IGF CultureWatch

As I've mentioned before, I think the right's attempt to conflate gay marriage and abortion is both wrong and deceptive, certainly as a constitutional matter. And I'm coming to believe this false analogy might also be wrong as a cultural matter.

Fox's " Family Guy " is easily the most wildly satiric, boundary-crossing show on network television. It is sometimes compared to "The Simpsons," but no matter how far out "The Simpsons" gets, it always swings back to television's essential sentimentality; "Family Guy" will have none of that. "South Park" is more caustic, still, but "Family Guy" sets the network standard for how far comedy can go.

And that's pretty far. For the unitiated, one year-old baby Stewie is gay (and has made several aggressive attempts to murder his mother), next-door neighbor Quagmire is a sex-addicted airline pilot, and any attempt to chronicle the carnal lives of husband and wife Peter and Lois would not be publishable in most newspapers. And that's not to mention the old pedophile who lives across the street, with his eternal affection for very underage boys.

Amidst all that explicitly sexual content is a lot of homosexuality, which Fox seems to have had no problem with. But abortion is where Fox draws the line. The show's inspired creator, the divine Seth MacFarlane, finally decided to do a show about abortion (35 years after "Maude" did, with no intervening encounters), and the network wouldn't air it. The best they'd agree to do is include it on a DVD of the series.

Even reading a description of the episode, and watching the three darkly riotous clips read by the cast, shows that abortion is in a completely different class from homosexuality -- it is still incendiary as the subject of humor.

That is as telling as anything I can think of. In fact, it may clarify what distinguishes the right from the rest of the country. With sitcoms like "Ellen" and "Will & Grace" happily ensconced in syndication, most of the nation is comfortable enough with homosexuality to laugh about it and with us. It's not a touchy issue for the most part, except among a shrinking number of cranks and malcontents. In contrast, abortion is something that really is, always, deeply serious and off-limits to jokes.

To be fair, a lot of lesbians and gay men can tend to be ill-humored, particularly when our rights are at stake. I'm that way, myself, sometimes. But it should comfort us all that there is room in the culture for kidding around about homosexuality. It shows a healthy acceptance.

For the most part I'm with Dale, and am, if anything, more optimistic than he is about 2012. Two extra years gives us, and the voters, breathing room. My biggest disagreement with him is whether a vote in 2010 would be a "calamity."

In my opinion, we get to keep doing this until we get it right. Marriage equality is no longer a mere possibility. It will happen. It's not necessary for anyone to think opponents are bigots to see that they misunderstand us. The seemingly ancient argument about us demanding "special rights" has faded into obscurity. That rhetoric depends on people viewing the status quo -- and our exclusion from it -- as eternal. That's no longer the dominant cultural assumption, and as it eroded, heterosexual voters (and judges) could see that we really are asking for nothing more than exactly the same rights they have and take for granted. They can see the status quo as tilted in their favor, and once you see that, our own inequality really does come into focus.

That means we can lose elections without losing our moral standing. More important, our opponents look smaller and meaner with each increasingly fragile victory. As their numbers fall off, their empty arguments seem more incoherent. The case of Doug Manchester illustrates the point. One of Prop. 8's largest early donors, he opposed our equality because of his "Catholic faith and longtime affiliation with the Catholic Church," as he told the NY Times. That's fair enough, except that a couple months after that donation, he and his wife separated and began divorce proceedings, which are now at their most disagreeable stage. Neither divorce nor hypocrisy is alien to human nature, but cases like this help people see the selfishness and convenience of hoarding religious favor for yourself and denying it to others.

The cornucopia of groups supporting same-sex marriage almost assures that it's possible someone not affiliated with our leadership might be able to qualify a repeal initiative. Equality California's very good report, Winning Back Marriage Equality in California lists 78 distinct groups they are working with. That's a testament to the vibrancy and diversity of our cause. But it's also a sign that our self-selected leadership cannot be as monolithic as it sometimes seems to wish.

And that is my concern. Here is how EQCA views the job we have to do in California:

We need to do outreach to every progressive organization in California: to labor unions, to progressive churches (more on that below), to women's groups and civil rights organizations.

Are there really that many progressives out there who need to be convinced on gay equality? The assumption of our leadership continues to be that they need to appeal to the liberal in everyone. That assumption is clearest in their invocation to broaden their base:

At the same time, we need to continue and expand our work on issues of concern to our partners in the broader struggle for social justice. We must also identify and enlist new spokespeople, particularly those who are not "usual suspects"-Republicans, business leaders, leaders from communities of color, "mainstream" clergy, cultural and entertainment stars and others. And we must identify appropriate outlets for them to help make the case.

