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The Center of Britain

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

To get a broad sense of what Britain once was, just what necessitated the rise of Margaret Thatcher, ignore the frequently referenced punk lyrics of the late 1970s, so full of manufactured rage at the ruling class (White riot! England’s dreaming! Guns before butter!). Instead, drop Yes, Minister, the classic early 1980’s television comedy of Whitehall perfidy and ministerial incompetence, into the Netflix queue. Or just find the episode “The Compassionate Society”—season two, episode one—in which the show’s protagonist, Minister Jim Hacker, attempts to halt a massive National Health Service (NHS) hospital project which bequeathed to London 500 full-time nurses and doctors but housed not a single patient. Arrayed in defense of the plan are the usual interests: the tub-thumping left-wing union leader (a send up of the militant socialist head of the mineworkers union, Arthur Scargill), Downing Street spinmeisters, and various members of Parliament shilling for self-interested constituents. An advisor defends the project, telling Hacker that one must “sort out the smooth running of the hospital. Having patients around would be no help at all.” It was, unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Thatcher’s favorite episode.

It isn’t hyperbolic to say that this was more or less the government the Iron Lady inherited—a bloated, free-spending state, full of make-work jobs jealously guarded by union toughs. It was a system that Thatcher would help delegitimize and then effectively destroy. The heavy lifting was done (thank you very much) by those heartless Tories, though by 1997 voters decided it was time to return government to the more compassionate hands of Labour.

And Tony Blair’s “New Labour” didn’t win the 1997 election so much as they pushed the Conservative Party to the edge of oblivion. The Tories retreated having lost a massive 178 seats, its biggest defeat in almost a century. For the Conservative Party leadership, it was an existential crisis.

Pop stars that, 10 years previous, excelled in writing songs about the forgotten British miner were now popping champagne corks at Number 10 Downing Street. These would be the years of “Cool Britannia”; Red Wedge was dead. But the honeymoon of pop and politics was mercifully—and predictably—short. Noel Gallagher, guitarist of the seminal 1990s Britpop band Oasis and early adherent of New Labour, soon grumbled that the prime minister was forgetting the working class and acting like an American president. This Tony talked god, was chummy with President Bush, and fancied himself a liberal internationalist. Indeed, the rebranding of Labour, according to Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, resulted in far more criticism from the traditional left than the Tory right. Blair would govern from the center.

Fast-forward to early 2008: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is wildly unpopular and local council elections resulted in Labour’s worst showing in 40 years. Barely a week after the catastrophic defeat, a YouGov poll put Conservative Party support at 49 percent and Labour at 23 percent, its lowest rating since polling records began in the 1930s. (Though it is tempting to blame an easy culprit like Iraq, Labour was 11 points ahead of the Tories just eight months ago, and this week’s Economist leader, which asks if “Gordon Brown is doomed,” doesn’t even reference the war.)

A certain amount of this Labour collapse is attributable to a palatable alternative: Conservative leader David Cameron, the Eton-and-Oxford party boss who professes a love of The Smiths and began a recent Times editorial with the cringe-inducing line “Radiohead are one of my favourite bands.”

But it’s not the pathetic hipster pose that has attracted so much positive attention from both voters and Fleet Street journos, but Cameron's bold (some say facile and opportunistic) attempt to rebrand conservatism in the style of New Labour: "I made changes to and with the Conservative Party over the last 18 months for a very clear purpose, to get us back into the centre ground, to get us into a position where people listen to what we were saying, where we are more in touch with Britain as it is today."

It’s getting crowded in the center of British politics.

Even after his stunning local election victory, Cameron continued to burnish his centrist credentials, writing this week in the lefty paper The Independent that "If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment—forget about the Labour Party…If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change."

Cameron didn’t always consider himself a “true progressive.” When running for Parliament in 2000, he repeatedly dealt the social conservative card, grumbling about legislation that was "anti-family" and warning that it would force the "teaching of homosexuality" into British schools. When he took over the party leadership, Cameron jettisoned the tradition talk and spoke of welcoming gays and lesbians into the party fold, admonishing the Tory old guard for not supporting domestic partnership arrangements. The perpetually peeved Thatcherite Norman Tebbit grumbled that he didn't think "Tory supporters have gone soft, but I think the Tory leadership believes the electors are too soft to take the hard decisions which the country is now facing."

Others argue that the dash to the center—the “modernization”—is vindicated by recent electoral success and recent polling data. "The modernisers were right,” Times columnist and former Tory policy wonk Daniel Finkelstein trumpeted after the election. “Their critics were wrong."

It’s hard to argue with success.

The days following the Conservative rout saw nearly every political columnist on the island considering the future of Gordon Brown. The Spectator wondered what Brown “could learn from Hillary Clinton.” In the 1990s, when Labour was emerging from its punishing wilderness period, it took on countless Clinton operatives as consultants to micromanage its Clintonian rightward drift. But perhaps it’s time for American politicos—i.e. Republicans—to tear a page from the British political playbook.

The political landscape in America is hardly analogous to that of England. Despite Blair’s public piousness, fealty unto God isn’t a prerequisite for a presumptive prime minister. Nor do issues like abortion, the death penalty, or stem-cell research dominate the political culture. British conservatism is in many important ways distinct from its American cousin. But as many American conservatives have noted—David Frum in his book Comeback and his National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg—America too is becoming more socially tolerant and, if the Republican Party is interested in a successful future, a Cameron-like shift to the center on issues such as gay marriage and the drug war is advisable.

