More Reassessing.

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A thoughtful column by Debra Saunders, posted at the conservative townhall.com site:

In 2000, I voted against Proposition 22 [an initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California] because I believe in the benefits of marriage, for gays and straights. But the reaction to this election chills me and makes me wonder if it makes more sense for advocates to push for civil-union legislation now, and marriage later, when the public is ready.

It doesn't help when advocates demonize those who hesitate to change laws that have existed for a long time and that shape American families. It doesn't help when they blame Bush voters for sentiments also shared by Kerry voters.

Indeed, it doesn't.

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The Religious Revival, Gay Marriage, and Federalism

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Social conservatives hit the trifecta on Nov. 2, winning the White House and gaining seats in both the House and the Senate. Moreover, the election has been interpreted widely as a referendum for "morality" and against gay marriage. What do we do now?

First, don't panic. The evidence for an anti-gay religious landslide in the 2004 election is actually quite slim. Yes, 22 percent of voters rated "moral values" as the top issue. But 78 percent did not. And Kerry voters comprised almost one-fifth of that 22 percent, so the pro-Bush morality voters were about 17 percent of the total. Some minority of these people support gay equality or think of "moral values" as being mainly about abortion or a candidate's personal integrity. So probably no more than 15 percent of all voters were driven to the polls primarily by a hellfire-and-brimstone opposition to gays.

Second, panic a little. State constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed easily in 11 states, with majorities ranging from 57 percent in Oregon to 86 percent in Mississippi.

More such state constitutional amendments will be proposed, and adopted, over the next few election cycles. We'll probably see about 30 states ban gay marriage by constitutional amendment when all is said and done.

Exit polls showed that 27 percent of voters favor gay marriage, while 35 percent favor "civil unions." This led some excited gay pundits to proclaim that a whopping 62 percent of the public favors gay marriage or its equivalent.

Don't believe it. Polls on gay marriage cannot be trusted. They systematically undercount opposition, often by 10 or more percentage points, as they did before the election.

As for civil unions, it's doubtful most people understand what the term means, much less understand it in the way gay activists do. Confronted with a polling question containing the actual definition ("Should homosexual couples receive all of the benefits and privileges of marriage, albeit under a different name?"), public support would drop. Informed specifically that gay couples in a civil union would have a right equal to married couples to adopt children, public support would likely fall to levels close to the support for gay marriage.

But there's a deeper reason to be concerned, deeper than particular fights over state amendments. We may be in the midst of a long-term religious revival, a periodic fact of life in this country's history. The revival has been most pronounced among Christian evangelicals who cleave to a literal - and anti-gay - interpretation of the Bible.

The Christian-conservative movement has organized itself politically with increasing vigor and effectiveness. It has now utterly captured the Republican Party, whose hard-right blueprint for victory has been vindicated. For as far as the eye can see the South and West are solidly Republican and religiously conservative. With the exception of Illinois, the Midwest is also trending Republican. By my count, 34 states are now either deep-red Republican or moving in that direction. In the next few election cycles, by fits and starts, we could see a Senate dominated by a party dominated by anti-gay religious conservatives.

This leads to my third suggestion. In the face of resurgent anti-gay religiosity, our best bet is to defend the principle of federalism. Federalism is the basic design of American government by which limited powers are allocated to the federal government to deal with defense, foreign relations, interstate commerce, certain fundamental rights, and a few other matters, while the states largely control everything else, including criminal law, property rights, and, most importantly for our purposes, family law.

Under our system, states are allowed to act as laboratories to experiment with social and economic reforms. Sometimes state reforms work and are then adopted nationally, as when a few states first gave women the right to vote. Sometimes they don't catch on, as when Nevada partially legalized prostitution.

Even many conservative Republicans who oppose particular reforms (like gay marriage) believe that states should be allowed to experiment with them. Federalism-based arguments are the only thing that saved us from a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage this past summer.

