IGF CultureWatch

The proposed reform of Social Security puts a bright light on the battle lines within the gay community. Last week, the liberal Human Rights Campaign flirted with endorsing personal Social Security accounts (which gay partners could bequeath to one another). But having ignited the wrath of the gay left, HRC quickly retreated, proclaiming it actually has "no position" on the issue, reports the Washington Blade. That didn't protected it from attacks by left groups such as the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and its allies, which again condemned HRC for merely considering working with Republicans on a GOP initiative.

Nevertheless, the Blade notes that openly gay Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) is a leading backer of personal Social Security accounts. And the paper reports that reform is being supported by the Log Cabin Republicans:

"Social Security reform is and continues to be a significant part of Log Cabin's legislative agenda," said LCR spokesperson Christopher Barron. "Most Americans support allowing gays and lesbians to share in Social Security reform," Barron said. "We will be engaged in this debate because the reality is the Congress is going to have a dialogue on this important issue."

This declaration of support is certainly welcome, though you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of that position, or support for any GOP initiative, on the LCR's website.

Finally, the Blade also has the good sense to quote IGF contributing author David Boaz of the Cato Institute:

Boaz said the current Social Security system was designed in the 1930s for married couples with wives who did not work. Single mothers or same-sex couples were not contemplated by the creators of a system that now fails to meet the needs of a changed society, Boaz said.

"Social Security reform and choice will help gays," he said. Added Boaz, "You can say that gay groups should stay out of issues like Iraq or Social Security. But gays should not oppose something just because a grand coalition of the left opposes it."

But the gay left remains adamant in demagoging against reform. Note to NGLTF: the present system will go bankrupt; there is nothing in Al Gore's "lock box" but a mountain of slips marked "I.O.U." that future taxpayers will be forced to pay (and pay...and pay....). And because they won't want to pay the lion's share of their earned salaries to support the elderly, the future of tomorrow's seniors will be bleak indeed without personal accounts that the government can't raid at will.

Nevertheless, the gay left continues to treat any attempt to think outside the traditional liberal-left box as heresy that must be stomped out quickly and completely.

Walter Olson, at his overlawyered.com site, takes apart social conservative David Frum's distortion of a contentious custody fight between two former lesbian partners, one now an "ex-gay."

The Dec. 16 Wall Street Journal (online for subscribers only) covered attempts to put ROTC programs and military recruiters back on Ivy League campuses. As the Journal reports:

Few debates better demonstrate America's cultural divide. Harvard's faculty, which voted to expel ROTC amid antiwar sentiment in 1969, now objects to the military's practice of prohibiting openly gay soldiers....

Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz says faculty and students generally support Harvard's stand, while alumni -- and much of the public -- don't understand why the university would want to distance itself from the armed forces.

And then there's this revealing note:

At Harvard, the top-ranking Army cadet this semester [he trains at MIT] is senior Elliott Neal.... He says fellow Harvard students often treat him as a curiosity. "Gosh, you don't seem like you want to shoot people," Mr. Neal, 21, recalls being told recently.

I, too, wish the military would drop its retrograde, counter-productive anti-gay policy. But in the post Sept. 11 world, treating the U.S. military as if it were an entity we'd be better off without is worse than delusional. And if gay-tolerant Ivy League students are dissuaded from being recruited into the military, how is that going to help make the military more gay receptive?

Worse, the anti-ROTC position leads to gays (and gay-supportive straights) being viewed as reflexively anti-military. That's about the worst public relations message to send to the "red states" I can imagine.

Former Log Cabin Republican leader Rich Tafel, writing in National Review Online, understands what the current LCR leadership doesn't - that gay Republicans are generally supportive of the Bush administration while disagreeing with the president on gay marriage. That's why Bush's percentage of the overall gay vote declined only slightly (from 25 percent in 2000 to 23 percent this go round), while his total number of gay votes actually rose substantially - despite Log Cabin's "non-endorsement" and criticism of the president.

I think it's important to note the venue here - National Review is to the political right what the Nation is to the left. But reaching out to this audience is exactly what the current Log Cabin leaders ought to be doing, but aren't - working to find common ground with Republican conservatives who have been traditionally gay-unfriendly.

I think Tafel is on the mark when he observes:

Now that the election has passed, the part of the gay community that has built a movement on the demonization of Republicans will not engage in self-reflection. It will tell its followers that George W. Bush won because he gay-bashed. This will only convince the administration that it has nothing to gain from engaging the gay community in dialogue. A rigid standoff will ensue, and the gay community can look forward to four more years in the wilderness.

Given that Kerry/Edwards endorsed amending state constitutions to ban same-sex marriage, the gay liberal/left's partisan strategy of voicing no criticism of the Democrats should be viewed as bankrupt. Meanwhile, however, Log Cabin's current Washington leadership seems incapable of finding any GOP initiative they're willing to support.

Memo to LCR Executive Director Patrick Guerriero and Political Director Chris Barron: Even the liberal Human Rights Campaign is risking the wrath of the gay left by considering support for private social security accounts. If you can't find anything that the Bush administration is doing that you can get behind, then it's time for you to go.

