IGF CultureWatch

Jonathan Rauch explains why Rick Santorum’s beliefs on privacy are deeply troubling, to say the least. He writes:

Defending sodomy laws, Santorum didn’t make the usual half-hearted point that the laws were rarely enforced. He came out swinging. Homosexuality is among behaviors that are “outside of traditional heterosexual relationships” and therefore “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family.” People have no right to engage in such behaviors, even in their own homes.

Rauch then asks,

If the state can’t be trusted to regulate our markets, can it really be trusted to regulate our morals? By way of an answer, return, for a minute, to Houston in 1998. According to “Flagrant Conduct,” a fascinating and important new book by University of Minnesota law professor Dale Carpenter, what really happened in Lawrence’s apartment that night, though shocking, won’t surprise many gay Americans. Lawrence and Garner were not having sex when the cops arrived. …

Two officers freely admitted to Carpenter that their disgust at homosexuality was a factor in the arrest. Nothing new there. Sodomy laws in practice had nothing to do with the enforcement of virtue, and everything to do with the arbitrary use of state power against gays. Before Lawrence, many police departments treated baiting and entrapping homosexuals as a kind of sport.

Back to Santorum, Rauch observes:

He can’t revoke privacy, which the country prizes, and he probably can’t be president. But his ascendance could—and, by rights, should — break the already strained alliance of libertarians and social conservatives on which the post-Reagan conservative movement is built.

For more about Carpenter’s book on Lawrence v. Texas, here’s a link to the San Francisco Chronicle’s review.

Conservative Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn discusses “The Gay Alternative to Obamacare,” by which he means GOProud’s critique of the Democrats’ signature power grab. McGurn writes:

Gay Americans understandably chafe at the way the tax code discriminates against them with regard to health insurance. If you are heterosexual, the insurance provided your spouse by your company is treated as a benefit—which means it is untaxed. If, by contrast, you are gay, the insurance provided your spouse or partner by your company can be treated as income—which means taxed.

And then he observes:

Yet with one notable exception, most gay organizations nevertheless continue to argue for solutions that expand the federal government’s role in health care and leave the employer privilege intact. The exception is GOProud, a pro-free market, pro-individual liberty, pro-limited government coalition of gay conservatives and their allies. This group argues that the problem with our tax code isn’t just that it discriminates against gays. It’s that it discriminates against every American who doesn’t have his or her health insurance through an employer.

The folks at GOProud aren’t asking for special treatment. To the contrary, they want a system in which all health-care consumers are treated equally. They argue that this requires a thriving national marketplace for individual insurance…

The point being:

“When the left does identity politics, they simply craft special policies that benefit particular groups,” says [GOProud’s Executive Director Jimmy] LaSalvia. “We’re about explaining how limited government and policies that treat everyone equally might benefit some people in unique ways. As conservatives, we need to do a better job of letting particular groups know how they would benefit from this approach.”

The statist left, including LGBT “progressives,” sees big government control as a way to eventually ensure equality, as long as progressives are calling the shots (and when they’re not and the mega-state falls into the hands of social conservatives, well, too bad). The libertarian view is that it’s better to reduce the role of government and allow free people to make their own decisions via voluntary contractual relationships within a free market system.

As the New York Times reports:

An attempt to repeal New Hampshire’s same-sex marriage law failed on Wednesday in the House of Representatives, with members of the Republican-dominated chamber voting 211-116 to kill the bill. …

With Republicans outnumbering Democrats by three to one in the House, which has approved a number of socially conservative bills this session, proponents of same-sex marriage feared early on that there was little chance of preserving the law.

“Every step forward is a sign of momentum,” said Marc Solomon, national campaign director for Freedom to Marry, a group that lobbies for same-sex marriage nationwide. “The fact that we got two-thirds of the vote, in one of the most heavily Republican legislatures in the country, will make a serious impact.”

The leftwing flagship Daily Kos ran a story headlined, “New Hampshire’s tea party-run legislature … upholds gay marriage.” It concluded, rightly, “In other words, progress.”

David Boaz writes at the Huffington Post about Cal Thomas’s Confusion About Freedom. I especially liked the blurb David posted on his Facebook page:

“Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas LOVES freedom. Just read his column today. Except the freedom to smoke pot, read pornography, love the person you love, marry the person you love, etc.”

