IGF CultureWatch

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz analyzes recent polls to shed some light on whether Tea Party activists are truly libertarian-minded or (as liberals and their media never tire of claiming) in fact dangerous and reactionary social conservatives. He blogs:It’s disappointing to hear that New Mexico Tea Partiers booed Gary Johnson’s support for legalizing marijuana. And it’s true that a new poll shows Tea Partiers pretty strongly against marriage equality. But the poll does show them just a smidgen more supportive than either conservatives or Republicans. And other polls … have shown somewhat more support among self-identified Tea Party supporters, or a clear division between libertarian-minded and culturally conservative Tea Partiers. In general, Tea Party activists — organizers and people who attend events — seem somewhat more libertarian than people who simply tell pollsters they consider themselves to be members or supporters of the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party groups have declined invitations to criticize federal court rulings on gay marriage. They have studiously avoided taking positions on social issues, even when social conservatives stomp their feet and demand that the Tea Party start talking about abortion and gay marriage.

I have said before that “The tea party is not a libertarian movement, but (at this point at least) it is a libertarian force in American politics. It’s organizing Americans to come out in the streets, confront politicians, and vote on the issues of spending, deficits, debt, the size and scope of government, and the constitutional limits on government. That’s a good thing. And if many of the tea partiers do hold socially conservative views (not all of them do), then it’s a good thing for the American political system and for American freedom to keep them focused on shrinking the size and cost of the federal government.”

As part of his campaign to out-Romney Mitt Romney in the right-wing-pandering department, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty wants to reinstate the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on openly gay service in the military.

According to the GAO, it turns out the ban cost almost $200 million over fiscal 2004-2009, or an average of $53,000 per discharged service member. And that’s just five years. As we know, discrimination is expensive. From PoliticsDaily:

Some 39 percent of the dismissed service members “held critical occupations, such as infantryman and security forces,” the GAO said. That percentage included 23 experts who held skills in an important foreign language, “such as Arabic or Spanish.”

This is the same Pawlenty who demands federal spending cuts and opposes raising the debt limit (i.e., deficit financing).

Shall we ask the Governor, then, just which program he’d cut (Medicare? school lunches? the defense budget?) to reinstate discrimination in the armed forces? Or perhaps he’d prefer to raise taxes? He could call it the Safe Showers Surtax.

Ah…but rhetoric is free.

From National Journal:

For months, the family values wing of the Republican Party has been protesting the inclusion of GOProud, a right-wing gay group, at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). You won’t hear any protesting, however, from conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart.

“We’re going to have a big ol’ gay party,” he said on a radio show Wednesday. Breitbart says gays deserve a place within the Republican Party and he’s been “offended” by efforts to exclude them. Therefore, he’s throwing an 80’s-themed gay party to welcome them on board.

Say what you will about Breitbart or conservative firebrand Ann Coulter, who headlined a GOProud fundraiser in New York last fall—a transgression for which she was roundly denounced by social conservatives. Breitbart and Coulter are not supporters of gay legal equality (marriage, military, etc.) to be sure. But just the fact that they are willing to alienate themselves from the religious right by welcoming gay conservatives into the party’s tent is a sign that power is shifting away from the social conservative bloc.

On another political note: Jim Messina, a deputy White House chief of staff, will spearhead the Obama re-election campaign.

Will he accuse the GOP candidate of being gay, which is what Messina did when he worked for Sen. Max Baucus?

New Census Bureau data reveals child rearing among same-sex couples is more common in the South than in any other region of the country, and that, as the New York Times reports, “Gay couples in Southern states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are more likely to be raising children than their counterparts on the West Coast, in New York and in New England.”

Another interesting finding: “Moreover, gay men who have children do so an average of three years earlier than heterosexual men, census data shows.”

Those gay people; they’re just such family values conservatives!

There is more visceral media interest in our reaction to Jared Loughner’s heinous acts than there is in Loughner, himself.  It is worth our attention that our first instinct, after learning of the mass murders he committed, was to try and locate him on the political spectrum.

