IGF CultureWatch

Achievable Measures. I return to the topic of pushing for achievable victories in Congress that will improve the status and well being of gay citizens, as opposed to sweeping gay-rights measures with little, if any, chance of becoming law. One example: I just read in a tax-advice newsletter that certain proposals regarding Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) are likely to be debated in the upcoming Congress, including "Allowing rollovers for non-spouse beneficiaries. Current law does not allow this."

If I understand this correctly, you can currently leave the funds in your IRA account to a non-spouse beneficiary, but they"ll have to cash out the IRA rather than maintain the funds in a tax-benefited retirement account. Income taxes also have to be paid on the inherited proceeds of a traditional IRA. A law change could allow beneficiaries to transfer the inheritance into their own IRAs, and to do the same with funds inherited from a 401(k) plan.
As the newsletter puts it:

When you add a possible repeal of the estate tax to the above mix, it amplifies the benefits of leaving more IRA funds to beneficiaries who can inherit them estate tax free.

Don't smirk; this sort of common-sense measure could make a big difference in the financial well being of a great many surviving gay partners. Yes, it would be better to have legal gay marriage, or even federally recognized civil unions. But that's not going to happen anytime soon; reforming some of the hundreds of laws that disadvantage gay partners relative to spouses is something that CAN be done, law by law. And one of the biggest such laws involves Social Security benefits, which can now only be inherited by a spouse. You contribute year after year throughout your entire working life, but if you die unwed in the eyes of the law, your partner gets nothing. Enacting personal (that is, privatized) Social Security accounts that you can leave to whomever you choose would be a godsend to many gay survivors (ironic, isn't it, given the adamant opposition of left-liberals to meaningful Social Security reform).

Do such steps risk "weakening marriage"? To some extent, yes. That's unfortunate. If social conservatives would wake up and support same-sex marriage or even marriage-equivalent civil unions, this wouldn't be an issue. Until that day, it's important to work toward increased legal equality in vital areas such as inheritance; it might even put pressure on the social conservatives to change their tune.
--Stephen H. Miller

A Better Student-Boycott Story. In a Nov. 13 posting, I noted a newspaper account that said hundreds of students at a Kentucky high school had stayed home to protest against the school's new gay-straight alliance. But here's a more uplifting "students stay home" story, this time from the Windy City. As the Chicago Tribune reports:

Fearing that two girls voted "cutest couple" would be denied the honor because of their sexual orientation, about 60 students at
Crete-Monee High School walked out of class Tuesday in a show of support. But administrators said they never intended to deprive the two seniors of their title, only to seek consent from their parents before allowing the information to appear in the yearbook. ... The walkout was hastily planned after the school board failed to address the issue at a meeting Monday.

So at one American high school students boycott to protest gay inclusion, while at another they boycott to protest what they feared was gay exclusion. In a nation as idologically diverse as ours, this shouldn't be suprising. But the proponents of inclusion are clearly winning, despite the reactionary eruptions we're still likely to see from time to time.

Bigotry, Left and Right. Here's a fine column by Deroy Murdock taking aim at how the military's anti-gay bigotry is hurting the war against terrorism (and the Republican adminstration's failure to remedy the situation), as well as a look at some of the anti-gay shenanigans, by Democrats, during the recent congressional campaigns. That Deroy's criticism of political homophobia is published on the conservative National Review Online website is of great significance, again showing that the political right seems more open to actual debate these days than the political left.

Back to the Past. As it happens, my partner and I had dinner with Deroy last weekend and then we all saw the new film "Far From Heaven," in which Dennis Quaid plays a married, closeted gay man in 1957 suburban Connecticut. Julianne Moore is his loyal but frustrated wife, who turns to the family's black gardener for solace. If you"re a fan of the great Douglas Sirk classic melodramas of the fifties, especially "All that Heaven Allows" in which Jane Wyman is a well-to-do suburbanite who falls in love with gardener Rock Hudson (who was, in real life, a closeted gay man), then pounce.
--Stephen H. Miller

Margin of Difference. A provocative op-ed ran in the New York Times on Nov. 16 by conservative writer John J. Miller, titled A Third Party on the Right. Miller (no relation) observes that in South Dakota's hotly contested Senate race, Republican challenger John Thune lost by a mere 524 votes, while Libertarian Party candidate Kurt Evans drew more than 3,000 votes. Says Miller, "It marks the third consecutive election in which a Libertarian has cost the Republican Party a Senate seat." He continues:

It's important to appreciate that Libertarian voters are not merely Republicans with an eccentric streak. Libertarians tend to support gay rights and open borders; they tend to oppose the drug war and hawkish foreign policies. Some of them wouldn't vote if they didn't have the Libertarian option. But Libertarians are also free-market devotees who are generally closer to Republicans than to the Democrats.

