The Court-Stripping Measure.

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Somewhat obscured in the aftermath of the Senate vote-down of the anti-gay Federal Marriage Amendment, the House last week voted thumbs up for a bill that seeks to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to hear challenges to parts of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) pertaining to whether a state must recognize same-sex unions legalized elsewhere.

I find it doubtful that federal courts would find constitutional a bill limiting their jurisdiction, presuming the Senate went along with this measure. But even so, despite the anti-gay animus behind this attempt, letting state legislatures and courts decide whether to recognize marriages performed elsewhere has long been the standard (a Supreme Court ruling was necessary to specifically bar miscegenation as a reason states could refuse to recognize marriages).

So I'm not up in arms over this new bill. In fact, if a federal court were to rule that state x must recognize a Massachusetts same-sex marriage, it would swiftly reinvigorate the push for the Federal Marriage Amendment (with far more devastating results), as well as for even more state constitutional amendments barring recognition of our marriages.

Maybe I'm wrong not to be upset by this court-jurisdiction bill; time will tell.

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Courting Blacks, Dissing Gays.

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President Bush went before the Urban League to say that the Democratic Party is taking African Americans for granted, and to suggest they would have more political leverage if they spread their votes around. But he admitted that the Republican Party "has got a lot of work to do" to improve its paltry support among minority voters, reports the Washington Post.

I'm not the first to note the willful blindness that leads George W. not to see that the same appeal could apply to gays. But rather than seeking to expand our support, which overwhelmingly goes to Democrats, Bush (and strategist Karl Rove) have decided the bloc of 1 million gay votes he received in 2000 is expendable.

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A Rare Agreement with NGLTF.

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On the Federal Marriage Amendment, "the statements made by so many senators to explain their votes were discouraging, frequently insulting, and denied many Americans the respect we are due," writes Matt Foreman, head of the left-liberal National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. He continues:

"Not a single senator stood up and said he or she was voting against the amendment because marriage is a fundamental right that same-sex couples should enjoy under the Constitution. If the Senate actually reflected and articulated the views of the American public, at least one-third of them would have actually argued for marriage equality and the basic rights of all Americans."

Actually, I'm told that Ted Kennedy and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were the two (count 'em) senators who did say supportive things about gay marriage.

More Recent Postings
7/18/04 - 7/24/04

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Goodbye, Federal Marriage Amendment

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First published on July 23, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

The furor leading up to the disposition of the Federal Marriage Amendment was a tangle of feints, posturing, mixed signals and tactical maneuvering. But the final result was almost a letdown.

In the end, anti-gay zealots and their fellow travelers were unable to get even a simple majority on a vote to close off debate, much less the 60 votes they needed and far less than the two-thirds vote necessary to pass the amendment. And the 48 votes for cloture included some Republicans such as U.S. Sens. Arlen Specter (Pa.) and John Warner (Va.) who were willing to go along with party leaders on cloture but announced their opposition to the amendment itself.

But the "debate" - mostly "end of the world" rhetoric from social conservatives - was disappointing since the issues were never joined. As with the anti-gay marriage arguments all along, no senator ever explained how marriage by gays would harm marriage, children or the country.

Co-sponsor Wayne Allard, R-Colo., claimed that "Marriage is the foundation of a free society." Wrong, bozo! The Soviet Union had marriage. Communist China has marriage. The actual foundations of a free society are - pay attention now! - private property, laws against initiating force, enforcement of contracts and limited government.

The supposedly pro-gay side was disappointing too. Anti-amendment senators argued that the amendment was unnecessary since the Defense of Marriage Act was in place. Or that the Senate should be spending its time on other issues. But no senator, even liberal senators with safe seats, ever managed to say that the amendment was bad because gay marriage was a good thing, that it would be good for gays and good for the country.

It was as if the Brave Knight rode up to a clearing where the Evil Dragon had the Innocent Damsel tied to a stake and instead of killing the dragon, the knight said to it, "Really now, this is just so inappropriate at this time! I totally sympathize with your feelings but we already have laws against unescorted damsels gadding about outside of castles and, anyway, there really are more important things dragons should spend their time on - like guarding treasure hordes. And isn't this really just a ploy to get attention, perhaps even a subconscious cry for help?"

To be sure, anti-amendment senators might say they were trying to appeal to their undecided colleagues but does anyone really think that by the time debate began any senator was really undecided? Put it down rather to politicians' long ingrained habit of anticipatory damage control, never exposing him - or herself any more than absolutely necessary.

