Poll Wars

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You may have seen this recent Washington Post/ABC poll: the latest and, in my view, most reliable of the still-few national polls which have shown an outright majority of Americans favoring same-sex marriage.

I have been as careful as anyone to read the polls cautiously. When people are offered the third alternative of civil unions, support for SSM falls to the 30-40 percent range (though the trend has been upward). And it is true that more people say they support same sex marriage than vote for it.

That said, I scratch my head when reading conservatives’ interpretation of the poll. “Don’t believe it,” says a National Review editorial (April 18):

Respondents seem to tell interviewers that they favor same-sex marriage because they think it’s what they are supposed to say. Their answers are more negative when voting or responding to robo-polls… The poll is not evidence that a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. It is, however, evidence that its supporters have succeeded in setting the terms of the debate.

Or that, says Maggie Gallagher, they have succeeded in “intimidating and silencing” gay-marriage opponents. “America is becoming a place where people have to be wary about saying what they believe.” Got that? Gay marriage opponents are…an oppressed majority.

Having relied so long on the argument that elites are trying to ram gay marriage down the throats of an unwilling majority, opponents now have their backs to the wall. In the face of evidence of shifting public opinion, they have little choice but to deny.

Even if it is true, however, that people are growing more reluctant to express opposition to SSM—which, by the way, would be evidence of changing public morality, not of “intimidating and silencing”—it strains credulity to say that nothing but bullying is reflected in Pollster.com’s Charles Franklin’s splendid scatterplots of poll results going back more than two decades.

As the charts show, support for SSM rises slowly but steadily over time, and opposition declines—on both the two-way and three-way questions. Are we to believe these results measure nothing more than the creeping menace of gay bullying?

Here’s something else, from Gallup. Over a decade, the trends in approval of same-sex relations mirror the trends in approval of same-sex marriage. Is that “intimidation” too? A coincidence?

To me it seems pretty hard to sustain, with a straight face, the claim that these polls don’t represent real changes in public opinion. I don’t think there’s a national voting majority in the U.S. for same-sex marriage. But I do think the day is coming.

One reason is the poor job that SSM opponents have done convincing the public that keeping gay couples out of marriage will help keep straight couples in. Another is their refusal to address the country’s growing moral compassion for gay Americans. Denial doesn’t cut it.

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Do LGBT Activists Prefer an Anti-Gay GOP?

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The Republican Party as a whole is not supportive of gay equality. You might think that would lead LGBT political groups to try to increase the number of pro-gay (and openly gay) Republican office holders, who once elected would be in a position to change the party. Alas, that’s not the case.

Take the Victory Fund. Its stated mission is “To change the face and voice of America’s politics and achieve equality for LGBT Americans by increasing the number of openly LGBT officials at all levels of government.” But the group has long had a virtual litmus test against pro-life gay candidates, which (with rare exception) has excluded endorsements for gay Republicans. Robert Turner, president of the D.C. chapter of Log Cabin Republicans, argues “being pro-life is not bad for the gay cause” and is urging the Victory Fund to “Get rid of the pro-abortion plank in your vetting process and move on.”

Another case in point; Just this week Equality California (EQCA) endorsed Democrat Debra Bowen for Congress. She’s a pro-gay liberal, but also running for the seat is popular Republican Redondo Beach mayor Mike Gin, who is openly gay and married (yes, to a man).

You’d think sending him to Congress would convey a powerful message to the GOP and be a significant step toward changing the party’s anti-gay stance. But fealty to the Democratic Party remains the top priority of a great many LGBT activists, whose worst fundraising nightmare is a GOP that isn’t adamantly anti-gay.

More. Log Cabin Republicans are “Proud to Support One of Our Own, Mike Gin, For Congress.”

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Standing Firm

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Thomas Peters (“American Papist”) thinks that the Catholics who support same-sex marriage are just a bunch of phonies, and this makes the Public Religion Research Poll bogus.  I’ll leave the question of who counts as a Catholic to the Catholics, but can’t help pointing out that insulting fellow believers for insufficient dogmatism seldom works out well.  Plus, just as a demographic matter, if (as Peters suggests) the only real Catholics are the ones in the pews every week, the number of American Catholics is wildly inflated by pollsters, social scientists, and the church, itself.

