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The Dyke March, in Their Own Words. Rebecca Fox and Nicole Levine, organizers of the June 8th D.C. Dyke March, penned an op-ed for the Washington Blade titled "D.C. Dykes Will March for Revolutionary Movement," in which they state:

For us, a revolutionary queer movement would address injustice in all forms. It would demand reproductive rights on demand and without apology and health care for all. It would challenge the prison industrial complex and our wars at home and abroad. It would demand equality, but not just the watered-down on-the-books-only equality that many gay and lesbian organizations are forced to settle for.

Clearly, the true barriers to gay liberation are too few taxpayer-funded abortions, prison sentences for criminals, and the war against terrorist murders. They continue:

The Dyke March is in part a response to the male-dominated, corporate-sponsored Capital Pride events, but even if the pride festival were more inclusive, we would still need a dyke march. Sexism, racism and transphobia are alive and destructive in the gay movement. We want our gay brothers to know that you can't simply get more women or more people of color to be involved and assume that the event is more inclusive. You have to look at how your meetings are run and how conflicts are negotiated.

Yes, getting more women and people of color is only superficial inclusion; "real" inclusion means altering how everything is done so that no female or person of color can in any conceivable way feel that they are being denied the preferential treatment they are entitled to. And finally:

We organize as a feminist collective, without hierarchy, without corporate sponsorship. We do this to show that our community does not need to rely on corporate money or mainstream acceptance to be empowered or to make our voices heard.

Yes, capitalism is clearly the enemy of gay rights because, well it is. And so is organizational "hierarchy"; much better to have an unstated power structure that only insiders can fathom. Otherwise, you never know what sort of non-progressive, non-socialist, non-revolutionary sorts might try to make a place for themselves in our movement.

Bigots, Bigots, Everywhere. A full-page ad appearing in many gay newspapers, paid for by the coalition supporting the continued boycott of Coors beer, claims that "Coors money founded the Heritage Foundation, America's premier far-right think tank." Heritage, of course, is a conservative policy institute that could be described as center right; it opposes gay rights efforts, but it's hardly the klan. Calling it "far right" simply shows an ignorance of mainstream conservative politics. But worse, the ad goes on to declare that "Massive Coors family funding of right-wing homophobia continues today, including"the Center for the Study of Popular Culture"." On the contrary, David Horowitz, the head of the Center, is a gay-inclusive conservative who has frequently scolded other conservatives for homophobia; he also features articles by gay authors (including, in the past, myself) in his publications and on his website. But, to the gay left, anyone to the right of Jesse Jackson must be part of the vast "far right" homophobic conspiracy.

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I"m Not Making This Up. From the AP earlier this week, about a priest's slightly unusual online offering:

A Web site founded by a priest that featured images of young wrestlers in bikini briefs was voluntarily shut down after questions were raised about its content and purpose. --

So he's just a wrestling fan, I guess.

A Movement of Their Own.Yet another annual "Dyke March" will decend on Washington, D.C. this weekend. According to the official Dyke March website, organizers are "Calling all "lesbians -- dykes -- bi-women -- lesbian moms -- lesbianas -- transwomen -- androgs -- queers -- gay girls -- womanists -- asian dykes -- dykes on bikes -- senior lesbians -- lesbians of color -- rural dykes -- femmes -- butches -- goddesses -- poly girls -- amazons -- hippy chicks -- lipstick lesbians -- lesbian avengers -- differently abled dykes -- wise old lesbians -- boychicks -- grrrls -- leather dykes -- babydykes and all those in between!" Well, that about covers it.

The event will once again be an "in-the-streets in-your-face celebration/demonstration of dyke love, power and rage," as if you couldn't guess.

By the way, can you imagine the righteous outrage if gay men dared to entertain the thought of staging a male-only march to celebrate male solidarity and male-bonding (and reached out to straight men in order to form a broader men's movement?) And what if this "for men only" march were led by male-only groups ranging from a "Gay Male Avengers" (with a "bomb with lit fuse" logo) to a "National Center for Gay Male Rights." I"m not advocating it, mind you, it's just that the sexist double standard ("We want our own groups and events; oh, and we want control of the biggest lesbigay groups and events, too. You disagree? Sexist pig!) is so all-encompassing that we typically don't even bother to recognize it anymore.

