Homosexuality and Morality, Part 2: The Bible

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MANY PEOPLE claim that homosexuality is wrong because "The Bible says so." This claim rests on two presuppositions:

(1) The Bible condemns homosexual conduct. (2) The Bible is a good moral guide.

Each of these raises questions. Regarding the first: does the Bible condemn all homosexual conduct, or just some? And which Bible are we talking about? (Remember that in addition to the numerous editions of the Judeo-Christian Bible, there are also countless other religious texts that claim divine authority. Given our tendency toward cultural myopia, it bears repeating that the vast majority of the world's inhabitants are not Christians.)

Regarding the second presupposition: is the Bible infallible, or might it contain some error? If the latter, how do we distinguish true moral teaching from that which simply reflects the authors' prejudices? Consider, for example, two passages - one from the Old Testament and one from the New - that seem pretty clearly to endorse slavery:

"[Y]ou may acquire male and female slaves ? from among the aliens residing with you, and from their families that are with you, who have been born into your land; and they may be your property. You may keep them as a possession for your children after you, for them to inherit as property." (Leviticus 25: 44-46)

"Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ" (Ephesians 6:5).

Faced with such morally troubling passages, the reader has one of three options:

(A) Deny that the passages really endorse slavery. But this seems rather difficult to do, especially given the references to "property" in the first quotation, which was allegedly spoken by God himself.

(B) Maintain that the Bible contains no error and concede that slavery may be morally acceptable. Not surprisingly, few believers take this approach (though the case was quite different 150 years ago, when slave-owning Christians often cited these passages). This option ought forcefully to be rejected. Surely one should have more confidence in the wrongness of slavery than in the inerrancy of the quoted text. Which leaves us with?

(C) Acknowledge that the Bible contains some error. To admit this is not to claim that God makes mistakes. Perhaps humans have erred in interpreting God's will: after all, one should not confuse complete faith in God with complete faith in human ability to discern God's voice.

Option (C) comes at a cost, however. Once you have admitted that the Bible contains error, you cannot simply use "The Bible says X" as if it were an airtight justification of X. This is as true for homosexuality as it is for slavery.

Is the Bible thus rendered useless? Not at all. The Bible is a valuable account of the experience of past believers, and it can teach important lessons on matters both moral and non-moral. But to quote its passages on controversial issues without paying attention to its historical context is to diminish its richness. Fundamentalists do the Bible no honor when they treat "The Bible says X" as if it were the last word, rather than a piece of a larger puzzle regarding human longing for truth and meaning.

Which brings me to another point. Critics often suspect that there's something self-serving about "revisionist" readings of scripture by pro-gay scholars. In some cases, the critics are right. But the revisionist readings are also motivated by honest recognition of a tension between the apparent evidence of scripture and the apparent evidence of our experience. If God is the creator of all things, surely God reveals divine intentions in our lived experience and not merely in an ancient text. (Besides, if you don't generally trust your own experience, why trust your experience of the text?) And if our lived experience teaches us that homosexual relationships can be loving and nurturing, there's something incongruous about the idea that a benevolent God would condemn them.

How then do we explain the handful of passages that seem to condemn homosexuality? Biblical interpretation is a complex matter, and I can only scratch its surface here. (For a more thorough treatment, see Daniel Helminiak's What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality.) But let me suggest that these passages, like the passages on slavery, strongly reflect the cultural circumstances of the authors. More specifically, they reflect (1) the fragility of the authors' communities and a corresponding emphasis on procreation for the sake of community survival, (2) a distaste for Greek pederasty, and (3) a distaste for various pagan practices that included ritual homosexual conduct.

If the Biblical authors had these features in mind when they wrote about homosexuality, then what they were discussing is quite different from what we are discussing. In that light, using Biblical passages to condemn contemporary homosexuality looks much like using them to support nineteenth-century American slavery - a reflection of the reader's prejudices, rather than an honest assessment of the moral facts.

