IGF CultureWatch

I'm probably more forgiving of heterosexual politicians who have to deal with gay rights than most gay activists. Our equal rights are hard enough for many of them to envision and talk about in private, and it's waterboard-level torture when they have to speak about gay equality in front of an audience or a camera. I don't have sympathy for their plight (millions of their fellow heterosexuals have no problem at all), but when they are in a position to actually make the needed changes to the law, I find myself rooting for them, rather than hoping they'll fail.

I really wanted to root for Admiral Mike Mullen speaking at USC, but in the end I have to share the gay community's general disappointment with him. Granted, Karen Ocamb asked him some pretty hard questions about DADT (imagine that - the man in charge of our armed services being asked hard questions in public by a journalist!), but here's where I just find him embarrassing: It's 2010, and in response to a question about Don't Ask, Don't Tell, he cannot even say the words "gay" or "lesbian." The closest he ever comes is in an indirect reference to people who have to lie - though he can't bring himself to say what they have to lie about. He dithers on about the people DADT will affect "the most" but the only troops he seems to have in mind are the heterosexual ones.

To be clear, the troops DADT affects the most are homosexual. They are referred to in ordinary public discourse as lesbians and gay men. People who cannot say those words - "homosexual," "lesbian," "gay" - are portraying themselves today as hopelessly clueless, and very nearly ignorant. I am very sorry to say that that is the way the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff comes across.

Heterosexual troops are affected by this policy, if at all, only in the sense that it caters to the ones who are - still, today - uncomfortable with open homosexuals. Certainly, their opinions should be considered, but this seems to me to be a very rare case where the comfort level of some troops is the driving force behind our policy - we force homosexual troops to lie only because their open presence might distress some heterosexuals. In most other military contexts I'm familiar with, admirals not only don't concern themselves with matters of troop discomfort, they go out of their way to assure troops don't come to expect comfort or nurturing. And that should be especially true when what leadership is fostering is bigoted notions about fellow troop members.

Admiral Mullen might, in fact, understand that. But his repeated inability to call gay and lesbian troops by their right name when they are the subject of his comments is a problem. DADT puts a burden on homosexual soldiers, and that is the burden we are all talking about when we talk about this misbegotten policy. The habit of mind that would permit anyone to avoid mentioning that quite obvious fact is the very habit of mind that needs to be cured. And a man who has that habit of mind and speech is not exactly the model of the man who should be leading this charge.

The 1970s were a pretty fruitful time in gay history, you should pardon the expression.. And despite what some people seem to think, there was an enormous amount of work being done in the realm of politics, rather than just in the courts.

A Denver attorney, Gerald Gerash, has put together a nice YouTube document of a turning point in Denver, when the police harassment that was so characteristic of the time led local lesbians and gay men to band together and fight city hall.

This is exactly the kind of thing I hope people in towns and cities across the country are putting together. History happened in our lifetimes, and we should be recording it like mad. These are people who actually had to argue that homosexuals could live productive and decent lives, and saw their arguments falling on some deaf ears.

But they also fell on ears that were willing to hear, and one of the best parts of this series is when you begin to see council members standing up for the lesbians and gay men in the audience. It takes a long time, but it happens.

There are twelve parts to this series, and they're not exactly organized very well on YouTube. And no one will complain that the piece is too slick or overproduced. But I think that's actually a virtue. This is history made by amateurs, and it's exactly how things are supposed to work in this country.

There's plenty to think about in Frank Rich's NYT Sunday column. I'm not sure if he invented the phrase, "Rat Pack From Hell," but it certainly got my Sunday off to a good start.

His discussion of Perry v. Schwarzenegger brought me back to a theme I've been pretty interested in: the right's dogged fight to keep any aspect of the trial from being televised or broadcast. That is consistent with their efforts, in general, to avoid any public defense of their opposition to same-sex marriage except in commercials and other species of sound bites, including religious ones. They're happy to agree among themselves, but they do not care to have pubic debate with people who disagree with them.

