IGF CultureWatch

A year ago at this time there were high hopes among gay activists for the new Democratic Congress. They were going to pass legislation expanding gay rights and eliminating discrimination that had long been blocked by the Republicans in power since 1995. Even if Bush vetoed new gay-rights legislation, the Democrats would at least put him on the defensive about it and build momentum for the day when the Democrats took the White House. All of this would be payback for the huge amount of time, energy, and money that gay Americans - their third most loyal voting constituency after blacks and Jews - had given the Democrats.

That was then.

At the midpoint of this Congress, it's not looking very good. Not one piece of pro-gay legislation has even reached the president's desk.

Let's look in more detail at just how far short the Democrats have fallen. In a column one year ago, I proposed a 100-point scorecard based on four key issues and suggested how to evaluate the total:

75-100 points: Never vote for another Republican.
50-74 points: Democrats are worth our first-born children.
30-49 points: Democrats are willing to fight for gay equality, at some political risk.
10-29 points: Democrats will do the minimum necessary to mollify gays.
0-9 points: Democrats know they can take gays for granted.

Now here are the four issues and how things are looking so far:

(1) Federal recognition of gay relationships (worth up to 50 points): Congress has done nothing to eliminate or modify the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It has also done nothing to give spousal benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees. Not only has no vote been taken on proposals to do these things, there have not even been hearings on them. While the Democratic presidential candidates have talked about such things, we learned painfully from the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton that talk is very cheap.

Points for the Democrats: 0.

(2) Gays in the military (worth up to 30 points): Congress has done nothing to eliminate or modify the ban on gays in the military, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Clinton in 1993. There have been no hearings on the subject, either, despite a stream of military leaders coming out against the policy and a wartime decline in anti-gay discharges. Again, the Democratic presidential candidates all oppose DADT on paper, but this counts for nothing until something is actually done.

Points for the Democrats: 0.

(3) ENDA (worth up to 15 points): The Employment Non-Discrimination Act passed the House, with 35 Republicans providing the necessary margin for passage. That first-ever triumph for a gay-rights bill was thanks largely to the leadership of Barney Frank, who fended off efforts by left-wing gay groups to kill the bill because it did not include explicit protection for transgendered people. Senator Ted Kennedy has promised to introduce the bill in the Senate, but so far no action has been taken or scheduled. It's unclear whether the bill will even get a vote in the Senate this year.

Points for the Democrats: 5.

(4) Hate crimes legislation (worth up to 5 points): This is the least important of the four issues. There's no evidence hate crimes laws actually deter hate crimes, but a federal law would have some symbolic value. Yet even that seems unlikely to come out of this Congress. Both the House and the Senate have passed hate-crimes legislation, but have waffled on how to send the bill to President Bush for his signature or veto. An effort to send the bill to Bush as part of a larger defense spending authorization foundered when anti-war liberal Democrats opposed the spending.

Points for the Democrats: 3.

By my scorecard, the Democrats have earned just 8 out of a possible 100 points at mid-term, which means that so far at least they're taking gay support entirely for granted. While they still have a few months to go, it seems unlikely they'll accomplish much in an election year when they have to worry about reelection and are likely to let gay rights take a seat even further back on the bus.

The Democrats' anemic performance so far does not necessarily mean you should vote for Republicans this November. If you support the Democrats' views on taxes, the Iraq war, national healthcare, and other issues, you're likely to back them even if they get nothing more done on gay rights.

But the Democrats' failure to produce does liberate voters who intensely support gay rights but disagree with the Democrats on other important issues. Many of these voters, subordinating their strong feelings about non-gay issues, have supported Democrats in the past because they believed the Democrats would actually accomplish something positive for gay rights.

Now these voters will find it harder to support a Democrat they would otherwise oppose just because the candidate says she supports civil unions, employment protection, ending the military ban, and the like. For them, voting Republican is not a strategy to punish the Democrats for their faithlessness on gay issues. It's a vote of principle.

Soothing words are nice, and the Democrats excel at such kindnesses. But results matter much more. On this, so far at least, they're failing.

What a non-issue civil unions are turning out to be.

I fully expected that the GOP candidates would leverage New Hampshire's newly enacted civil union law to remind voters that only they will protect the traditional family. I'm sure there were comments made at rallies and in restaurants that I didn't hear and that reporters chose to ignore. But short of Mike Huckabee's statement in the ABC/WMUR/Facebook debate that he and Obama likely held different positions on same-sex marriage, fulminations against lesbian and gay couples simply failed to materialize.

In point of fact, the positions of Huckabee and Obama are much closer than one may realize - no viable candidate for the White House supports same-sex marriage - but consider what the silence in New Hampshire portends. Just a little more than a week before the Jan. 8 primaries, the local papers were abuzz with news of the law taking effect. The steps of the capitol became the Dixville Notch for gay couples as three dozen of them said their "I do's" before family, friends and the media (and at least one cranky protester from Maine) at midnight on New Year's Day. Projections from those in the know suggest that over 3,500 couples will take advantage of the new law in the first year alone. That ain't chump change.

Meanwhile, the local GOP opposition isn't even trying to overturn the law. At present, it hopes to repeal the provision that says New Hampshire will recognize out-of-state civil unions. News flash: Not gonna happen. Gay Vermonters who work in the Granite State are tired of being legal strangers every time we head east across the Connecticut River, and our allies in New Hampshire will rally for us. Besides, four states now have civil unions: Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey and New Hampshire. Only one has same-sex marriage (Massachusetts.). The trend line says that more and more states will enact civil union laws, and just as in New Hampshire, more and more people will have no objection when that day comes.

