IGF CultureWatch

Good news headline: Judge Strikes Down Md. Ban on Gay Marriage. Bad news subheadline: Constitutional Fight Ignites.

If the judiciary route leads to a constitutional amendment banning both gay marriage and civil unions, will activists admit that suing for marriage (rather than working for legislatively approved civil unions, or even full marriage) is counterproductive?

More bad news: Virginia's Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, says he opposes the scope of the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, civil unions, and anything resembling partnership rights, which is working its way quickly through the Virginia legislature. But he says he'll nonetheless sign the measure as written, putting it to a referendum.

Virginia's gay lobbies worked hard to elect Kaine, whose Republican opponent was a vocal gay-marriage critic. But the proof is in the pudding, which here seems rather thin indeed.

More/Virginia: Blogger Tim Hulsey gives Kaine no slack:

he followed the Clinton playbook all the way to the Governor's Mansion. Now that he's elected, Kaine continues to follow the Clintonian example-by betraying his Gay and Lesbian supporters first.

Ouch!

More/Maryland: Many of the state's leading Democrats are hoping that the Baltimore circuit court judge's ruling is reversed, quickly, so the Republicans can't demagogue it.

Columnist Norah Vincent, who has contributed some writings to IGF in the past, has a new book that got big play Friday night on 20/20 and a positive New York Times review. In Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again, Vincent (who is an out lesbian) spent several months transformed into "Ned," to discover what men are really like. She concludes men aren't so bad, but hurt from a lack of intimacy. From the Times review (by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Kamp):

introducing herself to some guys in a bowling league, she's touched by the ritual howyadoin', man-to-man handshake, which, "from the outside . . . had always seemed overdone to me," but from the inside strikes her as remarkably warm and inclusive, worlds away from the "fake and cold" air kisses and limp handshakes exchanged by women.

...Norah-as-Ned commits to [the bowling league] for eight months, becoming the weak link on a four-man team of working-class white men.... The resultant chapter is as tender and unpatronizing a portrait of America's "white trash" underclass as I've ever read. "They took people at face value," writes Vincent of Ned's teammates, a plumber, an appliance repairman and a construction worker. "If you did your job or held up your end, and treated them with the passing respect they accorded you, you were all right."

Neither dumb lugs nor proletarian saints, Ned's bowling buddies are wont to make homophobic cracks and pay an occasional visit to a strip club, but they surprise Vincent with their lack of rage and racism, their unflagging efforts to improve Ned's atrocious bowling technique and "the absolute reverence with which they spoke about their wives."

On 20/20, some of the bowlers indicated they had once or twice speculated about whether Ned was gay-though apparently that didn't result in any coldness or hostility that Vincent picked up on, despite any homophobic cracks.

By the way, reviewer Kemp's "white trash" characterization has already gotten heated blogosphere comment: Some feel it shows NYT/Vanity Fair insularity, others (including instapundit) think it was meant as a poke at that very elitism.

Another view: My partner was struck by how basically conservative Vincent's message was-the bowlers were genuinely nice, both to each other and to their wives; women have the power in heterosexual courting; men and women really are different. Vincent says "I found out identity is not something to tamper with"-living as a man eventually sent her into a hospital with depression, because she really is a woman and she had exhausted herself trying to seem like a man.

But over at salon, Andrew O'Hehir dismisses as "bizarre" Vincent's assertion that "male human beings and female human beings [are] as separate as sects"; in other words, that men and women are fundamentally different, in no small part because of the unique power of male sexual desire. Which to me seems a perfectly reasonable observation, and not at all "bizarre" outside the precincts of liberal feminist fantasia.

A very disturbing Washington Monthly profile of blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of The Daily Kos, hero of the Democratic left, and an unvarnished hate-monger:

In June 2003, after television cameras caught a cheering, thousand-strong mob in Fallujah dragging the charred, dismembered bodies of American contractors through the streets, Moulitsas linked to the reports and said of the contractors: "I feel nothing...Screw them."

... If the episode hurt him, it wasn't evident from his readership numbers, which continued to sky-rocket.

He's like Father Coughlin (or worse), preaching that political hatred is a virtue. He makes Limbaugh and Hannity look like intellectuals. And he's shaping the Democratic party.

"If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married," says Jay Zagorsky, research scientist at Ohio Sate University. The reasons: (household) economies of scale and marriage's stabilizing factor. It's just more evidence of why the anti-gay-marriage forces are fundamentally unconservative.

As to the headline "Marriage Builds Wealth More than Being Single," one wag commented: John Kerry could have told them that!

