Sour Grapes: A Reply To Christopher Caldwell

The conservative writer Christopher Caldwell appears in this month's Claremont Review of Books, reviewing Closet to the Altar, a history of same-sex marriage by Michael J. Klarman. I'm going to leave most of Caldwell's arguments alone—Klarman can defend his own work—but I do want to contest Caldwell's seeming assertion toward the end of his piece that what makes the gay marriage movement particularly odious is its use of nasty strong-arm tactics:

The most troubling aspect of the gay-marriage movement is that, more than any social movement in living memory, more than feminism at its bra-burning peak in the 1970s, it aims not to engage in lively debate but to shut it down. Scurrility has become a norm. In April 2009, Miss California, Carrie Prejean, told a Miss America judge she thought marriage should be between a man and a woman and got called a "dumb bitch" for it on the judge's website. If it is now easier to call people dumb bitches, then it makes no sense at all to extol the gay marriage movement as a moral advance.

Let me condemn in the strongest possible fashion the use of the term "dumb bitch" as a response to Carrie Prejean. It seems to me that fighters of sexism and fighters of homophobia should be natural allies, and to deploy hateful sexist terminology on behalf of gay rights isn't just odious, it also seems to surely be missing the point.

Nonetheless, it surely seems that Caldwell's trying to make the case that "dumb bitch" entered political terminology as a means of shutting down Prejean's anti-gay-marriage views. This, of course, is poppycock. As I've written elsewhere—and as basically any woman who writes for public consumption knows—the term is used to silence women all the the time, particularly—I would guess—women coming from a lefty or feminist point of view. Caldwell's shock at the term in this context is either naive or, I suspect, disingenuous. He's right to point out that it's an ugly bit of business; but's far from a unique weapon of gay marriage forces, nor particularly common to them.

Nonetheless, Caldwell continues down this track:

Shutting down debate can be more effectively done now that the internet has solved the organizing problem of mobs. Anyone who expresses the slightest misgivings about gay marriage can become the object of boycotts, blacklists, and attempts to get him fired. Restaurant chain Chick fil-A was boycotted when its chief operating officer speculated that gay marriage might be "inviting God's wrath." A theater director in Sacramento resigned his post after having been shown to be a donor to Proposition 8. The law firm King & Spalding refused to allow Paul Clement permission to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act on behalf of the House of Representatives. Defending O.J. Simpson will not get you booted from your firm, but defending a federal law will. Most companies are probably brave enough to defend their employees' freedom of opinion, but cowardice of King & Spalding's sort risks becoming the norm.

What I recall about the Chick fil-A boycott is that it turned out to be a tremendous success for the company after social conservatives rallied to its success. I recall, as well, that about the same time an anti-marriage-equality group calling itself One Million Moms (probably, ahem, a misnomer) vowed to boycott JC Penney after the retailer ran ads featuring Famous Lesbian(™) Ellen DeGeneres in holiday ads. If boycotts are an attempt to silence debate, rather than a form of it, then one would expect Caldwell to be shocked by the JC Penney action—or, at least, acknowledge that that Chick fil-A boycott comes in a context of back-and-forth boycotts over the subject of gay rights that have been going on for years.

The Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott Disney in 1997 because of that company's perceived gay-friendly direction. It lasted eight years. The National Organization for Marriage is behind the Dump Starbucks campaign for similar reasons. Conservative Christian groups do this stuff all the time. The evangelicals I grew up with sometimes had trouble keeping track of all the companies (and sub-companies, and sub-sub companies) they were supposed to boycott: Were these paper towels the right ones to buy, or not? If boycotting is a pernicious form of trying to silence debate, Caldwell might want to pluck the log from his side's eye before pointing out the speck in his neighbor's eye. And, too, he might want to tell Martin Luther King Jr. about the moral illegitimacy of boycotts as a political measure.

