IGF CultureWatch

On Dec. 11, at a candid community discussion on the pursuit of D.C. marriage equality, a few participants noted that D.C. domestic partners already enjoy protections comparable to gay married couples in Massachusetts and Connecticut. That raises a question: What are the potential gains and risks of proceeding with a marriage bill early in 2009, as D.C. Councilmember David Catania has indicated he plans to do?

There are several factors to consider. First, the U.S. Constitution gives Congress exclusive legislative power over the District of Columbia, and past Democratic congresses have infringed on D.C. Home Rule over gay issues. The fact that Democrats increased their majorities in both houses and won the White House does not mean they will respect D.C.'s local autonomy or support marriage equality. The many conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats elected in 2006 and 2008 certainly will not. Even activists who favor moving forward on marriage equality expect Congress to bar the District from implementing it.

Second, D.C. Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton wants the marriage bill postponed until she can press her legislative agenda for the District, including a full voting member of Congress as well as legislative and budgetary autonomy. Winning those first would put us in a stronger position to move ahead with marriage.

Third, the plan to block a ballot measure on the bill by making it an amendment to the D.C. Human Rights Act (whose protections are not subject to referendum or initiative) will be firmly challenged - including by Congress members - as an attempt to foil the popular will. While I agree that minority rights should not be subject to majority vote, politically this stratagem is too clever by half.

Fourth, nearly 60 percent of the D.C. population is African American, and polls show that a majority of black voters opposes marriage equality while a majority of white voters supports it. Those numbers can be improved, but it will require a concerted grassroots effort coupled with a well-funded media campaign.

Catania claims that those who say "not now" are really saying "not ever." It is absurd to suggest that Norton, a staunch ally of the LGBT community, wants to put off marriage equality forever just because she asks for a few months' delay. Treating those who don't support one's preferred timetable as opponents on the underlying issue is a poor way to cultivate allies, and fails to refute the reality-based activists who urge that we proceed in a smart and strategic way.

Jon Hoadley of Stonewall Democrats said at the town hall meeting that we should make it clear that we will not accept the D.C. marriage bill being traded away for the sake of passing other legislation. That is easier said than done when we lack the votes on the Hill for marriage but are better situated on hate crimes and employment discrimination. Denouncing congressional allies for such pragmatic trade-offs is likelier to grind the national LGBT legislative agenda to a halt than advance D.C. marriage equality.

Until marriage equality is achieved federally, marriages granted to same-sex couples by D.C. or the states will be unequal, and the difference between marriages and comprehensive domestic partnerships or civil unions will be largely symbolic. To be sure, marriage carries powerful symbolism, and nationwide demonstrations on Nov. 15 revealed new enthusiasm. Translating enthusiasm into victories, however, requires political savvy, outreach and organizing. With the holidays upon us and no campaign in place, the prospect of introducing a hot bill in a few weeks seems more a grandstanding gesture than part of a serious plan.

With Catania bent on moving ahead in January, we are faced with recruiting key allies in the African American and faith communities within a few weeks. This work, which would provide political cover for wavering D.C. Council members, requires far more hands than the relative few who have reached across our city's social divides over the years. As it stands, Catania is putting the cart before the horse.

I will be faulted for broaching these concerns publicly, but keeping silent out of solidarity will not make the problems disappear. Those whose enthusiasm outstrips their judgment should stop using talk of a generational split to dismiss the concerns of more experienced activists. Reality has a way of coming back to bite you. Let's work methodically toward real, sustainable marriage equality, not chase a mirage.

A recent article in The New York Times emphasized the relative youth or newness to activism of many of the planners and participants in the demonstrations for same-sex marriage that have occurred since the passage of Proposition 8 in California.

Why did California precipitate so much activism while passage of those 32 state bans on gay marriage generated little except disappointment? I think the answer is fairly simple.

Most importantly, because Proposition 8 took away a civil right (that is, a right vis-a-vis the state) that had been granted by the state Supreme Court just a few months earlier. But also: because: California is by far the most populous state in the Union and what happens there holds significance for the rest of the country; because Prop 8 called into doubt the legality of those 18,000 or so same-sex marriages that had already been performed, including many from out of state; because pre-election polls had held out hope that Prop 8 would be defeated, so its narrow passage came as a shock and an insult; because Prop 8 was petty in that gay marriage provably was causing no harm to heterosexual marriage or society at large; and, finally, because it was seen to be a religious intrusion into civic affairs since Mormons, mostly from out of state, contributed half of the funds used to help passage of Prop 8.