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The Troglodyte. Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss.), the once and soon-to-be-again Senate Majority Leader, is in hot water -- and deservedly so -- for failing to censor himself during a birthday bash for retiring centenarian Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.Carolina). Lott joked that the country would have been better off if Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948, when he ran on the break-away "Dixiecrat" segregationist ticket. Said Lott:

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

Those in attendance reportedly gasped.

The story has been widely reported, but most accounts failed to draw a connection with another significant Lott gaffe, back in 1998, when he compared gays with alcoholics and kleptomaniacs. Said Lott then, when asked his view about homosexuality:

"It is [a sin]....You should try to show them a way to deal with that problem, just like alcohol...or sex addiction...or kleptomaniacs."

Trent Lott is not a fire-breathing hater, nor is he an unreconstructed segregationist. Often it seems he doesn't even realize the implications of what he's saying. Nevertheless, unlike George Bush's amusingly twisted syntax, Lott's remarks convey a political worldview that is rather scary. So why is this man honored with the powerful position of Majority Leader? For fear of losing white GOP votes in the "solid South," I suspect. But the way forward is not tethered to the bigotries of the past, and if the GOP wants to be the majority party of the future it will have to come to terms with that fact.
--Stephen H. Miller

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Speaking Their Language. The Orange County Register ran this editorial making a libertarian argument for why the Supreme Court should hold sodomy laws unconstitutional. The editorial reads in part:

So sodomy laws are objectionable in a free society. But are they forbidden by the U.S. Constitution? Roger Pilon, director of constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, thinks so.

The first clause he cites is the 9th Amendment, which says in its entirety: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." That was included in the Bill of Rights to remind us that just because the framers hadn't mentioned an individual right didn't mean people didn't have it. In that reminder can be found a right to privacy, to sexual freedom, or the more general right of a free citizen to be left alone by government if he or she is not harming another person.

Mr. Pilon also believes the 14th Amendment, which states in part, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," forbids laws that intrude into private bedrooms. "That clause was meant to be the principal font of rights against the states, to protect the freedom and personal integrity of the individual," he told us. Justice Clarence Thomas has been especially interested in the "privileges or immunities" clause as a guarantee of individual liberty, and he could use it in this case to good effect.

Too often gay activists, who"ve come of age in the cocoon of liberal-left culture, don't understand that conservatives and libertarians not only don't view the world through the same lens as liberals do, but neither speak nor respond to the same rhetorical language as liberals. That may be one reason why when a sodomy-law case last came before the Supreme Court, 16 years ago, gay advocates failed to convince a conservative-leaning court that repeal wouldn't be just one more example of liberal judicial activism beyond the intent of the Constitution. Let's hope this go-round the pro-repeal lawyers will be able to argue the case in a way that can sway conservatives. It can be done, and Cato's Roger Pilon is perhaps showing the way.

A British Example. The British newspaper The Guardian reports that Tony Blair's Labour government will propose recognizing same-sex "civil partnerships" and granting these the same rights given to married couples (though civil partnerships would remain a separate category from "marriage"). Significantly, a leading Conservative Party figure says Conservatives will support the plan:

The shadow home secretary, Oliver Letwin, indicated that the Conservatives would support the measure when legislation was introduced. "Whilst we attach a huge importance to the institution of marriage we do recognise that gay couples suffer from some serious particular grievances," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "If what the government is coming forward with is indeed a set of practical steps to address a set of practical problems that affect people, then we will welcome them."

And in America we"re still debating whether homosexuality should remain a criminal act!

But What About the Transgendered? I do have one pet peeve about the reporting of the above story by The Guardian. It begins:

Gay men, lesbians and bisexual people are to be offered the same rights as married couples, a government minister indicated today".

But really, isn't including "bisexuals" a bit of a stretch? If they"re in an opposite-sex relationships, they already have the right to marry. If they"re in a committed same-sex partnership, then it's a gay relationship. Referencing bisexuals in this regard seems like politically correct sophistry.

