Taxing Our Patience.

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In California, registered domestic partners (DPs) are subject to that state's community property laws, and may file their state tax returns accordingly. But as the San Jose Mercury News reports, the question of how to deal with federal tax returns has sown a great deal of angst and confusion.

The IRS, having waited until the middle of tax return season, has now issued a clarification, recognizing that "the California [Domestic Parntership] Act allowed registered domestic partners to file joint income tax returns for California state tax purposes and to be taxed in the same manner as married couples for state income tax purposes," but adding:

In our view, the rights afforded domestic partners under the California Act are not "made an incident of marriage by the inveterate policy of the State." The relationship between registered domestic partners under the California Act is not marriage under California law. ... Consequently, an individual who is a registered domestic partner in California must report all of his or her income earned from the performance of his or her personal services notwithstanding the enactment of the California Act.

That means no recognition of community property.

I guess the CPA lobby must be happy, since DPs will have to have their taxes done twice, using two separate sets of "books"-one that recognizes their financial union and one that pretends that they're just two economically unconnected entities.

This sort of federal nonrecogntion, an outgrowth of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), will only get worse as forward-looking states recognize gay couples' spousal relationships through DPs, civil unions, or marriages, while Washington resolutely digs in its heels.

More. Reader Dan Leer clarifies that DOMA would prohibit gay couples from filing joint federal returns even if states (such as Massachusetts) recognized them as wed. At issue in Calif. is community property:

Under long-standing federal precedent, state law determines the rights of persons to property and income and federal law determines the federal income tax consequences attendant to such rights. For more than a century, the federal courts have held that spouses who are resident in a community property state are not only permitted, but required, to report their shares of the community income on their respective individual income tax returns (if they file separately) without regard to which spouse actually earned the community income.

What the IRS has now concluded (in a Technical Advice Memorandum, which does not have the force of legal precedent) is that registered domestic partners cannot split their community income in this fashion-and not that they cannot file a joint return.

I believe that this flies in the face of well-established precedent to the contrary, but ultimately the courts will have to determine what the federal income tax law is as respects this issue.

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The Nightmare Scenario.

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IGF contributing author Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, marshals far too many facts to be easily dismissed. As Jonathan Rauch writes in his backcover blurb, "Some books are merely important. This one is necessary."

Among other issues, Bawer details a frightening rise of gay-bashings in Europe by Muslim immigrants, who cite their faith as their motivation-including a beating suffered by his Norwegian partner in Oslo. He writes:

"Soper!" ("Faggot!") the man shouted, charging at him. ... My partner got off at the next stop. So did the man, who leapt on him, kicking and punching. This was in a busy downtown square, crowded with people on their way to work; but although several passersby stopped to watch the assault, no one made a move to intercede. ...

When we got to the police station, the officer on duty told us that the assailant and his wife were there already-and that the wife had accused my partner of attempted murder. This, he explained wearily, was a familiar tactic in the immigrant milieu: rushing to the police station to file charges against your victim before he can report you. We were outraged. But the cop shrugged it off and urged us to do the same.

And on and on, in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and throughout Europe, where attacks and intimidation are mounting rapidly, "while Europe sleeps."

The Right Side of the Rainbow blog links to a recent Mark Steyn column, which notes:

...radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond.

Steyn is a conservative, and the fight against Islamofascism may indeed make strange bedfellows of (some) gays and (some) conservatives (i.e., those who believe in conserving Western Civ.). But (some) social conservatives on the religious right may well envy what radical Islam has in store for the "perverts," while (some) gays on the anti-American, anti-Israel left will dream their sweet, false dreams of benevolent multiculturalism and moral relativism, until it's too late to save themselves.

Note: As requested, I've added some additional "somes" to the above.

More Recent Postings
02/19/06 - 02/25/06

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The Sodomy Delusion

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First published in the Chicago Free Press on February 22, 2006.

In a recent column I wrote that members of the religious right want gays to be invisible if their sexual behavior cannot be entirely suppressed. That prompted a friendly correspondent to write the following:

Many conservatives also have these two contradictory beliefs:

  1. Homosexuality leads to misery and unhappiness, and homosexual sex is totally repulsive. (But)

  2. Nonetheless, it's so appealing that if people find out about it, many will want to try it. ... (O)nce they get "hooked" they can't or won't stop.

This is absolutely on target. Two decades ago the late polymath scholar Joseph Wallfield, who wrote under the name Warren Johansson, formulated what he called "The Sodomy Delusion," published in an obscure monograph called Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality by historian Wayne R. Dynes (who also edited the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality).