But Peters doesn’t stop at provoking his fellow Catholics.  He goes on to argue that only (only!) 43% of these faux-Catholics support same-sex marriage, and that the higher figure of 74% includes those who support civil unions.  Peters says it’s important to draw a distinction:

In other words, the only way LGBT-funded pollsters can get Catholics (again, lumped in with inactive and less active Catholics) to “support” same-sex marriage is to create a false choice between full same-sex marriage on the one hand, and “no legal protection/recognition” on the other.

As soon as you introduce the reality that there are other ways of accommodating homosexual relationships into civil law without redefining marriage, support for same-sex marriage among Catholics drops off again. And yet we still see the headlines, “Catholics support same-sex marriage.”

How could I disagree with him about this false choice?  I’m all about the compromise.

The problem for Peters, though, is that one of the few people on earth who is undoubtedly a real Catholic thinks that false choice is the only one.  In 2003, Pope John Paul II approved of a document titled, “CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING PROPOSALS TO GIVE LEGAL RECOGNITION TO UNIONS BETWEEN HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS.” Bottom line? “The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”  This explicitly includes civil unions which you’d think, by their very definition, might fall outside the jurisdiction of Catholic religious doctrine.  But it’s right there in black and brown and sepia.  These “considerations” were issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and bear the name of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who in recent years has moved up in the organization.

I get a bit hot under the collar when people like Peters invoke civil recognition of same-sex unions, and imply they would support that compromise when, in fact, they won’t (Since Peters claims he’s a Real Catholic, I assume he would follow the teachings of the Vatican on this matter).  That has always been the shell game NOM plays, ceaselessly claiming they want same-sex couples to be happy, just not married, and then remaining blithe about the lack of any legal recognition for same-sex couples; they go blank in the eyes at any mention of support for civil unions.

In this, at least, Indiana’s legislature is being honest.  They are getting ready to go on the record as prohibiting any same-sex couple in their state from having any legal recognition, marital or otherwise.   While state statute already defines marriage as between one man and one woman, this constitutional amendment would make it clear to any uppity judges out there that Indianans won’t tolerate wobbliness.

It’s rarer than it used to be to see such open hostility to same-sex couples.  Even politicians who think their constituents want them to be anti-gay are more careful these days, and couch their rhetoric in fashionable tolerance-manque.  But Indiana and the Vatican remind us what steel-toed intolerance — the kind that ran rampant in this country for most of the last century — looks like.

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Authoritah!

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MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell could maybe, as Jon Stewart says, “Take it down a notch for America,” but he makes a sound enough point; anyone who refers to America’s “Catholic vote” is not saying anything coherent.

But I think O’Donnell misses the most important comparative statistic.  He overemotes the fact that 56% of American Catholics don’t believe same gender sexual relations are a sin, which is ten points higher than the general population.

True enough.  But far more important is the fact that this number is a full 56% higher than the figure for Catholic leadership on that supposedly doctrinal issue.

This is unsurprising to anyone who knows or loves an American Catholic.  But it’s importance goes much further than religion.  It’s not out of the question that the Catholic hierarchy is viewed favorably — at least on sexual morality — by about the same percentage of American Catholics as Muammar Gaddafi is, on any issue, by the Libyan people.

The difference, of course, is that Gaddafi has arms and the Vatican doesn’t — any more, at least.  But the larger point remains.  When leaders get too far out of touch with the people they’re supposed to lead, they lose their credibility.  The Vatican has credibility on many other, real moral issues, but its positions on sexuality have become bizarre through neglect or just stubbornness.  Catholics can freely ignore the Vatican since it has no real enforcement authority.  They can go to church (or not) for the good things the church stands for, and shake their heads at the more ludicrous positions.

With luck, we’ll be able to help a coalition deprive Gaddafi of his enforcement authority, and help the Libyan people enact the revolution of disregard for incompetence and malfeasance that this country’s Catholics have successfully fought and so happily won.

