IGF CultureWatch

Facebook’s decision to include “civil union” and “domestic partnership” as relationship statuses is not an unmixed blessing.  Marriage Equality’s Mollie McKay is right enough that “. . . it’s important to be able to recognize and describe the legal status of same sex couples.” Facebook is the virtual New York: If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. . .

But all this does is clarify for the world that, when it comes to being homosexual, It’s Complicated.  Facebook used to offer same sex couples the legally accurate but obviously wrong option of saying they were “single,” or the vague but helpful “in a relationship.”  Five of the other options (“engaged,” “married,” “separated,” “widowed” and “divorced”) locate people on the spectrum of the ordinary marriage spectrum.  The two others, “in an open relationship” and “it’s complicated” acknowledge the varieties of human experience.

So adding civil unions and domestic partnerships clarifies some new legal options and lets same-sex couples identify themselves more precisely.  But the cost of that precision is an additional level of social clutter.  Prior to the creation of domestic partnership as a legal category in 1985, and Vermont’s civil unions in 2000, no same-sex couples would have referred to themselves in such legalistic terms.  They would have said they had a committed relationship, and would almost certainly have married one another if the law allowed.  And on the other side of the scale, it is unlikely at best that any significant number of committed heterosexual couples (i.e. the ones who wouldn’t call their relationship “open”) would have dreamed of formalizing their relationship in any way other than a marriage.

Domestic partnerships and civil unions are way-station categories, created only because the vacuum in the middle of gay lives was so obvious and oppressive, at first only to same-sex couples, but increasingly to heterosexuals who could see the glaring injustice.  While the law can not prohibit same-sex couples from loving one another and forming commitments, it can nevertheless enforce a blasé cruelty by simply ignoring the relationships entirely, treating them as a legal irrelevancy.

It is that blasé cruelty that makes Maggie Gallagher and so many others irksome.  But it is exactly because of social speedbumps like Gallagher that we have to further complicate the world before we can resimplify it in a more inclusive way.

Domestic partnerships and civil unions, at least when they provide comprehensive state benefits and responsibilities identical to those of married heterosexual couples, are not as egregiously offensive as some argue; they lie somewhere between deeming our relationships 3/5 of a real relationship and full equality, neither as bad as the former nor achieving the latter.  We are clearly making progress on full marriage equality, but there we have to expect some political defeats in the years ahead.

That is the compromised ground we will be working from for the next generation.  Facebook has made it clear that ground is solid if confounding.  Let’s just hope we can stick with two additional relationship categories for awhile, before we wind the world back to just having one for everybody.

Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle say it’s OK with them if GOProud, a gay Republican group, attends the Conservative Political Action Conference. This distinguishes them from a number of other leading Republican figures. Good on them.

But how grateful should we be? At The Daily Caller, Jeff Winkler calls out gay-rights groups for “willfully ignoring” Palin’s and Angle’s gestures:

The nation’s largest gay rights advocacy organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), has instituted its own “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward conservative firebrands Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle after they implicitly — but clearly — voiced support for the gay-oriented Republican group GOProud.

I agree that mainline gay groups have been too partisan (though I also agree that Republicans have given them little cause for bipartisanship). IGF came into being partly to make this point.

But are we really supposed to praise Republican politicians simply for saying they’re willing to share a convention hall with—well, with “diverse groups,” as Palin delicately put it? (Would it have been so hard to say “gays”?) Isn’t that setting the bar a bit low? Shouldn’t we expect them to do or say something that might actually help us? Or at least specifically acknowledge that we exist?

Put me down with HRC on this one. I’ll keep an open mind on Palin. But I’ll praise her when she earns it.

The odds that Rep. Ron Paul will ever be president are very slim. But it’s still nice to see him best Mitt (amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage) Romney and win the presidential straw poll at CPAC—the Conservative Action Political Conference—thanks largely to his energized young supporters.

For those who don’t know, Paul was one of just five GOP members of Congress who voted to end “don’t ask, don’t tell.” And during his 2008 presidential run, when John Stossel (then of ABC’s 20/20) asked if gay people should be allowed to marry, Paul, an opponent of the anti-gay federal marriage amendment, replied “Sure…I’d like to see all governments out of the marriage function. I don’t think it’s a state function; I think it’s a religious function.”