As political scientist Morris Fiorina points out in his book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, both residents of red and blue states are “basically centrists”; American's aren't "red" or "blue" but various shades of purple. As conservative commenter David Brooks pointed out in 2001, "Although there are some real differences between Red and Blue America, there is no fundamental conflict."

Pat Buchanan's declaration at the 1992 Republican convention that there was a "religious war" raging in America, a "war for the soul" of the country, seems preposterous in retrospect. With a strong majority of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade, a clear majority supporting civil unions for gay couples, and the very real possibility of the country electing an African-American president, it's time for the Republican Party to borrow from the Tories if they want to recapture the center ground.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Compensate Much?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:32:00 EDT

Via Reddit, the 50 most popular pages on "Conservapedia," the reference wiki for right-wingers.

I Wasn't Actually Born That Way, But the Preacher's Boy Was

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:44:00 EDT

Andrew Sullivan suggests that Carl Bean's "I Was Born This Way" might be the gayest song ever. I thought the gayest song ever was "I Love My Fruit," or maybe Tiny Tim's "I'm Gonna Be a Country Queen," but we can set that aside. The interesting thing about "I Was Born This Way" is that it was composed by a heterosexual. As The Advocate reported in 1978,

[T]he lyric was written by Bunny Jones, a straight black woman with a family. Jones employed gay people in her New York hairstyling salon, and many of them became her close friends. When the gay rights issue got hot and heavy she decided that it was time for a positive statement.

"She is the opposite of Anita Bryant," states Bean.

I found that clip on the Queer Music Heritage website, which also informs us that the songwriters Ronnie Wilkins and John Hurley were lovers. Wilkins and Hurley wrote two major hits, one of which was "Son of a Preacher Man," which takes on new dimensions if you imagine it sung by a guy rather than by Dusty Springfield or Aretha Franklin. It may well be autobiographical, since Hurley himself is a gospel singer. (As is Carl "I Was Born This Way" Bean. That's Archbishop Carl Bean to you.) So I take back what I said about Tiny Tim: "Son of a Preacher Man" is the gayest song ever.

The other big hit written by Wilkins and Hurley? It's "Love of the Common People," which is, depending on how you prefer to think of it, a great country song by Waylon Jennings, a great soul song by the Winstons, a great reggae song by Nicky Thomas, or a great '80s pop song by Paul Young. Also, this guy plays it on the accordion, which is totally gay.

Separating Marriage and State

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:00:00 EST

The historian Stephanie Coontz offers a brief but potent description of how and why the state seized control of marital contracts.

Elsewhere in Reason: Julian Sanchez reviews Coontz's most recent book. I observe the ongoing evolution of marriage. And Jonathan Rauch makes the Hayekian case for gay unions.

Harry Potter and the Tattoo of Regret (A.K.A. "It seemed like a good idea at the time" Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:41:00 EDT

Ernest Hemingway once said that all true stories end in death. In my experience, all tattoo stories end with the slowly sobering-up recipient opining, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

The latest instance of this takes off from the recent revelation by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling that the esteemed headmaster of Hogwarts Academy, Albus Dumbledore, was in fact gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, especially for a guy who really knew how to use his wand. But it has complicated at least one man's life.

From the U.K. Sun:

PROUD Paul Croft got a tattoo of Harry Potter wizard Albus Dumbledore on his back - but is now being teased by pals after he was outed as GAY.
Proud Paul, 36, spent a YEAR having the Hogwarts headmaster etched into his skin as a surprise for his five kids.
But the factory worker has been the butt of jokes ever since Harry Potter author JK Rowling revealed last week that Dumbledore was in love with a fellow male sorcerer.
Paul, of Nottingham, moaned yesterday: "It's been terrible. I've always liked Dumbledore - just not in that way.
"I went into work and everyone was sniggering....

"There were wisecracks about ‘Watch your backs, lads.' Someone asked me if I was planning to get a tattoo of Graham Norton. I thought, ‘Why me?' "
The huge £500 tattoo shows Dumbledore holding a scroll bearing the names of his Harry Potter mad children - Charlotte, Deanna, Brandon, Tamzin and Paris.
Paul said: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

More here. Note to fans of the movie series, the tatt is of the Richard Harris rendition of Dumbledore, which Croft thinks is the "original and best." Oddly, the Sun's reporters didn't think to ask about the George Lazenby Bond tattoo on his scrotum. Go figure.

Hat Tip: Reader Jim Bob tipped me two weeks ago about the Rowling revelation. I can't remember how I stumbled across the tattoo story itself.

Shepard, Show the Way

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 06:42:00 EDT

Politicians are often accused of being irrelevant. But rarely has a group of them been so intent on proving that charge than the senators who voted last week for the "The Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007."

This bill is supposed to be a brave and pioneering piece of legislation. According to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights organization, "Congress has taken an historic step forward and moved our country closer to the realization that all Americans, including the GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender] community, are part of the fabric of our nation."

The bill, passed by the Senate Thursday, is named for a gay man beaten to death in Wyoming in 1998. In explaining the need for this bill, co-sponsor Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., declared, "What happened to Matthew should happen to no one."

