IGF CultureWatch

Timothy Kincaid provides a good rundown of the latest numbers from the Pew Research Center on support for gay marriage.  42% support, 48% oppose.

As always, the story isn’t in the numbers, themselves, but the trend.  The chart he provides shows support flipping around, but generally moving upward, even at the lower levels of support among Republicans. Nate Silver’s now-infamous graph of the polling on this question since 1988 illustrates the bigger picture.  As Kincaid points out, Pew shows that, for the first time in their polling, opposition to same-sex marriage falls below a majority.

As we know from DADT, even a huge popular majority won’t necessarily result in political victories on an issue where the discussion is still so poisoned by fear and misunderstanding.  That is how prejudice short-circuits politics.

But what I can’t help noticing in the Pew numbers, and what Kincaid is so smart to  have pointed out, is that even among the groups whose fear and loathing of us taps directly into the mother lode of prejudice, there are green shoots of actual, bona fide support.  And not just for a compromise measure like civil unions, but full-on marriage equality.  It’s easy to vilify white evangelicals or “Southerners” or the elderly as bigoted and stubborn.  But within all of those groups, we still have some very real, if invisible, support.  And that support is up.

The growth of small numbers is easy to ignore.  But it’s in those groups where we most need the support to grow.  Those are seeds, people.  Let’s cultivate them.

From the AP:

[New Jersey Gov. Chris] Christie is among those who argue that Republicans can succeed when they focus on fiscal conservatism, often at the expense of focusing on key social issues, whereas former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee energize the party’s religious and socially conservative base. Palin and Huckabee have been in Iowa recently, as has Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenti, who courts that same base.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, of course, is another fiscal conservative who famously called for “a truce on social issues” (read: abortion and gay bashing). Yes, he added, “until the economic issues are resolved,” but a GOP president elected without making promises to the religious right, and in fact elected by downplaying social issues, won’t be indebted to them. That’s the fight, and it’s for the soul of the New GOP.

Jim DeMint, old school gay-baiter and never going to change. But he’s the past, not the future.

More. Because this is my post and it generated lots of bitingly negative comments, I’m going to highlight a response defending me by commenter avee:

It strikes me there is a certain purism among critics of Miller’s post. Miller makes the point (perhaps too broadly, but it’s a blog post, not a white paper) that a number of leading Republican presidential contenders are asking for a tone-down on social issues, and that this is significant. His critics blast him because these same leading GOP contenders are still not as good as liberal Democrats on gay issues, and therefore nothing has changed and we should all only support liberal Democrats.

Change is incremental, and failing to encourage small steps that can lead to bigger steps is a losers game — it’s the game of Democratic party fundraisers in LGBT-activist clothes. For my part, I’m tired of reading gay media articles that state (1) Gays are in big trouble if (or, more accurately, when) Republicans make big gains in November, and (2) offering no strategy other than going down with the Democratic ship.

Of course the critics weren’t persuaded, but neither do they have a convincing response to point (2) above.

Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project is as fine a public service as anyone has put together for gay and lesbian youth — and no government needed.

But am I the only non-youth who spends time watching the videos when I need to cheer up?  I spend more hours than a reasonable adult should reading the misinformation, innuendos, distractions, forgeries, slanders, deceptions and flat out lies that are cast into the universe of discourse about us, and I’ve found a quick visit to the YouTube channel is an excellent tonic.

Thanks, not only to Savage, but to everyone who’s contributing these wonderful little truths.

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz blogs, Krauthammer Misreads History:

Charles Krauthammer calls same-sex marriage “the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history.” Really? . . . I would suggest that the truly radical redefinition of marriage is the revolution over the past generation in the idea that people should marry before they cohabit or have children. . . .But like socially conservative politicians, Krauthammer is not about to confront his friends, colleagues, and fans by denouncing that radical redefinition of marriage.

I just wanted to mark the tragic death of 18-year-old Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after his roommate, Dharun Rav, helped by fellow freshman Molly Wei, reportedly set up cameras in Celmenti’s dorm room to secretly transmit over the Internet a streaming video of Clementi engaged in sex with a male student, as the New York Post reports. The moral corruption of Clementi’s tormentors speaks for itself.

More. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie calls the freshman’s death an “unspeakable tragedy” and says he can’t imagine how the two students accused of secretly filming Clementi can sleep at night.

In a related way, this story of a state of Michigan assistant attorney general using his blog to vilify and harass a gay University of Michigan student leader is another portrait of moral corruption.