Another promising new organizational leader is the Gill Action Fund’s Kirk Fordham. As the Washington Blade reports:

Growing up in a Christian and Republican family, Fordham said he also has experience with parents who initially were unhappy about his sexual orientation, but later came to terms with it, and he knows what it takes to change the hearts and minds of people like them. …

A lifelong Republican, Fordham currently serves as CEO of Everglades Foundation, but has had experience working for several GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, even some with anti-gay records. …

Fordham said he “absolutely” plans on reaching out to Republican lawmakers to influence them on LGBT issues and he knows “how to speak their language.”

Along with the impressive R. Clark Cooper at Log Cabin, the team at GOProud, and perhaps Chad Griffin, newly named head of the Human Rights Campaign (a liberal Democratic activist who has reached out to and worked with Republicans), the broader LGBT movement may yet realize that focusing on electing and lobbying Republicans who are socially libertarian (and preferably fiscally conservative) is the best way to make the Democrats less complacent toward us.

Everyone will read a different moral lesson into the conviction of Dharun Ravi for invading the privacy of Tyler Clementi and intimidating him because Clementi was gay.  Some see the verdicts as the reason we shouldn’t have hate crimes laws, and others view this case as the vindication of those laws.

I have always been divided.  No hate crime can occur unless there is an underlying offense, and those offenses – whether murder, assault or anything else – are already crimes irrespective of who the victim is.  Penalty enhancements because of a motive beyond that to commit the crime itself do raise troubling questions about government intrusion into thoughts, and there are few areas where the government’s machinery is more destructive and menacing than in criminal prosecutions.

On the other hand, the kinds of cases we associate with hate crimes – lynchings and dragging, the grisly and horrifying death of Matthew Shepard – are especially repulsive because they are more than just the crime itself.  They are genuinely hateful.

And that is the problem for me.  Dharun Ravi’s case is void of anything like that.  It trivializes any meaningful notion of “hate.”

Ian Parker’s excellent article lays out the story in the New Yorker, and if it is unrecognizable as the story told by the daily press and television news, that is the point.  It’s been a long time since the mainstream media got the adrenaline rush of a real hate crime against a homosexual like they had with Matthew Shepard.  Clementi’s suicide seemed to have all the right elements, but Parker astutely sticks to the actual facts, rather than just the ones that support the desired spin.

Ravi certainly seems to have been a privileged, arrogant and heedless young man, and there’s little doubt he possessed just enough high school-level ambiguity about gay boys to be pretty uncomfortable when he learned his new college roommate was gay.  His initial reaction on finding out, texted to a friend, was “FUCK MY LIFE; he’s gay.”

Ravi didn’t have the makings of a Meghan McCain style gay rights supporter, but neither does he seem to have what it takes to be a homophobe.  When another friend fretted about how awkward it would be if Clementi made a sexual overture, Ravi replied, “He probs would. Why would it be awk. He’d want me I wouldn’t want him.”  If homophobia has any touchstone at all, it is an exaggerated overreaction to gay sex in general, and any thought of a homosexual advance in particular.  On that score, Ravi is wanting.

Like many boys his age, Ravi seemed more concerned about Clementi’s possible effeminacy than about homosexuality in general, and agreed with a friend who drew the distinction between the apparently feminine, weak and geeky Clementi and a less flamboyant homosexual they had met during orientation.  When Ravi finally actually heard directly from Clementi for the first time, he reported to a friend that Clementi was “gay, but regular gay.”  Not a ringing endorsement of equality, but not exactly the Red Flag of Homophobia.

Ravi’s use of words like “fag” and “fruity” are hardly hallmarks of tolerance, but they fall into a broader context, as does his silly reference to January being a “gay month,” and ultimately his appallingly dumb decision to turn his computer camera on Clementi.  How much of that decision was based on Clementi being gay, and how much on other things about Ravi’s new roommate which were at least as exotic to him?  It seems the only time Ravi actually used the word “hate” about Clementi was in reference to what he thought was Clementi’s poverty.  The privileged Ravi was pretty clear: “Dude, I hate poor people.”  Ravi knew how to use the word “hate,” but even here, there’s more rhetoric than emotion.

The jury did not have to be convinced Ravi hated gays, which is one more reason this case is such a poor exemplar of a hate crime.  It is enough under New Jersey law that the invasion of Clementi’s privacy was intended to intimidate the victim based on sexual orientation.  Ravi was straddling the line between intimidation and embarrassment, neither pleasant for the victim, but with consequences for the perpetrator that make all the difference under the criminal law.

