IGF CultureWatch

First published on February 11, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Back in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, you could scarcely go out to bars on weekend nights without paying a door charge "for AIDS" or being asked by some fresh-face young man to contribute to AIDS education. Bars held raffles, sales, fundraisers garnering anywhere from a few hundred to several hundred dollars.

Then the head of some AIDS group would step forward, accept the money and thank the crowd for "helping support the fight against this dread disease," telling us how wonderful we all were. And we would smile and applaud because we knew we were helping the fight against AIDS and we were wonderful.

For years, I cheerfully contributed a few dollars each time I was asked. After all, it was a worthy cause, I knew people with AIDS, some dying, and I was glad to help as much as I could.

Then sometime in the late 1980s I read that the head of the largest local gay health organization doing AIDS work was paid a salary of something like four or five times my admittedly rather unimpressive annual income at the time.

That made me stop and think. And I stopped contributing. The amounts this woman was gushing over and thanking people for contributing would barely pay her salary for a day or two, much less go to help anyone with AIDS. If she were so concerned about AIDS, I wondered, how much of her own salary she was contributing?

And this was while I was doing a considerable amount of volunteer AIDS-advocacy work of my own within the all-volunteer state gay advocacy organization.

So I resolved to make no more contributions to AIDS groups unless there were full disclosure. That is, unless I knew how much the executives made, how much money actually went to useful projects, and what specific things the money went for. And that information was seldom if ever available.

I thought back to all this when I recently read an article in the Washington Blade detailing the salaries of executive directors of more than a dozen gay advocacy groups.

Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, headed the list with salary and benefits of about $210,000. Next was Elizabeth Birch, until recently head of the Human Rights Campaign, paid a total of $200,000. Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's Kevin Cathcart was third at not quite $200,000. Kevin Jennings, founder and head of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network earns about $165,000. And so forth.

These salaries are higher than most of us earn, at least more than I earn. I suppose they are not out of line with salaries in other social advocacy groups. If they seem high, maybe we are too used to thinking of gay advocacy as something you do as some sort of personal sacrifice.

And, after all, executive directors do have responsibility for the survival and growth of their organizations: setting policy, hiring staff, being a spokesperson, keeping the money flowing in, and doing what we hope is effective advocacy.

Still, since that moment of revelation years ago, my standards for contributing have risen. Fundraising letters waving the bloody shirt of religious right have no impact on me. Don't tell me about the menace, tell me what you are going to do about it. I want specifics. I figure if they are soliciting our money, we have the right, the obligation, to know what they are going to do with it. And how do we do that? Do they issue annual reports of what they achieved with the money we gave last year? Don't even ask.

In my book Kevin Jennings gets a free pass. He founded GLSEN, working courageously in the minefield of homosexuality and young people. He has written books, given innumerable speeches to educators and sparked those high school Gay/Straight Alliances. If anyone deserves his salary Jennings does. And Cathcart's Lambda Legal files high profile suits against unjust laws and policies and often wins. Perhaps no other gay organizations achieve such obvious results with so comparatively little money.

But the others? Especially GLAAD, best known for holding glittery fundraisers and award ceremonies "honoring" pop culture personalities, piggybacking on other people's achievements. And when we learn that Garry's $210,000 salary is a stunning 5 percent of her organization's total annual revenue of $4 million, something seems awry. Do they need my $25? I'm sure Garry can afford groceries without it.

I don't in principle begrudge executives making more money than I do, even a lot more. Maybe they deserve it. Some certainly do. But if they still want me to contribute, they had better give me a really good reason to contribute to them rather than any one of several other groups.

Just for starters, keep in mind that most statewide gay organizations are desperately poor - yet the state level is where most gay political issues are being decided - gay adoption and foster care, hate crime and civil rights laws, gay marriage and partnership issues, and state ratification or rejection of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.

Gays have been blamed for just about every bad thing that's ever happened in human history, from the fall of the Roman Empire, to the rise of Nazi Germany, to earthquakes in California. How was homosexuality responsible for these events? Well, they happened and there were homosexuals around. There was a correlation.