Blacklisting is rather more problematic, admittedly. Does that term apply to Scott Eckern, the theater director to whom Caldwell refers? Possibly. But that seems tricky to me. Adults understand they have the right to make political statements—but they also recognize that that doing so might affect their ability to do their jobs. But again: Social conservatives feel free to deprive jobs to those who don't share their values on this topic.  If everybody should keep their job despite their political views, then everybody should get to keep their job despite their political views.

As for Mr. Clement, well: He wasn't booted from his firm, as Caldwell has it—he quit, after the firm decided it didn't want the job of defending the Defense of Marriage Act. It's an important distinction, a factual error that clearly undermines the case that Caldwell is trying to make.

Caldwell concludes:

In a decade, gay marriage has gone from joke to dogma. It is certainly worth asking why, if this is a liberation movement, it should be happening now, in an age not otherwise gaining a reputation as freedom's heyday. Since 2009, if Klarman's estimates are correct, support for gay marriage has been increasing by 4 points a year. Public opinion does not change this fast in free societies. Either opinion is not changing as fast as it appears to be, or society is not as free.

This is a baseless assertion, but I think it gets at the deeper conservative frustration on this issue: They're losing not just politically and legally; they're losing culturally. And when you lose the culture, that's when the debate really is over, at least for awhile. Conservatives never lost the culture entirely on abortion, which is why we're still debating the issue 40 years later. Will we still be debating gay marriage 20 years from now? Forget my answer: I'd like to know what Caldwell thinks.

Besides, Caldwell's wrong about public opinion: Big cultural shifts often happen little-by-little, then a lot all at once: It's fascinating to look at Gallup's list of long-term poll trends, measuring attitudes for most of the 20th century in America.

On the question of "would you be willing to support a woman for president," for example, barely half the country—53 percent—said yes in 1969. Two years later, than number was at 66 percent: A movement of 6.5 points per year, on average. It's about what you might expect with the women's liberation movement getting underway at the time. Similarly, in 1962, only 48 percent of Americans said they would support a black president—a number that rose 18 points, to 66 percent, by 1968: Around 3 percent a year. That's not quite as dramatic, but it's still plenty dramatic, and certainly indicative of a massive shift in racial attitudes underway during the era. Does Caldwell want to suggest that American society wasn't "free" then? Perhaps, but I don't think the case he'd make would be recognizable to most Americans.

Anti-gay-marriage conservatives have failed to convince an increasing majority of Americans of their views.  Of late, they have resorted to a final argument: That allowing gay marriage will lead to the victimization of those who believe in traditional marriage. It's an argument that does the neat trick of sidestepping the worthiness of gay marriage itself in favor of creating a needless zero-sum contest of rights. But the loss of privilege—the privilege, in this case, to disdain your gay neighbors' relationship without social consequence—is not the same thing as a loss of rights. If Caldwell believes he can win the gay marriage debate by painting a falsely negative portrait of the gay marriage movement, he should understand the lies will only comfort true believers on his side: For everybody else, facts and a sober examination of history will show his errors.

(Edited for clarity, spelling, boo-boos.)

Look elsewhere

Over the last year, my blogging energies have been increasingly consumed by my work for Philadelphia Magazine. If you're looking for my thoughts on politics, that's probably the place to go. Thanks to those of you who have followed me here. I may return someday, who knows?

The Olympics are meaningless

Interesting story in NYT today about how an American who won silver at the 2004 Athens games may now take the gold. Why? Retroactive drug testing:

Doping protocols allow for officials to store samples for eight years and retest them for substances they may not have been able to detect at the time the sample was taken. When Bilonog’s sample was analyzed in 2004 at the Olympics, the results were negative, doping officials said. Eight years later, with new tests at their disposal, officials decided to re-examine about 100 samples from the Athens Games, focusing on certain sports and medalists.

I'm kind of at the point that I don't care about athletes doping—I suspect that it's so widespread that it's no longer a competitive advantage, but rather a leveling of a dope-saturated playing field. I don't think that makes the competition that much less interesting: The drugs can't make the human body do more than it's capable of, ultimately.

