A Window Slams Shut

The shocking demise of Window Media is a jolting reminder that gay newspapers have been the eyes and ears of our movement. [read article]

Why Approval Matters

Why should gays care whether straights approve of us? Because gay kids are raised by straight parents. [read article]

Maine, Detroit, and the Closet

We’ll ultimately win on marriage for the very reason we lost in Maine: gays are never going back in the closet. [read article]

Taking Maine’s Measure

Gay marriage did not command majority support in Maine. But it came close—and getting there is just a matter of time. [read article]

Open—But Invisible

As more gay people defy and disprove stereotypes, we face a new problem of how to be out to each other. [read article]

What a Difference a Decade Makes

Only ten years ago, an out lesbian was a skunk at the wedding party. Today, she comfortably slow-dances with her partner. [read article]

The Other Ballot Battles

The Maine marriage repeal initiative is important. But let’s not overlook the less well known battles in Kalamazoo and Washington State. [read article]

Opposite Color...Same Sex

A Louisiana JP’s refusal to marry an interracial couple throws the denial of same-sex marriage rights into bold relief. [read article]

An Unbalanced Bill

The federal hate-crimes bill gives too much power to prosecutors and the federal government, without doing much good for gays. [read article]

New March, New Movement

The crowd on the Mall traded radicalism and flamboyance for calm determination—and a new confidence. [read article]

Street vs. Suite

The National Equality March highlighted understandable impatience. But anger is no substitute for the patient incrementalism of politics. [read article]

The High Cost of Queer

Dollars and cents may not be as exalted as human rights, but they can help persuade key centrist voters of gay equality’s justice. [read article]

Pink, Maybe. But Still Red.

Raul Castro’s daughter uses her pro-gay credentials to whitewash the regime’s oppression of all Cubans—including gays. [read article]

Self-Help Helps Most

Making schools safer and building our communities will make more of a difference than marching on Washington. [read article]

‘Always and Everywhere’...Again

Even if marriage has always been only by heterosexual couples, that doesn't make it only for heterosexual couples. [read article]

‘Always and Everywhere’?

It’s not true that same-sex marriage is totally unheard-of. But even if it were true, it wouldn’t be very important. [read article]

Not a Priority

by Stephen H. Miller

Posted on November 21, 2009

The House-passed health care bill included one decent provision that would have extended the payroll tax exclusion on employer-provided health benefits that spouses receive to domestic partners. The New York Times described it here. But despite the Senate bill running to an amazing 2,074 pages in which all sorts of social engineering are hidden, and a less-strict abortion-funding ban than in the House bill, there is apparently no provision for remedying the tax inequality faced by gay spouses and partners.

So despite raising taxpayer costs by at least $1 trillion and imposing costs on businesses and individuals of another $1.5 trillion, in its 400,000 words Harry Reid couldn’t find a sentence or two for equality under the law.

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If They're Democrats, It's Not Homophobia

by Stephen H. Miller

Posted on November 21, 2009

Yet another fawning Washington Post puff piece on an Obama staffer looks at White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who was formerly chief of staff to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.).The post relates this bit of history. In Baucus's 2002 senate race:

Messina masterminded a bruising attack ad against Republican state Sen. Mike Taylor, a former hairdresser. The ad featured video footage of Taylor, then decades younger and bearded, setting the hair and massaging the temples of a mustachioed man in a beauty salon chair -- with a funky bomp-chic-a-bomp-bomp '70s beat in the background. The spot ends with a frozen frame of Taylor reaching down and out of sight toward the other man's lap. Disapprovingly, a voice-over declares, "Mike Taylor: Not the way we do business here in Montana." ...

Stephanie Schriock [Montana's junior senator Jon Tester's chief of staff] cited the ad as one example of how Baucus has long appreciated and been served by Messina's killer instinct. "Jim was willing to make the hard call to put an ad out there," she said.

Nowhere does reporter Jason Horowitz question the use of overt homophobic stereotypes (regardless of the fact that Taylor wasn't, in fact, gay) to aid the Democrat's cause. But then, neither the politically supplicant media nor LGBT Democratic activists seem to mind pandering and promoting the denigration of gay people when it serves the interests of their party. (Which is to say, if it were a Republican administration, the appointment of a White House deputy chief of staff with this history would have triggered loud protests; here, it's just an amusing anecdote.)

