Purple California

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An interesting piece is posted at the Hoover Institution website about how California's Republican party has drifted off the centrist track but the state's GOP voters haven't. Morris P. Fiorina and Samuel J. Abrams write:

[There's been] a change in the image of the California Republican Party and a change in the kind of candidate it nominates. A generation ago, it was a pragmatic, broad-based party that emphasized issues such as taxes and spending of concern to the broad middle of the electorate (and even to many on either side). It was a conservative party when conservative was defined largely in economic terms-low taxes, efficient public services, and limited government. Today, it is an ideological, narrowly based party that defines its conservatism by social and cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage that are of only secondary concern to most Californians. Moreover, most Californians take more liberal views on such issues than do California Republican activists.

The middle of the road in California runs through the economically conservative but socially tolerant quadrant of the ideological space.

There's much food for thought here, as the GOP faces a crossroads after Rev. Huckabee's win in Iowa's benighted caucuses.

More. Blogger Rick Sincere notes the passing of former Wisconsin governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus (1926-2008), a Republican who in 1982 signed the nation's first statewide gay anti-discrimination law, saying on that occasion:

"It is a fundamental tenet of the Republican Party that government ought not intrude in the private lives of individuals where no state purpose is served, and there is nothing more private or intimate than who you live with and who you love."

Rick comments that:

[Gov. Dreyfus] represented a Republican Party that held strong to its libertarian roots: the Republican Party of Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, not the Republican Party of Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney (unless you mean the pre-2008 election cycle Mitt Romney). Dreyfus maintained his position about government intrusiveness through the rest of his life: He actively opposed the 2006 anti-gay-marriage amendment that was put on the ballot in Wisconsin. His side, unfortunately, did not prevail.

Let's hope that in the year ahead, the GOP finds its way back to the future.

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The Age of the Bachelor

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I just finished reading an engrossing book titled "The Age of the Bachelor" by Howard Chudacoff. It details the development of a specifically bachelor-oriented culture in major U. S. cities between 1880 and 1930, suggesting why it developed, how extensive it was, and what institutions grew up to service its needs.

Some of the reasons for its development include the rise in the average age of marriage, the rapid increase in immigration, and the difficulty many men working low wage jobs would have had supporting a family. But more important was the development of institutions to meet the needs of single men for meals, housing, companionship and entertainment--thus making it possible for increasing numbers of men to lead a comfortable and satisfying life without any need for marriage.

The extensive array of primarily male institutions that developed or expanded to meet bachelors' living and socializing needs included rooming houses, cafes, saloons, barbershops (given the lack of hot water for shaving in most rooming houses), pool halls, tailor shops, bathhouses (no hot water for bathing either), all-male social clubs and fraternal organizations (Elks, Odd Fellows), vaudeville theaters and music halls, participant and spectator sports, and "red-light districts."

The newly developed YMCAs might offer any or all of the following amenities: rooms for rent, cafeteria and lunch counter, barbershop, gym, swimming pool, shoeshine stand, telephones, employment service, laundry room, game room, newsstand, and even entertainment in the evenings.

There are only a few incidental mentions of gay men in the book, but it seems obvious that some of those bachelors (15 to 20 percent?) were gay and that bachelor culture enabled gay men to meet one another and explore their lives with a new freedom. In some ways the book can serve as a prologue to George Chauncey's "Gay New York"--and gay Boston, gay Chicago, and other major cities where bachelor culture created the conditions for the first wave of gay community.

For instance, not only did primarily bachelor social institutions enable gay men to find one another more easily, but some rooming houses and YMCAs allowed residents to take guests to their rooms. Some bathhouses turned a blind eye to patrons who engaged in sex and some bathhouse employees must have been available for "massages." And there must have been young gay or bisexual men in any of these environments who were willing to engage in sex for a small fee. For much of this we have to make educated guesses but Chudacoff's book gives us the material to do that.

Although modern technology and a developed economy have enabled today's bachelors to have at home conveniences (telephones, hot water, spectator sports) that were once available only publicly, it is still fascinating to see how many of the social and entertainment institutions of modern singles culture and our gay culture have preserved or replicated in one form or another institutions developed around the turn of the century.

