IGF CultureWatch

The National Organization for Marriage has every right to get itself into a tizzy over the juvenile and vulgar ad from a group calling itself FCKH8.  But I’ll tell NOM the same thing I’ll tell FCKH8:  You’re not ever going to stop people from using vile and offensive language — at least not in a country with a first amendment.  So stop it.

It is no pleasant thing for me to have to endure NOM’s relentless obliviousness, just as I’m sure it’s tough for them to have to suffer being called haters by enthusiastic twentysomethings, and now, even some of their kids.  But that’s part of living in a country that established from the start the invaluable notion that the individual freedom to speak one’s mind is one of the most important fundamentals of a society where the government derives from the consent of the governed.  People are a varied and messy lot, and while we can be managed a bit, we can’t be controlled.  There will always be people of strong feeling who feel no obligation to manners and social restraint.

Dealing with other people’s bad habits is one of the things that demonstrates true civility.  And while ceaseless complaining isn’t exactly uncivil, it’s certainly unseemly.  That’s what this whole skirmish boils down to, unseemly whining by NOM and FCKH8.  Once you get past the hyperobvious fund-raising potential for both groups in complaining about the other’s rhetoric, you really aren’t left with very much of substance.  FCKH8 undermines a sound theme of tolerance with its brash and rude intolerance.  NOM, I’m afraid to say, has lost any claim to respectability, but it’s probably best to leave them alone in their ever-shrinking world.

We’re near Christmas, and I’d much rather focus on real things and honorable emotions.  To all men and women of good will, have a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!

Conservative “don’t ask” supporter Bill Kristol writing in the Weekly Standard:

President Obama said last week, speaking “to all Americans”: “Your country needs you, your country wants you, and we will be honored to welcome you into the ranks of the finest military the world has ever known.” Our fine servicemen and women won’t quit, they won’t whine, they won’t fret, and they won’t cause a scene. Conservatives owe it to them to conduct ourselves with the same composure and dignity.

Conservative “don’t ask” opponent Max Boot writing in Commentary:

Perhaps the most lasting impact of this policy change will be the return of ROTC to Ivy League campuses. Already Harvard and Yale are talking about reinstating their ROTC programs. This, too, will not make much of a change in either the Ivy League or the military, but it is a small, welcome step toward bridging the chasm that separates the armed forces from society’s elites.

Next up: the same lack of leadership on gay marriage? At least until the formidable team of Sen. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. Collins (R-Maine) indicate to the Democratic leadership that it’s ok to support us.

David Brock, the head of the left-progressive and George Soros funded Media Matters group, which basically attacks Fox News 24/7—often disingenuously (e.g., for reporting that there actually are two sides to the global warming debate)—has announced the formation of a tangent effort called Equality Matters. The new group will be led by Richard Socarides, who served as Bill Clinton’s special assistant on gay issues. From Brock’s announcement:

Despite huge progress in gay rights in recent years, exemplified by the historic vote this weekend finally striking down the ban on gay men and women from serving in the military, we are now living through a period of ferocious fundamentalism in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Traditional conservatives and the Tea Party movement are united only in their contempt for equal rights for all Americans and a desire to return America to a 19th century idyll. Equality Matters will not allow these latter-day ‘clerics’ to gain serious recognition by the media nor influence the policies that affect the lives of every American. . . .

The purpose here is to demonize fiscally conservative Tea Party supporters as the equivalent of the Klan. The aim is to keep gay votes firmly tied to the party of gargantuan government spending and politically controlled redistribution (the Soros/Media Matters agenda). The result will be to dissuade limited government conservatives and Republicans who are rightly revulsed by Brock from positively viewing the fight for gay equality.

It’s a shame that someone as intelligent albeit partisan as Richard Socarides will be leading such a counter-productive effort.

More. “Another Steve” responds to comments defending Brock with the following:

the Tea Party agenda is to reduce government spending and support limited government. No Tea Party groups are promoting social issues–it’s not what they are about. Yes, individual Tea Party people might be socially conservative (not all; there are many, many liberterians, like me, who attend Tea Party events), but it is not what the movement is about.

So if you attack “the Tea Party movement,” as Brock does, you are attacking limited goverment conservatives, like me. You are saying that I am a bigot and racist because I oppose what’s happened to the size and cost of government. It’s the worst sort of smear.

Yes, it is. And it’s by an organization that purports to fight misinformation and stereotypes.

There’s no shortage of commentary and analysis about the repeal of DADT, so I’ll just add a brief thought.

A number of people showed amazing, active leadership to get this done.  Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Murphy in the House, Dan Choi and all the folks at Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen; even Lady Gaga deserves a tip of the hat.

But I want to say a word for a different kind of leadership, the kind that takes place out of the limelight.  Barack Obama, in particular, gave us several measured and tailored statements of support, none of them exhibiting the kind of inspiring rhetoric that will live on in the history of political oratory.  He has taken no end of criticism for failing to live up to his self-description as our “fierce advocate.”