You know what? He's right. Which is why murder is against the law, even in Wyoming, and why Shepard's attackers are now serving sentences (life in prison) that would not be any longer if this law had been in effect then.

As it happens, the bill will not likely ever become law, because the president has promised to veto it. But it would be a mostly cosmetic exercise even if it were enacted.

It targets crimes based on a host of illegitimate factors, including the victim's race, religion or national origin, as well as "gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability." Some of the latter categories have earned the bill the fervent denunciation of the Traditional Values Coalition for allegedly "catering to the homosexual/drag queen lobby."

That may win it the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani and John Travolta, but the bill has other shortcomings. The first is the defining defect of hate crimes bills: It is intended to provide extra penalties for criminals who think incorrect thoughts.

It's already illegal, after all, to deliberately injure someone with a gun or an explosive. But this measure establishes special punishment for anyone who carries out such an attack because the victim has certain traits. It's like slapping extra jail time on those who assault people who demonstrate against the Iraq war but not people who demonstrate in favor.

The most important feature, though, is one that the sponsors are loath to publicize. For all its grand intentions, it doesn't really do much at all. Supporters would like to make every hate crime a federal offense. But they can't. And the ones they can outlaw are so few and far between that it's hard to see why they bother.

The problem is that ordinary crime is mainly the purview of state and local governments. Over the last century, the federal government has usurped a lot of functions once assigned to lower levels of government, but there are limits on how far it can go.

Back in 2000, the Supreme Court struck down a major part of another high-minded statute, the Violence Against Women Act, which allowed anyone attacked because of her gender to sue the attacker in federal court. The reason the court gave for overturning the law was simple: The Constitution doesn't give Congress the power to legislate against crimes of a purely local nature.

Said the court, "We can think of no better example of the police power, which the founders denied the national government and reposed in the states, than the suppression of violent crime and the vindication of its victims." Only if such crimes are clearly connected to interstate commerce—which is rarely—can Washington intervene.

So if Congress can't legislate on violence against women, how can it legislate on violence against women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals and the disabled? The truth is, it can't—except when such offenses are connected in some way to interstate commerce.

So the authors of the hate crimes bill were forced to restrict it to incidents that fit this tiny exception. The provision in question thus snares only those crimes in which someone crosses state lines, uses "a channel, facility or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce," or uses a weapon that has traveled across state or international boundaries.

What's the relevance to the murder of Matthew Shepard, or to most of the other attacks on gays? None whatsoever. You might think it's better to do nothing than to do something irrelevant. But for a lot of senators, there's no gesture like an empty gesture.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

La Cage Aux SÃ©nateurs

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:57:00 EDT

Larry Craig goes to court to fight his sex rap later this week. Frank Rich -- the only readable regular in the New York Times opinion district now that John Tierney has moved to the science pages -- sticks up for the embattled senator:

What Mr. Craig did in that men's room isn't an offense either. He didn't have sex in a public place. He didn't expose himself. His toe tapping, hand signals and "wide stance" were at most a form of flirtation....

Yet gay civil rights organizations, eager to see a family-values phony like Mr. Craig brought down, have been often muted or silent on this point. They stood idly by while Republicans gathered their lynching party, thereby short-circuiting public debate about the legitimacy of the brand of police entrapment that took place in Minnesota. Surely that airport could have hired a uniformed guard to police a public restroom rather than train a cop to enact a punitive "Cage aux Folles" pantomime.

Camille Paglia on "sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman's relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard, squirt, goo, spunk, splooge..."

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:21:00 EDT

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes (coff, coff) this Chronicle of Higher Education review-essay by Camille Paglia about three new books about male sexuality:

A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women's-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on.... despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men - or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness....
Gender studies, for all its trafficking with porn and pop, too often paints a bleak, condescending picture of ordinary human life. Alternate views (even from among dissident feminists) are not considered or evidently even imagined. When any field becomes a closed circle, the result is groupthink and cant. The stultifying clichés of gender studies must end. But in the meantime, all faculty members should vow, through their own scholarly idealism rather than by external coercion, not to impose their political or sexual ideology on impressionable students, who deserve better.

More here, including the circumscribed everlasting gob-stopping litany of terms cited in the title of this post.

reason writers on "the man who marketed sperm" and Impotence: A Cultural History.

reason interview (1995) with Paglia here.

Columbia, the Germ of the Ivies

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:55:00 EDT

The Wall Street Journal lays it on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's U.S. host, Columbia University:

[H]is regime also executes homosexuals for the crime of being themselves. Maybe if Columbia University President Lee Bollinger were aware of the latter fact he would reconsider his invitation to the Iranian president to speak on his campus next Monday.
Mr. Bollinger, notoriously, voted in 2005 not to readmit an ROTC program to Columbia (absent from the university since 1969), ostensibly on the grounds of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gay service members. Never mind that other upper-tier schools, including Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania all have ROTC programs. Never mind, too, that in 2003 the Columbia student body voted in favor of readmission by a 2-1 margin. In Mr. Bollinger's view, "the university has an obligation, deeply rooted in the core values of an academic institution and in First Amendment principles, to protect its students from improper discrimination and humiliation."
Mr. Bollinger's position might at least be coherent were he not now invoking the same principles to justify his invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose offenses to gay rights and any other form of human dignity considerably exceed the Pentagon's....

More here, but only for WSJ subscribers, alas.