As the Economist reports, Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron gave a resounding endorsement to what were once termed liberal values and against the sort of state multiculturalism that defends the separatism of immigrant communities, including radical Islamism, and opposes their cultural integration into Western society.

Cameron declared that the state needs actively to promote values of “freedom of speech and worship, democracy, rule of law and equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality.”

Added the Conservative PM:

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.…

We need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.

His remarks, not surprisingly, were dismissed by progressives.

Relatedly, columnist Abigail R. Esman describes how the liberal media’s refusal to investigate and report on the wave of honor killings of young women by their families in Islamic immigrant communities led her to reassess her progressive politics.

More—Here vs. There. It’s worth noting that, unlike the British Conservative party, the U.S. Republicans are under the sway of a powerful and well-organized religious right contending for influence with a more libertarian, small-government “leave us alone” faction. That’s a challenge on the right that will have to be confronted for many years to come before we see a Republican president call for “equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality.”

Moreover, Britain’s Conservatives are in a governing alliance with the Liberals against the leftwing, union-dominated Labour party. In the U.S., our traditionally liberal party, the Democrats, are now controlled to a large extent by public-sector unions. So we no longer have a pro-market liberal party. That leaves us with a rightwing party dominated by social conservatives and a leftwing party driven by redistributionist unions. Hence, our sad political predicament.

The brouhaha over GOProud’s participation in the Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest annual gathering of conservative activists in Washington, is getting bigger.

Those boycotting the event over the participation of openly gay conservatives are using the Orwellian name “Conservatives for Unity” to declare that gay conservatives are anathema and must be expulsed from the movement. They held forth that “it is necessary for each group within any coherent movement not to stand in diametrical opposition to one or more of its core principles. It is our conviction that the institution of marriage and the family qualify as such principles.”

But what does it say that Larry L. Eastland, a bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a board member of the American Conservative Union, the group that organizes CPAC, responded in a letter to fellow board members that they should “not be guilty of ‘casting the first stone,’ and added, “Let us not lose sight of our goals by closing the door on individuals who will stand with us on public issues on which we agree, and keep to themselves their differences on issues where it could give ‘aid and comfort’ to our opponents.”

I guess it says that the boycotters are so crazy that they make the Mormons look like liberals.

More. Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who sits on the board of the American Conservative Union and is on the advisory board of GOProud, dismissed the boycotters, saying:

Loser people and loser organizations that haven’t done any work all year try to get headlines so they can whine about CPAC. They can get a little press. That happens all the time.

Zack Rosen demonstrates the contortions that gay white men who aspire to be part of the LBGT progressive world have to undergo. He writes “In Defense of the Gay White Male,” but his defense is extremely tepid and his column is more about recognizing his privileged condition as a non-transgendered non-person of color while asserting, mildly, that he really doesn’t quite understand why he should be apologizing for this. Give it up, Zack, cause you’re never going to escape the oppressive white male accusation with that crowd.

Mark Twain said that, if there is a heaven, it’s apt to be mighty crowded with hypocrites. Writing in the L.A. Times on social conservatives who go after gays because they’re easier targets than divorce and single parenthood, David Boaz shows why Twain was right.

Frank Kameny laid the groundwork for the gay rights movement. Now it’s time for us to help him.

In the San Diego Gay & Lesbian News, a progressive outfit called Courage Campaign states:

This weekend in Rancho Mirage, Calif., the Koch brothers—key funders of California’s anti-environment Prop 23 as well as the Tea Party, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and countless other right-wing organizations—will meet behind closed doors with other conservative power brokers. There, these billionaires and their elected officials will strategize on how to impose their right-wing agenda on the rest of us.

Would that “right wing agenda” of the Cato Institute include its amicus brief in Lawrence that Justice Kennedy cited in his opinion overturning state sodomy laws (note: he didn’t cite the briefs from NGLTF or HRC), or the Cato Institute’s efforts backing the suit to overturn California’s anti-gay marriage Prop. 8?

Ah, well here’s some good news to be filed under Things Change: Gay Marine’s husband surprised at respect shown by Naval Academy.