With federalism in place, we can use our support in Blue Nation - the relatively secular enclaves in the Northeast, West Coast, and Illinois - to push for positive change (domestic partnerships and civil unions where necessary, marriage where possible). As the results in state races in California, Massachusetts, and Vermont showed, these enclaves are solidifying for pro-gay secularism just as the rest of the country is solidifying for anti-gay religious conservatism. Experiments in recognizing gay relationships can proceed in this state-by-state way until the religious revival subsides, as historically these revivals always have, or the Republican coalition fissures.

In the meantime, this strategy means discouraging lawsuits that try to nationalize the gay-marriage issue. Litigation attempting to force Red Nation to accept gay marriage will only succeed in goading these states into anti-gay constitutional action, which would destroy federalism and any fledgling experiments along with it. We will have to do the hard and time-consuming work of persuading our fellow citizens in the states that they have nothing to fear from encouraging commitment among gay couples.

I still think we win in the long-term, including on marriage. But the election helped to clarify that the long-term is likely to be a very long time indeed. The federalism-based enclave strategy will not please revolutionaries, but it's right in principle, and it's probably the best we can do for now.

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What Now?

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First published on Nov. 10, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

People who like to read post-election analyses of the voting, the campaigns, candidates, exit polls, etc., are no doubt heartily sick of them. People who don't care about post-election analyses won't read any at all, including any offered here. So let's move on.

Clearly we gays and lesbians present a problem for the Democrats - and for the Republicans. Here's why.

We are a problem for the Democrats because they need to continue receiving the large percentage (75-77 percent) of gay votes in presidential races (lower in congressional races). The gay vote (4 percent) was larger than Asians (2 percent) or Jews (3 percent) and two-thirds as large as the Latino vote (6 percent).

And they need gay campaign contributions. Gays contributed copiously first to the Dean and then to the Kerry campaigns. Figures are hard to come by, but it seems safe to say that given what we know about the economic profiles of minority communities, it is likely that gays contributed more money than either African-Americans or Latinos.

Further, Democrats need gays in order to retain their status as liberal or progressive. But equally important, nothing gays want - marriage/civil unions, military access, employment nondiscrimination - requires significant government expenditure, so in a time of huge budget deficits, doling out small doses of equality for gays is a cheap way to act progressive.

So the Democrats can hardly afford to dump gays from their coalition or continue to de-emphasize them the way Kerry did during the convention and campaign. Gays might put up with that once, accepting the tactical rationale. But even gay Democratic Party functionaries must have chafed at the ignoring of gay issues, and excuses will become unacceptable, particularly since Kerry lost anyway.

But gays are a problem for the Republicans as well. That is because there has been and continues to be a growing tolerance of gays and gay relationships, a tolerance that gradually transforms itself into acceptance - and then, with respect to gay-related policies - approval.

Support for gays in the military keeps increasing. Support for gay marriage stands at 25 percent and for civil unions 35 percent for a total of 60 percent who support recognition of gay relationships. Support for nondiscrimination laws approaches 80 percent.

The reasons are too well-known to do more than list: Ongoing coming out by gays, high rates of acceptance by young people, the growth of partnership benefits in private industry, the visibility of viewer-friendly gays in popular culture, gay gains internationally and growing acceptance in some U.S. religions.

This means that overt homophobia by the GOP will have a diminishing appeal, so the GOP will find itself forced to defend a steadily shrinking range of anti-gay positions. As this column repeatedly reminds people, culture shapes politics, not the other way around.

Less than a decade ago, in 1996 Bob Dole returned a check from the Log Cabin Republicans. In 2000 Bush said nothing about civil unions. But by 2004 although Bush opposed gay marriage, without actually endorsing civil unions he twice said they would be OK if states wanted them. Is there a consistent direction of movement here? GOP political strategists can read polls, too.

Still, coping with gays will not be easy for either party. There seems to be a view among pundits that to remain competitive Democrats need to talk more about values, virtues, morality. If so, fine. Most of us are for those things, too. But Democrats will need to find a way to talk about them in ways that include gays and gay relationships: tolerance, a culture of civility, respect for individual differences and the right of all citizens for an equal chance at happiness.

