IGF CultureWatch

In the closing weeks of the mid-term campaign, President Obama—having lost the support of everyone else—has been strenuously campaigning to bring out the Democratic Party base, especially young liberals, black, Hispanic, and now gay voters. In the closing days of the campaign, he teased that he might consider revisiting at some point his opposition to marriage equality, maybe. After the election. Because, as he told liberal bloggers, “Attitudes evolve, including mine.”

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is busy appealing court decisions that found the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

More. Actually, Obama previously said he supported gay marriage when he first ran for Illinois state senate in 1996, but then discovered it was an affront to his deep religious faith in 2004 when, during his U.S. Senate run, he stated: “I’m a Christian…. I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.” He reiterated that position during his presidential run.

So, perhaps it might be more accurate to say his attitude could re-evolve (or just revolve).

In a number of tight Senate and House races, time and again it seems that GOP candidates who veer away from focusing on fiscal restraint and limited government, and instead jump on the culture war bandwagon (gay issues, in particular) are doing themselves no good. In fact, many swing district/state GOP candidates have hurt themselves by vocalizing their opposition to gay legal equality.

We need not point again to New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. Instead, consider Colorado GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck. According to Denver’s Fox affiliate:

Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck’s comments about homosexuality continue to draw strong reactions just two weeks before the Nov. 2 election. Buck, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, said he believes people are gay by choice.

“You can choose who your partner is,” Buck said. “You don’t think it’s something that’s determined at birth?” host David Gregory asked. “I think that birth has an influence on it like alcoholism and some other things but I think that basically you have a choice,” Buck replied.

Reports the conservative Washington Times:

Democrats, in an effort to woo suburban female voters, have ramped up attacks on Mr. Buck’s anti-abortion stance, a rape case he declined to prosecute as Weld County District Attorney, and his remarks that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. . . .

The Democratic strategy has shifted the focus of the campaign away from economic issues, where Mr. Buck and Republicans have enjoyed success in hammering the Democrats on the stimulus bills, health care reform and the trilions of dollars being added to the national debt.

The race is now a dead heat.

More. Just as New York’s Paladino found himself stunned by the response to a little gay-bashing and tried to backtrack (Daily News: “Carl Paladino pleads for ‘forgiveness’ after anti-gay remarks set off campaign firestorm”), so too is Buck trying to stem the damage (Colordado Independent: “Buck campaign to gay teen’s mom: ‘Ken may have misspoke.’”) That, in itself, is a sign of how the world has changed.

As the Washington Blade reports, in Florida, GOP Attorney General Bill McCollum announced Friday that he won’t appeal a court ruling last month overturning Florida’s law banning gay people from adopting children, putting a “final end” to the 33-year old state prohibition.

Meanwhile, the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on openly gay servicemembers is back in effect, after an appellate court granted the Obama Administration’s request for an injunction to a district court ruling that had, for several weeks, put an end to government-ordered discrimination against gay citizens. With a Republican House on the horizon and the U.S. Supreme Court’s tradition of military deference, there is a real risk that the reinstated gay ban could be with us for a long time.

Interestingly, the Blade story reports that this need not have been the case:

legal experts, including constitutional specialists with the American Civil Liberties Union and the LGBT litigation group Lambda Legal, agree that presidents generally should defend federal laws. But they say the obligation to defend a law should not apply to cases where strong evidence exists that the law is unconstitutional and a court issues a ruling overturning the law on constitutional grounds. . . .
“The question is no longer whether the Executive will defend an Act of Congress, but whether the Executive will appeal from a well-reasoned, obviously correct federal court ruling based on findings of fact that are exceedingly unlikely to be reversed,” [ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero] said in his letter. “Given these findings and the proper legal standard of review to be applied, there is no reasonable argument for the constitutionality of the policy, and no reason for the government to appeal,” he said.

Generally, I believe that legislatively overturning anti-gay laws is preferable. But if that is not going to happen (because for the year and a half the Democrats had a filibuster-proof senate majority, they dithered), then the courts must be used to secure equality under the law. But when it comes to military discrimination, or the Defense of Marriage Act’s banning the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages that states have sanctioned, that’s not the view of this administration.

Over at his blog, Rick Sincere has a perceptive takedown of former Sen. Rick Santorum’s recent lip service to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Worth reading.