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For Your Entertainment

by David Link

Posted on November 21, 2009

I have to side with Adam Lambert over Out editor Aaron Hicklin in their recent dust-up.  Hicklin is critical of Lambert for conditions Lambert imposed on a cover shoot and interview, and he argues that Lambert is trying to avoid being perceived as “too gay.”

No one could fairly argue that Lambert is in the closet, or anywhere close to one.  Hicklin’s real beef, I think, comes from an assumption that lesbians and gay men – particularly those who are out --  have an obligation not only to be public about their sexual orientation, but also to be politically active.  Lambert’s failure to fully embrace Out magazine seems, in Hicklin’s view, to show that Lambert is backing away from this obligation to the gay community at large.

As someone who’s been politically active in gay rights for over a quarter of a century, I sympathize with Hicklin.  I, too, wish all homosexuals would spend a lot of their time and resources fighting in the political arena for our equality.  It is not fair to us that heterosexuals have made our sexual orientation (not theirs) a political matter, and because we are such a small minority, this places an enormous burden on all of us.

But ever since the time of Harvey Milk, those of us who are active in politics have now and then needed to urge our fellow homosexuals, “Out of the bars and into the streets.”  Politics does not come naturally to everyone, or even to most people.

I would love for Lambert to use his celebrity to help us cross the finish line to full equality.  But the thing is, he earned that celebrity with amazing talent and work, and can use it as he sees fit.  He shows considerable and admirable awareness of his own talents and limitations when he says, “I’m not a politician. I’m an entertainer.”  We can all tote up a personal list of entertainers and others our community has thrust into the political arena to be our champions, only to regret our pushiness.  Better for those who are politically inclined -- Dustin Lance Black, Rachel Maddow, Melissa Etheridge -- to take up the cause willingly and competently.

None of this is to say that Lambert will not be helping us simply by being out.  Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris aren’t expressly political, but like Lambert, just being out is a political act for us, and that’s a lot more than any of them, as entertainers, would have bargained for.

Also, remember it took a long time for Elton John to come out, get his balance in the very bizarre world of politics, and develop into a kind of elder statesman.  Maybe that’s in Lambert’s future.  He’s only in his mid-twenties.

But in the end, that is his choice, not ours.

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Silly

by David Link

Posted on November 19, 2009

Did the voters make opposite-sex marriage illegal in Texas?  That’s what Barbara Ann Radnofsky claims, and there’s reason to take her argument seriously.

She’s running for Attorney General in that state, and when you read the amendment passed in 2005, her analysis is pretty cogent.  The voters in Texas, swept up in Karl Rove’s anti-gay marriage fever, amended their constitution to say that marriage is between one man and one woman.  They then added this belt to the constitutional suspenders: "This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

Heterosexual marriage is not just “similar” to itself, it is (by definition) “identical” to itself.  It’s not only hard to argue with that proposition, as a logical matter it’s pretty close to impossible.  Therefore, a plain reading of this language would mean that Texas is prohibited from recognizing heterosexual marriage.

But Kelly Shackleford, president of the Liberty Legal Institute in Plano says this argument is “silly.”  And I have to agree with her.  Only conservative legal thinkers follow the plain language of a statute, and who could accuse Texas voters of being conservative?  Them’s fighting words.  Everyone knows that in Texas, they favor the liberal, Let’s Look At What The Voters Really Meant kind of statutory analysis.  Words and their plain meanings are for sissies.

OK, I kid Texas (as Bill Maher says).  But I still have to side with Shackleford over Radnovsky.  It truly is “silly” to think that Texas heterosexuals would discriminate against themselves.  Of course they meant only to discriminate against the homosexual minority.  Who could seriously think they had anything else in mind?  Any other conclusion would be a slander on the good name of Texas Prejudice.

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Common Decency, Common Sense

by David Link

Posted on November 18, 2009

I’ve obviously been in a foul mood since Maine, and needed some good cheer.  So Karen Ocamb’s interview with Charlie Beck, the new chief of the L.A. Police Department couldn’t have come along at a better moment.

As Stuart Timmons has documented, L.A. has a long history of pretty brutal police harassment against lesbians and gay men.  That has been fading into the dustbin of history, and Beck embodies the view that is slowly but inevitably deflating our opponents.

Ocamb asks him, right off, whether he thinks sexual orientation is chosen or innate. His response is profound only because it’s so matter-of-fact: “Sexual orientation is formed long before you have the ability to make a choice.  I’m heterosexual and I never made that choice.”  He comfortably discusses an uncle who’d been with his partner for fifty years (“Imagine what they went through”), and chuckles about whether he should tell her how he voted on Prop. 8, ultimately saying, “I support gay marriage.”