Enter Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, who is making a career out of predicting catastrophe if gay marriage is recognized in the United States. In his latest article, published in the conservative Weekly Standard, he argues we have something to learn from the experience of Scandinavia. "Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia," Kurtz begins ominously. "A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more." Gay marriage will undermine the institution of marriage, Kurtz concludes, and Scandinavia proves it.

There's one major problem at the outset for Kurtz's argument. There is not one gay marriage in any country he cites. In 1989, Denmark adopted a registered partnership law that granted most of the benefits and obligations of marriage to same-sex couples, with the notable exception of adoption rights. Norway adopted a similar law in 1993, and Sweden expanded its cohabitation law along the same lines in 1994. (Not until 2001 did a European country - the Netherlands - recognize gay marriages that are legally identical to traditional heterosexual marriages.) Thus, Kurtz blames "gay marriage" for worsening a host of social ills that were already present before it existed anywhere in the world.

Second, even if these Scandinavian gay partnerships could be called "marriages," Kurtz shows only a correlation between them and marital decline. For example, after Kurtz notes that marital problems are highest in European countries where gay "marriage" has a foothold, and lowest where it does not, he writes: "This suggests that gay marriage is both a cause and effect of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood." But this is a correlation; it does not show causation.

There are also correlations between marital decline and non-gay marriage phenomena, like rising women's equality (in employment and elsewhere); no-fault divorce; rising incomes and prosperity; a generous welfare state that serves a caretaker role; longer life and better health; contraception; abortion; less religiosity, and so on. Any of these is a more likely culprit than gay marriage.

Does Kurtz conclude we should return women to barefoot-and-pregnant legal status, ban divorce, tamp down on incomes, lower the quality of medical care, ban the use of contraceptives, and erase the distinction between church and state? All of these things would probably have a positive effect on marriage rates, divorce rates, and illegitimacy - but at very high and unacceptable cost to people like him. Yet Kurtz wants to ban gay marriages, which would have negligible or no effect on the pre-existing problems with marriage, at very high cost to the lives of gay people.

In an effort to demonstrate gays really don't want marriage, Kurtz notes that only 2,372 gay couples had registered after nine years of the Danish cohabitation law, only 674 after four years in Norway, and only 749 after four years in Sweden. Notice that these are tiny numbers in countries of 5.1 million, 4.2 million, and 8.5 million people, respectively, in the 1990s. They seriously undercut Kurtz's claim that registered partnerships are destroying marriage in those countries. To reach his conclusion, Kurtz must assume a huge effect (marital decline) from a tiny cause (gay "marriages").

Even if Kurtz could demonstrate that these Scandinavian gay partnerships have somehow contributed to the erosion of marriage as an institution, he only reaches a conclusion long ago pressed by gay conservatives. It is the opposition to gay marriage that has led to the proliferation of alternatives to marriage itself. These alternatives serve to knock marriage off its pedestal as the gold standard for relationships, something feminist and libertarian critics of marriage might applaud, but traditionalist defenders of marriage should abhor.

Traditionalists like Kurtz rightly worry about the rise in out-of-wedlock births in Europe and America. Notably, registered partnerships in Scandinavia restrict or forbid adoptions or artificial insemination by gay couples. That is, these partnerships encourage the separation of wedlock from parenthood.

Full-fledged gay marriages would not encourage that separation; they would encourage the opposite. In two respects, gay marriage would result in _fewer_ children being raised by single or cohabiting parents. First, there are about 150,000 gay couples in the U.S. right now raising children. Yet these couples cannot marry. Current law guarantees these children will be raised in unmarried households. Second, most gay parents get their children from prior heterosexual marriages or relationships that many of them entered because of the pressures created by anti-gay social stigma. To the extent gay marriage increases social acceptance, and provides models of married gay couples, we should expect these people to be channeled earlier into gay relationships and away from doomed heterosexual relationships that produce children.

Most telling, perhaps, is Kurtz's apparent resistance to changing no-fault divorce laws. Of all the legal changes to marriage over the past 40 years, no-fault divorce has had the greatest impact on the institution. Next to it, gay marriage as a legal reform is trivial. This shows, I think, that Kurtz isn't really serious about defending marriage. Like the many doomsayers before him, his goal is to keep gays down.

