IGF CultureWatch

I guess I am just a sex-negative prude, but I really do not think that soliciting more porn industry support for marriage equality efforts is a great idea. I guess it is nice that NickYoungXXX-dot-com supports the cause and all, but the Maggie Gallagher press release kind of writes itself. And I really don't think we are going to win over any moms in Sherman Oaks with a porn-funded campaign of artsy NO H8 photos.

This whole thing is kind of silly, but it does illustrate a real problem in California. It seems like just about everybody out here has his or her own "grass roots" organization dedicated to overturning Prop 8. There is a real incentive for those groups to do outrageous stuff, because the ones who do the most outrageous stuff will stand out in a crowded field. That means attention that should be focused on nice boring gay couples will be diverted to Mormon-bashing or porn-industry fundraising or Perez Hilton.

The epoch of the cultural wedge issue is ending, says Democratic political analyst Ruy Teixeira, in his new report, "The Coming End of the Culture Wars" (PDF). And gay marriage will soon lose its political potency. It's baked in the demographic cake.

That's because of generational change, as culturally progressive Millennial voters surge into the electorate. It's also, more immediately, because of the decline in the number of white working-class voters. And the fastest growing religious group is not evangelicals but seculars, who tend to be very culturally progressive.

Of course, this does not mean that conflicts over gay marriage will die out overnight. There will continue to be attempts on the state level to keep gay marriage illegal through the initiative process. Such initiatives have met with considerable success, including the recent passage of Proposition 8 in the progressive state of California. Yet a simple regression model developed by Nate Silver suggests that such initiatives have been losing support at the rate of roughly 2 percentage points a year. This time trend, combined with a couple of other variables on state religiosity, indicates that California would fail to support such an initiative by next year and only a handful of Deep South states should be expected to support gay marriage bans by 2016.

Fights will continue on the gay marriage issue, but the outcome of these struggles is not really in doubt looking 10 years or so down the road. And neither is the decreasing usefulness of this issue to the conservative culture warriors.

This seems to be the year of the Gay Kiss. Kiss-ins are taking place from Salt Lake City to El Paso to Paris (and not the one in Texas -- the one in France).

Talk about the personal being political. This is the most delightful possible response to the sourpusses who are trying -- today -- to deny us a peck on the cheek (the horror that set the LDS church's hair on fire) or a smooch to smooth out the spice from good Mexican food. The El Paso police were apparently ready to arrest people, and the Police Chief had to issue a public statement letting everyone in on the news that gay kissing isn't against any known law, even in Texas.

We may or may not have Katy Perry to thank for this, but I can't think of anything that more wonderfully illustrates how far we've come, and how far other people haven't since the 1950s.

Is the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation past its prime? GLAAD's reaction to the movie Bruno makes them sound like a bunch of crotchety old fussbudgets who could use a toke of medical marijuana.

Their press release on July 7 grudgingly noted the movie is "apparently intended to skewer" homophobia, but GLAAD couldn't get past the fact that gay teenagers are still "bullied, beat up and ridiculed." GLAAD's Rashad Robinson cranks that up to 11 in an op-ed for the LA Times. Straight people can laugh at the movie, then go back to their normal lives; but not gay people, who must suffer interminably:

It could come up in the form of jokes about gay parents at the office. Or gay teens taunted with the name "Bruno" in school hallways. Or in fanning the flames of anti-gay campaigns and laws, like California's Proposition 8, pushed by those who exploit discomfort, and the "ewwww" factor, for political ends. . . . For a major studio film with a massive cultural footprint to pile even more stereotypes and discomfort onto an already hostile climate -- despite what are inarguably the best of intentions -- doesn't make the work of changing and overcoming it any easier.

I think GLAAD turns Bruno on its head. They're confusing the way people might misperceive the movie with the message the movie is sending. Bruno wants to make fun of homophobic cluelessness, and GLAAD doesn't seem to want to let it. Unlike the sexless pansies in movies past, which GLAAD helped the general public contextualize, Bruno goes Full Dildo on the puritans.

Ironically, Bruno is the kind of movie GLAAD paved the way for - gleefully anti-homophobic. But now it's GLAAD who's become orthodox. If GLAAD doesn't get itself a sense of humor, they may wind up being the subject of Baron Cohen's next movie.

I've never shied from criticizing the gay left for preaching that "LGBT rights" are just one part of a broad "progressive" agenda leading to the golden age of redistributive socialism under the direction of a liberal elite that's better than the rest of us. And I stand by that, especially to the extent that the leading LGBT rights organizations are now little more than Democratic party fundraising fronts run by Democratic party operatives.

