IGF CultureWatch

My great-grandmother was a wonderful woman. Her home was one of the warmest, most comforting places I have ever been, and many of my best memories as a child revolve around her kitchen.

My great-grandmother was also a bigot. As a child, she patiently explained to me that the Ku Klux Klan was a force for good (they built schools!). She thought that Brown v. Board of Education was one of the worst events in U.S. history, equaled only by the end of mandatory school prayer. In response to a horrific string of murders of black children in Atlanta, she commented that such a thing shouldn't happen "even to children like that."

My great-grandmother was a product of her time. The odds of a working-class Southern woman born over a century ago being anything other than a bigot were slim to none, but even now it feels kind of gross and traitorous for me to acknowledge her bigotry. She clearly met any reasonable standard for the word 'bigot', yet applying the word to her feels disgusting.

This brings me to Rod Dreher and the bitch-slap theory of politics.

Rod recently penned a column whose central thesis was "I dares you to call me and everybody else who opposes gay marriage a bigot!" This is a classic bitch-slap tactic. "Call me a bigot and you call all those nice old ladies who voted for Prop 8 bigots too!"

The bitch-slap tactic isn't so much an argument as a dare. As Josh Marshall eloquently explained, a political bitch-slap involves taunting an opponent in a way intended to highlight their lack of strength or courage. If the person whom you bitch-slap responds angrily, they look irrational or crazy. If they respond in a calm, measured way, they look and feel like wimps. It is a win-win for the person doing the bitch-slapping. It's also a cheap, nasty tactic that should be recognized as such.

Rod's argument is also, frankly, unfair to bigots. My great-grandmother didn't have much of a chance to be anything but a bigot. Her bigotry was an accident of history, and not in any real sense a choice. Frankly, I do not blame her for what she was. I blame the politicians and writers and preachers who actually had the chance to shape her environment and chose to do so in a way that inflamed bigotry. I don't know if those people were actually bigots. I do know that they deliberately spread the evil of bigotry, which to my mind is far more immoral.

While it's hard not to be heart-broken over Maine voters rolling back marriage equality in one state where it was legislatively (not judicially) created, there are some key lessons that might be learned. Or not, more likely.

On marriage, the "M" word remains our biggest hurdle, no thanks to a "progressive" president who still reiterates his belief that marriage is only between a man and a woman, which anti-equality activists certainly make use of, and an LGBT movement that responds with "Thank you, sir, may I have another."

While all-but-marriage partnerships may just survive in Washington State, advocates face the hard truth that U.S. voters remain unwilling to grant us marriage equality in the vast majority of states.

Great Britain doesn't use the "M" word for all but marriage-they use "civil partnerships"-and many European nations that now have marriage equality first went through a period of all but marriage. We may have to as well (with the stipulation that the federal Defense of Marriage Act be amended to give equal rights to all but marriage partnerships recognized by the states-and even that remains a huge political hurdle, despite Democratic congressional majorities, which are sure to shrink in two years time-tick, tock, tick, tock).

Skipping "all but marriage" and demanding the "M" word may make for rousing protests, but at some point you have to admit that, when voters have the final say, it's a failed strategy, barring a sea change in popular opinion.

In the political contests, it's not all gloom. Bob McDonnell, the new GOP governor of Virginia, may be a Christian conservative, but he barely mentioned social issues in his campaign (while his Democratic opponent, Creigh Deeds, lambasted McDonnell for being against women's equality in a 20-year old master's thesis, which was also anti-gay, but that point was not used by Deeds.) Both Deeds and McDonnell had voted in the Virginia legislature for a successful state amendment banning same-sex marriage, although Deeds receive all the organizational LGBT endorsements. But McDonnell, while avoiding social issues (other than declaring his present support for women in the workplace) ran a low tax, contained-government campaign. And that's why he won, with some Republican and libertarian gay support.

I haven't followed the New Jersey race in which Republican moderate Chris Christie ousted Demcrat John Corzine, a close Obama ally, but it doesn't seem like gay issues were much discussed there, either.

