IGF CultureWatch

As I’ve previouisly blogged, Harry Reid set up the “don’t ask, don’t tell” pre-election vote to fail. By refusing to allow a full debate, he ensure united GOP opposition, even though GOP senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Richard Lugar (Ind.) have indicated they would otherwise have voted for repeal, thus denying the GOP its filibuster. GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine), John Ensign (Nev.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), among others, are also mentioned as obtainable votes against filibuster and for repeal.

As Kimberly A Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal (full column only available to wsj subscribers):

If Democrats leave town with few or no final victories to tout—if they fail even to protect Americans from tax hikes—they can thank their Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. It was Mr. Reid’s flawed pre-election strategy that landed his party with this undercooked fowl, and his post-election floundering has even his own members worried.

You wouldn’t know this from listening to Mr. Reid, who has laid out a lame-duck agenda that bears no connection to time, reality or election results. According to the Nevadan, Senate Democrats are going to confirm judges, rewrite immigration law, extend unemployment insurance, fix the issue of gays in the military, reorganize the FDA, forestall tax hikes, re-fund the government, and ratify a nuclear arms treaty—all in two, maybe three, weeks. This is the same institution that needs a month to rename a post office.

This legislative pileup is what happens when a majority leader chooses to hijack the Senate—to use it not on behalf of the country, but on behalf of a midterm campaign. The first part of Mr. Reid’s strategy was to introduce legislation specifically designed to rev up a liberal base for the midterm vote. To pep up gay rights activists, the majority leader promised legislation to change the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. To inspire Latino midterm voters, he also embraced the Dream Act, which would offer a path to citizenship for some immigrants.

Part two of Mr. Reid’s strategy: Make sure nothing, including these highlighted bills, then passed. Much of today’s unfinished business is legislation that could have earned GOP support. But the majority leader deliberately included poison pills that would cause Republicans to balk. The entire goal was to tag Republicans with obstructionism, turning off average voters and further inspiring the base.

The strategy didn’t work, and by putting politics above all else, we’re likely to pay the price for a long time indeed.

Thor Halvorssen blogs on last week’s vote in the UN to remove gay people from a resolution calling on countries to condemn “extrajudicial, arbitrary and summary executions” based on discriminatory grounds. As Halvorseen explains:

The resolution highlights particular groups historically subject to executions including street children, human rights defenders, members of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minority communities, and, for the past 10 years, the resolution has included sexual orientation as a basis on which some individuals are targeted for death.

The tiny West African nation of Benin (on behalf of the UN’s African Group) proposed an amendment to strike sexual minorities from the resolution. The amendment was adopted with 79 votes in favor, 70 against, 17 abstentions and 26 absent.

In other words, the resolution ensures that the U.N. no longer condemns extra-judicial killings of gay men and women The countries voting for and against the resolution reads like a list of the civilized vs. the uncivilized world (sorry, no moral relativism here).

As Halvorssen notes:

Those against the amendment include every European nation present, all Scandinavian countries, India, Korea, most of Latin America, all of North America, and only one Middle Eastern nation: Israel. In most countries in the Middle East, it is a crime to be gay—in some, like Saudi Arabia, it is punishable by beheading and in others, like Iran, by hanging.

Be thankful if you don’t live in one of the countries voting in favor of the resolution. And if you’re an American, be especially thankful for these freedoms.

From the Washington Blade: ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ repeal ‘barely hanging on’:

One Senate Democratic aide, who spoke to the Washington Blade on condition of anonymity, said repeal — currently pending before the U.S. Senate as part of the fiscal year 2011 defense authorization bill — is “barely hanging on with life support.”

“The only way to resuscitate this effort and get a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ vote is for President Obama and [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates to start pushing directly, something we on the Hill had expected the president and Gates to do long ago,” the aide said.

Frustration over the lack of movement on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” prompted activists affiliated with GetEQUAL to take action on Monday and chain themselves to the White House fence in an act of civil disobedience.

Elsewhere in the Blade:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) on Thursday expressed confidence about having the necessary 60 votes to move forward with legislation containing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal — provided certain conditions are met with the amendment process on the Senate floor. . . .

