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It's interesting that President Bush, in defending a guest worker/citizenship program for undocumented aliens, is willing to stand up against the reactionary House Republicans who want to build a big wall along the Mexican border and drive all the undocumented workers back across. Bush sees Hispanic Americans as a potential bloc for the GOP, unlike gays (who would alienate the religious right base).

Interesting, too, that NGLTF put out a press release in support of the McCain/Kennedy immigration reform bill (which, to me, does sound like a reasonable measure), but missed the opportunity to discuss the problems of gay immigrants, especially partners of U.S. citizens who can't gain residency. Guess that's "mission creep" (or fear of offending their supposed Latino "allies" by bringing up gay-immigration matters).
--Stephen H. Miller

Monday's Wall Street Journal carried a page one feature (online for WSJ subscribers only) on couples "uncoupling" in the digital age. It began:

A few days after breaking up with his boyfriend, Jeff Ramone couldn't resist logging on to Friendster-a popular online social community-to check out his ex's profile page.

Dr. Dobson, as well as anti-assimilationist (and anti-Wall Street) gays, will no doubt be displeased by such inclusion.

Elsewhere, the Washington Post had an interesting story on the decline of marriage in the African-American community. Somehow, they'll blame this on us, too.
--Stephen H. Miller

More Recent Postings
03/26/06 - 04/01/06

Tom Palmer, writing a column in the Washington Blade, looks at why intolerance toward gays, in Russia and elsewhere, puts economic growth at risk:

Studies...have demonstrated quite effectively that the more open and welcoming a city or region is to peaceful diversity, the more economically productive, prosperous and commercially and technologically advanced it is likely to be.

But the fight against "insularity, prejudice, poverty, and backwardness" will be a long one, over there and over here.

More Recent Postings
03/19/06 - 03/25/06

We've posted John Corvino's insightful look at polygamy illogic and the "slippery slope" argument. Over at Slate, William Saletan also joins the debate with a column worth reading, in which he observes:

Fidelity isn't natural, but jealousy is. Hence the one-spouse rule. One isn't the number of people you want to sleep with. It's the number of people you want your spouse to sleep with.

Saletan also recognizes a key point, "Gays who seek to marry want the same thing. They're not looking for the right to sleep around. They already have that. It's called dating."

More. Uh, oh. HBO's "Big Love" muddies the waters. Here's their synopsis of this week's episode:

Roman's been busy on several fronts. With son Alby as his P.R. aide, he grants an interview to the Los Angeles Times to defend the practice of polygamy.... With Alby's prompting, he offers the journalist a final talking point: "If the Supreme Court says yes to the privacy rights of homosexual persons, surely it's time to recognize our rights to live in peace, too."

--Stephen H. Miller

This isn't exactly a gay item, but given that San Francisco's politics has more input from its gay constituents than just about anywhere else, it's worth noting David Boaz's posting on how government over-regulation is driving families (undoubtedly including a good many gay families) out of town.
--Stephen H. Miller

The Democrat-dominated Florida Supreme Court, the one that killed school choice and tried to elect President Gore, turns sharply rightward when it comes to gays. Having upheld, in 1995, that state's worst-in-the-nation ban on letting gays adopt, the court has now ruled a sweeping anti-gay marriage amendment can go on the ballot. The amendment reads:

Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.

But the Florida constitution prohibits "logrolling" in constitutional amendments (that is, putting something into an initiative that voters like, and then adding something else that voters wouldn't necessarily approve on its own). Since the amendment in question first defines marriage (one man, one women), and then adds in language that bans even civil unions and domestic partnerships (i.e., "other legal unions"), it seem like a pretty clear case of impermissible logrolling. But count on the Florida Supremes to ignore the language of the law and again rule on their own prejudices.

More. Like those Japanese soldiers at the end of WWII who hid in the jungles and refused to surrender, some of our readers still insist that Bush stole the 2000 election. Nothing will convince them that Kos and Moore aren't reliable sources, but for the rest, this should.

Brokeback Mountain continues to demonstrate why it was not only the best film of the year (not withstanding the Academy's snub), but one of the most significant of its era. This commentary, for instance, looks at how it speaks to and for oppressed gays in Arab countries.