In New York's 23rd congressional district, liberal, pro-gay-marriage Republican Dede Scozzafava was challenged on the right by Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman. She withdrew and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens after tanking in pre-election polls. Owens, a gay-marriage opponent like the president he supports, won. If Scozzafava hadn't been so far to the left on economic issues (her support for bigger government spending and union "card check" fueled her rightwing opposition), it would have been a clearer test of the GOP's willingness to support gay-marriage advocates in its big tent. But we'll have to wait to see those contests.

More on Marriage. Columnist Steve Chapman seems of a similar mind when he writes, in Gay Marriage Lost, But It's Not Losing:

it's not the idea of treating gay couples equally that bothers most Americans. It's the name of the legal arrangement. Call same-sex marriage by another term...and they're fine with it....

...you don't get across a broad river in a single leap. You get there by building a bridge that allows you to travel across one step at a time. As a destination, civil unions leave a lot to be desired. But as an avenue, they're hard to beat.

I don't usually think of George Will as someone who misses the point. Even when he is wrong about something, he usually understands and can articulate what is at the heart of the debate. That's one of his particular virtues.

So I was more than just disappointed in his column this morning about the election in Washington State. Reading his column makes it seem as if Washington's electorate is voting on a referendum to disclose the names of petition signers. Will offers one offhand sentence to mischaracterize the election ("The referendum is on a new state law that some say establishes same-sex marriage." Yes, "some" say that - the proponents), but virtually every other word in his column is about a completely tangential lawsuit that is pending in the courts.

Will, of course, has no obligation to write about the subject of the actual election two days before election day -- though people could certainly be forgiven for thinking that might be what the column is about. What is most confounding is that the tone of the column is so characteristic of the core tactics of the anti-gay side. Its premise is right out of the 99 and 44 one hundredths percent of Pure Fox News that is not news: The liberals are out to get decent conservatives in this country: "It is time to speak up about thuggish liberalism," he writes in the final paragraph.

Well, maybe it is. Writers on this site can speak from experience about such thuggery. But Washington is having an election, not about thuggery, but about whether to approve a legislative proposal to correct a history of injustice to same-sex couples, an imperfect one that attempts to give them everything but marriage. The opponents cannot tolerate such equality, and lacking real arguments, want to talk about anything but marriage: implicating gays in the recruitment (if not actual molestation) of children; insinuating that religion would somehow be undermined by domestic partnership; and now distracting the voters from the actual subject by focusing them on the privacy rights of petition signers.

Two days before the election, Will has added his considerable voice to theirs in preventing voters from focusing on the issue before them in the referendum. The press keeps presenting these elections as being about gay marriage. But once again, we're seeing how little interest the right has in having that discussion.

Jim Burroway has an excellent post at Box Turtle Bulletin on the contrasting messages in the Maine election: Frank Schubert's ugly, fear-inflected slurs against marriage equality (when he even bothers to address marriage, which isn't very often), vs. our hopeful appeals to the better angels of the electorate.

Jim is worried that this is a recipe for us losing, and he has a point. Schubert has worked hard to create doubts among many moderate heterosexuals about what would happen if same-sex marriage were legalized. These are fraudulent doubts, but they are nontheless effective ones.

Jim's concerns about our response are well-taken, but he doesn't offer a better strategy for us. I think that's because there isn't one.

Here is the gist of his analysis:

". . . people don't see how same-sex marriage will impact them and their families - especially not enough to pay attention to the issue and go out and vote in an off-year election on someone else's problem. . . . So how do you fix it? Change the topic from something nobody personally cares about to something everyone cares about."

In both California and Maine - and in Washington, which keeps getting left out - the other side appeals to education as the primary self-interest that heterosexuals care about. As Jim notes, there simply isn't much reason for the 95-97% of Americans who are heterosexual to care about same-sex marriage, but everyone (even us!) cares about education.

But it's not just "education" that is being appealed to; it is centuries of prejudice about the "Homosexual Menace" when it comes to children. The savvy characters running the anti-marriage campaigns know enough to finesse their leverage of prejudice. But when you start insinuating that legalizing homosexual marriage will lead to second graders learning about gay sex, it's hardly accurate to claim your argument is a high-minded one about education.

