IGF CultureWatch

There’s a tsunami, and it isn’t in Japan.

I’ve been blogging for a few months on a series of polls showing increases in support for gay marriage and gay equality. (Here…and here…and here.) They all point in the same direction, and they show such rapid change that, especially at first, I was cautious about taking them at face value, especially when they found majorities for same-sex marriage.

Now comes yet another. And it is as stunning as the others. This is from Gallup, which has asked for years whether gay and lesbian relations are “morally acceptable” or “morally wrong.” In my opinion, this is the single most important polling question on gay rights, because moral disapproval lies at the heart of anti-gay discrimination and animus. As I argued here, when moral disapproval falls below a certain critical mass, the whole superstructure of discrimination will eventually topple with it.

So…in 2011, 56 percent say gay relations are morally acceptable, up four points since just a year ago, and up seven points from just a year before that. Disapproval is down to 39 percent, just over a third of the public. As Gallup’s chart shows, in the past ten years the approval/disapproval contingents have traded places. In other words, our side is where their side was just a decade ago!

And, no, it’s not a fluke. Pew has 58 percent saying that homosexuality should be accepted by society.

Gallup headlines another result (same survey), which strikes me as less important but still interesting: 64 percent say gay or lesbian relations between consenting adults should be legal, the highest in the 30 years since the question was first asked.

Political polls bob up and down, but never in my career of covering politics and society have I seen such rapid movement of public opinion on a core social values. But I think one must bow before the accumulating evidence and say this: we are at a Berlin Wall moment in gay-straight relations. Right now.

We’ve won. It’s all over but the shouting. Now, there will be a lot of shouting, and some of it will matter. But there will be no going back. History has happened.

More: But…an important cautionary note from Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune. Change in public opinion does not mean the Republicans change their steadfast opposition any time soon. Money quote:

In fact, there is every reason to think that for the foreseeable future, the GOP will continue to reject gay rights — and there are ample grounds, alas, to think it can do so without any real political penalty.

In light of Jon Rauch’s post on the Gallup Poll, I’d like to revisit something we’ve been debating.  I think the issue can fairly be described as the tone of the more unrestrained voices on our side.

Jon has been concerned that the rhetoric of hate “plays into the other side’s hands.”   Maggie Gallagher has been whipping this horse for all its worth, trying to paint herself as the victim of hateful gays.  With the able assistance of California’s Frank Schubert, she has pulled off a couple of miraculous electoral victories.  Jon doesn’t want us to provide any more fuel to that fire.

In light of that, we shouldn’t overread the Gallup results.  We know that in any particular state at any particular time there is a cushion of residual prejudice marriage opponents can take comfort in.  The older voters who grew up ignorant of homosexuality still vote in far greater numbers than the younger voters who are the staunchest supporters of equality.  There is still a gap between the polling numbers and the polling places.

But as Jon notes, support in the Gallup poll has increased at a stunning pace, and Gallup isn’t alone.

This has happened despite the right’s drumbeat cries of victimization.  Why?

I think it’s because the plea was always so implausible and rickety, and it isn’t getting any sturdier.  Within the ephemeral media, each true anecdote can breathe for a day or two, and then wisps away.  In the non-mediated world where real people live, the notion that it is our opponents who are suffering is losing what tenuous hold it ever had.  We’re gaining supporters because we are the ones who have something real to endure, and that is no longer escaping peoples’ notice.  More and more Americans see our frustration and anger as justified, and while that isn’t a reason to encourage hatefulness, it can make some level of outrage comprehensible.

That was highlighted yesterday in the Minnesota House, where homophobic preacher-manque Bradlee Dean was invited to offer the opening prayer at a session where the anti-gay constitutional amendment was expected to come up.  Dean took advantage of the opportunity to make a crass political speech that only tangentially invoked “Father God.”  The speech, itself, was not explicitly anti-gay (though Dean did find time to insult the President), but it was so wildly inappropriate that the Speaker was effectively forced to cancel the prayer and re-start the session with a whole new preacher.  I’ve seen a lot of things in legislatures in my time, but this is the first time I’ve seen the need to void the preceding prayer and start over.

There would be few reasons to invite Dean to the Legislature at this moment (he’d never been at that podium before) except for his anti-gay views — a Republican poke in the eye to the Democrats, who are trying to fend off an unnecessary anti-gay amendment to the state constitution.  Dean’s transgression of the normal etiquette was severe enough that the amendment might now be in some trouble.  Needless to say, no one in the Minnesota leadership will own up to having invited Dean.