Part of that has to do with the fact that the primary target of his attack was a politician.  But there was something else at work as well: a need to view people as having and taking sides.

Rep. Giffords is a Democrat, and there can’t be much debate about the fact that a cadre of commentators on the left did what they could to locate Loughner on the other side – the right, and specifically, the Tea Party right.  If she was political, then there must be a political motive for the shooting somewhere.  Commentators on the right then needed to respond to these misguided efforts, and have done what they could to associate Loughner with the left, or more generally with the Democratic Party.

This is not exactly the kind of madness that Loughner suffers from, but it is the defining insanity of our time – the compulsion to understand people within categories.  In other contexts, we know this to be prejudice, but nothing is ever called prejudice when it is taken for granted.  Our political prejudices are so completely subsumed in our thinking that we don’t recognize them for what they are.

No one with the least amount of sense believes that Loughner acted for political motives.  Even the most herculean efforts to shoehorn his acts into politics needed to resort to the gymnastics of assigning blame to our political rhetoric, and the rhetoric’s effect on Loughner (and, necessarily, others).  There is little doubt in my mind that our political rhetoric is poisonous and unhelpful.  But only those who live and breathe in our rancid political culture could think that everyone understands the world this way.  Many Americans – maybe even a majority – partake of only enough political talk to get by, and ignore or shun vast swathes of it.

I suspect that these are the people who are abandoning the sides.  As Gallup has helped us understand, 38% of Americans identify themselves as independent of either political party, 7% more than the next leading brand.

It is the media’s tiresome and incessant need for “narrative” that helps to drive this movement.  The binary nature of the Democratic/Republican divide is invaluable in crafting stories that purport to explain our public life.  The drama comes from the divide, and the divide is endlessly exploitable by the press.  Because the parties need the press’s attention, the dramatic cycle is complete and self-replicating.

Except for the people who eventually weary of it.  While the political world is divided in two, the world Americans live in is neither binary nor so simplistic.  Drama and conflict are not always sufficient to truly understand things, and can, in fact, obscure more profound truths.  Sometimes, the effort we expend in trying to locate human beings on one side or the other, in order to better understand the narrative, wastes our time and leaves nothing but empty anger behind.

This site was started exactly because of that sort of problem.  The Democratic party’s impulse toward equality for lesbians and gay men was always decent and important.  Removing discriminatory laws from the books is the bedrock of our movement, and we now only have one left to go: marriage.

But after the laws that require discrimination are gone, Democrats still want to do more, to try and remove discrimination from the culture, itself.  That is a much larger, and more difficult task, and government’s role in it is not uniformly accepted.

On this point, the Independent Gay Forum was formed, both to question the reliance of lesbians and gay men on only a single political party, and to prod the Republican party on its unwillingness to address the simple issue of the existence of homosexuals and their role as citizens who are not heterosexual.  Should the law continue to ignore their existence?  Encourage their silence?  Punish them?

Neither party – neither side – was exactly right for us, as I’m sure neither party is exactly right for many people.  The binary political debate the nation was having about gay equality did not fit the more complicated facts and multiplicity of motives that exist.  And the disconnect could not be ignored.

I don’t expect all of those independent voters Gallup is tracking to go away soon.  I think they are now a permanent part of our politics, made more so by the parties, themselves, who find such a hard time even giving public acknowledgement of their existence.  But an awful lot of us just don’t feel a need to pick a side, and suffer the toxic effects of our artificially two-sided debate every single day.  We crave a discussion that is a bit more nuanced, and a lot more realistic.

I hope that’s what IGF provides.  Even when we irritate our own readers (and from the comments, it seems we do that a lot), we hope the irritation is welcome, and useful.

I have to say, I envy what Sherif Girgis, Robert George, and Ryan Anderson (GGA) have accomplished in their recent article (available here) and several follow-on posts (the latest is here). They have at last brought 100 percent epistemic closure to their opposition to same-sex marriage.