Compare those last four words with the hundreds it took poor Melody Barnes to almost confess the same sentiment in Boston.  That is Maggie Gallagher’s greatest challenge -- an emerging epidemic of common sense.  Frank Schubert has been clear how hard he needs to work to create fear in his campaigns against us, and his partner, Jeff Flint, was brutally honest in confessing that even they’re surprised at how easy it is for them to win, even when we outperform them, as we did in Maine.

But that’s only because they can exploit existing prejudice, and eagerly do.  We're the ones who have to fight uphill.  Prejudice is what confounds common sense.  Once heterosexuals can get past that – can see our sexual orientation as forming in the same way as theirs does (“I’m heterosexual and I never made that choice”) the distortions that bias creates melt away.

Charlie Beck seems to have that common sense.  Bit by bit, it’s breaking out all over the country.

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No Argument

by David Link

Posted on November 14, 2009

This is the last straw for me.   I took Americablog’s pledge.

Melody Barnes seems to be a shining example of the kind of person I expected Barack Obama to surround himself with when I voted for him for President. She is Obama's Senior Domestic Policy Advisor, and Director of his Domestic Policy Council. A tape of a speech she gave at the Boston College of Law included a response to a question about same-sex marriage. When the White House got the tape, they went through the Agonies of the Damned over two full days determining whether they'd let Boston College make it public or not. Eventually the White House saw that it would be futile to try and censor it.

Like the President she works for, and so many others in the administration, Barnes is articulate, humane, self-possessed, good-humored and exceptionally intelligent. But look at the damage done to all that because of the administration’s decision to side with the Catholic Church and the National Organization for Marriage.  I was going to say the administration is incoherent on same-sex marriage, but it is not – the Obama administration opposes our equality.

That prevents the most senior advisors like Barnes from issuing a simple declarative sentence – “I support same-sex marriage” – even when it is clear that is her position.  Instead, when asked a direct question, she has to speak in the wild circumlocutions and detours that are now becoming characteristic of this administration on this topic:

“I guess I would respond in a couple of different ways. One, I appreciate, I really appreciate your frustration and your disappointment with the president’s position on this issue. He has taken a position, and at the same time, he has also articulated the number of ways that he wants to try and move the ball forward for gay, lesbian and transgendered Americans, including signing the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, and a whole host of other things that we’ve started to do to model as a leader in terms of what the federal government is doing, as well as to encourage changes both in the military, in the workplace, and certainly with regard to hate crimes.”

For the record, the President’s position in same-sex marriage is this: "I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

While that is a position, it is not an argument.  Rather, it is indistinguishable from the positions (not arguments) adopted by the Vatican and NOM – which is to say, it is unchallengeable in any civic forum.  And it is intended to be unchallengeable in any civic forum.  References to tradition and particularly sanctification have little purpose other than to short circuit any opposition – certainly any secular opposition, which is what the President was being asked about.

So when Barnes says . . .

“when I walk into the White House . . . I work to put all arguments in front of the president, [but] as you say, I also work for the president. And we have very robust policy conversations, very robust constitutional conversations with the White House counsel, and others about these issues, and we’ll see what happens from there”

. . . it’s hard to believe she’s talking about same-sex marriage.  What policy or “robust constitutional” conversation can you have with a man who tells all of the American people in response to a secular question that his religious beliefs say that marriage is “something sanctified between a man and a woman”?

The tragedy of this – for both the President and for us – is that he knows better, and we all know that he knows better.  He is presiding over the historical turning point, not for gay rights in general, but for marriage in particular, and he is stuck in reverse.  The President’s opposition is giving support to the very people who hate him as much as they resist us.

It says everything that the most articulate president in my lifetime – on the most controversial issues like race, the Middle East, war, and all the rest – is reduced to verbal sputters and clichés on gay marriage.  That’s all there is on the other side – on his side; if there were anything reasonable to argue, he’d have done so.

This has to be hard on his own conscience; he has to know that his opposition to equality will stain his legacy.  But it is our lives – and the hopes we had – that he is playing with here.  And it is decent people like Melody Barnes whose best is being corrupted and tortured to serve the Administration’s retrograde cynicism.

Sadly, the President’s party has to follow his lead.  That’s why I had to take the pledge, and I urge others to do so.  The President is encouraging a rot in his own party, the same rot of prejudice that is invigorating the worst of the Republicans, and terrifying their best.

That is not what I voted for, and I cannot possibly support it.

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