IGF CultureWatch

While tens of thousands of people were marching in DC for gay equality, a few of us were in Los Angeles piecing together the events on this coast that made all this possible.

The occasion was the book release party for Tom Coleman's memoirs, The Domino Effect. Tom is one of the key figures in gay history who fought tirelessly in L.A., first to eliminate our state sodomy law, then to chip away at the other vague laws which the police used to harass us, and most significantly to find a way for the culture and the law to include same-sex couples within the definition of family. That effort put California in the nation's forefront in having our elected leaders reshape the law before the courts needed to. If you want to know how important California is in gay rights, ask yourself why the State of New York, which has had an organized gay community for about as long as California, continues -- to this day -- not to have even so much as domestic partnership for the state's same-sex couples. My answer: They lacked a Tom Coleman.

As Tom was briefly recounting his career, I could not help but notice how many of the key figures in the room he was thanking were heterosexuals whose role in our movement is both essential and unrecognized: State Senator David Roberti; Attorney General John Van de Kamp; L.A. City Attorney Burt Pines (absent due to a hospitalization, but definitely in everyone's mind); L.A. City Councilman Mike Woo; Wallace Albertson; Dr. Nora Baladerian; Judge Arthur Gilbert. Whether you know their names and contributions or not, these are what fierce advocates of gay equality look like.

But they had to be coaxed into action by gay advocates with farsightedness, political wisdom and sheer common sense: Jay Kohorn and Chris McCauley, and, of course, Tom, were at the head of that list. This small band of people came together and used the freedom and tools our political system offers to turn a world that had no place at all for same-sex couples into one where our chief complaint is that the compromise they devised and then implemented -- domestic partnership -- is viewed by some people as good enough, at least for us. It was a fine compromise for the world that existed in the 1980s and 90s; but it is a step toward equality that arose from political necessity; it is not equality itself.

If what you know about the history of gay rights in California is Harry Hay and Del Martin and Harvey Milk, there are entire chapters left to understand. Tom's book will not be the last word on these people's place in our history. But it is a good start.

This debate on CNN shows how the HRC event provides cover for the President's silence about Maine and Washington. Hilary Rosen -- who I tend to agree with, mostly -- is exclusively focused on one thing: the federal government. The President cannot do anything because it takes a long time to get a bill through Congress. We have to give him time because Congress is slow.

No one with any sense could disagree with that, but its blinkered focus is dangerous. There are two critical state elections about our relationships, and the President's ambivalence about our relationships will be a factor in both of them. He doesn't need to ask Congress to do a thing. His very clear remarks last night reinforced the fact that he supports qualifed equality for our relationships (Washington) but not marriage (Maine). Like his statements as a candidate, this reaffirmation of his position (which the event attendees cheered) can and will be used against us, either explicitly in Maine, or implicitly in Washington, where his failure to say anything against repealing their domestic partnership law will not go unnoticed.

We are right on the verge of winning the support, not only of courts and legislatures, but of voters directly. The President is the leader who could tip the balance. Last night he stepped away from the field. And we let him.

There is no shortage of excellent commentary on President Obama's speech to HRC. Andrew Sullivan, Jim Burroway and Jeremy Hooper are all great. I only have a few thoughts to add.

(1) For those who want action from Obama, it's good to remember a speech by the President of the United States is action. We talk a lot about "war," but that is just a metaphor for what we are doing: changing a cultural prejudice that has existed for centuries. Signing bills is only one kind of action in that kind of struggle, and that's an end, not a means. Finding heterosexual leaders to join us has been the hardest part of our effort. This was a speech inconceivable from any prior President. It will be helpful in moving toward equality, and may stand as a landmark.

(2) This speech incorporated exactly the incoherence we are fighting in the culture. Obama did promise to sign bills that would punish anti-gay prejudice -- hate crimes and employment discrimination. But whatever political value those laws will have is undermined -- powerfully -- by the federal government's own explicit discrimination against gays in DOMA and DADT. Until those laws are changed, the government Obama presides over remains the country's dominant source of anti-gay discrimination. Those who oppose us will certainly have those two pillars of discrimination to support their own feelings about our inferiority.

(3) The President's failure to mention either Maine or Washington is unforgivable, and Obama has compromised, if not forfeited, any claim to be a fierce advocate of our equality in leaving them out. His ambiguous language about equality for our relationships will be used in Maine, as it was in California, to reinforce his opposition to same-sex marriage -- which is a fact. That fact will be used against us, and Obama is the only person that can prevent that, if he chooses. But the election in Washington state is one where even his lack of conviction about our equality would have been no bar to supporting us. The Washington referendum is not about marriage, it is only about domestic partnership rights. That is exactly the qualified equality he said he supports for us. There was not a person in that room last night who did not know about these two elections, and their cheers for the President's waffling on this central issue were inexplicable. Washington's legislature finally moved same-sex couples in that state to the nominal equality the President believes we are entitled to, and some in that state want to take it away, leaving same-sex couples in Washington with scraps (though not "nothing" as I incorrectly asserted in an earlier post). How could the President possibly be silent about that and be celebrated?