That is where anti-gay prejudice is now – orphaned, but alive.  Anti-gay Republicans know what Maggie Gallagher knows: Americans are having a harder time with each passing year tolerating this particular brand of intolerance.  She has to struggle every day to make us out as the bad guys when, after all, we are the ones who can’t get married.  Bradlee Dean, Fred Phelps, Bryan Fischer, Bill Donohue – Americans will tolerate these firebrands, but take no pride in associating with them, or the snide insults they trade in.  These are the men who demonstrate that our anger is sometimes justified, and make our equality more legitimate.  I can’t answer for anyone else’s extreme language, but when these are the characters you have to respond to, it’s a little less shocking to people when you become a bit intemperate.

Even to someone fairly jaded about seemingly dramatic poll results, Gallup’s new finding that support for same-sex marriage is now the majority position is breathtaking. The poll finds a huge one-year jump in support, from 44 percent in 2010 to 53 percent this year. If the pollster weren’t Gallup (gold standard), and if The Washington Post/ABC News poll hadn’t come up recently with exactly the same result, I’d suspect this was a fluke. You just don’t normally see attitudes change that much in one year, absent a catalytic event.

Moreover, support for SSM is up among every group: men, women, old, young, etc. Well, every group but one. The only group among which support for SSM hasn’t grown: Republicans. They continue to oppose it by almost three to one.

Though I admire certain aspects of Republicans’ plan to abolish Medicare as we know it, while admiring nothing about Republicans’ posture on homosexuality, on both dimensions what you see is a party increasingly digging itself into isolation, convinced that if if only adheres to the true faith the public will eventually come around.

I’d rather the anti-SSM constitutional amendment didn’t pass in Minnesota; but, if it does, I’ll get some consolation from knowing that the GOP will have shot itself in the foot with a vote that will look very bad, very soon.

Jim Burroway makes a very good point at Box Turtle Bulletin, as “the race to water down Rhode Island’s civil union bill” begins.

Marriage is the only non-negotiable relationship the law recognizes.  Anything less leads to bargaining.

That’s one of the key ways you can tell the difference between a right and things like privileges, desires and the lesser forms of contract the law recognizes.

This seems to be a good point to make to heterosexuals.  They have the luxury of  not having to go to their elected officials (or fellow voters!) to wheel and deal over how the law will respect their marriage.  For lesbians and gay men, I suppose, it’s better to be in a position where we have something to bargain over, rather than having no recognition at all.  That’s progress, but it’s certainly not anything straight people should envy us for.

And, of course, I have to make the obvious point that Jim misses, about California.  We don’t have civil unions here, we have domestic partnerships.  Neither our marriages nor our DPs would get any recognition in Rhode Island at all.  Perhaps they could add in a provision about “domestic partnerships” as well as calling out civil unions.  But, of course, they’d then also have to put a provision on the list for any future state that chooses, in the legislative back-and-forth, to implement some other name.  Yet that’s what they tried to do with the phrase, “substantially similar legal relationship,” and they had to edit that out because marriage is substantially similar, and the whole point is to sidestep that little issue.

This is what it looks like to aspire to equality — vying in the bazaar of the legislative process for whatever you can get.  There are lots of things that are worth this tremendous, muddy, divisive fight.  But heterosexuals should pause, every now and then, to appreciate how nice it is not to have to engage in this battle.

Seven years ago today, on May 17, 2004, same-sex couples began marrying in Massachusetts. The onslaught of happy homosexuals has not harmed marriage in that state, which still has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. It has simply made marriage available to more families, a benefit to them and their communities.

Yet the campaign to protect some abstract, fall-from-the-sky, untouched-by-human-hands, changeless thing called “the institution of marriage” grinds on—now in the form of a proposed amendment to the Minnesota constitution that would define it as the union of one man and one woman. The debate in the state senate last week avoided hysterical rhetoric about dirty, subhuman homosexuals poisoning the minds of our children with their evil ways. Absent were the usual arguments about the One Great Purpose of Marriage: responsible procreation. Gone was the familiar but baseless charge that married gay couples would force themselves on helpless God-fearing people and churches. Silent were the protestations that Heather would be taught she could have two mommies. In fact, all of the substantive arguments against same-sex marriage were slighted in favor of process-based concerns that robed tyrants will decide the issue and that the people should get to vote on it.

When a state senator proposed to restrict court power over the issue, amendment supporters said that wasn’t good enough because it wouldn’t let people vote on the definition itself. When the amendment’s sponsor was asked what, precisely, the people would accomplish by voting on the definition, he could not think of anything substantive. In other words, the amendment would protect marriage but not marriages.  It was a rare moment of clarity and honesty in the gay-marriage debate.  Watch for yourself:

“It’ll do nothing to help you with your marriage.”

