Submitted to a Candid World

Hucka-being John McCain

While our friend Progressive Conservative at “The Big Stick” wondered aloud today whether the maverick spirit of 2000’s John McCain lives on in 2008’s Candidate McCain, the man himself continued his sell-out to the fundamentalist wing of the Republican party by pulling out the Republican Party’s perennial election year distraction: the danger posed by The Gays. This time the issue was adoption: guess where McCain stands.

McCain’s defense of his opposition to gay adoption is right out of the “family values” theo-conservatives’ playbook - “we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so” - and it has always struck me as odd in the extreme. The appeal is essentially only to tradition, without any attempt to grapple with the real reason behind the issue: we’ve always done it this way, so we ought to continue. What is tradition, but a shield to hide behind when all other arguments fail? That we a nation should turn away willing parents when children languish in orphanages, to the detriment of their futures, is an appalling disgrace.  When a “pro-family” position requires one to sacrifice the best interests of the child at the altar of the Old Testament’s outdated Levitical morality, “family values” cease to be about the family, and become solely about the politics.  The greatest ruse ever pulled on the American voter was to convince him that defending the family meant being an evangelical Christian, ergo a Bush/Huckabee Republican.  In time, ridiculous contradictions like this one will give the lie to that old canard.

And it’s downhill from there.  While one side of McCain’s mouth casts him as a practical, thoughtful, reasoned and progressive conservative like Teddy Roosevelt, the other pulls creationism into the public school classroom.  “[Teaching evolution is] up to the school boards,” he has said on the issue. “That’s why we have local control over education.”

No.  It isn’t.  Local control over education is meant to allow schools to tailor their curriculum to subjective beliefs and standards, to allow them to teach local history, languages, and literature.  Science is not a subjective belief.  It is an objective methodology geared to uncovering the facts that knit the universe together, and as such it does not vary based on locale.  Gravity works the same in Louisiana as it does in Manhattan, and it ought to be taught as such.  McCain’s subtle endorsement of creationism is just the latest in a swing right on that issue.  Take McCain’s recent keynote speech at the Discovery Institute.  This is the man who reluctantly campaigned at Bob Jones University, now embracing his role as the avatar of theocratic religion.

McCain attempts to mask his endorsement of the religious right mainline by couching it in the rhetoric of “local control” - let the states/cities/towns decide issues like abortion, gay rights, and science.  This is a thinly veiled attempt to pass the buck, and a tactic commonly used by McCain to exculpate himself from endorsing far-right positions by nominally devolving the issue to others who he knows will make the (religious-)right decisions.  McCain won’t destroy women’s rights: his Supreme Court appointees will.  McCain won’t endorse homophobic bigotry.  But he will idly stand by states do it.  McCain won’t teach creationism.  But he will subtly endorse it, and let others teach it if they want to.  Make no mistake: McCain may interpose a middleman between him and some radically theocratic positions, but the result is the same.  Invoking states’ rights on issues of federal constitutional law only absolves him of the responsibility for the decision, a cop-out I frankly didn’t expect from Senator John McCain, straight-talking maverick extraordinaire.

And that’s the real story.  McCain is no longer his own man.  We get our term “candidate” from the Roman rite by which the politician, prior to an election, donned a white robe to symbolize his purity of mind and devotion to justice.  It may be true that no candidate ever has, then or now, maintained that purity in fact.  As for McCain at least, his white robe has already been blackened by the dirty hands of a million special interests, not the least of whom sit happily in their megachurches and marvel at the speed and grace with which they turned the politician who once called them “agents of intolerance” so firmly into their man.

Barack Obama is a once in a lifetime candidate.  After eight years of divisiveness, we have a candidate who - quite apart from favoring serious, progressive policies to put America back on track - actually wants to work across the aisle and rebuild a collegial, functioning government.  We’ll have a true President of the United States, rather than a President of the Bible Belt.  There’s truth to Obama’s (considerable) hype - we have a lot to be excited about.

But.  Even for the best of candidates, there are compromises to be made, for the sake of fairness, and for the sake of expedience.  Coalitions and presidencies are never built on unswerving pursuit of an ideological party line, and even when they are, the country’s worse off for it (look where we are now).  When Democrats, like Kos, expect Obama to never deviate from Kos-style liberalism, they expect him to change the way politics works, and not for the better.  Liberalism imports subordination of passion to reason; we ought to bend when we have to, for the larger good.  Politics in a democracy, especially a democracy still suspicious of the word “Liberal,” means that Obama cannot be a model Daily-Kos-style Democrat.  Deal with it.  Certainly there’s an element of betrayal here - Kos democrats made Obama.  But candidate and (soon-) President Obama belongs to the American people, not to the narrow interests that got him to where he is.  Isn’t that independence, after all, what we admired about Obama in the first place?