Am I the only one who detects just a whiff of condescension here to the very people I think are the key targets of any attempt to overturn Prop. 8 at the ballot box? While there are still "partners" in the fight for social justice to be embraced, the movement is just looking for "new spokespeople" among Republicans, business leaders and others, for whom the leaders "must identify appropriate outlets" in order to help them out.

The fact that EQCA does not see Republicans -- and business leaders, for heaven's sake! -- as partners (or even as independent thinkers when it comes to gay marriage) reveals the worst aspects of the Democratic left as it tries to achieve the best aspirations of Democratic philosophy. Two years may not be enough to cure that, but there are enough Republicans, not to mention those ever-suspect "business leaders"who can suck up this kind of condescension for the greater good.

Despite what I had feared (see here and here), it seems common sense has prevailed. Equality California, the main gay lobbying group in the state, has announced it won't support a Prop 8 repeal effort in 2010. See the group's analysis here. This despite the group's hint last May that it probably would support a 2010 effort. It seems that EQCA looked hard at the voter projections and polls, the short time frame, the lack of unity among gay advocates for 2010, and especially at the lack of support for 2010 among big donors, and has decided to target 2012.

I'm still not persuaded that even 2012 is the right time, but at least it's more realistic. Further, I understand the need to start a fundraising, organizing, and educational campaign now on the basis of a target date that isn't five or more years away (2014 or 2016).

Of course, some of the "grassroots" activists on Facebook and elsewhere who think a campaign is a matter of sending around a bunch of emails and starting a website will continue the quixotic 2010 effort. But without the backing of the main existing California group, and especially without the backing of major donors, they will probably fail even to qualify language for the ballot. At least let's hope they fail, because if they succeed we'll face a real calamity: a 2010 fight we won't win.

Now comes the hard part: actually raising the money and organizing for a possible ballot fight in three years.

One of California's best -- and quirkiest -- political writers is Bill Bradley, whose New West Notes is essential reading if you're interested in California. He has a new piece at the Huffington Post on the strategic debate over when to repeal Prop. 8 that surveys the landscape pretty well.

But his discussion of strategy, like most discussions of strategy, I suppose, is too clinical. Political strategy can be a cold science, but as we learned from Yes on 8's Frank Schubert (who is now in Maine, trying to establish himself as the nation's go-to guy for the anti-gay marriage crowd), politics is very often best practiced by intuition and guts. A less nimble opponent might have missed the implications of Gavin Newsom's "Whether you like it or not" gaffe, which no strategy could ever have anticipated. Schubert's instinct for populist homophobia was right on, and he capitalized on it, to his -- well, "credit" isn't exactly the right word for his amoral achievement.

But there's not much life left in that horse, and maybe next time we'll have some folks of our own whose instincts are better than their spreadhseets. It's that aspect of politics -- and particularly the politics of gay marriage -- that I think our leaders are missing. The other side claims a vague and tattered morality, but we've got the real thing.

There is another non-strategic fact about any repeal of Prop. 8 that transcends the pie charts. Whether it happens in 2010 or 2012, or even, god forbid, 2014, California will, almost certainly, be the first state to have its voters amend their constitution to eliminate a ban on gay marriage. The constitutional bans, and particularly Prop. 8, were the last creakings of the machine of discrimination. The repeal of Prop. 8, whenever it comes, will be looked back on as the death knell for an unlamented age. And I'm still quite sure California will be the state that strikes that blow.

Andrew Sullivan does a good job of showing how Robert George's WSJ piece about same-sex marriage seems to leave no reasonable option for lesbians and gay men in our society. But George illustrates something else that's at least as important: He wants us to view court decisions about same-sex marriage through the same lens as those regarding abortion. That's his preference, but it's not at all necessary.

It all started with Roe v. Wade, as you know, which was the "judicial usurpation of authority." If a future court were to rule in favor of same-sex marriage as a constitutional matter, George argues it would amount to judges trying to "peddle a strained and contentious reading of the Constitution-one whose dubiousness would undermine any ruling's legitimacy." Judges should not resolve morally charged policy issues "according to their personal lights."