Their article is long and full of stuff, and it has generated an interesting discussion (many posts thru Jan. 3 are here, and GGA’s latest includes links to some more recent ones), but the verbiage is really all a gloss on this proposition: “Same-sex couples can’t marry because heterosexual intercourse is the sine qua non of marriage.” Or, to put it even more concisely: “Same-sex couples can’t marry because they’re not opposite-sex couples.”

Remember all that talk about marriage being “ordered (or oriented) to procreation”? As the new article and especially this follow-up make refreshingly explicit, “ordered to procreation” actually means “synonymous with heterosexuality.” Whether or not couples can actually procreate has nothing to do with it. If they can have penile-vaginal sex, they can accomplish the good of marriage. If not, not.

Never mind that the authors think they have discovered the truth of their proposition in the mists of time, in the self-evident contours of human sexuality, etc., etc.: what they have here is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, impervious, like some species of Marxism or Freudianism, to external refutation. Tell them that marriage does many important things besides provide a context for procreation, and that (straight) couples who cannot possibly procreate are allowed (indeed encouraged) to marry, and they merely say that those other purposes and other constituencies of marriage are not marriage’s essential nature.

Theirs is, in my own view, an impoverished, incomplete, and significantly wrongheaded view of marriage—and, what’s more important, it’s the whole wrong way to talk about marriage, which is a social institution, not a Platonic abstraction. But I see why it appeals to GGA: it allows them to absent themselves from all of the difficult questions in the gay-marriage debate…e.g.:

* The policy debate. GGA’s article includes some pragmatic arguments, but they’re baggage. If the documentary evidence were a mile high that legalizing same-sex marriage benefits gays and society, that wouldn’t change the fact that same-sex couples can’t be married.

* The equality debate. What equality debate? There is no equality case for same-sex marriage, because same-sex couples can’t be married.

* The humanitarian debate. Look, it’s not GGA’s fault that gay couples can’t be married, but they can’t, and that’s that. The good news, though, is that gays can still have intimate friendships. (Thanks.)

Disconcertingly, GGA congratulate themselves for resolving the gay-marriage issue, when they’ve merely ducked most of it. They seem to have no moral qualms about saying, in 2011, that their moral universe need take no account of gay lives and loves. Let them eat friendship! GGA have, indeed, defined not only gay marriage but gays out of the picture. I wish I could help them to see why, to a gay American in 2011, their approach seems not only unpersuasive but chillingly callous.

I wasn’t being entirely sardonic when I said I envy what GGA have accomplished. I sometimes wish I, too, could write myself a permission slip to take a pass on the hard moral and social questions. I’m grateful that the American public hasn’t and won’t.

Navy Captain Owen P. Honors has lost his command of the USS Enterprise over raunchy comedy videos he made, which were shown on the ship’s closed circuit TV two years ago when he was serving as the Enterprise’s executive officer (XO). The media is making much of the gay content in the videos and charges that they were homophobic, sexist and profanity laden. But is Capt. Owen getting a raw deal?

Here’s one series of video excerpts posted by the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. One example of the “gay” content: XO Owen, wearing a funny shower cap, opens the shower to find two women (from shoulders up). The rule is three minutes max to shower. They say, “there are two of us; don’t we get six minutes.” It’s repeated by request later, but then toward the end of the excerpts Owen again opens the shower and finds two hunky men. They repeat the line.

But Owen has his defenders, including some openly gay former sailors who served on the Enterprise. From the Washington Times:

Interviews with sailors on the Enterprise at the time, including several who have since left the Navy and say they were openly gay when they served, suggest that the videos, far from offending, did, as intended, raise morale through their crude humor. Many of Capt. Honors’ former shipmates think the Navy has already gone too far in stripping him of his command. . . .

Capt. Honors “absolutely did not” create a hostile or homophobic atmosphere on board, added Eric M. Prenger, a gay sailor who also served on the Enterprise at the time. Mr. Prenger, an electronics technician, third class, said the crew looked forward to the videos, which were broadcast on the ship’s closed circuit TV system every Saturday night, preceding the showing of a movie.

