IGF CultureWatch

Author/blogger Chris Sciabarra has seen Brokeback Mountain and offers his view:

The film is heartbreaking. It is a testament to the damage that is done to human lives by self-alienation, repression, and fear, internalized homophobia and the pressure to conform to certain "roles" in society. It can be tender, sad, and funny. The performances are superb; the cinematography is gorgeous; the minimalist score is effective; the nature-backdrop is awe-inspiring.

Guess he liked it. But the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas wonders whether it's a gay movie at all, since it's not focused on sex or activism (just love between men). And at least some of the urban gay clubheads he quotes seem to think not.

The Human Rights Campaign and its lib-left abortion-rights allies have come out against the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. As with John Roberts, they have done so before a word of testimony has been given in the upcoming Senate confirmation hearings.

Alito has a scant record on gay issues, aside from two separate rulings on public school anti-harassment policies. In Saxe v. State College Area School District, he struck down one policy as too broad, noting:

There is no categorical 'harassment exception' to the First Amendment's free speech clause....When laws against harassment attempt to regulate oral or written expression on such topics, however detestable the views expressed may be, we cannot turn a blind eye to the First Amendment implications.

Free speech advocates supported the ruling, but it's what the gay groups are hanging around Alito's neck.

In another case, Shore Regional High School Board of Education v. P.S., Alito reversed a lower court in order to uphold the claim of a student regularly called names such as "faggot," "gay," and "homo" that he was not afforded appropriate protection from harassment.

Cut to the chase: these groups are opposing Alito because they think he'll rule to limit abortion on demand. Period.

I wonder about the practical effect of such intense and highly political opposition-including by Lambda Legal Defense, which may well be arguing gay rights cases before Alito and Roberts. When you assert firmly that they will "Roll Back Civil Rights Protections for the LGBT Community," you may have ensured you've made a self-fulfilling prophesy (hey, all the better for future fundraising!).

More: Or, as one of our readers puts it, the actual threat is to "9th-month, partial-birth, taxpayer-funded, abortion-on-demand for minors without parental notification." The NARAL crowd that the gay groups have joined with in "coalition building" represents a minority of American opinion, which consistenlty favors legal abortion with some limitations, weighing an individual's right to autonomy against the destruction of a living being (in some cases, moments before a live birth).

Joining our fight for legal equality to those demanding no abortion restrictions works against us with the very independents we need to win over.

Still more: Law.com on the liberals' strategy: "Transform Alito into Robert Bork by any means possible-whether the shoe fits or not."

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More Recent Postings
12/4/05 - 12/10/05

A New York State appellate court has struck down a lower court ruling that found a right to same-sex marriage under the state's constitution. The appellate court held that there was no such right and that the lower court had overreached into the realm of the legislature.

I wonder if the case had been about the rights of marriage, instead of marriage itself, if the outcome might have been different. In Vermont, most famously, the state's highest court found gay couples to be entitled to the state-granted rights and obligations that married couples enjoy, while leaving it to the state legislature to devise a means to grant those rights (which it did, via the then-novel idea of civil unions). But in New York it was all about the "M" word.

Yet progress rarely comes in such big steps, and we pay a price for the rejection of incrementalism (which, despite initial lesbigay activist opposition, recently brought statewide marriage rights to gay couples via civil unions in Connecticut as a result of legislative action not forced by a court ruling). The enactment of Britain's new Civil Partnership Act is another example.

Washington Blade editor Chris Crain rightly takes aim at a Washington, DC, partnership bill just passed by the city council that would extend partnership rights and obligations to any two people, including brother and sister, so as to be "nondiscriminatory." The problem: instead of offering gay couples a limited step forward toward equality until such a time as marriage is accessible, it fulfils the worst nightmare of our critics by creating a "marriage lite" for straights that's a step down in terms of the traditional legal commitment (plus introducing a weird incest kind of blood relationship thing).

Sounds like Crain might have read this column of mine from back when, arguing that domestic partner benefits for gays are at best a stopgap measure (I'd now say incremental step), and offering such benefits to unmarried heterosexuals might in fact contribute to family breakdown by discouraging fully committed relationships.

You have to feel just a mite sorry for Ford Motor Co., which is trying to assert that it just happened to decide to pull ads for its Jaguars and Land Rovers from the gay press after meeting "several times" with the anti-gay American Family Association (which was threatening a boycott over the company's "support for the homosexual agenda"). The AFA wanted Ford to go a lot farther and, for instance, stop sponsoring gay pride events. So you can see how the company sort of said, "We won't do that, but we'll give you something." The fact that its Volvo brand will continue to advertise in the gay press shows just how finely they were trying to split hairs.

