IGF CultureWatch

A recent blog post by David Link praised Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project for reaching out to gay youth who might be contemplating suicide. But not everyone is a fan. For example, LGBT blogger Femmephane takes exception, calling it “ageist garbage,” and arguing that “This is a video for rich kids … Telling our own stories from our incredibly privileged positions overwrites youth experience,” while “Promoting the illusion that things just ‘get better,’ enables privileged folks to do nothing and just rely on the imaginary mechanics of the American Dream to fix the world.” Whatever. Femmephane, by the way, responds to critics here. Life in the blogosphere.

Bill Browning writes on the Huffington Post that the left’s “One Nation” march on Washington included LGBT progressives groups such as GetEqual, Human Rights Campaign, Stonewall Democrats and others. But, Browning relates, in an email to him Lt Dan Choi of GetEqual reported on the reception the group got as they carried signs with the faces of six LGBT youth who recently died by suicide:

We attended the “One Nation” progressive march on Washington today and were met with mixed reactions by “progressives.” All we intended was to bring visibility to the recent gay suicides. Some remarked: “Yeah…If y’all just stop killing yourselves, and turn to God…” and “You guys are stupid.”

Asks Browning:

Why wasn’t the LGBT community front and center as part of the progressive community? Because, as we’ve seen with the current crop of “progressive” leadership—both inside and outside of the administration—our rights are not a priority for our friends and natural allies. We are the group that is always the easiest to lop off when the going gets tough—when people start to feel “uncomfortable.” We are the group that gets “support” if we’ll promise to keep our mouths shut…

LGBT organizations that purport to represent us and our issues signed on to this march to increase our visibility and support among progressives—even though some of these same orgs refused to even add their name to a list of orgs supporting the National Equality March. I hope they’re satisfied with the results they got.

As long as progressive LGBT “leaders” view themselves as Democratic party operatives first and foremost, that’s not going to change.

More. How “liberal litterbugs” trashed the Mall. Blogs Jenny Erikson:

What a sad day. The left can’t get people to an event without bussing them in and making sure their bosses cross their names off the list. The left can’t make their own signs, they have to be handed flashy manufactured ones. The left can’t even get people to respect the National Mall, a place that deserves reverence. The left can’t get a group of people that claim to care about the environment to, you know, actually care about the environment.

I overheard one of the attendees talking to a park ranger. “I just don’t understand,” he said, “Why is there so much trash? I heard there wasn’t any at that Beck rally … How did they do it?”

Timothy Kincaid provides a good rundown of the latest numbers from the Pew Research Center on support for gay marriage.  42% support, 48% oppose.

As always, the story isn’t in the numbers, themselves, but the trend.  The chart he provides shows support flipping around, but generally moving upward, even at the lower levels of support among Republicans. Nate Silver’s now-infamous graph of the polling on this question since 1988 illustrates the bigger picture.  As Kincaid points out, Pew shows that, for the first time in their polling, opposition to same-sex marriage falls below a majority.

As we know from DADT, even a huge popular majority won’t necessarily result in political victories on an issue where the discussion is still so poisoned by fear and misunderstanding.  That is how prejudice short-circuits politics.

But what I can’t help noticing in the Pew numbers, and what Kincaid is so smart to  have pointed out, is that even among the groups whose fear and loathing of us taps directly into the mother lode of prejudice, there are green shoots of actual, bona fide support.  And not just for a compromise measure like civil unions, but full-on marriage equality.  It’s easy to vilify white evangelicals or “Southerners” or the elderly as bigoted and stubborn.  But within all of those groups, we still have some very real, if invisible, support.  And that support is up.

The growth of small numbers is easy to ignore.  But it’s in those groups where we most need the support to grow.  Those are seeds, people.  Let’s cultivate them.

From the AP:

[New Jersey Gov. Chris] Christie is among those who argue that Republicans can succeed when they focus on fiscal conservatism, often at the expense of focusing on key social issues, whereas former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee energize the party’s religious and socially conservative base. Palin and Huckabee have been in Iowa recently, as has Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenti, who courts that same base.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, of course, is another fiscal conservative who famously called for “a truce on social issues” (read: abortion and gay bashing). Yes, he added, “until the economic issues are resolved,” but a GOP president elected without making promises to the religious right, and in fact elected by downplaying social issues, won’t be indebted to them. That’s the fight, and it’s for the soul of the New GOP.

Jim DeMint, old school gay-baiter and never going to change. But he’s the past, not the future.

More. Because this is my post and it generated lots of bitingly negative comments, I’m going to highlight a response defending me by commenter avee:

It strikes me there is a certain purism among critics of Miller’s post. Miller makes the point (perhaps too broadly, but it’s a blog post, not a white paper) that a number of leading Republican presidential contenders are asking for a tone-down on social issues, and that this is significant. His critics blast him because these same leading GOP contenders are still not as good as liberal Democrats on gay issues, and therefore nothing has changed and we should all only support liberal Democrats.

