IGF CultureWatch

Roll Call reports that openly gay Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) is gearing up to run for an open seat in the Senate:

Groups including the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and the Human Rights Campaign have supported Baldwin’s political career for almost 20 years, and they intend to tap into their vast supporter lists to fully back a Senate bid by the seven-term Congresswoman, whose voting record has consistently been among the most liberal in the House. …

The Human Rights Campaign has more than a million members and supporters nationwide, and it already has a fundraising portal for Baldwin set up on its website. “If Tammy decides to run for the Senate, we will step up our efforts to get the word out about her record,” HRC spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz said.

Would that be her record for gay rights, or her record as one of the most left-liberal members of the House? And does HRC know that there is a difference?

More. An interesting if rather hard-core libertarian item from the Friends of Liberty Newsletter:

D.C.’s gay pride festival in June was a case study in how the Left operates. What struck me as I walked around the festival was how a young person would see all the Left-leaning institutions of the gay community and conclude, a) that’s normal, and b) there is no alternative way to think about being gay. Only the almost-invisible gay Republican and libertarian booths offered any kind of diversity of thought. A number of organizations with booths at the festival had “equality” in their name . … The real deal is never articulated – ‘Support us and we’ll give you equality but, oh by the way, what we’re not telling you is that you’re signing up to live in a socialist country.’

Furthermore. Baldwin joins with the hard left to vote against the deficit ceiling agreement, finding even a modest amount of decrease in the growth of spending too much of an affront to her spendthrift sensibilities. She’s one of our elected representatives who is most responsible for this.

Former 2-term New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Gary Johnson says that the Christian right’s anti-gay “family leader pledge,” which other GOP White House contenders are jumping to sign, “gives Republicans a bad name.” Too bad the media refuses to take Johnson’s presidential bid seriously (unlike, say, Herman Cain, with no government experience), but he doesn’t fit into their political narrative.

More. Johnson’s latest on YouTube, Tolerance is American.

Furthermore. Filed under “There he goes again”…. Ex-Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, gay-rights opponent and GOP presidential contender, gets mired in whether being gay is “a choice” (which he seems to reduce to the dispute over a specific gay gene), when in truth this should be irrelevant to whether gay people deserve equality under the law. (For what it’s worth, the answer, given what we generally mean by “choice,” is almost always no, but maybe for some bisexuals in the middle of Kinsey’s scale, and more often for females than males, sometimes kinda sorta, as if it matters.)

The Pentagon has ordered a halt to all separations of gay troops under “don’t ask, don’t tell” and will begin accepting applications from prospective recruits who identify themselves as gay, reports Army Times, following a ruling by a panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Log Cabin Republicans v. United States.

It’s true that in a few weeks/months the administration would have formally ended DADT (60 days after the defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs certify that it will not adversely impact military readiness), after Congress voted to repeal the anti-gay-service law last December. But Log Cabin’s suit and the Ninth Circuit’s ruling are still good things. The court’s finding that the statute is unconstitutional because it treats gay Americans differently under the law is an excellent precedent to take into battle against the Defense of Marriage Act and other anti-gay government edicts.

With very different agendas: Margaret Hoover, a leading GOP strategist, fights for gay equality. Michele Bachmann is a vehement phobe (although she’s currently soft-peddling her bigotry).

Some progressive activists fear that liberalism today is too concerned with social issues like gay marriage instead of focusing on income redistribution and expanding government, Washington Post reporter Alec MacGillis writes:

If the country is becoming more liberal on accepting minority rights, why is the left having such a hard time making progress on its bread-and-butter issues of class and economics, which were once its central, animating concerns? Why is liberalism half-dead, half-alive? …

Helping push the marriage vote were billionaire financiers who have spent heavily to elect Republicans and block Democratic efforts to regulate Wall Street. And the hero of the vote, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has garnered praise from the right for balancing New York’s budget by cutting public education and public employees, instead of raising taxes on millionaires…

MacGillis quotes Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign, who says of wealthy Republicans who pressed New York GOP legislators to support gay marriage that:

he knows that the GOP donors are working to undermine other causes of the left, but he expressed no regret. “We do work very closely and in concert with folks in the progressive movement,” he said. “But we also understand there are times when we will have different stakeholders.”

