IGF CultureWatch

Joe Solmonese will step down as president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest and wealthiest LGBT political lobby, when his contract expires next March.

My criticisms of HRC have dwelt on its becoming too much of a strategic arm of the Democratic party. I’ll just note that it would be nice if the HRC board would consider the possibility that come January 2013, the U.S. might have a Republican president and a Republican Senate and House. It would be useful to have an HRC head who had some ability to understand and make the conservative-libertarian argument for gay equality, rather than a hard core progressive Democratic partisan. But the chances of that happening are meager.

It could be a very long time before the Democrats again have the presidency and both houses of congress—the situation during the first two years of the Obama administration (with a Senate super-majority for the first year and and half). That more advantage of this wasn’t taken by HRC is a bit of a scandal. No congressional movement on repealing the Defense of Marriage Act or even the liberal priority (at least during the Bush years) of pushing the Employee Non-Discrimination Act. And I believe there would have been no administration/congressional movement to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell if the liberal blogosphere and several progressive activists hadn’t bucked the “be nice to Democrats” line and demanded that action be taken before the Republicans took the reins of the House in January (plus, significantly, the October 2010 advancement of the Log Cabin Republicans’ lawsuit). HRC’s tune, instead, has been to play nice with the party that they so closely identify with.

Now I realize the GOP harbors fierce opponents of gay rights. Some of my critics seem convinced that this fact means that the LGBT movement should be in the business of advancing the party of the left. I think that’s the wrong take-away. We won’t have gay equality in the U.S. until both parties are on board. Writing off the GOP instead of lobbying it—and doing so by speaking its language of individual liberty (protection from government), not the left’s language of group rights (bestowed by government)—is not going to help get us there from here.

More. Being able to “speak the language” is important. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, overturning state sodomy laws, was written by Justice Kennedy, a Reagan-appointee. He repeatedly cited an amicus brief filed by the libertarian Cato Institute, primarily making a constitution-based individual liberty case, and ignored the brief co-filed by HRC (which focused on “victimhood” issues such as asserting that sodomy laws provoked violence against gays as a group).

But in politics just speaking the language isn’t enough. The ability to mobilize support is what earns the attention of politicians. That requires money and ground operations, and a willingness sometimes to cross party lines (as the National Rifle Association did by endorsing the re-election of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid).

Furthermore. David Boaz of the Cato Institute hails, in his blog post How Judges Protect Liberty:

four federal judges who had courageously and correctly struck down state and federal laws:
• Judge Martin L. C. Feldman, who blocked President Obama’s moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico;
• Judge Susan Bolton, who blocked Arizona’s restrictive immigration law;
• Judge Henry Hudson, who refused to dismiss Virginia’s challenge to the health care mandate; and
• Judge Vaughn Walker, who struck down California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage.

That’s a political perspectives that’s neither beholden to left nor right.

The Washington Blade reports that “LGBT advocates are urging the new head of Apple, Inc., to make his sexual orientation public amid media reports asserting that he’s gay.” But the only evidence of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s sexual orientation is a “report from [gossip website] Gawker in January citing anonymous sources asserting the new CEO identifies as gay.”

If Cook is gay, I hope he chooses to comes out. But this “campaign” seems extremely presumptuous. Not everyone without public (or private) relationships is gay. One of the movement’s original aims was to allow people to be who they are, and not just to add the “LGBorT” categories as approved identity options along with “straight” that everyone must be pressured to select among and pigeonhole themselves into.

Aaron Blake blogs at the Washington Post that the GOP is witnessing a:

clash is between two converging branches of the conservative movement: the social conservatives who wants to outlaw gay marriage at all costs, and the newly in vogue brand of tea party federalists holding that, regardless of how you feel about the controversial issue, it’s a matter for the states. . . . it’s hard to marry (no pun intended) the two positions.

Blake notes that that while Republicans broadly are against gay marriage, “a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute last September, by a 55-to-41 percent margin, they think decisions about the issue should be made at the state level. And among tea partiers, the margin is even greater: 62 to 35 percent. So, at least on the surface, that’s a solid majority of Republicans AND tea partiers expressing what amounts to opposition to a federal marriage amendment.”