"The Age of the Bachelor" is not a new book. It was published in 1999, so you won't see it listed in any of those best books of 2007 or whenever. But not every good book gets the attention it deserves when it is published. This is particularly true of academic books, which tend to survive--if at all--as footnotes in other books. Yet when you seek them out they can turn out to be highly informative in ways you did not expect.

I've run across several other books in the past year, whether gay-specific or not, that I found worthwhile reading. Among them:

Rictor Norton, "The Myth of the Modern Homosexual" (1997). The title refers to the modern "social constructionist" myth that no men or women had a homosexual consciousness until the late 19th century when the word "homosexual" was coined. Drawing on copious historical research tracing self-understood homosexuals back through the centuries, Norton destroys that myth and restores gay history to its full legitimacy. He also shows how flimsy were the arguments advanced to support the myth.

David M. Friedman, "A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis" (2001). Friedman wittily traces the various ways the male member has been viewed in different times and cultures, including religious, anthropological, psychoanalytic, scientific and feminist approaches, and illustrates how the penis has been symbolized (battering ram, measuring stick, cigar, gear shift) over the years.

Michael Sherry, "Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy" (2007). Sherry details the increasing number of gay creative artists in the fields of music, theater, and literature in the 1950s and the growth of a homophobic reaction against them. Critics charged them with shallowness, insincerity, inauthenticity and a distorted view of the world. A fascinating recovery of a dismal episode in recent American history.

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Speaking Truth

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I was pleased to read that Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is standing up for the U.S. Episcopal church, saying it has been unfairly singled out for criticism because it is honest about consecrating gay bishops:

Jefferts Schori told BBC Radio 4's PM program that the church, which is the Anglican body in the U.S., is far from the only Anglican province that has a bishop with a same-sex partner. In 2003, Episcopalians elected the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, causing an uproar that has pushed the Anglican family toward a split.

"He is certainly not alone in being a gay bishop; he's certainly not alone in being a gay partnered bishop," Jefferts Schori said in an interview broadcast Tuesday. "He is alone in being the only gay partnered bishop who's open about that status."

The Anglican Communion's leadership has all but capitulated to its African churches of hate in the name of "unity" as an overriding and unquestionable value. The best thing Schori could do is support full independence for the U.S. church and break definitively with Britain once and for all. How about launching such as campaign around, say, July 4?

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The Perils of Ron Paul

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The 2008 presidential primaries and caucuses loom, so what's a gay Republican to do? For many, the answer has been to support Ron Paul. He's not going to win any primaries, but a vote for him could be thought a protest against the theocratic tendencies of the party. It could also be a vote for libertarian principle, which appeals to some. Yet while some of Paul's views are superficially appealing, he's a very bad choice.

Let's start with what's attractive about Paul. First, he's not the other GOP candidates. With the exception of Sen. John McCain, they're about as politically and ideologically unlovely a lot as one can imagine. They're nativist and anti-evolution. Several are running for National Pastor instead of president.

On gay issues, they're as bad as we've ever had. The two candidates with gay-friendly records -- Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney -- have abandoned their erstwhile principles to cozy up to religious conservatives.

All of them support Don't Ask, Don't Tell. All, except McCain, support some kind of anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment. Giuliani, who initially opposed any amendment, has since wobbled.

In walks Ron Paul, formerly a practicing doctor, promising to limit government and sticking by his principles. He would abolish the IRS, the income tax system, and the departments of Education, Energy, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services. He would eliminate Medicare and end student loans for education. He would even get government out of the medical licensing business. As he put it in an interview with Google, this means your neighbor could dispense medications.

Part of this is intriguing. If we were starting the world over again, it might make sense to do a lot of things very differently from the way we do them now.

But we are not at liberty to begin the world anew. Taken together, Dr. Paul's radical prescriptions would entail a massive disruption of life in the United States as we know it. Millions of elderly Americans depend on Medicare for basic medical needs. Student loans have given a college education to millions of middle- and lower-income students whose financial needs were not met by private markets. Every person a pharmacist? I'm sorry, but that's just loony. It's also typically reckless of Paul.

He wants the U.S. to quit the United Nations and withdraw from just about every important treaty it has entered. This sort of thing gets applause from conspiracy theorists who think U.S. "sovereignty" is endangered, but it's stupid foreign policy.

