IGF CultureWatch

Paul Varnell's column in the Chicago Free Press, like so much quality journalism these days, has fallen victim to the budget ax.

Paul was the founding editor of IGF, back in the 1990s, and his columns have been a mainstay of our site. His sane yet passionate pieces in the Free Press and, before that, the Windy City Times modeled a calmer, more rational kind of writing and thinking at a time when so many gay voices were shrill and doctrinaire. And it seemed there was nothing that Paul couldn't write elegantly about.

The Chicago Sun-Times has a lovely appreciation of Paul's work by Neil Steinberg.

Paul tells Steinberg: "It was my identity, and I felt I was doing something worthwhile by trying to be calm and reasonable." We hope Paul finds a new outlet. He's still needed.

This is not good.

No. It's worse than not good. It's miserable. I've tried to be as generous as I can to the Administration in its political struggle with a morally clear question: equality for gay couples. While the criticism was most prominently used about Afghanistan, if you want to know what dithering looks like, try to draw a straight line graph through the White House positions on same-sex couples.

And now, a week before a critical election we might just be able to win, Attorney General Eric Holder goes right into Maine and says -- directly to Maine voters -- that he and the President really don't much care, one way or the other, how the election comes out.

I'll say it again: If the right wins either or both of these elections, it will energize the worst elements of the very faction that is most harmful to the President, himself. Even if he doesn't want to help us explicitly (and it's now clear he does not), is that really the outcome he wants?

Let me offer a draft for the next White House statement about Question 1 in Maine and Referendum 71 in Washington -- or whatever the next gay marriage equality battle turns out to be: "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"

H/T to KC Johnson

The central deception fabricated against us in the SFMM ad, "They Said" is that while we promised we wouldn't push same-sex marriage on schoolchildren, we can't be trusted. Last time we deceived only adults, but this time it will be the children who will "suffer."

The use of children in modern American political campaigns to terrify parents about homosexuals dates back to Anita Bryant's campaign in the 1970s to withdraw gay rights in Dade County, Florida, though it has a more ancient pedigree. It is another example of adapting a malevolent prejudicial notion used to slander a different minority: Jews. It is the gay Blood Libel, though without claiming we actually kill children.

As Jon Rauch explains, the concern is not, in fact, with school curriculum; it is about gay marriage as a reality in the broader world today. But it goes further than that. Children don't know about the law governing marriage. Any same-sex couples, whether married, united in a civil union or simply living together with no legal rights present the same problem - children observe the world and ask questions.

It is unrealistic to believe children can be protected from television, movies, books, magazines, and the gay parents of their soccer teammates. School curriculum is formalized, and thus seems to be where anti-gay parents can exercise control. The use of the verb "push" four times in a 30-second ad inflames the sense that parents who want gays to remain in the closet have lost the upper hand.

What those parents really want is to prohibit any discussion of gay couples, period; and that has nothing to do with marriage or school curriculum and everything to do with gays abandoning the closet and being honest about themselves in the world at large.

The existing curriculum reflects the earlier world they are comfortable with, which is not neutral to sexual orientation. Children are regularly taught that princes can marry princesses, which is no more than a simple reaffirmation of heterosexual love and affection. Homosexuals are simply left out - they do not exist.

If that is all children learn, then they are, in fact, learning a kind of bias in their most formative years. This has never been intentional, since the vast majority of all children are heterosexual, and are learning about themselves. But they are also learning about the broader world, and what it includes. If they are prevented from learning that a prince (so inclined) can marry another prince (who is also so inclined) then they are learning that princes cannot marry other princes.

More to the point, those children who are, or may be gay, are learning something far more perverse about themselves - they are learning that the world does not include them. Again, this is not intentional, but as any adult homosexual can testify, it is as real as anything can be.

Invisibility always works against homosexuals who are, after all, seeking their place in the public world. When the debate is about children, that invisibility gets submerged in a non-sexual environment that, nevertheless, has very strong elements of future, developing sexuality running through it. Whether it's in the curriculum or not, children see heterosexuality everywhere. That is as it should be, since heterosexuals are everywhere. It would be preposterous to pretend that could ever change.

But it is wrong to prohibit - or think that anyone could prohibit - children from knowing that some people, and potentially some of them, will not be heterosexual. In public schools, or in any other forum, such discussions must be age appropriate, though. What teachers discuss in a second grade class is very different from classroom debates in high school.

But school districts are not running amok if some of them make a conscious, public decision to include books like King and King as one book among the thousands children will have access to. That book was turned into a wedge in California, where it was invoked to make it seem schools were "teaching" homosexuality. The book is subject to similar abuse now in Maine.