Actually, maybe my crankiness is, in fact, just jealousy. There was a time in the early days of the movement when it was acceptable for both gay men and lesbians to have their own cultural, social, and political space (aside from the purely sexual spaces, that is). Working to create a culture of gay men was not automatically denounced as part of an anti-woman conspiracy. But today, lesbians may claim their own sphere, but outside the bars and sex clubs, gay males can't associate in private gay-male associations without being denounced as part of an anti-lesbian conspiracy -- unless the purpose of the group is to confess and work towards overcoming their supposed misogyny.

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So There. The New Republic has published my letter taking to task their recent anti-Log Cabin "one party's enough for us" screed.

Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge. An interesting Cathy Young op-ed in the Boston Globe, "The Bias Against Male Victims," argues that too little is being made about the psychological harm inflicted on adolescent boys who are seduced by older women. I can't really buy that all, or even most, of these "Tea & Sympathy" / "Summer of "42" type cases necessarily constitute "abuse" (much depends on the age of the "boy" and his eagerness), but Young does score a few points on the equal treatment front when she notes:

In 1993 in Virginia, a male teacher who had sex with three teenage female students was sentenced to 26 years in prison -- while the next day, a female swimming coach who had an "affair" with an 11-year-old boy and sexual encounters with two others got 30 days.

To many men's rights advocates, this double standard reflects an egregious form of political correctness: the refusal to take seriously the victimization of a male by a female perpetrator. (Sexual abuse of boys by adult men is seen very differently.)

Your FBI at Work. A Washington Post report on how the FBI devoted major resources to keeping a New Orleans (hetero) brothel under surveillance is well worth pondering. Using wire taps, "month after month, 10 agents recorded the men's demands, the brothel keepers' deals and the prostitutes' complaints." No mob ties were found, but federal prosecution is being applied because the prostitutes flew in and out of New Orleans and were part of a "national prostitution ring," according to the local U.S. attorney. Oh, and by the way, the FBI was listening on Sept. 11, in the days before and in the days after. Good to know that federal law enforcement has its priorities straight.

He Could Use a Hug. The AP reports on an unusual encounter between troubled former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson and a gay rights demonstrator, who apparently was protesting anti-gay language on Tyson's part:

Mike Tyson hugged a demonstrator Sunday who shouted 'stop homophobia' at him. Tyson, in town to fight heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis next Saturday night, got out of a sport utility vehicle outside a fitness center and walked over to nearby gay rights activists. "I was shouting stop homophobia and holding up my sign, and then he just came up and hugged me and said he wasn't homophobic," said Jim Maynard, vice-chair of Equality Tennessee and one of three demonstrators. "I was totally shocked," Maynard told The Commercial Appeal. "I didn't really know what to do. So I just posed with him and smiled for the cameras."

Odd, but kinda touching.

Subverting from Within. The Log Cabin Republicans sent out a link to an intriguing column by Steve Sebelius at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, about Nevada's Chuck Muth, newly appointed head of the Washington-based American Conservative Union. Muth, a conservative/libertarian, is being attacked by the hard right. Sebelius writes that the anti-gay crowd is upset because, for instance, "as the Clark County [Nevada] Republican Party put the anti-gay marriage Question 2 at the top of its agenda, Muth wondered in vain if any candidate would swear off taxes instead."

One local anti-gay blowhard declared that "The big worry about Muth taking that position is that (the ACU) is going to start abandoning their pro-family positions"He is entrenched within the gay agenda ... he sympathizes with that agenda." But Muth, columnist Sebelius notes, has not come out in favor of gay marriage, "he simply has said there are plenty more important issues that should top the conservative agenda. And, contrary to the good Rev. Jerry Falwell, Muth has scoffed at the notion that the nation was left vulnerable to terrorism because two gay gentlemen tied the knot in Vermont." Concludes Sebelius, with tongue in cheek, "Clearly, Muth is a subversive. But the addled folks at the ACU don't seem to see it; Muth still has his job. (Maybe the entire ACU has been infiltrated by gay-friendly fifth columnists?)"

