IGF CultureWatch

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.

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.