IGF CultureWatch

Some 20 years ago, I was a spokesman for the then newly formed Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). There are still a few news articles archived online that quote me from those days, such as here, here and here.

In the years since, GLAAD has had an array of executive leaders, and too often has seemed most interested in raising money by partying with Hollywood friends. While the religious right and social conservatives have been used endlessly in fundraising appeals, they were rarely, if ever, publicly engaged and debated (IGF-affiliated John Corvino and Jonathan Rauch have done far more in this regard, with little or no budget). Instead, trendy political correctness and ideologically lock-step “diversity,” along with echo-chamber “coalition building” with those on the political left, have been the order of the day.

So I was pleased to read in the Washington Post that GLAAD is taking on NatGeo over the cable channel’s promotional programming with the anti-gay Boy Scouts of America. The BSA is far past the point where it should enjoy free media rides (which it wouldn’t, of course, if it excluded boys and scout masters who were African-American or Jewish), but NatGeo seems clueless about its latest programming being in any way controversial. It’s not a matter that government should weigh into, but it is an issue that should be confronted within the bounds of civil society. So, good for GLAAD.

More. Suddenly, it looks like the BSA’s gay ban could fall, at least as national policy. The Washinfgton Post reports:

Southern Baptist leaders…were furious about the possible change and said its approval might encourage Southern Baptist churches to support other boys’ organizations instead of the BSA.

Well, that’s their right. And they could always revive the Hitler Youth.

Obama’s gay inclusiveness during his inaugural address advances our cause. I have never said the Democrats aren’t far better on gay issues (who would argue they weren’t?). What I have contended is that, in many cases, they are not as good as LGBT Democrats claim and, in particular, that Harry Reid, with the administration’s tacit support, was working to bury “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal efforts the same way the administration backtracked on immigration reform when it held congressional majorities, in order to have a campaign issue, but that the LGBT blogosphere and, especially, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), refused to let that happen.

Let’s also be clear; those of us who believe that Obama’s economic and regulatory policies are beyond misguided and, in fact, are dangerously destructive, are compelled to point out that a party that combines support for gay legal equality with backward leftism on economics, with trillion dollar deficits and metastasizing public-sector growth, aimed at increasing dependency on government (and the party of government), will risk, in the end, discrediting the parts of its policy that are right. So I’m happy that LGBT Democrats have something profound to celebrate, but in no sense does this mean that gay critics of Obama and his party should back off for the sake of LGBT solidarity.

More. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute on the importance of “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall,” and what these milestones should mean to libertarians.

The National Stonewall Democrats has ceased operations, at least for now, citing funding issues. More to the point, the organization really has had no reason to be, since the Human Rights Campaign competes far more successfully on the same turf—organizing LGBT support for Democratic candidates and working to defeat Republicans, including openly gay Republicans (such as Richard Tisei), and socially moderate, gay supportive Republicans (such as Scott Brown). In fact, the preponderance of the LGBT movement is a thinly veiled party fundraising operation run by LGBT Democrats, making the need for an explicit “Stonewall Democrats” on the national level redundant from the get go.

Relatedly, Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff opines on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, despite his recently renounced anti-gay record going back decades. HRC had scored Hagel a “0” during his time in the Senate from 2001-2006 (not a single pro-gay vote), but “immediately accepted the tepid apology” Hagel issued just before Obama announced his nomination. Moreover:

Did HRC extract any promises from the White House or Hagel himself before so quickly forgiving and forgetting his rather serious sins? Hagel voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, putting him in the company of the most rabidly anti-gay members of Congress. In 1999, he said he opposed repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” …
It’s all politics as usual — Log Cabin opposes Hagel merely because Obama wants him. And HRC supports Hagel because it must now support everything Obama does. What’s lost here is accountability.

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Much is being made of the sperm donor to a lesbian couple who is now being sued by the state of Kansas for child support, after the lesbians broke up and the birth mother applied to the state for financial help (after which, at the request of the state welfare agency, she provided the name and contact info for the sperm donor). The donor had no relationship to the child or the mother; he had originally responded to a Craigslist ad seeking a donor, and had signed a contract with the lesbian couple absolving him of all parental rights and responsibilities including financial support.

