IGF CultureWatch

Jonathan Rauch has written two very insightful articles for the National Journal about the Tea Party; one focusing on its leaderless anti-organization, and one examining its effects on national politics and particularly the Republican Party.

In looking for precedents to the leaderless group, Jon misses what I think is one of the most relevant, and obvious examples: ACT-UP.  Formed formlessly well before the internet, ACT-UP wasn’t an organization, it was an impulse, a reaction against a deadly status quo that wasn’t being reacted to by anyone else.  Like the Tea Parties, its fury came from what everyone else was just taking for granted.  Its variant affiliates across the country all had the same animating spirit, but acted up in their own unique ways.  No one led ACT-UP.

Also like the Tea Parties, ACT-UP had more than its share of members addicted to a theatrical style that crossed over into parody and sometimes developed into actions that were fully offensive.  The 1989 invasion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during mass still stands as one of its signature delinquencies.

But in the end, ACT-UP was successful beyond anyone’s imagination in actually changing federal bureaucracies for the better, and that will remain its legacy – one the Tea Party should take very seriously.  Major protests at both the FDA and the NIH, along with sustained follow-up work, led to changes in focus on HIV, and long-term advances in compassionate use of experimental drugs, as well as other institutional innovations that made the bureaucracies more humane and actually helpful.  Government changed because of ACT-UP.

The Tea Parties have a more developed infrastructure, but they also have a bigger and more diffuse target – fiscal sanity in a political environment that can’t envision ever spending less.  That’s an ambitious undertaking

But the Tea Parties have one other big difference from ACT-UP: a hungry pack of national politicians eager to speak for them.  That would be an advantage for any traditional organization, but as Jon notes, the internal contradictions of the Republican party, first synthesized by the sheer magic of Ronald Reagan, and held together ever since by duct tape and Krazy Glue are splitting back into their component and inconsistent parts: the religious right and the small government faction.

You can see the problem as the American Family Association’s increasingly deranged Bryan Fischer tries to co-opt the Tea Party Express’s Amy Kremer.  She is as candid as one can imagine when she tells him that she has to disappoint him.  If the Tea Party were to include the religious right’s social issues, “this movement is going to fall apart.”

That’s sticking to your guns, but it’s no small fact that she was, at the time, attending the Values Voters Summit.  Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally at the Lincoln Memorial was a religious revival under a Tea Party tent.  Despite Kremer’s protestations, she, no less than any current Republican leader, will have to deal with what Karl Rove hath wrought.

I wish the Tea Party well, if they’re really serious about smaller government.  I hope they can do better in dealing with the problems of politicized religion than the GOP has.  But it’s a heavy lift.

Keep your eyes on the prize, Tea Partiers.  Silence = Debt.

This video is making the rounds, and deservedly so.  It’s a pretty amusing parody of the “No homo” tick hip-hop invented to defend itself against The Gay.

But it’s got more going for it than that.  What makes it both funny and pointed is that it shows how closeted gay men are as irritating to heterosexuals as they are to homosexuals.  We all have a direct interest in making sure that people don’t delude themselves about their own sexual orientation.  Straight is cool, gay is cool, bi is cool (if confusing); but for God’s sake, man, figure yourself out.

And the video is especially timely because its humor comes from the same tortured logic that gave us Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  The delusion of mostly older heterosexuals, and mostly men, is that if only gay men could “keep quiet about it” everything would be OK.

“No homo” is risible in the hip-hop world because it is such a lame attempt to acknowledge that some relationships and interests of heterosexual men are non-sexual but can look a little iffy.  That “if” only matters when there is a stigma about being gay, a stigma that has historically been able to drive homosexuality into the netherworld of the closet.  As that stigma recedes (and it is), the feints and jabs at its fading shadow look more pathetic – and sillier.

DADT is not just some military policy based on that stigma, it is a piece of social engineering designed to hold up the eroding barricades of prejudice in that small part of the world where prejudice can actually be enforced every day.  But in the end it is just another limp cry of “no homo,” this time in a uniform.

We can laugh about that in the civilian world.  But in the military, DADT has real consequences, both for national security and for the lives of the men and women whom the law requires to lie, every day, every hour, every minute.  This not only undermines their lives, it makes the military look as duped and misfocused as the laughable character in this video.