Johansson characterized the Sodomy Delusion as a set of paranoid beliefs inculcated by the Christian Church in the Middle Ages. It includes the following components:

  • Homosexual acts, particularly by men, undermine people's moral character and assure their eternal damnation.

  • Communities that tolerate homosexual acts are inevitably visited with catastrophes such as earthquakes, droughts, plagues, floods, and infestations.

  • So society should punish people who engage in homosexuality as severely as possible and make every effort to blot out any awareness or record that anyone ever engaged in homosexuality. (The Catholic Church typically destroyed church trial records of people accused of sodomy.)

Most of these beliefs can still be found among many fundamentalist Christians. Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony called for the execution of people who engage in homosexual acts. Anita Bryant, Pat Robertson and others blamed droughts and other disasters on the tolerance of homosexuality. Even now many fundamentalists are eagerly awaiting the inevitable earthquake to damage San Francisco, so they can say "I told you so."

Johansson then set out a series of contradictory beliefs held by people in the grip of the Sodomy Delusion. We could call them "Johansson's Antinomies." They include the following:

  • Everyone is by nature heterosexual BUT everyone is susceptible of the demonic temptation to commit sodomy, and potentially guilty of the crime.

  • Everyone regards the practice with loathing and disgust BUT whoever has experienced it retains a lifelong craving for it.

  • Everyone hates and condemns the crime of sodomy BUT the practice is ubiquitously threatening and infinitely contagious.

  • Sodomy is a crime committed by the merest handful of depraved individuals BUT if not checked by the harshest penalties it would lead to the suicide of the human race.

We have all heard these contradictory claims made at various times by anti-gay polemicists from the average Catholic bishop to the average fundamentalist Protestant minister. Even today some polemicists view it as the conclusive anti-gay argument to ask rhetorically "But what if everyone became homosexual?"

To Johansson's list we might add some more recent refinements. For instance:

  • The current version of Johansson's first antinomy is that everyone is by nature heterosexual BUT people-especially young people-can be easily lured to try homosexuality if they see films or plays or television programs that include homosexuals or see people who they know are homosexual or even learn that homosexuals exist.

  • The current version of the fourth antinomy is the religious right claim that homosexuals are only a tiny fraction of the population-just 1 or 2 percent, BUT homosexuality is growing like wildfire.

Of course, anti-gay polemicists have been saying this for many years so we may wonder how homosexuality could have been growing like wildfire for years yet still be only 1 or 2 percent of the population.) Then, too:

  • Homosexuality is viewed as a form of moral depravity that undermines a person's whole moral character BUT people keep being shocked to learn that someone believed to be of unimpeachable moral character such as a conservative religious leader is revealed to be "involved in" homosexuality.

Notice that when they are found out, such men usually blame alcohol or "stress" although alcohol or stress never seem to make homosexuals become "involved in" heterosexuality.

A special Catholic antinomy holds that the celibacy of the priesthood is a special calling and a gift of the Holy Spirit BUT men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" are expected to be celibate throughout their entire lives despite the manifest absence of such a special calling and/or gift of the Holy Spirit.

Where facts and reasoning are insufficient to condemn homosexuality, total fabrication will serve. Elsewhere in Homolexis Prof. Dynes traces the diffusion of a medieval legend that on the night Jesus was to be born, all the sodomites in the world died because the Savior refused to be incarnated as a human unless the world were free of homosexuality.

That could lead us to a final antinomy:

  • Jesus (supposedly) hated sodomy most of all the sins BUT (unaccountably) never thought to mention any disapproval of it at any time during his public ministry.

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Same Old, Same Old,

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Writing in the American Prospect, E.J. Graff breathlessly announces an exciting new strategy to energize the gay movement and the fight for marriage equality. Here it comes: "LGBT groups are helping to build a new progressive coalition from the ground up." Ta-da!

Sadly, it sounds like the "new strategy" is once again to practice diversity fetishism with an alphabet-soup-of-the-left project, which always does so well (not). If you believe that a grand coalition led by the likes of Urvashi Vaid (a blast from the past, see here) and built around efforts by the NAACP, the United Farm Workers, and "Asian American and Pacific Islander groups" will win over the suburban independents, enjoy your fantasy.

More. Reader Lori Heine commments:

We have not done ourselves any real favors by becoming so entangled with broad, Left-Wing coalitions. In my conversations with conservatives, I generally find these individuals less hostile to gay rights than they are to liberals in general. And they tend to stick all "liberal" issues together into one big, gooey, scary mess.

I believe we would get a better reception from those Right-of-Center, or even at the Center, if we made them deal with our own issue apart from any other. ...