The fear this ad exploits is no more than that - an inchoate fear. It is an anxiety about homosexuality itself. But like all fears about minorities, it refuses to accept that it is not universal. That is the truth the ads for No on 1 so successfully express. As between these two messages, and these two strategies, I am proud to be associated with the one that depends, for its success, on appealing to what is best in our nature.

The latest ad from Stand For Marriage Maine is a political attack in the classic tradition of Lee Atwater's Willie Horton ad for the first George Bush, and California Governor Pete Wilson's infamous smear showing immigrants flooding across the border with a narrator intoning, "They keep coming."

Both of those predecessors worked. And both of the men they helped elect have lived to see the consequences of their appeals to prejudice eat away at the credibility of their party.

There is no candidate in Maine, though, nor is there technically any party. But there is a group of people whose lives and reputations are being dragged through the mud again, and who are being lied about.

That is the central irony of the ad. It claims to be about deception, but it is the ad, itself, which deceives.

It opens, over agitated music, with the narrator saying, "In the 2005 campaign, they said they weren't pushing for homosexual marriage, but now we know they were." Pat Peard is quoted, from 2005 saying, "It has nothing to do with marriage," followed by a video of Monique Hoeflinger in 2009 saying, "Literally, we launched this campaign back in 2005." The narrator then says, "Now they say they won't push teaching homosexual marriage to children in Maine schools," with a quote from Jesse Connolly, campaign manager for No on 1, "yet they are already pushing gay-friendly books in preschools, and hiring paid gay advisors in public schools. Last time, they deceived us [with a screen-covering graphic of the word "DECEPTION"], now it's our kids who will suffer. Vote Yes on Question 1 to prevent homosexual marriage from being pushed on Maine children."

The rhetorical device in the ad is the oldest in the book: the vague, undifferentiated they. This is the fundamental element of which prejudice is made. All of them have a connection which others are not privy to, and (of course) they have an agenda.

I don't know Pat Peard, or Monique Hoeflinger, or Jesse Connolly. Perhaps they have, in fact, all coordinated their comments. But if so, that circumstance, which is central to understanding the slur in this ad, is never documented. Rather, because all of them are supportive of gay equality (Connolly is not even gay), the ad's dark tones invoking what "they have been telling us imply the connection as necessarily existing.

That paves the way for the central claim of "DECEPTION." Normally, it is individuals who deceive, saying one thing and meaning something else. Proving that takes substantiation, but it is something well within the realm of human behavior. The burden of proof is just about short-circuited when you are claiming a group of people have been involved in deception. Different people in different contexts say a multitude of different things. That is exactly what happened here, as GoodAsYou explains. Once you've taken the first step of assuming they have a unified agenda, then it's ludicrously easy to find documentable statements from different individuals in different contexts that can be woven together to demonstrate - conclusively, to people who want to believe it -- a lie.

That unitary vision of a minority group is practically the definition of prejudice. Members of minority groups have to fight to establish their identity against that sweeping, reductionist thinking. Whatever legitimate differences there are in the struggle of African-Americans and homosexuals for their equality, it is this damaged notion that makes both struggles necessary.

Ads like this invoke - rely on - the subliminal provocation of such convictions.

Frank Schubert, who is running the campaign responsible for this ad, swears he will not engage in gay-bashing, and will, in fact, do everything he can to make sure it doesn't happen. If the premise at the heart of this ad is not actual gay-bashing, it is certainly indistinguishable from a straightforward appeal to people's worst instincts. That has precedent in recent American politics, and a tainted history of success.

it is a stark contrast with the No on 1 campaign, which has avoided these low-road tactics with uniformly positive, decent and honest ads. The people of Maine will have to determine which of these courses in most consistent with their vision of civic life in their state.

"The secular arguments against gay marriage, when they aren't just based on bigotry or custom, tend to be abstract in ways that don't find purchase in American political discourse. I say, 'Institutional support for reproduction,' you say, 'I love my boyfriend and I want to marry him.' Who wins that debate? You win that debate."

Ross Douthat is both right and wrong about who wins that debate. Yes, we win it in the long run. But to get to the long run you have to go through the short-term. And we definitely didn't win the debate in California -- or 29 other states.

What Douthat describes is the simple humanity of our appeal. We aren't asking for anything abstract at all. What is esoteric or obscure about connecting love and marriage? Who doesn't understand that? But look at the lengths our opponents go to to counter that simple truth.