It was particularly disappointing that U.S. Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards, touted by gay Democratic groups as "the most pro-gay presidential ticket ever" managed to be elsewhere and were the only senators not to cast a vote. To be sure, both men said they opposed the amendment and would have returned to Washington had the amendment itself been voted on.

So they said. But it cannot be encouraging for those seeking evidence of either man's willingness to pursue gay-supportive policies when faced with the risk of any political damage. Ah, someone might say, but this is just during the campaign. Once they are safely elected they will be different. Well, not necessarily. After all, a President Kerry would want to be re-elected. Seeking re-election, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act.

Supporters of the amendment say now they never expected to win passage on the first attempt. Funny how they never said anything like that before the debate. And they say they will bring the amendment back again. Brave talk, but having lost once, and lost significantly, momentum can hardly be said to be with them. So the helium may be leaking out of their blimp. That would be for two reasons:

1. Anti-gay advocates pin their hopes on defeating senators, mostly Democrats, who opposed the amendment. "This will be a big issue in November and I think a couple of senators who we saw today won't be coming back in January," anti-gay crusader Gary Bauer said.

But gay marriage is hardly a major issue in most states and in so close an election, President George W. Bush has no electoral "coattails" to offer his party, so the GOP can expect to pick up at most two or three seats, not enough to change the dynamics of the senate. And at least one of those senators who won't be coming back is amendment co-sponsor Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill., who will likely be replaced by Democrat Barack Obama.

2. Time is on the pro-gay side. Public opinion continues to move slowly in a pro-gay direction, so as time goes on the chance of the amendment's passage dwindles. Young people moving into the ranks of voters are increasingly gay-supportive. The New York Times reported recently that the former editor of Northwestern University's conservative magazine "said his college paper had trouble finding any conservatives on campus who supported amending the constitution to ban same-sex marriage."

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Money for Nothin’.

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Columnist Bob Roehr hits the nail on the head in his analysis of the Senate's marriage vote. He writes:

Most Democrats harped on the fact that, gasp, the Republicans were playing politics with the issue; all the while promoting their own set of political priorities. There was not a lot of defense of the gay community -- one of its most loyal constituencies in terms of votes, workers, and dollars -- which may signal a rocky future for that relationship.

Indeed, I'd be hard pressed to recall a single defense of gay marriage as a social good from the party that takes our money (yes, yes, the Republicans are worse; but we don't fund them).

Roehr goes on to note:

The Kerry/Edwards Democratic presidential team skipped the FMA vote, the only Senators to do so. The campaign staff said that Kerry was in Boston "preparing" for the Democratic National Convention.... During the preceding month the Kerry/Edwards campaign raked in over $600,000 at gay fundraisers in Boston and New York.

The day after the FMA vote Kerry was in Philadelphia at the NAACP convention. He criticized George W. Bush for claiming that a scheduling conflict kept him from addressing that group.

Can Sen. Kerry spell HYPOCRISY? As Roehr comments, perhaps we're just supposed to be grateful they're taking our dollars.

Dale Carpenter has more to say about this in "No Excuse for Kerry"

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No Excuse for Kerry

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On July 14, the Senate effectively killed the Federal Marriage Amendment. Ninety-eight Senators were there; only two were not. Unfortunately, the absentees were John Kerry and John Edwards-the Democratic presidential ticket.

Both had already made it clear they oppose a constitutional amendment, so why not actually vote against it? The answer they have given is disingenuous; the real reason for their absence should be disturbing to anyone who's hoping a President Kerry might actually take some chances to advance gay equality.

Kerry has missed many Senate votes over the past few months while campaigning. However, when a matter has come up that he cares about or that has important political implications-like a veterans' issue-he has altered his campaign schedule to return to Washington. You can tell what really counts for Kerry simply by listing these moments of campaignus interruptus.

According to a Kerry campaign spokesperson, while the Senate was voting on gay Americans' constitutional future, the Democratic nominee was in Boston "preparing for the convention," whatever that means. In this modern age of telephones, fax machines, and email, it's hard to imagine Kerry couldn't have prepared for the Democratic convention from his Washington Senate office. (Edwards was giving a speech in Des Moines, which is more excusable but hardly Earth-shattering.)

Is a last-minute plane flight from Boston to D.C. prohibitively expensive? I checked Travelocity. With one-day's notice you can get a round-trip ticket starting at $201. According to a friend of mine who has raised funds for Kerry in San Francisco, he's gotten more than half a million dollars from gays in the Bay Area alone.

Here are three common excuses for Kerry's absence.

Excuse No. 1:

The vote was on a procedural motion, not the substance of the amendment.

