HRC, Abortion & Us

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In our mailbag, a reader asks our opinion on a recent message from the Human Rights Campaign stating that, regarding the open position on the Supreme Court:

if the nominee doesn't even have an explicitly anti-GLBT record, his or her record on other issues, like choice, will be important. Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas are legally intertwined so an end to Roe could very well mean an end to Lawrence and the promise that it holds for GLBT rights.

It's no surprise that long-time abortion activist Joe Solmonese, now HRC's top dog, would stress this linkage. (While head of the Emily's List PAC, Solmonese channeled funds to a senate candidate who supported amending the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage but was "pro-choice.") And the claim regarding Roe and Lawrence is not baseless. As noted in previous items, Justice Kennedy's majority decision struck down state sodomy laws on "privacy" grounds similar to Roe.

But as I've also said, sexual privacy isn't likely to be the lead argument in future cases fighting the Defense of Marriage Act, or Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Those cases will be based on whether equal protection under the law is extended to gay people, as it should be, and as Justice O'Connor argued when she supported overturning the Texas sodomy law on equal protection, not privacy, grounds.

So it may very well be that the Lawrence sodomy ruling is the only one that will trace its pedigree to Roe.

As there are certainly gay people who do not favor unrestricted taxpayer-funded partial-birth abortion on demand for minors without parental notification, and possibly even people of good will who don't favor abortion as birth control but hold no animus against gays and gay legal equality, HRC's tying abortion and gay rights tightly together seems to put the interest of the liberal-left Democratic coalition above that of gay people (who, to be frank, are the least likely cohort to need unrestrained abortion access for themselves).

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On “Bisexuality,” Some Truths Must Not Be Spoken.

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A New York Times story published July 5, "Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited," refers to a forthcoming study on bisexuality in males conducted by Toronto and Chicago psychologists, who measured how men who described themselves as gay, bisexual, or heterosexual responded to erotic movies. Three-quarters of the bisexuals were aroused in the same pattern as the gay men. The article concludes that the study "casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men."

Note: The research was on sexual arousal, not behavior. No one disputes that many men who are aroused primarily by men can still manage to marry and father children. It just suggests that their primary sexual orientation is still homo. And, in fact, researchers have long recognized that female sexuality is far more fluid with regard to sexual orientation and bisexuality, while men tend overwhelming to be one way or the other (again, in terms of what they think about when they masturbate, to put it bluntly).

But all this flies in the face of the "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender" mantra proclaimed by leading gay activists. The "LGBT" fixation came out of academic "queer" activism in the 80s, and woe be upon anyone today who challenges it. So, even though there is no organized male bisexual activist movement, our LGBT (or, chauvinistically, GLBT) activists are up in arms over the Times story. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force issued a statement declaring:

We remain stunned that the New York Times Science section would carry such a shoddy, sensationalistic and downright insulting story. It - and the profoundly flawed 'study' it purports to cover - are laced with biased premises, misstatements and inaccuracies. It equates sexual orientation with sexual arousal, as supposedly measured by a crude device. . . It defames the truth in the lives and loves of millions of bisexual men. The Times should be ashamed.

The NGLTF also notes that it is working with "bisexual leaders and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to consider a coordinated response to the Times article." But interestingly, its "media contacts from the bi community" lists three women - and no "bisexual" men.

Update: Openly gay science writer Chandler Burr states in a letter to the Times:

Some gay and bisexual advocates are condemning "Straight, Gay or Lying?" regarding a study suggesting that bisexuality may not exist among human males - something those of us familiar with the scientific literature have known since, basically, forever.

Compare this hysterical - and anti-science - reaction to the conservative Christians' anti-science reaction to studies showing that homosexuality is an inborn orientation like left-handedness. They're identical.

The right hates science because the data contradict (in the case of homosexuality) Leviticus; the left because the data contradict the liberal lie that we're environment-created, not hard-wired in any way.

These particular scientific facts are making these advocates scream like members of the extreme right, though it's they who always tells the right to let go of concepts that are contradicted by science.

Dogma to the left, dogma to the right, and the facts be damned.

More Recent Postings
7/3/05 - 7/9/05

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Of Bigots and Cowards—and Principled Independents.

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Here's an interesting story out of Virginia, where independent gubernatorial candidate Russ Potts supports changing state law to let gays adopt, while both the Republican and Democratic candidates want to keep the adoption ban in place.

Potts is actually a Republican state senator (and chairman of the state senate's education and health committee) who, the AP reports, "is disenchanted with what he sees as his party's turn toward right-wing extremism on social issues." Moreover, "Potts said he saw no reason law-abiding gay couples who can provide good homes for children without parents should be barred from doing so."

