Anti-Gay Mayor Had a Secret Life.

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Conservative closet case politician accused of molesting boys while a Boy Scout troop leader. Don't know if the accusations are true, but in any case this story should demonstrate why closet cases ought not to be scout leaders, but will no doubt be interpreted to warn against letting openly gay men work with boys.

As for the double-life of Spokane's Mayor James E. West -- homophobic politician by day, online gay-sex cruiser by night, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!"

By the way, I don't think this is in any way comparable to the outing of conservative journalist Jeff Gannon. Gannon was not an elected official using his office to push for anti-gay legislation. But outing advocates will, no doubt, cite this case as justification for delving into the personal life of anyone who is politically right of center.

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A Bashing in Amsterdam.

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Washington Blade editor Chris Crain was gay-bashed in Amsterdam, the gay-welcoming capital of a country where gays enjoy legal equality. But his attackers weren't Dutch. He was spat on and beaten by men with heavy accents, apparently Moroccan immigrants, upset that he was holding hands with his boyfriend. In the wake of the murder of gay politician Pim Fortuyn (who declared Islamic immigration a threat to Dutch tolerance toward gays) and liberal filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (who was making a movie about the treatment of women under Islam), it's a reminder of why anti-western intellectuals preaching multicultural relativism are so wrong.

Rick Rosendall wrote this column three years ago about the Fortuyn murder, reckoning, "There is nothing progressive about refusing to distinguish cultures that persecute gays from those in which we have thrived."

Update 1: Crain published a near-identical version of his story in the current issue of the Blade, except for one changed detail [in the print version]. His description of his attackers now omits the the fact that they were not Dutch natives but had "Moroccan features." That sop to political correctness distorts the account, misinforms readers, and diverts attention from the real problem (anti-gay Muslim immigrants, not bigoted Dutchmen). If we can't name the problem, how on earth can we confront it?

Further Addendum: Rick Rosendall notes, correctly, that the online version of the editorial does now say the attackers had Moroccan features and heavy accents, as the original Blade Blog item did. However, the printed version, in the May 6 issue distributed last Friday, omits this sentence but otherwise is identical. So, why leave it out of the print edition?

Update 2: Friday, May 6, marked the third anniversary of Pim Fortuyn's assassination, remembered in this posting at PeakTalk.

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Joe Valentine Has Two Moms — and It’s No Big Deal.

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Cincinnati Reds reliever Joe Valentine recently revealed that he was raised by a lesbian couple who have been together now for 30 years - and the response from the public, the media and his teammates has been a resounding "no big deal":

"I've gotten good feedback [from teammates]," Valentine said. "A lot of guys noticed and read it. They said, 'That's pretty cool. That's a pretty awesome thing.' That's really it."

He adds, "At least people know there are different ways to be raised."

There's still a long way to go, but this is another signal of how things are changing.

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How Not to Fight the Gay Ban.

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The military's ban on openly gay enlisted personnel is odious on many levels, as IGF contributing author Paul Varnell reminds us. But is barring the military from recruiting on elite liberal college campuses a productive way to fight the ban? Only in some bizarro politically correct universe. Instead of educating America that gay people want to serve their country but can't, to the country's detriment, broadcasting images of effete ivy academics and their pampered charges, reeking of contempt for the military and dismissive of the war on terror, only sends the message that gays are part of the Michael Moore-Move On (i.e., Moore-on) cultural left.

The Supreme Court has now agreed to consider whether the government can withhold federal funds from colleges that bar military recruiters. Whatever way the court rules, the media coverage will only reinforce exactly the wrong message about gays, activists and our "supporters."

A few months back, IGF contributing author James Kirchick, writing from the belly of the beast at Yale, shared his thoughts on the campus recruiting ban. He wrote:

In addition to the general anti-military sentiment that is so prevalent on this campus, now one may be labeled a "homophobe" if he merely wants to discuss job opportunities with a military recruiter in a law school classroom. ... If gay advocates ever wish to change the military's unconscionable policy, they would be well advised to encourage, and not hamper, military recruitment at a socially progressive campus such as Yale. ... While claiming to be leading the fight for gay equality by snubbing their noses at the military, sympathizers of the gay cause are actually harming the movement's prospects.