The Race Card. IGF contributor Rick Rosendall authored a brave column (it ran in Boston's Bay Windows and elsewhere) on racial guilt-mongering in the corridors of the gay left. Writes Rick of a recent National Gay & Lesbian Task Force conclave, which included sessions for people of color only:

The preferred mode of communication at Creating Change resembles not conversation but emotional hostage taking. It is for the designated victims to harangue, and for the rest to pander. Each year the ritual starts all over again, as if for the first time.

NGLTF's Sue Hyde responded with a letter arguing that:

There are LGBT people of every color, ethnicity, class, age, race, condition of birth and gender who are joining together to make a stronger, more powerful and more fully representative movement for social justice, equality and freedom. Some of the work to build this movement will be accomplished when the voices of women, young people, people of color, old people, transgender people and intersex people can be heard more clearly, which logically requires that they be given the space, the time and respect to hear themselves first.

Listen, I don't doubt that the diversity-first crowd is sincere in its ideological beliefs and actually thinks all of this is somehow "progressive." But the ceaseless laundry-listing of victimized subsets leads not to a unity of the many (which requires a focus on commonality despite differences), but to seemingly endless balkanization and a competition to see who can exhibit the greatest wounds. This has never been healthy.
--Stephen H. Miller

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In America? Columnist Steve Chapman has an excellent piece in the Chicago Tribune (free registration required) on the sodomy law case now before the Supreme Court. He writes:

One night four years ago, sheriff's officers -- entered the dwelling and barged into a bedroom. But all they found was a couple enjoying a pastime commonly enjoyed by couples in their bedrooms, and I don't mean organizing the closet. You might guess that at this point, the cops would have blushed, apologized and left as fast as their feet would carry them. Wrong. They arrested the couple under the Texas anti-sodomy statute. "

For [Tyron] Garner and [John] Lawrence, there was the indignity of being jailed, hauled into court and fined for consensual acts carried out in private. On top of that, their lawyers note, they are now disqualified or restricted "from practicing dozens of professions in Texas, from physician to athletic trainer to bus driver." If they move to some states, they'll have to register as sex offenders.

And there are those who claim these laws have no real impact on our lives.

Shareholders Rule. Lockheed Martin Corp. is one of the world's largest defense contractors with some 125,000 employees. That's why it's significant that the company has now changed its employment policy to include a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation, and will also begin offering domestic partnership benefits sometime next year. According to the Rocky Mountain News, thanks goes to an ambitious group of college students who lobbied Lockheed's shareholders.

In another corporate development, the board of CBRL Group Inc., the parent company of Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores restaurants, has voted to add sexual orientation to the company's non-discrimination policy. As reported on the Gay Financial Network site:

Cracker Barrel drew national attention in 1991 when it instituted a company policy that called for terminating employees "whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values which have been the foundation of families in our society." At least 11 workers were fired as a result.. -- [But this year] A shareholder proposal to add sexual orientation to the company's non-discrimination policy would have received a majority of the votes cast Nov. 26.

Remember whenever you hear corporations vilified as dark, nefarious powers unto themselves that not only do they need to please the consuming public in order succeed, but they are also owned and ultimately responsive to the will of their shareholders, who can organize, petition, and vote for policy changes. Talk about "economic democracy," we have a far higher degree than ever existed under state socialism!
--Stephen H. Miller

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Defending the Indefensible. How many right-wingers are willing to argue that gay sex should be outlawed and sexually active gay people prosecuted and sent to prison? Probably not many, but count on a good number trying to support sodomy laws (now once again before the Supreme Court) as serving some useful function, such as "upholding morality," while not actually encouraging that they be effective enforced. Still others will hold that it's a matter best left to states legislators, as if there were simply no federal Constitution to provide equal legal protection to a subset of the citizenry disliked by local bigots.
Already, we"re seeing headlines such as "Governor defends ban of same-sex intercourse," wherein Texas Gov. Rick Perry said of his state's law to punish same-sex couples for having sex, "I think our law is appropriate that we have on the books." Then why not really enforce it, Governor?