(In all fairness, I should note that many Libertarian Party voters don't support anti-discrimination laws for gays or anyone else, but do oppose government-sanctioned discrimination -- and many don't think the government should be in the business of deciding who can marry whom.)

Miller's point is to castigate Libertarians for running candidates against Republicans, but an alternative conclusion would be that Republicans have to start courting those who vote Libertarian -- i.e., politically engaged voters whose "live and let live" views on social issues are often diametrically opposite those of the religious right. It won't be easy to reach out to Libertarian voters and to placate religious conservatives, but no one said life, or politics, was easy.

Times Says "Never Mind". On Nov. 14, the New York Times ran the following correction:

An article yesterday about a California judge's victory after a bitter but nonpartisan campaign to be San Diego's district attorney, making her the first openly gay elected prosecutor in the country, misstated her political affiliation. The judge, Bonnie Dumanis, is a Republican.

As I wrote on Nov. 13, the Times just naturally assumed that a ground-breaking lesbian D.A. would be a Democrat. The lesson: don't assume.

Update. A readers writes in to say:

I think you went too easy on the NY Times getting Dumanis' party affiliation wrong. They didn't just simply misstate her political affiliation as "Bonnie Dumanis [D]", they smugly declared, "it was no secret to the voters that she is a Democrat." They tried to make it sound as if they have the inside track on Ms Dumanis and her friends. They outright lied in print - and this is a newspaper of record America is supposed to trust?

The Minority Leader. It will be interesting to watch how Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, newly elevated into the position of House Democratic leader (and, in effect, the shadow Speaker), plays out. As the Washington Post reports:

There's little doubt that on issues of trade, gun control and tax cuts, House Democrats are about to take a left turn.... As Democrats sift through the wreckage of last week's elections, many fault party leaders for rushing too quickly to the center and failing to excite the party's base of abortion rights supporters, environmentalists, minorities and union members. But as more exit polls come to light, it appears that Democrats lost several key elections by failing to attract swing voters, particularly in the "red" states Bush carried in 2000.

In 1983, Pelosi defeated gay San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt to win election to Congress, and she's been re-elected easily ever since. She's a strong supporter of gay rights -- especially when it invokes big government intervention, such as with the proposed Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Here's part of her statement celebrating this year's San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride:

This weekend marks the 32nd annual San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration entitled, "Be Yourself, Change the World!" This is our time to celebrate San Francisco's proud history of advocacy for equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons and to recognize the important contributions the LGBT Community makes to our City and to our nation". [We] reaffirm our commitment to the fight for equal rights for all and our belief in the beauty of our diversity.

Now it's GOOD to have the highest Democratic official in the House affirm gay equality, even if the language is a bit hackneyed. But it remains to be seen if Pelosi will actually focus on achievable victories for gay inclusion, which will require building alliances with centrist Republicans, or turn to rhetorical posturing in an attempt to "fire up" the gay base, with few if any actual results.

It will also be worth noting whether the Republican leadership uses Pelosi's gay advocacy -- as opposed to her general leftism -- against her. So far, I haven't seen this happen, which is a positive sign. As I said, it will be interesting to watch what develops.

Toeing the Line. Here's an example of the just-beneath-the-surface authoritarianism among so many gay activists worldwide. It's an item from The Australian newspaper about a cadet reporter who was kicked out of the recent Gay Games in Syndney:

Last week AAP cadet journalist Jonathan Moran, covering the Gay Games, asked organisers at the wrestling tournament about the homo-erotic aspects of the sport. They were not amused. "The homo-erotic is simply through the eyes of the viewer -- if you have ever done it out there, there is no way in hell you are going to get excited," International Federation of Gay Games wrestling director Gene Dermody told Moran, who reported the quotes in a wire story headlined "Nothing sexy about Gay Games wrestling: Officials". Dermody, a Yank, then promptly had other officials throw Moran out, telling him his comments were "offensive". Organisers of the homosexual sporting tournament later apologised to Moran who, by the way, is gay.