It's worth re-reading.

Update 1: A boisterous debate in the comments zone, where "Remy" opines:

to deny that the academic left isn't reeking of anti-military venom is simply absurd. And that's why the whole "killers off campus" thing is terrible for gays to get wrapped up in.

Here's the headline being broadcast Mr. & Mrs. America, thanks to the campus activists and the gay establishment that's gone along with them: "GAYS OPPOSE MILITARY RECRUITING." Put it in a box and label it "Ways to ensure that the military ban against gays stays in place."

Update 2: Michael M. Rosen writes at TechCentralStation:

in order to cultivate change, infiltrating the culture from within is generally more effective than railing against it from without. Can it really be doubted that the presence of Ivy League hearts and minds in the upper echelons of military rank would have a significant impact? Sadly, the Ivory Tower is effectively reinforcing the very policies it abhors.

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More on Microsoft.

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It turns out the anti-gay Seattle minister who met twice with Microsoft officials and threatened the company over its support for a gay rights bill is black, as presumably are at least some members of his congregation/Microsoft employees whom the company cited as lobbying against its pro-gay stance. Why does this matter (and why was the press amiss in leaving it out of earlier reports)? Because it could help explain Microsoft's decision to shift into "neutral" on the legislative issue - with executives feeling pulled between two minorities, both with "diversity" claims.

Update 1: In the comments area, "Remy" writes:

While Gates and Ballmer would have had no truck whatsoever with a white anti-gay bigot, they let Microsoft have two meetings with this guy. Why? Because they are very sensitive to being perceived as a group of privileged whites who don't pay enough respect to blacks. The far right has become very shrewd about using the race card against gays, and MS fell right into the trap.

As for the media not reporting the preacher was black, that's certainly true of the gay media reports. I understand they don't want to be seen as inflaming prejudice, but they missed the story on the role that "the race card" played. How can we respond to the race card if we're not allowed to be informed that's it part of the game?

I agree.

Update 2: Microsoft now backs the gay rights bill. Notes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

some say Microsoft's recent indecisiveness could hurt the company's image or - worse yet - make it susceptible to future attacks from special interest groups.

Angry gays, in this case, trump angry anti-gays. For now...

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New Strategy Needed?

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This report from Maggie Gallagher's anti-gay marriage website analyzes data from the latest Gallup polls, which show a drop in support for same-sex marriage:

After eighteen months of intense public scrutiny, polls show strong and increasing opposition to same-sex marriage. Between June 2003 and March 2005, opposition to gay marriage rose from 55 percent to 68 percent in Gallup polling. In the last 18 months, the proportion of Americans who support a constitutional amendment defining marriage has also risen seven points from 50 to 57 percent.

I know, the website is not exactly unbiased, but I've seen reference to these Gallup numbers elsewhere and no counter-explanation on any of the gay sites. A knowledgeable poll-watcher tells me Gallagher, unfortunately, seems to have it right. If that is in fact the case, then the silence from gay groups in the face of bad news is just as worrisome as their to-date less than successful efforts to garner public support for the cause of marriage equality.

Update: The numbers get debated, as does the wording of the poll questions, in the comments zone. Also noted: GLAAD did weigh in on Gallup's findings.

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D.C. Hubbub.

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In the nation's capital, the D.C. attorney general issued an advisory opinion saying same-sex couples married in Massachusetts can file a joint D.C. tax return. Unfortunately, as the Washington Blade reports, Sen Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a staunch opponent of gay marriage, chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the District, which must approve the D.C. budget and which has the power to attach anti-gay amendments to D.C. appropriations bills.

Some local activists are urging D.C. to pursue marriage recognition nonetheless (as one puts it, "If Brownback is going to do something bad, then we should come back and do something stronger. At some point D.C. residents have to stand up for their rights"). But the local Gay & Lesbian Activist Alliance - whose leadership includes IGF contributing author Rick Rosendall - is urging Mayor Anthony Williams to resist releasing an opinion stating whether D.C. has legal authority to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.

As I've argued before, spousal rights are best achieved by working in the various states through popularly elected representatives (see, for example, Dale Carpenter's latest, Winning the Right Way in Connecticut).