Well, that’s good. But does HRC think that endorsing Obama’s re-election in June 2011 and backing all manner of liberal-left agenda items is going to open doors to working with gay-supportive Republicans? On the contrary, HRC has all but ensured that its help carries so much baggage as to make it the kiss of death for anyone who might be supportive of gay equality but isn’t on the left.

MacGillis concludes with remarks from openly gay uber-liberal Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.):

And how does Frank view the gay-marriage push provided by financiers—who will now resume trying to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank law and preserve the loophole that lets their winnings be taxed at only 15 percent?

“I know a couple hedge-fund people helped us on marriage,” he replied without hesitation. “But that’s no reason for me to back off on taxing them.”

Thanks in large part to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a coalition of liberals and gay-supportive Republicans carried the day in New York. But the “progressive” left to which many LGBT activists are aligned still puts government expansion and income redistribution at the top of its wish list, making it difficult to build and maintain a broad, national coalition of liberals, libertarians and free-market/limited govenrment conservatives in support of gay equality.

More. Columnist Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post:

We are now engaged in a messy debate over big budget deficits and the size of government. The struggle nominally pits liberals against conservatives, but this is misleading. The real debate involves reactionaries vs. radicals. Many liberals are reactionaries and many conservatives are radicals.

So why must the LGBT movement weigh in on one side or the other?

The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, R. Albert Mohler Jr., writes in the Wall Street Journal:

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. …
…we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality. We cannot pretend as if we do not know that the Bible clearly teaches that all homosexual acts are sinful, as is all human sexual behavior outside the covenant of marriage. …
There is no escaping the fact that we are living in the midst of a moral revolution. And yet, it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.

There you have the crux of the Christian right’s position, stated without rancor. It may do no good to argue, as many do, that Jesus never mentioned or condemned homosexuality but went out of his way to break bread with social outcasts and to charge those who would condemn a prostitute to cast the first stone if they were, themselves, without sin (as no one is). The apostle Paul, who never met Jesus in the flesh, did condemn a man who lies with a man as with a woman, but as with many Biblical prohibitions that statement is open to contextual interpretation (i.e., a condemnation of pagan practices). However, to the fundamentalist, whether on the Christian right or the politically correct left, the world is always black and white.

What particularly struck me about Mohler’s argument, however, is the underlying claim that we are in the midst of a moral revolution that is anti-gospel and therefore must be opposed. His is the same church, mind you, that about 150 years ago proclaimed that chattel slavery was Biblically sanctioned and worth fighting to maintain (although it would seem that anyone who reads the gospels without blinders could easily see how antithetical to the message of Jesus such as view was). Ending slavery, too, was a “moral revolution” that his church could not, and would not, accept.

It’s particularly sad when those who choose to dwell in darkness proclaim that their effort to keep human souls in bondage, then as now, is somehow God’s will. Here’s another Biblical verse: “Jesus wept.”

More. Bruce Bawer shares his thoughts on Mohler’s op-ed.

In the Wall Street Journal, it’s dueling op-eds by my friend Walter Olson (“An Amen for Albany“) vs. Maggie Gallagher (“New York’s GOP Let Down the Base“).

The struggle is not just between the left and the right. There’s a fight within the right as well. And since those who lean to the right of the political spectrum consistently represent more than half of the nation, it’s a fight that must be made and won.

I was as surprised as anyone by David Frum’s declaration that the facts no longer support the claim that gay marriage will damage straight families. David and I have been friends since college, but our friendship was strained when he asserted in the 1990s that sodomy laws—i.e., menacing people like me with arrest and imprisonment—would be a good way to discourage judges from imposing SSM. When he and his wife offered last year to host a reception in honor of my marriage to Michael, I was deeply touched, but I understood his gesture as one of friendship, not as a recantation.