However:

The last thing someone like Bachmann or Perry wants to do is alienate social conservatives, particularly given their influence in Iowa, the home of the first caucuses. But the candidates have also got to remember where their tea party bread is buttered, and if they stray too far from the emerging federalist trend, they could lose some of that tea party support.

The amendment isn’t likely to go anywhere, but the judicial challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) could be front and center next year. And, as the Washington Post editorializes: “If defending DOMA requires making assertions that are clearly false, the law is not defensible.”

Slate takes note that Elmhurst College outside of Chicago “has begun asking potential students about their sexual orientation in a move the school says is aimed at increasing campus diversity.”

Here’s the question on the application for those students hoping to attend Elmhurst College in the fall of 2012: “Would you consider yourself to be a member of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community?” The three multiple-choice answers: “Yes,” “No” and “Prefer Not to Answer.”

Which begs the question, is it possible to be gay or lesbian without considering yourself “a member of the LGBT community”? In fact, it is possible, and not just among “closet cases.” Elmhurst is not asking “Are you gay or lesbian (or bisexual or transgender), but a far more politically correct question with collectivistic assumptions (we are all inherently part of the group borg that subsumes our individuality). Even those who socialize with other gay people may not accept the designation of an “LGBT community,” fraught as that phrase is with so many political implications.

Going further, the college’s thinking seems premised on the belief that if you’re gay but don’t view yourself as part of “the LGBT community” then you don’t count toward diversity. That would make sense if your actual goal is not a diversity of individuals but a mix of progressive-thinkers and activists representing strands of the progressive rainbow, who can mutually congratulate one another on being, you know, progressives.

More. This reminds me of the old Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber routine where Burns, as a talkative taxicab passenger, asks cabbie Schreiber if he’s “of the Hebrew persuasion,” and Schreiber responds, testily, “I’m a Jew!” Burns replies, “You said it, not me,” as if the word itself was offensive. Maybe something similar is going on here: it seems less “offensive” to say “LGBT community” than “gay.”

Over at the Scotusblog, focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, a series of posts looks at same-sex marriage including “Why the Supreme Court will strike down DOMA” and “Marriage equality: religious freedom, federalism, and judicial activism.” IGF Culture Watch contributor Dale Carpenter discusses his misgivings over the suit to overturn California’s Prop. 8 in “Perry as Politics.”

The optimistic arguments suggest that Justice Anthony Kennedy (a Reagan appointee), given his trail-blazing record authoring decisions favoring gay equality in Lawrence and Romer, will be the swing vote needed to ensure that the federal government recognizes same-sex marriages in states where it is legal (it’s less likely that same-sex marriage will be imposed on all states, which is not necessarily a bad thing at this point in time, given the consequences of a political backlash).

Of course, anything can happen and if a Defense of Marriage Act case doesn’t come up before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg resigns due to illness and President Rick Perry replaces her with a social conservative, then all bets are off.

More. Michael Barone’s column in the Washington Examiner, Same sex marriage a tricky issue for Obama, GOP, points out:

The Republicans’ problem is young voters. Huge majorities of them favor same-sex marriage, and for most of them it’s simply a no-brainer. They must have been turned off if they were watching the Republican presidential candidates vie with each other in opposing it in the Fox News-Washington Examiner debate in Iowa.

Indeed. And as for Democrats, Barone points to:

a split between Democratic core constituencies. Affluent liberals overwhelmingly favor same-sex marriage. But most black voters are opposed.

In a 2008 referendum in California, 70 percent of blacks voted against same-sex marriage. A same-sex marriage bill was defeated this year in Maryland after black Democratic legislators opposed it. Same-sex marriage would be legal in California and Maryland were it not for opposition by black voters.

Which is long known, but an issue no one on the left really wants to address.