But in the case of D.C., which is only a "semi-democracy," I don't much see the point in poking the congressional lion and risking the rollback of gains that have already been made. Right now, this battle is better fought in the states.

Update: Rick Rosendall has more on D.C. developments, in the comments zone.

More Recent Postings
4/24/05 - 4/30/05

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Virginia Isn’t for Lovers.

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IGF contributing author David Boaz, who wrote the book on libertarianism, provides an astute and provocative look at how anti-libertarian the government of Virginia was, is and likely will remain, in a new article posted at Reason Online.

As evidence of the state's century-long heritage of interfering with love and marriage, Boaz cites - among other examples - Virginia's former law barring mixed-race couples from marrying (only struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967) and its current fixation on nixing even private contractual relationships that might smack of gay unions. All of which adds up to, in Boaz's words, "an arrogant desire by the state to control private relationships." Old habits, apparently, die hard in the Old Dominion.

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The New Pope: Wrong on Relativism

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Although some people would describe me as a fallen Catholic, they're wrong: I didn't fall; I leapt. Still, after John Paul II's death, I followed the papal candidates with an enthusiasm normally reserved for American Idol contestants. Eagerly I scrutinized their biographies on interactive websites, trying to guess who would be picked.

"Do you think it will be Ratzinger?" my friends asked.

"No way," I answered. "Too divisive."

"Habemus papam," came the announcement (which is Latin for, "He's changing into something white - hang on"). Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI.

I knew Ratzinger's name well. Back in the late 1980s when I was a philosophy and theology student at St. John's University (NY), I studied his "Letter to the Catholic Bishops on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons." There Ratzinger described homosexuality as "an objective disorder" towards "an intrinsic moral evil." Incidentally, at the time I was a candidate for the priesthood and had recently come out of the closet as a gay man.

The letter was not without its "pastoral" moments. Ratzinger (as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which enforces Church orthodoxy) wrote that "It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society."

But he followed this admirable admonition with a more equivocal one: "But...when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase."

In other words, when gays demand civil rights, we should expect people to beat them up. While Ratzinger's wording was more nuanced than many critics admit, it is hard not to detect a "blame the victim" element in it. Similar blame-shifting appeared in some of his comments on the priestly sex-abuse scandal.

But what worries me even more about Ratzinger/Benedict is the false dilemma he erects between fundamentalism and relativism. In a homily before the papal conclave, the soon-to-be pope stated:

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." Relativism is the view that truth is dependent on, or relative to, a person's or culture's perspective. Contra Ratzinger/Benedict, it need not have "as its highest goal one's own ego," since not everyone's perspective is egoistic.

Granted, relativism often results in moral wishy-washiness (to use the technical philosophical term). Relativists believe that any moral view is ultimately as good as any other. And that belief is not only false, it's pernicious, since it demotes moral commitments into matters of mere personal taste.

But the proper alternative to relativism is not fundamentalism, which closes itself off from the world and brooks no dissent. The proper alternative is a healthy - and thus humble - regard for truth.

Can truth tolerate dissent? Absolutely. Pope Benedict (along with the rest of us) would do well to recall the words of the philosopher John Stuart Mill on this point. In his 1859 classic On Liberty Mill argued that those who silence opinions - even false ones - rob the world of great gifts:

"If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

Mill understood that we should embrace diversity of opinion, not because there is no objective truth, but because history shows us to be imperfect in its pursuit. We should welcome other perspectives, not because we necessarily lack confidence in our own, but because a confident perspective need not fear dialogue.

Upon his election as pope, Benedict described himself as "a simple and humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord." It is hard to recognize humility in a man who insists that anyone who rejects his particular religious worldview must therefore endorse relativism and egoism. It is still harder to recognize it in someone who now claims to speak directly for God.

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Winning the Right Way in Connecticut

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There are right ways and wrong ways, helpful ways and counterproductive ways, to win. In Connecticut, advocates for gay marriage won the right and helpful way by persuading state legislators to enact civil unions for same-sex couples. While Connecticut is in some respects exceptional, this has been a lesson in democratic politics that can and should be exported to other states. Several rules from that lesson follow.