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Total Recall

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As the American Family Association continues in its quest to become the most annoying of the conservative gadfly organizations, they couldn’t have come up with a better pick for patron saint than Newt Gingrich.  Last year, Gingrich provided them with $350,000, more than a third of their funding to “defend traditional marriage” in Iowa by recalling judges whose marriage ruling they disagreed with.

The cheap shots at Gingrich’s own troubled marital traditions are too easy and numerous, and frankly they distract from a more important criticism.  To court the right wing, Gingrich has to feign for them the same obsession with same-sex marriage that blinds them to issues of real importance.  I don’t think Gingrich is, in fact, so blinded, but his generosity certainly won their admiration, and bought them success.  Iowa’s voters did throw out the three targeted Iowa Supreme Court justices, and they’re gunning for more.

This offense is a dangerous kind of defense – of marriage or anything else.  The justices were not accused of misconduct, of incompetence, of corruption, or any kind of scandal, defect or misbehavior.  They were accused, and found guilty, of a result.

Far more than that, they were found guilty of only a single result.  No other cases in their long careers, no positions they had taken, no opinions they had joined, but that one, were at issue.

This is politics in full fury, the very thing the founders wanted to protect the third branch of government from.  Every day, judges across the country deal with an infinite number of problems, and do their best to solve conflicts that seem to have no other solution.  Appellate courts, in particular, get only the most developed of these cases, and the time to consider them fully.  Multiplicity is what makes reviewing courts work: multiplicity of judges, multiplicity of cases, multiplicity of parties.

A recall election like this is not without precedent, but there are damn few others.  That’s because of their inherent nihilism.  This is political vindictiveness of a special kind, a frenzy of unconcern.  No possible opinion on this one matter, not even a unanimous one, could be persuasive or correct if it comes to the disfavored conclusion.

This isn’t, perhaps, a definition of bias or prejudice, but it’s awfully close.  It cannot exist without a necessary prior assumption that any justice joining the opinion is somehow acting in bad faith.  There is only one correct answer here, and judges had better get it right.

That undermines the entire role of the judiciary as an institution.  We need our courts to resolve conflicts, both personal and political.  Few cases have split the nation like Bush v. Gore, but after all the political poison was aired, we accepted the result.  That respect for the institution, however grudging, is one of the things that holds this nation together.

Gingrich is aiding and abetting the AFA, and many others, in a rancid enterprise.  Maybe right now, the only judges who need to worry are those who think the constitution’s specific enumeration of equality applies to same-sex couples.  But it’s short-term victories like that that can lead to the next single-issue recall, and the one after that.  Perhaps that sort of judiciary, driven by the politics of the moment, is the one a President Gingrich would want.  But it’s nothing like the judiciary the constitution gave us, or the one this country needs.

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A Mea Culpa on DADT

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The 111th Congress, 2009-11, was a landmark triumph for the rights of lesbians and gay men. The passage of legislation permitting the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a watershed. It heralded the end of the counterproductive and cruel exclusion of gay Americans who want to serve their country in the military. This was a personal relief for the thousands of gay men and lesbians now serving, for many of those who have served but were discharged because of sexual orientation and may now re-enlist, and for the many more who will serve in years to come. Beyond that, it was important to have the country — by legislation, no less — bring homosexuals into the single most conservative institution we have, the one closest to the heart of citizenship, the one charged with the defense of our freedoms and values. The repeal knee-capped common arguments against the equal rights of gay men and lesbians in many domains, and will continue to do so as the hysterical fears it inspired are disproved in the years to come.

I confess to having been one of those who, in the fall election of 2008 and continuing until the moment of repeal last December, was deeply skeptical about the commitment of Democrats to repealing DADT and dubious about President Obama’s dedication to the effort. And while I could cavil about the sequence of events that led to the repeal vote, could note bitterly that President Clinton was primarily to blame (by incompetence, at the very least) for the codification of the ban, and heap praise on the brave handful of Republicans who voted for repeal, there is no question in my mind that it happened because of the Democrats, and specifically because of the gay Democrats and their supporters who worked for decades to change minds in their party. None of this makes any less important the work that gay Republicans are doing in the GOP. But we must give credit where it is due.