Rich takes note of the fact that the defense of Prop. 8 could only muster two actual experts to take the stand for their entire case. One of them was David Blankenhorn, who seems barely to be an expert on anything, at least in the academic or scientific sense. Like many of us, he certainly has his opinions. But it's a close call whether they're any more reliable than the next guy's. The other expert they called, Prof. Kenneth Miller, did appear to possess some expertise on politics and government, but his testimony that lesbians and gay men are not really discriminated against by initiatives like Prop. 8, isn't exactly open-and-shut.

Judge Vaughan Walker is doing everything he can to supplement the defense's case, since they don't seem to be very interested in doing that, themselves. This is how a responsible judge approaches a trial, considering the interests even of parties who don't seem capable of or willing to make their own best arguments.

Judge Walker released 39 questions he would like answered (by both sides), and Number 1 goes right to the heart of the defense's passivity:

Assume the evidence shows Proposition 8 is not in fact rationally related to a legitimate state interest. Assume further the evidence shows voters genuinely but without evidence believed Proposition 8 was rationally related to a legitimate interest. Do the voters' honest beliefs in the absence of supporting evidence have any bearing on the constitutionality of Proposition 8?

There's a constitutional question for you: What should a court do if voters genuinely, but without any basis, believe there is a reason for a law? Do honest but unsupportable and possibly discriminatory beliefs have a role in a court's decision about whether a law is constitutional?

That's important for any number of reasons, but here's how it plays out for me. It's possible very few people would actually have watched the Prop. 8 trial if it had been televised. It's also possible a whole lot would have watched it - maybe not O.J. Simpson numbers, but a lot.

The point of a trial, as opposed to a political campaign, is to examine, with some level of thoughtfulness, the facts supporting each side's best case. Prop. 8's defenders obviously don't think they have much in the way of factual support. But they also don't think they need facts. They rely on intuition and time-tested feelings and beliefs, rather than facts. Politics permits that.

In contrast, a public trial (in the sense that the public could actually watch it) would have been quite the opposite of the trench warfare of the Prop. 8 political campaign. No one really gets cross-examined in a political campaign; everyone gets cross-examined in a trial. Every piece of evidence is subject to challenge and counter-evidence, and it's hard to slide by on sloppy reasoning.

The lack of a full public trial will leave us in no better position than we were during the political battle. The questions and the answers in court are much more focused than the blasts and sputters of the Prop. 8 30-second ads. The very hard work of Ted Olson and David Boies - and the less hard work of their opponents -- will utterly disappear in the rush to judgment when Judge Walker releases his opinion.

The O.J. Simpson criminal trial isn't exactly a model for trials being made public, but whether it led to justice or not, it certainly allowed people to form an opinion based on actual evidence presented in a court. Disagreeing about the evidence is a very different thing from disagreeing about beliefs.

When Perry v. Schwarzenegger is decided, very, very few people will have had access to the strong evidentiary case made by the challengers, and the extremely weak, and nearly nonexistent case made to defend Prop. 8. Judge Walker will be accused of judicial activism if he rules that Prop. 8 is unconstitutional, irrespective of what the facts show, what his reasoning is, or anything else. He could issue a one page judgment or a two-hundred page treatise, and it will make little difference. The headlines will be written only minutes after the bottom line is available.

That is how courts are drawn into politics despite the best intentions of the framers. The public would have been better served if it had been privy to the trial, itself; we could all have seen, directly, that a court has an obligation to take more time than any voter ever will in making a decision about matters of real consequence. Maybe people would still disagree with Judge Walker's opinion, but if so, they'd be able to explain why. That, in my opinion, is the lifeblood of a constitutional democracy.

I've been meaning to take note of the seemingly strange, to many, fact that Elton John performed at Rush Limbaugh's recent wedding. Washington Post blogger David Weigel addressed this, quoting Limbaugh biographer Zev Chafets:

On some social issues, like abortion, Limbaugh is a conventional conservative. On others he sounds a lot like Barack Obama. In an interview last summer, he told me that he regards homosexuality as most likely determined by biology, considers other people's sex lives to be none of his business and supports gay civil unions.

Of course, "the LGBT community is none too pleased with Sir Elton," according to gossip site Popeater:

"I'm flabbergasted," Aaron Hicklin, Editor-in-Chief of Out, tells us. "It betrays either ignorance or self-interest or both, and jeopardizes his admirable record on gay rights."