Protest demonstrations suddenly occurred across California, followed by many smaller sympathetic demonstrations in other large cities, largely organized by technologically adept young people using new Web sites, social networking sites and other tools of the Internet. The Times quoted one 26-year-old woman who works at a search-engine marketing firm as saying, "I'm good at driving traffic to Web sites. That's what I do."

So the young people are bringing new life, new ideas, and a more rapid responsiveness to the gay movement. And, what continually surprises many of us who are older, they are finding substantial support from young heterosexuals who seem to see gay rights as their generation's big civil rights issue. It is, but we never received that kind of visible support before, and while it is most welcome it feels, well, a bit odd.

Now venerable activist Robin Tyler has trotted out the tired and hackneyed idea of a National March on Washington, which would be, if I count correctly, the fifth. But national marches haven't really accomplished much, and the last one lost money and created a good deal of ill will by stiffing its vendors. Not a good precedent.

Besides, marriage is a state issue, not one primarily determined by the federal government. So why protest to the federal government if you want to marry? And even though repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act is desirable, at this point it would affect only the residents of two states-Massachusetts and Connecticut, which offer same-sex marriage. It would be much more reasonable to hold off any national march until significantly more states allow gay marriage and the measure affects far more gays.

For a number of reasons, much better is the idea, now in the initial planning stages, of coordinated demonstrations at state capitals or major cities.

First, because more people will be able to be involved. Not everyone can take the time, and/or the time off from work to drive or carpool, or has the money to fly to Washington, particularly the young people who have been a mainstay of the recent demonstrations. California was a hotbed of activism in the last two months, but it is unlikely that most of the participants would be willing to travel 3,000 miles to some demonstration in Washington.

Then too, it seems particularly valuable to gear up activism in Southern and Great Plains states that are the least gay-friendly. A national march won't do much for them. But if they hold state marches, that would be new in a lot of places and encouraging to local activists. In addition, part of the point of demonstrations is to get gays (and our supporters) to meet one another and develop the kind of synergy that comes from scattered activist knowing one another and working together.

Local demonstrations would also give young activists a chance to contact their state legislators, probably for the first time, and make a case for gay marriage. It might well impress legislators that this is the way the wind is blowing among newer voters.

In truth, I have some doubts about the political effectiveness of demonstrations. But as a way of getting attention for your cause and garnering local press and television coverage, they cannot be beaten. And at this point, with a lot of older voters (and the legislators who cater to them) same-sex marriage still needs to prove that it can be a popular issue.

Mr. C. is incredibly busy right now with a last minute rush to finish all the toys, get the reindeer in shape for the long trip, make sure the sleigh is in proper repair and all. So he asked me if I would write our Christmas letter this year. Goodness knows I have my hands full making the fruitcakes and Christmas cookies, preparing the sweetmeats and candied fruits, but writing the Christmas letter is a welcome break. It is like having a nice chat over-the-backyard fence with all our friends at once.

Things went pretty well this year, all things considered. Our annual January vacation in Miami Beach was a delight. Mr. C mostly relaxed after the taxing Christmas Eve journey, lying in the sun and trying to get a suntan while I went shopping at some of those fancy boutiques. This year Mr. C bought one of those little bikini swim trunks which reveals some things I think I should be the only one to see, but Mr. C pointed out that a lot of other men were wearing them too. And he got me a lady's bikini to wear, but I'm not quite ready to try that.

The gay boys on the beach really cottoned to Mr. C. He was almost constantly surrounded by young men who said he was a "Daddy" type. Mr. C. loved the attention. One of the boys insisted that he wanted to come back north with us. So we let him, to see how he liked it. I put him to work in the kitchen helping with the cookies.