This is the excuse offered by Kerry and Edwards themselves, who claimed they would have attended an actual vote on the FMA. The implication is that this "mere procedural vote" wasn't very important.

That's nonsense. During the 1960s, the most important votes on civil rights legislation were "procedural" votes to close debate. Nobody who knows how Congress operates thinks they're trivial. They're often the most effective way to defeat legislation.

Everyone understood that the July 14 vote would be tantamount to a vote on the FMA itself; indeed, it was probably the only vote we'll have on the FMA this congressional session, perhaps ever. "We are casting this, as are our enemies, that this is absolutely a vote on the FMA, this is not a procedural vote, this is a substantive vote," said Human Rights Campaign Executive Director Cheryl Jacques on July 6.

You can gauge the significance of the vote by the reaction to it. Gay groups rejoiced; religious conservatives vowed to fight another day. The media played it as a knockout punch, not a technical triumph. Here was the front-page headline in the New York Times: "Senators Block Initiative to Ban Same-Sex Unions; Amendment, Endorsed by Bush, Fails After Days of Debate."

Excuse No. 2:

Kerry's vote wasn't needed to defeat the amendment.

This is true, but irrelevant. It ignores the fact that opponents of the FMA considered it essential not just to win, but to win big. Again, listen to HRC's Jacques, speaking to reporters the week before the vote: "It isn't just about narrowly defeating this measure, it's about winning soundly, sending a clear message to the House and to the states [considering state constitutional amendments] that discrimination is wrong.... [Kerry] will be there."

It was unclear immediately before the vote whether the FMA would get a bare majority, which would've been a symbolic majoritarian victory for its advocates (though still short of the 60 votes they needed for cloture). In the end it was close, but they didn't get a majority. But we didn't know that beforehand, and neither did Kerry.

In fact, over the past few months Kerry has hurried back to Washington to vote on other issues even when his vote wasn't "needed." What was different this time?

Excuse No. 3:

"This effort [to pass the FMA] is about re-electing George Bush and we don't blame John Kerry and John Edwards for not participating."

That's the word-for-word rationale I received from HRC's political director the day after the vote. It not only contradicts what HRC said before the vote (see # 1 and #2 above), but it's no excuse at all. Every anti-gay effort in Congress has both political and ideological aims. If avoiding even small political cost on gay issues is reason enough for Kerry to stand down from a fight, please remind me what the point of supporting him is.

That gets us to the real reason Kerry stayed away. Since he has publicly opposed a federal amendment, he's already paid most of whatever political price that opposition will entail. The GOP will still run commercials against him for it, and Bush will bring it up in the presidential debates. His vote would have increased the political cost only slightly.

Kerry does not believe we're worth that small additional political cost, even on an issue as fundamental as amending the Constitution. And politically it's a safe call for Kerry since he believes we have nowhere to go.

Considering only gay issues, a friendly but utterly uncommitted candidate (Kerry) is still preferable to a committed and hostile one (Bush). But let's have no illusions about the choice, or about the likely fecklessness of a Kerry administration.

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The Anti-Arnolds Take Offense.

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California Democrats and left-leaning gay activists are up in arms over a quip last weekend by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the most pro-gay governors in the nation (just how many top Democrats have gone on national TV and said they have "no problem" with legal gay marriage?).

In a speech about the state's stalled budget, Schwarzenegger joked of the Democrat-controlled legislature: "[i]f they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers' ... if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men."

The phrase, of course, comes from an old recurring "Saturday Night Live" skit in which Arnold-style, Austrian-accented body builders say it ubiquitously. But now out come the language police, declaring that the governor's use of the SNL parody line, in which he's making fun of his own reputation for muscleheadedness, is "homophobic" and "sexist."

"It's really painful to hear the governor resort to such blatant homophobia," Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), an open lesbian, told the Los Angeles Times, doing her best to parody a hopeless politically correct, censorious, grievance-collecting liberal. "There are many people who are very upset and think he owes an apology to women and to the gay community," said gay Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco. I'm just waiting for the governor's liberal opponents to label his jibe racist and anti-poor, but I'm sure they're working on that one, too.

Democrats are now using the brouhaha to fight the governor's budget reforms and defend their gutless pork-barrel ways. "Why would I possibly call him?" said Democratic Senate leader John Burton. "Why in God's name would I call him? I mean, I'm not that much of a girlie man."

Comments Log Cabin California's Jeff Bissiri:

"The Governor's use of the term 'girlie man' was not a slur aimed at the gay and lesbian community and Senator Kuehl knows that", Bissiri stated. "Where was her outrage when the [Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cruz] Bustamante campaign referred to candidate Schwarzenegger as a 'sissy' for not agreeing to an endless series of debates?" Bissiri added.