Lieberman said he’s received assurances from GOP senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) as well as “others privately” that they would be open to moving forward with defense legislation containing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal provided there’s an “open amendment process” in bringing the bill to the floor.

And from the Washington Times, on the pre-midterm election “don’t ask” Senate vote debacle:

Many Republicans wanted to debate amendments on how the nation would handle trials for suspected terrorists, and also wanted a chance to try to strike language that would allow military hospitals to provide abortions to women willing to pay for them.

Asked whether Ms. Collins, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, would support a repeal effort, her spokesman, Kevin Kelley, said “she wanted to vote for the defense authorization bill and supports the repeal.”

“Her issue at the time was that Majority Leader Reid had said he would not allow any Republican amendments to the bill at the time. She was opposed to that process, which shut Republicans out of the debate,” he said.

So Harry Reid and the liberal Democrats didn’t want to let the GOP vote on banning abortions in VA hospitals, and were willing to let “dont’ ask” repeal go down because of it. Thanks, Harry. Let’s see if you make amends (by allowing a fair amendment process, and thus bringing in GOP votes from Collins and Lugar) as the clock ticks away.

More. tick, tock, tick, tock.

A new study by the Pew Research Center shows that four out of 10 Americans believed marriage is becoming obsolete. In 1978, just 28 percent felt that way.

Although the push by gay people for marriage equality goes against this trend, expect social conservatives to blame us for the decline in marriage.

The real reason marriage is on the ropes: about 29 percent of children under 18 currently live with a parent or parents who are unwed or no longer married, that’s five times more than the number from 1960.

Then there’s the class angle. In 1960, people with a college degree were only 4 percentage points more likely to be married than people with just a high school education or less. By 2008, that gap widened to 16 percentage points.

The rise of the welfare state has much to do with the decline of marriage and coherent families as support systems. On this as on other matters, limited-government conservatives and libertarians are correct, and social conservatives who scapegoat committed gay couples are wrong.

More. Maybe this will help bring marriage back into vogue.

GOPround, a gay conservative group, and representatives of leading Tea Party organizations have sent a letter to House and Senate Republican leaders urging them to keep social issues off the Republican agenda, reports Politico. The letter states:

“On behalf of limited government conservatives everywhere we write to urge you and your colleagues in Washington to put forward a legislative agenda in the next Congress that reflects the principles of the Tea Party movement. . . . This election was not a mandate for the Republican Party, nor was it a mandate to act on any social issue, nor should it be interpreted as a political blank check. . . .

We urge you to stay focused on the issues that got you and your colleagues elected and to resist the urge to run down any social issue rabbit holes in order to appease the special interests. The Tea Party movement is not going away and we intend to continue to hold Washington accountable.

“When they were out in the Boston Harbor, they weren’t arguing about who was gay or who was having an abortion,” said Ralph King, a letter signatory who is a Tea Party Patriots national leadership council member.

More. EDGEBoston, a gay paper, provides some background and analysis, concluding:

Some social conservatives. . . have decried the shift in focus from social hot button issues. . . . With American society becoming more accepting of GLBT citizens, however, the nation’s politics seem bound to change as well. For the moment, it appears as though gays wishing for less government intrusion into their lives may have made common cause with other stripes of conservatism.

Every time I think I have reached the limit of my disappointment in John McCain, he manages to push the envelope.  With this morning’s appearance on Meet the Press, he has achieved a level of disingenuousness I didn’t think was humanly possible.

David Gregory naturally asked McCain about DADT repeal.  McCain first takes a side swipe at the fact that the results of the military survey were prematurely leaked, as if that somehow affected what they show.  Perhaps what was leaked is not, in fact, accurate.  If that’s true, a lot of folks will be red-faced, and should be.  But if the results are as advertised, the fact that they came out early, and without authorization, doesn’t change the answers. The primary danger of leaking the results is to make it a bit harder for politicians, and the politically inclined military brass to spin the answers.  That’s not a dangerous matter of military strategy, it’s an unfortunate problem of political inconvenience.