And Republicans surely know that if they want to appeal to increasingly gay-friendly voters but retain evangelicals, they need to learn to talk of respect for all citizens, neighborliness, promoting the productive contributions each citizen can make, freedom from government obstacles to happiness and the social value of stable relationships.

These languages are not very different. And both are emphatically American.

Let me conclude with a speculation about that 4 percent of the vote that was gay (or GLB). Assume that both 2000 and 2004 results were 4 percent. Note that the popular vote increased from 105 million in 2000 to 115 million in 2004, an increase of 10 percent, including an apparent 10 percent more gay voters.

But if you assume, as I do, that the (openly) gay vote is reasonably well-educated and politically alert and have already been voting in fairly high percentages, then the apparent increase of gay voters is at least partly attributable to an increase in the number of gays and lesbians who acknowledged being gay. No doubt that trend will continue.

And a final thought: How can fundamentalists and pseudo-scientific "researchers" continue to claim that gays are only 1 to 2 percent of the population when just the openly gay vote is 4 percent? That would mean every openly gay person must be voting two to four times.

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A Pragmatic Manifesto.

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A week after the election, the Log Cabin Republicans' Patrick Guerriero has issued a thoughtful assessment of mistakes made by gay activists and what must now be done. It's well worth reading. Here are some excerpts:

As we judge who our friends and opponents are in Congress we should think twice about labeling party-line procedural votes and refusal to sponsor our legislative priorities as anti-gay. We can and must speak out against anti-gay legislation, hate speech, and anti-gay votes. But we should attempt to do so without burning every bridge and without demonizing those who we need to educate and work with in the years ahead. When our most reliable friends are up for re-election, they deserve our community's full support even when they are Republicans.

That, of course, is a jibe at the Human Rights Campaign, which worked to defeat Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter despite his long record of supporting gay equality. The release continues:

And, President Bush has won a clear and decisive popular vote and electoral college victory. He is our nation's duly elected leader and we must find a way to work with him and his administration over the next four years.

That should be obvious, but it's not to partisan gay lobbyists and, until today, it wasn't clear Log Cabin realized it. And it would have been even better if LCR could have found some part of Bush's GOP agenda to praise (social security reform? health savings accounts? the war on terrorism? anything?).

We must accept that sometimes we cannot always do what feels good in the short term. Sometimes we have to do what is pragmatic and what will aid our battle over the long term.

Which is what maturity - a trait too often lacking among the activist vanguard - is all about.

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Gays as Scapegoats?

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Writing at Slate, Paul Freedman argues in The Gay Marriage Myth that terrorism, not "moral values" (and, in particular, not gay marriage) elected Bush:

The evidence that having a gay-marriage ban on the ballot increased voter turnout is spotty. Marriage-ban states did see higher turnout than states without such measures. They also saw higher increases in turnout compared with four years ago. But these differences are relatively small.

BoifromTroy also picks this up and adds his two cents, suggesting that liberal Democrats are trying to blame gays for their loss rather than their selection of a lousy candidate (making gays, as he puts it, "the new Ralph Nader"), while conservative Republicans just want to blame gays.

There's some truth that the ambiguous "values" exit poll question is being spun mercilessly by both sides (hey, I would have said "moral values" were important, too!). But the fact that the Democrats are so quick to scapegoat us should be a warning sign to the "one party's all we need" partisans.

The much bigger issue is the triumph of the statewide gay-marriage-banning initiatives, which swept to victory even in liberal, Kerry-voting Oregon, and the widespread antipathy it reveals toward gay marriage �?? regardless of the issue's arguable role in Kerry's ("The president and I have the same position, fundamentally, on gay marriage. We do") defeat.

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11/07/04 - 11/13/04

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Wanted: Fresh Thinking.

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On his website, former Log Cabin Republican leader Rich Tafel, now president of RLT Strategies, urges the gay community to rethink old tactics. He writes (in an excerpt from an op-ed he penned last month):

How have gays come so far in the popular culture, yet lost ground politically? What strategy could we employ that could end this trend? ...