But I have to say, as of late, I'm more sympathetic to focusing on a broader agenda, but from the opposite direction. One reason my heart hasn't been in blogging here at IGF is that, as important as gay legal equality remains in the face of government-mandated discrimination (primarily marriage and the military), I'm totally bummed out by the greater issue of the harm to American long-term prosperity and individual liberty under the current administration in Washington, all to the sycophantic cheerleading of the big-government-loving propagandists who dominate the media.

As I doubt that there will be anything other than feigned moves toward repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act or Don't Ask, Don't Tell before the 2010 elections (at which point Republicans who've been opposed by the gay lobbies will, I believe, pick up several or more seats in both congressional chambers), all we're likely to reap from the chosen one is a yet bigger orgy of spending to grow government at the expense of the private sector, sowing the seeds of even more confiscatory taxation and/or hyperinflation, along with still more ill-conceived and anti-growth regulation (much of the worst justified by the hysteria of global warming alarmism, the left's religious apocalypticalism).

So my attention has not been on gay rights; it's not where the action is. And to that degree, as I said, I can sympathize with the left that's always been more interested in "larger issues" at hand.

Still, from time to time I'd like to draw attention to some truly independent thought on gay issues, such as Camille Paglia's recent explanation of why she's against hate crime/thought crime laws (it's here, but you have to scroll down to the last answer on the page). Excerpt:

"Government functionaries should not be ceded the dangerous authority to make decisions about motivation. ... The barbaric acts that led to the death of Matthew Shepard in 1998 deserved a very severe penalty, which has been applied."

As reader "avee" wrote in the comments, responding to some muddled assertions:

Motive is only important in terms of its relation to pre-meditation. If motive reveals a crime was pre-meditated, then it's a more serious crime.

Increasing the penalties for assault or murder because of the bias in a person's head is a very different matter. It is, in effect, punishing thought. You may like punishing those with thoughts you don't think they should have, but it's a very bad road to go down. Beware, social engineers, of the consequences of your actions.

More. Reader "Sol" comments, responding an assertion that it's all Bush's fault:

"The Bush deficit was bad; the Obama deficit is catastrophic. There really is no way to convey the unprecedented size of the projected federal debt, but this chart gives some indication. ... At some point we will either have to inflate our way out of this hole, or raise taxes in a drastic way. The result will be a low-growth, heavily government dependent economy for years to come."

Ah, but at least we'll have higher criminal penalities (or, probably in fact not) if the state can ferret out bias!

There is A Homosexual in America. And He's a problem:

Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity-but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him. A vast majority of people retain a deep loathing toward him, but there is a growing mixture of tolerance, empathy or apathy. Society is torn between condemnation and compassion, fear and curiosity, between attempts to turn the problem into a joke and the knowledge that it is anything but funny, between the deviate's plea to be treated just like everybody else and the knowledge that he simply is not like everybody else.

This is from Time magazine's issue of January 21, 1966. I can't even begin to unpack how far we have all come from these pre-Stonewall days, but Hendrik Hertzberg does a fine job in the New Yorker.

The only thing I'd add is to ask you to think about that bizarre third person singular. "The homosexual is unsure of his position in society. . . " "Society is torn between condemnation and deep loathing toward him. . . " This lumps us all into some undifferentiated whole, then puts us behind a grammatical wall from the author and the society he takes for granted.

And before you offer up a prayer of thanks that those days are gone, check out Matthew Rettenmund's analysis of Admiral Mullen's view of DADT at Towleroad. The Admiral says he wants to "give the president my best advice, should this law change, on the impact on our people and their families at these very challenging times."

Matthew hits him with a sound blow that knocks the Admiral right back to 1966:

Pitting LGBT soliders against "our people and their families" begs the question: What about our people and their families, Admiral?

That is exactly the right question, and the Admiral ought to answer it -- even if only for himself. Why doesn't he view us as part of "his" people and "their" families?

While we're waiting, check out the Time article -- if for no other reason than to find out that we seem to have lost the "cuff-linky" bars our ancestors used to enjoy.

A young gay man, fresh out of a Catholic law school, notices a generation gap at this year's Pride festivities in Minneapolis:

One observation I made was that the younger crowd (perhaps ages 18-30) were very tame this year. In past years, I feel like the younger crowd has donned the more traditional Pride garb of brightly colored short-shorts, flip-flops, and perhaps a pooka shell necklace. This year, I noticed the younger crowd was not nearly as sexually provocative in their dress. . . . Most of the younger crowd was dressed normally, dragging along their puppies and dogs.

The older crowd was drastically different. My friend and I were in the beer garden and she and I both commented on how so many "older" men were dressed provocatively and with the purpose of expressing sexuality . . . .

Assimilationist? That's one way to look at it. Performative rather than authentic? Perhaps, but radicalism in attire and manner is as much a performance as modesty can be. This writer sees better days ahead:

I think young gay men and women are beginning to see the possibilities for the general gay community and are starting to subdue and prepare themselves for leading a "normal" American life, something that a lot of gay men and women desperately need right now. I know I am and I am definitely looking to the future with high hopes.