An overview of the Golden Globes, via the Washington Post.

I was surprised that Philip Seymour Hoffman, accepting his best-actor award for "Capote," didn't bother to mention much less offer his respects to the brilliant if tortured man whose life he portrayed. Not classy, and in marked distinction to all the kind and deserved tributes the "Walk the Line" folks paid to Johnny and June. It's one reason I wish more gay actors played gay roles (I think they'd get it).

While the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has reiterated its "adamant opposition" to the confirmation of Judge Alito, its latest statement contains some welcomed balance:

Judge Alito, addressing a case brought by students seeking to protect their right to express anti-gay views, for which he received an award from the Family Research Council, explained his vote against the constitutionality of an extraordinarily broad school anti-harassment policy as required by the controlling constitutional standard, a view we share, and offered up his ruling in another case where he voted to allow a student thought to be gay to transfer to another school because the "student had been bullied unmercifully...to the point of attempting...suicide" as an example of favoring "the small person." (emphasis added)

Recognizing that Saxe v. State College Area School District was not an anti-gay ruling but a pro-free-speech ruling, and that Shore Regional High School Board of Education v. P.S. was a gay-friendly ruling, distinguishes NGLTF from the ridiculously partisan position taken by the Democratic Party lobbyists who now run PFLAG. As noted previously, that formerly nonpartisan group issued a statement condemning Alito's free-speech ruling in Saxe while making no mention at all of Shore Regional.

More: Assessing the Alito hearings panderfest, Paul Horowitz of Prawfsblog writes:

I appreciate the value that interest groups such as NOW and NARAL have to the Democrats in the political process, but if I were running the party I would be seeking a Sister Souljah moment with those groups at least once a week, or better yet ignoring them altogether.

And then, if the Republicans would only ignore the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family!

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01/8/06 - 01/14/06

There's more than a little disingenuousness here:

[Anti-gay Sen. Sam] Brownback wanted to know if Alito believed that the Federal Defense of Marriage Act which says states do not have to accept same-sex marriages from other states is counter to the full-faith-and- credit clause of the Constitution. Without directly answering the question Alito said that the issue is the subject of disagreement by constitutional scholars.

"Its unfortunate that Alito has given completely non-answers to questions," Laura Schwartz, chief legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign told 365Gay.com.

Sounded like an appropriate answer to me.

Note: liberal judicial nominees also refuse to publicly prejudge issues likely to come before them, as everyone in Washington knows.

More: In response to Democrats' charge that he never stands up for the "little guy," Alito pointed to his 2004 decision protecting a high school student from anti-gay bullying by letting him go to the school of his choice. The Advocate reports:

This was a case in which a high school student had been bullied unmercifully by other students in his school because of their perception of his sexual orientation, Alito said. He'd been bullied to the point of attempting to commit suicide, and his parents wanted to enroll him at an adjacent public high school. And the school board said, 'No, you can't do that,' and I wrote an opinion upholding their right to have him placed in a safe school, in an adjacent municipality.

Of course, standing up for gay kids against government educrats isn't what the Democrats had in mind. Which is why PFLAG and others ignored this decision in their anti-Alito screeds. (hat tip: gay patriot)

The ACLU argues, correctly, that his arrest was unconstitutional. I hope this experience leads Rev. Latham to come out.

According to Reuters, the top court of the Cherokee Nation has declined to strike down a marriage between two women performed in May 2004, before tribal law was changed to ban the practice. A lawyer for the tribal council says it's possible the U.S. government will have to recognize the marriage because of the sovereign status of Indian tribes, which could, in theory at least, make them eligible for federal tax benefits denied to date to gay couples.

DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) vs. tribal sovereignty. We'll see how this one plays out.

IGF gets mentioned in an anti-gay marriage op-ed, from the Jan. 8 Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Charles H. Darrell of Minnesota for Marriage/Minnesota Family Council takes note of Dale Carpenter's argument that civil unions are an incremental step that will help pave the way for full marriage equality. Now, if only we could convince more gay activists of this!

More. Guess there's some confusion on ends and means. Commenter "Mickie" gets it, though:

[I]n many (not all) states, demanding full marriage through the courts has breed a backlash that led to state constitutional amendments that ban both marriage and civil unions. Whereas states that have instead gone the legislative route for civil unions, such as Connecticut, have not faced such as draconian backlash. And before too long their electorates will be poised to pass full marriage for same-sex couples.

The United Kindom has civil partnerships that are not marriage, but everyone is now calling them marriage. That's smart strategy. Not dumb politics.

Hope that helps clarify things. For more, read Steve Swayne's latest.