I couldn't agree more with Evan Wolfson's advice to Barack Obama about what he needs to say at his speech to the Human Rights Campaign this weekend.

Well, maybe a little. Evan thinks that Obama needs to make the moral case against exclusion of gay couples from the law. He follows David Mixner's lead, saying that Obama needs to explicitly oppose Maine's attempt to override the legislature's decision to support same-sex marriage.

Amen to that.

But he also follows the mainstream media's obsessive focus only on the east coast of this country, and completely leaves out what's happening in Washington.

In fact, opposition to Washington's Referendum 71 fits more comfortably into Obama's current position on gay equality. R-71 grants same-sex couples only domestic partnership benefits, not marriage - which is exactly what Obama is already on the record supporting. Given that, his silence on Washington's election is already inexplicable, and should be remedied. After all, if R-71 passes, gay couples in Washington will have no legal recognition of their relationships - no rights - at all. That makes Washington a good starting point for Obama's remarks.

But I agree with Evan that Obama needs to go beyond that bare support for qualified equality, and support the real thing. That is what is at stake in Maine. Washington's Equality Lite is a political compromise that is better than no equality at all. But in Maine, they have true equality on the ballot. Mixner is exactly right that Obama's hedged rhetoric was used against us -- against Obama -- in California, and will be used the same way in Maine. Only he can prevent that from happening.

The latest "Yes on 1" ad, just released by supporters of the Maine initiative revoking same-sex marriage, strikes me as so misleading, and so tangential to marriage per se, as to amount to little more than a naked pitch that gays will recruit your kids-the anti-gay "blood libel."

In a Sept. 18 memo, Maine public officials and law professors responded effectively to the substance of such ads (which, of course, really have not much substance to respond to): Marriage is not taught in the Maine curriculum and won't be soon; Maine has good religious-liberty protections in existing law; the cases misleadingly cited by SSM opponents have nothing to do with marriage per se (they're anti-discrimination cases). It's a fine letter. Everyone should read it.

But here's the political problem we face in Maine and California and, we can be confident, elsewhere. We are asking for full legal equality and, where education is concerned, we still have not figured out how to defend it. As the new ad makes pretty brazenly clear, what our opponents are really saying in their ads is: "Gay marriage will make it legally and morally harder for schools to condemn or ignore same-sex marriage, to teach that straight families are superior to gay ones, and to ignore and stigmatize homosexuality generally."

There's no denying that measures advancing gay equality in law, culture, and society will, other things being equal, advance gay equality in schools. If we cannot figure out how to defend that core proposition to voters, we're going to lose.

So what's my bright idea? I'm working on it. But I suspect the answer will be in the nature of a positive, forthright, non-defensive message about the value of teaching kids that discrimination is wrong and that everyone deserves a family. "Liar liar pants on fire" looks to voters like an evasion.

It's not like there's a shortage of gay-related things to write about this week, but I don't think nearly enough people know about Brendon Ayanbadejo and Scott Fujita.

No, they are not the new It Gay Couple. Far from it. They are linebackers. In the NFL. Ayanbadejo plays for the Baltimore Ravens (he's on injured reserve right now) and Fujita is with the New Orleans Saints, both teams at the top of their divisions.

And both of them have gone public supporting gay equality; Ayanbadejo explicitly in favor of same-sex marriage and Fujita throwing his support behind the National Equality March this weekend.

Fujita became active after last year's proposal in Arkansas to ban gay adoption. As an adopted child, himself, Fujita felt he could not remain silent. When complimented for his courage, he said:

I don't think it's that courageous. I think I have an opinion, that I wish was shared by everybody, but I honestly believe that it's shared by more [football players] than we know because a lot of people just won't speak out about it. I'm hoping that what [Baltimore Ravens linebacker] Brendon [Ayanbadejo] did, and things like what I'm doing, speaking out a little bit, hopefully more people will step up and acknowledge the fact that hey, its ok to talk about this. Just because I'm in favor of gay rights doesn't mean that I'm gay or doesn't mean I'm some kind of "sissy" or something. That's the language that you hear in locker rooms. I know these guys well. I know for the most part, guys are a lot more tolerant than they get credit for but they're not comfortable yet speaking out about it. It's going to come in time. By in large, it's an opinion that's shared by more people than are realized. I just wish it was shared by everybody.

This is a theme I'm seeing a lot more lately: closeted support for gay equality from people who are afraid to say publicly what they believe privately. That is the closet Fujita and Ayanbadejo came out of, and they're not alone. It is extremely problematic for many straight men to even talk about gay equality, for the reasons Fujita states. But then, it was hard for us to talk about it for many centuries, as well. It's easy for us to assume that pro locker rooms are hotbeds of homophobia, and it's good for us to hear that maybe sometimes we should be more generous in our assumptions, and encourage more public support like this. We need it. And I deeply appreciate it.

