CenterFeud

Do tell

15 years after the institution of "Don't ask, don't tell." a sea change in public attitudes towards gays in the military. From the Washington Post:

Today, Americans have become more supportive of allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the armed forces. Support from Republicans has doubled over the past 15 years, from 32 to 64 percent. More than eight in 10 Democrats and more than three-quarters of independents now support the idea, as did nearly two-thirds of self-described conservatives.

These numbers are heartening, especially the response from conservatives.

ASL Vlogging

You know videoblogging (aka vlogging) has really come into its own when you see Deaf vloggers like Joey Baer posting in ASL (American Sign Language) and linking to other vloggers for commentary and personal perspectives, also in Sign Language.

The focus of his blog is the current controversy at Gallaudet University in Washington DC, which is the only post-secondary liberal arts institution in the world specifically serving a deaf and hard-of-hearing student body (much like the role Howard University plays in the African-American Community).

For the uninitiated, some background: in 1988, Gallaudet's campus erupted in controversy as students protested the university Board of Trustees' decision to appoint a hearing administrator as President, bypassing a well-qualified deaf candidate, I. King Jordan. As a result of the protests (now known as the "DPN" movement for "Deaf President Now"), Gallaudet reversed course and appointed Jordan, who became the university's first deaf president. (To get a sense of the students' outrage, imagine the uproar if Howard University had since its inception consistently passed over African-Americans candidates to serve as its president).

Now, nearly 20 years later, a new controversy has erupted over Jordan's successor, Jane Fernandes who like Jordan is deaf but learned ASL as an adult. She is seen as problematic for reasons related both to cultural identity and the fairness of the selection process, as well as to assessments of overallcompetence. Go here for a side-by-side rendition of this argument in both English and ASL by Gallaudet faculty member Dr. Tom Holcomb:

Many of us do not see her as a leader. The first time many of us met her, we each walked away from the encounter harboring grave doubts about her abilities. So many of us did. You can go down the line. Each and every one of us have the same doubts. And we all love Gallaudet too much to accept this situation. We simply love Gallaudet too much.

Earlier this month, Protein Wisdom covered the controversy as a critique of identity politics. And got this comment from a deaf Gallaudet student, who echoes Holcomb's argument:

I know some do have the culturally deaf issue as a complaint, and I think it’s a poor one. I adhere to classical liberal values, and I would prefer that the best qualified person be picked for the presidency regardless of color, disability, religion, and so on. And while many of the protesters are of a liberal or Democratic mentality, which I’m not of, I also do know they’re focusing on the two demands reiterated above. Fringe elements of the protest are the ones pushing the culturally deaf issue.

The reason there is a protest against the selection of Fernandes is because she’s a poor academic administrator, and because the Board of Trustees did not listen to the protesters – the undergraduates, graduates, and faculty, in separate polls, voted overwhelmingly against her before the selection. In fact, it is now known that the Presidential Search Committee recommended someone else to the Board of Trustees.

The revival of the Deaf President Now controversy at Gallaudet, this time swirling around the twin issues of culture and competence, coincides with the spread of videoblogging as a phenomenon. It's an ideal medium for deaf bloggers and I hope to see more of it, even once the current controversy fades.

Flying pig moment: MN GOP endorses openly gay state senator for re-election

Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Lori Sturdevant notes that openly-gay Republican Minnesota state senator Paul Koering has won his party's endorsement for re-election (after seven tortuous ballots):

You can tell a person by his friends," Koering told the 106 delegates to the Senate District 12 GOP convention, with a nod to the senators sporting Koering buttons. "I've got some great friends."

You also can tell a political party by the way it treats its Paul Koerings. Tuesday night, the stalwarts of Morrison and Crow Wing counties made their good state senator run a mean, seven-ballot gantlet. But in the end, they behaved like a political force that's serious about being this state's majority party, and endorsed Koering for a second term.

Important point: Koering himself would not care for the headline of this post. He is not running as a "gay Republican" - he is running as the senator who has represented the interests of Senate District 12, and his support is based on listening to his constituents. His sexual orientation is, in his view, irrelevant to the discussion.

Except that it's the elephant in the room in a roomful of elephants. As in 19 other states, social conservatives in the Minnesota GOP are pushing hard to amend the state constitution to prevent any possibility of same-sex marriage, or even its "legal equivalents" such as civil unions or domestic partner laws. So far, the state senate, dominated by the DFL (our Dems), has manuevered to defeat the amendment in the judiciary committee, preventing it from being placed on the ballot in the midterm election. This move was viewed by Republicans (including, notably, Koering) as preventing the people from having their say on this issue (Koering doesn't support the amendment but believes it should be it on the ballot as a matter of principle).