Rule #1:
Advance through legislatures, not courts.

Connecticut becomes the first state in the country to recognize gay relationships in such an exhaustive fashion without being ordered to do so by a court. While religious opponents of gay marriage intend to challenge pro-civil-union state legislators in the 2006 election, I doubt that effort will succeed. Connecticut is a gay-friendly state dominated by liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans. Six of the 12 Republican state senators voted for the civil-union law and the Republican governor signed it. The response among the electorate has been muted.

Contrast that to the reaction when courts have forced gay marriage on states. In the 1990s, courts in Hawaii and Alaska ordered the recognition of gay marriage only to have the people in those states ban it by state constitutional amendment, a precedent that would soon be followed. Vermont enacted civil unions in 2000 under compulsion of a court order, which produced a toxic political upheaval. Civil unions survived, but no further progress toward gay marriage has been made there.

Massachusetts recognized gay marriages in 2004 only because the state's highest court ordered it. That led directly to consideration of a state constitutional amendment (still pending) and indirectly to the passage of state constitutional amendments in more than a dozen states last fall.

Until recently, California was advancing steadily and democratically toward gay marriage. From 1999 to 2003 the state legislature added annually to the benefits and responsibilities conferred on gay couples. By the beginning of this year, California's domestic partnerships offered gay couples legally much of what marriage offers. Those democratic gains for gay couples induced only a statewide yawn.

Recently, however, a state judge in San Francisco threatened that progress by declaring the state's marriage law unconstitutional. Unless the decision is reversed by the state's highest court, as I expect it will be, California too will face a possible referendum banning gay marriage. And that referendum might be broad enough to eliminate not just gay marriage, but much or all of the painstaking legislative progress already made.

Connecticut has so far followed a wiser path. However, even in Connecticut this progress is threatened by a pending lawsuit challenging the state's marriage laws. It might be fair to say that judicial victories have primed the legislative pump in Connecticut and elsewhere. Even so, more such judicial pump-priming just now will only fuel a backlash not just in Connecticut but further kindle the fire consuming gay-marriage advocates across the country.

There's something about representative democracy that makes even losers accept the legitimacy of the result. There's something about courts that makes losers want to dump tea in Boston Harbor.

Rule #2:
Incremental steps to gay marriage are necessary, but the steps can be large.

No state has yet authorized gay marriage by legislative action. That suggests that almost everywhere progress will have to be made piecemeal. In California, the legislative pace has been glacial in some years, lightning fast in others.

While incremental legislative steps toward gay marriage are often necessary, they can sometimes and in some places be very large. By recognizing civil unions, Connecticut has taken a huge leap to gay marriage. It will now be easier, in just a few years, to argue that granting Connecticut's gay civil unions the legal and social dignity of "marriage" poses no threat to society.

In this respect, however, the Connecticut model has limited application. Polls showed that 56 percent of the state's residents already favored civil unions. That level of support may be present or quickly obtainable in most of the northeastern states. Beyond those core states, any legislative progress will have to be much slower. For example, Illinois should probably be on the slow track.

Rule #3:
Compromise.

Reform movements need both idealists and pragmatists. Without idealists, the pragmatists have no idea where to go. Without pragmatists, idealists have no idea how to get there. The early years of the gay marriage struggle have necessarily been dominated by idealists, people who thought the revolutionary thought that gay couples should be allowed to marry. Now that this idea has been implanted in the political culture, and has awakened a fierce resistance, it's time for a season of pragmatism.

Pragmatism means compromise. If we stamp our feet and demand marriage, and nothing less, we will get nothing. That was initially the stand taken by Love Makes A Family, the Connecticut group supporting marriage equality. The group opposed civil unions as "separate but equal" and a "dead end" that would never lead to gay marriage. Yet the state legislature was unready for gay marriage, and even getting civil unions required a reaffirmation of the principle that marriage is for "one man and one woman."

After universal criticism in gay circles, Love Makes a Family pragmatically ended its opposition to civil unions. The legislation then passed. Now even the group's president admits that civil unions are not a dead end, but part of a "conversation about marriage equality [that] will continue."

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