I'm not sure I follow the full implications of this argument--so the WSJ would be OK with the visit if ROTC were on campus?--but there is almost always something bizarre about university policies regarding campus speakers, organizations, etc. After having gone through grad school in the late '80s and early '90s, the only thing I know for sure is that there are very few people--in academia and in the press, too--who really are consistently in favor of free speech, especially if it means giving time to something you oppose.

Cleaning out the Republican Closet

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:33:00 EDT

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Dale Carpenter ponders how the Republicans can stop worrying and start to openly love the many closeted gays in their ranks:

How to end [the GOP's private acceptance of gays and its public rejection of same]? The private acceptance will continue and, I predict, become even more prevalent as young conservatives comfortable around gay people take over. There will be no purging the party of gays. There is no practical way to purge them, and even if there were, most Republicans would be personally repulsed by such an effort.
These closeted politicians, staffers, and party functionaries will occasionally be found out one way or another and again will come the shock, the pledges to go into rehab, the investigations, the charges of hypocrisy, the schadenfreude from Democrats and libertines, the sense of betrayal from the party's religious conservatives....
The only practical way out of this for the GOP is to come to the point where its homosexuals no longer feel the need to hide. And that won't happen until the party's public philosophy is more closely aligned with its private one. That will be the day when the GOP greets its gay supporters the way Larry Craig, with unintended irony, greeted reporters yesterday at his news conference: "Thank you all very much for coming out today."

More here.

The Best Take So Far on the Larry Craig Affair

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:44:00 EDT

Why would Larry Craig oppose gay marriage even as he cruises for quickies in public restrooms? Here's my favorite explanation so far, from an anonymous reader quoted by one of Andrew Sullivan's guestbloggers:

The current political wars are a re-alignment. It used to be gay vs straight. But now it's the old gay culture against the new gay culture. Larry Craig cruises for sex in bathrooms, he's part of the old gay culture. His lifestyle is threated by gay marriage: more guys sitting at the boarding gate with their husbands means fewer in the airport washroom. His lifestyle is threated by gays in the military: more sailors with boyfriends on shore means fewer available underneath the dock. Craig, West, and Haggard are the death throes of the old gay culture, desperately longing for the good old days.

I read this as a clever joke, but Sullivan's stand-in takes it seriously. I'm not sure which one of us is being tone-deaf here, but I'm going to chuckle appreciatively either way.

Maf54, Where Are You? or, Sen. Larry Craig's Bathroom Confession

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 06:18:00 EDT

Forget Atlanta Falcons QB Michael Vick's guilty plea and literal come-to-Jesus moment for a second.

There's another guilty plea making the rounds that's a tad more central to how power and politics play out in these United States.

It's just come out that, on August 8, Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who had a role in the presidential campaign of latter-day anti-gay Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), entered a guilty "plea on misdemeanor charges stemming from complaints of lewd conduct in a men's restroom at the Minneapolis airport."

The 62-year-old Craig doesn't just put the party back in the "Grand Old Party," though he certainly does that. Back in the day, he voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, a clearly anti-gay measure, and he supported the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

America is the land of opportunity and more power to Craig if he wants to have consensual sex with men in toilets (although, good libertarian that I am, I do believe the owners of said facilities should be allowed to regulate what behavior goes on in their crappers).

But I find it despicable that Craig would deny the option of matrimony to gay men who want it. Shouldn't the people he wants to fuck have the right to decide if they, like Craig, want to enjoy the bounty of marriage? (Not to mention, as seems likely in Craig's case, the right of divorce?)

There was a time--long ago in a distant galaxy, it seems--when small-government Republicans along the lines of Barry Goldwater would talk about getting the government out of the boardroom and the bedroom (and by extension, the bathroom, too). The national leadership might think about revisiting its libertarian chops, which the relatively tolerant Ronald Reagan called "the very heart and soul of conservatism." Conservatives have (rightly and thankfully) lost the culture war, at least as it relates to the mainstreaming of gays and lesbians. They should re-learn their supposed political philosophy, which is that government should leave people (and their money) alone as much as possible to pursue happiness.

Back before the midterms in 2006, reason's Kerry Howley explored the legislative hypocrisy of another tormented Republican, Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, whose instant messaging antics as Maf54 helped kill the GOP's congressional majority.

Update: Belated tap o' the foot to commenter crimethink, who notes below that he discussed this story yesterday in a post about a wandering pedophile. I hadn't seen the comment, but am happy to point it out.

Killer Lesbians on the Prowl!

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 09:02:00 EDT

Proving once again that when you're a conservative talk show host, the plural of anecdote is panic!, Bill O'Reilly closed one of his shows last month with a truly bizarre segment that sounded like the plot of a Pam Grier movie.

Apparently, America is under attack from roving bands of terroristic lesbian gangs. Broadly extrapolating from a few unrelated news stories, O'Reilly concluded that these butch brigades are scouring America's schools in search of young girls to rape, while launching brutal surprise attacks on unsuspecting heterosexual men. O'Reilly and Fox News "crime analyst" Rod Wheeler claimed these killer chicks pack pink pistols, and that there are over 150 lesbian gangs in the D.C. area alone!

