IGF CultureWatch

Dr. Charles Socarides, a psychiatrist who gained notoriety for his claimed ability to "cure" homosexuals of their "disorder," has passed into the great beyond. The New York Times obit mentions he was married four times. Since Socarides was often cited by anti-gay "defense of marriage" types, one can only ponder which of his four marriages was being defended.

The most interesting thing about him, however, was that his openly gay son was Bill Clinton's liaison to the lesbian and gay community. Can you say "dysfunctional family"?

Over at Positive Liberty, Jon Rowe takes Socarides death as an opportunity to share some thoughts on the misuse of the mental health profession to enforce social norms.

Among the saddest developments for the gay community this past year may be the transformation of the group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) from an organization that sought to create dialogue among straights and gays into a knee-jerk, Daily Kos-ite arm of the Democratic National Committee. I can remember several years back speaking to PFLAG's then executive director at a Republican Unity Coalition event, where she was the only representative who chose to attend from any of the supposedly nonpartisan gay lobbies. But that was then. Now, under current executive leader Jody Huckaby, PFLAG deviates no more from politically correct lesbigay leftism.

The language the group deployed to attack the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts tells all. PFLAG's Huckaby wailed that "We cannot sit back and allow a man with a demonstrated record of hostility towards privacy and minority rights to make decisions on our nation's highest court that will affect this nation for generations to come." Say what? Could that be the John Roberts who did pro bono work on behalf of the gay attorneys arguing Romer vs. Evans, the landmark Supreme Court case which successfully struck down a 1992 Colorado amendment prohibiting localities from enforcing gay-inclusive nondiscrimination protections?

Now PFLAG is working to derail the nomination of Sam Alito, and its press statement disingenuously cites a case in which Alito ruled that a public school non-harassment policy went too far toward curtailing free speech, while ignoring another Alito ruling in favor of a harassed gay student (as I recounted most recently here).

The loss of PFLAG to the partisan left leaves us with no significant national organization that seeks to forge a broad consensus for gay equality (aside, arguably, from the religious groups like Soulforce, God bless 'em). And that's why I think it's the saddest gay development of the year.

More: Reader "Another Jim" comments:

The original mission was outreach to angry, scared, and misinformed parents who've learned that their child is gay. It was basically a self-help group, parents helping parents.

Something began to change when it went from "Parents and Families" to "Parents, Families and Friends." These "friends" seem to be standard issue gay activists, and PFLAG is now fast becoming a clone of NGLTF.

What does this mean for parents, many of whom no doubt are Republicans, who may turn to PFLAG seeking information and support? When they catch drift of the intense anti-GOP politicking, they're not likely to be receptive to the message of openess and acceptance that, once upon a time, was PFLAG's reason for being. And that's a shame.

Yes, it is.

Iraq-war opposing, Republican-despising, political cartoonist Jeff Danziger (distributed by the New York Times Syndicate) compares the love between two cowboys to a sexual relationship between a cowboy and his horse.

Danziger last year portrayed Condoleezza Rice as Prissy in Gone with the Wind, to the delight of the administration's critics (that cartoon is no longer online, but here's a description). What's a little racism-or homophobia-when you're a LIBERAL?

By the way, to date I haven't seen any of the gay watchdogs criticize Maureen Dowd's hateful Brokeback column. As noted previously, liberal Bush-hater MoDo offered that "'High Plains Drifter' now sounds like a guy who might get arrested in a bus station bathroom." Remember, kiddies, no enemies on the left.

More Recent Postings
12/18/05 - 12/24/05

We've posted Paul Varnell's intriguing column tracing the Vatican's latest attacks on homosexuality to Freud's views. Hopefully, if we receive enough contributions-and please contribute if you haven't-we can shift to a design that incorporates a comments area for all our articles as well as for this blog (which now sits on an entirely different platform).

Anyway, I would take issue with the notion that Freud in a larger sense has been debunked (do we no longer accept the subconscious, or the meaning of dreams?), although on certain points he's been revised and expanded upon. And his "Letter to an American Mother," which gets Paul's ire up, is actually a surprisingly accepting view of homosexuals, especially given the time (there's a link to letter text in the article, so readers can judge for themselves).

Two headlines from this week's Washington Blade: Gay, AIDS groups oppose Alito and Bush declines to name [openly gay D.C. Attorney General Robert] Spagnoletti for judgeship. Only in lesbigay political never-never land would gay activists think they can vehemently oppose all of the president's judicial nominees, and then expect he should reward our community by appointing a gay judge.

I sometimes think gay activists are the only people in D.C. who don't have a clue how politics works-or, more depressingly, they do know but care more about being on the left and losing (which is actually better for their fundraising efforts), then making progress.

More: From reader Curtis:

Bush doesn't owe the critics of his judicial nominations anything, that's for sure. And LCR's failure to support his re-election pretty much rules them out as effective lobbyists.

So Bush gets a free ride with all those gay Bush voters who have no institutional lobbyist in Washington.

Gay activists to Bush: We will never, ever, EVER support you. Now, here's what we want!

Exactly.

Congrats to the happy couple. As the NY Times reports:

The most striking thing, in fact, about the people gathered along the streets of Windsor today for Sir Elton John's civil partnership ceremony with his boyfriend, David Furnish, was how little they appeared to care, one way or the other, about the couple's sexuality....

