IGF CultureWatch

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.

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.