IGF CultureWatch

The new iman of the so-called Ground Zero mosque and Islamic cultural center, Abdallah Adhami, advocates retribution for those who leave the faith, reports the New York Post. He advised that those who preach about apostasy should at least be jailed, as “Many [Islamic] jurists have said they have to be killed.”

That led Jordan Sekulow, a lawyer at the Pat Robertson-founded American Center for Law and Justice, to question why the mosque project would choose a leader who advocates retribution for those who leave the faith. He remarked, “To be in the United States of America and to tell former Muslims to ‘keep your mouth shut’ is against the Constitution.” The Robertson-affiliated center is suing to stop the Islamic center and mosque from being built.

The iman also addressed the issue of homosexuality, holding forth that “An enormously overwhelming percentage of people struggle with homosexual feeling because of some form of violent emotional or sexual abuse at some point in their life.”

That led Fred Sainz, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, to respond that “When a religious leader of his standing opens up his mouth and spews this kind of ignorance and hateful statements, it does put his greater judgment into question.”

I believe that those who have legally secured ownership to property should be able to build a religious center, no matter how intolerant they are—whether Iman Abdallah Adhami or Pat Robertson. But that is different from celebrating such a center (when it is of the Islamic variety, of course) as a tribute to “diversity” and the multiculturalism of the Big Apple, as some have done.

The Washington Post reports on still small but none the less important gay inroads within the conservative world, while the New York Times looks at the CPAC flap.

Wishful thinking or green shoots?

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz on what he would have liked to have heard from the president: big spending cuts and repeal of DOMA.

I don’t know if either of these ads will make it to network television, much less the Super Bowl; but I know that I, for one, will be eating more Doritos.

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz analyzes recent polls to shed some light on whether Tea Party activists are truly libertarian-minded or (as liberals and their media never tire of claiming) in fact dangerous and reactionary social conservatives. He blogs:It’s disappointing to hear that New Mexico Tea Partiers booed Gary Johnson’s support for legalizing marijuana. And it’s true that a new poll shows Tea Partiers pretty strongly against marriage equality. But the poll does show them just a smidgen more supportive than either conservatives or Republicans. And other polls … have shown somewhat more support among self-identified Tea Party supporters, or a clear division between libertarian-minded and culturally conservative Tea Partiers. In general, Tea Party activists — organizers and people who attend events — seem somewhat more libertarian than people who simply tell pollsters they consider themselves to be members or supporters of the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party groups have declined invitations to criticize federal court rulings on gay marriage. They have studiously avoided taking positions on social issues, even when social conservatives stomp their feet and demand that the Tea Party start talking about abortion and gay marriage.

I have said before that “The tea party is not a libertarian movement, but (at this point at least) it is a libertarian force in American politics. It’s organizing Americans to come out in the streets, confront politicians, and vote on the issues of spending, deficits, debt, the size and scope of government, and the constitutional limits on government. That’s a good thing. And if many of the tea partiers do hold socially conservative views (not all of them do), then it’s a good thing for the American political system and for American freedom to keep them focused on shrinking the size and cost of the federal government.”

As part of his campaign to out-Romney Mitt Romney in the right-wing-pandering department, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty wants to reinstate the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on openly gay service in the military.

According to the GAO, it turns out the ban cost almost $200 million over fiscal 2004-2009, or an average of $53,000 per discharged service member. And that’s just five years. As we know, discrimination is expensive. From PoliticsDaily:

Some 39 percent of the dismissed service members “held critical occupations, such as infantryman and security forces,” the GAO said. That percentage included 23 experts who held skills in an important foreign language, “such as Arabic or Spanish.”

This is the same Pawlenty who demands federal spending cuts and opposes raising the debt limit (i.e., deficit financing).

Shall we ask the Governor, then, just which program he’d cut (Medicare? school lunches? the defense budget?) to reinstate discrimination in the armed forces? Or perhaps he’d prefer to raise taxes? He could call it the Safe Showers Surtax.

Ah…but rhetoric is free.