That nine of his fellow senators showed up at the District 12 Senate Caucus to endorse Koering speaks volumes to how well respected he is. It also, as Sturdevant points out, underscores that gay-bashing may not be a winner for the local GOP this Fall:

The back-of-the-room politicos at the VFW wondered: If these rural, mostly Catholic, mostly older Republicans can embrace a gay man as their senator, how will Bachmann's anti-gay-rights brand of social conservatism be received by a younger, more mixed crowd in the northern suburbs?

As an outright supporter of same-sex marriage, I am relieved that the amendment is not going to be on the ballot this fall. I acknowledge that a significant plurality, perhaps even a majority of Minnesotans, would like to see this put to the vote. And if the Minnesota GOP can gain a majority in the state senate this fall, I expect we'll see that vote - that's the policital process in action. But I am in no hurry. The proponents of the amendment don't link to the full text of the amendment, which reads (emphasis mine):

"Only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in the state of Minnesota. Any other relationship shall not be recognized as marriage or its legal equivalents."

It's those last four words, that make it a dealbreaker from my perspective. Like the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment during the 2004 election that never made it out of the Senate, the Minnesota amendment is discriminatory in nature. I would hope that my fellow Minnesotans, however they feel about the merits of broadening the concept of marriage, would not vote to deprive gay couples of any kind of legal protections or rights. I'd like to think that in a state where even conservative small town GOP caucus-goers are willing to endorse the gay senator who has worked hard for them, the voters would refuse to go along with this unnecessarily mean-spirited amendment.

Garrison Keillor n'est pas bien impressé avec M. Lévy

Garrison Keillor, no red-stater but nonetheless an enthusiastic romanticist of small-town American life, reviews the latest book by French sociologist Benard-Henri Lévy, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville for the New York Times Book Review and finds it to be superficial and off-the-mark:

Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

Although I have not read his book and therefore am not really qualified to comment, I had formed a similar impression of Lévy, after listening to him for five minutes being interviewed by John Stewart. He claims to be out to dispel the stereotypes of Americans for his French readers, but ends up reinforcing them at every turn. As a result, he comes off as either hypocritical or clueless about his subject, and doesn't do much to dispel American stereotypes of the French as arrogant, judgmental and elitist.

My own experience as regards France and its people is largely positive. True, I don't care for France's role on the global stage ("a moral compass has to have a butt end" as humorist P.J. O'Rourke observed), and most of us have had at least one or two experiences with snooty French waiters at one time or another, but at the grassroots level, I have had mostly positive experiences with everyday French citizens, who have hosted me in their homes and were gracious guests in mine.

I was hoping that Levy's excursion across this country would be more of an acknowledgement of that reality. And perhaps to some readers, it is just that. But it's telling that he can't even persuade Garrison Keillor to go along for the ride.

Does anyone happen to know where the Center is?

If you do, Mitch Berg would really like to know:

The question - which Dennis Prager asked his audience yesterday - is an interesting one; what is the "Center" in America today? Is it a mean - the place where everyone's position averages out by sheer weight of numbers? Or is it a median, the midpoint between International ANSWER and Michael Savage?

Neither, of course, and such a calculation would be meaningless, because for every person there are shades of gray between the poles on each issue (except for the woman I link to above, for whom politics would seem to be a black and white, good vs. evil issue - but I digress).

So here's my question: For each of the following issues, write in my comment section where you think "the center" is. I'll list the issues, and then I'll write my opinions (and, largely for my own edification, where I think i fall from the greater American "center", wherever that is).

• Gay Marriage
• Gun Control
• Iraq
• The War on Terror, at Home
• School Choice and Vouchers
• Abortion
• Taxes
• Campaign Finance Reform
• School prayer

Readers of this blog may be a very useful part of this debate, since by definition you are either centrist, center-ish, center-oriented or center-esque. Or, at the very least you are willing to consider arguments outside the left/right paradigm that don't fit the talking points of either political orientation, or attempt a synthesis of the two. Even if you consider yourself solidly liberal or conservative, you probably have some feel for where the "center" of the debate might lie on the above issues.

So go weigh in at Mitch's blog, Shot in the Dark. My own take on where the "Center" stands on these issues (and where I differ) can be found in the comments.

Previous posts of interest:

(Defining and) Debunking 'centrism'

"Most voters are still centrists"

Teach your children well?

This story out of Bakersfield, CA is certainly disturbing:

Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.

They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that. But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.

Known as "Prussian Blue" — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

As is this item out of the UK:

A poem which praises the murder of Jews by the Nazis has been included in a book of children’s poetry to be distributed amongst schools in the UK.

The publication, entitled Great Minds, features the work of school children aged 11 to 18 who won a nationwide literary competition.

But one poem has generated outrage amongst Jewish groups, politicians and Holocaust charities for its anti-Semitic content.