So why do we lose debates, in the concrete form of very consequential (to us) elections? Because of what Douthat buries in a subordinate clause. What secular arguments against gay marriage are anything other than ". . . just based on bigotry or custom"? There are certainly arguments about children and religion, but they aren't arguments against gay marriage, they're arguments against homosexuality in the common world. The most vocal opponents of same-sex marriage find homosexuality an intrusion into a worldview that has no place for anything other than heterosexuality. That's a worldview that used to be all but universal, but it isn't any more. Marriage is the only respectable arena left where people can express their distaste for lesbians and gay men who don't have the good taste to pretend they are straight. The closet is closed for business; lesbians and gay men are on television and in government and business and sports; some of them live right there in the neighborhood and their children go to school and play soccer. All of that is done.

Marriage is the only part of the civil law where prejudice still has some hold, where ancient misunderstandings retain their bite. Every time someone has the conversation Douthat describes, we can win another voter or two. But if he has any doubt about how hard our task is (and has been for decades), he should ponder this thought, which he expressed to the Observer:

"Mr. Douthat indicated that he opposes gay marriage because of his religious beliefs, but that he does not like debating the issue in those terms. At one point he said that, sometimes, he feels like he should either change his mind, or simply resolve never to address the question in public."

How many lesbians or gay men can even imagine what a luxury it would be to be able to avoid addressing this question in public? As a heterosexual in good standing, Douthat has that option. But every heterosexual who exercises it casts a potent kind of vote in favor of the status quo, which works for them but not at all for us. Having all of those conversations, all of those debates, is no easy thing for us, or for heterosexuals. But we have no other tool to achieve the simple equality that we deserve.

(H/T Andrew)

So now it's official: Opponents of gay marriage in Maine do not just want to block gay marriage. They want to use the law to force all discussion of gay marriage out of the schools. In other words, they demand to turn the public schools into closets.

This was always implicit in the logic of their anti-SSM message, which is, as far as it goes, unassailable. 1) Legal gay marriage will make married gay couples more visible and grant them full legal equality. 2) Gay couples' heightened equality and visibility will increase the likelihood that gay marriage would be discussed in schools, even though marriage isn't in the Maine curriculum.

Of course, if gay marriage can be discussed despite not being in the curriculum, it can also be discussed despite not being legal in Maine. Its existence in Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Hampshire might come up in the classroom, for example. So the logical consequence is: 3) The only way to protect schoolchildren's ears from mention of SSM is to censor it.

Don't take my word for it. Here's what a "Yes on 1" official says:

Mutty said gay-marriage supporters had the chance to prohibit the teaching of same-sex marriage in schools when they drafted the legislation.

"They had ample opportunity to blunt our concerns by expressly prohibiting same-sex marriage from being discussed in public schools, but they did not do so," he said.

The Maine campaign, then, is not about preventing gay marriage. It's about preventing discussion of gay marriage. But why stop at "expressly prohibiting same-sex marriage from being discussed in public schools"? How about domestic partnerships? Why, isn't the very existence of homosexuality too controversial for children's ears? How about textbooks and-hey!-library books mentioning gay marriage or gay couples? Hadn't they better be banned?

I would thank Mr. Mutty for clarifying the underlying radicalism of his cause. Let's call him on it.

(Hat tip: KC Johnson.)

I stick by my limited gratitude to the White House for its oblique but helpful statement about state referenda on gay equality, and specifically (kind of) marriage.

But I'm nobody's fool. President Obama is, today, headed to New Jersey to help out Jon Corzine in a very hotly contested race that could go either way. It's not a national race, or a national issue. It's just the sort of thing polticians do in cases where their considerable presence can help in very close elections.

I wouldn't ask the President to actually speak in person in Maine (even if it's just a little further up the East Coast from New Jersey) or Washington (clear out here in the West Coast). But both of these races are at least as close as the NJ governor's race, and in one sense there's more at stake. Jon Corzine's race is of interest mostly to Jon Corzine and, indirectly, to the Democratic Party -- but only indirectly. If we lose the extremely close elections in Maine and Washington, after having lost in California, it will energize the right wing across the country more than anything else I can imagine.

On many other issues, the White House has been able to manage the right wing attacks. But not on gay equality. He has told us what we want to hear (kind of) but a speech to HRC is very different from a statement directly to voters in Maine and/or Washington. Again, he's given us a tool to use to counter the damage his existing words caused, and that's good. But the new polls are showing these races neck-and-neck, and getting people to the polls will be the deciding factor. As I've argued, the 3% or so of us who are homosexual will certainly go to the polls in those states, as will a certain number of supportive heterosexuals. But an awful lot of them don't have enough of a direct interest in the ballot initiatives to drive them to vote. Our lives and equality are at stake, but not theirs.

That is a message the President can make to voters better than we ever could. It is the one extra thing we need most from him.