The Republican nominee, Jerry Kilgore, flatly opposes adoptions by gays, but so does Democrat Tim Kaine, who says only married couples should be allowed to adopt (but, of course, he strongly opposes letting gays marry).

Many charge that anti-gay Republicans "force" Democrats in GOP-majority states to take anti-gay positions. While I don't think that excuses the Democrats' "see, we're bigots, too" stance, it does point out that the real battle for gay legal equality rests within the Republican party. Democrats won't be moved to embrace gay equality until it's "safe" for them to do so (i.e., it won't require them to spend too much political capital).

But until the time when pro-gay Republicans can wrest control of their party away from the religious right, I'm happy to see some break ranks and, like Potts, make independent runs for office.

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Taking Gay Dollars for Granted.

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Harry Reid, the U.S. Senate's Democratic leader, has suggested that four of his Republican colleagues be considered by President Bush as potential Supreme Court justices. Among Reid's recommendations: Florida Sen. Mel Martinez. "There are people who serve in the Senate now who are Republicans who I think would be outstanding Supreme Court members," Reid said.

Martinez is best remembered by gay voters for his rabidly homophobic slanders, which were the cornerstone of his election bid. He accused his opponent, conservative former GOP Congressman Bill McCollum, of being "the new darling of the homosexual extremists" and "anti-family," and of trying to appease "the radical homosexual lobby" because he supported a bipartisan federal hate-crimes bill that included sexual orientation.

Walter Olson notes that all four of Reid's recommendations are reliable allies of the trial lawyers' lobby, a key Democratic Party funding bloc. Olson writes, "while none of Sen. Reid's four faves are identified with the GOP's socially liberal Chafee-Snowe wing, all four. . .have repeatedly broken partisan ranks to side with the Democrats and the organized bar against liability reforms. "

Apparently, Reid is ok with a virulent homophobe (and maybe even a Roe v. Wade skeptic) as long as he'd be likely to keep the lawyers happy.

Sure looks like someone's taking HRC and its gay dollars for Democrats for granted.

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Eyes on the Court.

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This story on legal battles against the military's don't ask, don't tell policy suggests how important the next Supreme Court justice will be for hot-button gay issues. The Pentagon wants the challenges dismissed, saying that the Supreme Court's Lawrence ruling nullifying sodomy laws has no bearing on the case because the dismissed service members "could have abstain from sexual activity and not reveal their sexuality." The plaintiffs maintain that the current policy denied them the right of privacy, equal protection of the law and freedom of speech.

In Lawrence, the majority ruled that sodomy laws were an unconstitutional violation of privacy for gays and straights alike, while Justice O'Connor's concurring decision ruled against same-sex sodomy statutes as a violation of equal protection under the law for gays. As I've said before and others have reiterated in their comments on my earlier post about O'Connor, her take (though not embraced by the majority) remains by far the more valuable in fighting legal double-standards on marriage, the military, and other areas of state-sponsored discrimination.

Whether her replacement is a fair-minded, small government conservative like O'Connor, or a flaming bigot like Scalia, will make a huge difference in our lives for many years to come. Bush's assertion that abortion and gay marriage won't be "litmus test" issues offers at least some room for hope.

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Luther Vandross’s Glass Closet

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Luther Vandross was the avatar of romance. Other people's.

The famed R&B singer, who died last week at 54, zealously declined to discuss his personal life, telling reporters that it was "none of your damn business." Indeed, when his biographer Craig Seymour tried repeatedly to broach the subject of his sexuality, the singer told him, "You're trying to zero in on something that you are never ever gonna get....Look at you, just circling the airport. You ain't never gonna land."

Well, I'm just going to come out and say it. Vandross was gay.

Not that I've ever slept with him, or even know him personally. But his gayness was as much an open secret as Liberace's or Peter Allen's. And like those two similarly flamboyant and energetic performers, he was a master of hiding in plain sight, neither confirming nor denying what anyone with even moderately well-tuned gaydar knew anyway.

So Seymour's biography, Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross, dances around the question it can't quite ignore. As reviewer J.S. Hall described the book:

Any motions of love and/or romance are followed by the observation that Vandross has never revealed any of his beloveds' names or gender. And while they are not traits exclusive to gay men, Vandross's near-total immersion into his work, his fluctuating weight, his penchant for perfectionism (and his bitchiness when things don't live up to his expectations), his love of flashy stage clothes and the color pink, his flare for interior design and his ownership and display of a homoerotic David Hockney painting, all strongly suggest someone who's focused far too much time, energy and effort into submerging an aspect of himself that he doesn't wish to deal with.