He turned out to have quite a knack for baking. He did all kinds of interesting things like adding a little nutmeg to this recipe, a little almond extract to that one, a quarter of a mashed banana here, a dash of ground cinnamon or a dollop of honey there. I'll have to confess that they certainly perked up the flavor of some of my old recipes. I asked him how he knew all this. It turned out his father had been a baker in some South American country, so he came by it naturally.

We had hoped to have a more relaxed pace of production during the spring, but as the signals started coming in about the economic downturn around the world, it became clear that parents weren't going to be able to buy all the toys they normally do, and we would have to make up the difference.

We tried bringing in a dozen or so "guest worker" elves from Germany, where most of them seem to live, but once they got here all they did was complain about the cold weather and the lack of that dark beer they drink all the time. "When does spring arrive," they kept asking, and Mr. C kept explaining, "It doesn't!" So finally we had to send them back and resolved to do it ourselves.

Along about August, some of the elves became interested in the battle down in the United States over gay marriage, particularly the campaign in California. The elves' gay caucus said they wanted to be able to marry too. So they called a big meeting to petition Mr. C. to institute gay marriage.

"But you're all men, er, male," said Mr. C. "And formal marriage has always been just for opposite sex partners-men and women. So I don't see how you can officially get married." "But why are we limited by tradition?" the spokes-elf asked "Well," Mr. C. replied, "marriage is essentially about reproduction-the fact that men and women have children. You all don't have children."

The spokes-elf didn't say a word. He just stared very hard at Mr. C. Then he looked over at me, then back at Mr. C. It was so quiet in the meeting hall you could hear a pin drop. I could hear the wheels turning in Mr. C's head. Finally he said quietly, "Oh." Then he held out his hand to me and I walked over and took it in mine. "Well," Mr. C. said, "I guess if Mrs. C and I are good enough for marriage, you all are too. Let's do it."

There was a big cheer from the assembled elves and I'll confess that I had a tear in my eye. Mr. C is sometimes a little slow on these social issues-his life is so wrapped up in toys-but he almost always comes to the right position eventually. The elves picked him up and carried him around on their little shoulders. And so another crisis was averted.

Well, the rest of the year went smoothly, if rather busily. And so I close, wishing you and yours a merry Christmas and the best from all of us.

Mr. and Mrs. S. Claus

It's not surprising that Sean Penn, thanks to his star turn as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's biopic Milk, is becoming a hero to gays. His performance is moving and, judging by the archival film footage, flawless; Penn simultaneously renders Milk as a figure of historic importance and a vulnerable individual with a sparkling sense of humor. Aside from the acting prizes he will surely win (and deservingly), Penn is likely to earn himself the iconic status of "straight ally," a heterosexual who goes out of his way to take a stand for gay rights and is thus showered with praise from gays. A GLAAD Media Award, honors from the Human Rights Campaign, and a slew of prizes from other prominent gay rights organizations are only a matter of time.

Which is a shame, because Penn's political activism, irrespective of his views on gay rights, negates the values for which a movement based upon individual freedom must stand.

The same week that Milk premiered in theaters, The Nation published a cover story by Penn based on interviews he conducted recently with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro, the dictators of Venezuela and Cuba respectively. The article is a love letter to the two men, defending them against all manner of Western "propaganda." It hearkens back to the notorious dispatches penned by Westerners fresh from the Soviet Union who reported on the amazing progress of the workers' paradise. These worshipful epistles, often published in The Nation, neglected to mention anything about the gulag, the "disappearance" of political dissidents, the Ukrainian famine, or any other such inconvenient truths about communism. Lenin termed the individuals who delivered these apologetics "useful idiots," and Penn and his enablers are nothing if not that.

Penn traveled to the region with the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, and while the loquacious Chavez was happy to entertain both men, the reclusive Castro was a harder get. Penn's long-standing defense of the communist regime in Cuba, however, must have endeared him to the Castro brothers, as Raul decided to grant an interview only with the actor. The import of a communist dictator purposely deciding to sit for an interview with Penn and not Hitchens, who would have been less - how to put it? - deferential in his line of questioning, was apparently lost on the movie star and his readers. Reporting on his dinnertime conversation, Penn dutifully made all the standard arguments in defense of the Cuban regime, from pointing out that the Communist Party would win 80% of the vote in an open election to morally equating the United States' Guantanamo Bay prison to Cuban jails that house the Castro brothers' political enemies.