Santorum, you may recall, is a socially conservative Republican who representated Pennsylvania for two Senate terms before being defeated in 2006. More than that, though, he wrote one of the most articulate and thoroughgoing modern critiques of the very libertarianism that Goldwater and Reagan championed. 

In his 2005 It Takes a Family—a good book, by the way, worth reading and taking seriously—Santorum argues that the family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society. Conservatism, consequently, should focus primarily on supporting families, not on shrinking government. And indeed, as I pointed out back then, Santorum found all kinds of ways to make government bigger. “With It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the Left, but from the Right.”

In 2010, Santorum’s felt need to pay homage to two politicians whose worldview he has opposed—while suggesting that in 1964 Goldwater was not a libertarian!—is another example of why social conservatives are feeling uncomfortable in this Year of the Tea Party.

Jason Cianciotto at Box Turtle Bulletin diagnoses the problem of bullying, finding support from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s language in the Colorado Amendment 2 case.  Anti-discrimination laws that don’t specifically enumerate sexual orientation do, in fact, send the message that government approves — or at least doesn’t disapprove — of those who think heterosexuals are superior to lesbians and gay men.  The government’s neutrality about anti-gay discrimination is clearly a contrast to its explicit position on race and gender discrimination.  Cianciotto urges government to be more explicit in prohibiting anti-gay discrimination, particularly in schools.

But this diagnosis misses the disease.  After the upheaval of the civil rights movement — and by that, I  include feminism — our laws are now overwhelmingly consistent in being race and gender neutral.  Law is the government speaking at its loudest, and it is clear to anyone who listens that our laws may not discriminate in those areas.

In prominent contrast, our laws are entirely schizophrenic when it comes to sexual orientation.  Two areas of law — marriage and the military — expressly demand discrimination against open lesbians and gay men.  Unlike the silence of many anti-discrimination laws, this is active inequality.

Does anyone think bullies don’t notice this?  Whatever else they may or may not know about the law, they certainly know that lesbians and gay men are fighting hard and loudly for marriage equality, and are having a hell of a time getting laws changed.  Even in states like California where the law is quite clear that some measure of equality is required for same-sex couples, marriage is still out of reach.  Our laws prohibiting other kinds of anti-gay discrimination — including bullying — send a message that is directly contradicted by other laws.

That’s how Carl Paladino of New York, and Barack Obama of the White House can both say, apparently without irony or shame, that they are 100% for gay equality, except for marriage.  I can’t speak for others, but the equality that matters most to me is equality under the law.  That’s the guarantee that’s promised so publicly above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Laws that prohibit heterosexuals from discriminating against lesbians and gay men don’t mean anything until laws that, themselves, discriminate against lesbians and gay men are removed from our books.  Until that happens, heterosexuals and homosexuals alike will get the same, consistent message from government — that it’s all right to be a little suspicious of the faggots and the dykes.

What anyone does with that, of course, is not the government’s fault.  How could it be?

Rick Sincere blogs that, speaking at the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum claimed that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan “are certainly two of the shoulders that we stand upon as the Republican Party.” Sincere quotes the Cato Institute’s David Boaz commenting on Santorum’s remarks:

“Santorum in Richmond speaks of freedom, individual rights, and the dignity of the human person. But he has demonstrated in the past that he doesn’t really mean the freedom to live your own life as you choose. He has denounced ‘this whole idea of personal autonomy … this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do.’ That’s the American idea of freedom, but it’s not Rick Santorum’s idea.”

Comments Sincere:

Given that Santorum has declared his interest in pursuing a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, he needs to take some time to reconcile his contradictory views and ask himself, are Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan’s shoulders those of giants upon which Republicans stand, or are their old-fashion views about individual autonomy, personal responsibility, and human freedom at odds with the 21st century’s Republican Party?

That’s the question facing the GOP, and it involves whether Tea Party libertarianism will withstand attempts by GOP social conservatives to co-opt the movement.

More. Then again, some see the
winds of change altering the GOP itself.

Furthermore. From The Daily Caller, Sexual orientation makes surprise appearance as campaign issue.

If nothing else, Log Cabin’s lawsuit to overturn “don’t ask, don’t tell,” leading to a district court’s ruling barring enforcement of the policy, puts the White House on the spot. If the Obama Justice Department appeals, as it has just appealed a set of recent rulings against the Defense of Marriage Act, it won’t help shore up the Democrats’ liberal base. But it’s expected that lower court rulings invalidating laws passed by Congress should be appealed (although, apparently, there are exceptions). Obama has 60 days to decide. I expect he may wait until after the election and then appeal, although it would be uncharacteristically gutsy to announce the policy is now dead.