The entry by the 14-year-old Gideon Taylor is apparently written from the viewpoint of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

It includes the lines "Jews are here, Jews are there, Jews are almost everywhere, filling up the darkest places, evil looks upon their faces."

Another part reads: "Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races, on their way to a gas chamber, where they will sleep in their manger… I'll be happy Jews have died."

Comment: Extremist groups exist everywhere, but in most cases their impact is marginal. The girl group Prussian Blue learned their neo-Nazi philsophy from their parents, who encouraged them to use their talents to spread these hateful ideas among sympathetic circles such as the followers of ex-klan leader David Duke.

But in the case of the UK child poet, his disgusting poem received an award from the book publisher and was included for distribution in schools across Great Britain. The book's editor justified the poem's inclusion because it demonstrated the boy's ability to empathize with another person's point of view, in this case Adolf Hitler. So, channeling a 20th century genocidal mass murderer now constitutes an advanced poetic sensibility?

How the British government can allow such a thing to happen - and at a time when it is banning images of piglet from government offices and schools so as to not offend Muslim sensibilities - is beyond me.

(Via: Crooks and Liars and American Future)

Where do I stand? (the sequel)

In the early days of this blog, I did a post called "Where do I stand?" which included the results of a political quiz:

I just recently took another, and here is how I come out:

You are a Social Liberal (68% permissive) and an... Economic Moderate (43% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating

These results may surprise many of my readers, who assume that based on my positions on Iraq, the War on Terror and international politics (plus my support for Bush in last year's elections) I am a neocon of some stripe. (Actually, many necons - Paul Wolfowitz is an example - are quite liberal on social issues, so maybe I am.) Counter-evidence can be found here, here and here.

But I continue to believe that the Democrats could be in power for the next few decades if they were paying attention to folks like me, rather than the noisy Michael Moore fringe. Apparently, Hillary Clinton thinks so too, which is why I am giving better than even odds that she will be our next president (I will demure for the moment on whether that would be a Good Thing).

Going to hell with the shrimp eaters

Dan Savage is guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan and he's on a roll:

Why, I often wonder, can’t the religious right extend gay and lesbian Americans the same courtesy they extend to, say, adulterers? Or shrimp lovers? Yes, the gays are going to hell—it says so right there in the bible somewhere. It says we should be put to death along with the adulterers and shrimp eaters. But the adulterers and shrimp eaters don’t come in for the same degree of persecution. No attempts to strip them of their civil rights or write them out of the U.S. Constitution. And what about the Jews? They’re going to hell, along with Tom Cruise and his Scientologist pals and Lutherans (if you ask the Catholics) and the Catholics (if you ask the Lutherans). So many hell-bound sinners—and everyone else gets a pass. Fundamentalist Christians seem content merely knowing that everyone else will suffer horribly when we’re all left behind after they’ve been—what is it again? Ruptured or something? They may attempt to persuade others to join them, prior to the rupture, but there’s no attempt to actively persecute. Anyone else. Just us.

BTW, for those of you not familiar with Dan, he is a sex columnist and author whose wickedly funny advice column Savage Love is widely syndicated in the alternative press. A regular read, but not for the fainthearted.

Culture war in the Netherlands

Not the usual suspects we see on this side of the pond. And some of the alliances may surprise you. But only if you haven't been paying attention to the story of Somali-born Dutch MP Aayan Hirsi Ali, who has become a lightning rod in the struggle between liberal Dutch cultural traditions and Islamism. From The Nation:

In the United States, where few people have had the chance to read or see her critiques of Islam, the 35-year-old Hirsi Ali has been almost exclusively portrayed as a champion of free speech and women's rights. In the Netherlands, however, she remains the subject of intense controversy. Well before van Gogh's murder, she had become a major hate figure among Dutch Muslims, who accuse her of stirring up Islamophobia on behalf of a cabal of right-wing politicians and columnists. Since the murder, a surprising number of native-born Dutch intellectuals have come around to the Muslim point of view.

In a series of "Letters to Hirsi Ali" published this spring in the newspaper De Volkskrant, several well-known, mostly male writers charged her with poisoning the political atmosphere with her strident attacks on Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. They argued that by pandering to Dutch prejudices and putting Muslims on the defensive, she contributes to the very Islamic radicalization she claims to want to stop. In a book rushed into print in February, the popular historian Geert Mak went so far as to compare Submission to Joseph Goebbels's infamous Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew. He warned that the Netherlands could be on the road to civil war. "When the time comes for us to tell our grandchildren, how will we tell the story of the last months of 2004?" Mak asked breathlessly. "The tone, the new tone that suddenly had taken hold? Where did it all begin?"