Wrong About Everything. The New York Times has a story today about Justice Lewis Powell, who during his time on the Supreme Court managed to consistently oppose the fundamental principle of equality before the law and equal treatment for all by the state and its institutions (that's my take, not the opinion of the Times!). Of Powell, who died in 1998, his

embrace of racial diversity as a valid goal in [state] university admissions, expressed in a solitary opinion in the 1978 Bakke case to which no other justice subscribed, not only established a rationale for affirmative action but frames the current debate a generation later.

Powell was also the deciding vote in Bowers v. Hardwick, the sodomy law case. His fellow liberals expected a supporter of race-based preferences to side with them. But Powell, we're told by the Times, had

no personal experience with gay rights and found the issues raised by the case confusing and somewhat threatening. "I don't believe I've ever met a homosexual," he told one of his law clerks while the case was pending. "[T]he law clerk, who in fact was gay, told the justice, "Certainly you have, but you just don't know that they are." "

A book published last year on the history of the gay rights issue at the Supreme Court, "Courting Justice," by Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price, asserted that there have been at least 22 gay law clerks at the court, and that in each of six consecutive terms in the 1980's, one of Justice Powell's four law clerks was gay. "Doubts still gnaw at Powell's ex-clerks about whether they could or should have done more to educate him," the authors wrote.

And indeed they should have.

For what it's worth, Powell later indicated he had probably erred.

On rereading the case, "I thought the dissent had the better of the arguments," he told a reporter in 1990.

That and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee. Thus, the legacy of liberal Justice Lewis "through in the towel" Powell, supporter of university admissions by skin color, and of sodomy laws -- two issues once more before the High Court, which has a chance to set right what it previously did so wrong.
--Stephen H. Miller

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Supreme Court to Get It Right -- at Last? Back in 1986, in its infamous Bowers vs. Hardwick decision, a deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled states may criminalize consensual, non-commercial same-sex behavior among adults -- even in the privacy of their own bedrooms. This appalling miscarriage of justice put up a major roadblock to full legal equality for gays and lesbians. Now, after 16 years, the Court has finally agreed to revisit its ruling.

Much has changed over those years. Today, just four states (Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma) punish only homosexual sex, while nine states ban consensual sodomy for everyone -- although prosecution is generally limited to those unfortunate gay couples who are, for whatever reason, "caught" (i.e., straights doing it in a parked car are told to move along; gays get arrested and a criminal record as sex offenders). But the problem isn't really actual arrests for private sex. Rather, because these laws make sexually active gay people into criminals per se, they are used to justify all manner of government discrimination -- from denying child custody or even visitation rights (some state courts have told a divorced gay parent to jettison their lover or stop seeing their child), to preventing gays from becoming cops, to prohibiting same-sex couples from seeking the benefits states provide to opposite-sex couples. If the Court reverses itself and finds state sodomy statutes are unconstitutional, it will be much harder to deny gay citizens the rights of other Americans. If it goes the other way, it will be a huge setback. Stay tuned...

Addendum: I should have mentioned that the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund is spearheading the case before the Supreme Court -- especially since I recently criticized them for their over-wrought protest against Miss America (triggered by her support of pro-abstinence education).
--Stephen H. Miller

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Good News! More Sex; Less Lies. A new Centers for Disease Control survey of American men finds that more men say they are having sex with other men than in the 1980s. As Reuters reports:

surveys collected since 1996 showed between 3.1% and 3.7% of men reported having sex with another man during the past year. This is a sizeable jump from 1988 estimates of between 1.7% and 2% "

Of course, this 3.1% to 3.7% of American maledom should be viewed as a minimum baseline, since many MHSWM (men having sex with men) won't admit it. In the words of the CDC's Dr. John E. Anderson, who co-authored the report: "Male-to-male sex is still a sensitive, stigmatized behavior, and...is likely to be underreported to some unknown degree. Even though these recent estimates are somewhat higher than other surveys, they probably are still low." No kidding. (Plus, the survey wasn't intended to count those gay people who don't happen to be sexually active.)

