IGF CultureWatch

Yesterday's House floor debate over repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was revealing - you might even call it telling. I could not count the republicans who alleged that the democrats and the administration were not listening to the troops, were ignoring what the troops had to say, were, in fact, disrespecting the troops who risk their lives for us every blessed day.

I try to be expansive in discounting political rhetoric before I'll call it a lie, and there's enough selective truth here to judge these statements as misleading rather than fully false. But a more complete and accurate view is that the democrats and the administration, after having listened to the troops and to the country at large, and after having reviewed the policies of every other nation that has dealt with this issue, nearly all of which have allowed lesbians and gay men to serve openly, have decided that those who support repeal of DADT have the better argument than those who support retaining it. That may feel oppressive and dismissive to those whose position has not prevailed, but it is hardly fair to say their point of view has not been heard. We've all been heard.

In fact, the listening won't stop under this bill. It requires yet another study, though this one will be unique in that it will solicit the views, not only of heterosexual troops who can speak openly about how they feel, but also provides a mechanism where homosexual troops who are serving in silence can express their own feelings. Imagine that: asking lesbians and gay men who are forced to be in the closet how they feel about a policy that forces them to be in the closet. On this subject, while the views of heterosexuals are important, it would seem that the views of gay soldiers ought to be given some weight. The fact that they can't reveal their opinions under the current policy - because it would get them kicked out - seems to me proof enough that the policy is perversely and calculatedly designed to be self-perpetuating.

I'm pretty sure this kind of polling of the troops about their policy preferences is original, but our political branches do have the authority to demand such things if they think that's wise. They didn't need to pass DADT in the first place, but they had the ability to do so, and did. If they think they might have made a mistake, and that polling the troops is worth doing to confirm the suspicion, then polling it is.

But I'm with Nathaniel Frank in suspecting that the new study will show what the decade of existing ones shows - that our military, like the militaries of so many other nations, won't suffer as an institution by allowing lesbians and gay men to be truthful, and that it might even benefit a bit by ridding itself of a policy that, unique among military policies, demands people lie.

We'll see, today, if John McCain can keep the lie alive.

After a long spell with no staff whatsoever, the national Log Cabin Republicans' board of directors has named R. Clarke Cooper as the group's new leader. Here's the announcement. And some background on Cooper's military service (well, he seems like a straight shooter!).

As I've often argued, to the dismay of the one-party-is-all-we-need crowd, we will never obtain full legal and social equality if the conservative party in the U.S. remains in adamant opposition. That's why making gay integration into American society a conservative goal is so important. Witness the strides toward legal equality in Britain, where several top Torie party leaders are openly gay.

In the U.S., as of now the left-leaning Democratic party has an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress and the presidency, and after two years we are not going to see even partial repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act that prohibits the federal government from recognizing gay unions sanctioned by individual states (no joint tax returns, no Social Security inheritance, no tax break on employer-provided spousal health care, etc. etc.). The reason: the Democrats have more or less gotten a free ride, so why spend political capital?

Let's hope with new leadership, LCR (along with newer rival GOProud), can help to move the ball forward.

Adding to the posts below by Dale and David, it doesn't appear to me that Obama deserves any credit for being forced to move ahead on repealing "don't ask, don't tell." The movers here are those Democrats in Congress who are, finally, standing up to the president.

As the AP reports, under the proposal Congress would overturn the Clinton-era law barring gays from serving openly in the military, but would "allow the Pentagon time-perhaps even years-to implement new policies" following completion of a comprehensive study. At that time, implementation would require approval of the president, defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And tellingly, according to the AP:

"The White House had hoped lawmakers would delay action until Pentagon officials had completed their study so fellow Democrats would not face criticism that they moved too quickly or too far ahead of public opinion in this election year. Instead, administration officials recognized it could not stop Congress in its effort to repeal the 1993 ban and joined the negotiations."

In other words, Obama's hope was to sacrifice his commitment to gay equality in the military for electoral expediency. But at least some congressional Democrats, who may or may not have the votes to put this across, aren't letting him get away with it. Good for them.

More:

uh-oh.

"A lukewarm endorsement from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and opposition among some lawmakers cast doubt Tuesday on whether Congress this week would lift a 17-year-old ban on gays serving openly in the military....

"I see no reason for the political process to pre-empt it," Sen. Jim Webb, a conservative Democrat from Virginia, said of the military study."