That is why fear works for the other side. That gut-level dread and misunderstanding is exactly what we have spent generations trying to erode in people's consciousness. The other side is not interested in conscious thought, they're manipulating unarticulated bias, which they get to take for granted as part of their voters' psyche.

We don't have any similar bias to work with. Or even rational fears. The only thing we have in our toolbox is what is best about people: their sense of justice, understanding and fairness about how majorities can advantage themselves, even without meaning to disadvantage a minority. As I was reading Jim's piece, I kept wondering what kind of campaign we would run if we tried to emulate Frank Schubert's tactics. We just don't have the fundamental material to work with - accumulated prejudice - that he has.

That is, in fact, the dilemma any very tiny minority with a long history of being misunderstood has in a majoritarian culture. Burdened with all those harmful stereotypes, and lacking any constitutional protection against laws that single them out, a minority's only remedy is an appeal to the majority to move beyond the stereotypes, the little formless fears. If there is some way to present that as involving the self-interest of the majority, I would dearly love to know it.

Perhaps I'm being too narrow in my thinking, and I'm certainly open to suggestions. But the only two heterosexual self-interests I can think of are both weak tea. The first is that heterosexuals have an interest in protecting themselves from being deceived by people who are in the closet. Marriage is the arena where the closet becomes the most potentially dangerous for heterosexuals. Don't ask, don't tell works well enough when people are single, but if the gold standard of heterosexuality is entering into a marriage, then heterosexuals have a self-interest in making sure we are not deceiving both ourselves and consequently, them. But try making a 30-second spot out of that.

The other heterosexual self-interest is the purely political one of reasonably-minded people protecting themselves from the aggrandizement of the religious right. As I've argued, I think it is in the President's self-interest to make sure we win both of these elections, because losses will energize some of his most virulent opponents. But he's being advised by a lot of very smart people, and he doesn't seem to see this as worrisome.

And that leaves us where we started. We simply don't have anything bleak or cynical to use in these campaigns. That is certainly a weakness in a political campaign where the other side does have those tools. But we can only work with what we have. We can't run a negative campaign because we don't have anything for people to vote against.

As President Obama signs the new federal hate crimes statute-the only major piece of LGBT-related legislation that's likely to pass, in my view-Camille Paglia bucks the LGBT lockstep mindset, again (you have to scroll down through the jump in her latest omnibus Salon posting):

Hate crimes legislation, in my view, simply cushions people in their own subgroups and gives them a damaging sense of false entitlement. . . .

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.

Rick Sincere, another independent voice, offers his own critique. As does Rob Power at Outright Libertarians.

Maybe Maine or Washington State will break the trend and affirm by popular vote the legal equality of same-sex marriages. Maybe. We'll know in a week. But if I can jump the gun, a victory in both states looks dubious.

Not unrelatedly: A new Gallup poll should be a wake-up call to the LGBT mainstream activist groups. Should, but likely won't. The key finding:

Conservatives continue to outnumber moderates and liberals in the American populace in 2009 ... Forty percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 20% as liberal. This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group....

Changes among political independents appear to be the main reason the percentage of conservatives has increased nationally over the past year: the 35% of independents describing their views as conservative in 2009 is up from 29% in 2008.

Last November, Obama's victory and the Democrats' sweeping gains in Congress seemed to assure the leading LGBT groups (nationally, as well as their state counterparts) that they were on the politically correct track by linking LGBT rights at the hip with a broader leftwing "progressive" big government, pro-union, Democratic Party agenda (let's leave aside, as they did, last November's simultaneous voter rollback of marriage equality in California, Arizona and Florida - their focus was on bringing out the vote for Obama, which they did, even if that meant increasing the numbers of anti-gay minority voters. But those are lessons that everyone has chosen to ignore, so let's go on).

At a time when the need to forge dialogue and, eventually perhaps, alliances with libertarian conservatives who make up a sizeable part of the "tea party" resistance has never been greater, the LGBT movement groups are still devoting themselves to being loyal foot soldiers (and fundraisers) of the left, placing all their bets on the benevolence of the president they worked so tirelessly to elect and his Democratic majorities in Congress. In one year's time, those majorities are going to be a lot smaller. The clock is ticking.