All told, Muth's ascendancy at the ACU is one more small but undeniably positive development.

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Muslims: Can We Talk?

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Originally appeared May 31, 2002, in The Washington Blade.

Syndicated columnist Mubarak Dahir recently slammed "several gay writers," whom he did not identify, for using the assassination of Dutch gay politician Pim Fortuyn as an excuse to demonize Muslims. He charges that these writers "have even marked followers of Islam as responsible for Fortuyn's demise, if not his actual murder."

As one of the writers in question, I must dispute Dahir's characterizations. Dahir, usually a more accurate writer, offers no evidence that anyone has blamed Muslims for Fortuyn's murder. He fails to quote anything that columnist Paul Varnell or I wrote in our Fortuyn essays. He refers to "gay writers masquerading as experts on the Dutch political system," as if we could not possibly be informed on the subject, and as if only experts approved by him have a right to comment. This is merely a ploy to avoid seriously addressing our arguments.

Dahir suggests that there has been no similar criticism of Christians, despite the fact that the religious leaders most often criticized by gay Americans are the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Dahir asserts that "few mainstream religious leaders of any faith openly embrace us," whereas a number of Protestant denominations perform gay weddings and ordain gay ministers. Where are the gay-affirming Muslims?

I once dated a devout Muslim who expressed anger at the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists, while he himself celebrated the murder of the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. He insisted that he did not have to read the book in order to make conclusions about it, and that no one had the right to commit blasphemy.

When Martin Scorsese released his film of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel The Last Temptation of Christ, there were indeed cries of blasphemy by theocratic Christians who demanded that the film be banned. But unlike censors in Muslim countries, the fundamentalists are not in charge here, and filmgoers were mostly free to make up their own minds. In his acclaimed novel The Tin Drum, German author Günter Grass refers to Jesus as "Athlete of Athletes, world's champion hanger on the cross," and describes seagulls attacking a carcass as "the Holy Ghost descending to feast the Pentecost." Instead of being sentenced to death, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Three decades ago, when I began questioning my Roman Catholic upbringing, my uncle, an Augustinian priest, said to me, "Who are you to question centuries of Church teaching?" My answer was, "A human being with a brain." Yet I later managed to graduate in the Honors Program at Villanova University, where my uncle had been a prominent official. The card catalog in the campus library still noted books that were on the old Index Prohibitorum, but the condemned books were nonetheless available on the library shelves. Christendom has its problems, but it has had a Reformation. Islam desperately needs something similar.

Dahir quotes Fortuyn as condemning "third-generation Moroccans" who "won't live by our values." The values to which Fortuyn referred were social tolerance and equality for gays and women. Dahir does not explain what is wrong with these values or with defending them. He also attacks Fortuyn for blaming crime on gangs of immigrant Muslim youths, while ignoring the fact that Fortuyn's crime statistics were accurate. Apparently we are expected to ignore reality to protect Muslim sensibilities.

Dahir attributes criticism of Muslims to "fear and ignorance and stereotyping." As my colleague Bruce Bawer writes, "Fear is right. Fear of having a wall dropped on you! Fear of gay-rights advances in the Netherlands and other countries in western Europe - and of liberal democracy generally - being watered down, or reversed, by a growing Muslim minority that, generation by generation, refuses to adapt to democratic ways." As to ignorance, Bawer asks, "Ignorance of what? The strong, vibrant democratic systems in place throughout the Islamic world?"

According to Dahir, "Muslims are the new communists. an easy scapegoat for all our political woes." Here Dahir joins the leftists who talk, against overwhelming evidence, as if the Communist threat to the West was entirely invented by Joe McCarthy. Does Dahir claim that the persecutions of gays in Muslim countries were fabricated? As to scapegoating, even after September 11, Muslims enjoy far more protections in the West than under Islam, which may be one reason so many come here.

