IGF CultureWatch

An historic day for Britain (although Scotland, with its own Parliament, is left behind, for now).

Reading coverage of responses from various faith groups, I hope that denominations that welcome marriage equality will thrive. I particularly liked this:

Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said: “It’s wonderful to see same-sex marriage achieve legal recognition. Quakers see the light of God in everyone so we respect the inherent worth of each individual and each loving relationship.”

As for the Roman Catholic and many evangelical churches, it’s a different and predictable story. A bit more complicated with the Anglicans (Church of England and Church in Wales), which are now actually banned by law from performing gay weddings. Some Anglican churchmen were strongly against marriage equality, but others are opposed to the ban, which reminds us why state churches are a terrible idea.

As noted by the Drudge Report, Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel gave CNN her first interview since testifying in the George Zimmerman murder trial, telling Piers Morgan that during her final cell phone conversation with Martin he said he was afraid that the “creepy ass cracka” following him might be a gay rapist (I assume in more colorful language).

When asked if Martin “was freaked out” by this, Jeantel replied, “Definitely…for every boy, for every man, every — who’s not that kind of way, seeing a grown man following them, would they be creep out?”

But I don’t expect the media will show much interest in whether the fight with Zimmerman might have started as a gay panic attack. [Update: I was right; virtually no mention of this revelation beyond Drudge, even by CNN, which broadcast the Jeantel interview.]

[Added] A rare exception, William Saletan at Slate:

‘Martin, meanwhile, was profiling Zimmerman. On his phone, he told a friend he was being followed by a “creepy-ass cracker.” The friend—who later testified that this phrase meant pervert—advised Martin, “You better run.” She reported, as Zimmerman did, that Martin challenged Zimmerman, demanding to know why he was being hassled. If Zimmerman’s phobic misreading of Martin was the first wrong turn that led to their fatal struggle, Martin’s phobic misreading of Zimmerman may have been the second.

People will never agree on whether Zimmerman’s use of deadly force was justified, but IF Martin threw the first punch, as Zimmerman claims, and IF Martin feared that it was a gay guy pursuing him (as his best friend says he told her, moments before they came to blows) and that added to his anger, then we have a more complicated and maybe revealing tragedy, but one that doesn’t serve the dominant narrative.

More. But of course: “A coalition of LGBT-rights organizations has called for justice for Trayvon Martin after a Florida jury on Saturday acquitted George Zimmerman of the teenager’s murder.” It’s a Who’s Who of Democratic party front groups.

Furthermore. Via Instapundit: “Black Man With Pistol Permit Shoots White Teen, Is Acquitted.” Instapundit comments, “Funny, didn’t get much coverage — not politically useful.”

And then there’s this.

Still more. An apparent conflict within the ACLU has resulted in what TalkLeft is calling “a 180 degree u-turn” after which the group is no longer calling on the Department of Justice to bring federal civil rights or hate crime charges against George Zimmerman. That could be viewed as a rebuke to ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, who is openly gay. Four days earlier, Romero had called on DOJ to investigate Zimmerman on federal charges, joining with several Democratic Party allied LGBT partisan groups. It’s also a small victory for those actually concerned about the threat of the federal government respecting our right to be found not guilty by a jury of our peers.

More on the ACLU switerchoo from Politico, reporting that former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser called the initial Romero letter a symptom of “the transformation of the ACLU from a civil liberties organization to a liberal bandwagon organization.” Gay groups such as GLAAD and PFLAG are by now so far down that path there may be no calling them back.

Still more. Via Cathy Young at Reason.com: Zimmerman Backlash Continues Thanks to Media Misinformation. Those who get their worldview from the partisan defamers who run mainstream media will find some inconvenient facts.

Recently, in a posting titled The Ugliness of Reverse Animus, I pointed to the case of a 68-year-old flowershop proprietress being sued by the Washington state attorney general because, on religious grounds, she declined to provide wedding flowers for a customer who was marrying his partner. I asked, “Must progressivism decree that the power of the state be so absolute that there be no exemption from its dictate for religious conviction, not to speak of individual liberty?”