He says he supports free trade, but opposes the agreements that have made trade freer.

The best that could be said about a Paul presidency is that almost nothing he believes would become law. We might as well elect Daffy Duck.

But isn't Paul the best of the Republicans on gay issues?

Paul's opposition to a federal marriage amendment is welcome. But he voted for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as heterosexual for federal purposes. DOMA substantially reduced the legal significance of marriage even for same-sex couples in states where their unions might be permitted. In contrast to the federal marriage amendment, which has no chance of passing, DOMA has done actual harm to gay families.

In an interview with ABC's John Stossel, Paul said that he supports gay marriage. Then he explained what he meant: "Sure, they can do whatever they want and they can call it whatever they want, just so they don't expect to impose their relationship on somebody else. They can't make me, personally, accept what they do, but they can do whatever they want."

There's more than a whiff of homophobia in this. It's akin to, "They have a right to their disgusting behavior."

More importantly, it's not clear what he means by saying gay couples can call their relationships "whatever they want." If he means that gay couples can contract for certain legal rights and call what results a "marriage," that's nothing new. And full legal marriage "imposes" on people in all kinds of ways since married couples have state-granted rights and benefits others don't have.

Paul's answer to this is to abolish marriage as it exists, to "privatize" it. State-sponsored marriage is bound up in our law at all levels of government. Ending state involvement in it is has as little public support as any imaginable policy proposal. So it's naive at best and a cynical dodge at worst to offer gay families "privatized" marriage as the answer to the practical problems they face right now.

Paul says citizens should be able to serve in the military as long as their sexuality is not "disruptive." That suggests he'd apply the same standard to heterosexuals and homosexuals in uniform. But the whole point of opposition to gays in the military is the claim that homosexuality itself degrades unit moral and cohesion. Paul has had nothing to say about this.

Personally, I'd vote for McCain. While I disagree with him on a few things, including campaign finance regulation, he's the candidate in the GOP field with the most potential to be a good president. He has the integrity, the life experience, and the national-security credentials for it. Alone among the Democratic and Republican candidates, he has the credibility with military leaders to end or at least to weaken DADT, if he decided to do that. The others are all talk on the issue.

A vote for Paul, on the other hand, is a flight from responsibility. He is too ideologically hard and pure to be president. A conscientious voter should think harder about the serious choices.

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The Dog that Didn’t Bark.

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My colleague Jon Rauch reminds me that at the end of August an Iowa state judge ruled that the Hawkeye state's constitution required marriage equality for same-sex couples, a decision that was immediately stayed pending the resolution of an appeal to the Iowa supreme court.

So, why hasn't same-sex marriage become an issue in the red-hot caucus race? As Jon said to me, "you'd have thought Republicans would be jumping all over this."

Seems that the gay marriage card is no longer seen as red meat to incite GOP voters, at least in Iowa-certainly a good sign, especially if it holds up nationally.

More. Similarly, New Hampshire's new civil union law just took effect, a week before the first presidential primary. Again, marriage equality hasn't been much of an issue there for the GOP contenders, although last April Giuliani, no doubt expecting a backlash, felt compelled to say that the Granite state had gone too far. Given the lack of heat that marriage equality has generated (so far), that seems to be a capitulation to the right that wasn't necessary, and indeed counter-productive for Rudy as it undercut his attacks on Romeny as a flip-flopper. If the flipper fits…

Tangentially, "One of the benefits of marriage is divorce," which presents major hardships, financial and otherwise, for same-sex couples. That's due in no small part to the fact that the federal government and many states look at gays who were married or civil unionized elsewhere as legal strangers.

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It’s Not Easy Being Straight

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An email discussion list I'm on alerted me to this posting from Anthony Bradley's Christian-themed (but not religious right) blog. Are things really this bad for heterosexual men? Bradley paints a depressing picture. Here's an excerpt:

Families like the Keatons and the Cosbys (like the Cleavers and Nelsons of a previous generation) were presented as the pinnacle and fullest expression of life on earth. This is what you want fellas, a beautiful wife, a few kids, a nice house, a good job...then comes retirement, grandchildren and you die a fulfilled man. Ahh, what a life!