Islam has a serious problem in its treatment of gays and women, and in its suppression of free expression and free worship. Portraying critics of this as villains is mere evasion. I can sympathize with the cautious approach of Faisal Alam, leader of the gay Muslim group Al-Fatiha, since he has received death threats as I have not, but that only illustrates the problem. And I do not recall any Christian fundamentalists flying fuel-laden aircraft into office buildings. I do not blame Dahir for this. I just want him to stop his distortions and stop blaming the West for defending its hard-won secular tradition of personal liberty.

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Kiddie Porn? Below is a message, in full, from Mrs. Andrea Lafferty, Executive Director of the Traditional Values Coalition:

Dear Friend,
Nickelodeon will be airing a show this summer that will promote homosexual sodomy as a normal lifestyle to our nation's children! I have just signed a petition urging Nickelodeon to cancel production of this pro-homosexual show. I am urging you to sign this petition to protest this effort to normalize homosexuality. Nickelodeon leaders must get the message that they should not be promoting sodomy to children! Please join with more than 43,000 concerned citizens who have already signed this petition! To sign this petition, go to: Stop Nickelodeon.

Just imagine, the premier children's cable network, in between re-runs of "The Andy Griffith Show" and "The Beverly Hillbillies," will be instructing the tikes on the intricacies of anal penetration. My, this world is truly a den of sin. Lottie, get the checkbook!

The show, by the way, is one of a series of "Nick News" reports, produced by veteran journalist Linda Ellerbee, examining topics in the news -- this time on gay rights.

Fortuyn's legacy. IGF stalwart Jonathan Rauch forwarded these off-the-cuff comments, recommending a piece in the usually gay-unfriendly National Review about Pim Fortuyn, the recently assassinated Dutch conservative/libertarian political leader who might well have become his nation's first openly gay prime minister. Writes Jon:

Here's a piece that might be worth recommending to blog readers, a very astute article by John O'Sullivan arguing that Fortuyn may have been the start of something big. He picks up on the fact that gays -- appalled by the virulent homophobia of many Muslim fundamentalists and disappointed by the establishment's indulgence of said attitudes -- are fast moving into the orbit of Europe's growing conservative/libertarian coalition. Joining them are many feminists, Jews, and blue collars. Could be, he notes, the beginning of a European political realignment that both broadens the right's base and softens its edges.

Yes indeed. Told that it's "extremist" or "fascistic" to question immigration or criticize Muslim intolerance, that Israel is a brute and Al-Fatah is on the side of the angels, and that nationalism and patriotism are outdated in the age of the EU, gays and Jews and blue collars and others are naturally going to say: Stuff it. And the European establishment seems eager to drive away all these voters -- epitomized by Fortuyn himself -- by pooh-poohing them as neanderthals. In fact, the left had more problems with Fortuyn's politics than the right did with his homosexuality.

One other interesting aspect: O'Sullivan is utterly matter-of-fact about the prospect of gays joining a European conservative coalition. He even seems to welcome it. You'd never have seen that in National Review a few years ago, when failure to write snidely about homosexuals cost conservatives their union card.

Is this truly a shift in the political tides? We shall see.

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Gay Marriage and the Catholic Priest Scandal

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GIVE CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE, opponents of gay equality can be creative in desperation. Lately, they have been finding ingenious ways to use the Catholic priest scandal to criticize the entire gay civil rights project. The essence of their argument is that gays are incurably promiscuous, that this promiscuity is a kind of moral disease, and that it threatens to lay low every traditional institution it infects.

Stanley Kurtz, writing recently in the influential conservative magazine National Review, has applied this argument to same-sex marriage. The argument must be rebutted, and it can be.

Kurtz, a writer of considerable intelligence and subtlety, has specialized in arguing against the conservative case for gay marriage. That case has rested in part on a prediction (and a hope) that gay marriage would reduce gay promiscuity. This would improve the lives of gays and benefit society by, for example, increasing social stability and reducing the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Let's call it the "domestication effect."