Or this attack by a blogger who thinks the lesson is "It Pays to Hate." Google reveals this is a common response on the LGBT blogosphere.

The real lesson is that Elton John likes to reach out to those who are sometimes our enemies-witness his performance with Eminem, despite the rapper's (at that time) gay-bashing lyrics, at the Grammy's a few years back. In fact, Sir Elton didn't become the wedding singer just because it was a well-paying gig; since meeting Limbaugh earlier this year, he's kept up a fairly regular e-mail exchange, according to conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, a guest at the wedding (as reported by the web site Elton John News). "He's about tearing down walls, not building them," Levin added.

Limbaugh supported California's Prop 8 and mocks Barney Frank. But think about this: if we want to at least modify the Defense of Marriage Act-so that, for instance, federal benefits could be granted to same-sex couples in states that have civil unions/ partnerships, such as California, post Prop. 8- then getting the support of Rush Limbaugh (the "bigoted" voice of the right, who supports civil unions) could be crucial. It's called coalition building-the real kind, not just among groups on the left that all think alike (the current LGBT progressive strategy).

I've been writing about the changing political climate on the right as efforts to roll back the fiscal insanity take precedence over social issues and crowd out the religious right-driven by average people coming together to protest and work for change, often in opposition to the party hack machine. That's an extremely positive development. The libertarian Cato Institute's David Boaz shares that assessment in this blog post, but adds the qualifier that "out in the real world, where real Republicans live, the picture isn't as promising."

A case in point: the disappointing result from last Tuesday's GOP congressional primary in the DC suburbs of northern Virginia (Arlington/Alexandria), where Matthew Berry, a libertarian-leaning fiscal conservative who is openly gay, narrowly lost to Patrick Murray, backed by the local GOP machine. Boaz writes:

Republican activist Rick Sincere tells me that "in the last few days before the election, I received numerous emails from the Murray campaign that included subtle reminders that Matthew is gay and supports an end to DADT. [Murray] also, in a Monday email, took a quotation from Matthew out of context to make it look like he supports a federally enforced repeal of Virginia's anti-marriage law. In other words, Murray played the anti-gay card."

Still, there's reason for optimism about the future:

Blogger RedNoVa made similar observations, adding, "If you were at the Matthew Berry party last night, you would notice that the average age in the room was about 30. Young people were everywhere. The future of our party was there. Murray's campaign crowd was older, and full of party purists."

Boaz also notes chillingly anti-gay rhetoric in a western Tennessee GOP congressional primary, and sums up, "With Republicans like that, it's no wonder that many moderates, centrists, and libertarians still aren't sure they want to vote Republican, even with Democrats running up the deficit and extending federal control over health care, education, automobile companies, newspapers, and more."

Added: From the Log Cabin of Northern Virginia newsletter:

Matthew Berry, the first openly gay man and member of Log Cabin to run for the Republican nomination for the 8th Congressional District, was defeated in the primary on June 8 by Patrick Murray after Murray repeatedly raised the issue of Matthew's sexual orientation and his positions on specific gay issues in emails to supporters just prior to the election.

In the final days of the campaign, Murray attacked Berry for his support of marriage equality and repeal of DADT, which just recently passed Congress. He also falsely claimed that Berry had labeled himself a "liberal progressive" and then called him a RINO to boot, a charge that mystified Berry's many libertarian supporters as well as the many conservative activists and Virginia bloggers who endorsed Berry.

The 8th District is currently represented by Democrat Jim Moran, who has a long history of scandal and corruption during his years in public office. Given the politics and cultural makeup of the 8th District, however, few political observers believe Murray has any chance of unseating Cong. Moran. Many believe Berry's defeat in the primary will unfortunately kill any chance of extending the Republican Party's reach in the 8th District beyond its narrow conservative base.

More. From the Washington Times, Fiscal focus splits GOP factions on social issues. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a likely contender for the GOP presidential nod in 2012, says that given the dire economic situation being created by out-of-control deficit spending, the next president "would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. ... We're going to just have to agree to get along for a little while." Sensible, of course, but enough to trigger the wrath of the Family Research Council (and, as commenter Carl points out, Mike Huckabee).