Along similar lines, Bart Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch takes note in a column titled Can gay couples, too, live and let live? of a case in which a gay Colorado couple filed a discrimination complaint against the owners of a cakeshop who declined for religious reasons to make them a wedding cake. Hinkle writes:

But there is another, stronger sort of equality: the equality of authority – which suggests social interactions should be consensual because nobody has the right to impose his will on somebody else. This is the sort of equality most compatible with liberty (including the liberty to marry whom one wishes), and the sort of equality gay-rights advocates should embrace. …

Yet if we are to respect the best arguments for gay rights, then we also have to recognize that those arguments also apply to people like Robertson – and to the owners of Masterpiece Cakeshop, and to others like them. They should not have the power to impose their will on gay couples. But gay couples should not have the power to impose their own will on them, either. “Live and let live” cannot be a one-way street.

Liberty ends when the aim is to force others to bend to your will and do your bidding or face persecution by the state, now aligned with your cause. That, sadly, has been the endgame of too many “liberation struggles.”

I’ve been reading a recently published book looking at opposition to same-sex marriage from “queer” political activists and academics, The Marrying Kind? Debating Same-Sex Marriage within the Lesbian and Gay Movement. The book is a collection of analytical pieces that let LGBT and “queer” opponents of “heteronormality” speak for themselves, which exposes the weakness inherent in much of their worldview.

It’s not that all of the criticism of marriage voiced here lacks merit; it’s just that the typical solution — more leftism; subsuming the LGBT/queer movements within what’s seen as a more important push for broader “social justice” and leftwing social transformation, is so utterly predicable. Dig through the buzzwords and what you end up with is an agenda for bigger government to direct economic redistribution to those deemed more deserving (or more politically useful).

But primarily the focus here is on “Queer scholars and activists [who] have leveled harsh critiques against the movement’s supposed tendency toward assimilationist goals and strategies, with the goal of legal same-sex marriage often singled out as a prime example of the broader tendency.”

Along those lines, I was happy to see IGF mentioned, if only within quotes from a critical academic. In the introduction, editors Mary Bernstein and Verta Taylor write that

One of the most vocal queer opponents of same-sex marriage, who represents what we term the “homonormative critique,” is Lisa Duggan. … [In an essay from 2002] Duggan argues that for LGBT organizations like IGF, “Marriage is a strategy for privatizing gay politics and culture for the new neoliberal world order.”

Forgotten these day, or simply denied, is how IGF and others often mislabeled “gay conservatives” were making the case for marriage equality over a decade ago, before the mainstream LGBT progressives came onboard. So it’s good to have “queer” radicals reminding us of that.

Another chapter contains interview excerpts representing various ethnic and class perspectives, in which “a thirty-one-year old Asian-American middle-class lesbian” is quoted saying:

They’re just, like, highly normative kinds of things that they want to do. … I understand that some lesbians want to go to some country club to play with their kids or have their membership, I don’t, it’s like they don’t get, they are not really interested in changing, in social change. I think they are really interested in kind of like, making us more like kind of heterosexual middle-class people, also white.”

You get the drift.

This book provides more evidence of the reality of LGBT academia that Bruce Bawer exposes in articles and in his most recent book, The Victims Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, also highly recommended.

In fact, The Victims Revolution and The Marrying Kind? complement each other quite nicely.

San Diego’s Democratic mayor Bob Filner has apologized for his behavior and said he needs help, amid allegations that he sexually harassed women.

You might recall that last year LGBT activists fell over themselves to support Filner against an openly gay Republican, city councilman Carl DeMaio, in a race with no incumbent.

However, given the political culture these days, I don’t think harassment charges are likely to hurt Filner much.

More. Third accuser goes public against San Diego Mayor… But at least he’s still not a gay Republican, because that would be really, really bad.

Justice Anthony Kennedy has one thing in common with Father Scalia: They both believe that human dignity is important.

Here is Justice Kennedy, overturning DOMA in U.S. v. Windsor:

The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.

And here is Father Scalia:

. . . we should not predicate “homosexual” of any person. That does a disservice to the dignity of the human person by collapsing personhood into sexual inclinations.

Paul Scalia is a Catholic priest, and it is his formulation of the issue that crystallizes what the right thinks they are arguing over, far better than his Justice father’s dissent in Windsor.

Many of us at IGF agree that “collapsing personhood into sexual inclination” can be problematic.  Human beings are more than their sexual desires and actions.