Using the crisis in the Catholic Church as an example, Kurtz questions the likelihood of a domestication effect. Kurtz argues that gays go into the priesthood promising to meet the strictures of the institution (celibacy), perhaps sincerely believing they will, but soon fall prey to their profligacy. Similarly, in Kurtz' view, gays would go into marriage promising to meet the strictures of the institution (fidelity), perhaps sincerely believing they will, but would soon fall prey to their profligacy. If gay priests can't keep their vows of celibacy, it's unlikely gay spouses will keep their vows of monogamy.

In fact, Kurtz argues, it's worse than that: "The priesthood scandal is a stunningly clear case in which the opening of an institution to large numbers of homosexuals, far from strengthening norms of sexual restraint, has instead resulted in the conscious and successful subversion of the norms themselves." That is, gays will not only fail to benefit from marriage, they will hurt it. As a conservative who believes traditional institutions like marriage are valuable, I take this charge very seriously.

There are many ways to respond to Kurtz's analogy. One would be to question the comparison of an institution that allows some sexual outlet to participants (marriage) to another that completely forbids it (the Catholic priesthood). Human nature may simply be better equipped to deal with restricted sexual access than with none at all.

Yet another response would be to note that Kurtz's argument has no apparent application to gay women, who can't even become Catholic priests.

But I want to attack Kurtz's conclusion that gay men will somehow destabilize marriage. First, let's make a concession to Kurtz for the sake of argument: suppose the magnitude of the domestication effect is indeed very small. We can doubt gay male promiscuity is simply an artifact of repressive laws that will wither away when those laws are gone. Of course, we cannot know for sure because no other regime has been available to gay men. But even if we concede that many gay men will not be changed much by marriage, will gay male marriage change marriage?

Surely even Kurtz would agree that at least some gay male couples in marriage would remain monogamous, just as many gay priests have remained celibate. And surely at least some, however small, domestication effect would take hold. This domestication effect will provide at least small benefits to gay men and to society, benefits that all principled conservatives should welcome. In a cost-benefits analysis, that's a point for gay marriage.

Then what's the cost? Though Kurtz never explicitly spells it out, he appears to fear that straight couples will see gay spouses living it up sexually and do the same (that is, to a greater degree than they already do).

But this genuinely conservative nightmare sounds fanciful to me for two reasons. First, women will always be present in straight marriages and women will for the most part demand fidelity, as they always have. That won't change because they hear a few married gay men have open arrangements.

Second, even assuming gay men are uncontrollably promiscuous and that access to the social support marriage provides will not change that, it borders on paranoia to think they will manage to subvert marriage itself.

To see why, let's do some math. Conservative critics of gay equality like to say that homosexuals are no more than three percent of the population. I'd bet gays will get married at a lower rate than the general population, so gay married couples will likely represent less than three percent of all marriages.

Gay male married couples will be even rarer at first. The experience of Vermont civil unions shows that twice as many lesbian couples as gay male couples get hitched. Two-thirds of homosexual unions would probably be female pairings, which will be largely sexually closed (perhaps more so than straight couples).

The potentially problematic gay couples - the gay men - will represent perhaps one percent of all marriages. Some of them will manage to be faithful all or most of the time, so the truly troublesome unfaithful gay male couples will represent less than one percent of all marriages.

These paltry numbers will undermine the institution of marriage? Undermine it more than the large percentage of married people who already acknowledge in studies they have been unfaithful? To state the proposition is to refute it. Perhaps gay conservatives have more faith in the institution of marriage than its traditionalist defenders do.

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Polling Priorities that Perplex Purists. Gays and lesbians overwhelmingly say the right to marry should now be the number-one priority of the gay rights movement, dwarfing those who identify equal employment opportunities and hate crimes legislation, according to a new poll by Zogby International (the highly regarded national polling outfit) and GLCensus Parnters (a "GLBT Consumer Research" firm associated with the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University). Here are the percentages of lesbian and gay (and bisexual and transgendered) respondents identifying the "top priority":

Marriage rights: 47%
Equal employment opportunities: 16%
Hate crimes legislation: 9%
Increased gay representation in government: 7%

While nearly half of gays and lesbians call marriage the top priority, the percentage was even more pronounced among younger respondents (51% of those aged 18 to 24). So why is ENDA (the proposed federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act) the number-one priority of Washington-based lesbigay lobbies? And why was the leadership of the Log Cabin Republicans pilloried by ENDA supporters for daring to raise the issue of re-accessing movement priorities?