Who couldn't agree with that? But does George's constitution really have nothing to say about all people being treated equally? It is true that Roe (and far more important, its predecessor, Griswold v. Connecticut) had to stretch to find constitutional penumbras and emanations. But no such ephemera are necessary to conclude that lesbians and gay men, too, are citizens, and that laws must apply equally to them. At the very least, whether and how equality might apply to marriage laws needs a radically different kind of constitutional analysis than Roe demanded.

This focus on Roe is magician's misdirection. Gay equality is certainly controversial enough, and it is true that court decisions about marriage equality reverberate through the culture. But that is not necessarily because the judges have exercised any usurpation of their authority, it is because the prejudice about homosexuality is still deeply rooted. Judges ruling in favor of gay equality are caricatured as acting on personal prejudices, but it may not be their prejudices that are at issue.

Amen to Dale's post. I'd add one additional point. The political class offers us these shiny political objects because our leadership (and, to be fair, many of us) give them the impression that they'll make us happy. A natural consequence of asking for things other than the hard ones: marriage and the military -- is that we allow politicians to work on the easy ones at the expense of what we really need.

California's legislature, like the President, is seeking to honor Harvey Milk, but they're doing it after having done their work on the hard issue of marriage (and getting preempted by the voters). I don't want to diminish the political importance of symbolic or accessory accomplishments, like hate crimes laws. These can and do pave the way in the political process for the momentous achievements that are needed. Presidential honors to openly gay and lesbian citizens do let the nation know that honor and homosexuality are not mutually exclusive, and show that the President was speaking honestly when he said his vision of America includes lesbians and gay men.

But this is not hard work. By definition, presidential honors go to people whose reputations are well-established. It is the rest of us -- the undistinguished ones who have to live under federal laws that mandate discrimination against us -- who aren't much helped by honors like these. Changes in the law are the only thing that will make a difference in our everyday lives, and for a minority that continues to be denied the dignity of the constitution's equal protection clause, that means we can only depend on political majorities. We have done a monumental job of getting this nation close to majority support -- and have gone above and beyond the call of 50% when it comes to the military -- but are at the point of either diminishing returns or sheer exhaustion right now. Either way, it is only those like the President who have it in their power and talent to make the closing case.

Honoring Harvey Milk and Billie Jean King is good for Harvey Milk and Billie Jean King, but those honors do not change a single word of a single discriminatory federal law. Anything less than that is costume jewelry.

Congratulations to Billie Jean King and to Harvey Milk (posthumously) for receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I figure these medals, though deserved by the recipients, cost the gay-rights movement about $5 million each.

We were told in 2006 that we needed a Democratic Congress to pass gay-rights legislation. We got one and nothing much happened. Two years later, we were told we needed a filibuster-proof Senate majority. It was delivered, but nothing valuable is passing the Senate. We were told we needed a Democratic president. We elected one and nothing's moving. It wasn't enough. It will never be enough. The problem is not that the Democratic Party is useless, at least not completely. (And useless is still better than hostile.) The problem is not that the president has more important things to do, though he does.

The core of the problem is that every "gay rights" measure is still viewed by politicians, political pundits, and the most energized actvists on both sides, as liberal. That's true even where majorities tell pollsters they support the measure, as with passing ENDA and repealing DADT. Liberals are proud gay rights is their cause. Conservatives are delighted it's not. The association of gay rights and liberalism is easy and unquestioned across the political spectrum -- the last bastion of bipartisan consensus.

But as the healthcare debate is reminding us, this is not a left or even center-left country. We may have a Democratic majority in Congress, but we don't have a liberal majority. We haven't had one since 1965. If we didn't get one after the misrule of the past few years, we aren't going to get one. So electing more Democrats is not the answer, or at least not the whole of the answer. Building grand progressive coalitions is not the answer.

We must break the consensus about gay rights. We must challenge the assumption that gays are just the next group with a list of demands. The political culture must come to see military service by gays as patriotic and honorable, which it is, not as a civil right or as a social experiment, which it is not. It must see gay marriage as an embrace of responsibility and tradition, which it is, not as hedonism or as yet more sexual license, which it is not. It must see gay rights not as left, but as right.

The estimable Peter LaBarbera commented on my post about GLAAD. Some folks here replied with varying levels of snark and/or mockery. LaBarbera does tend to bring that out in people.

But I think his comment deserves a bit more, because I think his assumption helps clarify the distance between us. He says, "When will the entertainment industry catch up with reality and cast a sympathetic FORMER homosexual character who is content with his sexuality in a major film? The "gay-as-victim" shtick is getting so tiresome."

I couldn't agree more with his final sentence. That is one of the things that distinguishes IGF, I hope. But what about those former homosexuals who are content with their sexuality?

