There are gay conservatives. I know this. When I have the sense of humor for it, I try to read their words and figure out where they’re coming from, and how they got there. There is a common, oft-repeated complaint among gay conservative bloggers and pundits [all three of them] that the Big Gay Left constantly carries water for other liberal causes. They assume that this is something that happens without forethought, which is always strange to me, because liberalism and LGBT equality go hand in hand.
Indeed, it’s actually conservatism, with its competing strains — disproven economic theory meant to serve Wall Street and Wall Street only vs. libertarianism which hates Wall Street; making the government so small that you can drown it in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist so famously said vs. a social conservatism that hates democracy and seeks to use the government to damage the lives of LGBT people and women from coast to coast, and so forth — that is anything but an aligned movement. Liberalism? Not so much.
Amanda Marcotte highlights this in a larger post about John Edwards’ troubles, lamenting just how sucky it is that Edwards has turned out to be such a giant ass in his personal life, as his presidential campaign was one of the few in recent history which actually tied together all the different arms of liberalism into one defining philosophy, and who explained it in terms that made sense to the average voter. And it really is one defining philosophy. She outlines the three major arms of liberalism and starts to connect the dots:
1) Economic justice. This is labor movements, anti-poverty initiatives, fair taxation, health care reform, social services, government that is functional, etc. Anything that helps secure the middle class, bolsters the economy, and lifts people out of poverty.
2) Social justice. Feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, anti-colonialism, things like that—anything that divides people against each other on the basis of identity hierarchies.
3) Environmentalism and rationalism. Preserving the planet, promoting science, basically using the now to work towards a better tomorrow.
Obviously, a smart person sees how these are interrelated and that you really fail at anti-racism if you don’t think about poverty and that you’re not a good environmentalist if economic justice isn’t part of your worldview, and you’re not an effective feminist if you treat science like it’s a lark.
They really all do go together. I’d add that you’re not really going to understand the gay rights struggle if you aren’t a rationalist who believes in science, and you’re not going to understand the need for marriage equality fully if you don’t understand the real economic results of policies that serve the whole population well — as opposed to just those at the top. This seems like a good time to point out that gay conservatives tend to be upper-middle class white men, or those who dream of one day being so, and are willing to overlook where they actually are in service of who they might be, maybe one day, if things go well for them. And Amanda’s right — there are a million other intersection points between those three arms.
One thing I’ve been encouraged by over the past year has been that, more and more every day, Truth Wins Out readers are coming from more and more diverse areas out of the greater liberal spectrum. Surely there is a huge case to be made for why moderates and conservatives should also support equality for LGBT people, as there is really no philosophy aside from theocracy that it doesn’t fit into. But for those who wonder why educated gay rights activists also tend to support the rest of the planks of liberalism as well, well, now you know why.
It’s good to see that the First World is taking notice of the brave, courageous gay activists of Uganda:
Ugandan gay activist Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera has been given the prestigious Martin Ennals rights award.
The 10 organisations which make up the award jury said she was courageous and faced harassment because of her work.
[...]
In January, her colleague David Kato was murdered not long after suing a paper that outed them both as gay. Police denied the killing was because of his sexuality.
Three months before the murder, Uganda’s Rolling Stone newspaper published the photographs of several people it said were gay, including activist Mr Kato, with the headline “Hang them.”
The name of Ms Nabagesera, the founder of gay rights organisation Freedom and Roam Uganda, also appeared on the list.
Still standing with the bigots in Uganda? Notable American conservative Evangelicals. “What’s new?,” says we.
It’s nice to see that American Catholics are paying less and less attention to what comes out of their church leaders’ mouths. Here are the results of a new study:
Catholics are more supportive of legal recognitions of same-sex relationships than members of any other Christian tradition and Americans overall. Nearly three-quarters of Catholics favor either allowing gay and lesbian people to marry (43%) or allowing them to form civil unions (31%). Only 22% of Catholics say there should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship.
When same-sex marriage is defined explicitly as a civil marriage, support is dramatically higher among Catholics. If marriage for gay couples is defined as a civil marriage “like you get at city hall,” Catholic support for allowing gay couples to marry increases by 28 points, from 43% to 71%. A similar pattern exists in the general population, but the Catholic increase is more pronounced.