More from Gallup:

The propensity to want the government to "promote traditional values" - as opposed to "not favor any particular set of values" - rose from 48% in 2008 to 53% in 2009. Current support for promoting traditional values is the highest seen in five years.

The fact that LGBT political groups abandoned lobbying for gay equality regardless of other issues and turned themselves into adjacents of the Democratic Party plays a big role, I'd argue, in why there are virtually no politicians willing to embrace a limited government, pro-growth agenda that includes ending federal government discrimination against gays in marriage and the military. [Added: A rare exception is former two-term New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, now preparing a long-shot 2012 Republican presidential run.]

The original Human Rights Campaign was willing to work with and occasionally endorse Republicans; today's HRC is nothing but a Democratic Party fundraising front (yes, I've said it before, but non-leftist gay people keep giving them money as if they were a gay rights organization, so I'm going to keep saying it).

The recent Equality March in Washington featured speakers from the leftwing Service Employees International Union. I'm just surprised ACORN wasn't invited to speak.

More. How partisan has HRC become? In the special congressional election in New York's 23rd district, a pro-gay marriage liberal Republican who supports most of HRC's "progressive" agenda is up against a liberal, pro-Obama Democrat who opposes gay marriage, and a limited government but anti-gay-equality conservative. HRC's position: no endorsement (in fact, no mention of the race on their website).

The elections in Maine and Washington are less than a week away; it is now Go Time, or, in the language of politics, GOTV Time. That stands for Get Out The Vote, and it has never, to my mind, been more important for us.

Since we are not yet believed to be entitled to the promises of the federal constitution's Equal Protection clause, we have to do exactly what the framers never intended - fight as a very small minority in the political arena for our equality. This is regrettable, but it is a fact.

Another fact is that our opposition has a very well-established GOTV infrastructure. It's their churches, and it has proved to be amazingly successful for them. While some churches support our equality, we simply have nothing of equivalent size or consequence on our side. We have to rely on thousands and thousands of individually motivated people.

The final fact is that we don't have fear on our side. Scaring voters is a time-tested means of getting them to the polls, and our opponents have followed the script to the letter. All we have is hope and faith in the good will of our supporters and particularly the undecided voters who hold our equality in their hands. While hope was a guiding theme of the last presidential election, Barack Obama's political cynicism has held sway when it comes to us, undercutting this theme, at least when it comes to gay equality. He's going to make us do this on our own.

So let's.

Over the next six days, the campaigns in Washington and Maine need simple things from us. You can call voters from your own phone for an hour or two - they'll have a list of known supporters that just need to be urged to get out to the polls, or send in ballots through the mail. That will be supplemented in both states by boots on the ground, but these calls really do make a difference. More important, the lack of them can be fatal. Just a couple of hours of your time will really help.

And, of course, both campaigns will need money. The end of the campaign is when we need to be most nimble and responsive (Second-graders are now being trotted out again, learning all about gay sex - in the second grade! And that's in an ad that says people want to be supportive of us.). Both campaigns have shown that they are spending our money extremely well and responsibly. I've been proud to give to them both, and I urge you to do the same.

Each campaign is winnable - or losable. Whether we like it or not, we have to fight for our equality, and these elections are critical. After a long string of losses, including the stunning one in California, we need to prove - to ourselves, and to our disbelieving President - that the landscape really is changing. We are the change, or can be.

Here's the site for Washington.

And here's where to go to help in Maine.

This is not good.

No. It's worse than not good. It's miserable. I've tried to be as generous as I can to the Administration in its political struggle with a morally clear question: equality for gay couples. While the criticism was most prominently used about Afghanistan, if you want to know what dithering looks like, try to draw a straight line graph through the White House positions on same-sex couples.

And now, a week before a critical election we might just be able to win, Attorney General Eric Holder goes right into Maine and says -- directly to Maine voters -- that he and the President really don't much care, one way or the other, how the election comes out.

I'll say it again: If the right wins either or both of these elections, it will energize the worst elements of the very faction that is most harmful to the President, himself. Even if he doesn't want to help us explicitly (and it's now clear he does not), is that really the outcome he wants?