It's only in the closing moments of his otherwise adulatory, seven-hour interview that Penn bothers to ask about human rights abuses on the island, and just the "allegations" of abuses at that. The lack of interest in individual liberty, hardly surprising for a far-left fellow traveler like Penn, is nonetheless ironic given the Cuban regime's treatment of gay people, a subject that one suspects Penn might have some interest in given his critically acclaimed performance in Milk. Not long after the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro ordered the internment of gay people in prison labor camps, where they were murdered or worked to death for their "counterrevolutionary tendencies."

Over the gate of one of these camps were the words "Work Will Make Men Out of You," an eerie homage to the welcome sign at Auschwitz instructing Jews on their way to the gas chambers that "Work Will Make You Free." (The plight of gays in the Cuban revolution is movingly told in the novel Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas, made into a film starring Javier Bardem. Playing a gay character in a film that has both an antitotalitarian and pro-gay message, Bardem is an "ally" less morally compromised than Penn.) In the early years of the regime, Raul Castro was notorious for ordering the summary execution of its opponents, including people whose only crime was their homosexuality. This is the man with whom Penn was "in stitches" knocking back glasses of red wine.

While homosexuality has since been decriminalized in Cuba, the communist government bans gay organizations, as it does any organization critical of the regime.

"There isn't a single individual that is taken seriously in the human rights community - whether you're talking about Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or Freedom House - that would describe the Castro brothers and their regime as anything other than a police state run by thugs and murderers," says Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, which focuses on Latin America. "That Sean Penn would be honored by anyone, let alone the gay community, for having stood by a dictator that put gays into concentration camps is mind-boggling."

Penn's credibility as an effective advocate for gay rights is also weakened by the generally illiberal policies of the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes. Chavez, in spite of Penn's apologetics to the contrary, is no democrat; the record of his rule is unmistakably authoritarian. The latest State Department human rights report cites the following government infringements in just the past few years: "unlawful killings; disappearances reportedly involving security forces; torture and abuse of detainees; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detentions; a corrupt, inefficient, and politicized judicial system characterized by trial delays, impunity, and violations of due process; searches without warrants of private homes; official intimidation and attacks on the independent media; government-promoted anti-Semitism; widespread corruption at all levels of government; violence against women; trafficking in persons; and restrictions on workers' right of association."

Chavez has also cavorted on the world stage with individuals like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, trying to form a bloc of third-world, authoritarian regimes to stand in opposition to the West. Penn, playing the role of the apparatchik almost as well as he did the former San Francisco supervisor, doesn't bother to ask Chavez about any of these manifold abuses or associations, preferring to repeat without skepticism the crazed dictator's claim that the United States is plotting an invasion of his country. "It's true, Chavez may not be a good man," Penn declares. "But he may well be a great one."

That Penn would write an homage to Latin American caudillos is nothing new, as both he and The Nation have sung the praises of anti-American dictators for quite some time. Indeed, Penn fancies himself something of a foreign correspondent.

In December 2002 he traveled to Baghdad to meet with cronies of Saddam Hussein - the killer of hundreds of thousands, if not over a million people - to defend the Ba'athist regime against impending war. Penn hobnobbed with notorious individuals like Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister infamous as the public face of the Hussein regime, and pleaded on their behalf. This is not to condemn the notion of antiwar activism, but there were principled arguments to be made against the Iraq War and means of arguing against it that didn't require the knowing exploitation of oneself as a propaganda tool for a totalitarian regime. While Penn nary has a word of criticism about genuine tyrants and terrorists, last year he delivered a speech naming senior American government officials as "villainously and criminally obscene people" (Chavez proudly read the letter on state television).

Why should anyone care about an actor's politics? The bloviations of Hollywood stars tend to be ignorant and irrelevant to those interested in serious debate about the issues of the day, but Penn's grandstanding matters due to both his role in Milk and the film's political relevance in the context of Proposition 8 and the nationwide campaign for gay rights. Gay rights are human rights, as Milk said, and Penn discredits both when he rationalizes illiberal ideologies as "anti-imperialist" and rushes to the defense of thugs who posture as victims of the West. Penn's ignoble political side projects taint a noble cause.