This has been all over the blogosphere for weeks, but for those who just refuse to read any blog but CultureWatch, you can view the now-infamous South Park "Trapped in the Closet" episode, pulled from the re-run schedule by Comedy Central, here.

The AP reported:

The episode in question, "Trapped in the Closet," shows Scientology leaders hailing Stan, a child on the show, as a saviour. A cartoon Cruise locks himself in a closet and won't come out. John Travolta, another Scientologist, enters the closet to try and bring him out.

The repeated tag line: "Tom Cruise won't come out of the closet."

Hecklerspray sums up what those "in the know" have been alleging:

Comedy Central pulled the plug on a repeat of "Trapped In The Closet," leading to whispers that Tom Cruise himself ordered the removal of the episode, or he'd cancel all promotion for Mission: Impossible III. Paramount, the Mission: Impossible III studio, and Comedy Central are both owned by Viacom.

Issac Hayes, who voiced "chef," also resigned, calling the episode offensive (Hayes is himself a Scientologist and purportedly got pressure from the "Church" to disassociate himself from the show.)

The larger picture (via LA Times columnist Bridgette Johnson):

The Chef-Cruise-Scientology kerfuffle comes off the heels of worldwide protests of Muhammad cartoons and the assertion by demonstrators that freedom of speech does not mean being allowed to offend, or even that freedom of speech should not be completely extended in society because it can offend.

It's the meeting point between leftwing political correctness and rightwing fundamentalism (Muslim, Christian and Scientology versions), with more than a dollop of Hollywood hypocrisy and homophobia thrown in to boot.

Update: Tim Hulsey points us to this Fox News report that says:

Hayes, like Katie Holmes, is constantly monitored by a Scientologist representative.... [Friends say] Hayes did not issue any statements on his own about South Park. They are mystified.....That certainly begs the question of who issued the statement that Hayes was quitting South Park.

Who, indeed.

The leftwing Radical History Review shines a light on just how far out of the mainstream some "queer theorists" and activists are. The RHR, in calling for papers for a "Queer Futures" issue, notes that:

[F]ilms featuring gay characters and themes are celebrated by mainstream audiences...; "gay marriage" has emerged as the central civil rights cause for powerful organizations like the Human Rights Campaign; urban activists and civic boosters promote "gay business districts" as a means for achieving visibility and equality; and multibillion-dollar markets targeting gay and lesbian tourist dollars are booming

Sounds pretty good, right? Wrong:

[P]rominent lesbian and gay rights organizations increasingly embrace agendas that vie for acceptance within contemporary economic and political systems, thereby abandoning their earlier commitments to economic redistribution and protecting sexual freedoms. This shift has made strange bedfellows out of lesbian and gay rights organizations and social conservatives: both endorse normative and family-oriented formations associated with domestic partnership, adoption, and gender-normative social roles; both tend to marginalize those who challenge serial monogamy and those-including transgender, bisexual, pansexual, and intersex constituencies-who feel oppressed by a binary gender or sex system.

And on it goes, concluding that such strategies "threaten to erase the historic alliance between radical politics and lesbian and gay politics."

It's actually hard to envision what the radical queer left wants other than ripping apart society and all its norms, including property rights and any remnants of sexual inhibition/self-discipline, to be replaced by a redistributionist order that must be both infantile and totalitarian in nature.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell," a policy based on animus toward gays, is losing support in the military if not in Washington, the Boston Globe reports:

A growing body of evidence that attitudes have changed within the ranks. A recent study by the Naval Postgraduate School found that a majority of military personnel felt comfortable around openly gay colleagues....

Overall, the number of soldiers facing discharge under the policy has dropped steadily-from 1,273 in 2001 to 906 in 2002 and 787 in 2003, the most recent year available....

[L]awyers who represent [gay] soldiers...attributed the change both to a growing acceptance of gays within the ranks and to the military's need to keep more highly trained soldiers in the Iraq War.

But the Democrats won't make an issue of the ban, and Republicans will use their support of it as another way to energize the "base."

DADT, in fact, is one more example of how both parties use hot-button emotional appeals to the easily frightened and poorly informed (i.e., blocking Social Security reform and opposing freer trade on the left, blocking immigration reform and trying to amend the consitution to ban gay marriage on the right) to keep their respective bases crazy-angry at all times.

More Recent Postings
03/12/06 - 03/18/06