And, in fact, I think David’s statement on gay marriage is not a change of principle. Just the opposite. It represents  fidelity to a principle—a conservative principle—and therein lies its importance.

David, in the past, has expressed philosophical objections to SSM, having to do with marriage’s being founded on distinctive gender roles and so on. You’ll note that in his article he doesn’t embrace SSM. What he does say is that his consequentialist objections—objections based on real-world consequences—have been disproved.

None of that nuance will matter in conservative-land. Right-wingers will cite this as yet another example of his apostasy. But here’s the irony. They are not the real conservatives. He is.

Specifically, he’s a Burkean conservative, one who begins from a presumption that social change is disruptive, but who is also open to real-world evidence that sometimes change is necessary or beneficial. Burke, remember, supported the American revolution as protective of basic rights, even as he bitterly opposed the French one.

There is nothing conservative about never changing your mind, regardless of the facts. Nor is there much that is truly conservative about the strange coalition of anti-government radicals and social reactionaries that dominates the American right. Nor will that coalition do itself any political favors by excommunicating Burke and his pragmatic descendents. A better approach would be to understand why David Frum, far from betraying conservatism’s greatest tradition, exemplifies it.

New York’s Republican-controlled state Senate voted 32-29 late Friday night to bring gay marriage to New York.

As I blogged a few days ago, “What’s going on in the New York marriage struggle shows why winning over Republicans (even just a few!) matters greatly.”

Only a handful of GOP state senators voted for the bill, but the GOP majority leader allowed the vote to come to the floor. We’re still a ways away from the day when national congressional GOP leaders would allow something like DOMA repeal to receive an up or down vote in the GOP controlled House, but New York shows that with some effort, enough Republicans can be moved to advance gay equality in a real and substantive way.

More. The role played by rich Republicans, to the dismay of some. And no immediate response from the GOP presidential contenders, perhaps because of the complete absence of a “judicial tyranny” argument for conservatives. Now we can ask supposedly Tenth Amendment-style Republicans, “Do you think the federal government should overrule the governor and legislature of New York?”

Furthermore. Michele Bachmann speaks, and she’s gotten it exactly wrong. She supports Tenth amendment state rights to set the laws they want to set, and she supports using Congress to override state decisions that she doesn’t agree with. From Fox News:

the Minnesota congresswoman said it’s also up to the states to decide whether they permit same-sex marriage. … She added that it’s not a contradiction to pursue a federal constitutional amendment that would trump state law…

And 2+2=5.

More still. Maureen Dowd writes critically of the president:

Obama’s reluctance to come out for gay marriage seems hugely and willfully inconsistent with what we know about his progressive worldview. And it is odd that the first black president is letting Andrew Cuomo, who pushed through a gay-marriage bill in Albany on Friday night, go down in history as the leader on the front lines of the civil rights issue of our time.

But for the president, “the fierce urgency of now” applies only to getting checks from the gay community, not getting up to speed with all the Americans who think it’s time for gay marriage.

Yet more still Conservative columnist James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal:

the overwrought expressions of anger and despair from people who style themselves champions of traditional marriage have the feel of scapegoating. It isn’t the fault of gays that marriage is in dire straits.

And David Boaz calls Republicans to account on federalism and states rights.

Mark Steyn on free speech:

Mark Steyn on Free Speech.

At 6:20, he describes investigations by Scotland Yard against a Muslim cleric for homophobia after the cleric denounced homosexuality, and a simultaneous investigation by Scotland Yard against a gay group for Islamaphobia after it accused Islam of being homophobic.

More about Steyn’s remarks here.

While his most egregious examples are from Britain, Canada and Australia, they serve as a cautionary tale. Despite the First Amendment, there are many ideologues on both the left and the right would like to stifle speech they view as “hurtful” or “offensive” here in the U.S.—which is why vigilant support for free speech remains so important.