IGF CultureWatch

This political column in the Washington Blade caught my eye. It’s an endorsement of Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley’s run for the U.S. Senate, noting that Berkley is a strong advocate of gay rights. Also in her favor, according to columnist Peter Rosenstein, “Shelley Berkley understands how bad the Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) budget is for her constituents and seniors everywhere.”

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t disagree more. The waste, abuse, fraud and over-utilization in government-run Medicare is unsustainable, and Ryan’s plan is an important and courageous step to bring this overspending under control. While the columnist suggests that Berkley has other ideas on fixing Medicare, as with her fellow Democrats she has failed to spell them out while Demonizing GOP cost-controlling efforts. Berkley’s track history, in fact, casts doubt on whether she would favor any approach other than upping taxes, as a comment on the Blade piece (not from me) points out:

Berkley has a 100 percent pro-gay record. Great! Meanwhile, according to National Taxpayers Union, last year she voted 96 percent in favor of big spending. We have a $1.5 trillion deficit and a $14 trillion national debt because of people like her. So if I’m gay AND a taxpayer AND concerned about the looming debt disaster, should I support people who are spending us into bankruptcy?

So there you have it: good on gays, terrible on the #1 issue confronting the nation: the future of American economic solvency through reducing the exponential growth of government spending. But this is the choice gay voters typically face since gay equality was subsumed under the grand coalition of the left.

More. This Washington Post national debt chart says it all.

Democratic political operatives overwhelmingly say the time has come for gay marriage, while a majority of Republican operatives now believe they should just avoid this issue, according to a National Journal Political Insiders Poll. “Both positions represent significant gains for gay marriage compared to two years ago,” according to the analysis.

Thus does progress get made, but it’s never simply linear. It’s extremely likely, for instance, that the 2012 GOP presidential nominee will favor a constitutional amendment against gay marriage (unlike McCain, who opposed the amendment, which Bush had championed). That anti-gay position will thrill the base in Iowa and the South, but cost the party support among independents and young voters. Maybe in 2016 the party will redo the calculus and a more enlightened conservative will take the day.

More. Texas Gov. Rick Perry—far less odious than Mitt Romney on gay marriage

“Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me,” he said to applause from several hundred GOP donors in Aspen, Colo. “That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.”

Furthermore. According to the Washington Blade, “a Perry spokesperson said the governor supports a U.S. constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.” Which, if still true, would make his position just as odious as Romney’s.

Still more. On reflection, I concur with commenter “Another Steve,” who said: “Perry’s recent statement about New York marriage showed a shift, and one that might be capitalized on and used to move him (and the GOP) further. ” That’s right, too.

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s site, where I’ve been guest-blogging, I look at a case you can expect to hear about from gay marriage opponents: Canadian sportscaster fired, he plausibly claims, for opposing SSM in a personal tweet. Gay activists should help well-intentioned supporters understand that creating martyrs for the other side is not helpful.

The Department of Justice filed a motion in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the Log Cabin Republicans v. United States case, asking the court for “emergency” reconsideration of its July 6 decision to lift the stay of the worldwide injunction of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, reports Metro Weekly.

Administrative separation board hearings proceeding and discharges are continuing under DADT, and since the passage of the repeal act the Air Force has confirmed three discharges and one resignation related to 10 U.S.C. 654 in 2011, according to the publication, which notes:

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Servicemembers United executive director Alex Nicholson, said in a statement provided to Metro Weekly, “The Administration’s response to this latest development in the Log Cabin Republicans lawsuit is unfathomable and confusing. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ should be completely dead by now.”

Yes, it should. I wonder if the Obama administration would be fighting this suit if it had been brought by LGBT Democrats rather than Republicans.

More. From the San Francisco Chronicle, “Obama’s Lawyers Seek to Re-Impose ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’

Furthermore. R. Clarke Cooper, executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, on why the Log Cabin suit has mattered.

Roll Call reports that openly gay Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) is gearing up to run for an open seat in the Senate:

Groups including the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and the Human Rights Campaign have supported Baldwin’s political career for almost 20 years, and they intend to tap into their vast supporter lists to fully back a Senate bid by the seven-term Congresswoman, whose voting record has consistently been among the most liberal in the House. …

The Human Rights Campaign has more than a million members and supporters nationwide, and it already has a fundraising portal for Baldwin set up on its website. “If Tammy decides to run for the Senate, we will step up our efforts to get the word out about her record,” HRC spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz said.

Would that be her record for gay rights, or her record as one of the most left-liberal members of the House? And does HRC know that there is a difference?

More. An interesting if rather hard-core libertarian item from the Friends of Liberty Newsletter:

D.C.’s gay pride festival in June was a case study in how the Left operates. What struck me as I walked around the festival was how a young person would see all the Left-leaning institutions of the gay community and conclude, a) that’s normal, and b) there is no alternative way to think about being gay. Only the almost-invisible gay Republican and libertarian booths offered any kind of diversity of thought. A number of organizations with booths at the festival had “equality” in their name . … The real deal is never articulated – ‘Support us and we’ll give you equality but, oh by the way, what we’re not telling you is that you’re signing up to live in a socialist country.’

Furthermore. Baldwin joins with the hard left to vote against the deficit ceiling agreement, finding even a modest amount of decrease in the growth of spending too much of an affront to her spendthrift sensibilities. She’s one of our elected representatives who is most responsible for this.