It's here that I think LaBarbera and his supporters are at odds with the vast majority of America. it's not that we don't think there are people who describe themselves as ex-gays, or even who have found someone of the opposite sex to marry and are content with, even proud of their lives.

But very few people think those folks are "former" homosexuals. Rather, I think most of us agree with Alan Chambers. Chambers, who is the president of Exodus Intenational, is candid that he continues to "struggle" with his homosexuality, but that his religion helps him to resist that temptation.

While most Americans understand sexual temptation, they don't "struggle" with their sexual orientation, and I doubt very many today imagine God demands that exertion of homosexuals any longer. If homosexuals want to make that deal with their God, they certainly can, but that God is looking increasingly unreasonable. Why should secular gays be in the same class as Catholic priests? Even American Catholics are evenly split on priestly celibacy, with 55% of all Americans saying that rule appears to have outlived any usefulness it might once have had.

I don't know what kind of God LaBarbera has in mind, but I think the deity he and Chambers worship is not the one the rest of us envision. If some TV producer wants to do a modern-day Thorn Birds, with a gay man in the role of the priest (maybe Richard Chamberlain is still available), he might give it a try. But I think that God might get a lot less sympathy than the one in the original could count on.

The Palm Center's just released report, A Self-Inflicted Wound: How and why gays gave the White House a free pass on 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell', reveals how it's not just politicians who stand in the way of DADT repeal, but some of our own leaders. The Military Readiness Enhancement Act, or MREA, is ready to go, with 164 co-sponsors. Independently, the President really could do something unilaterally, but won't. And according to the report, he has been given cover by gay leaders.

Aaron Belkin's position will raise any number of hackles, and it should. Here's mine: Like most politically active minority groups, we don't actually elect any of our "leaders." They are generally self-selected, and over time, that process of self-selection can become incestuous. Small groups of like-minded individuals designate themselves, in various combinations, to represent the interest of the group, and exercise a pretty free ability to determine what they believe that interest is.

Belkin doesn't name any names, but the problems facing DADT repeal speak for themselves. Between 69-75% of Americans now support eliminating this blot on our national reputation, but the fear of a backlash like the one Bill Clinton suffered has the political classes paralyzed and positively verklempt. How much more public support is needed to give them comfort? Do we have to wait until support rises to 80%? 90%?

This is a funhouse mirror image of why minorities are given special consideration in the constitution. Not only are our politicians afraid of a majority's biases about a minority, they are now even afraid of a minority of the majority's biases about the minority.

Can't anyone in our leadership point that out?

I don't know if this phenomenon has a name (I'd suggest CEGSSS: Clinton-Era Gay Shell-Shock Syndrome), but if our leaders can't guide politicians through it, what good are they? I'm sure Rahm Emanuel is no easy project, but are the rest of us supposed to live through the aftereffects of his trauma forever?

I'm really wondering whether we need GLAAD anymore. They've just released their Network Responsibility Index for 2008-09 to "serve as a road map toward increasing fair, accurate and inclusive LGBT media representations." ABC led the pack among networks; of its 1,146.5 total hours of primetime programming, 269.5 hours (24%) included LGBT impressions. The CW came in second with 138 LGBT-inclusive hours, or 20% of its primetime offerings. CBS gave us the back of their hand, devoting only 60 hours -- 5% of its schedule -- to us. For shame.

In 1985, when GLAAD was a startup, this kind of monitoring was not only valuable, but necessary. Back then, the New York Times had a specific editorial policy against use of the word "gay," to describe us. GLAAD is the reason that changed, and they can claim credit for much more. They've helped us change the world.

But now we are in the position where we can complain when one network only shows us five percent of the time -- a number pretty close to our actual percentage in the population. Anyone tuned only to ABC would have had to put up with 269.5 hours of us. How helpful is it, really, that we know, to the decimal point, total network hours, percentages (subdivided by race, as well; Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives lose serious GLAAD-cred on that point) and year-over-year differentials of GLAAD-approved achievement? Are we studying stuff now, not because we need to, but just because we can?

I don't know how much it cost to do all this monitoring, and slicing and dicing of the data, nor how much was spent to produce the 39-page, very glossy report. But in a world where we have some important and expensive political work to do in (for example) Maine, New York and possibly Washington (and let's not forget California), is this really the best use of $11 million? Do we really need GLAAD as an institution any more? More important, if we ever decided we didn't, would it be possible to get rid of them?