Two op-eds from gay-sympathetic straights come to differingt conclusions on the state of the gay rights fight. In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Dimitri Vassilaros catalogs the string of defeats gays encountered in 2004 and says, "To paraphrase Kermit the Frog, it's not easy being gay.... The news lately has not been very good for non-heterosexuals." But writing in his widely syndicated column, Michael Kinsley finds that:

Gay civil union, itself a radical concept from the perspective of just a few years ago, has widespread support outside of liberal circles. The notion that gay relationships should enjoy at least some of the benefits of marriage...is probably a majority view.

Today's near-universal and minimally respectable attitude - the rock-bottom, non-negotiable price of admission to polite society and the political debate - is an acceptance of gay people and of open, unapologetic homosexuality as part of American life that would have shocked, if not offended, great liberals of a few decades ago such as Hubert Humphrey.

Of course, both perspectives are true - gays have made great strides in the long march toward equality and sufferred devastating politic defeats. That's the oddity of our times, highlighting the challenge of recognizing and moving beyond the failed strategies of the recent past.

More Recent Postings
12/12/04 - 12/18/04

Responses to my Dec. 7 posting, both in that item's comments area and on our letters page, take me to task for conveying Abner Mason's claim that George W. Bush supports civil unions and that gay activist badly missed the boat when they failed to capitalize on it. While it's true Bush actually said he's not against states passing such recognition, let's note that on Good Morning America he explicitly criticized his own party's platform for opposing civil unions, and that he said on the Larry King Show: "If [states] want to provide legal protections for gays, that's great. That's fine." I'd say that's a tilt at least arguably to the left of neutral.

On the other hand, it's true the Federal Marriage Amendment that Bush supports bars "marital status or the legal incidents thereof" from being conferred on same-sex couples, although whether the amendment only limits judicial "conferring" of such "incidents" is murky (and perhaps intentionally so).

Nevertheless, Bush's saying that civil unions are OK was still an opening that gay activists should have promoted to defeat state initiatives that banned both gay marriage and civil unions, and for dialoging with Bush about the apparent inconsistency in his civil union statements and his support for the FMA. Instead, activists in knee-jerk fashion condemned Bush's remarks and continued to chant, like petulant 3-year-olds, "George W. Bush, You're Fired!"

Well, it didn't work out that way, did it? And now there is no dialogue with the party in power to speak of. Sorry, folks, but this was an opportunity missed and our activists (including Log Cabin Republicans' Washington leadership) need to be called on the carpet.

I'd noted on Dec. 9 that the Human Rights Campaign was considering endorsing private social security accounts that would allow gays to inherit at least part of a deceased partner's retirement savings (now, because federal law does not recognize gay marriages, surviving partners and their nonbiological children can't inherit any benefits).

Sadly, but typically, the mere suggestion that HRC might support personal accounts, reports the New York Times,

provoked a sharp protest from other gay and lesbian leaders. After the article was published, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force sent a letter to all members of Congress saying the gay rights movement should not try to obtain equal rights at the expense of any other group of Americans.

"We specifically reject an attempts to trade equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people for the rights of senior citizens under Social Security or, for that matter, the rights of any other group of Americans," said the letter, signed by more than 60 gay and lesbian individuals and organizations.

So, although personal accounts would be good for gays without harming today's seniors (who'd continue under the current system), the reform is opposed by the grand coalition of the left, which plans to demagogue the issue for partisan gain, and so it's anathema for gays to support it. Got that?

Update: LawDork weighs in on NGLTF vs HRC.

And here's Mike Silverman's Red Letter Day blog on why private accounts matter (scroll down).

Resources: This report from the libertarian Cato Institute notes how incorporating personal retirement accounts into Social Security would "create clear property rights for individuals in which they can bequeath contributions to their family members, regardless of state or federal legality of their union."

Look Back: In 2000, I first urged activists to support personal social security accounts, in An Economic Agenda for Gay Couples.

I haven't wanted to wade through the sewer that is the Internet campaign by Michael Rogers, formerly of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, to "out" low-level, closeted gay Republican staffers working on Capitol Hill. But his recent missive, asking his minions to call and encourage anti-gay organizations to pressure Republicans to fire their gay employees, seems about as low as you can get.

On a much happier note, we welcome former Log Cabin leader Rich Tafel to the blogosphere. Check it out.

Canada could become the third country (after Belgium and the Netherlands) to fully legalize same-sex marriage, but a potentially bruising fight in parliament awaits, reports the Toronto Star. While the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that the government can legalize same-sex marriage, this actually disappointed many activists who hoped the court would rule that the government must grant recognition to same-sex couples. Of course, as we've seen elsewhere, using court decrees to override the democratic process doesn't always work out so well in the end.

Belgium and the Netherlands both began with domestic partnerships/civil unions that were eventually merged into full marriage, so it will be instructive to see how the Canadian strategy plays out. I hope gay marriage is embraced by the people and their elected representatives. But I wouldn't expect U.S. gay marriage opponents to weaken their resolve either way.

Meanwhile, New Zealand goes the civil unions route.

posted December 10, 2004

Massachusetts companies, some of which pioneered domestic-partner benefits for unmarried, same-sex partners, said they are now withdrawing them for reasons of fairness: If gays can now marry, they should no longer receive special treatment in the form of health benefits that were not made available to unmarried, opposite-sex couples, reports the Boston Globe.

For those who believe that "marriage lite" alternatives actually weakened marriage, that's good news. But the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) of New England argues that taking away partner benefits for the unwed is discriminatory. Way to get across the message that gays want to strengthen marriage by joining it, GLAD!