First published February 4, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

One of the biblical trump cards for fundamentalist Christians and Jews in their opposition to homosexuality and gay equality is the passage in the Old Testament book of Leviticus 20:13 which reads:

"If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them." (Revised Standard Version)

But there are problems here. First, notice that this passage says absolutely nothing about a woman lying with a woman. In fact, nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there any injunction against women engaging in lesbian sex. Ruth and Naomi may not have had a lesbian relationship, but they could have had they wanted to. So fundamentalists cannot cite this passage as a prohibition against anything regarding lesbian equality.

Second, although the passage clearly calls for (non-celibate) gay men to be executed, few fundamentalists except "Reconstructionist" Christian followers of the late theologian R.J. Rushdoony advocate execution for homosexual acts. But if most fundamentalists do not accept the Bible teaching about execution why do they accept the biblical condemnation itself? Both are in their Bible.

Third, as with other topics, the Old Testament is not without contradiction on the issue of homosexuality. Leviticus itself just two chapters earlier provides an alternative view, seldom cited by fundamentalists. Leviticus 18:22 and 29 reads:

"You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. ... For whoever shall do any of these abominations, the persons that do them shall be cut off from among their people."

The point to notice here is that while gay male sex is again described as an "abomination" - that is, a violation of cultic purity - this passage mandates no punishment. It is simply an injunction to Hebrew men on how to please Yahweh and achieve prosperity. Men who engage in gay sex are only to be ejected from the religious community. This plainly contradicts Lev. 20:13, yet fundamentalists explain neither the contradiction nor why they generally cite the later passage.

That said, it is worth pulling back from fundamentalist literalism and looking at these passages in their historical context. Both passages are part of a larger unit including Leviticus chs. 17-26 that Bible scholars call the Holiness Code.

The Holiness Code in the form it comes down to us consists of a repetitious and disorderly collection of several smaller law codes containing overlapping regulations written at different times and under different circumstances. Biblical scholar Otto Eissfeldt in his The Old Testament: An Introduction, puts it this way: "Whoever united them wished to alter their content as little as possible and had to let the duplicates stand."

Thus, for instance, Lev. 20:10-26 is more or less a parallel to 18:6-30, except that the second version has penalties attached where the first version does not. The likeliest explanation is that, as the New English Bible observes, "The two chapters were once independent, self-contained units."

It is not definitely known when the Holiness Code was patched together, but it was well after the Hebrews became numerous in Israel because Lev. 25-29 refers to the Canaanites having already been expelled. Clearly the compiler forgot that he was supposed to be impersonating a scribe at the time of Moses. According to Eissfeldt, the Code probably dates from sometime after the Hebrews returned from exile but in any case no earlier than 550 B.C., although it contains some older material.

It is tempting to imagine that the prohibition of male homosexuality without penalties was written when the Hebrews lacked political power to mandate penalties and the prohibition with penalties was written when they did have that power.

However that may be, nowadays we might wonder why the Hebrews condemned homosexuality. The Old Testament explanation is that Yahweh condemned the male prostitution that was a religious practice of the rival Canaanites. But this answer has difficulties.

For one thing, it is hard to see why disapproval of sacred male prostitution by a rival religious cult should lead to disapproval of non-religious, non-prostitutional sex between males. For another, the Levitical language actually seems to come into the Hebrew codes as a late borrowing from the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism which the Hebrews came into contact with during the exile and which condemned "the man who lies with mankind as man lies with womankind."

Third, despite the Old Testament claim, there is little evidence that Canaanite religious practice actually included sacred male prostitution. The accusation seems merely to have been part of the backdated fifth-century polemic against the Canaanites.

After a comprehensive examination of the available historical evidence for sacred prostitution, Kenyon College religion professor Robert Oden wrote in his book The Bible without Theology, the accusation of sacred prostitution "played an important role in defining Israel and Israelite religion as something distinctive. ... However, that it existed in ancient Syria-Palestine or Mesopotamia is not demonstrated in any of the evidence to which appeal is so frequently made."