The Gay D.A. Bonnie Dumanis, an openly gay Republican, has declared victory in San Diego County's hotly contested district attorney race, becoming the first openly gay person in the country to hold such an office, reports planetout.com. Although the D.A.'s race is officially nonpartisan and candidates don't run on party lines, both Dumanis and her opponent, the incumbent district attorney, identify themselves as Republicans. While planetout got the story right, the New York Times got it wrong, calling Dumanis a Democrat. Guess they"re still having a bit of trouble with the concept of gay Republicans at the Times.

View from South Park Miss Liberty's Film & TV Update website, compiled by libertarian Jon Osborne, is frequently worth checking out. Here's the description of tonight's episode of South Park (a repeat from last season):

10:30PM~COM~South Park~Cripple Fight.
Big Gay Al, troop leader for the South Park kids, is ejected from the Scouts for being gay. It's clearly a bad decision, as Big Gay Al is a good and popular scout leader, and his apparently heterosexual replacement, a macho guy, turns out to be a pedophile. But when Big Gay Al is reinstated via a lawsuit, he declines to accept the reinstatement on the grounds that private organizations should be free to determine their own membership. (In a separate subplot, a new kid steals Timmy's spotlight, hence the title).

Insufficiently Downcast Eyes. A sophomore at Atlanta's Morehouse College, one of the most prestigious of the nation's private, historically black colleges, is charged with beating another student on the head with a baseball bat and fracturing his skull after the victim allegedly looked at him in the shower. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Some students at Morehouse, an all-male college, say they can understand what might have motivated his attacker." The paper reports that the victim was a music student and a member of the college glee club. The attacker turned himself in after speaking with his father, a Chicago minister. "Irrespective of motivation, Morehouse has a zero tolerance policy of any act of aggression," said the college dean.

I wonder if anyone will note that not too long ago a black man routinely risked a vicious beating, or worse, if he was thought to have looked at a white woman the "wrong" way. Would a college dean have then opined that "irrespective of motivation" such an attack would be unacceptable behavior?

Get 'Loose. Here's a follow-up on the Boyd County, Kentucky story about protests led by local ministers against a high school's new gay-straight alliance. As noted in a posting on Monday, hundreds of students stayed home to express their opposition to gays and straights meeting together on school grounds. Now the Courier-Journal reports that anti-gay activists from as far away as Sacramento, California, showed up at an anti-alliance rally to egg on the locals and stoke the fires even further:

David Miller, vice president of Citizens for Community Values, a Cincinnati pro-family activist group, told those attending the rally across the street from the high school that they can serve as an example for others who oppose gay-rights organizations in schools".The Rev. Tim York -- a leader of off-campus opponents of the alliance, pastor of Heritage Temple Free Will Baptist Church and president of the Boyd County Ministerial Association -- said yesterday he will file an appeal today with Boyd County superintendent Bill Capehart of the decision to allow the group to meet.

One parent told the paper, "We're standing up for our godly rights". I think we have to protect our children at all costs." Still, there was also this:

Tim Dail, 20, a 2000 Boyd County High graduate from Ashland and one of the few alliance supporters who showed up, said he would have been a member of the alliance if it had existed when he was in school. "'Homosexual kids always have it toughest," Dail said. "They're the ones who are ostracized for being different."

In the movie "Footloose," Kevin Bacon fights against the local Bible-Belt minister and parents who"ve forbidden high school dances as "immoral, -- and the kids -- struggling to find their own, more open interpretation within their religious tradition -- join his rebellion. In other words, the kids in the movie knew enough to be on the side of freedom. When that happens in all the Boyd Counties across America, we"ll know the tide has turned.

Bigotry Trumps Security. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) has taken on the cases of seven Arabic language specialists fired recently from the military's elite Defense Language Institute upon the discovery that the linguists were gay. Yes, despite the dangerous shortage of qualified Arabic linguists in the intelligence and defense fields, the Army places the need to purge gay personnel above all else, including the war against terrorism. As Nathaniel Franks writes in The New Republic, "For national security's sake, let's hope our leaders are finally ready to acknowledge in public what they've admitted privately for quite some time: It is [the] enemy that threatens our nation's freedoms and survival, not the open homosexuality of patriotic Americans standing ready to serve."

