IGF CultureWatch

Navy Captain Owen P. Honors has lost his command of the USS Enterprise over raunchy comedy videos he made, which were shown on the ship’s closed circuit TV two years ago when he was serving as the Enterprise’s executive officer (XO). The media is making much of the gay content in the videos and charges that they were homophobic, sexist and profanity laden. But is Capt. Owen getting a raw deal?

Here’s one series of video excerpts posted by the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. One example of the “gay” content: XO Owen, wearing a funny shower cap, opens the shower to find two women (from shoulders up). The rule is three minutes max to shower. They say, “there are two of us; don’t we get six minutes.” It’s repeated by request later, but then toward the end of the excerpts Owen again opens the shower and finds two hunky men. They repeat the line.

But Owen has his defenders, including some openly gay former sailors who served on the Enterprise. From the Washington Times:

Interviews with sailors on the Enterprise at the time, including several who have since left the Navy and say they were openly gay when they served, suggest that the videos, far from offending, did, as intended, raise morale through their crude humor. Many of Capt. Honors’ former shipmates think the Navy has already gone too far in stripping him of his command. . . .

Capt. Honors “absolutely did not” create a hostile or homophobic atmosphere on board, added Eric M. Prenger, a gay sailor who also served on the Enterprise at the time. Mr. Prenger, an electronics technician, third class, said the crew looked forward to the videos, which were broadcast on the ship’s closed circuit TV system every Saturday night, preceding the showing of a movie.

“They were definitely a tension reliever,” said Mr. Prenger, who has also since left the service. “I remember laughing at them.”

Still, in a video not in this series (and not posted online), the word “faggot” was used. In this Washington Post op-ed, Bruce Fleming, a civilian English instructor at the United States Naval Academy, writes:

The worst offense to many viewers of the videos seems to be Honors’ use of a word usually meant as a gay slur. He’s not referring to someone believed to be gay, but to one of his “alter egos” [which he plays in the videos] and to the video’s audience, Surface Warfare Officers, who (the self-deprecating inside joke has it) are not as cool as pilots. …

Yes, the captain uses a slur, but not to make fun of gay people. Everything depends on context—in this case, the insular confines of a ship at sea.

Fleming stresses Owen’s non-hateful intention, in his view, although he makes clear that a line was crossed that made his firing inevitable.

That’s probably right. But most gay people quite rightly have a lower tolerance of the word gay (or the f-slur) being used as any kind of deprecation.

Still, judging from the posted video excerpts, those charging that the videos promoted “sexual harassment and sexual assault” or that Capt. Owners “should be prosecuted” seem way over the top. Personally, I’ve been more offended—much more offended—by some of the homophobic “humor” on Saturday Night Live.

More. Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute blogs:

there was a morale problem on the ship for a while, in part due to the fresh water restrictions that the shower scenes in the videos tried to make light of. By many accounts, XO Honors was instrumental in turning this state of affairs around. The Enterprise, a bear of a ship to operate, the oldest nuclear-powered vessel in the fleet, with eight (8!) reactors, earned unit citations under Honors’s leadership.

All that said, I stand by my original assessment. In striving to improve the crew’s morale, Captain Honors crossed the fine line between clever and stupid. He demonstrated poor judgment in producing videos in an official capacity that could easily be taken out of context, as they have been.

Jon’s post on the CPAC Crack-Up glosses over the most important part of this story: GOProud.  In fact, Jon doesn’t even mention them by name, referring only to “a gay Republican group.”

Credit where credit is due.  In the more than three decades of its existence the Log Cabin Republicans never provoked this level of anguish and inflammation in its party – or, more accurately, this level of public anguish and inflammation.  Log Cabin has been a private thorn in the party’s side since 1977, but up until now, the party has been able to brush them aside in its public pronouncements.

But it’s also true that Log Cabin has been something of a team player.  In contrast, GOProud is the Republican ACT UP.

And I mean that in a literal sense.  GOProud is unleashing power.  Republicans have spent a lot of political energy in the last decade trying to finesse and manage their religious problem, while benefiting from it electorally.  The religious wing of the party expects all people who call themselves “conservatives” to share their abhorrence of and intolerance for open and honest homosexuality.  The party has given them lip service; pledges and resistance to progress, and even a couple of outspoken backbenchers who show all the signs of being true believers.