As Hot Air correctly points out, if Kansas recognized same-sex marriage and the lesbian couple had been wed, then the state would have properly pursued the now-ex, who by right of marriage would have been a second legal parent, for financial support. But without marriage, the ex is a legal stranger in this case. So now, it’s a mess—an embarrassment to the state, possibly ruinous for the innocent sperm donor, and (despite this case’s particulars) a threat to the system of sperm donorship due to all the fearsome publicity.

Writing in the New York Daily News, Akhil Reed Amar, who teaches constitutional law at Yale, argues that “gun lovers should invoke a landmark gay-rights case where the court’s liberals won out,” namely Lawrence vs. Texas. Writing at the Reason magazine blog, Damon W. Root comments on Amar’s column and points to the relevance of a Cato Institute amicus brief filed in Lawrence that states: “America’s founding generation established our government to protect rather than invade fundamental liberties, including personal security, the sanctity of the home, and interpersonal relations.”

Root adds that Lawrence and the Supreme Court’s ruling supporting gun ownership in District of Columbia v. Heller “each represent a major victory for the libertarian approach, with individual liberty triumphing over intrusive government in both cases.”

More. “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds blogs: “Over the years I’ve often said that in my ideal world, happily married gay couples would have closets full of assault weapons.” The first part hasn’t gone over so well with social conservatives.

The Washington Post reports that:

an Annapolis company whose old-fashioned trolleys are iconic in the city’s wedding scene has abandoned the nuptial industry rather than serve same-sex couples. The owner of Discover Annapolis Tours said he decided to walk away from $50,000 in annual revenue instead of compromising his Christian convictions when same-sex marriages become legal in Maryland in less than a week. And he has urged prospective clients to lobby state lawmakers for a religious exemption for wedding vendors.

“As long as he doesn’t discriminate against other people, he’s free to do whatever he wants to do, including withdrawing his business from the industry,” said Equality Maryland executive director Carrie Evans, oblivious to the Orwellian overtones of her statement.

The situation is similar to that of a religiously conservative photographer who refused a request to photograph a lesbian wedding; her case is now before the New Mexico Supreme Court.

In each of these cases, the vendor is not refusing to serve gay people who come into their shops, for instance; they’re refusing to provide their services for same-sex weddings, which they feel violate their religious beliefs. There is a difference here that is not minimal.

LGBT progressive activists don’t have a problem with forcing wedding vendors whose religious convictions oppose same-sex marriage to either violate their personal beliefs or go out of business. But it smacks of progressive authoritarianism. We want the right to marry; forcing private businesses to serve us is another matter entirely, and another agenda. It erodes liberty in favor of state coercion for progressive ends.

Along similar lines, progressives cheer that private businesses will now be forced by the state to provide their employees with free “morning after” abortofacient drugs, despite their owners’ religious objections.

Eventually, it might dawn on these champions of governmental coercion that granting the state power to force private business owners to violate deeply held beliefs may come back and bite them when a different regime, with a different ideology, is in power.

Let’s be clear; the government should treat all citizens as equal under the law, and government marriage clerks that refuse to perform same-sex weddings shouldn’t hold their jobs. But private businesses are not agencies of the state, not quite yet, though increasingly that, too, seems part of the progressive playbook.

More. From a letter published in the Washington Post:

Why in the world would two people who are about to celebrate their marriage—surely one of the more joyful events of their lives—want to use a vendor who is unhappy about providing a service that they are paying for?

Why, indeed. Until you grasp that it’s all about force, coercion, and the use of state power to bring all who might dissent from the progressive worldview to heel.

On the passing of failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (who was, infamously, “borked“) we recall that he denounced “the radical redefinition of marriage” to include same-sex couples and backed a federal constitutional amendment to prevent any state from recognizing same-sex marriage. He also said lots of other bad stuff about the “normalization of homosexuality” and “the libertarian virus.” After Bork’s borking, President Reagan nominated conservative jurist Anthony Kennedy, who turned out to be a stalwart supporter of gay legal equality, penning decisions overturning the sodomy laws that Bork defended, and holding that states could not use anti-gay animus as a justification for denying constitutional rights to gay people.

The court will shortly rule on the constitutionality of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act. Now, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has announced a change of heart on the issue of marriage equality, from virulent opposition to resigned acceptance. And thus progress is made.