Ah but don't fret. It appears the day when renegade Isuzu Trooper convoys swarm the highways like a Bandidos motorcycle gang are apparently far ahead of us. The Southern Poverty Law Center looked into the report, and concluded that O'Reilly and his guest are confused. The "Pink Pistols" are actually a group of law-abiding gays and lesbians who lobby for their Second Amendment right to carry handguns for self-defense. As for O'Reilly's expert guest:

Wheeler was unable, in several phone and E-mail exchanges over a two-day period, to specify a single law enforcement agency or officer, police report, media account or any other source he relied upon for his D.C. area lesbian gangs claim. But he insisted that his report was accurate and that any law enforcement officer who disagrees is "out of touch." "For some reason or other, these organizations don't lay it on the line because they don't know what is going on on the streets," said Wheeler. "This is a serious crisis and the so-called experts are missing it."
According to Wheeler's personal website, he is a member of Jericho City of Praise, a conservative Christian megachurch in Landover, Md., whose leadership publicly advocates against equal rights for gays and lesbians. The website details Wheeler's 500-plus appearances on MSNBC, Court TV and Fox News Channel shows including "The O'Reilly Factor," "On the Record With Greta Van Sustern," and "Hannity & Colmes."

I, for one, welcome our new vicious lesbian overlords.

Thanks to David Boaz for the tip.

Ridiculous Gay Marriage Lawsuit of the Day

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:28:00 EDT

Just six months after an anti-gay marriage group withdrew its $5 million federal lawsuit against Massachusetts lawmakers, Stephen Dunne, a 30-year-old would-be lawyer from Boston, is suing the state, claiming that the "homosexual agenda" prevented him from passing the bar exam. The AP explains:

A man who failed the Massachusetts bar exam because he refused to answer a question about gay marriage has filed a federal lawsuit, claiming the test violated his rights and that his religious beliefs were targeted.
Stephen Dunne, 30, of Boston, is seeking $9.75 million in the suit against the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He was denied a license to practice law in May after scoring 268.866 on the exam, just shy of the 270 passing grade.
...
In the suit, Dunne's called the question "morally repugnant and patently offensive," and said he refused to answer it because he believed it legitimized same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting, which is contrary to his moral beliefs.

Dunne claims the Massachusetts state government is "purposely-advancing Secular Humanism's homosexual agenda."

Whole story here.

For more info on "Secular Humanism's homosexual agenda," check out the always insightful Independent Gay Forum.

The History of Gay Soldiering

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:19:00 EDT

Via the Cincy Enquirer comes this AP story on an exhibit about gay soldiers in the pre-"don't ask, don't tell" era:

The airman's dress blues are faded, the footlocker he carried through three tours in Vietnam has gone to rust. Yet the epitaph he chose to mark his grave is still as fresh as today's headlines: "When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."
Leonard Matlovich's medals, uniform and other personal effects make up the centerpiece of "Out Ranks," a new exhibit that documents the tortured relationship between gay troops and the U.S. military from World War II to the present.
Matlovich, who died in 1988, was a decorated Air Force sergeant who came out to his commanding officer a month before the fall of Saigon, hoping to challenge the government's ban on gay service members. In 1975, the idea of an openly gay combat veteran was incongruous enough to land him on the cover of Time magazine....
The show also reflects the lives of individual soldiers and sailors who, even more than most, had to give up their personal identities when they put on uniforms - from a brigadier general who did not come out until after his retirement to lesbians who found a sense of belonging in the Women's Army Corps during World War II.
Michael Job, 62, a Vietnam veteran who later founded a peace group for gay veterans, donated a bulletproof Bible, hats and other items for the exhibit. Job said he enlisted in the Army in 1970 because he feared he might be gay....
Escaping questions about his sexuality was not so simple, though. Job said when local women were brought into camp to have sex with the soldiers, he had to make up excuses for why he would not get in line. Even now, Job said he feels uncomfortable attending support groups with other veterans being treated for post-traumatic stress.

More here.

If you've never read about the post-World War I Newport Sex Scandal--surely one of the most bizarre gays-in-the-military witch hunts of all time, featuring Franklin Roosevelt, undercover seaman who would make a Cruising-era Al Pacino flush with embarrassment, and the Jazz Era's answer to Rev. Ted Haggard--check it out here.

Anti-Gay Russia

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 11:02:00 EDT

For the second year in a row, gay activists in Moscow have tried to hold a parade to mark the anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia. This choice of date was rich with irony: the outcome was a powerful reminder that decriminalization does not equal tolerance. Once again, as in 2006, the parade was banned by the city authorities, and the people who attempted to protest the ban found themselves on the receiving end of brutality both from a gay-bashing mob and from the police. Alas, this ugly incident is all too typical of the treatment of gays in many post-Communist countries.

The events surrounding the protest in Moscow were a particularly stark example of state-sponsored bigotry. At a Kremlin event in January, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov railed against "unprecedented pressure to sanction the gay parade, which can only be described as satanic," and vowed never to permit such a parade in the future. (For good measure, he added that same-sex marriage and sex education in Western countries were "a deadly moral poison for children.")

On May 27, the day of the planned parade, a group of fewer than 100 Russian activists, accompanied by several European parliamentarians and other foreign supporters such as British journalist Peter Tatchell and pop singer Richard Fairbass, rallied to present Luzhkov with a petition asking for the ban to be lifted. None of the protesters were able to get to City Hall. About 30 were arrested, and the police and special riot forces mostly looked on with indifference as skinheads and other thugs beat the demonstrators and militant Christian grandmas pelted them with eggs. Three of the attackers, including a man who punched Tatchell, were reportedly arrested; mostly, however, the police "protected" the gay activists and their supporters by hauling them away.