Another nifty finding: 48% of those polled would like the media to refer to our community as "gay" or "gay and lesbian" or "lesbian and gay"; 39% favor GLBT (that's gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) or LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender). So, naturally, a growing number of activist groups have gone with GLBT or LGBT. Even the press release accompanying the poll results stated at top that "most prefer media to use "GLBT" vs. "LGBT" -- -- as if that was the most important finding from the naming question. It figures.

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All-Male Social Clubs Verboten. A Senate panel has approved the nomination of Circuit Court nominee Judge D. Brooks Smith, with three Democrats defying their colleagues" contention that the candidate be defeated because he was a member of an all-male rod-and-gun club. I don't know a thing about Judge Smith, although he did receive the highest rating -- "well qualified" -- from the liberal American Bar Association, but reading the attacks on him for belonging to a men's club makes me red with anger. The club in question, it should be noted, was not some fancy country club with swimming pool or golf course or tennis courts. No, just a club house. And a group of guys who wanted to associate together in an all-male environment.

But no, that's too much freedom of association for the ever-more revolting Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and committee chairperson. Turns out Judge Smith actually resigned from the odious all-male association, just not fast enough for inquisitor Leahy, who declared Smith "should have resigned from the "country club" -- when he first told the committee of his membership. Judge Smith also said he would resign but did not do so until 1999." For shame! Bellowed Sen. Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, "No one should be on the court if they give the slightest [hint] of discrimination." Chimed in Sen. Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, Judge Smith "has not demonstrated good judgment on certain ethical issues" and is "plagued by an ethical cloud."

Sen. Orrin Hatch, Utah Republican, responded:

Given the bipartisan support Judge Smith enjoys from the people who know him best, and his stellar record, I find it most difficult to accept that the opposition to him has centered on his belonging to an all-male, family-oriented fishing club where his father first taught him to fly fish."

Hatch warned that "if this is the kind of thing that this committee uses as an excuse for thwarting the president's judicial nominations, then the American people will have a big laugh at our expense, and rightly so." If only it were so. But the right of men to associate socially with men has now been cast as an offense akin to racial exclusion (women's clubs, on the other hand, get a free pass). Any gay man who supports these smug political clowns should be forced to cruise a co-gender sex club!

Scholarly Fundies? The Regent University Law Review (yes, Pat Robertson's own Regent University publishes a law review!) has devoted its Spring 2002 issue to what it calls "a series of scholarly discussions of homosexuality." According to comments by Lou Sheldon posted on the Web site of the Traditional Values Coalition (kindred spirits of Robertson), one article looks at "The Selling of Homosexuality to America," by a Regent University doctoral student (yes, Regent University has doctoral students!). It describes:

a carefully designed marketing strategy developed by homosexual activists more than 15 years ago. The key marketers in this campaign to normalize homosexuality are Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, authors of the 1989 book "After the Ball: How America will conquer its fear & hatred of Gays in the "90s."

"After the Ball" has been the marketing strategy book used by homosexual activists in government, in the media, and in other power centers.

I vaguely remember this book from my years as a GLAAD committee chair in New York (before being pushed out for raising objections to the group's unctuous political correctness). I recall that "After the Ball" did make a good case for a mainstream gay rights movement that focused on placing the normality of our lives before the American public -- and using professional PR strategies to accomplish this. But the book didn't generate much buzz among the lefty lesbigay activists at the helm of "the movement" and certainly was never adopted as any kind of a blueprint. Today it's all but forgotten. To suggest that this book is and has been driving a "gay agenda" is bizarre to say the least. How gullible are these people?

Follow Up. F. Brian Chase, an attorney and friend of IGF, writes:

I used to work for a group in Florida that followed Hunter & Madsen and even published some of their proposed ads. The group was uniformly criticized by the other gay rights groups in the area for not being inclusive enough and for trying to sanitize gay life to suit hetero tastes. As I recall, Hunter & Madsen were viewed as sell-outs by most of the GLBT etc. groups of the day.