From National Journal:

For months, the family values wing of the Republican Party has been protesting the inclusion of GOProud, a right-wing gay group, at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). You won’t hear any protesting, however, from conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart.

“We’re going to have a big ol’ gay party,” he said on a radio show Wednesday. Breitbart says gays deserve a place within the Republican Party and he’s been “offended” by efforts to exclude them. Therefore, he’s throwing an 80’s-themed gay party to welcome them on board.

Say what you will about Breitbart or conservative firebrand Ann Coulter, who headlined a GOProud fundraiser in New York last fall—a transgression for which she was roundly denounced by social conservatives. Breitbart and Coulter are not supporters of gay legal equality (marriage, military, etc.) to be sure. But just the fact that they are willing to alienate themselves from the religious right by welcoming gay conservatives into the party’s tent is a sign that power is shifting away from the social conservative bloc.

On another political note: Jim Messina, a deputy White House chief of staff, will spearhead the Obama re-election campaign.

Will he accuse the GOP candidate of being gay, which is what Messina did when he worked for Sen. Max Baucus?

New Census Bureau data reveals child rearing among same-sex couples is more common in the South than in any other region of the country, and that, as the New York Times reports, “Gay couples in Southern states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are more likely to be raising children than their counterparts on the West Coast, in New York and in New England.”

Another interesting finding: “Moreover, gay men who have children do so an average of three years earlier than heterosexual men, census data shows.”

Those gay people; they’re just such family values conservatives!

There is more visceral media interest in our reaction to Jared Loughner’s heinous acts than there is in Loughner, himself.  It is worth our attention that our first instinct, after learning of the mass murders he committed, was to try and locate him on the political spectrum.

Part of that has to do with the fact that the primary target of his attack was a politician.  But there was something else at work as well: a need to view people as having and taking sides.

Rep. Giffords is a Democrat, and there can’t be much debate about the fact that a cadre of commentators on the left did what they could to locate Loughner on the other side – the right, and specifically, the Tea Party right.  If she was political, then there must be a political motive for the shooting somewhere.  Commentators on the right then needed to respond to these misguided efforts, and have done what they could to associate Loughner with the left, or more generally with the Democratic Party.

This is not exactly the kind of madness that Loughner suffers from, but it is the defining insanity of our time – the compulsion to understand people within categories.  In other contexts, we know this to be prejudice, but nothing is ever called prejudice when it is taken for granted.  Our political prejudices are so completely subsumed in our thinking that we don’t recognize them for what they are.

No one with the least amount of sense believes that Loughner acted for political motives.  Even the most herculean efforts to shoehorn his acts into politics needed to resort to the gymnastics of assigning blame to our political rhetoric, and the rhetoric’s effect on Loughner (and, necessarily, others).  There is little doubt in my mind that our political rhetoric is poisonous and unhelpful.  But only those who live and breathe in our rancid political culture could think that everyone understands the world this way.  Many Americans – maybe even a majority – partake of only enough political talk to get by, and ignore or shun vast swathes of it.

I suspect that these are the people who are abandoning the sides.  As Gallup has helped us understand, 38% of Americans identify themselves as independent of either political party, 7% more than the next leading brand.

It is the media’s tiresome and incessant need for “narrative” that helps to drive this movement.  The binary nature of the Democratic/Republican divide is invaluable in crafting stories that purport to explain our public life.  The drama comes from the divide, and the divide is endlessly exploitable by the press.  Because the parties need the press’s attention, the dramatic cycle is complete and self-replicating.

Except for the people who eventually weary of it.  While the political world is divided in two, the world Americans live in is neither binary nor so simplistic.  Drama and conflict are not always sufficient to truly understand things, and can, in fact, obscure more profound truths.  Sometimes, the effort we expend in trying to locate human beings on one side or the other, in order to better understand the narrative, wastes our time and leaves nothing but empty anger behind.

This site was started exactly because of that sort of problem.  The Democratic party’s impulse toward equality for lesbians and gay men was always decent and important.  Removing discriminatory laws from the books is the bedrock of our movement, and we now only have one left to go: marriage.