The testing protocol might actually do more damage to the Olympics. What this means is that every competition you watch, the results are only provisional—and will remain so for up to a decade. The agony of defeat? The thrill of victory? Well, sure, as long as an asterisk is placed on each gold medal, a disclaimer read before every playing of the national anthem, noting that the results won't be official and final for another eight years. That sure seems to diminish the moment of competition.

Tabor College, my alma mater, ends up in Sports Illustrated for all the wrong reasons

Well, I'd love to hear from some of my Tabor friends about this, but the story SI describes doesn't seem terribly different from what things were like when I was a student at Tabor 20 years ago, at least in my mind.

I even did a little research into WHY Tabor had a football team when I was there, digging through old stacks of the student newspaper. If memory serves, the team didn't exist until 1969. It started (and an existing soccer team shut down) more or less in order to stay in the KCAC—the worry being that the college wouldn't survive unless it maintained its membership in the athletic conference.

The football team seemed to exist in a different universe than the rest of Tabor, which was no lip-service denominational college: It really did (and does) take seriously the mission of Christ-centered learning. The student body was pretty white and devout. The football team …much, much less so. Every year or so, there'd be one or two players who really participated in church-related events on campus in a major way, and they drew a lot of attention, but often they were gone the next year, just like most of the rest of the team.

So the team didn't seem to square, even then, with either Tabor's spiritual or educational missions. I recall, in fact, my senior year of college putting the question directly to David Brandt, then Tabor's brand-new president. Why did Tabor persist in keeping a program that seemed to fit the campus so badly?

I don't recall his answer, in fairness: I do recall he answered it with a kind of smiling frustration reserved for the "you don't get how the world works, son," and I guess I did and didn't.

I'm disappointed that the current president, Jules Glanzer, elected to try to avoid attention by declining to speak about this with SI's reporter. In fairness: I'm no longer an ideal Tabor alum myself, being an agnostic liberal. And the story of who benefits and who loses from the existence of the football team at Tabor is complicated by hundreds of individual stories.

But I also suspect that the conflict between how Tabor presents itself, how it thinks of itself, and the different reality lived by much of the football team—well, public embarrassment of some sort was going to come at some point. I'm sorry that it took the death of a young man, a father, to heighten those contradictions. I hope, however, that Tabor will wrestle with the questions posed in this story with honesty, integrity, and fidelity to the faith it proclaims in the world.

Update: Final thought: It was clear 20 years ago that Tabor might not live without football, but would live in a compromised state *with* football. It seems like little has changed. I'm more clear-eyed than I was when I was a self-righteous 20-year-old about the need for and nature of compromise, but I still wonder if it's all ultimately to the good.

Lying liars in the Philadelphia Daily News: Obama and Israel

I understand that a newspaper applies somewhat looser standards in its letters-to-the-editor section than it usually does its own reported news and opinion columns, yet it's a source of unending irritation to me that the Philadelphia Daily News often lets blatant misrepresentations of fact reach its readers uncontradicted.

I'm not against the Daily News printing opinions I dislike, understand. But I hate actual lies and untruths. And the latest emerges today from Pat Dougherty:

Benghazi coverup?

When will you do your duty to the American people and cover this tragedy honestly? You have covered for this corrupt administration for far too long. Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of this administration has the blood of those four dead Americans on their hands. You are complicit and their blood stains you also. Would you be so uninterested if this was a Republican administration? No, your headlines would scream of it daily! You are in bed with a man that, in his own words, said he would stand with Muslims against Israel. Nice. A leader of America standing with those that say they want us dead.

The lie? That Obama, "in his own words, said he would stand with Muslims against Israel." I don't have to even look this up. Know how I know this is a lie? Because this is such an Israel-supporting nation that any major political figure who ever said such a thing would see his electoral career finished. Instantly. Especially if that politician were running for president.