Beyond the issue of same-sex marriage, Catholic support for rights for gays and lesbian people is strong and slightly higher than the general public. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Catholics favor laws that would protect gay and lesbian people against discrimination in the workplace; 63% of Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian people to serve openly in the military; and 6-in-10 (60%) Catholics favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to adopt children.
Here’s Lawrence O’Donnell’s report on the same study:
Apparently, you see, Japan is full of atheists, and God decided to grab them by the throat and shake them in order to show them his love.
I think clips like this are important because they really show us what sorts of people we’re fighting against for our equal rights. Here we have a girl who obviously thinks that she means well, but is so brainwashed into her belief system that she not only does not understand that the shifting of the earth’s plates has absolutely nothing to do with the religious beliefs of the people living atop them, but also that the idea of a deity who would destroy and kill in order to show his “love” would be called an sociopathic abuser, if we were talking about a human.
Warped conception of love? Glaring disconnect from reality? Yep, that’s what we fight against for our equal rights.
UPDATE: Some people think this is a Poe. Discuss in comments. This is the thing about Poes, though, and it’s kind of the point. If you are not familiar with Poe’s law, it is this:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.
They are often indistinguishable. This is why so many people continue to be taken in by ChristWire.org.
[N]ew regulations on hospital visits that took effect this week are providing protection for same-sex couples or others whose closest relationship is with a non-family member.
The regulations, ordered by President Barack Obama last spring, state that hospitals should not “restrict, limit or otherwise deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability.”
Hospitals now must have written visitation policies, and patients or their representatives are to be informed of their rights to designate their visitors. The rules apply to all hospitals receiving federal Medicaid or Medicare money, and hospitals that violate them risk losing that money.
Administration officials say requirements for same-sex couples should not be more cumbersome than those for opposite-sex couples, who generally do not have to provide legal documentation to be considered a patient’s support person. The guidelines suggest that hospital policies require such proof only when there is a dispute over a patient who cannot speak for himself.
This is one of those issues that wingnuts, when they’re trying to look loving, claim to support, but when the chips are down, it bothers them just the same.
In a long interview with Kerry Eleveld about the role Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has played in bringing LGBT equality to the forefront at home and around the world, we learn that, unfortunately, as much good as she’s been doing, she’s somehow still not willing to take the plunge and support full equality. This is less of a criticism than a friendly encouragement, because Hillary really is so good on so many issues. Eleveld describes a gay pride celebration held at the State Department last summer:
Displaying an uncanny depth of understanding for the challenges that many LGBT youth experience, Clinton spoke of tragedies that would only come to national attention months later after a spate of heart-wrenching teen suicides dominated headlines for weeks. She called on the staff members before her to help create a safe space for gays and lesbians everywhere, “Particularly young people, particularly teenagers who still, today, have such a difficult time and who, still, in numbers far beyond what should ever happen, take their own lives rather than live that life.”
Men and women around the world were being “harassed, beaten, subjected to sexual violence, even killed, because of who they are and whom they love,” she said.
“This is a human rights issue,” Clinton told the rapt audience. She ad-libbed, recalling an oft-quoted line from a landmark speech on women’s rights at a U.N. conference in China: “Just as I was very proud to say the obvious more than 15 years ago in Beijing—that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights—well, let me say today that human rights are gay rights, and gay rights are human rights, once and for all.”
But yet…
Marriage seemed like the place to start, since Clinton had been caught off guard by a recent inquiry on the issue while visiting Australia. Her husband has said that he now supports full marriage equality: Many of his gay friends are in committed relationships, former president Bill Clinton said in 2009. As far as marriage goes, he said, he had just been “hung up about the word.”
Did she share his experience? I wondered. Was she at odds with President Barack Obama’s stated position in support of civil unions but against marriage equality?
But on the phone, Clinton is circumspect about her husband’s comments. “Well, I share his experience because we obviously share a lot of the same friends, but I have not changed my position,” she says without elaborating. The secretary wasn’t taking any political bait, nor was she going to tangle with anything that could figure negatively for her boss.
Unfortunate.