More importantly - and more cynically - we can’t expect that, because we have an honest candidate, politics will all of a sudden be 100% honest, transparent, and above-the-table.  Politics is not sunshine and blossoms. Sometimes we as Democrats have to read the signals, guess what’s going on, intercept the code, and learn to listen for the spin.

Example: Obama on gay rights.  Yes, thank you, “Confluence,” for pointing out that Obama says he isn’t a fan of gay rights.  But that’s cheap talk.  Obama can oppose gay rights all he wants, but it’s not something he will have control over as president.  His Supreme Court picks, who will be equal-protection-clause-expansion liberals like you and me, will make the call on gay rights issues.  Obama wants his Supreme Court to protect “people who may be vulnerable in the political process.” What do you think that means?  It’s barely-concealed code for “gay rights.”  Do you want to make him say it clearer, and blow the whole game?

I realize it may hurt a few feelings for Obama to stand against a group that’s already been beaten up enough - talk about picking on the Bush administration’s scapegoat! - but his anti-gay rights stance is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  He has to say things like this to get elected.  No political campaign is conducted 100% above the table.  Watch the signs; watch the hands.

So, Democrats, I realize some of you may feel neglected, or “thrown under the bus.”  But realize that compromises have to be made, and learn to separate talk from spin, and read the signs correctly.  And then, fall the hell into line.  Even if you don’t think Obama needs your help, he does.  To turn Ben Franklin’s quote around, if we don’t hang together on this one, we won’t be hanging alone come November: under four more years of Republican rule, America will be hanging with us.  Join together.  Save the state.  Fall into line.

Standing as we are two days after the first gay marriage took place in California, it’s important to take stock of where the dialogue on gay rights is going to go from here. Arguably, it’s more complex than I’ve let on. For a conservative - namely, one who is, on the issue of marriage, willing to give tradition the benefit of the doubt, and credit it as more than mere habit - there are arguably two ways to approach gay marriage in the post-California era. One may approach it responsibly or irresponsibly; with careful acceptance, or with untempered panic and fear.

For the responsible conservative approach, one need look no farther than our friend at “The Big Stick,” who remains a credit to his side of the partisan fence. Writing there, Progressive Conservative accepts the course California has taken, while wondering with trepidation what the future holds for the children of gay couples. Truly, I suppose, we don’t know. I have a hunch, that life will continue much the same as it always has, with some good parents and some bad parents. After all, idiocy knows no partisan, sexual, or gendered lines. Fifty years from now, I doubt a study of who is a good parent, and who is not, will find any clustered data points along the lines of sexual orientation. But one never knows. At worst, it’s an experiment with no sure outcome, but one that we owe it to ourselves to try. Democracy in America has always been a roll of the dice; as the world’s first great democracy, our entire existence has been an experiment that shows no signs of ending. I applaud “The Big Stick” for asking responsible questions without bias.

The National Review, of course, has taken the opposite approach. Maggie Gallagher, of some reprehensible political “think” tank, levels three accusations at gay marriage: (1) it will destroy fidelity as a precept of marriage, since gays are promiscuous; (2) it will lead to polygamy being acceptable next, and; (3) it amounts to a suppression of religious belief in some instances.

While all of Gallagher’s arguments are wrong, some are more wrong than others. (more…)

Nothing boils up the blood quite so nicely as a read through Human Events, or its partner in evil, Townhall.com. Then again, it could be my fever (still).

No, it was the websites.

Ever so rarely, opposition to gay marriage rises above the level of name-calling and discourses on Deuteronomy/Leviticus, to address the question of whether gay marriage is actually bad in an objectively cognizable fashion. I’m pleased to see that people are willing to rise above bigotry to discuss the merits. But even then, Townhall.com gets it wrong. Marriage, the author argues, is about raising children, not about solemnizing love, and gay marriage is bad for children, since children need a mother and a father. The author claims that that’s something even liberals can get behind.

Maybe some liberals would find that compelling, if they haven’t thought the matter through. First, if marriage is about childrearing, restricting marriage to heterosexual couples is not narrowly tailored to that objective. It’s both underinclusive, in that it fails to support those gay couples that seek marriage to raise children, and overinclusive, in that it supports those straight couples that get married just because they love each other, and don’t intend to raise children. That justification - which bases part of its logic on the argument that children need married parents - inexplicably harms the children of gay couples who would get married, thus bringing about the very evil it purports to protect

Second, arguments like this are only logical if one assumes, before beginning, that children need to be raised by a mother and a father as defined by biological sex, and that any heterosexual mother/father couple is preferable to any homosexual couple. That assumption ought to fail on its face. The comparison to Norway, in an attempt to prove this point, is inapt: different culture means different results.