There may still be vestiges of the stigma against homosexuals left among a number of younger military personnel.  We’ll see when the results of the military’s survey come out (and hopefully we’ll be able to discount for the biased structure of the questions; the survey looks like it was intended to goad the most anti-gay answers out of the respondents).  But at its worst, that survey would only show us that a lot of military folks believe some things most of the rest of us just find pretty funny.

Unlike “No homo,” DADT is a dead serious matter.  They are similar only in this: No one benefits, and problems arise when we urge or demand that people deny the truth about themselves.

I can recommend, sort of, that you read National Review’s recent cover editorial, “What Marriage Is For” (online, “The Case for Marriage“). It’s a good example of how not to make a case.

The article is a mass of non sequiturs. It assumes that if marriage is “for” something—regulating procreative sex—then using it for anything else must be “against” marriage, which is like saying that if mouths are “for” eating, we mustn’t use them for talking or breathing. It claims (conjecturally) that marriage would not have arisen if not for the fact that men and women make babies, from which it concludes that society has no stake in childless marriages.

It argues that marriage, and a culture of marriage, are good and important, a point on which thoughtful gay-marriage advocates enthusiastically agree. But, of course, our whole argument is that including gays won’t stop marriage from doing the good things it now does, and will probably strengthen marriage and the marriage culture. Maybe we’re wrong. But the editorial doesn’t even bother to engage. It proceeds as if “gay marriage is bad” follows obviously from “straight marriage is good.”

Confronted with the obvious fact that no society has ever excluded sterile heterosexual couples from marriage, and that excluding them would be absurd, the editorial simply baffles. “An infertile couple can mate even if it cannot procreate.” It can mate? If “mate” means “have heterosexual intercourse,” the argument merely assumes the conclusion, and “procreativity” has gone right out the window. The article notes that the inclusion of sterile straight couples does not prove that marriage “has nothing to do with” procreation. Right! But it also does not prove that marriage has only to do with procreation. In fact, it quite strongly suggests the contrary.

I could go on. The public, thank goodness, is thinking more seriously and clearly about marriage than are the editors of National Review, which is why the public is coming around.

Florida Gov. Crist shifts support on gay rights issues. I sometimes wonder if any politician believes in anything other than their own will to power, and organizing effective electoral coalitions to that end.

More. Republican John Dennis isn’t going to beat Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, but his ad is fun.

To David Link’s eloquent plea to the U.S. Senate, below, I’ll add these thoughts. Regarding the district court ruling that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unconstitutional, I agree that if barring openly gay people from serving in the military (that is, requiring that they lie and hide, subject to discharge if the truth about their orientation should be learned) is based on societal hostility and the presumed (or even real) prejudice of heterosexual troops, then the policy is in violation of constitutional protections ensuring due process, free speech, and (more generally) equality under the law.

But that’s a different question from whether it would be a better political course to reverse “don’t ask, don’t tell” via congressional action rather than by court ruling. A legislative death to the policy would be less likely to provoke a backlash by those claiming judicial overreach. (Of course, if the judiciary did not, in fact, so often overreach to advance a political agenda not grounded in ensuring constitutional protections for all, then such claims would be less effective, but that’s another story).

So here’s hoping that Log Cabin’s to-date successful lawsuit may light a fire under a recalcitrant Senate.

The Usual Suspects have made the Usual Statements about the new court opinion concluding that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is unconstitutional.  The gays, including the Log Cabin Republicans (who brought the suit) think it’s great, and the Christianists think it’s a horrible act of judicial overreach.  The political universe remains in balance.

To that, I’ll add my own entirely predictable comment.  Whether you agree with the opinion or not, yet another judge has spent a lot of time listening to the evidence of one side, and doing her best to balance that against virtually no evidence on the other.  As in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the side supporting a law that openly discriminates against lesbians and gay men relies on a majority vote and pretty much nothing else to justify exclusion of an extremely small minority.

In the 85 page DADT opinion, there are 54 pages devoted to laying out the evidence that DADT is unconstitutional.  Weighing against that is a vote of Congress, ratified by a president’s signature.  No judge would or should take that lightly, but neither is a judge obligated to ignore what the law actually does.  And once again, a court has found that the hard evidence of unconstitutionality is more compelling than the vaporous political pretexts rationalizing a majority’s prejudices.