Although the legislation stops short of calling the new arrangement marriage...it does give gay couples legal rights similar to those of married people on matters like inheritance, immigration and pensions, as well as responsibilities in areas like child-rearing.

But here in the U.S., for both advocates and opponents, all that seems to matter is keeping it about the "M" word.

Author Annie Proulx had this to say in a recent interview with the AP:

AP: Have you gotten any response from gay organizations?
Proulx: No. When the story was first published eight years ago [in the New Yorker], I did expect that. But there was a deafening silence. What I had instead were letters from individuals, gay people, some of them absolutely heartbreaking.

Guess gay groups have been too busy honoring "Jack" from Will & Grace!

Meanwhile, the anti-gay Traditional Values Coalition quotes "ex-homosexuals" condemning the movie and encouraging closeted and married (to women) gay men to stay with their wives. Says one:

"Believe me, we can sadly expect to see a lot more men like former Governor Jim McGreevy of New Jersey not only resigning from their jobs, but from their wives, children and families."

But as I read on another list in response to the TVC, "it doesn't occur to these people that a better way to prevent cases like McGreevey's is not to pressure gay people into straight relationships in the first place, but instead to support them as they are."

No, it wouldn't occur to them. Not for a second.

Lionel Tiger is always worth reading, as he points out the dangerous double-standards in academia and elsewhere toward boys and men. In his latest op-ed, he writes:

[T]he publicly financed educational system is at least 20% better at producing successful female students than male, yet hardly anyone sees this as remarkable gender discrimination. While there is a vigorous national program to equalize male and female rates of success in science and math, there is not a shred of equivalent attention to the far more central practical impact of the sharp deficit males face in reading and writing. . . .

When it comes to health status, the disparity in favor of women is enhanced by such patterns as seven times as much federal expenditure on breast cancer as on the prostate variety. And no one is provoked into action because vaunted male patriarchs commit suicide between four and 10 times as frequently as oppressed and brainwashed women. . . . There is scant acknowledgment that we face a generation of young men increasingly failing in a school system seemingly calibrated to female rhythms.

Hat tip to Instapundit, who also linked to this like-minded posting.

But you won't catch a single lesbigay group, so big on "coalition building" with abortion-on-demand feminist lobbies and all manner of leftwing causes, ever going to bat for boys.

More Recent Postings
12/11/05 - 12/17/05

IGF contributing author Rick Rosendall asked me to link to his column taking aim at a Chris Crain editorial I had praised (on why Washington, D.C.'s newly expanded domestic partner benefits shouldn't be available to brother-sister couples and similar combos). Says Rick:

In addition to being sensationalistic, Crain's latest charge is false and untimely. The provision allowing blood relatives to be domestic partners has been law for 13 years, and has stirred no controversy in that time.

You can make up your own minds.

I saw it last night (yes it's heartbreaking and haunting), with an all gay audience at a tiny theater in Washington's Dupont Circle, the only venue in town where it's showing.

Here's a reluctantly positive review, at least about the quality of the movie (with plenty of disclaimers about its morality), from Christianity Today. Catch the discussion questions at the end.

Still, that review is more supportive than this dismissive and petty one in the Washington Post, which labels the movie "a potential camp classic, larded with unintended humor" and a set-up for Saturday Night Live parodies. Here we see the typical straight response-and why, sadly, the movie won't attract a mainstream audience despite the truckload of awards it will win.

Another example, from Mickey Kaus over at Kausfiles, here ("I don't want to go see it. (Why? Sexual orientation really is in the genes. Sorry") and here ("If a gay man, say, goes to see 'Wuthering Heights,' there is at least one romantic lead of the sex he's interested in! In 'Brokeback Mountain,' neither of the two romantic leads is of a sex I'm interested in."). That about sums it up.

More: The New York Times' always mean-spirited Maureen Dowd, an oh-so smug liberal Bush-hater, penned a Saturday column (not available gratis online) that says:

Maybe it's time to take another look at that sway in John Wayne's stride. Everything will have to be re-evaluated "High Plains Drifter" now sounds like a guy who might get arrested in a bus station bathroom. And audiences may be ready for "The Good, the Bad and the Bad Hair Day."

She then goes into an attack against Republicans and the frontier myth, and concludes by returning to Hollywood and gays:

"King Kong is not as daring as it could be. Peter Jackson...could have made "Brokeback Island." Just picture it: Leonardo DiCaprio, blond, doe-eyed and smitten, curled in the ape's epicene yet hairy grip. Kong, swinging both ways."

Scratch a liberal, find a phobe.

Still more: Here's a tonic to some of the above-quoted poisoned pens, a Times' piece on what it's like for real gay cowboys, who affirm the film's truth. Writes Guy Trebay:

The light Ang Lee allows into the bunkhouse closet may shock those who like their Marlboro Men straight. But to gay men trying to forge lives in a world where the shape of masculinity is narrow, and where the "liberated" antics of the homosexual minstrels so often depicted on television can seem far off, the emotional privation and brutal violence of "Brokeback Mountain" seems like documentary.

Take that, MoDo.

Yet more still: Comments reader Another Jim:

When bush-haters Maureen Dowd and (as Steve recently posted) Al Franken let down their guard, out comes the sneering contempt toward gays.

I think these people are just haters of anyone who's not like them, and they've found it's profitable to unleash their hatred toward George Bush and conservatives. But their hearts are very dark.

Let's just say they're not nice people, despite their smug liberalism.