Another survey finding: attitudes about the acceptability of same-sex activity have also improved:

between 1996 and 2000, up to 34% of survey respondents said they believed homosexuality was generally not wrong, while only 24% of people who completed the survey between 1988 and 1994 had similar attitudes toward same-sex activity.

Can anyone doubt that these trends will continue to do anything but rise, with significant socio-political ramifications for issues such as same-sex unions?

Breaking Up Really Is Hard to Do. Couples who were legally united via a civil union in Vermont are finding they can't dissolve their unions if they reside in other states, leaving them in a kind of legal limbo as regards inheritance rights and other matters. One of the problems: the federal Defense of Marriage Act and similar state statutes, which state courts interpret as barring them from ruling on same-sex union matters. As the Washington Post reports:

Outside of Vermont, civil unions are not recognized, so they cannot be ended. ... The U.S. Constitution's "full faith and credit" clause requires states to recognize "public acts, records and judicial proceedings" from other states, but the courts have never applied that to same-sex unions.

This problem will only get worse as more couples united in Vermont later seek to disentangle themselves. The answer is for other states, at the very least, to recognize Vermont civil unions as a legal contract. But that would mean they'd have to stop stigmatizing gay couples, of course.
--Stephen H. Miller

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Must We Fear the Gay Right?

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Originally appeared Nov. 29, 2002, in Gay Life (Baltimore).

Richard Goldstein, an executive editor of the Village Voice, has opened a new front in the gay cultural wars with his new book, The Attack Queers, in which he argues that an alliance between the liberal media and the gay right (whom he calls "attack queers" "homocons" and "neocons") is threatening the soul of the gay movement. Gay conservatism, he charges, strays from the tradition of "queer humanism" which is the ideological bedrock of our movement, and that makes it betrayal and disloyalty, pure and simple. "The gay right exists, just as Jews for Jesus do, but it stands apart from the sensibility that marks us as a people." Radicals, the only authentic queers, must expose and defeat this evil "before it's too late." Most prominent on Goldstein's enemies list are Andrew Sullivan, a conservative; Norah Vincent, a libertarian; and Camille Paglia, a Ralph Nader liberal; but he claims to see through their "superficial" differences to the underlying, frightening reality - that all of them are soldiers in a unified campaign of backlash and reaction.

This book is not serious political analysis. You won't learn anything about actual gay conservatives by reading it because Goldstein has no real interest in, or knowledge of, their political views. Instead, he goes to battle with familiar, cartoon-like stereotypes of the right - accusing his enemies of fearing differences, supporting male domination, advocating rigid gender conformity, and so on. No one familiar with the published positions of the writers listed above (such as Paglia's spirited defense of drag queens and identification with the transgendered) will recognize their actual ideas in his deliberate caricatures of them. There's also something disconcerting about a gay writer who takes other gay writers to task, not on the merits of their ideas, but because they "deviate" from a presumed orthodoxy.

What is interesting about this book is that it throws into sharp relief how much we as a culture have changed socially and psychologically in the last three decades. Goldstein is a member of the Stonewall generation (as I am), but there's something of the '70s dinosaur about him. He seems locked into the emotional atmosphere of that tumultuous time.

We often felt, then, a profound sense of alienation from American culture and political life. It wasn't clear that this country could or would make room for us, and many of us believed that only a revolutionary restructuring of America would guarantee our liberation. Despite our enthusiasm, many of us were deeply fearful, because emerging from the closet exposed us to the real dangers of arrests, beatings, firings, ostracism and ridicule. We were excited by the gains we were making, but suspicious about how long the country would tolerate our movement before crushing it in a brutal backlash.