More. Former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican, has retracted homophobic comments he made 14 years ago, as his hopes to be nominated as Secretary of State dim. Barney Frank is unforgiving (but we should all forget Frank’s shameful role in the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac meltdown, and all his other personal and political scandals).

If we don’t let people (that is, Republicans) evolve on gay issues, then why should they evolve? But the last thing progressive Democrats want to see is a GOP that could actually compete for gay votes.

Still more. The Log Cabin Republicans also are wrong to oppose Hagel based on now-recanted anti-gay views. If they want to oppose him because of foreign policy disagreements, fine. But to tell Republicans it doesn’t matter if they evolve is directly counter to the group’s mission.

Furthermore. Glenn Greenwald finds the LCR ad suspicious, for several reasons.

And more still. James Kirchick argues that not to evolve until a Cabinet post is dangled in front of you, and then to do so half-heartedly, is not to evolve at all. It’s about the best argument in support of LCR’s position, but I tend to agree that the opposition to Hagel has more to do with his perceived weakness on support for Israel and opposition to Iran (and his positions are certainly open to debate), then on gay matters. And if that’s the case, then LCR has been played. I hope it doesn’t indicated what the post-R. Clarke Copper leadership will be like.

Walter Olson takes the GOP’s social conservatives to task for their erroneous belief that opposing equality for gay people will attract anti-gay black and Hispanic voters:

Suppose the party were to drop its odd view of minority voters as motivated mostly by (and in favor of) social conservatism. It might instead choose to appeal to them on the same grounds as other citizens; that is, by emphasizing questions of fiscal soundness, better grasp of national defense and the needs of small business, and other historic themes from the long-past Nixon-Eisenhower era when Republicans used to do better with the minority vote. Alternatively (or in addition), it might resolve to listen to what minorities actually say about why they view the parties the way they do, perhaps with a special ear to the voices of younger voters who might be more open to rethinking old political habits.

But that would take some fresh thinking. One thing is for sure, we’re unlikely to see it from the likes of anti-gay Sen. Jim DeMint, newly appointed head of the socially conservative Heritage Foundation, which was instrumental in getting the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to ban GoProud, a gay conservative group.

An interesting new study looks at the genetic link to homosexuality and explains why identical twins do not always have the same sexual orientation:

Long thought to have some sort of hereditary link, a group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuality is linked to epi-marks—extra layers of information that control how certain genes are expressed. These epi-marks are usually, but not always, “erased” between generations. In homosexuals, these epi-marks aren’t erased—they’re passed from father-to-daughter or mother-to-son, explains William Rice, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and lead author of the study.

Another nail in the coffin of the “it’s a choice” crowd, whether religious fundamentalists on the right or queer theorists on the left.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear challenges to the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which bars the federal government from recognizing state-sanctioned same-sex marriages. That was expected. What wasn’t so clear was whether the high court would also hear the challenge to California’s Proposition 8, through which voters amended the Golden State’s constitution to nullify same-sex marriage, which the legislature had authorized. Had the court not heard that challenge, an appellate court ruling against Prop 8 would have been upheld by default and California’s same-sex couples would have again been able to marry (which is why many had preferred the court take a pass on this one).

It is widely anticipated, and hoped, that the Supreme Court will recognize that the DOMA provision banning federal recognition is unconstitutional, treating gay couples as second-class citizens, and doing so on the basis of anti-gay animus. Moreover, while the court might now uphold Prop 8 and deny Californians marriage equality, there is at least the possibility that the court, through its Prop 8 decision, could declare that all states must allow same-sex marriage as a matter of equal protection under the law. Would that provoke a backlash that could strengthen the anti-gay contingent of the GOP? Probably. There is a sound argument that it would be better in the long run to let marriage equality advance through the states (as Jonathan Rauch argues here). There is also an argument that equal means equal. These are indeed interesting times.

More. Walter Olson expects the Supremes to punt.

Furthermore. James Taranto argues that constitutional law favors striking down the DOMA provisions, but upholding Prop. 8. If the court agrees, another California vote on same-sex marriage is likely, and more likely this time to favor marriage equality.

More still. Conservative infighting: Rod Dreher vs. Glenn Beck. And similar infighting within the British Conservative Party (more on that here).