Now, the Human Rights Campaign and its allies are threatening counter-moves against Ford. That's fine. But the fact is that the AFA claims "3 million supporters" and the HRC claims "600,000 members," and both figures are wildly inflated. However the AFA managed to get to Ford dealers in the South and scare them a bit, which is why Ford (which is about to eliminate some 30,000 jobs to stave off bankruptcy) felt the need to capitulate just a little.

But if you're a company whose founder urged Hitler to find a final solution to the problem of world Jewry, you might take a bit more care about even symbolic acquiescence to organized bigotry.

Update: I may have let Ford off too easy. WardsAuto.com (as cited by the Washington Blade) reports that as part of the agreement between the AFA and Ford, Volvo ads will no longer be tailored to gay consumers and Ford agreed not to sponsor any future gay events. The worst thing about such cave-ins is that they embolded the bigots to go further and up the ante next time.

Update: Ford relents, at least on the ads.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Tuesday about whether it should overturn a law allowing the federal government to withhold grants from universities whose law schools bar military recruiters from their campuses. Opponents of campus recruiting argue that that (take a breath) just because their schools accept federal money does not give the federal government the right to withhold that money if the schools discriminate against the federal government's military recruiters because those recruiters discriminate against gays.

Interestingly, the anti-recruiters and their gay activist allies cite the Supreme Court's ruling in Boy Scouts vs. Dale (which they strongly condemned at the time), holding that a private organization has the right to exclude those deemed contrary to the organization's values. Another case cited allowed organizers of a St. Patrick's Day parade to exclude a gay-identified contingent.

Reportedly, even some of the liberal justices seem dubious of the claim that the federal government could not chose to withhold its grants, although the libertarian Cato Institute argues that expressive rights shouldn't be curtailed by a limited degree of government support, for either Harvard, the Boy Scouts, or St. Patraick's Day organizers.

But regardless of the merits of the legal arguments, gay opposition to military recruiting is awful politics, sending a message that gays seek to weaken the military during a time of war.

I can't think of a less effective way to achieve an end to the military's anti-gay ban. And I have no doubt that officers drawn from Harvard, Yale and other elite universities (particularly their law schools) would be the most likely to move the military to a more accepting position. But then, many who oppose recruitment on campus, I firmly believe, are using the gay angle as a pretext-if the military accepted gay recruits, they'd still be fighting against recruitment because they see Iraq as Vietnam and America as the enemy of world peace and oppressor of third-world peoples. And gay activists who don't share those leftwing views have none the less proved themselves willing dupes for that cause.

Update: George Will notes, correctly, that "Schools eager to ban military recruiters from a few hours of access to students who want to meet them have faculties that expose students to a one-sided bombardment of political views." And other liberal campus hypocrisies.

I've been out of town attending to family matters over the past several days, but did catch this moving piece from the Washington Post on the life and recent death of Pierre Seel, one of thousands of gay men imprisoned and tortured by the nazis (he was forced to watch his lover being ripped to pieces by attack dogs), who later spoke up against clerical homophobia.

Shifting gears, I received an email titled "from gay hustler to pope." Hmmm. But alas, it was in reference to John Voight first making his mark in "Midnight Cowboy" and now playing John Paul II in an ABC TV flick.

More Recent Postings
11/27/05 - 12/3/05

Madam Heidi Fleiss is reportedly planning to open a Nevada bordello "stud farm" featuring prime male beef, but catering to women. However, some are crying foul, alleging discrimination if men aren't also serviced:

Nevada lawmaker David Parks, who is gay, plans to ask for a legal opinion this month on whether Fleiss would be violating the state's anti-bias law by letting only women hire her studs.

Seems fair. (Note to libertarians: I fully support business owners' rights to establish the type of service they desire to provide, free of government coercion.)

Gay conservatives/libertarians at Harvard don't exactly find themselves embraced by either the BGLTSA student "queer" group or by the local GOPers (who, as the Harvard Republican Club, use the moniker "HRC"). As quoted by the Crimson, one non-leftie opines, quite sensibly:

I don't think there's any reason being gay should lead you to support bigger government and high taxes. These are issues that have nothing to do with being gay.

But I guess it's not easy finding support for personal autonomy, limited government, property rights and voluntary (non-coercive) association on a lib-left campus with a smallish conservative opposition. Nor in the wider world polarized betwixt a highly partisan left and right. (hat tip: Rick Sincere)
--Stephen H. Miller