“They were definitely a tension reliever,” said Mr. Prenger, who has also since left the service. “I remember laughing at them.”

Still, in a video not in this series (and not posted online), the word “faggot” was used. In this Washington Post op-ed, Bruce Fleming, a civilian English instructor at the United States Naval Academy, writes:

The worst offense to many viewers of the videos seems to be Honors’ use of a word usually meant as a gay slur. He’s not referring to someone believed to be gay, but to one of his “alter egos” [which he plays in the videos] and to the video’s audience, Surface Warfare Officers, who (the self-deprecating inside joke has it) are not as cool as pilots. …

Yes, the captain uses a slur, but not to make fun of gay people. Everything depends on context—in this case, the insular confines of a ship at sea.

Fleming stresses Owen’s non-hateful intention, in his view, although he makes clear that a line was crossed that made his firing inevitable.

That’s probably right. But most gay people quite rightly have a lower tolerance of the word gay (or the f-slur) being used as any kind of deprecation.

Still, judging from the posted video excerpts, those charging that the videos promoted “sexual harassment and sexual assault” or that Capt. Owners “should be prosecuted” seem way over the top. Personally, I’ve been more offended—much more offended—by some of the homophobic “humor” on Saturday Night Live.

More. Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute blogs:

there was a morale problem on the ship for a while, in part due to the fresh water restrictions that the shower scenes in the videos tried to make light of. By many accounts, XO Honors was instrumental in turning this state of affairs around. The Enterprise, a bear of a ship to operate, the oldest nuclear-powered vessel in the fleet, with eight (8!) reactors, earned unit citations under Honors’s leadership.

All that said, I stand by my original assessment. In striving to improve the crew’s morale, Captain Honors crossed the fine line between clever and stupid. He demonstrated poor judgment in producing videos in an official capacity that could easily be taken out of context, as they have been.

Jon’s post on the CPAC Crack-Up glosses over the most important part of this story: GOProud.  In fact, Jon doesn’t even mention them by name, referring only to “a gay Republican group.”

Credit where credit is due.  In the more than three decades of its existence the Log Cabin Republicans never provoked this level of anguish and inflammation in its party – or, more accurately, this level of public anguish and inflammation.  Log Cabin has been a private thorn in the party’s side since 1977, but up until now, the party has been able to brush them aside in its public pronouncements.

But it’s also true that Log Cabin has been something of a team player.  In contrast, GOProud is the Republican ACT UP.

And I mean that in a literal sense.  GOProud is unleashing power.  Republicans have spent a lot of political energy in the last decade trying to finesse and manage their religious problem, while benefiting from it electorally.  The religious wing of the party expects all people who call themselves “conservatives” to share their abhorrence of and intolerance for open and honest homosexuality.  The party has given them lip service; pledges and resistance to progress, and even a couple of outspoken backbenchers who show all the signs of being true believers.

They also gave them Texas.

But no political party can live with intolerance indefinitely; compromise always creeps in, and the world outside the party can’t be denied for long.  Lesbians and gay men aren’t going away, and it’s hard to maintain the closet as an institution if they keep refusing to cooperate.  Today, there are simply too many examples of decent, moral, public and powerful homosexuals to sustain the notion that “they” are evil or harmful or much of anything other than fellow citizens, friends, coworkers, neighbors and family members.

Republican leaders have suppressed their party’s best instincts about this for too long, and GOProud is, as ACT-UP did before it, unleashing the power that’s been there all along.  GOProud can be as juvenile and theatrical as their predecessors, but they are also, like ACT-UP, a deeply serious group – as this reaction to their existence shows.

Maybe the timing is better for them than it ever was for Log Cabin.  Or maybe Log Cabin’s political strategy wasn’t what was needed to blow up the party’s entrenched hypocrisy.  But either way, GOProud is now forcing their party to have a public conversation about a fundamental question that has been kept at the margins: What would Republican conservatism look like if it weren’t anti-gay?

That won’t be resolved at CPAC.  But it’s a question whose resolution will affect a lot of people, gay and straight, Republican and Democratic.