During the past decade our political strategy has been: "Elect more Democrats, defeat more Republicans." This strategy hasn't worked. The fundamental problem with it is that the same voters who embrace us in the pop culture have voted to increase Republican control of their Governorships, the House, the Senate and the White House.

Given this failed partisan strategy by gay lobbyists (and, though he doesn't say it explicitly, in light of Log Cabin's public criticism of Bush during the recent campaign), Tafel asks:

Who in the gay community will be at the table with the White House and Congress to insure gay and lesbian American's concerns are included? When social conservatives push to lift those protections in a second Bush Administration who will lobby the Administration on behalf of the gay and lesbian community?

And, even more fundamentally:

Our national [gay] organizations must change our political debate from good versus evil to terms of those we've educated and those we've failed to educate, which forces us to take responsibility for our own lack of progress. Instead of figuring out how to win over our opposition, we generally demonize them for being cold hearted, intolerant or stupid. We need to spend less time preaching to our choir of supporters and more time figuring out how to win over our opposition.

Tafel also writes, "I personally think gays should be pushing for civil unions, something that the President supports," rather than outright marriage.

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The Abandonment of Incrementalism.

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Perhaps it was morally right to adopt a strategy of using state courts to gain full marriage equality, damn the consequences, but in retrospect there was little real debate within what's called the gay "community" about the risks of going for full marriage, rather than spousal rights through civil unions.

From the AP (via the Washington Blade):

German lawmakers expanded the rights of same-sex couples last week, allowing registered domestic partners to adopt each other's children and making rules on splitting up and alimony similar to those for heterosexual marriages.

That's the incremental approach that got the Netherlands and Belgium from civil unions/partnerships to full marriage -- but not in one, judicially degreed swoop. It's the path we were on in this country, state by state, until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's marriage ruling, followed by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's high-media (but legally vacuous) gay marriage decree.

As good as those developments felt, they were seen as a radical slap in the face by the conservative U.S. electorate, which differs markedly from Canada, where judicially ordered same-sex marriage is not, apparently, provoking a comparable backlash. But in this country, the slew of state amendments banning gay marriage -- and in several cases, now even civil unions -- shows that we've reaped the whirlwind.

From liberal Tina Brown's Washington Post column:

On Wednesday morning, even the gay editors of liberal upscale magazines were prepared to tell you that if there's one person who should get a big bouquet from Karl Rove it's Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, aka Mrs. [columnist] Anthony Lewis, who forced her state to authorize gay marriage.

From a Wall Street Journal editorial:

Having ignored the 11 state gay marriage initiatives before Tuesday's election, our friends in the mainstream media now can't talk about anything else. They seem astonished that even voters in Oregon and Michigan, states that President Bush lost, supported traditional marriage by landslides.

Will we have a wide-open debate about strategy now? In the wake of last week's electoral losses, activists' are pledging a new round of lawsuits to overturn what the voters decreed. Will these suits focus on the civil unions bans while working to educate the country on marriage rights? I doubt it.

[Update: A reader responds, in our mailbag.]

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10/31/04 - 11/6/04

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The Gay Leadership Crisis.

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Gay Patriot West takes a look at just how wrong-headed HRC has been, with its focus on defeating Bush instead of fighting state referendums. And an excellent point relayed about their infantile "George Bush, You're Fired" sound trucks during last summer's GOP convention:

Who were they trying to influence? I mean, did HRC actually think GOP delegates who spent thousands of dollars to go the convention (not to mention all the political capital, such as years of activism for GOP causes, it takes to win election as a delegate) would read those signs and change their minds about a man whose nomination they came to celebrate?

[Update: As quoted in the Washington Blade, gay Republican activist Carl Schmid drives the point home:

"You can just fight, fight, fight and try to defeat these Republicans, but that hasn't been successful," Schmid said. "HRC spent millions to defeat Republicans and maybe they should spend some money on educating Republicans. The issue of gay marriage is not doing so well. I don't think 'George Bush: You're Fired' does a good job at educating America about gay marriage."]