By the way, the Human Rights Campaign's website is still bragging about the group's support for Webb.

ADDED: With House passage, all eyes will be on the Senate, which isn't expected to vote until later this summer. At issue: will the Senate Republicanbs mount a filibuster?

Also, it should be noted the despite the characterization in the excerpt above, Sen. Jim Webb is no "conservative Democrat." He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Obama mega-billion pork-barrel "stimulus" and of so-called health care reform. He's a big spending, government expanding Democrat who thinks he can placate Virginia conservatives by opposing equality for gays. Nice. Let's all send our checks to HRC to keep him in office.

Benefits of bipartisanship. GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine backs repeal, giving conservative Democrats some wiggle room.

I'll go further than David in endorsing the "compromise" on Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It would be a huge and necessary step toward the permanent end of DADT. It's a conditional repeal, restoring the status quo ante 1993 under which presidents had sole authority to set military personnel policy toward gays and lesbians. But it would wipe out the statutory basis for the exclusion of gays. President Obama would surely exercise his authority to end the ban. And while a future president could in theory reinstate it, that's extremely unlikely in fact.

The problem is that we may not get this conditional repeal. Congress still has to vote for it. The Obama administration was dragged kicking and screaming into acquiescence. The letter from budget director Peter Orszag on behalf of the administration is about as non-committal and unenthusiastic as a message of "support" could be. The president and the White House are exercising no leadership, which is what may be needed to get this through even this heavily Democratic Congress this year. And if it doesn't get through this year, it isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

I can't say I disagree with some of the criticisms of the DADT compromise reached yesterday between the White House and Congress. As Americablog notes, there are loopholes that might delay or even prevent the repeal from going into effect.

But here's the thing: It was us, has always been us, who have been making the far more dominant argument that a repeal bill has to be passed this year -- now -- or it will fall between the cracks of politics in the Congress That May Come.

Politics is hard, and few domestic issues have more complicated political dynamics than those related to sexual orientation. Yes, gay issues are nothing compared to health care reform, but on that issue, the country was pretty evenly divided (depending on how you choose to slice and dice the numbers); on DADT repeal, we've got 70-plus percent of the country in our camp, and still have to drag a couple of legislators across the finish line to get a majority, even in the House.

The politics of the market are nothing compared to the residue of misunderstanding that still fouls some corners of the public debate over lesbians and gay men. That is the cold, hard reality, and I, for one, can't wish it away.

In that context, anything that removes a vile and offensive law from our books, and gives this administration the chance to act in good faith strikes me as not only acceptable but praiseworthy. Yes, implementation of the law was odious and insulting to the thousands of good men and women who suffered through it, but its very existence is an even worse insult to every lesbian and gay man in the nation, and every heterosexual as well. Removing it from our law is worth some risk.

The compromise will move the action away from Congress, where it never should have been in the first place, and put it squarely in the administration, who will no longer have Congress to hide behind. That strikes me as defensible at the least, and much more consistent with the way the rules for the military should be constructed than DADT's politicized discrimination.

I say let's remove this stain from our statutes now, while we have the chance.

This account in D.C.'s City Paper is about a burning issue facing our community: making sure that we all use LGBT (or LGBTQ, or LGBTQIT, or...) and not the no longer correct GLBT. For those not consumed with politically correction nomenclature, the only truly progressive stance is to put lesbians before gays, bisexuals and the transgendered in the ubiquitous if ungainly (and mystifying to the uninitiated) acronym. But see, we're striking a blow against male privilege, and after all, isn't that what matters?

And if you ever wondered why after two years of Democratic majorities we will not be seeing an end to "don't ask, don't tell" or movement on the anti-discrimination law that activists say is their top priority, this sort of nonsense may give you a clue.

We get some substantive and excellent comments at IGF, but Tom's essay in response to Steve's post on Rand Paul stands out. Tom's essential point is this: It is all well and good for a libertarian (or anyone else) to stand on principle. But once others have compromised your principle, what do you do?

Specifically in the case of same-sex marriage, Paul The Younger has said that he doesn't think the government should be in the marriage business at all. I'm not sure, myself, and can see the arguments on both sides. But he's acting on this principle only to protect same-sex couples from this governmental intrusion into liberty, while resting comfortably in the reality that opposite-sex couples are suffering daily with no end in sight. He has a similar position on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he doesn't think was good libertarian policy to begin with; but apparently he can live with it now. However, I'm sure he'd continue to protect the privilege of lesbians and gay men to be free of this overbearing encroachment on their rights.