But McCain’s main missing of the point is that the leaked study is flawed because it examines how to implement repeal of DADT, not what its effects on military readiness and morale would be.  Now certainly the President was clear that he was interested in a study that would help implement repeal, rather than decide whether to repeal or not.  But the survey asks every question – and then some – that anyone in authority would want to have answered if they needed a baseline assessment for dealing with the presence of openly homosexual troops in a military that, like the country at large, is overwhelmingly heterosexual.  The answers reveal how many are ready to know which of their comrades are homosexual (instead of going to all the trouble of guessing), and who is going to drag their feet, be a problem, or need special attention.  A bigger number of gay opponents would suggest a bigger problem.  And I can’t imagine a survey that would be better designed to serve that purpose; in fact, I believe it seemed almost designed to elicit anti-gay responses.

So the obvious came as a surprise to me, that our predominately young military is not unlike the general population in its positive-to-neutral sentiments about homosexuality.  McCain, along with some other top military leaders, seems to be hoping that there would be more anti-gay feeling among the troops, and is disappointed.  The 70% of the military who either support lesbians and gay men or find nothing worrisome, is almost exactly the same level of support that DADT repeal shows in surveys of the rest of the country.

Which shifts the focus to the 30% in both the general and military populations who continue to oppose homosexuality and homosexuals.  Since they are not a majority – not even close — the question is whether (and how) to deal with them.  Up until now, as a large majority, they’ve had their way with a policy that makes homosexuals, not them, the problem.  Now that’s turning around, and I’m sure it’s hard for them.  Fortunately, they have friends in high places.

McCain is providing his small band of resisters with aid and comfort.  Those of us who used to believe he was a moderate, rational Republican have seen him becoming nearly maddened by DADT repeal, to the point of declaring that he would stand alone to filibuster against it.  Watch his cold, cheerless laugh on Meet the Press.

Closer to home, the horrifying evidence of fairness among the troops has caused him to pull in the reins on his wife, who doesn’t strike many people as a woman who would take naturally to that.  Cindy McCain’s participation in the NOH8 campaign has been a small political miracle of open tolerance in a world of political spouses who find it more amenable to toe the party line — at least until it’s safe, as with Laura Bush, whose gentle common sense on gay rights was never allowed to surface during her husband’s presidency.

John McCain cannot make his thirty percent into fifty, but the magic of politics is that they might be just enough to continue to hold back an inevitable change a bit longer. That is why his wife’s silence is valuable.  She has been helping gain supporters for equality, while her husband is dedicating himself to not losing more of his misguided followers.  He’s only got one more victory in front of him, while all of hers are in the future.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Modern Family,” a sitcom that includes a gay couple with an adopted child, is the third most popular show among self-identified Republicans but doesn’t break into the top 15 among Democrats. Surprised?

“Desperate Housewives,” a comedy about families and friends with gay characters, ranks tenth among Republicans and doesn’t crack the Democrats’ top 15 (the show, by the way, is created, written and produced by Marc Cherry, described on his Facebook page as a “somewhat conservative, gay Republican” and winner of Log Cabin Republicans’ American Visibility Award.) However, “Brothers & Sisters,” a large family drama with a gay couple (and a more didactic liberal line) ranks sixth among Democrats but doesn’t break the GOP’s top 15.

And then there’s this to ponder:

“Mad Men”… scores through the roof with Democrats (does anyone in Santa Monica or on Manhattan’s Upper West Side not watch it?), but it has one of the weakest scores among Republicans. The same is true for FX’s “Damages,” Showtime’s “Dexter,” HBO’s “Entourage” and AMC’s “Breaking Bad.” . . .

“The big shows with mass appeal tend to have above-average scores from Democrats and Republicans but with higher concentrations of Republicans,” says John Fetto, senior marketing manager at Experian Simmons. “Looking at the Democrats side, I don’t mean to make light of it, but they seem to like shows about damaged people. Those are the kind of shows Republicans just stay away from.”