Let me offer a draft for the next White House statement about Question 1 in Maine and Referendum 71 in Washington -- or whatever the next gay marriage equality battle turns out to be: "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"

H/T to KC Johnson

Paul Varnell's column in the Chicago Free Press, like so much quality journalism these days, has fallen victim to the budget ax.

Paul was the founding editor of IGF, back in the 1990s, and his columns have been a mainstay of our site. His sane yet passionate pieces in the Free Press and, before that, the Windy City Times modeled a calmer, more rational kind of writing and thinking at a time when so many gay voices were shrill and doctrinaire. And it seemed there was nothing that Paul couldn't write elegantly about.

The Chicago Sun-Times has a lovely appreciation of Paul's work by Neil Steinberg.

Paul tells Steinberg: "It was my identity, and I felt I was doing something worthwhile by trying to be calm and reasonable." We hope Paul finds a new outlet. He's still needed.

The central deception fabricated against us in the SFMM ad, "They Said" is that while we promised we wouldn't push same-sex marriage on schoolchildren, we can't be trusted. Last time we deceived only adults, but this time it will be the children who will "suffer."

The use of children in modern American political campaigns to terrify parents about homosexuals dates back to Anita Bryant's campaign in the 1970s to withdraw gay rights in Dade County, Florida, though it has a more ancient pedigree. It is another example of adapting a malevolent prejudicial notion used to slander a different minority: Jews. It is the gay Blood Libel, though without claiming we actually kill children.

As Jon Rauch explains, the concern is not, in fact, with school curriculum; it is about gay marriage as a reality in the broader world today. But it goes further than that. Children don't know about the law governing marriage. Any same-sex couples, whether married, united in a civil union or simply living together with no legal rights present the same problem - children observe the world and ask questions.

It is unrealistic to believe children can be protected from television, movies, books, magazines, and the gay parents of their soccer teammates. School curriculum is formalized, and thus seems to be where anti-gay parents can exercise control. The use of the verb "push" four times in a 30-second ad inflames the sense that parents who want gays to remain in the closet have lost the upper hand.

What those parents really want is to prohibit any discussion of gay couples, period; and that has nothing to do with marriage or school curriculum and everything to do with gays abandoning the closet and being honest about themselves in the world at large.

The existing curriculum reflects the earlier world they are comfortable with, which is not neutral to sexual orientation. Children are regularly taught that princes can marry princesses, which is no more than a simple reaffirmation of heterosexual love and affection. Homosexuals are simply left out - they do not exist.

If that is all children learn, then they are, in fact, learning a kind of bias in their most formative years. This has never been intentional, since the vast majority of all children are heterosexual, and are learning about themselves. But they are also learning about the broader world, and what it includes. If they are prevented from learning that a prince (so inclined) can marry another prince (who is also so inclined) then they are learning that princes cannot marry other princes.

More to the point, those children who are, or may be gay, are learning something far more perverse about themselves - they are learning that the world does not include them. Again, this is not intentional, but as any adult homosexual can testify, it is as real as anything can be.

Invisibility always works against homosexuals who are, after all, seeking their place in the public world. When the debate is about children, that invisibility gets submerged in a non-sexual environment that, nevertheless, has very strong elements of future, developing sexuality running through it. Whether it's in the curriculum or not, children see heterosexuality everywhere. That is as it should be, since heterosexuals are everywhere. It would be preposterous to pretend that could ever change.

But it is wrong to prohibit - or think that anyone could prohibit - children from knowing that some people, and potentially some of them, will not be heterosexual. In public schools, or in any other forum, such discussions must be age appropriate, though. What teachers discuss in a second grade class is very different from classroom debates in high school.

But school districts are not running amok if some of them make a conscious, public decision to include books like King and King as one book among the thousands children will have access to. That book was turned into a wedge in California, where it was invoked to make it seem schools were "teaching" homosexuality. The book is subject to similar abuse now in Maine.

The fear this ad exploits is no more than that - an inchoate fear. It is an anxiety about homosexuality itself. But like all fears about minorities, it refuses to accept that it is not universal. That is the truth the ads for No on 1 so successfully express. As between these two messages, and these two strategies, I am proud to be associated with the one that depends, for its success, on appealing to what is best in our nature.