But I’m going to make a prediction here: both the President and the Secretary will be on record supporting marriage equality soon after the 2012 elections. Cowardly, yes. But such is politics…
An outgrowth of an already very effective organization:
As gay people around the country reveled on Sunday in the historic Senate vote to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a liberal media watchdog group said it planned to announce on Monday that it was setting up a “communications war room for gay equality” in an effort to win the movement’s next and biggest battle: for a right to same-sex marriage.
The new group, Equality Matters, grew out of Media Matters, an organization backed by wealthy liberal donors — including prominent gay philanthropists — that has staked its claim in Washington punditry with aggressive attacks on Fox News and conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
It will be run by Richard Socarides, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton who has been deeply critical of President Obama’s record on gay rights. A well-known gay journalist, Kerry Eleveld, the Washington correspondent for The Advocate, will leave that magazine in January to edit the new group’s Web site, equalitymatters.org, which is to go online Monday morning.
Wherever Kerry is, she’s an asset, so we’ll be looking forward to having Equality Matters on the front lines in Washington. For now, check out the site here.
I, of course, mean looking at the long game, not the day-to-day uphill battles we’re still fighting. But in the long term, here’s one example of why Wayne and I have said time and time again this year that we’ve crossed a tipping point in the fight for equality. Over at Jill Stanek’s blog, the extremely anti-choice, extremely medically ignorant Jill Stanek poses this question to her readers:
Are social conservatives losing the gay debate but winning the pro-life debate? If so, why? And does this really matter to pro-lifers?
The comments section is fascinating. The majority of commenters are anti-choice, but they come at it from all different directions, and that’s beside the point. What’s striking is the sheer number of extremely anti-choice people who not only understand why anti-gay opinions are losing several percentage points per year, but also [some of them] support this, to varying degrees. There are, of course, some serious wingnuts in there, which is to be expected at Jill Stanek’s blog, but the pro-gay commenters are exposing them as the uninformed malcontents they are.
Now, if you’ve read me at all, you know I’m fiercely pro-choice, so I’m not in any way endorsing the content at Stanek’s blog. But man, when anti-choice wingnuts are having an honest argument about gay rights and the anti-gay set is losing, bad, well then, we’ve reached a damn tipping point.
Click over and peruse…you’ll see what I mean. Here’s an example:
I think the simple answer is, the US is growing more secular. People go to church less frequently and claim no religion more often. And while there are a number of excellent secular reasons to oppose abortion, there aren’t really any great secular reasons to oppose homosexuality. And I’m saying this as a Christian. A Christian who doesn’t believe any part of the Bible is there by mistake, even. But, from a thoroughly secular point of view, every argument we use to oppose abortion can be used exactly the same way to support gay marriage. Which, logically, suggests that more people are doing just that since they are more sincerely pro-life and are applying that to their views.
This is a trend toward expanding rights for the unborn or for the LGBT community. Hopefully this is a wake-up call to gay-rights groups that they should embrace rights for the unborn and to multi-issue, pro-life groups to be more accepting.
Like I said, it’s a fascinating read. There is more disinformation about reproductive rights than you could possibly shake a stick at, and I think their premise that there’s some tidal shift happening where people are becoming more anti-choice is extremely wishful thinking, but if you read through it and continually remind yourself what blog you’re reading, it’s heartening.
As we remember Elizabeth Edwards, it’s good to remember what a true advocate she was for equality:
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on a speech Elizabeth gave at the kickoff event for the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco in June 2007. While talking to a crowd at the Alice B. Toklas Pride Breakfast, Elizabeth explained her views and how they differed from her husband and presidential candidate John:
“I don’t know why somebody else’s marriage has anything to do with me,” Elizabeth said. “I’m completely comfortable with gay marriage.”
[...]
The explanation for Elizabeth’s stance was simple: She compared someone’s marriage to the color they painted their house — it was none of her business.
“It seems to me we’re making issues of things that honestly… don’t matter.”
Just kidding, but there’s an ad running in Iowa for Fred Karger, which is indeed a campaign ad for the 2012 Republican nomination. Karger’s a bit of a different sort of candidate, though:
Karger is (unofficially, at this point) running for president as a Republican, on an almost exclusively gay-rights platform. A former Ronald Reagan aide who is now openly gay, it’s Karger’s goal to make it onstage at televised Republican debates and make hay over the party’s traditional gay-rights stances.