More. Obama Administration Requests Stay of Injunction Against ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Ruling. That didn’t take long. Our “fierce advocate” strikes again.

Furthermore. At least for now, Log Cabin Republicans Prevails Over President Obama. It’s a suit that the Human Rights Campaign and other Democratic party water-carriers would never have brought.

Still more. Obama’s Justice Dept. halts military equality, again.

Sometimes the political system just doesn’t work and there are no good choices, although there may be a lesser evil—sometimes a Democrat and sometimes a Republican.

Tea Party organizers and activists have shown a laser-like focus on reining in fiscal profligacy and eschewing social issues, but that’s not true for a few of the candidates they’ve supported through GOP primary victories. In the race for New York governor, Tea Party backed Carl Paladino has disgraced himself with his ignorant homophobia, some of which he now seems to be trying to distance himself from, given the uproar that, as if in a time warp, he failed to anticipate. If nothing else, his comments that children should not be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is acceptable”—coming in the wake of horrors such as the Bronx gay-bashing/torture story and a rash of gay teen suicides—show the political tone deafness of a candidate who fathered a daughter out of wedlock and sent racy (and some say racist) emails.

His opponent, Andrew Cuomo, is a career Democrat who, as Clinton’s head of HUD, is one of the godfathers of the housing bubble (e.g., through his promotion of the Community Reinvestment Act that strong-armed banks into making home loans to those without collateral). Expect more wasteful, unaffordable and counterproductive government interventions from his administration, which will bow to the public sector unions. But he’s clearly the better choice, alas.

Similarly, what more can you say about Christine O’Donnell in Maryland, with her history of wacky social conservatism? But her opponent is a serial tax hiker supporting establishment liberal policies that have choked off growth and innovation. I throw up my hands. Likewise, Nevada, with Sharron Angle vs. Harry Reid (although here, the chance to replace the unctuous Reid as the Senate’s Democratic leader would be worth the price of Sen. Angle).

Not all Tea Party backed candidates are this pathetic—Joe Miller in Alaska, Marco Rubio in Florida, Dino Rossi in Washington state, and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin seem solid, among others. I like Rand Paul in Kentucky as well, despite some political missteps. But clearly, for fiscally conservative social libertarians, sometimes there are no good options.

More. Back to Paladino, it’s hard to know what he actually thinks or believes, but it’s good to see him realize he crossed a line. I hope others on the right take note.

To clarify, it’s not that I don’t think gay pride parades should ever be criticized—in New York and San Francisco, The Onion may have hit the target—but the whole tenor of Paladino’s speech to the rabbis needlessly injected the divisive culture war into a race that should have maintained its focus on economic issues that unite all conservatives as well as many independents and libertarians. It was stupid politics, and coming on the heals of the gay-bashing torture and gay teen suicide stories, just wrong.

Furthermore. William Saletan at Slate writes that Carl Paladino is right about gay pride parades and wrong about gay marriage.

Saturday’s Wall Street Journal has a fine Weekend Interview profile of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, noting “Mr. Thiel has dabbled in activism to the minor extent of co-hosting in Manhattan last month a fund raiser for gay Republicans” (actually, it was GOProud).

Interestingly, Thiel reflects about Obama, “I’m not sure I’d describe him as a socialist. I might even say he has a naïve and touching faith in capitalism. He believes you can impose all sorts of burdens on the system and it will still work.” Unfortunately, he adds, government has become too big and too inefficient to work, “throwing good money after bad,” and has put up too many regulatory barriers to innovation and growth. He notes, for example, how Sarbanes-Oxley resulted in a dearth of initial public offerings—new public companies based on innovative ideas that are the foundation for robust economic growth—which is part of the reason why “we’re stuck in a period of long-term stagnation.”

The great exception, Thiel says, has been information technology: “So far computers and the Internet have been the one sector immune from excessive regulation,” he observes. Yes, so far.

For me, the profile highlights how openly gay conservatives and LGBT progressives view the problems facing us, as Americans, in starkly different terms. Peter Thiel is the anti-Barney Frank.

More. Barney Frank spins about his responsiblity for the mortgage crisis.