{Author's note: Since the first publication of this piece, my attention has been drawn to sociologist Stephen O. Murray's recent comprehensive study Homosexualities (University of Chicago Press, 2000) in which, drawing on different sources and different evidence, he also concludes that Canaanite sacred prostitution did not exist. Referring to the supposed cult prostitutes or "qdeshim" mentioned in the Old Testament, Murray says, "There is no evidence that their sexual services were sold to men or that having sex with them had any religious significance" (p. 295).}

First published February 4, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.

Some weeks we win.

The other week, in Florida, we lost.

For months we have been waiting for the courts to overturn Florida's 1977 blanket ban on gays and lesbians adopting children. Florida is the only state to have such a ban - most states put the welfare of children first.

The story was well-publicized, especially after the case was taken up by Rosie O'Donnell. Life partners Steve Lofton, a pediatric nurse, and Roger Croteau were bringing up five foster kids, three with HIV. Lofton quit his job to raise them full-time. Then, one of the kids, Bert, who had been placed with Lofton and Croteau when he was an infant, no longer tested positive for HIV. Which means that under Florida law he became "adoptable" - and so the state sought a new home for him.

Lofton and Croteau want to adopt Bert but they couldn't because of the adoption ban. Interestingly, Florida would have given Lofton legal guardianship, which would have taken Bert out of the foster system but also threatened his Medicaid coverage. In other words, Florida found Lofton to be a satisfactory parent - it just didn't want to give him the same full legal authority or financial help a straight man would get automatically.

So with the ACLU's help Lofton went to court. Hopes were high. Lofton seemed an ideal test case. But even though the court admitted that "by all accounts, Lofton's efforts in caring for these children has been exemplary," the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Lofton and Croteau and other gay men challenging the law.

If the law is to change, legislators need to change it, the court ruled.

That seems unlikely when the state's governor is Jeb Bush, who responded to the ruling by saying he was pleased. "It is in the best interest of adoptive children, many of whom come from troubled and unstable backgrounds, to be placed in a home anchored by both a father and a mother," he stated.

But we all know this law - and this court decision - aren't in place in order to protect the interests of adopted children. There are 43,000 children in Florida's foster care system (this number includes children waiting to be adopted, as well as children who may be reunited with their families). The majority of these children are minorities and a significant number are children with special needs, like Bert. That means that many of these are children who won't easily be adopted.

But Florida's primary concern isn't that these children get homes. And it isn't worried about the taxpayers supporting these children. And it isn't troubled over the citizens who will be impacted later, when these children, shuffled from home to home without adequate love or nurturing, enter the prison and welfare systems as adults.

As the State of Florida said in its argument, the state is concerned about only one thing: Retaining the right to legislate its "moral disapproval of homosexuality."

And the court, while noting the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence vs. Texas, said, "We conclude that it is a strained and ultimately incorrect reading of Lawrence to interpret it to announce a new fundamental right."

Therefore, the court reasoned, Florida isn't violating the Constitution's equal protection clause when it says that gays and lesbians are automatically banned from adopting, no matter what their qualifications. Because gays and lesbians don't have a right to do anything except have sex in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

This is not the way we wanted post-Lawrence life to go. Indeed, it is part of the feared backlash against Lawrence.

Other evidence of the backlash has been cropping up slowly across the country. The Democratic presidential contenders have been trying their hardest (and, I think, wisely) not to make gay issues a central part of their campaigns. Support for civil unions and same-sex marriage has been steadily dropping in polls. And also last month the Ohio legislature passed a Defense of Marriage Act that would make the state the 38th to limit marriage to a union between a man and a woman.

This backlash is not only impacting adult gays and lesbians. It is impacting entire families. It is impacting children like Bert, who can be ripped from their homes - or never placed in homes - because the state is terrified about what gay couples might do in their bedrooms.

So yes, we lost last week. And maybe if it were only the gay and lesbian community who lost, it wouldn't be so bad. But Florida's foster care children lost. They are hurt most by this law and this ruling, which we hope the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn.

Until then Florida will remain a state more committed to its backward, pinched view of the world than to its citizens - young and old.

It's a remarkable thing for a sitting vice president to disagree publicly with the president he serves. It's all the more remarkable when that happens in a presidential election year - and on an issue of fundamental importance.