The jury found that Ravi was intimidating Clementi because Clementi was gay, and that finding makes this a case of public interest rather than just another stupid college prank.

But it is being understood as a case about hate, and that is a shame.  If there is any hatred here, it is an anemic and indefinite kind of hate that comes from the decadent and feeble politics of victimization.  And that has left us with two victims, rather than none.

David Boaz of the Cato Institute remarks to Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin:

Every time Republicans have a big win — 1980, 1994, 2010 — it’s because Democrats have overreached on their big-government agenda and Republicans campaign on lower taxes and limited government. Every Republican strategist knows that smaller government is the unifying theme for Republicans and independents in this election. I think even Santorum knows it. I think he doesn’t really mean to get distracted into talking about homosexuality, contraception, and the outrage of separation of church and state. He just can’t help it.

In 2010, the nascent Tea Party movement, focused on fighting back against Obama’s trillions of dollars of debt expansion thrown willy-nilly at politically favored boondoggles, led to the GOP takeover of the House and strong gains in the Senate. But the empire strikes back, and social conservatives supporting Rick Santorum, the anti-libertarian, (and this) are showing they’re still potent.

This occurs just as the Koch brothers are attempting to take over the libertarian Cato Institute (a think tank that has played an important role in advancing gay legal equality, such as through its Supreme Court brief in Lawrence v. Texas that was cited approvingly in his decision by Justice Kennedy, and in supporting marriage equality) and turn Cato into another arm of their Republican election machine by placing Koch employees, Republican campaign operatives and social conservatives on its board. More on the libertarian-conservative divide from Outside the Beltway.

Why is the debate over contraception coverage a women’s issue?  I know a lot of heterosexual men, and my understanding is that they have as much of an interest in controlling whether and when to have children as women do.

Contrary to what you might think, the vast majority of heterosexual American men do not view sex the way Catholic bishops are required to.  So shouldn’t someone be asking men, too, how they feel about whether insurance coverage for contraception is important as a public policy issue?

David Boaz writes of the societal progression toward gay legal equality:

Even as the Republican candidates fight to see who can get furthest to the right, acceptance of gay people and gay marriage in the United States is moving briskly along. … Republicans haven’t given up their opposition, but their resolve is weakening. A few GOP legislators helped put [marriage equality] over the top in New York, Washington, and Maryland. Former Republican national chairman Ken Mehlman and a group of libertarian-leaning GOP donors played a key role in [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo’s efforts in New York.

The formerly vocal opposition to gay marriage has quieted. Congressional Republicans haven’t revived the Federal Marriage Amendment. Conservative media stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh and Bill Buckley’s National Review have barely mentioned the issue. (When you search for gay marriage at National Review Online, you get lots of ads for things like “Gay Destination Weddings.”) The ambitious [N.J. Gov. Chris] Christie vetoed his state’s bill while also calling for a referendum on gay marriage rather than flatly rejecting the idea. He also has nominated an openly gay judge to the state Supreme Court.

As Boaz sums it up, “That sound you don’t hear is social change happening.”

Chad Griffin, newly named head of the Human Rights Campaign is, like his predecessor Joe Solmonese, a Democratic partisan with close ties to the Obama administration. But perhaps unlike Solmonese, who departs to join the Obama reelection effort, he seems more willing to work with Republicans (something you sensed Solmonese felt was anathema) and to be critical of the administration (again, something that seemed anathema for Solmonese). From The Advocate:

Griffin, 38, is a fervent supporter of President Obama with personal ties to White House officials, but … Griffin has been openly critical of the president’s evolving position on marriage equality, calling Obama’s indicated support for states’ rights on deciding who can marry “a step backwards.”

NARAL and Planned Parenthood pressed Obama to force Catholic-affiliated institutions to buy abortion-inducing drugs for employees. The environmental lobby got Obama to block a jobs- and energy-gushing pipeline and to lavish federal funding on corrupt “green” boondoogles. Meanwhile, HRC took a back seat to the Log Cabin Republicans on pushing for “don’t ask” repeal and sits back while Obama “evolves” ever so slowly on marriage equality. Will any of this change? We’ll see.

More. The Washington Blade concurs:

“The incoming HRC president also comes into the role as many critics contend HRC has been too cozy with the Obama administration and too afraid to criticize Democratic lawmakers.”

You think? Recall that Democrats were in charge of the House, Senate (with a supermajority) and presidency, and ENDA never moved out of committee. Why spend political capital when the nation’s largest LGBT lobby views its mission as promoting the party.