There is a battle going on for the soul of the GOP, and it matters greatly to gay people who wins.

Furthermore. I should note that while Gov. Daniels called for a true over "social issues," the Family Research Council and Huckabee responded with appeals to ramp up the fight over abortion. Even here, they're downplaying (for now, at least) gay issues, and that's significant, too.

According to this primary election analysis in the conservative Washington Times:

The bottom line on Tuesday's primaries: The Republican Party is facing a purge, and limited-government conservatives are in the ascendance.

After years of taking a back seat as neoconservatives-big-government interventionists-and religious conservatives conducted a tug of war for the GOP's heart, traditional conservatives and fiscally cautious "tea party" activists are shaking up the Republican establishment and also helping shape Democratic contests.

"A center-right coalition, which is not dominated by the religious right or neocons, seems to be emerging as a powerful force in American politics," Republican National Committee member Saul Anuzis of Michigan said. "It doesn't mean their issues aren't important, but they are not necessarily the driving issues as our economy, jobs and ever-growing debt and deficit scare taxpayers."

This gels with what Jonathan Rauch wrote on this blog a few days ago, in 'Tea' Is for Tolerance. But will the hyper-partisan LGBT movement, which often seems to favor all things dependent on bigger government and higher taxes (i.e., the "progressive" agenda) pay heed?

Worth noting: This Washington Post op-ed on marriage equality was penned jointly by Bob Levy, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute (which often aligns with conservatives to oppose expanded government and higher taxes), and John Podesta, president of the left-liberal Center for American Progress (which often aligns with progressives to support higher taxes and bigger government). Both men serve as co-chairs of the advisory board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which is sponsoring the Olson-Boies case against California's Proposition 8, which overturned the legislatively passed extension of marriage to same-sex couples in the Golden State.

Ike Skelton, the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, has been no friend to the repeal of DADT. But sometimes people who disagree with us can make our arguments better than our strongest supporters do, and Skelton's comments to CBS News tellingly reveal the denial and futility at the heart of the DADT opposition.

As we argue about equality and patriotism and the harm a nation can do to itself by looking at this issue through the narrow slit of prejudice, Skelton sees the problem with DADT repeal more simplistically, and in a way few of our supporters would even have thought of: "What do mommies and daddies say to their 7-year-old child?" he asked.

That's a surprisingly good question, when you think about it. Not a lot of 7-year olds will be weighing in on the merits of gay soldiers serving openly in Afghanistan, but that's not what Skelton's talking about. In fact, he's articulating the concern of the entire generation of people who grew up denying that lesbians and gay men existed - could exist - at all. They're older than 7, but when it comes to homosexuality, they have that same sort of idealized innocence. Skelton speaks for those who think that homosexuality, like cancer, should only be whispered about in public, to shelter tender minds from facing this dark truth too soon, the people who believe in their deepest hearts that homosexuality, if it must exist, is something to be ashamed of, suppressed, and kept hidden from the public (which is what those 7-year olds have been enlisted for) at all costs.

Skelton and his constituency are living in an increasingly shrinking closet. According to a new CBS poll, 77% of Americans know someone who is homosexual, compared to 42% who could say that in 1992. And while the remaining 22% today can say they don't know anyone who's lesbian or gay, they certainly can't say they haven't heard about people who are. The fact that the question is now regularly being asked in public interest polls presupposes the problem that irks Skelton and others: sexual orientation is a political subject that pretty much all Americans are asked about, talk about, and have opinions about. Directly to Skelton's point, there are not a lot of nooks and crannies left in the country where discussion of gay rights is not permitted, for adults or children. Conservative churches from one end of the nation to the other have made sure of that, as has the National Organization for Marriage and other anti-gay groups that run ads - on television and radio and in newspapers - opposing gay equality. Like discussion of DADT, those ads can and do lead kids to ask questions of their mommies and daddies.

In fact, the only place where discussion of gay rights is hindered at all is in the military. Heterosexual soldiers, of course, are free to weigh in to support or oppose (or be indifferent to) DADT - as long as it's eminently clear they are straight. Lesbian and gay soldiers, however, have to be ever cautious about what they say and how they say it, and certainly cannot articulate the fact that their opposition might arise from experience.