Sympathy for the protesters seemed scarce. A 19-year-old Russian college student I met on an Internet forum wrote to me that she was nonplussed by Western condemnation of police actions: "The gay parades are forbidden in Russia and to make them without a permission sounds strange and stupid. No wonder that [the police] have to arrest the members." This logic may tell us more about attitudes toward civil liberties than attitudes toward gays in Putin's Russia; but the young woman's specific comments about gays were telling as well. "You see, the gay prides in Russia don't work not because of government but because of people," she wrote. "The majority of citizens truly despise gays. ... I have no idea what will happen if parades become a usual thing in Russia. In that situation gays will be all dead because normal people will just kill them." Ironically, she then added that she couldn't understand what the gays wanted anyway: after all, Russia now has "lots of gay clubs where they can be safe and enjoy their culture."

Such attitudes are fairly typical. Indeed, quite a few Russian gays opposed the push for the parade, fearful of popular backlash. (One self-identified lesbian posted a foul-mouthed rant in her online diary blasting "the fucking faggots" who antagonize the public by insisting on "waving their dicks in people's faces.") An April 2005 poll of 1,600 Russians found that only 14 percent "definitely" supported a law banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation while another 28 percent were "somewhat" in favor of such a ban. Moreover, over 43 percent said that same-sex relations between consenting adults should be prosecuted while only 37 percent opposed such prosecutions.

Russia is not the only post-Communist country with a gay problem. In Poland, authorities have recently undertaken an initiative to outlaw all discussion of homosexuality in schools, and a high-level official in charge of children's rights, Ewa Sowinska, followed in the footsteps of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell by expressing concern about the sexuality of purse-carrying purple Teletubby Tinky Winky and its possible effects on young viewers.

A few days before his personal experience with homophobia in Moscow, Tatchell wrote about the problem of anti-gay bigotry in Eastern Europe on the blog of the British newspaper, The Guardian. "With the demise of communism," Tatchell noted, "religious fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism are filling the void. Homophobia is the hallmark of these reactionary movements."

But this argument is not entirely accurate. Far from being a new phenomenon in the former Soviet bloc, homophobia was also a hallmark of communist regimes. In the Soviet Union, male homosexuality was punishable by up to eight years of imprisonment; while sodomy laws in American states required proof of specific sexual act, a gay man in Soviet Russia could be jailed if his neighbors testified that he had no female company and frequent male visitors who stayed overnight. Castro's Cuba has been notorious for its persecution of gays.

Why this intolerance in societies where traditional religion with its condemnation of homosexuality held no sway? The reasons are varied. Communist regimes have associated homosexuality with Western bourgeois decadence and individualism, a selfish pursuit of pleasure rather than reproductive service to the collective. It is also likely that the totalitarian suppression of civil society simply froze in place many cultural prejudices that were challenged and reexamined in free societies.

In today's Russia and Poland, conservative religious forces capitalize easily on these prejudices left from an atheistic past. In Russia, resurgent political authoritarianism plays a part as well. As one gay man wrote bitterly in the diary of the Moscow lesbian who lambasted the protest: "The power structure has no use for queers—any vertical power structure. Because they don't fit in and they keep breaking the rules."

Cathy Young is a contributing editor of reason.

Discuss this article online.

Fired Navy Translator Speaks

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:09:00 EDT

Writing in the New York Times, former Navy petty officer and Arabic translator Stephen Benjamin explains his dismissal under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy:

I was an Arabic translator. After joining the Navy in 2003, I attended the Defense Language Institute, graduated in the top 10 percent of my class and then spent two years giving our troops the critical translation services they desperately needed. I was ready to serve in Iraq.
But I never got to. In March, I was ousted from the Navy under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which mandates dismissal if a service member is found to be gay.

....

My supervisors did not want to lose me. Most of my peers knew I was gay, and that didn’t bother them. I was always accepted as a member of the team. And my experience was not anomalous: polls of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan show an overwhelming majority are comfortable with gays. Many were aware of at least one gay person in their unit and had no problem with it.

Note that Benjamin wasn't asked and didn't tell; Naval authorities discovered casual—not explicit— instant messages indicating that both he and his roommate were gay.

Whole frustrating story here.

What's Hate Got to Do With It?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 11 May 2007 10:00:00 EDT

Since I've been accused of suddenly taking an interest in hate crime legislation only because of my antipathy toward gay people, I thought readers might be interested in my 1992 Reason article on the subject, which is now available online as a PDF file.

McCain: Straight-Talkin' Bullshit Artist on Civil Unions

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:14:00 EDT

Ryan Sager chatted with prez hopeful Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) via conference call and got his reaction to the New Hampshire civil union law that so bothered formerly gay-friendly Rudy Giuliani. McNasty's take on the legislation?:

Today Mr. McCain held another blogger conference call, and I was able to put the question to him directly...
In the past, Mr. McCain has been very hard to pin down on civil unions.
But today, he was clear: "I am opposed to that legislation."

More here.