Gay Patriot also ponders why Log Cabin can't bring itself (as of this late writing) to comment on Bush's victory. I'd add that LCR has a big problem right now. The nonendorsement (which I supported) and public criticism of Bush (which I think did veer close to endorsing Kerry) put them on the outs with the White House. For the life of me, I can't fathom why or how Chris Barron, who began 2003 supporting John Edwards for president, became political director and spokesperson -- the most highly visible position after executive director Patrick Guerriero. Did this not seem like it would be a problem?

And I'm disappointed that when Bush made his statement a few weeks ago that civil unions were ok by him and that the GOP platform committee was wrong to oppose them, there was no response whatsoever from LCR. Talk about missing an opportunity to re-open dialog! This really did make it seem that they were hoping and betting on a Kerry victory.

LCR is needed, but Guerriero and the board have made terrible mistakes. If they don't shape up, they'll remain totally marginalized. Championing core Republican policy initiatives would help them re-establish their now-in-doubt GOP credentials and not seem like Democrats in drag. Sulking with the gay left about Bush's victory (with over 1 million self-identified gay votes!) is simply churlish.

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Massachusetts Court Gave Bush Victory.

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Writing in the well-respected Washington Monthly, columnist Kevin Drum argues that in retrospect "the most important event of the campaign" was:

the Massachusett's Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage. The result was nearly a dozen initiatives across the country to ban gay marriage and a perfect wedge issue for Republicans.

Over at one of my favorite sites, Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling writes:

Although I take a liberal attitude toward gay marriage, I do believe that the Massachusetts Supreme Court need not have found a right to gay marriage in that state's Constitution. The Democratic Party reaped the whirlwind from that exercise in judicial activism.

And at The Agitator site, libertarian blogger Radley Balko concurs.

Gay activists who bellow that those who voted to ban gay marriage are all "bigots" and "haters" don't get it. Most of those voters are work-a-day folks who fear same-sex matrimony is an invitation to moral anarchy. We can say that's misguided, but it's just not the same thing as rank bigotry. And given the overall state of the culture, which is far ruder and cruder than ever, the fear that things are spinning out of control is not that hard to fathom.

What's needed is education over time, and probably the incremental steps of domestic partnerships and civil unions -- contrary to the Massachusetts court's radical judicial decree.

But gay activists still think filing lawsuits, regardless of popular opinion, is that path to victory. On the heels of the 11-state defeat, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force leader Matt Foreman issued a statement saying:

The results underscore why we have a Bill of Rights -- because it is always wrong to put basic rights up to a popular vote. ...In the end, we know the Bill of Rights will guarantee every American the freedom to marry. ...This is only one round and when the fight is over, complete equality for gay people will be the only side left standing.

The courts do have an important role in guaranteeing legal equality. But at the same time you can't just steamroll over popular opinion or (as I think Foreman does) dismiss it contemptuously and say only court rulings matter -- because in the end judges are either elected or appointed by those who are elected. And Big Daddy Government isn't going to do the job of reaching hearts and minds for us.

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How HRC’s Partisanship Threatens Our Rights.

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Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a moderate, gay-rights supporting Republican poised to take over chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, "bluntly warned newly re-elected President Bush today against putting forth Supreme Court nominees who would seek to overturn abortion rights or are otherwise too conservative to win confirmation," reports the AP.

Specter helped kill President Reagan's nomination of arch-homophobe Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship. Specter called both nominees too extreme on civil rights issues. Sessions later became a Republican senator from Alabama and now sits on the Judiciary Committee with Specter.

The Human Rights Campaign vigorously opposed Specter's re-election, despite his co-sponsorship of the HRC's Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and Hate Crimes Prevention Act, among other measures. If HRC had been successful and Specter had been defeated, the Judiciary Committee could have been headed by a right-wing social conservative such as Alabama's Sessions.

[Updte: A new letter in our mailbag takes me to task over Sen. Specter's liklihood to stand up to anti-gay judicial nominees.]

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