The state senate paid no heed, passing the proposed amendment, 38-27. It now goes to the state house of representatives. If it wins there, it will go to the voters in the November 2012 election where they will be implored, apparently, to achieve nothing.

I think Stephen Miller might be letting partisanship eclipse his more characteristic common sense, similar to the way the partisanship of Nicholas Confessore and Michael Barbaro short circuits their ability to put together a reasonable thought for their article in the NYTimes.  (And I apologize to Stephen for the unkind comparison, but friends don’t let friends rely too uncritically on the NYT).  Any focus on liberals or Democrats misses the most important point of this story.

The heart of the problem for both Stephen and the NYT is the glaring use of the word “unexpected” in the article’s lede:

As gay rights advocates intensify their campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, the bulk of their money is coming from an unexpected source: a group of conservative financiers and wealthy donors to the Republican Party, most of whom are known for bankrolling right-leaning candidates and causes.

In New York’s incestuous thinking, it probably is unexpected that conservative financiers would want to spend money supporting same-sex marriage.  That, after all, comes right out of the dominant theology of the left – that donors to the Republican party actually want what the religious right says they ought to want.

But while the religious right and those wealthy donors share a party, they do not share an ideology, or much of anything else.  Responsible, thoughtful and strategic members of the national GOP have a long-term interest in ridding the party of the toxic influence that Ronald Reagan first brought in, the first George Bush tolerated, and the second Bush encouraged in the most cynical and malignant way.  John McCain was the most recent, high profile victim of this political perversion, but he will not be the last.  And there are a lot of people who want out of this dead-end.

It will be no easy task to deliver the GOP from this brand of political illiterates.  They cannot be expelled from the party just as cancer can’t be expelled from the body.  The treatment will be long and painful.  Fortunately, there is no shortage of political donors who have no interest in killing their party, but want to be rid of these troublesome priests.

Same-sex marriage in a state like New York is one of the openings they have to help break the ice.  They need to enable moderate members of their party to dislodge themselves from the stigma of religious fundamentalism, so they can focus on the economic issues that are paramount for their party and for the nation.  More important, they need to send that message to voters.  After a decade and a half of ODing on the crack of homophobia, the GOP has found itself with the reputation for treating fiscal issues with the same casual political cynicism that they have had to feign on marriage and other culture war skirmishes.

No one who takes real politics seriously – the kind that actual, savvy, politicians of good will practice every day out of the tawdry spotlights of the political press – would or should be surprised by this move.  It shows no more than that “conservative financiers and wealthy donors to the Republican Party” (as the NYT would have it) possess the normal level of self-interest that can be expected from any political faction, and that sometimes that self-interest has beneficial effects on the body politic.

I’m generally no fan of the way too smug Jon Stewart and his Daily Show, but this segment about gay life in San Francisco vs. Minneapolis actually hits on a real truth about how most of us live vs. what some still like to promote as gay identity.

The New York Times reports:

As gay rights advocates intensify their campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, the bulk of their money is coming from an unexpected source: a group of conservative financiers and wealthy donors to the Republican Party, most of whom are known for bankrolling right-leaning candidates and causes. . . .

The donations are financing an intensive campaign of television advertisements and grass-roots activism coordinated by New Yorkers United for Marriage, a group of same-sex marriage advocates. . . . The newly recruited donors argue that permitting same-sex marriage is consistent with conservative principles of personal liberty and small government.

More. Apparently, some are too young to get the allusion.

I hope people aren’t missing the point of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which is back before that country’s Parliament.  The debate in America has focused on the bill’s death penalty provision, which is, by any measure, a horrifying use of naked governmental power in the 21st Century.

But does that  imply that replacing death with some lesser punishment would make the bill better?  I’m afraid this report from the indispensable Jim Burroway, leaves that impression.

It is not the death penalty that makes this bill intolerable.  It is the bill’s entire premise.  Its title is “The Anti-Homosexuality Bill.”  Its purpose is to use the force of government to prohibit “. . . any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex; and [ ] the promotion or recognition of such sexual relations in public institutions and other places.”

Whatever your thoughts about the proper role of government, this aggressive, punitive and ignorant bill is a corruption and an abuse.  Even with no death penalty, the bill sends the same message: lesbians and gay men are not only anathema, they must be removed from the body politic.  They are not to be tolerated.

We shouldn’t let the presence of the death penalty in the bill blind us to that far more important fact.  Otherwise, our arguments against the bill could turn against us, and we could wind up with an amended version intended to satisfy our expressed concern.  There is no version of this bill that is acceptable.