A Harbinger? In the U.K., the Conservative party is facing a major internal struggle over, of all things, gay rights. As reported in The Guardian, the party's "moderates and modernisers" in Parliament are facing off against the conservative Tory old guard and party leader Iain Duncan Smith, who are demanding a united front against the Labour government's efforts to overturn the Thatcher-era Section 28 statute (prohibiting public schools from "promoting" homosexuality through gay-inclusive policies), as well as the government's efforts to allow gay and unmarried straight couples to adopt children. The "moderates and modernisers" reject their party's opposition to these measures, and are even threatening to bolt if they are not at least allowed to vote their conscience (as compared with the U.S. Congress, party discipline is far more severe in the U.K.)

Let's hope this is a sign that, before too long, the Republicans in the U.S. face similar pressure from forward-looking GOP senators and representatives, with a positive outcome that favors the tradition of civil liberty and legal equality for all.

Meanwhile, north of our border in Canada, Justice Minister Martin Cauchon is exploring the possibility of federal civil unions for same-sex couples. Currently, Quebec and Nova Scotia have civil union registries, but the unions are not recognized in other provinces. While France, the Netherlands, and several other northern European countries have legalized same-sex civil unions in one form or another, most Americans don't seem aware of this. If Canada follows suit, an example closer to home may help make the case for civil unions in this country as well, and the need to overturn the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act which forbids federal recognition of same-sex unions.

Some Things Don't Change. Here's a story out of Kentucky about Boyd County High School, where hundreds of students stayed home to protest the school council's decision to allow a gay-straight student alliance to meet on school grounds. The council cited the federal Equal Access Act as giving them no choice but to do so. Nevertheless, a local ministers' group plans to continue protesting against the alliance, and to keep indoctrinating local youth with their prejudices. Meanwhile, the gay-straight alliance held its first Boyd County meeting, with 19 students in attendance.

The New Reality. I don't intend to go on and on about the election -- others do that far better than I, and there are other issues of interest. But there are a few things still worth noting.

Democrats who engaged in gay-baiting against their GOP opponents tended to lose -- in the Senate race in South Carolina, the gubernatorial race in Hawaii, and a couple of House races (the exception was sleazy Sen. Max Baucus, who won easily in Montana). Welcomed losers included Democratic Rep. David Phelps in Illinois, who had introduced an anti-gay marriage amendment to the U.S. Constitution (it went nowhere) and leafleted cars at church services noting that his opponent, John Shimkus, was endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans and was pro-gay rights! Shimkus won, hurrah!

On the GOP side, the good news is that we won't have Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Bob Barr -- the two most vehement homophobes in Congress -- to kick around anymore. Helms retired and Barr was defeated in his primary race.

I see some are warning that if social conservatives were to introduce anti-gay bills, without a Democratic majority we could be in trouble. First, I don't think contentious "red meat" social issues are going to be brought up, given the President's enunciated agenda. But if they should, Republicans still lack the 60 vote "supermajority" necessary to overcome a Democratic filibuster under Senate rules. The Democrats will not be shy about using the filibuster to block or eviscerate pro-business legislation such as tort reform, so if they don't filibuster to block anti-gay measures (if any) it speaks to the extent to which they take their gay support for granted.

And there's another matter worth pondering. Earlier this year, it appeared that the Senate Democrats were poised to introduce the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) outlawing anti-gay discrimination in private-sector employment. They didn't do so. Yes, the fact that the House was likely to vote it down was a factor. But that was known all along, and it had seemed that the Democrats" strategy was to bring up ENDA and pass it in the Senate in order to mobilize their gay bloc and liberal supporters. Apparently, however, a lot of Democratic senators decided they didn't want to go on record voting for ENDA, or on record opposing it for that matter, and it was simply dropped.

HRC adapts? Finally, the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign has issued a statement coming to terms with the post-election reality:

"The time has come to consider the myriad federal issues regarding sexual orientation and gender identity and expression to move strategically forward -- not just on protection in employment and hate crimes, but on a whole range of economic benefits issues, such as taxation, pension and retirement benefits, immigration and hospital visitation rights," said [HRC leader Elizabeth] Birch. "While yesterday was a significant defeat for Democrats, our long experience tells us that GLBT issues will continue to move forward for human as well as partisan reasons."

This seems sensible, and perhaps where HRC and others should have been focusing their attention all along -- on possibly achievable measures that would clear away discriminatory aspects of law as regards gays and lesbians. But given the penchant of gay groups to focus on sweepingly broad legislation with little chance of passage, and to give primacy to pursuing the wide left-liberal agenda (and the election of those who support it), we"ll have to wait and see what road the movement actually winds up taking over the coming years.