Now fast-forward to the spring of 2009. Imagine the next president proclaiming that the federal benefits that attend civil marriage (well over 1,100) would be extended by executive order to all federal employees whose relationships have been registered in one of the 50 states. And imagine that president calling upon Congress to pass legislation to extend those benefits to all couples so registered.

I'm deliberately avoiding the M-word here because for years now I've argued that we as a nation need to divorce the legal benefits of marriage from the religious connotations of the word. I've argued that civil unions need to be available to all. And the collective shrug seen in New Hampshire suggests that a move in that direction is possible, both on a statewide and on a federal level.

After all, most of us intuitively grasp the distinction between a license filed away in a musty vault somewhere and the moment enacted before witnesses where two people wed their lives to each other. The latter, not the former, constitutes marriage. The rest is paperwork.

I do not discount the symbolic important the M-word has for many in our world today, which is why I'm happy to report that people routinely refer to my partner and I (neither one of us likes the word "husband") as married. The state cannot withhold the word or the ceremonial rites of marriage.

The legal rights of marriage, in contrast, are held exclusively by the state. Let's keep prying those rights free from the word itself. One of the fastest ways we can do that is to elect a president who can help make this distinction clearer, who respects all couples for their intrinsic worth and sees their genuine need for the protection of their relationships that only the law can afford. And when the GOP nominee starts squawking about civil unions on the state and federal level, say: You had your chance to speak up in New Hampshire. It's time for you now and forever to hold your peace.

College freshmen continued their decade-old upward trend of support for gay marriage in fall 2007, according to a mammoth annual survey of more than 270,000 freshmen at 356 colleges and universities and just released by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles.

One year earlier, in fall 2006, 61.2 percent of college freshmen supported "legal marital status" for gay and lesbian couples. By fall 2007 that percentage had risen by 2.3 percentage points to 63.5 percent.

When the question was first asked in 1997, just 50.9 percent of freshmen supported "legal marital status" for gays. Except for a downward blip in 2004 prompted in part by President George W. Bush's advocacy of a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage, the percentage of support has risen at an average rate of slightly over 1 percentage point per year.

The language "legal marital status" was chosen to refer only to civil unions or civil marriage and avoid the issue of whether churches should offer religious marriage ceremonies.

The survey also asked whether "it is important to have laws prohibiting homosexual relationships." Support for such laws fell from 25.6 percent in fall 2006 to 24.3 percent in fall 2007, a drop of 1.3 percentage points.

When that question was first asked in 1976, freshman support for such laws stood at 43.6 percent, so anti-gay attitudes have fallen nearly 20 points in 30 years. Support for anti-gay laws rose briefly during the peak years of the AIDS crisis in 1986 and 1987, but as public anxiety subsided support resumed a steady decline.

The term "homosexual relationships" is ambiguous, however. In 1976 it clearly referred to sodomy laws since legal gay marriage was not a public issue. But now that gay marriage is an issue, some students may take the term to refer to "defense of marriage" laws limiting marriage to a man and a woman. If so, the continued decline in support for such laws is especially welcome news.

As in past years, women were far more gay-supportive than men. More than seven out of ten freshman women (70.3 percent) thought that gays should have the right to legal marital status. Among freshman men a smaller 55.3 percent thought gays should have that right.

Similarly, only 18.1 percent of freshman women-fewer than one out of five-approved of laws prohibiting homosexual behavior, while 31.8 percent of freshman men approved of such laws. Still, this was the first year that support among men fell below one-third.

People have speculated about the reason for male/female differences in attitudes. But two possibilities stand out. When the term homosexual is used, most people probably think of male homosexuals. Most heterosexual men are offended by femininity in other men, so to the extent that gay men are still conceived to be feminine, they tend to be anti-gay. By contrast, most heterosexual women do not seem to be bother by male femininity.

The other possibility is that attitudes toward gay men are influenced by focusing on their sexual behavior, so what has been called the "yuck factor" that affects many male heterosexuals when they think of gay sex comes into play and contaminates their public policy views.

The only obvious way to counter both is for more heterosexuals to get to know gays as individuals, which would reduce their tendency to think of gays' behavior in the abstract.

The freshman survey is designed primarily to elicit information about the freshmen's family and academic background and their college and career plans. But it does contain a small unit asking freshmen whether they agree or disagree with statements about more than a dozen public issues, of which the questions about gay marriage and sodomy laws are a part.

On other issues of potential interest, 56.9 percent support legal abortion; 35.1 percent oppose capital punishment; decriminalized marijuana drew 38.2 percent approval; 25.8 percent supported raising taxes to reduce the federal deficit; only 31.4 percent think military spending should be increased; and 66.2 percent think that the U.S. military should remain all-volunteer.

Thirty-two percent of the freshmen described themselves as "liberal" or "far left," an increase over last year of 1 point, while the percentage describing themselves as "conservative" or "far right" fell by a similar 1 point to 24.6 percent. The rest described themselves as "middle of the road." There was no option offered for "libertarian" (socially liberal, free-market advocate).

And finally, exactly 25 percent described themselves as "Born-Again Christian" and 9.8 percent as "Evangelical." But more than one-fifth (21.4 percent) described themselves as having "no religious preference," an all-time high for that category. There was no option offered for "atheist" or "agnostic."