Next we have Human Events arguing that legalizing gay marriage will force employers and institutions to not only tolerate but also support gay marriage, since they’ll be legally obligated to grant spousal benefits to all married employees, gay or straight.

Right. So? While one certainly ought not be fired for expressing their viewpoints against a particular political or social issue in their capacity as a private citizen, part of the liberty one loses when joining a civilization is the liberty to discriminate against one’s employees. Using the economy and employment as a tool to oppress has the effect of potentially “freezing out” those members of society undesirable to the majority, creating the kind of caste system that can never exist in a putative democracy. What seems like private action, then, is a systemic problem that, if we truly believe that gay men and women are equal, must be solved.

This fact is often hard to handle. When restaurants were desegregated in the mid-20th century, some fought it, violently: for example, Lester Maddox of Atlanta (seen in the picture to the right, all the way on the right), wielded an ax-handle and a pistol (look closely at his hand in that picture) to fight off African-Americans who just wanted to eat at his restaurant. Maddox missed the same point then that Human Events misses now: the personal cost of living in a civil society is that one sometimes has to deal politely in the public sphere with people you don’t like. The majority doesn’t get the right to use economic power to create a caste system, and those that try to do so will, like Maddox, be remembered in time as the bigoted, hate-filled monsters that they truly were.

When equal protection rules change, employment rules change. While this may be another thing for conservatives not to like about extending gay rights, it was also something they didn’t like when civil rights expanded to protect African-Americans and women. But they learned to deal with it. If we as a society come to realize, as we should, that there is no just cause to think less of gay men and women, they’ll have to deal with this too. When it comes to civil rights, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

In The Hunt for Red October, Russian captain Sean Connery’s first officer marvels that Americans can travel freely between states.  This fundamental freedom strikes him as so important and meaningful as to be moving and definitional.  It is.  But, it only exists for married couples if they’re straight.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: the Defense of Marriage Act, and its state law progeny, create massive conflict of laws problems, automatically nullifying valid marriages if a married gay couple, purposefully or otherwise, crosses over an invisible state line.  While it’s arguable that states have the ability to deny the right to marry within their borders, I don’t think the states can validly strip a citizen of another state’s lawfully granted rights, or at least they can’t do it so easily.  I realize that the “privileges and immunities” clause has long-since been useless, but the full faith & credit clause isn’t just there for show, kids.  Citizens ought to be able to travel freely, do business freely, and see their country freely.  Like its Roman parallel did for Paul, or should have done at least, the phrase “civis Americanus sum” ought to be a talismanic defense against injustice and state-based bigotry.

Nullifying another state’s marriage, just because you wouldn’t perform it yourself, is pointless, petty, insulting, and nothing good.  Luckily, New York may agree.  You don’t have to like gays to decide that they don’t deserve to meet scorn at every turn.

But this makes me angry.

All we hear from the right about California’s gay marriage decision is that the unelected officials have overruled the “will of the people,” namely, the will to discriminate. But apparently ultra-right conservatives don’t care about unelected officials overriding the law?

Incidentally, we also know that they don’t really care about the will of the people: remember Colorado’s Amendment 2? In the early 1990s, when a few major Colorado cities made it illegal, only within those cities, to discriminate against gay men and women, the Colorado voters (largely in the rural areas) passed a constitutional amendment to invalidate the statutes. So a few municipalities set a higher constitutional bar to protect gay men and women, and the unaffected areas tear the protections down. How petty. And why? It didn’t affect them. The only thing anti-gay activists are out to do is to hurt.

What really gets me, though, are articles like this one, which seems to argue that the right to discriminate is a religious right. Clearly these people haven’t thought through the logic of their arguments. Free exercise is not a free pass to do whatever you want. All this goes to prove that homophobia is entirely emotion, no sense, no logic, no reason. Just bitter hatred.

Update: I’ve since had the opportunity to read some of the comments to the Human Events article.  Look in the early 800s, and you’ll see such gems as people equating the legalization of  gay marriage with “tyranny” and equivalent to loss of free speech & free exercise rights.

Really?