The greatness of libertarianism, in my view, is that it has the proper respect for the constitution, which after all is a limitation on government. One of its principal limitations is that, when the government acts, it must do so equally with respect to all groups, and may not pick and choose among them without very good reason. Perhaps the constitution really does prohibit the government from entering into the marriage business. Or perhaps that's just a better understanding of government's proper role, irrespective of the constitution. But no court has ever ruled that this is an illegitimate function of our government, and I'm not expecting one to any time soon.

As long as that is true, then, a libertarian -- if he or she is truly principled -- must take one of two positions: either take a stand to challenge the entire misbegotten exercise of unauthorized and/or immoral authority for everyone, or else make sure that this power, as it is being exercised, is exercised without illegitimate discrimination among groups.

That constitutional libertarianism is how we should measure Rand Paul's brand. So far, his principles seem a bit more politically convenient than constitutionally defensible. Or principled.

American libertarians, including Barry Goldwater back in the day, have opposed racial discrimination but been wary of using the federal government to make discrimination by private employers against "protected classes" illegal, as Reason' hit & run blog notes.

Which brings us to the current Rand Paul brouhaha. This erupted after the Kentucky GOP Senate primary winner, a favorite of Tea Party patriots, told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (when asked) that he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act barring discrimination in hiring by private employers. Predictably, Paul was branded a "racist" and has come under enormous political fire by the mainstream media.

But libertarians' opposition to the Civil Rights Act no more makes them "racists" than their opposition to outlawing anti-gay hiring discrimination in the private sector makes them homophobes (as Nigel Ashford addressed here back in 1999).

Whether you agree or not, it's a principled view based on assumptions about, and in defense of, individual liberty. But as a society we've become unable to discuss and debate serious positions regarding political philosophy, and instead have only demagoguery and partisan grandstanding.

What I find interesting is the fact that the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which would make sexual orientation and gender identity into classes protected from employment discrimination, is going nowhere fast (as Dale Carpenter makes clear), despite two years of a liberal Democratic president with sweeping majorities in both houses of Congress.

But in this case, it's not because Democrats are closet libertarians; they just don't see the advantage in using political capital on our behalf. And their inaction seems perfectly fine with the liberal grandees of the mainstream media, given their silence on the issue. For them, at least, some forms of private-sector discrimination are more tolerable than others. And that is not a principled position; it's just a political calculation.

Following protests by LGBT activists, the Energy Department removed Washington University physics professor Jonathan Katz from a select group of five top scientists asked to pursue a solution to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The reason had nothing to do with the physics of stopping oil from pouring into the sea. It centered on Katz's postings on his website regarding his adamant disapproval of homosexuality.

Let's be clear: Katz is a homophobe, and proud of it. As the Washington Times reported, in Katz's website posting titled "In Defense of Homophobia," he opined that "the human body was not designed...to engage in homosexual acts," and that "Engaging in such behavior is like riding a motorcycle on an icy road without a helmet...sooner or later (probably sooner) the consequences will be catastrophic. Lethal diseases spread rapidly among people who do such things."

Pretty offensive stuff. But should opinion written on a personal website get you booted from a government assignment? What about from your job? Where does the line get drawn?

According to the newspaper's account, A.J. Bockelman, director of the St. Louis LGBT advocacy group PROMO, applaued the decision to remove Katz, saying, "It's disappointing at a time like this that when all Americans need to come together and focus on relief efforts and recovery efforts in the Gulf, someone divisive was placed in a position of power." But obviously it's not "all Americans" that Bockelman thinks should come together to solve the Gulf spill, since Katz, too, is an American, and one (unlike Bockelman) with expertise that the Obama administration felt would be valuable to the mission at hand.

Rather than demanding that Katz not be allowed to help solve the spill, in an effort, more or less, to punish him for his wrong-headed advocacy, it would be far more productive to engage him (and the many who think like him) in open and vigorous debate. But that is no longer the progressive way, and hasn't been for many years. Bad speech is to be punished, otherwise some may be misled. End of story.

I might be more sympathetic to the argument that Katz's personal advocacy placed him beyond the pale if it weren't for the hypocrisy of so many on the left, who believe one of the great crimes of the 20th century was that certain American Communist Party members (and yes, they were), who during the time of Stalin worked to advance the cause of communist tyranny, suffered grievously by being denied movie industry work in Hollywood.