Goldstein remembers marching in a gay contingent in a New York St. Patrick's Day Parade. "We strode past a million people shrieking epithets. It was a terrifying spectacle, but utterly exhilarating. By facing stigma in all its fury, I was finally able to see the system it created, and how crucial my suffering was to its cohesion. I was the sexual other against which masculinity could be defined...." This was "gay identity" - grim and militant, angry and hypervigilant, formed in defiant confrontation with oppression and brutality.

I, too, remember participating in such demonstrations, but the last gay march I attended was a local Pride parade this year, a day of balloons and children, corn dogs and beer, bands and floats. I was prepared, as always, for the "exhilaration" of a confrontation with the hostile masculine other against which I could exercise my authentic gay identity; but, alas, no one was shrieking any epithets, so I had to settle instead for a less dramatic afternoon of dancing and cruising.

The social environment has changed enormously in the past thirty years, and our movement, like all successful minority movements, has largely evolved from the stage of street confrontation to that of dialogue and negotiation. We're all aware that there are many challenges still ahead, and we don't have to be reminded that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But reading Goldstein is like trying to have a conversation with a paranoiac who thinks that everyone who doesn't share his delusion that the Gestapo is running America is "naive." It isn't, and we aren't.

By every measure, the vast majority of gays and lesbians are left of center politically, so there's no need to believe the movement is about to be swamped by the right. But I think there is also little doubt that the profound sense of alienation from the larger society that formed the atmosphere we breathed decades ago has greatly diminished. Our movement has been a test of the commitment of western civilization to its professed values of liberty, diversity and tolerance. We made our case - we used the courts, the media, and the political systems - and our civilization responded. It's response remains unfinished and imperfect, a work in progress; nevertheless, we now enjoy in Europe and the United States a level of safety and freedom undreamed of almost everywhere else in the world. It turns out that we didn't have to overthrow the government or remake the economic system to move forward. Alienation has hardly disappeared, but fewer and fewer of us experience ourselves as strangers in a strange land anymore, and since 9/11 some are even bold enough to admit that they love their country. Our trust in the guiding values of western civilization has not been in vain; our loyalty to it's basic institutions has not proved to be the loyalty of fools. If these are the attitudes that worry Goldstein when he speaks of "homocons" then millions of gays and lesbians are homocons, and his cause was lost long ago.

There's a siege mentality in Goldstein's dread of the gay right, a sense that if we don't all hang together ideologically, then we'll all hang separately. He's willing to tolerate any kind of diversity except the political kind, but for those of us with more faith in the strength and vitality of our movement, ghettoes - physical or ideological - are increasingly anachronistic. We need lose no sleep if someone in the neighborhood is a Log Cabin Republican, and we can see diversity in gay political thinking as a sign of our increasing maturity, not as a betrayal of the One Truth. Let us always be skeptical of apostles of "inclusiveness" who work to create new outsiders, or any program for "liberation" which begins by fingering heretics.

The great irony of this book is that Goldstein, who imagines that he's a progressive, has written a book arguing for a return to "traditional values." As I read The Attack Queers, I sensed in its author the same deep dread that always powers such campaigns - the lurking fear that history has left him behind. Well, call me an optimist, but I believe it has.

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Two Views. I guess it all depends on how you look at things.

