters are currently put off by the Republican Party’s image of disrespect for gay people, and speaking out against persecution is one way to signal respect. But are senators ready to court the wrath of the likes of the AFA’s Bryan Fischer, who has applauded the Uganda legislation?

Our friend Dale Carpenter along with several other libertarian-leaning, nonleftist law professors filed an exemplary brief arguing that DOMA is unconstitutional under federalism principles:

Our view is that Section 3 fails equal protection review for a reason quite distinct from the standard approaches relying on heightened-scrutiny analysis. Whatever else may be its constitutional defects, Section 3 is not a constitutional exercise of any enumerated federal power. It is also not a “necessary and proper” measure to carry into execution any of Congress’s enumerated powers. Instead, it is an unprecedented expansion of federal authority into a domain traditionally controlled by the states.

An array of briefs have now been filed from left-progressive to libertarian and center-right. That’s laudable. But let’s recall how the libertarian Cato Institute’s amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas was the one that Justice Kennedy cited in his opinion overturning state sodomy laws (note: he didn’t cite the briefs from NGLTF or HRC).

As in Lawrence, Justice Kennedy (and perhaps, now, even Alito and Roberts) aren’t going to be swayed by the bigger-government, Democratic party-aligned progressives. But it’s still good to have them onboard.

More. Here is analysis that includes a link to the Cato Institute’s brief in favor of marriage equality.

Furthermore. James Kirchick writes:

At the time of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, few would have predicted that a movement predicated upon sexual liberation would mature into one calling for the right to get married and serve openly in the armed forces.

Some liberal gay activists, suffering from a bout of historical amnesia, do not like what they see as an attempt by conservatives (gay and straight) to claim the cause of marriage equality as their own.

Still more. Not a constitutional argument, but a powerful video ad from Republicans United for Freedom.

The American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., reminds us why we are not conservatives but pro-liberty, pro-free market libertarians (for want of a better word).

This year, again, at the behest of the Heritage Foundation and others, CPAC has refused to allow participation by GOProud, the gay conservative group. But that bigotry is just one point of contention we have with the CPAC crowd, which claims to be for limited government, an aggressive foreign policy and traditional values. Points two (often) and three (almost always) work against point one. And with point three, in particular, the CPAC crowd wants activist big government to impose traditional values on the states and on individuals, by forbidding states from recognizing gay unions, for instance, and by making gay people second-class citizens who are denied spousal inheritance and barred from military service and, until recently, treated as criminals.

As this blog has often noted, Republicans seem to delight in driving socially tolerant and fair-minded voters who otherwise favor fiscal sanity into the arms of those who support Obama’s spending frenzy and grotesque budgetary fear-mongering. And without a fiscally conservative, socially liberal center, that pain is just going to keep getting worse.

More. Fortunately, all Republicans don’t march in lockstep. And some represent the future.

Furthermore. Jon Huntsman’s advice to conservatives:

“I believe the American people will vote for free markets under equal rules of the game—because there is no opportunity or job growth any other way. But the American people will not hear us out if we stand against their friends, family, and individual liberty.”

Will it fall on deaf ears?

More still. Another good sign, Republicans Supporting Gay Marriage Write Supreme Court Amicus Brief, although most of those signing are not in office. Still, hurrah for current Congressmembers Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York.

And more. Roger Simon weighs in: CPAC Deflates the ‘Big Tent’ over GOProud.

And so does the conservative National Review:

[GOProud’s] participation in past CPACs caused only mild disquiet (indeed, much of the scattered criticism of GOProud’s inclusion at the conference was shouted down by other attendees) and was probably salubrious on net. Conservative opinion on the intersection of homosexuality and politics is not monolithic, especially among the college-aged set that makes up the better part of CPAC attendees. And a gathering that hopes to speak for the conservative movement will be better equipped to do so if it represents the overlapping gamut of views included in it.

Yet still more. From Jennifer Rubin: 10 lessons from CPAC’s debacle.

The New York Times Magazine looks at the problems engulfing the Republican “brand.” For instance:

Several G.O.P. digital specialists…found it difficult to recruit talent because of the values espoused by the party. “I know a lot of people who do technology for a living,” [Michael Turk, a 42-year-old Republican digital guru] said. … “And almost to a person that I’ve talked to, they say, ‘Yeah, I would probably vote for Republicans, but I can’t get past the gay-marriage ban, the abortion stance, all of these social causes.’ Almost universally, they see a future where you have more options, not less. So questions about whether you can be married to the person you want to be married to just flies in the face of the future. They don’t want to be part of an organization that puts them squarely on the wrong side of history.”

New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp reflects that:

“People aren’t repelled by the idea of limited government or balancing the budget or lowering taxes. Those Tea Party principles are incredibly popular with the public, even if they don’t know it….”

And research seems to confirm that a majority of Americans remain center right and fiscally conservative, believing that the government spends too much and tries to do too much, wasting billions (or, really, trillions) and fostering dependency. But they are so turned off by the party’s focus on social issues that they can’t conceive of themselves voting for the GOP.

The message to the party: evolve, or die.

Pope Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, has announced he will retire. As the Washington Blade reminds us:

He wrote in a 1986 letter that gay men and lesbians are “intrinsically disordered.” Benedict also said in the same document that gay organizations could no longer use church property. The Vatican’s ongoing opposition to condom use as a way to stop the spread HIV/AIDS has also sparked outrage among advocates.

Anything’s possible, but like his predecessor, Benedict/Ratzinger has stacked the College of Cardinals with hardline reactionaries such as himself, so it might take a miracle for a cardinal not committed to anti-gay, anti-sex philosophy to move forward.

How powerful the Roman church remains is shown by what happened recently in France. As AFP reports:

With opinion polls having consistently shown that a comfortable majority of the French support gay marriage, [Prime Minister] Hollande could never have anticipated that a promise he made in his election manifesto last year would generate so much controversy. A campaign orchestrated by the Catholic church and belatedly backed by the mainstream centre-right opposition steadily gathered momentum throughout the autumn and culminated in a giant protest in Paris last month.

Sowing fear and loathing of religious and sexual minorities, and of the natural expression human sexuality not rigidly controlled by church and state (and reaping the product of such repression, including generations of clerical pedophiles) has been the unfortunate history of the church of Rome.