Whether adding robust (as opposed to paper-thin) religious-liberty exemptions to Maine's gay-marriage law would have kept that law off the ballot is dubious, at best. But there maybe something to suggestion-made here (PDF) by Prof. Douglas Laycock, a gay-marriage supporter-that adding those exemptions now might take some steam out of the anti-gay-marriage initiative. Since reasonable and robust religious exemptions make sense anyway, this should be tried.

Another group of legal scholars weighs in for them here (PDF).

A persuasive rebuttal: K.C. Johnson, a Brooklyn College historian, Maine native and voter, and co-author of a book on the Duke lacrosse fiasco, offers this reply to my post (excerpted, with his permission, from a longer email):

I just read the Wilson group's letter to Gov. Baldacci, and write to express my dismay at its timing-and your suggestion that Baldacci and the legislative Dems should consider adopting it at this stage of the campaign.

I suspect [that] the Yes on 1 effort will use the Wilson letter to revive their theme that the state will see a flood of lawsuits if Question 1 is rejected. That the Wilson group's letter acknowledged that their original missive had been misinterpreted in Yes on 1 advertisements but still felt compelled to send another letter, at the height of the campaign, strikes me as disturbing.

I also found absurd the Wilson group's claim that if only the state legislature had adopted their suggestions in the spring, the resulting campaign would have been more "civil." Since Yes on 1 seems entirely responsive to NOM and the state Catholic Church--both of which would have opposed gay marriage anyway-it's hard to imagine the provision's adoption making any difference in the tone of the campaign. Indeed, the provision is irrelevant to the education argument that's been at the heart of the Yes on 1 campaign.

I support religious exceptions-although not the Wilson group's assertion that these exceptions could, in some circumstances, apply to government employees-for political reasons. But given the way this particular campaign has turned out, I don't think there's much evidence that things would have been any different if the law profs' recommendations had been adopted, and the timing of this current batch of letters strikes me as highly unfortunate.

Over at Newsweek.com, IGF contributor Jamie Kirchick points out that the appointment, in Germany, of the world's first openly gay foreign minister presents a historic opportunity to embarrass the world's leading homophobes.

After he takes the helm of the Foreign Ministry, [Guido] Westerwelle ought to kick off his tenure with a tour of the world's most homophobic nations, speaking about the horrific ways in which these regimes treat their gay citizens.

Or, failing that, just raising the issue would make a difference. "Hillary Clinton and her predecessors Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice have given great rhetorical and symbolic force to the cause of female equality during their tenures." Let's hope for the same symbolic advocacy from Westerwelle.

It's hard to know what to say about James Bowman's essay defending the ban on gays in the military. Andrew Sullivan and Isaac Chotiner take the first shots; I'm still speechless.

Here is the heart of Bowman's argument:

Yet if reason were to be readmitted to the debate, we might find something in the history of military honor to justify the principle now enshrined in the law decreeing that "homosexuality is incompatible with military service." We know that soldiering--I mean not training or support or peacekeeping or any of the myriad other things soldiers do, but facing enemy bullets--is inextricably bound up with ideas of masculinity.

Unpacking the centuries of stereotypes, affronts, provocation and plain old cheap shots jammed into these 70 words will take a week or so at least (and there are plenty more insults where these came from), but here's one that should be at the head of the pack, that I hope will be expanded on by the man who first made it, 18 years ago: Kenneth L. Karst.

In his prescient 1991 law review article, "The Pursuit of Manhood and the Desegregation of the Armed Forces" (38 UCLA L.Rev. 499, Feb. 1991), Professor Karst showed how attempts to keep African-Americans out of the military were of a piece with exclusion of both women and gays from the military. Here is his thesis:

Masculinity is traditionally defined around the idea of power; the armed forces are the nation's preeminent symbol of power . . . The symbolism is not a side effect; it is the main point. From the colonial era to the middle of this century, our armed forces have alternately excluded and segregated blacks in the pursuit of manhood, and today's forms of exclusion and segregation are similarly grounded in the symbolism of masculine power.

In a little over 80 pages, Karst demolished the narrow self-interest of those like Bowman who - whether intentionally or not - try to use the military as a means of affirming their own masculinity at the expense of others. The icing on the cake, of course, is that they then can use the lack of such "masculinity" against those they exclude.

It took generations for African-Americans to fully work their way into America's image of power and authority. Women are still trying. Lesbians and gay men have long been there, but only by agreeing to the extortion of lying - implicitly accepting that gay people should not participate in the very thing they are participating in.

I'd like to see Bowman respond to Karst, if he can. But frankly, I don't know if he's man enough.