Or at least, that he didn't wish to deal with publicly and directly. Instead, Vandross dropped hints, as when he retained the masculine pronouns in his 1994 recording of Roberta Flack's hit "Killing Me Softly": "I felt all flushed with fever, embarrassed by the crowd. I felt he'd found my letters and read each one out loud."

Such subtlety - some would say "evasiveness" - was consistent with Vandross's general approach: "I'm more into poetry and metaphor, and I would much rather imply something rather than to blatantly state it," he once told a reporter. "You blatantly state stuff sometimes when you can't think of a poetic way to say it."

True enough. But you also use poetry and metaphor sometimes when you're afraid or embarrassed to state things plainly. One can now only wonder at the full explanation for Vandross's legendary non-answers.

Perhaps one cannot blame the obituary-writers for being as elusive as Vandross on the subject of his sexuality. Most do not mention it at all, and the few that mention it do so only obliquely. The following, from the AP story, is typical: "The lifelong bachelor never had any children, but doted on his nieces and nephews. The entertainer said his busy lifestyle made marriage difficult; besides, it wasn't what he wanted."

Well, duh - unless "marriage" is read to include same-sex marriage. But most readers won't make that connection, and Vandross would presumably be just fine with that.

Some readers will no doubt think I'm being inappropriate. Perhaps you agree with Vandross that it's none of our damn business, and perhaps it isn't. But you can't fault me for pointing out that a celebrity who made a career out of singing about romance adopted a rigorous "Don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding his own. Even if his sexuality is none of our damn business, the irony of his public posture certainly is.

Or perhaps you'll insist that coming out is a personal choice. Of course it is. But it doesn't follow that we shouldn't encourage people to make that choice, or that if they don't we must be complicit in whatever public posture they assume, including those that treat gayness as a dirty little secret.

And this, ultimately, is what bothers me about hide-in-plain-sight gays: their implication that same-sex love is something unmentionable. As the philosopher Richard Mohr puts it:

People need to let the gayness of individuals come up where it is relevant, rather than going along with the shaming social convention of the closet, the demand that every gay person is bound to keep every other gay person's secret secret. For the closet is the site where anti-gay loathing and gay self-loathing mutually reinforce each other. Even people who are out of the closet demean themselves when they maintain other people's closets. For the closet's secret is a dirty little secret that degrades all people.

Luther Vandross was often rightly praised for the honesty of his music. If only he had taken that honesty one step further.

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Justice O’Connor and Gay Rights

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She was an important justice, but not a great one. Sandra Day O'Connor was important because, as we have been told ad nauseam, hers was the Court's "swing" vote, negotiating between the liberal and conservative blocs. She was not great because no enduring constitutional principles she announced will survive her tenure. On gay legal issues, however, she was quite good if mostly passive.

Justice O'Connor mattered in many cases that mattered because, for her, every case was a new universe to be judged on the basis of particular facts whose importance could only be known by consulting Justice O'Connor. Her decision-making was almost entirely free of great principles and guiding legal theories, which may seem admirably undogmatic but was actually maddening. She announced that the government could not place an "undue burden" on abortion, but nobody knew what this meant until O'Connor told us in a given case. She proclaimed the government could not "endorse" religion but, again, what this meant depended just on what O'Connor said.

She decided cases with the eye of a legislator, which is what she once was. So consider, for example, that O'Connor once decided that airports could ban people who solicit donations for political and charitable causes - on the theory that this activity might disrupt pedestrian traffic when travelers stop to hear pitches for donations. But airports in her view could not ban people who distribute (or even sell!) literature for political and charitable causes - on the theory that this activity would not disrupt the flow of pedestrian traffic in the airport terminal because interested travelers would be more likely to take a pamphlet and move on. Her view became constitutional law. It was this kind of policy-oriented hair-splitting that made her "important," but hardly great.

For gay people, she was pretty good. She confronted gay-rights claims in five cases during her 24-year tenure, and got four of them right. Her first encounter with a gay-rights claim was not promising. In Bowers v. Hardwick, decided in 1986, she joined a majority of the Court that upheld sodomy laws. Notably, she did not join an especially nasty anti-gay concurring opinion by Chief Justice Warren Burger, who suggested that homosexual sodomy was worse than rape.

In 1995, in Hurley v. GLIB, she joined a unanimous opinion upholding the right of the St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston to exclude a gay contingent. Considered a loss by some gay-right advocates at the time, the decision was actually a victory in that it upheld the right of private speakers to control their own message. The right that allows the Hibernians to exclude gays from their parade is the same right that allows gays to exclude Fred Phelps from the annual gay pride parade.

