Taking Gay Dollars for Granted.

by on

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.

0 Comments

Eyes on the Court.

by on

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.

0 Comments

Luther Vandross’s Glass Closet

by on

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.

0 Comments

Justice O’Connor and Gay Rights

by on

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.

0 Comments

Multiculturalism Run Amok.

by on

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.

0 Comments

Celebrate Liberty!

by on

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

0 Comments

Justice O’Connor’s Legacy.

by on

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.

0 Comments

A Victory for the Self-Appointed Thought Police.

by on

Following protests from the "muzzle 'em all, muzzle 'em now" crowd at GLAAD and its anti-free speech allies, ABC has canceled the broadcast of its new reality show "Welcome to the Neighborhood."

From the ads I had seen and ABC's description, the show explored the prejudices among Middle American Red Staters and how they are eventually (more or less) overcome. The premise: a diverse group of families, including a gay couple, competed to win a 3,300-square-foot, four-bedroom, 2 1/2 -bath house on a cul-de-sac near Austin by convincing the neighbors to welcome them. I had been looking foreard to watching it.

However: "These residents are making their judgments because of race, national origin and religion," Shanna Smith, National Fair Housing Alliance president and CEO, complained. She also hinted that the show violated the federal fair housing laws, which could subject ABC to prosecution, since the neighbors air their concerns about the "suitability" of some of their potential neighbors, and we're all suppose to pretend that such considerations never, ever happen in real life.

The Post also reports that "the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation also had cautioned ABC after seeing the first two episodes." Specifically:

GLAAD entertainment media director Damon Romine, who has seen the entire series, said that although it's clear "the producers intended to send a powerful message about the value of diversity and embracing the differences of others," the episodic format "created serious issues in terms of depicting the neighbors' journey from intolerance to acceptance."

Got that? GLAAD admits that showing people confronting their prejudices might be worthwhile, but the show could initially confuse the masses into incorrect thinking, and thus must not be permitted to air.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if, heaven forbid, these would-be cultural commissars ever had the political power, they'd be burning books and videotapes in the streets.

GLAAD's mission ought to be to respoind with intelligence and conviction to the anti-gay polemics of the religious right -- not stiffling debate, and not telling us all what we can and can't read or watch. But that's just not as much fun, I guess.

0 Comments

Changing World.

by on

First Canada, now Spain.

Don't expect the U.S. to be swayed to follow their examples anytime soon. But it definitely is a changing, and changed, (Western) world.

Update: Some bizarre assertions about the beneficence of European socialism, effectively refuted, in the comments zone.

0 Comments

Marriage and Privilege.

by on

The American Political Science Association issued this release on critical views toward gay marriage - from feminists and lesbigaytransqueeractivists who'd like to do without marriage altogether.

The author of the study, Jyl Josephson, director of women's studies at Rutgers University, writes:

For some queer critics of the same-sex marriage quest, the current heterocentric vision of marriage inappropriately associates the public granting of a privacy privilege with adult citizenship for those professing lifelong, monogamous sexual relationships. Their objection is not so much to the fact that same-sex couples wish to have such relationships recognized, but rather to privileging this form of sexual relationship above all others.

If married couples-opposite or same-sex-are provided greater social, economic, and political privileges than nonmarried individuals, the result will be secondary exclusions and reinforcement of an undesirable link between a particular form of intimate association and adult citizenship.

Surprise, the libertarian in me doesn't think this is totally off the walls. Government should recognize and enforce private contracts between individuals, but perhaps we should leave it to the voluntary institutions of civil society to support and encourage those types of relationships that their adherents feel ought to be supported and encouraged.

I happen to favor marriage as a stabilizing institution; but I don't think it's right for everyone. And I have qualms about government using its awesome power to "promote" it with a broad range of incentives.

Still, it will be a long trek to the time when state and federal governments don't see themselves as mandated to use the laws and tax code to favor matrimony over other relationships - and certainly, in the view of some (not all) IGF authors, that's well and good for society as a whole. And as long as government is both recognizing and "privileging" heterosexual marriage, surely it's unacceptable not to do the same for same-sex marriage, too.

0 Comments