The openly gay and lesbian members of Congress, all Democrats, have endorsed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to remain as soon-to-be minority leader in the new Congress, the Washington Blade reports. Her tenure was also praised this week by the Human Rights Campaign, which operates as a Democratic party fundraising machine. But some moderate Democrats and remaining “blue dogs” from swing districts don’t think the ultra-liberal San Franciscan is the best choice going forward, pointing out that she’s “politically toxic” outside of liberal enclaves. That’s probably right.

On gay issues, Pelosi’s achievements were limited to (in my view) a bad federal hate crimes bill and passage of legislation that would have allowed the president to end don’t ask, don’t tell, but which died in the Senate. The Pelosi House never moved on modifying the Defense of Marriage Act (which bars the federal government from recognizing state-sanctioned same-sex unions), or even the liberal-championed Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).

From the Blade story:

“Speaker Pelosi has been a consistent ally and advocate not just for LGBT people but for all fair-minded Americans throughout her congressional career,” [Fred Sainz, the Human Rights Campaign’s vice president of communications] said. “She has vigorously supported full and equal rights for LGBT people long before it was politically acceptable to do so.”

But John Aravosis, the gay editor of AMERICAblog, said Pelosi is responsible in part for the lack of progress on pro-LGBT legislation during the first two years of President Obama’s administration. Still, while he said he’s not completely satisfied with Pelosi, Aravosis said other LGBT advocates in power deserve worse job evaluations.

“All of our leaders let us down: HRC, Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi,” Aravosis said. “Having said that, Nancy Pelosi strikes me as the least culpable of the four. I’m not happy that she wasn’t able to even get ENDA through committee, but I’m a lot less happy at the moment with HRC, President Obama and Harry Reid. Pelosi at least came through for us part-way, the others have been MIA the last two years.”

Solely looking at Pelosi from the angle of gay rights advocacy, that view may make sense. But from a larger perspective, she has done a great disservice to the cause of gay equality by helping to cement the perception that pro-gay legislation is part of a broader mega-government, regulatory-state agenda that stems from the left flank of the Democratic party. That perception is not helping to advance our cause, to say the least.

Assistant Michigan Attorney General Andrew Shirvell has been fired by AG Mike Cox. Shirvell, as you may have read, blogged obsessively to condemn homosexuals in general and in particular Chris Armstrong, the openly gay student body president at the University of Michigan (Shirvell’s alma mater). Shirvell even showed up outside Armstrong’s building on the U of M campus late at night to protest the goings on he supposed were going on inside. Anyhow, here’s a very snarky parody about it all, via Popehat.

If you have any lingering doubt that anti-gay sentiment is becoming isolated in the Republican Party—and that the GOP is drifting toward cultural isolation as a result—check out this new election post-mortem from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Democracy Corps (PDF). Go to page 39, a chart titled “Opposition to homosexuality drops sharply,” and you see that the share of Americans saying homosexuality “should be accepted by society” has risen from only half in 2004 to a solid 56 percent majority this year. (Gallup confirms the trend.) Only a third of respondents—just one in three!—say homosexuality “should be discouraged.”

And just where is this opposition to homosexuality concentrated? Turn the page (to page 40) for the answer. Among Democrats, independents, and swing voters, majorities all agree on the acceptability of homosexuality, by whopping margins of 39 percent, 31 percent, and 27 percent, respectively. Republicans, however, stand strikingly apart from the consensus, with 55 percent of them frowning on homosexuality. In other words, if being anti-gay is your thing, there is only one place you can go to find a like-minded majority. (And, even there, 44 percent say homosexuality should be accepted.)

In the future that is coming right now, it is disapproval of homosexuality, not homosexuality itself, that mainstream culture regards as morally deviant. To the extent that Republicans cling to anti-gay postures (hat tip to Prez O for the piquant verb), they will turn off the independent and swing voters without whose support they cannot win national elections. On the other hand, with nowhere else to go, anti-gay social conservatives will fight all the harder to preserve their veto over GOP acceptance of gay equality. That’s why they’re going to block repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the Senate: to show they can.

I’m tempted to say, “Be my guest, guys.” The best they can do is delay DADT repeal, probably not for long, and that will come at a cost to their party’s cultural credibility. Anti-gay conservatives are becoming to the GOP as McGovernite liberals once were to the Democrats: an albatross.