They also gave them Texas.

But no political party can live with intolerance indefinitely; compromise always creeps in, and the world outside the party can’t be denied for long.  Lesbians and gay men aren’t going away, and it’s hard to maintain the closet as an institution if they keep refusing to cooperate.  Today, there are simply too many examples of decent, moral, public and powerful homosexuals to sustain the notion that “they” are evil or harmful or much of anything other than fellow citizens, friends, coworkers, neighbors and family members.

Republican leaders have suppressed their party’s best instincts about this for too long, and GOProud is, as ACT-UP did before it, unleashing the power that’s been there all along.  GOProud can be as juvenile and theatrical as their predecessors, but they are also, like ACT-UP, a deeply serious group – as this reaction to their existence shows.

Maybe the timing is better for them than it ever was for Log Cabin.  Or maybe Log Cabin’s political strategy wasn’t what was needed to blow up the party’s entrenched hypocrisy.  But either way, GOProud is now forcing their party to have a public conversation about a fundamental question that has been kept at the margins: What would Republican conservatism look like if it weren’t anti-gay?

That won’t be resolved at CPAC.  But it’s a question whose resolution will affect a lot of people, gay and straight, Republican and Democratic.

OK, addendum to my last post: Now it’s officially a big deal.

The Heritage Foundation has joined the social-conservative boycott of the Conservative Political Action Conference, reports The Washington Times. The casus belli is CPAC’s willingness to let a gay Republican group participate in the confab. Here’s an amazing quote:

“The rather arrogant treatment of social conservatives by libertarians is troubling,” said Mr. [Andy] Blom [of the American Principles Project].

So it’s “arrogant” for libertarians to ask conservatives to share a room with homosexuals? Whereas, I guess, dictating terms to the whole conservative movement is…humble?

Unlike other CPAC boycotters, Heritage regards itself as a big-tent patron of the whole conservative movement—a conservative uniter, not a divider. I doubt Heritage would have joined the boycott if it weren’t under severe pressure from the cultural right.

Anyway, whether Heritage jumped off the fence or was pushed, it has been forced to choose between its libertarian and social-con impulses. So, folks, it’s official. The battle is joined. The Manhattan Declaration has gone operational.

The real purpose of this campaign is to read libertarians the riot act and put them back in their place, which was worrying about taxes while social-cons handled “values” (abortion and gays). My guess is that libertarians will back down in the face of social-cons’ threat to split the movement. Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Maybe the anti-gay right’s plan to boycott the Conservative Political Action Conference is an isolated squabble. No big deal, says Dave Weigel. Maybe, but I don’t think so. I’ll agree with Jennifer Rubin: this is a fairly big deal, a sign of what life will be like for the right now that homosexuality is a wedge issue among Republicans.

In October of 2009, a group of social conservatives issued something they called the Manhattan Declaration: a not-very-veiled threat to split the conservative movement if it tried to soft-pedal abortion and gay marriage. Just weeks later, a gay Republican group called GOProud showed up at CPAC, causing a rupture between libertarians and social conservatives. Meanwhile, the Tea Party movement was entering conservative politics as a major disruptive force on the libertarian side. Though socially conservative in their views, Tea Partiers want to put economic issues first and see social issues as divisive distractions.

So now GOProud is back for Round Two, and a cluster of social-cons, including the Family Research Council and the National Organization for [read: Against Gay] Marriage, have drawn what they call a “line in the sand” against participating in CPAC if GOProud is there, which it will be.

Weigel and others are right to say that these tiffs are not uncommon on the right (or, for that matter, on the left). But it’s not the particular tiff that’s important here. Here’s the problem: conservatives’ hostility to homosexuality isolates them politically from the rest of the public, and the anti-gay consensus is fracturing even on the right (44 percent of Republicans say homosexuality should be accepted by society).

Translation: an issue which once divided and dispirited the Democratic coalition while uniting and energizing conservatives now cuts the other way. It’s a wedge issue against the right. Not just temporarily, either.