Evil is real in this world. While government has a role in protecting citizens from violence, neither of these cases involved physical attacks. It is society—families and civilized communities—that have to teach young people that wanton cruelty is not “funny” and cool, a message they’re not getting from their adult-excluded tribal social networks. And it’s society—and, ultimately, the electorate—that has to say that bigotry and fanaticism by government officials is beyond the pale and won’t be tolerated.

More. For those following the Michigan story, updates here and here.

The battle for the soul of the Republican party being waged between social vs. libertarian conservatives will likely be the central gay rights battleground for the next few years, as this Washington Post story makes clear. A pity so many partisan progressives seem to want to declare that battle lost from the get go.

More. The Advocate asks: “Two competing fund-raisers were held Wednesday night in Manhattan, one chock-full of conservatives and another laden with liberals. But which one did more to advance LGBT equality?”

Furthermore. Hard to disagree with this viewpoint, also from the Washington Post:

In the ’90s, the gay rights movement got in bed with the Democrats financially, according to [Paul] Yandura, who worked on LGBT issues for the Clinton White House, and the results have been scant ever since.

“You end up worrying more about what stature you have in the administration and in Democratic leadership and within the social world of Washington than you do about wanting to get equal under the law,” says Yandura, who often hosts out-of-town GetEQUAL organizers at his home in Columbia Heights. “Once you’re at a high-level meeting, it’s them telling you what’ll happen, and if you fight that, you’ll never come to another one.”

With his customary elan and good humor, John Corvino dissects the peculiar logic of a recent National Review cover editorial insisting that marriage is “for” one thing and one thing only, which is, um, “mating,” which implies that paraplegics, like gays, can’t possibly marry, in any meaningful sense of the term, so the law shouldn’t let them.

Or something like that. No, it didn’t make sense to me, either.

I believe that same-sex marriage will prevail. The main reason is not that younger people are more friendly to the idea, though that’s certainly important. Demography isn’t necessarily destiny. Nor is the reason that cultural liberalism is on the march. After all, the younger demographic is turning against abortion, where the harm done to the third party is obvious.

The real reason is that, to a growing number of people who take a common-sense view of marriage (e.g., marriage is a good thing whether you can have kids or not) and who are not burdened with superstitious ideas about homosexuality, the arguments against gay marriage just don’t make sense. NR’s editorial is a case in point.

I’m not a big “L” Libertarian Party guy, but I think LP Chairman Mark Hinkle put it very well in his outreach message to disenchanted gay voters:

“Exit polls indicate that Democrats get over 70% of LGBT votes in federal elections. Those voters must really love the Democrats’ rhetoric, because they certainly aren’t seeing any action.

“President Obama and the Democrats had almost a year of complete control of the federal government: the Presidency, the House, and a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate. They could have repealed ‘don’t ask don’t tell.’ They could have gotten rid of the Defense of Marriage Act. But they didn’t do either of those things.”

Would a Republican-controlled Congress have “done any of those things”? Not on your life. But what if the Democratic leadership had been willing to negotiate support for any of these initiatives with GOP moderates in exchange for things they would want (tort reform, for instance). But there was no will to go there.

From AP: “‘The whole thing is a political train wreck,’ said Richard Socarides, a White House adviser on gay rights during the Clinton administration.” Hard to disagree. At one time, the bill to overturn “don’t ask, don’t tell” had several Republican sponsors. But when push came to shove, we didn’t even keep the two Maine moderates, Collins and Snowe (here’s the cloture vote). Talk about pulling a defeat out of the jaws of victory.

McCain disgraced himself. But Socarides is right to fault the Democrats’ strategy. And whose bright idea was it to highlight Lady Gaga at a pro-repeal rally the day before the vote? It’s the kind of “let’s just speak to each other and our allies on the left” foolishness that shows a disdain for even bothering to try to reach out to the opposition.

In retrospect, waiting for the military report, due by the end of the year, would have taken away a crutch some socially moderate Republicans used to vote down repeal. Holding a lame-duck vote after the election might also have been a better way to go. But what’s done is done, and the struggle will have to carry on in the next Congress, with a much larger number of Republicans onboard (with some chance of another vote this year, after the military report is released). Either way, the Democrats-only strategy will be an even bigger failure if that’s all we’ve got.

More. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin says Harry Reid set up the vote to fail. He blogs:

The sixty votes needed to break the filibuster had already been lined up, but that was before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to limit debates and votes on amendments. That led to a collapse in support in ending the filibuster. Servicemembers United, which has been campaigning for DADT’s repeal, saw through Reid’s political posturing.

There are going to be a lot of political postmortems on this one.

Furthermore. Shikha Dalmia, a senior analyst at the libertarian Reason Foundation, blogs ObamaCare’s First Major Casualties: Gays and Aliens.