A Sharp Rebuke to Military Opponents in Gay-Rights Clothing.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that Congress was within its authority to withhold federal funding from law schools that discriminate against military recruiters. That's a stunning defeat for a case brought by "progressive" law professors backed by some gay student groups and other LGBT activists, all of whom thought private institutions could demand government funding without suffering government restrictions. (The gist of the matter was, superficially, that the military discriminates against gays; the more pertinent matter was liberal academia's hostility toward all things military.)

Not only was this fight terrible PR for the cause of gays in the military (aligning the gay struggle with a hodge-podge of leftie military haters), but even the most liberal Justices found the argument without merit. In fact, if the anti-militarists had prevailed, it would have called into question the government's ability to insist that (as of now) those that receive federal funding don't discriminate based on race, and (let's hope in the future) that they don't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

Sometimes, you have to wonder what "progressives" are thinking (giving them the benefit of the doubt that they're thinking at all).

More. I've revised the above to clarify that left-leaning law professors brought the actual suit. Here, George Will opines on how "The institutional vanity and intellectual slovenliness of America's campus-based intelligentsia have made academia more peripheral to civic life than at any time since the 19th century."

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Quick Oscar Impressions (with Several Follow-Ups).

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"Crash" is a film panoramic of racism in LA including the entertainment industry, with some good performances, yet hardly groundbreaking in content or style. But that's show biz. At least "Brokeback Mountain" came out with three awards, including adapted screenplay and director, with moving speeches by director Ang Lee and scripters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. I'm also glad Annie Proulx was there to share in the acclaim.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's impression of Truman Capote was, sorry to say, way down on my list (I'd have certainly gone with either Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix). And whereas Reese Witherspoon appropriately paid homage to Johnny and June Cash in her best actress speech, Hoffman (as at the Golden Globes) could find not one word to say about the brilliant but tortured gay man whose life he rode to Oscar gold. Really, I'm quite disgusted by him.

George Clooney was more than a bit condescending in his defense of Hollywood's being "out of touch" with America (because tinsel town, it seems, exists on a higher moral plane). That's the attitude that plays well in the blue states but ensures liberals won't be making inroads in the red states.

Jon Stewart, by the way, was a lot better than I had expected. Not exactly exciting , but occasionally clever and not (like Whoopi Goldberg) politically insufferable.

More. Reader "Jessup" writes:

Crash was the safe liberal choice-guilty Hollywood navel-gazing about how racist they all are in LA and in "the industry." Few people bothered to see it.

Brokeback is a modern classic.

...Steve was right; Hollywood is homophobic, and as he said before, they only like their queers when they have plenty of "swish." Absolutely. Steve don't be afraid to speak the truth!

Thanks for saying it for me.

Still more. Tom Shales writes in the Washington Post:

Film buffs and the politically minded, meanwhile, will be arguing this morning about wither the Best Picture Oscar to "Crash" was really for the film's merit or just a copout by the Motion Picture Academy so it wouldn't have to give the prize to "Brokeback Mountain," a movie about two cowboys who fall reluctantly but passionately in love."

"Mountain" won the major awards leading up to Best Picture....But the Academy ran out of love for the film at that point, making "Crash" the suprise winner.

And here's Charles Krauthammer's comment about "Syriana," which seems applicable to "Crash" as well:

[Y]ou have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.

That about sums it up.

Ye gads, still more. Blogger Tim Hulsey shares his thoughts.

What strikes me about this nasty National Review poke at "Brokeback" is just how lame it is. When it comes to hate humor, the hard right is even less funny than the hard left.

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Left-Handed Desks and Same-Sex Marriages

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I have just completed a week's worth of same-sex marriage debates with Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family. During the debates, Stanton made an excellent case in favor of traditional heterosexual marriage. I really mean that.

What he did not do-what he utterly failed to do-was to make a case AGAINST same-sex marriage. There's a difference, and it's crucial.

As I've said repeatedly, extending marriage to gays does not mean taking it away from straights. It's not as if there are a limited number of marriage licenses, such that once they're gone, they're gone.