I recently stumbled across an interesting essay discussing the connection between free markets and gay marriage, written in 2006 by the prominent legal theorist Ronald Dworkin in the New York Review of Books.

Dworkin argues that culture is shaped, among other things, both organically and by law. Organically, it is shaped "by the discrete decisions of individual people about what to produce and what to buy and at what price, about what to read and say, about what to wear, what music to listen to, and what god if any to pray to." But our culture "is also shaped by law, that is, by collective decisions taken by elected legislators about how we must all behave." Which of these processes - organic or legal - should predominate in the case of same-sex marriage?

What's most interesting about the essay is Dworkin's critique of conservatives who oppose state regulation of markets forbidding evolution in economic practices and arrangements but who invite state regulation of marriage forbidding evolution in familial practices and arrangements.

Socialist societies do give people in power the authority to shape the economic environment for everyone by stipulating prices and the allocation of resources and production. But we insist on a free market in goods and services: we insist, that is, that the economic culture be shaped by a composite of individual decisions reflecting individual values and wishes.

The socialism of a centrally controlled economy is an insult to liberty as well as to efficiency-a view most enthusiastically held by the conservatives who favor a religious model for non-economic culture. They do not realize that liberty is even more perilously at stake in the religious than the economic case. . . .

Everything I said about the cultural heritage and value of marriage is equally true of the general institution of religion: religion is an irreplaceable cultural resource in which billions of people find immense and incomparable value. Its meaning, like that of marriage, has evolved over a great many centuries. But its meaning, again like that of marriage, is subject to quite dramatic change through organic processes . . . . American religious conservatives, even those who regard themselves as evangelical, do not imagine that the cultural meaning of religion should be frozen by laws prohibiting people with new visions from access to the title, legal status, or tax and economic benefits of religious organization.

Within broad boundaries, conservatives believe, markets should be shaped by individual decisions. The presumption in markets should be against central regulation. A similar principle would apply to religious beliefs and practices - they should be allowed to develop organically.

Same-sex marriage is the product of an ongoing, organic process that reflects the values of millions of our fellow citizens living in actual families. The opposition to same-sex marriage, at least in so far as it is grounded in dogma, amounts to this: We know the truth, we have the power to write that truth into law, and we will use our power to stop any further development contradicting it. Applied to markets, conservatives would call it socialism.

Commentators on the post regarding the death of Seaman August Provost bring up what will probably be a red herring in the public debate: whether this was a hate crime. The death is being investigated as one, but I think this will distract from the real problem with DADT.

I am assuming that, in the military, there is a fairly high standard for what counts as harassment, since the daily environment must balance the need for brutal discipline against the necessity for young men and women to blow off a little steam. Facts may prove otherwise, but if reports are true that Provost told his family about being harassed, it was probably not just insults and nude pictures posted in his locker. We'll see.

Reporting that, or anything like it would subject Provost to being thrown out of the Navy for telling them he was gay -- unless he was willing to lie about that, which doesn't seem to be the case. And his harasser would obviously know that fact. In that sense, DADT is a bully's best friend.

The Navy doesn't have a report here -- it has a death. The first question on any investigator's list will be "Why?" Again, facts may show otherwise, but Provost's partner certainly seems convinced it was because Provost was gay. If reports are correct that he was both shot and burned, this would seem to be something more than just a minor incident gone bad.

For purposes of whether it was a hate crime, that motive is quite important. But even if there were no hate crime statute, this appears to be a murder. If it is because Provost was gay, it doesn't matter whether extra time is added to the punishment for that motivation. The problem is that DADT short-circuited any reasonable method for Provost to seek help from his superiors if he was concerned about a particular colleague's actions. DADT gives aid and comfort to those who want to intimidate homosexuals. That fact should not be lost in a search for the killer's motive.

You don't need to go much further than the death of Seaman August Provost to show how contemptible Don't Ask, Don't Tell is. He was not killed in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or off the coast of North Korea; he was killed in San Diego.

At Camp Pendelton.

And it is very likely he was killed because he was gay - a fact his non-military partner said was known among Provost's trusted friends at Pendelton.

Provost told family members he was being harassed, and their common-sense advice to him goes to the heart of DADT's incoherence: he should tell his supervisor.

Except, of course, that would be "telling."

DADT not only prevented the Navy from being able to investigate this harassment (though they can investigate it now that he's dead), it is exactly the kind of policy that sends a message to any potential harasser that our government views homosexuality as something wrong.

We can finesse this policy till the cows come home, and maybe mitigate a bit of the surface problems of DADT. But the deeper problem, the problem of what it says about homosexuals to heterosexuals in the military is the iniquitous heart of the policy, and that message will keep being sent as long as it exists.