Where indeed? For his part, Schwarzenegger now says the legislators are "acting like children" (whoops, call out the Children's Defense League) in order to protect the trial lawyers, unions and other special interests who are dug in at the Capitol "like Alabama ticks" (let's add the ASPCA and the Alabama Cultural Heritage Committee to the list of offendees).

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GOP Losing the Future.

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Writing in the New York Post, Ryan Sager explains why the Bush/Rove strategy of genuflecting to the religious right may drive away the next generation of voters. Of the GOP, he writes:

its leadership may well come to realize that gay marriage was the wrong territory on which to plant their flag.... The Republicans have put themselves on the wrong side of a generation gap. And it won't be easily papered over as today's young voters age into older voters -- who are more likely to show up at the polls.

When it's one of your first presidential elections -- as it is for me -- it's no trivial matter that voting Republican means a vote for a party catering to the worst prejudices about our brothers, sisters, friends from high school, college roommates, co-workers, bosses, drinking buddies and the like.

I'm not sure I can do it. And, if it weren't for the War on Terror, I know few for whom it would even be a question.

And for what purpose? As the Los Angeles Times reports:

For all the attention from the White House, some social conservative leaders are complaining that Bush and others in his administration were too measured in their support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage....

Some conservative activists also are protesting that their most prominent allies have not been given prime speaking spots at next month's Republican National Convention....

"It appears the president has extraordinary passion on his issue, but it doesn't seem that the passion is matched across his administration," said David Zanotti, president of the Ohio Roundtable, an advocacy group for "traditional Judeo-Christian philosophies."

Note to K. Rove: Short of declaring a theocracy, there really is no way to win over the support of these extremists. But I'm sure you'll keep trying.

Family Values.

Also noted in the same LA Times piece:

[Vice President] Cheney and his wife, Lynne, devoted much time on a recent bus tour through battleground states to talking about values and family. Speaking before partisan, conservative crowds, they introduced their 10-year-old granddaughter and celebrated the birth of their first grandson, children of their other daughter, Elizabeth. But they did not introduce Mary -- a full-time campaign staffer who accompanied them on the tour.

Mary, of course, being the out lesbian of the family.

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Conservatives Against the Amendment.

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Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, author of the Defense of Marriage Act, explains why conservatives should be glad the Federal Marriage Amendment failed:

the FMA -- had it been ratified -- would have neutered state authority. Moreover, it would have done so in order to promote a certain brand of social conservatism. I might agree with many of the tenets of this type of social conservatism, but I also believe that these should be promoted through lengthy and democratic deliberation -- not imposed without such deliberation, and especially not imposed by Washington.

And Lyn Nofziger, Ronald Reagan's former press secretary, takes a similar view:

Prohibition aside, efforts to limit freedom by way of constitutional amendments generally have failed, for the reasons that they intrude on state's rights, they are not necessary or their purposes are to limit freedom. ...
On other matters Ronald Reagan used to say that the great thing about America was that a person could vote with his feet. That is, if he didn't like the situation in his town or state he was free to move. This, it seems to me, applies to this issue, too. If you don't like the way your town, state or church deals with homosexual issues and you feel really, really strongly about it you can move.

A constitutional amendment would take that right away from me -- and you. And, while I don't know about you, I am not prepared willingly to accept that possibility.

Some conservatives actually do stick to their principles, even when this leads them not to take the partisan anti-gay position.
--Stephen H. Miller

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The Other Critics of Gay Marriage.

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Let's not forget that a segment of the gay left has never come onboard the marriage fight. Writes gay "progressive" Michael Bronski in The Boston Phoenix:

Alongside the well-worn plea for gay cultural liberation is emerging a critique of gay marriage based on class rather than culture. Indeed, the push to legalize same-sex marriage has been so rushed and emotionally heady...that complicated legal issues with particular implications for the working poor and people of color were quite simply ignored.

...in the Boston College Law Review, lawyers Kara S. Suffredini and Madeleine V. Findley argue persuasively that while same-sex marriage will provide advantages to some people -- those with incomes that are middle class or higher -- it could have deleterious effects on other groups. Suffredini and Findley examine a myriad of commonly accepted myths about the benefits of same-sex marriage and discover that, often, they deliver far less than they promise, especially if you are poor....

...the simple fact remains that the fight for marriage equality is at its essence not a progressive fight, but rather a deeply conservative one.

Oh, the horror of gays working for mere legal equality, rather than to undermine capitalism and patriarchy!
--Stephen H. Miller

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7/11/04 - 7/17/04

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