So I have no problem joining Glenn is saying hooray for heterosexual marriage, an imperfect but extremely valuable institution. I love heterosexuals. My parents were heterosexual (still are). Some of my best friends are heterosexual. I support their marriages and wish them all the best.

All I ask is that they give me the same support. This is not a zero-sum game.

Consider an analogy: most school classrooms have both right-handed desks and left-handed desks. Now imagine a time before left-handed desks. A reformer then might have argued, "Hey, right-handed desks are great. But not everyone is right-handed. Left-handed desks would make life better for left-handed people; their classroom experience would be more productive, and in the long run, their increased productivity would benefit everyone, left-handed and right-handed alike." Sounds like a strong argument for left-handed desks.

Now, imagine an opponent responding, "But we've always had right-handed desks! Right-handed-desks have served society well. We obviously don't need left-handed desks; we've gotten along fine without them thus far. What's more, introducing them is an untested social experiment, one that could have serious repercussions for our children!"

Before you dismiss this comparison as silly, recall that left-handedness was once considered a sign of moral depravity, witchcraft, or worse. It's no accident that the word "sinister" matches the Latin word for "left." But that's not the point of the analogy.

Many of the arguments against same-sex marriage-including some of those offered by Glenn Stanton-commit the same fallacy as the response above. They rightly point to the many social benefits of heterosexual marriage, but they then wrongly infer that any other marriage arrangement must be bad. This is a non-sequitur.

Let me be clear on what I am not saying here. I am not saying that choosing a spouse is just like choosing a desk, or worse yet, that whether children are raised by mothers or fathers is somehow equivalent to whether they have right-handed desks, left-handed desks, or both. When I used the analogy during a debate last week, Stanton misread me to be saying just that. (In fairness to him, I should note that he was responding off-the-cuff.)

What I am saying is that we can recognize something to be good without inferring that any alternative must therefore be bad. Right-handed desks are good for most people, but they're not good for everyone. Similarly, heterosexual marriage is good for most people, but it's not good for everyone.

All analogies are imperfect. However, one of the differences between these two cases actually favors the case for same-sex marriage: any classroom can only have a limited number of desks, so left-handed desks mean less space for right-handed ones. By contrast, there are not a limited number of marriage licenses. Again, this is not a zero-sum game.

But what about the claim that allowing same-sex marriage would "redefine marriage for everyone"?

Nonsense. No one's wife is going to turn into a man just because we recognize marriage equality for gays. No one's husband is going to turn into a woman. Heterosexual marriages will go on being just as heterosexual.

What same-sex marriages would do is to acknowledge that society has an interest in supporting stable, committed unions for its non-heterosexual members. Those unions are good for gays and lesbians, but they're also good for society at large, since people in stable, committed unions are typically happier, more productive, and less likely to place demands on the public purse. It's a win-win situation.

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Camille Paglia Covers the Oscars.

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Love her or hate her, feisty cultural critic Camille Paglia (an out but never PC lesbian) is always provocative. She'll be commenting on the Oscars real-time over at Salon, here.

She's got to be better than watching the insufferable Jon Stewart.

Update. See item above for a reconsideration of Stewart. As for Camille's commentary with Cintra Wilson, it was rather catty and less than riveting, alas.

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Gays Men Take the Lead, But It’s Statistics, Not Conspiracy.

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After a number of years in which lesbians simultaneously held the top leadership spots in the major lesbigay+trans organizations, including HRC, NGLTF, GLAAD, and PFLAG, these groups now all have gay men at the helm, reports the Washington Blade.

That's really not surprising. In the pre-AIDS years, men led most of the emerging gay rights groups while women gravitated to feminist/lesbian rights efforts. AIDS changed everything, and women came to the "LGBT" forefront.