In 1996, in Romer v. Evans, O'Connor joined the majority in striking down a Colorado state constitutional amendment banning all civil rights protections for gay people. It was the first out-and-out victory for gay-rights litigants in the Court's history. It put a stop to a movement that threatened the political progress made by gay advocates in cities across the country. It also declared that "animus" against gay people is not a legitimate basis for legislation under the U.S. Constitution.

In 2000, in Boy Scouts v. Dale, O'Connor once again joined the majority in declaring that the Boy Scouts of America had the right to exclude an openly gay scoutmaster. Also considered by many to be a defeat for gay rights, the decision was really a win. The opinion affirmed a robust freedom of association, the same freedom that had shielded fledgling gay groups from government persecution in the 1960s through the 1980s.

In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice O'Connor joined the majority in striking down a law banning homosexual anal and oral sex. Notably, she did not join the majority in striking down all sodomy laws as a violation of a constitutional right to privacy. Instead, O'Connor focused on the fact that the Texas law targeted only gay couples. While O'Connor's opinion would theoretically have allowed a state to ban both heterosexual and homosexual sodomy, she carefully noted that such an "evenhanded" law might be unconstitutional if unequally enforced (as such laws always have been).

Aside from these particular cases, Justice O'Connor's general preference for state over federal power must also be seen as a boon to gay-rights causes. In a series of cases, O'Connor voted to limit federal power and to protect the historic role of the states in determining important matters of public policy. While she was hardly consistent about it, she was firmly in the camp favoring such federalism.

Federalism is now the principle means by which gay-rights causes are advancing in this country. According to the Center for Policy Alternatives (CPA), headed by former Human Rights Campaign Executive Director Tim McFeeley, the states are now leading the way in granting protections to gay individuals and families. A new report by the CPA documents more than two dozen pro-gay state laws adopted since 2003 alone. These include not only civil rights laws protecting gays from discrimination, but also laws recognizing and supporting gay families. These gains have been made even as prospects at the federal level have considerably darkened.

Justice O'Connor did not personally push for these advances in the state legislatures, of course. But her general approach has protected a balance of state and federal power that makes them possible.

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Multiculturalism Run Amok.

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Ashraf Choudhary, a prominent Muslim lawmaker who serves in New Zealand's Labour government, has condoned the stoning executions of homosexuals and adulterers as prescribed by strict Islamic law. Laughably, New Zealand's Prime Minister Helen Clark responded:

Clearly Ashraf is a devout Muslim and he will have his own views. But for the record let me spell out the Labour Party does not support capital punishment. It does not support flogging. It does not support stoning. We have very strong views about that.

How very reassuring.

Local media in New Zealand reports that Choudhary's views are considered mainstream among New Zealand's growing Muslim population and that "Labour's Muslim MP is representing the majority of the Muslim community."

This situation, of socialists downplaying Islamic-fundamentalist hate, isn't unique to New Zealand. Recently London's leftwing mayor, "Red Ken" Livingstone, embraced radical Islamists as part of his coalition, as bemoaned by one appalled gay Muslim, here.

Meanwhile, Sir Elton John laudably called on his government "to ensure that ending violations of gay people's fundamental human rights around the world becomes an explicit issue in its diplomatic relations with other countries." He added, in reference to London's gay pride celebration:

There are many parts of the world where such a celebration could not take place, because basic human rights are not respected and people face threats, attacks, prosecution and even possible execution just because of their sexuality.

And there are clearly many who are willing to bring that very culture to the West if they think it may serve their own political purposes.

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Celebrate Liberty!

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Happy July 4th! We've got three new articles posted, by IGF contributing authors Paul Varnell, Jon Rauch and Dale Carpenter.

Also, Andrew Sullivan has a fine essay on the meaning of American liberty, which you can read or listen to here.

More Recent Postings
6/26/05 - 7/2/05

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Justice O’Connor’s Legacy.

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In 1986 Sandra Day O'Connor, then still a relatively new Supreme Court Justice, voted with the majority in Bowers v. Hardwick to uphold the constitutionality of a Georgia "sodomy" law that criminalized non-missionary position sex in private between consenting adults. Some 17 years later, a far more experience Justice O'Connor voted with the majority to overrule Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas.

Unlike the Georgia law, the Texas statute applied only to same-sex sex, allowing Justice O'Connor to find it unconstitutional on equal protection grounds (and to maintain the fig leaf that she wasn't directly contradicting her earlier ruling). But for all intents and purposes, she sent to history's dustbin a scurrilous anti-gay legal precedent she had originally helped put in place. Those 17 years had allowed Justice O'Connor, and much of the country, to develop a far deeper understanding of gay people as citizens entitled to equal treatment under the law.

Let's hope other conservative jurists eventually will follow in her footsteps.

Update: A critical view and my response, in our mailbag.

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