Oh well it's still worth reading that press release thing just for the laugh value of seeing "scholarly" and "Regent University" used in the same sentence.

Yes, indeed!

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No Generalization Intended? In my last posting, I commented on a Stanley Kurtz column in National Review Online that managed to blame the Catholic Church's escalating sexual-abuse scandal on efforts to allow gays to marry! In the days following, IGF contributor Andrew Sullivan, whose advocacy of same-sex marriage and the right to serve in the military were noted by Kurtz, responded on his blog (www.andrewsullivan.com -- scroll down to the May 21 posting). Responding to Sullivan's response on May 22, Kurtz protested in a posting titled "Contradictory Desires":

"Sullivan mischaracterizes my fundamental premise. I do not believe that 'all homosexuals are alike,' nor do I believe that all, or even most, homosexuals are child abusers."

He then goes on to state:

"Gays take vows of priestly celibacy, yet also discard those vows, and call for the overthrow of the Church's teaching on sexuality." ...

"So one lesson of this scandal is that the integration of homosexual and heterosexual men in the same living areas can in fact break down 'unit cohesion,' thereby causing institutional disruption -- military take note." ...

"...Homosexuals will always feel like outsiders, no matter how much approval society offers.... Because of this inevitable alienation, homosexuals will always be disproportionately rebellious on sexual issues."

What would Kurtz have concluded if he DID believe "all homosexuals are alike"? And do lesbians fit into his worldview of gays and societal subversion at all?

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Gay "Subversives." A perfectly ridiculous piece by anti-gay writer Stanley Kurtz titled Gay Priests and Gay Marriage, at nationalreview.com, blames the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandals on, well, us. Announcing ominously that "the greatest lesson of this scandal has yet to be drawn," Kurtz declares the uproar over priestly sexual abuse "offers spectacular confirmation of nearly every warning ever issued by the opponents of gay marriage." It seems that in battling for the right to wed, gays are managing to "subvert the monogamous ethos of traditional marriage." Yes, it's our "subversive subculture" at work, just as allowing gays to serve in the priesthood resulted in weakening the moral fiber of Holy Mother Church.

IGF's own Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan bear their share of them blame for this tragic situation, it seems. For as Kurtz explains:

"Although both Sullivan and Rauch have honorably and ably defended same-sex marriage as the best way to "domesticate" sexually promiscuous gays, the priesthood scandal is powerful proof that just about every one of their fundamental assumptions is mistaken."

As Kurtz spells it out, just as gay priests (which he simply equates with pedophile priests) undermined clerical celibacy in the worst possible way, so will allowing gays to marry subvert and destroy marital fidelity.

I believe strongly in engaging the anti-gay right (and the illiberal gay left) in open and forthright debate, so I generally don't favor a dismissive response to arguments against gay equality. But honestly, could anyone read Kurtz and be persuaded by his fatuous and circular reasoning? If this is what's passing as vanguard thought by our opponents, then without doubt they"re in pretty serious trouble.

A New World? Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.) was the lead sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars the federal government from recognizing gay unions (and which, after obtaining Bill Clinton's support, was signed into law by gay Democrats" favorite president). Now, Barr has done something surprising. He has come out against a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. According to a report in the Washington Blade, Barr said during an appearance on MS-NBC that the proposed amendment would infringe on the right of states to decide whether to allow same-sex couples legal recognition, and that states should have the right to legalize gay marriage if they choose to do so through the legislative process. This isn't exactly repudiating the Defense of Marriage Act (which didn't ban states from passing gay marriage, just federal recognition of those unions), but it is still a marked departure for the old anti-gay warrior.

What gives? It seems Barr, finding himself in a tough primary fight against another, more temperate incumbent GOP congressman, in a redrawn suburban Atlanta district, is moving to the center. Whatever the reason, if Bob Barr can reinvent himself as a relative moderate on gay issues, than, once again, the times they are a"changing.

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