But as Paul Varnell noted in this column, surveys repeatedly show gay men outnumbering lesbians about two to one. For starters, in the 1950s Kinsey's often misinterpreted figures actually showed 4 percent of the surveyed men were exclusively homosexual vs. between 1% to 2% of women. In 1993, a team at the Harvard School of Public Health noted 6.2% of men and 3.6% of women reported a same-sex partner in the pervious five years.

And in 1994 a large National Opinion Research Center study found 9% of men and 4% of women engaged in at least some homosexual behavior since puberty; that 6.2% of men and 4.4% of women reported any same-sex attraction; and that 2.8% of men and 1.4% of women acknowledged a homosexual or bisexual identity.

So, despite differing methodologies (none without critics) and over the decades, these ratios seem to hold up. As Varnell concludes:

The statistics may never be as firm as we'd like, but by this point it's hard to deny a striking fact about sexual preference: Gay men outnumber gay women, by an apparently substantial margin.

Women will again take charge of many LGBT organizations as they cycle through leaders, but it shouldn't be unexpected that gay men, after such a dearth, now predominate. Unlike in the population at large, demanding equal representation between gay men and lesbians turns out not to be equitable at all.
--Stpehen H. Miller

More Recent Postings
02/26/06 - 03/05/06

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Oscar Politics Gets Dirty?

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Looks to me like media pickup of this story, accusing Brokeback Mountain's filmmakers of imperiling sheep and other critters, just as Oscar voting reached its crescendo, smacks of dirty politics in Hollywoodland. It's reminiscent of how the LA Times held its story on Schwarzenegger's derriere-pinching until the eve of the Calif. gubernatorial election, or how the tale of Bush's youthful DIU was released just as his race with Gore drew to a close.

And just watch the LGBT "two-feet-bad/four-feet-good" crowd scurrying onboard. Talk about sheep!

More. Not to beat a dead sheep, but the religious rightists have now picked up the story.

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Going Dutch on the Truth.

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Jon Rauch (who, among other things, is IGF's co-managing editor), dissects Stanley Kurtz's misuse of data to claim that same-sex marriage undermined traditional marriages in the Netherlands, leading to an increase in out-of-wedlock births. It gets technical, but you can read Jon's analysis first here, then a follow-up here, and a final retort here.

But the rank distortion on Kurtz's part really isn't surprising. As one of the comments to Jon's posting puts it, "The arguments against same-sex couples marrying legally are not based on reason or on data. When you have faith, anything will do to feed it."

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Fundies vs. Parody.

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The Ex-Gay Watch site notes that it has received a cease-and-desist order from Liberty Counsel, "a religious-right legal assault team based at Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Liberty University," for showing a parody of an Exodus billboard (here's the original, here's the parody by Justinsomnia).

The fundamentalist dream: no gays, and no free speech. And alas, in this disdain for expression they find objectionable, they reflect their mirror opposites in the speech-code obsessed, politically correct left.

On a brigher note, the NY Times considers the meaning of Brokeback parodies, such as those avaiilable here. No word on any suits.

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On Marriage, Don’t Unite—Coordinate

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Though much will be made of it, the federal Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA) is unlikely to be the most important story on the marriage fight this year. To be sure, that constitutional atrocity must be defeated. But for most of us who are defending gay families, the fight is being fought at the state level. Given the wide range of situations from state to state, the question increasingly is how we can maintain a well-coordinated national movement with a minimum of fragmentation and internecine sniping.

• Ill-conceived lawsuits. One source of internal friction is irresponsible litigators-couples who are determined to gain their equal rights now, who are governed more by their hearts than their heads, and who press ill-advised court cases while refusing to work constructively with gay legal strategists. Such cases risk setting us back by creating bad precedents, as well as putting wind in the sails of a federal amendment by trying to force the policies of gay-welcoming states on less-welcoming ones.

Being in love, I sympathize with those who are unwilling to wait for a more conducive political climate. Unfortunately, wanting equality now does not make it so, any more than demanding my two-minute egg instantaneously will make it cook any faster. But while we remind our compatriots that our struggle is a long-term one, we must deal with the reality that some gay people will ignore us and go charging off making messes that the rest of us will have to deal with.