Quite so, or at least ensure a real "diversity" of approaches, with frozen-in-time "progressives" outreaching to labor unions and racial-grievance collectors, while those of a more conservative or libertarian bent form alliances with their kindred spirits.

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The Adoption Battle.

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USA Today looks at the growing efforts to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children, which it labels "a second front in the culture wars" over same-sex marriage. Steps to pass laws or secure November ballot initiatives are underway in at least 16 states.

It could be that before too long, gays-especially couples-who are able to do so, really will have to relocate themselves to those states that don't trample them underfoot.

Reason Online responds, primarily by referencing Julian Sanchez's Reason magazine article on the growing fight. Sanchez suggests that opponents of gay adoption:

...visit Florida and ask a child in foster care which makes him feel more threatened: the thought of being raised by homosexuals, or the prospect of an indefinite number of years spent passing through an indefinite number of homes.

One of the Reason blog's readers disputes that the kids would choose the gay parents (I guess some probably wouldn't, depending on whether they're old enough to have imbibed schoolyard homophobia). Another reader paraphrases libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke along the lines of:

I am such an extreme Republican that I support gay marriage and adoption. If gay people get married and raise kids, pretty soon they'll be living in suburbs, driving SUV's and voting Republican.

Well, in another universe where Republicans where true to their own best values, maybe.

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Sight Unseen Preferred.

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The "Ask Amy" advice column receives a query from a Colorado woman who had a gay couple move in next door, and who was so shocked by witnessing a goodbye kiss one morning that (on the advice of her pastor) she circulated a petition urging that they refrain from such displays of affection. The woman can't understand why her gay neighbors took it personally.

This dovetails with the point Paul Varnell makes in his recent column, "The War on Gay Visibility."

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Flawed Messenger.

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I'm glad former congressman Kweisi Mfume, one of the leading Democratic candidates for Maryland's U.S. Senate seat, has endorsed marriage rights for gay couples. However, his endorsement would be more likely to sway the uncommitted if his own record on marriage had been more, let's say, supportive (i.e., Mfume has fathered five children out of wedlock with four different women). His more recent behavior has also been less than exemplary on the marriage front.

True, Mfume is certainly less of a hypocrite than gay marriage opponents such as Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman who pushed the Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting federal recognition of gay unions, which led many to wonder which of his three marriages (via two divorces) he was defending. Still, supporters like Mfume aren't very likely to advance the cause.

More Recent Postings
02/12/06 - 02/18/06

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Cowboys and Hunters

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I liked this column in The Advocate by gay outdoorsman David Stalling, who-referencing the elk hunt in "Brokeback Mountain"-posted a query at a website for bow hunters. He writes:

For fun, on the Big Game Forum, I posted a new thread: "Brokeback Mountain: Best Elk-Hunting Movie?" Since folks on this site often and justly complain of poor Hollywood depictions of hunting, I mentioned that here was a good positive portrayal. The response didn't surprise me. People with screen names like Terminator, Sewer Rat, Bearman, and ElkSlayer wrote things like "No queers could really hunt elk"; "Elk are too majestic an animal to be killed by faggots"; "Imagine a gay elk camp: guys would worry that camouflage makes them look fat."

A lot of anti-gay swill? Sure. But considering that the media images of gays (excepting Brokeback) run the gamut from "Queer Eye" to "Will & Grace"-and these are the representations upon which GLAAD, HRC and The Advocate bestow their effusive praise-is it really any wonder that rural America sees gays the way it does?

Maybe Willie Nelson's new gay cowboy song will help. Or maybe not.

More. I guess not. Willie means well, but the song (penned by Ned Sublette in 1981) promotes the same old stereotypes that conflate sexual orientation and gender identity:

"What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?...Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out."

Alas, still more confusion about sexual orientation and gender identity isn't what gay people need.

Say Anything blog's posting has a link to an audio excerpt.

Some very thoughtful comments (ok, obviously not the first one). Check 'em out.

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Brave Move.

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As Variety reports, gay Indian Muslim filmmaker Parvez Sharma is directing a documentary called "In the Name of Allah" about gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims across the Muslim and Western worlds. He's working with Sandi Dubowski, whose documentary "Trembling Before G-d" movingly looked at gay orthodox Jews as they told their stories.

Good luck to Sharma and Dubowski. But as the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto warns:

One wonders how this will go over in the Muslim world, which has not of late gained a reputation for tolerance. And if Muslims react to "In the Name of Allah" with half the fury they've directed at those Danish cartoons, which side will our Western multiculturalists come down on?

I guess we'll see.

Given Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's brutal murder by an Islamic militant upset over Van Gogh's making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies, Sharma and Dubowski are brave men.

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