Former 2-term New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Gary Johnson says that the Christian right’s anti-gay “family leader pledge,” which other GOP White House contenders are jumping to sign, “gives Republicans a bad name.” Too bad the media refuses to take Johnson’s presidential bid seriously (unlike, say, Herman Cain, with no government experience), but he doesn’t fit into their political narrative.

More. Johnson’s latest on YouTube, Tolerance is American.

Furthermore. Filed under “There he goes again”…. Ex-Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, gay-rights opponent and GOP presidential contender, gets mired in whether being gay is “a choice” (which he seems to reduce to the dispute over a specific gay gene), when in truth this should be irrelevant to whether gay people deserve equality under the law. (For what it’s worth, the answer, given what we generally mean by “choice,” is almost always no, but maybe for some bisexuals in the middle of Kinsey’s scale, and more often for females than males, sometimes kinda sorta, as if it matters.)

The Pentagon has ordered a halt to all separations of gay troops under “don’t ask, don’t tell” and will begin accepting applications from prospective recruits who identify themselves as gay, reports Army Times, following a ruling by a panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Log Cabin Republicans v. United States.

It’s true that in a few weeks/months the administration would have formally ended DADT (60 days after the defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs certify that it will not adversely impact military readiness), after Congress voted to repeal the anti-gay-service law last December. But Log Cabin’s suit and the Ninth Circuit’s ruling are still good things. The court’s finding that the statute is unconstitutional because it treats gay Americans differently under the law is an excellent precedent to take into battle against the Defense of Marriage Act and other anti-gay government edicts.

With very different agendas: Margaret Hoover, a leading GOP strategist, fights for gay equality. Michele Bachmann is a vehement phobe (although she’s currently soft-peddling her bigotry).

Some progressive activists fear that liberalism today is too concerned with social issues like gay marriage instead of focusing on income redistribution and expanding government, Washington Post reporter Alec MacGillis writes:

If the country is becoming more liberal on accepting minority rights, why is the left having such a hard time making progress on its bread-and-butter issues of class and economics, which were once its central, animating concerns? Why is liberalism half-dead, half-alive? …

Helping push the marriage vote were billionaire financiers who have spent heavily to elect Republicans and block Democratic efforts to regulate Wall Street. And the hero of the vote, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has garnered praise from the right for balancing New York’s budget by cutting public education and public employees, instead of raising taxes on millionaires…

MacGillis quotes Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign, who says of wealthy Republicans who pressed New York GOP legislators to support gay marriage that:

he knows that the GOP donors are working to undermine other causes of the left, but he expressed no regret. “We do work very closely and in concert with folks in the progressive movement,” he said. “But we also understand there are times when we will have different stakeholders.”

Well, that’s good. But does HRC think that endorsing Obama’s re-election in June 2011 and backing all manner of liberal-left agenda items is going to open doors to working with gay-supportive Republicans? On the contrary, HRC has all but ensured that its help carries so much baggage as to make it the kiss of death for anyone who might be supportive of gay equality but isn’t on the left.

MacGillis concludes with remarks from openly gay uber-liberal Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.):

And how does Frank view the gay-marriage push provided by financiers—who will now resume trying to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank law and preserve the loophole that lets their winnings be taxed at only 15 percent?

“I know a couple hedge-fund people helped us on marriage,” he replied without hesitation. “But that’s no reason for me to back off on taxing them.”

Thanks in large part to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a coalition of liberals and gay-supportive Republicans carried the day in New York. But the “progressive” left to which many LGBT activists are aligned still puts government expansion and income redistribution at the top of its wish list, making it difficult to build and maintain a broad, national coalition of liberals, libertarians and free-market/limited govenrment conservatives in support of gay equality.

More. Columnist Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post:

We are now engaged in a messy debate over big budget deficits and the size of government. The struggle nominally pits liberals against conservatives, but this is misleading. The real debate involves reactionaries vs. radicals. Many liberals are reactionaries and many conservatives are radicals.

So why must the LGBT movement weigh in on one side or the other?

The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, R. Albert Mohler Jr., writes in the Wall Street Journal:

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. …
…we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality. We cannot pretend as if we do not know that the Bible clearly teaches that all homosexual acts are sinful, as is all human sexual behavior outside the covenant of marriage. …
There is no escaping the fact that we are living in the midst of a moral revolution. And yet, it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.

There you have the crux of the Christian right’s position, stated without rancor. It may do no good to argue, as many do, that Jesus never mentioned or condemned homosexuality but went out of his way to break bread with social outcasts and to charge those who would condemn a prostitute to cast the first stone if they were, themselves, without sin (as no one is). The apostle Paul, who never met Jesus in the flesh, did condemn a man who lies with a man as with a woman, but as with many Biblical prohibitions that statement is open to contextual interpretation (i.e., a condemnation of pagan practices). However, to the fundamentalist, whether on the Christian right or the politically correct left, the world is always black and white.

What particularly struck me about Mohler’s argument, however, is the underlying claim that we are in the midst of a moral revolution that is anti-gospel and therefore must be opposed. His is the same church, mind you, that about 150 years ago proclaimed that chattel slavery was Biblically sanctioned and worth fighting to maintain (although it would seem that anyone who reads the gospels without blinders could easily see how antithetical to the message of Jesus such as view was). Ending slavery, too, was a “moral revolution” that his church could not, and would not, accept.

It’s particularly sad when those who choose to dwell in darkness proclaim that their effort to keep human souls in bondage, then as now, is somehow God’s will. Here’s another Biblical verse: “Jesus wept.”

More. Bruce Bawer shares his thoughts on Mohler’s op-ed.