You go, guy. Here's a relevant passage from Matt Welch's April Reason cover story about John McCain:

McCain voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, has repeatedly chastised his fellow Republicans for trying to win votes by marginalizing gay Americans, and gave a stirring eulogy in San Francisco for the United Flight 93 hero Mark Bingham, who was gay. But in the 2006 elections he made a fool of himself campaigning for an Arizona ballot initiative banning gay marriage. Perhaps because of the libertarian strain in Arizona's political tradition, the proposition lost. McCain has been a pretty consistent opponent of abortion, but he went from saying he wouldn't seek to reverse Roe v. Wade in 1999 to saying he would in 2006.

More here.

Memo to McCain, Giuliani (and even Mitt Romney): Last-minute tacks to social con positions on gay marriage and abortion are not going to win you those votes. But they just might lose you whatever libertarian cred you could muster on a couple of social issues.

Giuliani Sells Out on Gay Marriage

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 08:21:00 EDT

Former Reason intern extraordianaire and Elephant in the Room author Ryan Sager, now the digital master of The New York Sun and just about the biggest booster among libertarian journalists for Rudy Giuliani in 2008, delivers an early sign that The Nation's Mayor is selling out his historically tolerant position on civil unions:

In a startling departure from his previously stated position on civil unions, Mayor Giuliani came out to The New York Sun yesterday evening in opposition to the civil union law just passed by the New Hampshire state Senate.
"Mayor Giuliani believes marriage is between one man and one woman. Domestic partnerships are the appropriate way to ensure that people are treated fairly," the Giuliani campaign said in a written response to a question from the Sun. "In this specific case the law states same sex civil unions are the equivalent of marriage and recognizes same sex unions from outside states.
This goes too far and Mayor Giuliani does not support it."

More here.

Giuliani's longstanding openness toward gays--he lived with a gay couple after separating from his second wife, Donna Hanover--was one of the things that set him apart from the rest of the GOP pack, who tend to hew close to the "ick" line generally espoused by the Party of Lincoln. As important, since the new attitude seems to be driven not by revelation from God but a felt need to suck up to socially conservative primary voters, it suggests that Rudy is not quite the 80 percenter he claims to be.

Tim Cavanaugh takes a long look at Prince Rudy's tenure as New York Mayor here.

Disney Legalizes Same-Sex Unions

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 11:44:00 EDT

Gay couples are now free to buy a Fairy Tale Wedding package at Disneyland, Disney World, or Disney's cruise ships, with "a ceremony setting befitting the dreams of a princess." The Disney properties have long allowed same-sex couples to tie the knot on the premises, but this is the first time those unions are being given official sanction. The Magic Kingdom has thus proved itself more progressive than the motherland, or as progressive as you can be while throwing around the word "fairy."

The reactions have ranged from the anti-gay activist Sonja Dalton's remark that this would be "a fantasy wedding indeed" to the gossip site TMZ.com's depressed discovery that homosexuals can be tacky too. (It's called camp, darlings.) But the most interesting fact here is just why Disney would change its policy. It wasn't because regulators ordered it to do so. If anything, the government has been increasingly unfriendly to gay unions, with multiple states passing laws refusing to recognize same-sex marriages. Nor was it pressure from activists, though The Advocate reports that "the change follows criticism from LGBT news outlets." (From the other side of the issue, the Southern Baptist Convention boycotted the Disney empire from 1997 to 2005 because of its "promotion of homosexuality.") It was the fact that two potential customers asked to purchase the service, and the company decided it had more to gain from saying yes than saying no.

This is why I don't buy what has been called the Hayekian argument against gay marriage, after F.A. Hayek, the economist and philosopher who celebrated social orders that emerge from below rather than being imposed from above. Jonathan Rauch—who doesn't buy the argument either—summed it up in a 2004 article for Reason. The position, he wrote, "warns of unintended and perhaps grave social consequences if, thinking we're smarter than our customs, we decide to rearrange the core elements of marriage. The current rules for marriage may not be the best ones, and they may even be unfair. But they are all we have, and you cannot re-engineer the formula without causing unforeseen results, possibly including the implosion of the institution itself."

My objection: Marriage isn't being re-engineered. It is evolving in an impeccably Hayekian fashion, as folkways appear on the ground and are gradually ratified by imitation, then market acknowledgement, and then, only lastly, by the law. For eons, same-sex couples have quietly lived as though they were married. As social mores changed and gays came out of the closet, so did those longtime-companion relationships. Before long, lovers were holding their own marriage ceremonies, which were not recognized by the government or (at first) by any established church but did carry weight with family, friends, and neighbors. Couples started to draw up marriage-like contracts, in an effort to establish rights privately that they couldn't acquire publicly. Businesses had to decide whether to extend benefits to gay spouses; with time, more and more did.

All this happened without legislators or judges taking the lead. It happened because a certain number of gay people wanted to live as married, then slowly established institutions that allowed them to do so. Legalizing gay unions—I don't really care if the government calls them "marriages," because what's important is what everyday people call them—doesn't rearrange a core social institution. It recognizes a rearrangement that is already taking place.

The smartest conservative critics of gay marriage understand this. The traditionalist writer Bryce Christensen once published an essay titled "Why Homosexuals Want What Marriage Has Now Become," which said plainly that "homosexual weddings constitute the predictable (not natural, but entirely predictable) culmination of cultural changes that have radically de-natured marriage. Once defined by religious doctrine, moral tradition, and home-centered commitments to child rearing and gender complementarity in productive labor, marriage has become a deracinated and highly individualistic and egalitarian institution." The roots of the change, he wrote, went back to the rise of the industrial economy, when "most men left behind the traditional household economy which had reinforced wedlock for millennia, leaving their wives to work alone in a functionally diminished home."