From the Log Cabin Republicans, Republicans Sweep Senate and House, Making History, While Gays Win Most Ballot Issues:

In all, 92% of LCR-endorsed House Republican incumbents were re-elected, and 100% of LCR-endorsed Senate candidates won or advanced to a run-off. Also, LCR-endorsed candidates for governor were victorious in New York (Governor George Pataki), Massachusetts (Governor-elect Mitt Romney), Maryland (Governor-elect Robert Ehrlich) and Georgia (Governor-elect Sonny Perdue). -- In Ohio, Governor Bob Taft (R) won overwhelmingly despite strong opposition by far-right groups to his selection of LCR-backed Jeannette Bradley (R) as his running mate. Bradley, a strong supporter of same-sex partner health benefits for public employees, will be the first African American female lieutenant governor in the nation's history. --

From the anti-gay Family & Culture Institute, Opposition to Homosexual Agenda Propelled GOP Victories Across Nation:

the fact that clear pro-family stances on homosexuality played well as major campaign issues rebuts a central argument of groups like the homosexual Log Cabin Republicans (LRC) and Republican Unity Coalition (RUC). For years, these groups have argued that GOP candidates must reach out to "moderate" voters either by taking pro-homosexual positions or - as RUC advises - making "homosexuality a non-issue" in their campaigns. But even in liberal, heavily Democratic states, the election results provided evidence that principled opposition to homosexual activism helped candidates win. ...

[In Florida,] Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, clearly embraced the state's law banning homosexual adoptions. ... [In Georgia,] Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R) defeated incumbent Sen. Max Cleland. The state Republican Party pounded Cleland for his vote against the Helms amendment prohibiting federal funding of schools that ban the Boy Scouts. "

Yes, I"m partial. But weighing both arguments, I think the anti-gays come up awfully short. Aside from a stray city council or state legislative race here or there, all the key victories they claim were decidedly not decided by "family values" issues at all. Meanwhile, Log Cabin's involvement in so many winning races was, in and of itself, a victory for gay inclusion.

Lambda Goes Astray. Just why is Lambda Legal Defense, whose mission is to fight legal battles against gay discrimination, going ballistic over Miss America's pro-abstinence views? Yes, the advocacy of abstinence-only education for America's youth, as opposed to publicly funded safe-sex education, is a topic worth raising and debating, but by Lambda? Take a look at their website, dominated by denunciations of Miss America 2003, Erika Harold. It's just bizarre. Are there no cases of government discrimination to litigate? Have all the "sodomy laws" been repealed? Is gay marriage now legal? Just what gives? We expect the censorious activists over at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to reproach those who express views not in step with the party line and demand contrition. It's a shame that Lambda has fallen into this trap.

Update: Since this posting, Lambda's website has been changed and the lead coverage is now, more appropriately, the Supreme Court case to overturn state sodomy statutes. The Miss America brouhaha has been reduced to only the second most important item on the website.
--Stephen H. Miller

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Beyond Left and Right. Check out this piece from Sunday's Washington Post by political reporter Thomas B. Edsall, titled
The Sum of Its Parts No Longer Works for the Democratic Party:

But perhaps the most significant recent development in the makeup of the electorate was found in an exhaustive August survey of 2,886 adults by The Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard University School of Public Health.

The survey found that the nation's youngest voters, who turn out in very low numbers on Election Day, are significantly different from the rest of the electorate. Their libertarian views cut across the social and economic spectrum. They support gay marriage and are more suspicious of religious values in public life, making them fair game for the Democrats. But they are also the only age group with majority support for partial privatization of Social Security (62 percent) and school vouchers (56 percent), both Republican issues.

As these voters grow older and turn out in larger numbers over the next decade, they are the only age group in which a plurality of people identify themselves as Republicans, edging Democrats by a 46-to-41 margin. This suggests not only that the Democratic Party cannot depend on the electorate of the future to restore its competitiveness, but also that the party faces intensified conflicts between its traditional constituencies and the more libertarian young electorate.

For the nation's sake as well as their own, let's hope the Democratic Party moves away from its reactionary opposition to Social Security reform, legal liability reform, and school choice, and begins to put the nation's well being above pandering to government employee unions and trial lawyers. And let's hope the Republican Party continues to break ranks with its own reactionary constituencies, which want to use the power of big government to control and diminish people's private lives.
--Stephen H. Miller

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