Guess what? Lots of guys are finding out the hard way that in the real world having the perfect "American family" image is the rare exception.

Here's the truth: lots of guys I know are in completely miserable marriages, many (I mean MANY) wives have committed adultery, kids have chronic illnesses, guys hate their jobs are stuck because of debt, divorced (even though they swore they were not going to do what their parents did by splitting up), many wives want to leave their husbands because they don't make enough money, lots of "great guys" never marry, many can't get over addictions because after praying for 12-15 years they've discovered that it "doesn't work," depression, dealing with their own sexual abuse at a late age, mulling over a very long list of regrets, wanting to pack it all up and go "into the wild," your daughter has a reputation for being a "slut," your son's already a pot head, etc.

And for guys that I talk to who aren't Christians or part of any religious tradition some of the issues are worse than these.

I know, this is not a cheery Yule Time/New Year's message. But it did strike me that gay people, as do other minorities, sometimes focus a bit too exclusively on our own travails and challenges (as if, say, straight people are the "haves" and we are the "have nots"). There's some truth to this perception, especially in terms of government discrimination and legal inequality. But we should always remember that what unites gay and straight men (as men), and gay and straight women, and all of us together, is the shared challenges of the human predicament.

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What Baby Bust?

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"Fertility Rate in USA on Upswing," says today's lead story in USA Today. Whereas "most industrialized nations...are struggling with low birthrates," America has hit the replacement rate.

What does this have to do with gay marriage? Nothing, really. But one recurring charge against gay marriage is that it reinforces, or at least reflects, an adult-centered view of marriage which pushes children aside - so people have fewer of them. Or something like that. The bottom line is that gay marriage gets blamed for the European baby bust.

Whatever has caused Europe's low fertility, I don't think it's gay marriage (which only a few countries have, and which low-fertility Japan, for example, does not have). But never mind: Whatever is going on in Europe isn't going on here. America is a lot more gay-friendly today than in the past, and it's a lot more receptive to same-sex couples and unions. And neither of those changes is pushing procreation out of the picture.

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The Religious Right Strikes Back

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Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister with close ties to anti-gay religious conservative activists, has surged into a virtual tie with front-runner Rudy Giuliani in the Republican presidential race, just two weeks before the first contest, according to a new Reuters/Zogby poll.

Last month, conservative columnist Johah Goldberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times that:

A devout social conservative on issues such as abortion, school prayer, homosexuality and evolution, Huckabee is a populist on economics, a fad-follower on the environment and an all-around do-gooder who believes that the biblical obligation to do "good works" extends to using government-and your tax dollars-to bring us closer to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

As others have already said, the rise of a socially intolerant, big-spending "populist" was always the fear that hovered over small-government, low-tax economic libertarians regarding the Republican party's strategy of aligning religious conservatives with free marketers. The hope was one day to see a socially tolerant (and gay inclusive) economic conservative (someone not too far from Giuliani, perhaps) emerge as the standard-bearer. The nightmare was/is Rev. Mike, the amiable enemy of liberty.

More. Be afraid: Huckabee and the Christian Reconstructionists.

And worse. He raised a son who is a dog torturer. But hey, he's got that old time religion, so let's make him president, say the Republicans of Iowa.

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IGF Needs Your Support

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Thanks, and happy holiday to all IGF's readers, commenters, and friends.

-- The editors, volunteers, and independent voices of IGF

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Expediency Trumps Discrimination,
for Now

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According to a new report by CBS's 60 Minutes, the military's enforcement of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (or, as I prefer, "Lie and Hide") has plummeted:

Discharges of gay soldiers have dropped dramatically since the Afghan and Iraq wars began, from 1,200 a year in 2001 to barely 600 now. With the military struggling to recruit and retain soldiers, gay soldiers claim that commanders are reluctant to discharge critical personnel in the middle of a war.

So much for the argument that gays must be drummed out to preserve the "unit cohesion" of our combat forces.

Addendum. Commenter John S. shares:

"Don't ask, don't tell" equals "Lie and Hide"... I like it. It is very obviously true, and the more airtime this particular turn of phrase receives, the more it will chip away at the "Don't ask, don't tell" mentality. Can I have your permission to use "Lie and Hide" with everybody I know?

But of course, and thanks.

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