But as the Rolling Stones observed, you may not always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.  What we should have learned from Bill Clinton’s spectacular failure on this issue is that a large component of vitriolic unfairness is built into it, and can and will be exploited easily enough.  When Clinton promised he would resolve the problem of gays in the military with the stroke of a pen, he gave Sam Nunn an engraved invitation to visit those infamous submarine bunks, and paved the way for Republicans to invoke the most fearsome set of showers since World War II.

This is the kind of political problem that can best be solved more indirectly.   There was no doubt about the public support for repeal, and while there was concern about how the troops would view it, that turned out to be based on the same wishful thinking by the right as everything else in the area of gay equality.  But even in the face of genuine popular support, the equally genuine, gut-level ugliness of the minority also has to be negotiated.

That is Obama’s real triumph, and he proved to be quite right about how you approach the problem.  Rather than offer up the moral leadership of the presidency as a target, and risk yet another failure, he allowed the focus of the animosity to diffuse, letting the political poison seep out in less toxic doses.

That’s not the kind of celebrity leadership that makes a president a short-term hero to a constituency group, and leaves nothing but moral victories in its wake – if a president is lucky enough to get even one of those.  It’s a brand of political leadership that is antithetical to our desire for immediate gratification, but is better for our long-term health.  Andrew Sullivan has called this Obama’s Long Game, and that gets it exactly right.

Harry Reid was complicit in this strategy to get us what we needed, not merely what we wanted.  Reid doesn’t have the oratorical gifts Obama has, but he doesn’t need them.  There are times when I wish Reid could give a speech with the conviction that Newt Gingrich had.  But Reid’s low blood-pressure style is what allows him to get the results that Gingrich could only promise in his failed House leadership.

There are a lot of different styles of politics, and despite what the media and the spokespeople would like us to believe, there is an enormous amount of politics that takes place quietly, thoughtfully and without fanfare, until the fanfare is actually warranted.  That is how the embarrassment of DADT was ultimately removed from the law.

May its slander rest in peace.

From the Washington Post: “A Senate vote Saturday cleared the way for final passage of a bill to end the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy…. Fifty-seven members of the Senate Democratic caucus and six Republicans—Sens. Scott Brown (Mass.), Susan Collins (Maine), Mark Kirk (Ill.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and George Voinovich (Ohio) —voted yes” on the procedural vote (that is, the vote to have a vote).

In the final 65-to-31 vote taken Saturday afternoon, two additional GOP senators supported repeal: Richard Burr (N.C.) and John Ensign (Nev.).

If the military report had been requested earlier and finished before the final month of the 111th Congress, and if the Democratic leadership had made it a priority, the repeal could have happened sooner. GOP senators Collins, Snowe and Brown, in particular, didn’t just become socially moderate.

But with the incoming GOP-controlled House, the path is blocked in terms of further legislative advances. It will be up to the courts to modify the Defense of Marriage Act’s ban on federal recognition of state-authorized same-sex unions. And the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which during the two years of a Democrat-controlled Congress never made it out of committee, is dead. (In 2007, during the 110th Congress, the House had passed a version of ENDA covering sexual orientation but not gender identity.)

More. The change won’t take effect right away. After being signed into law, the president and his top military advisers must certify that lifting the ban won’t hurt troops’ fighting ability. After that occurs, there’s a 60-day waiting period.

Furthermore. It’s worth noting that the Dream Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for children brought into this country at a young age by their parents, was set up to fail, just as “don’t ask” repeal was set up to fail until this week. The Senate Democratic leadership allowed no committee hearings on the controversial measure, and then in the final weeks of the congress brought it to the floor with truncated debate and no process for voting on amendments. It failed to achieve cloture, letting Democrats continue to paint the GOP as the “enemies” of Hispanics.

So, after two years of inaction and shenanigans over “don’t ask” repeal, tying it to a complicated Defense Authorization measure and allowing no debate or amendments, why did Harry Reid at long last move forward a separate measure that, surprise, garnered eight Republican votes? I think many (not all) activists and many (not all) left-progressive bloggers finally demanded an end to the gaming and threatened to blame Democrats as well as Republicans for failure (see, for example, Richard Grenell at the Huffington Post, as previously referenced). The threat to withhold dollars and support pushed the Democrats to give in and allow “don’t ask” repeal to be legitimately presented and passed. Unfortunately, Hispanic activists let the party have its way in order to keep the Hispanic vote tied to the Democratic party through 2012.

Still more. From Slate:

While undoubtedly a step forward, repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t suddenly establish a legal principle that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and also doesn’t allow transgendered individuals to serve in the military. [emphasis in original]

In retrospect, it’s surprising that LGBT activists didn’t sabotage DADT repeal by demanding transgender inclusion.