But, hey, let's give Mr. Dougherty the benefit of the doubt that he didn't make up this quote out of whole cloth. Where did it come from? Well, it's a popular trope among the darker corners of the conservative blogosphere that Obama once said this: 'I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." Which, you'll note, is not the same thing as saying he'd stand with the Muslims against Israel. But heck, lets look at the context even of that. Turns out it emerges devoid of its context from his book, "The Audacity of Hope." Snopes.com has it covered:

So, the then-future president said he would stand with Muslims to preserve their civil rights! Great! He didn't say he'd "stand against Israel?" Even better!

Maybe the Daily News expects its other readers to know that Mr. Dougherty is purveying mistruths and lies. But it's frustrating to see such fakery perpetuated in the newspaper, no matter which page it's on.

Rich Lowry: 'Racialized politics'

You almost get the feeling that Rich Lowry deliberately misunderstands:

"One of the most extraordinary things about the post-election discussion is how Democrats and the media are hailing a more or less explicitly racialized politics in this country."

Only if by "racialized" you mean "inclusive of more than one race." But I don't think that's what Lowry intends.

Here's the breakdown: Roughly 72 percent of Americans are white. 12 percent are black, 5 percent are Asian, and 16 percent are Hispanic or Latino (which gets included in the "white" count, which is why this adds up to more than 100 percent.)

Romney voters were 88 percent white. "We find that 2 percent of Romney's voters were black, 6 percent were Latino, 2 percent were Asian, and 2 percent had some other ethnic classification."

And Obama? "Obama's support was 56 percent white, 24 percent black, 14 percent Latino, 4 percent Asian, and 2 percent other."

Neither set of voters is entirely demographically representative of the United States population. But one set is a lot closer. And that set happened to be on the winning side.

This isn't rocket science: Republicans have spent decades appealing to white voters and deliberately repelling minority voters, usually screaming in anguish when anybody points that out. That's racialized politics. My advice to Republicans, if they want to be true to themselves but also win elections: You don't need to pander to minority voters. Just stop being jerks to them. And stop kidding yourselves that pandering to white voters is "colorblind." It's not.

Republicans should stop alienating minorities

That's my suggestion in this week's Scripps Howard column, taking stock of the election results:

Here's a bit of friendly advice to my friends in the Republican Party: It's time to stop being so afraid of minorities. It's the only way you'll survive future elections. 

Save me the talk about how you're not afraid of minorities. Your party spent 40 years pursuing the "Southern Strategy" of demonizing blacks to curry favor with Southern whites. Your party held up Arizona's anti-immigration law -- along with its racial-profiling practices -- as a model for the nation. Your party just this year passed voter ID laws that were a clear attempt to suppress minority votes. And your party tried to win the 2012 election by digging up an old videotape of Obama just weeks before this election, suggesting (falsely) that it was proof of his reverse racism. 

Republicans have sent a clear, unmistakable message. It has been just as unmistakably received. The result? Romney earned the support of a whole lot of white male voters -- and not a whole lot of anyone else. 

Women? African-Americans? Latinos? They ended up mostly voting for Obama. And Obama won re-election, you may have noticed. 

It doesn't have to be this way. There's nothing inherently "white" about a desire for limited government, or lower taxes or even "family values." If the GOP were seen as a welcoming place for a wider cross section of America, it would earn the support of a wider cross section of America. White guys can't deliver an election on their own anymore. 

Really, all you have to do is rethink your "severely conservative" rhetoric on immigration policy, and you might find a quick change in your electoral fortunes. Pass the DREAM Act. Start printing up visas for guest workers. These are measures that had GOP support in the past.

Support them again -- and change nothing else -- and you might win again.

I would love for this to happen, actually, would love for us to untangle our politics from tribalistic identity battles and instead really just be competitions between competing ideas. That's perhaps overly idealistic of me, but I would love it. And I don't think it requires much of a philosophical change on the part of conservatives--just (ahem) a bit of an attitude adjustment.