That’s why, despite my prediction (never have I been happier to be wrong!), Republicans couldn’t hold ranks last month over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It’s why the House GOP will make its stand in 2011 not on social issues but on spending cuts, which may not enjoy broad public support but which do, at least, unite rather than divide conservatives.

And it’s why the latest GOProud/CPAC tiff is not just a bad moment in a happy marriage. The anti-gay right is losing its grip, but it won’t surrender without a fight, and the fight it promised in the Manhattan Declaration is under way.

B. Daniel Blatt of Gay Patriot has an op-ed on AOLNews.com looking at the path ahead for implementing “don’t ask” repeal and other gay equality measures. He writes about the military:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates assured Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., that implementation would proceed in stages, “sequenced in order to protect small unit cohesion” . . . It remains to be seen how exactly the military will determine that “specific methodology. . . .The Palm Center’s Aaron Belkin, however, believes repeal “really isn’t rocket science” given that “the troops already know how to interact with gays because they do so every day.” . . .The Palm Center holds that it can be done in “a matter of weeks,” while the defense secretary thinks a year may be needed to educate troops, with the specific methodology yet to be determined.

We’ll see how drawn out the battle over implementation becomes.

Has anyone got a more blinkered view of gays in the entertainment industry than Ramin Setoodeh?  Last year, for reasons that escape me, he decided that Sean Hayes shouldn’t be playing the lead in Broadway’s Promises, Promises because Hayes is gay.  Worse, Setoodeh thought it was a good idea to share that insight with the whole world.

You’d think that experience would have taught him a lesson, but he’s now back claiming that not only do audiences not “see” gay actors in straight roles, but that Hollywood won’t even let gay actors play gay roles.

Given the economy in California, it’s possible (I suppose) that TV doesn’t count as “Hollywood” anymore, but anyone who saw the Emmy awards last year might have noticed that one category alone — Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series — had nominations for gay actors playing straight, gay actors playing gay and a straight actor playing gay.  Yes, the straight actor won, but does anyone at all think this Hollywood has any problem with any qualified actor playing gay roles?

Whatever it is Setoodeh is qualified to write about, gays in the entertainment industry seems not to be it.

Stephen Miller joins what is turning out to be a much larger, and enormously welcome conversation over gay rights that has been too long in making it to the public stage.  He says the Christianist rebellion against the conservative CPAC is a “Welcome Winnowing” of the right from the conservative movement.  Karen Ocamb asks the obvious related question from the left:  “Will LGBT progressives be able to work with Log Cabin Republicans in 2011?”  And Jonah Goldberg in the LA Times is dumbfounded to learn there are non-leftist homosexuals.

But it’s best to let the Christianists speak for themselves, and I think Joseph Farah of World Net Daily sums it up quite clearly:

Purge is not a bad word. It simply means, according to the dictionary definition, “to rid of whatever is impure or undesirable; cleanse; purify.

As I was listening to Handel’s glorious “Messiah” over Christmas, the phrase, “And we shall purify. . .” struck me, for the first time, as terrifying.  Something that is a necessary task in chemistry and the hard sciences is transformed, in human desire and behavior, into horror-ridden moral crusades.  Whether someone wants to purify a group of humans for religious reasons, racial ones or political ones — or any combination of those — there are no means to that end that are not gross, shocking, sometimes obscene, and at their worst, naked terrorism.

The Republican Party has given aid and comfort to people who want to cleanse the world of homosexuality.  All of their studiously loving words cannot hide that simple wish.  The GOP has been able to finesse this decay for long enough, and now faces an internal conflict that not even Ronald Reagan could manage.

The Purists are awake and active.  And I can’t see a Republican leader on the horizon who can even begin to handle them.

From the socially conservative World Net Daily:

Two of the nation’s premier moral issues organizations, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in February because a homosexual activist group, GOProud, has been invited. . . .

FRC and CWA join the American Principles Project, American Values, Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Liberty Counsel, and the National Organization for Marriage in withdrawing from CPAC. In November, APP organized a boycott of CPAC over the participation of GOProud. . . .

The American Conservative Union, longtime organizers of CPAC, disclosed just before Christmas that GOProud would be considered a “participating organization,” the second highest level of participation. As a “participating organization,” GOProud has a voice in planning the conference.