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Are NPR and Maggie Gallagher Missing the Boat?

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Andrew Sullivan is excerpting a fascinating debate he titles, “Embracing the Bias,” about the dilemma NPR faces over its surprising to no one tilt toward the left.  One of the key bones of contention is whether NPR should just say outright, yes, we are sort of leftish, but unlike Fox News, we’ll own up to our bias and honestly try to be fair rather than just asserting it.

As much as I’d like to endorse that kind of full disclosure, it presupposes, as the lawyers say, a fact not in evidence.  Lesbians and gay men should be more attuned than most to the fact that in a whole lot of cases, people don’t recognize their own bias.  On the contrary, they can understand what others view as bias as some sort of natural order.

When Maggie Gallagher takes umbrage at being called a bigot or worse, she is sincerely expressing her view that the world she grew up in and understands is entirely neutral and correct.  Her incredulity comes from the notion that such a uniform history of acknowledging heterosexual marriage holds no bias against homosexual couples.

And, speaking historically, she is not wrong. I don’t think the long, confounding and ongoing development of marriage came out of a bias against same-sex couples, it just came out of an ignorance of their existence.  It took all of that history, culminating late in the 20th Century, for lesbians and gay men to fully assert their public presence, much less their need for the same legal recognition of their relationships that heterosexuals take for granted.

But just because there was no intent to discriminate against same-sex couples in, say, the 16th Century doesn’t mean that the effect of that unawareness isn’t discriminatory today.  Gallagher has set herself up as the ambassador of that obliviousness.  If history isn’t biased, how could she and her followers be?  What is wrong with people?

What Gallagher can’t see (or won’t acknowledge) is what a gathering majority can no longer blind itself to.  Lesbians and gay men do exist, do fall in love, do form relationships, do raise children.  The law’s neglect of them is now clear to anyone who wants to see it.

But those who keep their blinkers on do, in fact, begin to look biased, look like they really don’t want to see something that is right in front of their eyes.  Perhaps that isn’t really bigotry or hate, but it looks so willful, so harsh, so mean.

Maybe it is always hard for us to recognize our own biases, too easy to mistake them for justice when, in fact, their injustice is only still coming into view.  It would be so nice if Gallagher and NPR and everyone could stand back from their deeply held beliefs and examine them fully.  But history proves that’s hard.

On a lot of subjects, now, we don’t know what bias is.  How can we expect people to admit something we don’t have agreement on the boundaries of?  If NPR doesn’t see their bias as bias, they can do no more about it than Gallagher can, and will be missing many of the same cultural shifts that are happening right under their nose.

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Party Tricks

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The Washington Blade reports:

Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) maintained this week that pro-LGBT legislation could see progress in the Democratic-controlled Senate during the 112th Congress as prospects of movement are unlikely in the Republican-controlled House.

Well, yes. So, why weren’t these measures brought forward during the 111th Congress, when Democrats enjoyed large majorities in the House and Senate (with a filibuster-proof party majority in the latter for a year and a half, lost only with the election of moderate Republican Scott Brown)? It’s only now, when these bills are certain to die in the GOP House that the Democrats are making them an issue with an eye on rousing LGBT donors and support for 2012.

It’s the same old, same old. As I’ve previously argued, even repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) was shoved off to the last possible moment last year, and then initially brought to the floor by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid in a way that ensured maximum GOP opposition (i.e., with no debate allowed on amendments to the military appropriations bill). It was only when left-wing bloggers and activists began to turn on the Democrats over these shenanigans that a clean DADT repeal bill was brought to the floor and then passed with the support of six GOP Senators (including Scott Brown).

Anyone remember Bill Clinton’s first two years, with majorities in both Houses?

Gay voters are like Charlie Brown and congressional Democrats are Lucy, jerking the football away so that Charlie Brown trips and falls as he runs up and is just about to kick it. Again, and again, and again.

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