For Christensen, gay marriage is another step in the wrong direction. But you could as easily argue that even if you find all those changes objectionable, they amount to one less reason to deny gays the same rights as heterosexual couples, one less reason to expect same-sex unions to undermine society. Nor are those changes entirely irreversible—it is possible to imagine a household economy reemerging in a post-industrial context, though there would be substantial differences between it and its pre-industrial counterparts. For one thing, it might be a gay couple now manning (or womaning) the home-based enterprise, with some adopted kids on the premises.

Meanwhile, the world we live in now is increasingly willing to embrace homosexual unions, even if many Americans—and most states—haven't gotten there yet. For an extra fee, couples buying the Fairy Tale Wedding can hire Mickey and Minnie Mouse to attend as guests, sitting in the audience in formal wear. If Mickey is cool with gay marriage, the rest of the country can't be that far behind.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.

Discuss this article online.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and Don't Ever Apologize. It's a Sign of Weakness[*]

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:55:00 EDT

The AP reports that Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "won't apologize for calling homosexuality immoral" in an interview yesterday with the Chicago Tribune:

Pace was asked about the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allows gays and lesbians to serve if they keep their sexual orientation private and don't engage in homosexual acts.
Pace said he supports the policy, which became law in 1994 and prohibits commanders from asking about a person's sexual orientation.
"I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts," Pace was quoted as saying in the newspaper interview. "I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way."...
"As an individual, I would not want (acceptance of gay behavior) to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else's wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior," he said.

Pace didn't or wouldn't respond to a 2005 Government Accountability Report which found that 10,000 members of the military, including 750 whose specialities were "critical" to the war on terror, have been cashiered since Don't Ask, Don't Tell went into effect. Nor, apparently, did he comment on a December 2006 Zogby poll which found that almost three-quarters of military folks were "comfortable" serving with gays and lesbians. More on that here.

The AP article ends by noting that

John Shalikashvili, the retired Army general who was Joint Chiefs chairman when the policy was adopted, said in January that he has changed his mind on the issue since meeting with gay servicemen.
"These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers," Shalikashvili wrote in a newspaper opinion piece.

The whole AP story here.

[*]: Headline allusion explained. Scroll down about 14 exchanges.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell Revisited

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:56:00 EST

Democratic Rep. Martin T. Meehan yesterday said he will introduce legislation repealing the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that allows homosexuals to serve in the armed forces....

A 2005 Government Accountability Office report says more than 10,000 members of the armed services, including 750 service members with specialties "critical" to the war on terror, have been discharged since the policy was implemented....
The bill, "Military Readiness Enhancement Act," has 109 co-sponsors, including three Republicans. Nonetheless, it faces opposition from many lawmakers, including House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton, Missouri Democrat.
"It's not going anywhere," said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a group that opposes allowing homosexuals to serve in the military. "Even the Democrats I've talked to don't want to touch this bill. It's very straight-forward, people who are homosexual are not compatible with the military's standards of service."...
A December 2006 Zogby International poll found that 73 percent of military service members were "comfortable" serving with homosexuals.

More here.

Procreative Propositions

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 12:50:00 EST

Pranking the system:

The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance seeks to defend equal marriage in this state by challenging the Washington Supreme Court's ruling on Andersen v. King County. This decision, given in July 2006, declared that a "legitimate state interest" allows the Legislature to limit marriage to those couples able to have and raise children together. Because of this "legitimate state interest," it is permissible to bar same-sex couples from legal marriage.

The way we are challenging Andersen is unusual: using the initiative, we are working to put the Court's ruling into law. We will do this through three initiatives. The first would make procreation a requirement for legal marriage. The second would prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children. The third would make the act of having a child together the legal equivalent of a marriage ceremony.

Andersen may make the satire timely, but the man behind the proposals, Gregory Gadow, has been kicking the ideas around for at least a decade. He is now at work on the first initiative, with a measure to annull any marriage that doesn't produce a child within three years. (Gadow told CBS that he considered requiring procreation before marriage, but "we didn't want to piss off the fundamentalists too much.")

When I lived in Washington state in the mid-'90s, a drive to ban gay adoptions prompted some activists on the other side to propose the "Responsibility in Adoptions Act," a initiative to bar any "person who practices right-wing fundamentalist Christianity" from adopting children or serving as foster parents. (No, it didn't make it onto the ballot.) I emailed Gadow to ask if he was involved with the earlier effort too; he says he wasn't, though it did "provide some of the inspiration" for his own mock proposals. I'm not surprised it was someone else: Despite the superficial similarity, Gadow's gag is a lot funnier.

Heterosexual Agenda Proceeds Apace

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 12:21:00 EST

A British hotelier says new anti-discrimination regulations will kill the mood in his romantic, gays-only guest house:

Mark Hurst, 47, said the proposed legislation would force him to open his doors to heterosexual guests.
"We feel if we were forced to a situation where we had to accept heterosexual people into our hotel, our gay clientele will not behave as naturally as they would now. "

Whole thing here.