Dick Cheney recently announced that, in contrast to George Bush, he does not support a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. At a campaign event in Davenport, Iowa, on August 24, an audience member asked Cheney this question: "I need to know, Sir, from your heart - I don't want to know what your advisers think or even your top adviser - what do you think about homosexual marriages?"

Here's Cheney's response, with my comments following parts of his reply.

"Well, the question has come up in the past with respect to the question of gay marriage. Lynne and I have a gay daughter so it's an issue that our family is very familiar with."

Never before had Cheney publicly acknowledged that one of his daughters, Mary, is gay. Her sexual orientation had briefly come to the fore during the 2000 presidential election. But back then the Cheneys took a "no comment" approach, with Cheney's wife, Lynne, telling a reporter that her daughter had never declared "such a thing."

With this recent comment, Cheney is saying three important things:

1. First, he acknowledges that "gay" people exist. While that may seem obvious to most of us, many religious conservatives deny there is a homosexual orientation. For them, homosexuals are just heterosexuals doing wicked things.
2. Second, Cheney's frank talk is an assertion that having a gay person in one's family is nothing to be ashamed of.
3. Third, it's obvious Mary Cheney's homosexuality has influenced her very conservative family's views on gay-rights issues. Even the issue of gay marriage has been seriously discussed in the Cheney family.

Earlier this year, when President Bush endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment, critics faulted Mary Cheney for quietly acquiescing in such anti-gay policy. It's clear now that she has not been quiet; she has been sticking up for gay rights in her own way. Moreover, she's having an effect on her father.

"We have two daughters and we have enormous pride in both of them, they're both fine young women and they do a superb job, frankly, of supporting us, and we were blessed with both our daughters."

Here Cheney is telling religious conservatives that there's nothing wrong with being gay. One can be gay and be a "fine young woman" at the same time. One can be gay and do a "superb job" of supporting one's family. One can have a gay daughter and count that fact as a "blessing." Again, none of this is revolutionary to most of us. But to many religious conservatives who form the base of the GOP, it is anathema.

"With respect to the question of [unintelligible word] relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everybody. People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to."

Cheney's conservative credentials were burnished decades ago. He was one of the most conservative members of Congress during his ten years representing Wyoming in the House of Representatives. His voting record was uniformly anti-gay. For someone like him to declare, amid a national debate over gay marriage, that gay couples must be allowed to share in American liberties is a watershed.

"The question that comes up with respect to the issue of marriage is, what kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by government, if you will, to the particular relationship? Historically, that's been a relationship that's been handled by the states. States have made the basic fundamental decision what constitutes a marriage.... [T]hat's appropriately a matter for the states to decide and that's how it ought to best be handled."

It's clear Cheney is not prepared to say publicly whether he actually favors gay marriage. I'd bet that, in his heart of hearts, he supports it or at least doesn't strongly oppose it. He hasn't mouthed the Bush-Kerry-Edwards mantra that "marriage is between a man and a woman."

Cheney emphatically reaffirms the pro-federalism position on the issue. Some states may adopt gay marriage; others may reject it; and still others may opt for something in between, like domestic partnerships or civil unions. In Cheney's view, the whole issue is one for individual states to resolve. This federalism concern has been the basis for conservative opposition to the FMA. It was the winning argument when the Senate rejected the amendment in July.

"The president has, as a result of the decisions made in Massachusetts this year by judges, felt that he wanted to support a constitutional amendment to define at the federal level what constitutes marriage.... At this point my own preference is as I've stated, but the president makes basic policy for this administration...."

Cheney accomplishes two things here. First, he remains a loyal foot soldier for the administration by acknowledging that the president sets policy. Second, he subtly undermines the basis for the president's policy judgment. The president may fear that judicial activism is about to unleash gay matrimony on the country, justifying a federal amendment, but Cheney does not. He has listened carefully to the arguments for a constitutional amendment and soundly rejected them.

So:

1. Gay is good.
2. Freedom is for everybody.
3. Don't mess with the Constitution.

Forget Bush and Kerry. Cheney for president, anyone?