Change is incremental, and failing to encourage small steps that can lead to bigger steps is a losers game — it’s the game of Democratic party fundraisers in LGBT-activist clothes. For my part, I’m tired of reading gay media articles that state (1) Gays are in big trouble if (or, more accurately, when) Republicans make big gains in November, and (2) offering no strategy other than going down with the Democratic ship.

Of course the critics weren’t persuaded, but neither do they have a convincing response to point (2) above.

Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project is as fine a public service as anyone has put together for gay and lesbian youth — and no government needed.

But am I the only non-youth who spends time watching the videos when I need to cheer up?  I spend more hours than a reasonable adult should reading the misinformation, innuendos, distractions, forgeries, slanders, deceptions and flat out lies that are cast into the universe of discourse about us, and I’ve found a quick visit to the YouTube channel is an excellent tonic.

Thanks, not only to Savage, but to everyone who’s contributing these wonderful little truths.

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz blogs, Krauthammer Misreads History:

Charles Krauthammer calls same-sex marriage “the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history.” Really? . . . I would suggest that the truly radical redefinition of marriage is the revolution over the past generation in the idea that people should marry before they cohabit or have children. . . .But like socially conservative politicians, Krauthammer is not about to confront his friends, colleagues, and fans by denouncing that radical redefinition of marriage.

I just wanted to mark the tragic death of 18-year-old Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after his roommate, Dharun Rav, helped by fellow freshman Molly Wei, reportedly set up cameras in Celmenti’s dorm room to secretly transmit over the Internet a streaming video of Clementi engaged in sex with a male student, as the New York Post reports. The moral corruption of Clementi’s tormentors speaks for itself.

More. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie calls the freshman’s death an “unspeakable tragedy” and says he can’t imagine how the two students accused of secretly filming Clementi can sleep at night.

In a related way, this story of a state of Michigan assistant attorney general using his blog to vilify and harass a gay University of Michigan student leader is another portrait of moral corruption.

Evil is real in this world. While government has a role in protecting citizens from violence, neither of these cases involved physical attacks. It is society—families and civilized communities—that have to teach young people that wanton cruelty is not “funny” and cool, a message they’re not getting from their adult-excluded tribal social networks. And it’s society—and, ultimately, the electorate—that has to say that bigotry and fanaticism by government officials is beyond the pale and won’t be tolerated.

More. For those following the Michigan story, updates here and here.

The battle for the soul of the Republican party being waged between social vs. libertarian conservatives will likely be the central gay rights battleground for the next few years, as this Washington Post story makes clear. A pity so many partisan progressives seem to want to declare that battle lost from the get go.

More. The Advocate asks: “Two competing fund-raisers were held Wednesday night in Manhattan, one chock-full of conservatives and another laden with liberals. But which one did more to advance LGBT equality?”

Furthermore. Hard to disagree with this viewpoint, also from the Washington Post:

In the ’90s, the gay rights movement got in bed with the Democrats financially, according to [Paul] Yandura, who worked on LGBT issues for the Clinton White House, and the results have been scant ever since.

“You end up worrying more about what stature you have in the administration and in Democratic leadership and within the social world of Washington than you do about wanting to get equal under the law,” says Yandura, who often hosts out-of-town GetEQUAL organizers at his home in Columbia Heights. “Once you’re at a high-level meeting, it’s them telling you what’ll happen, and if you fight that, you’ll never come to another one.”

With his customary elan and good humor, John Corvino dissects the peculiar logic of a recent National Review cover editorial insisting that marriage is “for” one thing and one thing only, which is, um, “mating,” which implies that paraplegics, like gays, can’t possibly marry, in any meaningful sense of the term, so the law shouldn’t let them.

Or something like that. No, it didn’t make sense to me, either.

I believe that same-sex marriage will prevail. The main reason is not that younger people are more friendly to the idea, though that’s certainly important. Demography isn’t necessarily destiny. Nor is the reason that cultural liberalism is on the march. After all, the younger demographic is turning against abortion, where the harm done to the third party is obvious.

The real reason is that, to a growing number of people who take a common-sense view of marriage (e.g., marriage is a good thing whether you can have kids or not) and who are not burdened with superstitious ideas about homosexuality, the arguments against gay marriage just don’t make sense. NR’s editorial is a case in point.

I’m not a big “L” Libertarian Party guy, but I think LP Chairman Mark Hinkle put it very well in his outreach message to disenchanted gay voters:

“Exit polls indicate that Democrats get over 70% of LGBT votes in federal elections. Those voters must really love the Democrats’ rhetoric, because they certainly aren’t seeing any action.

“President Obama and the Democrats had almost a year of complete control of the federal government: the Presidency, the House, and a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate. They could have repealed ‘don’t ask don’t tell.’ They could have gotten rid of the Defense of Marriage Act. But they didn’t do either of those things.”

Would a Republican-controlled Congress have “done any of those things”? Not on your life. But what if the Democratic leadership had been willing to negotiate support for any of these initiatives with GOP moderates in exchange for things they would want (tort reform, for instance). But there was no will to go there.