Small business blogger Erica Douglass explains why—although she’s not a Republican (nor a social conservative)—excessive red tape and taxes on her business have driven her to leave Jerry Brown’s California for Rick Perry’s Texas. She sums up her politics this way:

I believe in small government, dramatically lower spending, and the right for everyone to smoke marijuana and marry whomever they want (as long as both people are consenting adults). I refused to vote Republican or Democrat in the last presidential election because both candidates believed we should spend our way out of a spending problem. And I abhor the Republicans’ current stance of cutting spending on everything but the military. I love Ron Paul as a politician, but I don’t understand how someone so obviously brilliant doesn’t believe in evolution, and it’s for that reason that I don’t want to see him run as President.

Thus, the plight (and flight) of the libertarian-minded independents. I doubt she’d vote for Rick Perry because of his social views, but many others who are fed up might, and Perry’s message is being delivered with pizzazz.

Worth noting, from the Washington Times:

Maryland Sen. Allan H. Kittleman has spent seven years honing his reputation as a fiscal conservative and Republican leader in the General Assembly, but he made waves this year by standing apart from party colleagues on one of the state’s most controversial social issues—same-sex marriage.

The Howard Republican was the only one of 55 Republican state legislators who spoke out in favor of a gay-marriage bill that passed the Senate but died in the House because of seemingly unanimous Republican opposition and resistance from nearly one-third of Democrats.

As in New York, the eventual passage of marriage equality will take at least a few Republicans. Too much deference by LGBT political organizations to the Democratic Party doesn’t help get us there.

In response to a campaign asking PBS to let long-time “Sesame Street” roommates Bert and Ernie get married, the taxpayer-funded producers announced that:

“Bert and Ernie are best friends … Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics …they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”

Which came as news to blogger Julian Sanchez, who points out that many muppets of the opposite-sex variety often romantically date or pine for one another, and the Twiddlebugs muppets are a standard nuclear family. As Sanchez notes:

What all of these have in common is that they’re heterosexual couples. Because it’s regarded as the default, that “sexual orientation” is invisible. But, of course, it’s still there—and nobody imagines that simply depicting all these straight couples and families somehow counts as injecting inappropriate “adult” or sexualized material into a children’s show.

I doubt this is news to the clever producers at “Sesame Street,” however. More likely they’re dancing around the issue. To be fair, if Bert and Ernie got married there would be a huge brouhahah from the traditional values right, since PBS is a taxpayer-funded enterprise (that is, social conservatives have their money taken by the federal government and given to the producers, whether they like it or not). Since PBS has been long under fire for biased reporting favoring big government liberalism, a same-sex wedding could be the final straw.

Which is the problem with taxpayer-funded media; gay characters have proliferated on commercial and pay cable networks, including TV Land sitcoms, while children’s programming at liberal taxpayer-funded PBS remains in the 60s – big government is just dandy, but gays are in the closet.

What’s to say about the GOP debate last night? Romney further disgraced himself demanding that marriage be federalized; Huntsman defended civil unions and the rights of states to decide the issue but overall gave a lackluster performance. Paul was rambling. Santorum and Bachmann were evil. More from The Advocate.

Shifting gears but showing why the “progressive left,” despite its support for marriage equality, is a dreadful alternative, Barton Hinkle has a neat look at liberal apologists for the rioters in Britain.

Here in the U.S. we’ve just been through a budget showdown in which the side that wanted government spending to grow at a slightly less rapid pace than the other side wanted was denounced as terrorists in the literal sense. So far, none of those who called peaceful tea-party activists terrorists have flung the same accusation at the British rioters who have inflicted genuine terror. Interesting.

To be sure, those progressives seeking to understand what motivates the rioters in London do not actually endorse their behavior. They do not think individuals — no matter how aggrieved — should take it upon themselves to storm into other people’s shops and homes and “redistribute the wealth” as they see fit. After all: That, such progressives say, is government’s job.

More. Commenter “another steve” gets the point I was trying to make with this juxtaposition: “We have a choice of warmed over social democracy which has already crashed and burned in Europe, and social intolerance. We need to forge a new mainstream.”