This is a great sign that the gay haters (who hate to be identified as haters) are splitting off, just as during the late 50s/early 60s the avowed racists and anti-Semites left or were driven from what was becoming the new mainstream (Barry Goldwater, Bill Buckley) conservative movement.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

More. Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg opines: “I also find it cruel and absurd to tell gays that living the free-love lifestyle is abominable while at the same time telling them that their committed relationships are illegitimate too. . . . And given that open homosexuality is simply a fact of life, the rise of the HoBos—the homosexual bourgeoisie—strikes me as good news.”

Not quite a Christmas miracle, put this is a possible herald of change.

Televangelist Pat Robertson has been no friend of liberty, as witnessed by his long history of anti-gay and otherwise defamatory and discrimination-defending remarks. But as the Washington Post reported, he appears on the right side of one hot-button issue: pot criminalization. “We’re locking up people that take a couple of puffs of marijuana, and the next thing you know they’ve got 10 years,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club.” “I’m not exactly for the use of drugs—don’t get me wrong—but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot and that kind of thing, I mean, it’s just, it’s costing us a fortune and it’s ruining young people.”

Vice President Joe Biden was quick to disagree, responding “I think it would be a mistake to legalize.” Hey, if Robertson is for decriminalizing pot, then liberals must be in favor of it, right? As the Daily Caller comments:

The more glaring concern for Biden and Obama is that come 2012, there could be several Republicans running for president who are more progressive on pot. Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, and Gary Johnson have all expressed support for drastically reforming marijuana laws. (Johnson and Paul are in favor of legalization, Palin said she supports a person’s right to use it in their home.) You also have establishment Republicans and Tea Party groups citing the 10th Amendment argument for repealing health care—the same argument most libertarians cite when calling for the repeal of the Controlled Substances Act and allowing states to legislate their own drug laws.

The Democrats were once the party of slavery; then they became the party of civil rights. The Republicans were once the party of abolition and civil rights, then they became, well, you know. So, what if spurred on by the libertarian-receptive Tea Party movement the GOP would change again, while the Democrats remain committed to ever-more intrusive and expanding state power and government control. I’m not predicting, but rigidly thinking that the parties are frozen and unyielding is not a constructive approach to creating change.

More. Then again, Biden said this about gay marriage, which no leading GOP figure (to date) would. The difference might be that decriminalizing pot has a certain redneck appeal and they’re seen as part of the GOP base, whereas gay marriage is still viewed as lefty and urban (and hence hopelessly Democratic).

Also, at what point will Obama and Biden stop struggling over and “evolving” on gay marriage and openly support marriage equality?

The National Organization for Marriage has every right to get itself into a tizzy over the juvenile and vulgar ad from a group calling itself FCKH8.  But I’ll tell NOM the same thing I’ll tell FCKH8:  You’re not ever going to stop people from using vile and offensive language — at least not in a country with a first amendment.  So stop it.

It is no pleasant thing for me to have to endure NOM’s relentless obliviousness, just as I’m sure it’s tough for them to have to suffer being called haters by enthusiastic twentysomethings, and now, even some of their kids.  But that’s part of living in a country that established from the start the invaluable notion that the individual freedom to speak one’s mind is one of the most important fundamentals of a society where the government derives from the consent of the governed.  People are a varied and messy lot, and while we can be managed a bit, we can’t be controlled.  There will always be people of strong feeling who feel no obligation to manners and social restraint.

Dealing with other people’s bad habits is one of the things that demonstrates true civility.  And while ceaseless complaining isn’t exactly uncivil, it’s certainly unseemly.  That’s what this whole skirmish boils down to, unseemly whining by NOM and FCKH8.  Once you get past the hyperobvious fund-raising potential for both groups in complaining about the other’s rhetoric, you really aren’t left with very much of substance.  FCKH8 undermines a sound theme of tolerance with its brash and rude intolerance.  NOM, I’m afraid to say, has lost any claim to respectability, but it’s probably best to leave them alone in their ever-shrinking world.

We’re near Christmas, and I’d much rather focus on real things and honorable emotions.  To all men and women of good will, have a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!