But after the laws that require discrimination are gone, Democrats still want to do more, to try and remove discrimination from the culture, itself.  That is a much larger, and more difficult task, and government’s role in it is not uniformly accepted.

On this point, the Independent Gay Forum was formed, both to question the reliance of lesbians and gay men on only a single political party, and to prod the Republican party on its unwillingness to address the simple issue of the existence of homosexuals and their role as citizens who are not heterosexual.  Should the law continue to ignore their existence?  Encourage their silence?  Punish them?

Neither party – neither side – was exactly right for us, as I’m sure neither party is exactly right for many people.  The binary political debate the nation was having about gay equality did not fit the more complicated facts and multiplicity of motives that exist.  And the disconnect could not be ignored.

I don’t expect all of those independent voters Gallup is tracking to go away soon.  I think they are now a permanent part of our politics, made more so by the parties, themselves, who find such a hard time even giving public acknowledgement of their existence.  But an awful lot of us just don’t feel a need to pick a side, and suffer the toxic effects of our artificially two-sided debate every single day.  We crave a discussion that is a bit more nuanced, and a lot more realistic.

I hope that’s what IGF provides.  Even when we irritate our own readers (and from the comments, it seems we do that a lot), we hope the irritation is welcome, and useful.

I have to say, I envy what Sherif Girgis, Robert George, and Ryan Anderson (GGA) have accomplished in their recent article (available here) and several follow-on posts (the latest is here). They have at last brought 100 percent epistemic closure to their opposition to same-sex marriage.

Their article is long and full of stuff, and it has generated an interesting discussion (many posts thru Jan. 3 are here, and GGA’s latest includes links to some more recent ones), but the verbiage is really all a gloss on this proposition: “Same-sex couples can’t marry because heterosexual intercourse is the sine qua non of marriage.” Or, to put it even more concisely: “Same-sex couples can’t marry because they’re not opposite-sex couples.”

Remember all that talk about marriage being “ordered (or oriented) to procreation”? As the new article and especially this follow-up make refreshingly explicit, “ordered to procreation” actually means “synonymous with heterosexuality.” Whether or not couples can actually procreate has nothing to do with it. If they can have penile-vaginal sex, they can accomplish the good of marriage. If not, not.

Never mind that the authors think they have discovered the truth of their proposition in the mists of time, in the self-evident contours of human sexuality, etc., etc.: what they have here is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, impervious, like some species of Marxism or Freudianism, to external refutation. Tell them that marriage does many important things besides provide a context for procreation, and that (straight) couples who cannot possibly procreate are allowed (indeed encouraged) to marry, and they merely say that those other purposes and other constituencies of marriage are not marriage’s essential nature.

Theirs is, in my own view, an impoverished, incomplete, and significantly wrongheaded view of marriage—and, what’s more important, it’s the whole wrong way to talk about marriage, which is a social institution, not a Platonic abstraction. But I see why it appeals to GGA: it allows them to absent themselves from all of the difficult questions in the gay-marriage debate…e.g.:

* The policy debate. GGA’s article includes some pragmatic arguments, but they’re baggage. If the documentary evidence were a mile high that legalizing same-sex marriage benefits gays and society, that wouldn’t change the fact that same-sex couples can’t be married.

* The equality debate. What equality debate? There is no equality case for same-sex marriage, because same-sex couples can’t be married.

* The humanitarian debate. Look, it’s not GGA’s fault that gay couples can’t be married, but they can’t, and that’s that. The good news, though, is that gays can still have intimate friendships. (Thanks.)

Disconcertingly, GGA congratulate themselves for resolving the gay-marriage issue, when they’ve merely ducked most of it. They seem to have no moral qualms about saying, in 2011, that their moral universe need take no account of gay lives and loves. Let them eat friendship! GGA have, indeed, defined not only gay marriage but gays out of the picture. I wish I could help them to see why, to a gay American in 2011, their approach seems not only unpersuasive but chillingly callous.

I wasn’t being entirely sardonic when I said I envy what GGA have accomplished. I sometimes wish I, too, could write myself a permission slip to take a pass on the hard moral and social questions. I’m grateful that the American public hasn’t and won’t.