But Scalia goes further.  In praising Fr. John Harvey’s decision to not use the phrase “sexual orientation” at all, he tries to eliminate the notion that there can even be homosexual people:

This reflects the increased appreciation for the fact that homosexual tendencies (to use a term from magisterial documents), do not constitute a fixed, unchangeable aspect of the person and therefore should not be considered an “orientation.” Further, the term does violence to a proper understanding of human sexuality. Either our sexuality is oriented in a certain direction (i.e. toward the one-flesh union of marriage), or it is not. We cannot speak of more than one sexual “orientation” any more than we can think of the sun rising in more than one place (i.e. the orient).

This is not a question of placing sexuality in the context of other parts of your identity, it is the denial that sexuality can even be a part of a person’s identity.  Sexuality transcends identity.  It is, itself, the natural order over which humans have (or should have) no proper choice.  It simply is, like the sun.

In contrast, Justice Kennedy not only accepts that some people identify as homosexual, he posits that it is up to them to choose what part sexuality plays in their identity, and, within the confines of a constitution premised on individual liberty, concludes that the federal government has no power to discourage or punish that exercise of self-definition.  Americans may choose to let their sexuality dominate who they are, or may give pride of place to their ethnicity or profession or style of dress or nothing at all.  That’s up to them.

The Catholic Church, which by definition, is composed only of fellow believers, has the ability to decide for itself what forms of identity it will accept, what brands of human freedom it finds intolerable.  This is as difficult a task for them in the modern world as it is for Islam or any other religion that prefers to adhere to a chosen orthodoxy, but that is their choice.

But the U.S. Constitution’s insistence on liberty includes the liberty of self-creation.  Americans — and not only Americans — have taken that to heart.  And that includes some people whose identity includes religion.  Here is rapper Mr. J. Medeiros:

I don’t know what it’s like to be gay. I do know what it’s like to love someone in a way that only a marriage can describe. I do know what it’s like to have an identity. To believe these things should be denied to roughly 9million people living in the US (or the much greater number worldwide) does not sit well with my conscience. The same conscience that brought me to seek my God in the first place. I am a Christian who supports gay rights.

Choosing an identity, having an identity — this is a natural part of liberty.  Marriage, as a most deeply personal act, cannot help but be an important part of how anyone presents themselves to the world.  Any institution, whether government or religious, will struggle mightily to interfere in something so bound to the self.

The constitution limits the federal government’s folly in trying.  In that, Windsor may restore a measure of the government’s own dignity.

H/T to The Dish for the cite to Mr. J. Medeiros.

The 68-year-old proprietress of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Washington, is the target of a lawsuit by Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson because she refused to provide wedding flowers for a customer who was marrying his partner. Washington state legalized same-sex marriage in December.

According to CNN’s Belief Blog, Barronelle Stutzman, an evangelical, “said she agonized over the decision but couldn’t support a wedding that her faith forbids. ‘I was not discriminating at all,’ she said. ‘I never told him he couldn’t get married. I gave him recommendations for other flower shops.’”

Not surprisingly, “Among conservative Christians, Stutzman has become a byword—part cautionary tale and part cause celebre.”

Must progressivism decree that the power of the state be so absolute that there be no exemption from its dictate for religious conviction, not to speak of individual liberty? Apparently so, given Obamacare’s model of requiring private business owners to pay for their employees contraception, including abortifacient drugs, despite their religious convictions. In both cases, the state is not stopping one party from harming another; its forcing what it sees as positive behavior upon those who have a different view.

The pagans persecuted the Christians, and then the Christians came to power and persecuted the pagans. Similarly, there’s more here of animus against those who deviate from the one-true correct political line than anything else. It’s not only mean and vulgar, it’s politically counterproductive. But I’m sure using the power of the state to crush those who don’t toe the line makes those who can now persecute feel smugly empowered.

N.J. Gov. Chris Christie has proved a big disappointment. Having vetoed a marriage equality bill passed by the legislature, he’s now campaigning for reelection on his continuing opposition, although letting gay people marry has wide and growing support in his state (a Quinnipiac poll found 64% of New Jersey voters supporting gay marriage and only 30% opposed). But even worse, Christie went livid over the Supreme Court’s DOMA ruling, putting him to the social right of Sen. Rand Paul, who seemed to welcome the decision as turning the matter over to the states—despite his own stated belief that marriage should be reserved for a man and woman (which he plays up when courting evangelicals). Paul is a principled limited-government conservative unlike Christie, who seems to have no discernible political principles.

More. Christie may indeed by trying to outmaneuver Paul among socially conservative primary voters. That’s a good reason for gay Republicans and our friends to think about supporting Paul.

Furthermore. Christie lashes out at libertarians.