• Cutting slack, or being doormats? A second source of friction is disagreement over how much slack to cut politicians who are relatively gay friendly but oppose equal marriage rights. The call by some New York gays to stop giving money to Hillary Clinton is an example of this.

In races where the alternative choices are even worse, this question becomes somewhat moot, since most of us would agree that, pragmatically, we prefer the least objectionable candidate. Like President Bush dealing with the Saudis or the United Arab Emirates, we have to face the fact that imperfect alliances are necessary in a messy world. This, however, does not require us to be doormats. As Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand."

• Defining the cause. A third source of friction lies in how we define our cause. Some argue that since the federal Defense of Marriage Act bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages, and since more states offer civil unions, the likelihood of greater interstate portability for civil unions makes that the better way to go. Others argue that, since many states are moving to prohibit any protections for gay couples, and since we can never get what we want if we don't even ask for it, it makes more sense to go for full civil marriage-at least in the few states where that appears achievable in the next several years.

Appeals for unity are often just another way of telling people to keep their dissenting views to themselves.

As we argue over civil unions, domestic partnerships and civil marriage, it is worth remembering that our enemies want us to get nothing. But calls for unity do not resolve our differences. Appeals for unity are often just another way of telling people to keep their dissenting views to themselves. If I am convinced that my strategy will work and yours will backfire, it makes no sense for me to shut up and march off a cliff with you to show my solidarity. These disagreements are inevitable. The gay rights movement cannot expect to be any less contentious than earlier civil rights movements were.

Political reality in most states leaves us little choice but to embrace, at least for the time being, solutions that fall short of equality. But the defense strategies and pragmatic solutions of the present do not preclude longer-term efforts toward full equality. Indeed, the messages we convey in our initiative campaigns, and the legal commitments that gay couples are able to embrace in many states, can help move our society toward greater acceptance of gay families.

What is at issue here is not a mere label. The goal toward which gay people will inevitably push is civil equality, call it what you will. And equality at the state level does not confer equality at the interstate or federal level. As long as the 1,138 federal rights and responsibilities of marriage- including immigration rights-continue to be denied to all gay couples in the country, there will always be someone pushing to end this continuing injury. So whatever strategy is adopted in a given state, it will not be the final word on the subject.

Our statewide battles amount to a series of separate experiments from which all of us can learn. Rather than view our internal disputes over goals and strategies negatively, we can profit by regarding one another as laborers in different parts of the vineyard. Through all of our struggles ahead, the guiding force will not be mere abstractions but real couples seeking to redress particular inequities.

In the end, our nationwide success may depend on our ability to stand in one another's shoes. Our greatest risk may not be of a political or legal failure, but a failure of imagination. So while the passions that drive our activism are indispensable, on occasion we need to restrain them long enough to listen to one another. It is essential that we keep our networks in good working order.

The other side certainly does.

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The Ivy League.

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IGF contributing author Jamie Kirchick writes in the Yale Daily News about his university's glee at landing the former Taliban spokesperson as a student. Comments Kirchick:

Don't expect a word of protest from our feminist and gay groups, who now have in their midst a live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever. They're busy hunting bogeymen like frat parties and single-sex bathrooms. The answer Hashemi gave five years ago when asked about the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan, "American women don't have the right not to find images of themselves in swimsuits on the side of a bus," is the sort of sophistry likely to curry favor among Yale's feminist activists, who make every effort to paint American society as chauvinistic while refraining from criticizing non-Western cultures. To do so would be "cultural imperialism," and we cannot have that at an enlightened place like Yale.

I personally want to know whether Hashemi supports the flattening of homosexuals via brick walls, which was one of the ways the Taliban dealt with gay men.

And so it goes at Yale, Harvard, and the other bastions of elite progressivism, dedicating to training the next generation of would-be apparatchiks and fascism-appeasers.

More. Critics have noted that Yale won't allow ROTC or even military recruiters on campus, but welcome a Taliban spokesperson into their community.
--Stephen H. Miller

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