Did the court blithely dismiss concerns of national security?  Well, the administration defending the policy doesn’t think that’s at issue, and the court quotes the Commander in Chief to that effect.  So it’s unfair and incorrect for anyone to criticize the court for ignoring such concerns.

But in the end, everything returns to politics.  And congressional repeal of DADT is exactly what lesbians and gay men, and their allies, are vigorously pursuing.  But the problem of politics, the fundamental lack of rationality that drove passage of this miserable law in the first place, still plagues the Senate.  Harry Reid is not unaware of the evidence the court considered here, and found convincing.  He knows that 80% of Americans now say they support repeal of DADT.  I would not be surprised to learn that 80% of Senators think repeal is probably the right thing to do.

But the fear, the sheer panic that some people still feel about homosexuals, remains the decisive factor in any politician’s calculation.  It takes more than courage to get past that very irrational and very real fact; it takes independence.  Court after court after court is now exercising its constitutional independence, and after laying out all of the real evidence, the genuine facts, they are more consistently finding that our politics still is not ready to face up to its obligation to ensure the equality of homosexual citizens, which means the courts have to correct the deficiency.

The Senate now has to confront a double challenge to its political fears.  It has a public vote of confidence larger than any I’ve seen on any other issue in modern times, and it has a court decision saying that fairness is constitutionally required.  Is the Senate really willing to let the incoherent distress of about 20% of our population continue to form the basis of an unconstitutional, unpopular and unwise policy of naked discrimination?

According to a report posted by Jon Ward at The Daily Caller:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour issued a subtle rebuke Wednesday to conservative and Republican leaders who have focused on religious and social values issues this year, saying they were taking the GOP off message in an election year when voters care overwhelmingly about economic issues. . . . When asked about comments by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, that said the GOP should call a “truce on the so-called social issues” to focus on fiscal matters, Barbour said he supported the sentiment.

Elsewhere at the Caller, Alex Knepper posts that Montana’s Big Sky Tea Party gave the boot to one of its leaders over anti-gay statements. Writes Knepper:

The Tea Party has shown itself, time and time again, to be a force against those who would seek to focus on abortion and homosexuality. In fact, it has been an unmitigated blessing for those who were exhausted with the religious right’s veto stamp over Republican Party behavior. It has truly brought the party back to basic, bread-and-butter issues: size-of-government issues are unquestionably its key concern.

But read here about how “With the smug incomprehension in which it takes so much pride (can’t understand – won’t understand!), the BBC sets about the American Tea Party Movement as if it were a cross between the Klu Klux Klan and the German neo-fascist brigade.” The same could be said for MSNBC, or course.

A  footnote to David’s post on the hysterically anti-gay, and anti-limited-government, 2010 Texas Republican Party Platform:
 
“Joe My God” characterizes the platform as “tea-bagger influenced.” I’ve been doing a deep dive on the Tea Party, and this seems wrong, and another example of a knee-jerk anti-Tea Party reflex that will do gays no good at all.
 
When I talk to Tea Party people, they are firm on eschewing the social issues, which they regard—rightly, imho—as snares and delusions that Republican politicians have used to distract conservative voters from GOP complicity in ever-expanding government. Tea Partiers tell me they have wised up to the fact that politicians use the social issues to divide the country and empower themselves.
 
I talked to three leaders of the Dallas Tea Party, and they were very much on that page. Typical comment (from a Dallas TP leader): “We do not touch on social issues. We believe the biggest danger to our country is the fiscal irresponsibility that’s going on in Washington.”
 
And I was pointed to this interesting fact: Tea Partiers recently kicked out a Schlaflyite culture warrior as state party chair, replacing her with a fiscal-conservative lawyer who de-emphasized social issues. In fact, this was done at the very same state GOP convention that adopted the rabid anti-gay platform—which apparently was recycled from 2009.
 
So the real story seems to be, if anything, a swerve toward the libertarian branch of the Texas GOP (though this article sez it’s too early to be sure).

I don’t know much about Texas state politics, but the more I see of the Tea Party, the more convinced I am that it is good for gays, not because it is pro-gay (its members are mostly socially conservative) but because it is anti-anti-gay. To whatever extent they succeed in shredding the overdrawn “moral values” political credit card, more power to them.