And that is the point. Not that we are protecting children, somehow, since they'll be exposed to the public debates over homosexuality in any number of contexts, DADT being only one. No, all DADT protects is its own premise: that homosexual soldiers should be silent about that fact, and leave the debate over their lives to the heterosexuals.

This has historically been a very successful strategy of disabling the very people who discrimination harms from explaining why, and arguing for its elimination from the law. But those days are gone. Even the new survey of military opinions on DADT will inquire into the opinions of the very people the policy harms. . . in fact, the only people the policy harms. They will still have to remain in the closet in order to be surveyed - something not even Kafka or Orwell could have imagined - but they will be asked; as bizarre a victory as I can envision.

And while all of that is going on, 7-year olds across the country will be watching TV and listening to the radio, and even talking to their friends at school. It's entirely possible they already know more about gay people than Ike Skelton does, and will likely be more comfortable viewing gay people as just people than Skelton wants them to be.

The new chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party has one word for social conservatives: goodbye. She is telling Bay Windows, a gay newspaper, that gay marriage and other social issues are going on the back burner, presumably because they're losers. MassResistance, a virulent anti-gay group, is appalled.

That was in April. Today, the New York Times reports that overturning same-sex marriage is getting no traction as a campaign issue in Iowa, where a state court ordered SSM a year ago.

And National Journal has a poll of Republican political consultants and insiders in which half say the party should "downplay" the issue of gays in the military. With 13 percent calling for repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, that leaves only 31 percent who want to take a stand against open gays in the military. "This is going to happen, and Republicans don't want to look intolerant going into fall elections," says one typical insider. Another: "This issue will not help drive voters to the polls."

And there's this perceptive comment: "The Democrats and independents fleeing Obama are social liberals shocked by the administration's war on business. We would do well not to remind them why they once rejected the GOP."

Back in November, a group of social conservatives, led by Robert George, issued something called the Manhattan Declaration-a veiled threat to split the Republican party if it did not continue to put abortion and SSM front and center. But what Grover Norquist has been saying appears to be true. The energy behind the Tea Party represents a shift away from Jerry Falwell as well as a backlash against Barack Obama.

It's a mistake for gays to assume that the Tea Party movement is our enemy. More likely, it will help pull the Republicans off our backs.

Addendum: Thanks to the reader who points out that the Mass. GOP chair's comment is from April 2009, not two months ago. I should have caught that.

Living in a solidly blue district, my household received a fundraising letter from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee urging us to donate money at www.dscc.org/SilenceGOPlies.

At the site it doesn't, or no longer, uses the ominous phrase "Silence GOP lies," and instead offers the somewhat less threatening "Stop GOP lies" - perhaps because a number of bloggers have called attention to the DSCC's call to "silence" the opposition. Reportedly, many of these fundraising letters also have included a "Silence GOP lies" button.

Think about that; it's not "respond to GOP lies" or "expose GOP lies." The fundraising message (at least in the letter) is "Silence GOP lies." That's a little scary, but quite tellingly captures what's so wrong with the "progressive" mindset today.

And what, exactly, are these "lies"? Some are strongly partisan criticisms of Obama, but others are policy views widely shared by much of the American public, such as the "lie" that "the badly needed stimulus bill" that cost nearly a trillion dollars (helping to create our debt tsunami) and which preserved mostly government jobs wasn't, er, "badly needed." Silence those lying liars before they lie again!

And isn't it the Democrats who like to claim that the GOP uses threatening words in its criticisms of Democrats? So, what exactly is "Silence GOP lies" supposed to convey?

The letter also attacks "Tea Party hysteria" in terms that are, well, hysterical (say, isn't the word "hysteria" supposed to be sexist and no longer permitted? Uh, oh, somebody at the DSCC is gonna be in trouble!).

More. No, my point is not just to engage in partisan sniping, but to critique it. And the "gay" angle is my consistent argument that the fight for our equality should not be tied to just one of the two governing parties (and the negative repercussions of having so much of the LGBT political movement controlled by Democratic party operatives, whose agenda often places their party's needs first.