With a vote now schedule for Saturday, and GOP Senators Brown, Collins, Snowe and Murkowski on board, I’m betting this will, finally, happen. But this is troubling, from The Politico:

Publicly, President Barack Obama has reaffirmed his support for repealing the policy this year. But the White House is quietly pushing far more aggressively for the new START treaty, signaling it may be open to punting the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal until after the new year if it can get enough GOP votes on the treaty for ratification, according to several senators and Democratic aides.

And this:

Whether the Democrats’ approach will work is an open question. While gay rights groups do blame the GOP, which has promised to block all legislation until the government is funded and Bush-era tax cuts are extended, they have been urging Senate Democratic leadership to make the measure a higher priority and not wait until the end-of-the-session logjam to move it forward.

“We’re running out of time to get a lot of things done around here,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a proponent of the repeal. “I hope we can get a lot of things done, including that one.”

And this:

“I have a lot of people in Nebraska who are supportive of repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ but they don’t hold against you what you can’t do,” said Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat up for reelection in 2012.

And this:

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, contends the GOP just wants an opportunity to debate and offer amendments to important bills like the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the DREAM Act and the repeal bill. . . .

“They may be just trying to show their base that, yeah, they really tried hard,” he added, “and the mean ol’ Republicans stopped them from getting it done.”

(Reminder: we welcome comments from all perspectives, but those with personal insults or obscenities will be deleted. That’s the policy.)

Let me put it this way.  After today’s 250-175 vote in the House to repeal DADT (the second time the House has passed repeal this session), and Olympia Snowe’s newly announced support for repeal in the Senate, it would be a failure of epic proportions if the bill does not get approval from the Senate and make its belated but no less welcome appearance on Obama’s desk.

We are dealing with politics here, and anything is possible.  But right now, the naysayers are the ones who have the most to worry about.

From Richard Grenell at the Huffington Post, “Gay Leaders Need a Tea Party Style Shakeup—111th Congress a Total Failure“:

The entrenched gay leaders in Washington, DC, have spent the last two years blaming Republicans for the fact that they themselves have struck out on Capitol Hill and will end the 111th Congress with nothing to show for their multimillion-dollar fundraising efforts. If this were a public company, the Board or the shareholders would have run these leaders out of town a long time ago.

Despite campaigning for decades to put Democrats in control of all of Washington, their dream ticket of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama failed to deliver what the gay leaders themselves promised the movement. . . . [Gay leaders in Washington] have turned their comfortable and high-paying perches into a safe haven free from the consequences of job performance evaluations.

Read the whole thing.

More. Democratic party control of the White House and both chambers of Congress (with substantial majorities) was a once-in-a-generation occurrence. We will not see it again for a long, long time. But a permanent campaign to restore it will keep HRC’s fundraising coffers full for the next decade.

An important but unacknowledged figure in gay rights just passed from the scene.  In 1976, Adele Starr founded the LA chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.  Five years later, she became PFLAG’s first national president.  Karen Ocamb has a nice overview of Adele’s public life, summed up in this wonderful quote:  “We did it out of love and anger and a sense of injustice, and because we had to tell the world the truth about our children.”

Lesbians and gay men weren’t the only ones who needed to learn to come out of the closet; so did our parents and families, who were often even more embarrassed about homosexuality than we were.  But honesty and unconditional parental love were part of Adele’s nature, and she had an unparalleled ability to talk to other parents who felt their worlds had been turned upside-down.

It is ultimately arithmetic that secures her place in our history books.  We are not just a minority, we are an extremely small minority, no matter how you slice and dice the numbers.  It took us generations to begin to assert our own self-respect, but that is not nearly enough to change the history of misunderstanding that nearly all cultures have built up around homosexuality.  We also needed the support of our families and friends.

That was the bulk of the task we faced back in the post-Stonewall 70s, and Adele Starr stepped up to the plate, not only for her son, Phillip, but for all of us.  At LA’s gay rights parades of the time, PFLAG was always greeted with the biggest and most heartfelt cheers.  Their presence with us was simply joyous.  The gay rights history books will not be complete without a full accounting of PFLAG.

I know how inspiring Adele was to me in LA as we were working on the early ordinance on domestic partnership in the mid-80s, but I am sure there were people like here in cities across the nation.  Parents like her were as much the pioneers in their world as we were in ours, and maybe a little bit more so.  We had our own mountains of prejudice to fight against, but try to imagine what it must take for a parent to reject their own child.  That was what PFLAG was fighting.

Adele Starr isn’t with us any more, but her work isn’t anywhere near done.  There are still parents who find their own sons and daughters repugnant because of the child’s sexual orientation.  Adele and PFLAG showed by example that love can dominate that unnatural and destructive set of feelings.  We shouldn’t, for a second, forget how important that is to us.

Just to follow up on David Link’s excellent comments: barring last-ditch efforts by Sen. Joe Lieberman and a few others to secure a separate repeal vote, the question will be whether President Obama will appeal a future Ninth Circuit ruling that very well could uphold the district court’s decision that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unconstitutional. The administration, of course, appealed the district court ruling in favor of the Log Cabin Republicans well-argued suit. Stay tuned.