Have we forgotten what tyranny is?  Can we no longer even imagine what it’s like to be a minority?  Have we come to imagine that the Constitution institutionalizes white male fundamentalist Christianity, such that every deviation there from is a constitutional injury?  Really?

This little discovery is reason #34,058 of 135,593,235 that Constitutional Law should be a required high school course.

To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than “Human Events,” a website which gains its conservative street cred by mixing ads depicting lusty women wearing conservative-themed t-shirts (”buy more guns!”) with hate-filled xenophobic action group banners (see right). Get the message? According to “Human Events,” all immigrants are disease bags. And it’s downhill from there, folks.

Anyways, they recently posted an article critiquing the California Supreme Court’s decision to mandate gay marriage. The problem? The article is all vitriol - “they’re going to destroy America!” - no substance. An excerpt:

It’s time to hold accountable those lawmakers who have opened the door for this court ruling by trying to appease homosexual rights activists with laws that allow civil unions. You cannot have peace at any price with those who seek to conquer and vanquish our values.

The problem with anti-gay rights rhetoric is that there’s no reason behind the arguments, other than “majority values,” for gay men and women to not receive equal rights. Try an experiment. In the above quote, substitute “desegregation” for “homosexual rights,” and “black-white equality” with “civil unions.” The point is, you can justify anything by appealing to “our values” and “tradition.” But that’s not enough in a democracy. The majority may not mindlessly oppress the minority. That’s why we have a constitution. “We want blacks segregated, look, we have a majority,” was not enough, and nor is it enough now to oppress gay men and women without cause.

If anyone out there has a reason that gay marriage is so dangerous, let’s hear it, and cut out the doom-and-gloom culture war rhetoric. Cut the slippery slope crap, too, while you’re at it. No-one’s going to force you to marry your toaster, and if you can’t see the difference between gay marriage and polygamy, maybe you shouldn’t be writing in the first place.

Somewhat surprisingly, Bob Barr, arch-conservative and architect of the ridiculously-titled Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA), thinks California’s decision to allow gay marriage is an example of the system as it should work. Barr says,

Regardless of whether one supports or opposes same sex marriage, the decision to recognize such unions or not ought to be a power each state exercises on its own, rather than imposition of a one-size-fits-all mandate by the federal government (as would be required by a Federal Marriage Amendment which has been previously proposed and considered by the Congress)…. Indeed, the primary reason for which I authored the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 was to ensure that each state remained free to determine for its citizens the basis on which marriage would be recognized within its borders, and not be forced to adopt a definition of marriage contrary to its views by another state.

While his commitment to Brandeis-style federalism (every state a “laboratory”) is admirable, Barr seems to miss the point of his baby, DoMA. I admit that the idea of gay marriage being a “state” issue is an attractive one. But DoMA precludes and works directly against this possibility, since DoMA not only allows states to refuse to grant gay marriages. It also allows states to refuse to recognize gay marriages.

That may not at first sound like a big deal, but the effect works a gargantuan evil. As some states’ marriage laws (”mini-DoMAs,” authorized by DoMA) work, a Massachusetts or California gay couple, innocently and fleetingly in a state like Nevada, could find themselves denied access to the law to redress a wrong that occurs while out of their marriage-state. For example, Nevada’s “mini-DoMA” would deny a surviving gay spouse the ability to use the state’s wrongful death statute to sue a driver responsible for his partner’s death. Thus DoMA not only authorizes the states to ignore the rights of its citizens, but it allows the states to eviscerate the rights of other states’ citizens, callously and without regard to federalism.

(If you want a legal treatment of this issue, this article is on point).

As long as DoMA is in effect, gay couples will effectively become second-class citizens whenever out of state, however briefly. It’s nice to see that the issue, at least for Barr, has moved beyond mindless bigotry. But he still has a long way to go.

Color me optimistic. My earlier post, which assumed McCain would stridently oppose the California Supreme Court’s pro-gay rights ruling, and that the Democrats would keep silent, assumed that we were still in a religious-right dominated nation, and therefore a religious-right dominated campaign.

Based on their reactions, my assumption could be wrong. The McCain campaign voiced their candidate’s support for states’ rights to decide the issue (while subtly commenting on “judicial activism”), while Obama and Hillary both suggested that they would fight for civil unions on the national stage. These are bold moves from all the candidates. Nothing less than outright condemnation from McCain could appease the religious right, but McCain’s response was slightly more than “neutral” on the issue. Anything more than silence from the Democrats could be damaging, but they boldly lent their voices to the cause for equality.

Apparently none of the candidates are willing to foster or suborn bigotry just to win.  The tide may be turning.  I’m very proud of our country today.