The backlash against Hirsi Ali has astonished and disappointed many Dutch feminists, who continue to count themselves among her biggest fans. Margreet Fogteloo, editor of the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, said flatly that Mak is crazy. "People like him feel guilty because they were closing their eyes for such a long time to what was going on," she said. In what appears to be a Europe-wide pattern, some feminists are aligning themselves with the anti-immigrant right against their former multiculturalist allies on the left. Joining them in this exodus to the right are gay activists, who blame Muslim immigrants for the rising number of attacks on gay couples.

In the final analysis, the culture war in the Netherlands - and across Europe - comes down to the role of women and a battle over female sexualtiy:

Whatever happens to Hirsi Ali, the debate she helped polarize over women and Islam is sure to spread and intensify all over Europe in the next few years. As Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have argued in their book Rising Tide, the true clash of opinions between Islam and the West is not about democracy but sex. Successive World Values Surveys, in which social scientists polled public opinion in more than eighty countries between 1981 and 2001, have shown that people in Muslim countries share broadly the same views on political participation as people in the West. What they disagree strongly about is gender equality and sexual liberalization.

In the United States the distinction is not as sharply drawn. Conservative Muslims are not the only religious group here opposed to what they see as sexual license; it's their opposition to Israel and US foreign policy, not their sexual politics, that sets American Muslims apart from the rest of the right. But in Europe, acceptance of gender equality and homosexuality have become core values across the political spectrum, said Jocelyne Cesari, a Harvard research associate and the author of When Islam and Democracy Meet. "Here it is part of a national debate that doesn't involve immigrants only," Cesari said. "In Europe, this is seen as proof that Muslims are still outsiders whose values are in contradiction to ours."

Islamist thinkers have often argued that women are the key to culture, since they have the responsibility of raising children. An emerging coalition of European feminist and anti-immigration forces seems to be adopting the same view. In France, Belgium, Germany and Scandinavia, as in the Netherlands, the "woman question" is at the center of the debate over how to integrate the Muslim community. "I know most of my Muslim friends will disagree with me, but in my opinion the gender issue is the most important issue," says Martijn de Koning, an anthropologist at Leiden University who studies jihadi groups. "The head scarf, the Islamic schools, the policy of family reunification--every debate here more or less concerns the position of women."

Hirsi Ali is only the most prominent of a number of young Muslim women who have lately begun to criticize their own communities for their treatment of women. In Sweden, Fadime Sahindal campaigned against forced marriages before her father killed her in 2002 for having a relationship with a Swedish man. In France, Fadela Amara heads the Ni Putes ni Soumises ("Neither Whores nor Submissives") movement against Islamist groups she calls "the green fascists." In Germany, where six honor killings have taken place just this year, Seyran Ates, a Berlin-based lawyer, has charged the government with allowing Islamic fundamentalism to flourish under a policy of false tolerance.

Feminists and gays abandoning the left and making common cause with the right? It seems counterintuitive. But if one is choosing sides in the culure wars, it only makes sense to side with those opposed to misogyny and homophobia versus those whose impulse is to rationalize it in the name of multicultural ideals. Such ideals look good on paper, but in the real world they can get you killed.

A gay Republican steps out

CityPages, the local alternative weekly here in the Twin Cities has worthwhile interview with Reoublican State Senator Paul Koering, who recently announced he is gay. In Minnesota, as in other parts of the country, the activist wing of the Republican party is dominated by the religious right, including many in the legistlature who are working at a fever pitch to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot to outlaw gay marriage. Proponents of the amendment, such as State Senator Michelle Bachmann, are not just trying to "defend marriage" - they want to place even civil unions or domestic partnerships off-limits as well. An attempt was made to fast-track an amendment out of committee and onto the floor, bypassing debate. Koering voted to defeat the amendment, which precipitated a retaliation by some of his fellow Republicans, leading to his coming out:

City Pages: You came out a few days after voting against an anti-gay marriage ballot referendum. Was that entirely the reason for your announcement, or did other factors play in the decision?

Sen. Paul Koering: There were a lot of factors. That vote was certainly part of it. But I guess in my mind, I knew I was going to have to do something sooner or later. I just didn't know when it was going to happen. But I never, ever tried to keep anything a secret from anybody. Everybody knew at the Capitol.

Things got ratcheted up so much that I felt--what really made the final decision for me was when it started to affect my job to be so preoccupied with this. Then I made a decision that it was time to come out and say, here it is, and let's get back to work. And that's virtually what I did. I just wanted to end all the speculation.

My vote on that [amendment] was a procedural vote. People don't understand that I wasn't voting for or against the gay marriage amendment. I was voting "no" on departing from the way we normally do business in the Senate. Normally you introduce a bill, it goes to committee, and it works through a process. People have input, and it's changed by the time it gets to the Senate floor, probably for the good. To make a motion to pull this out of committee and drag it right to the Senate floor, I just thought it was the wrong thing to do.

CityPages interviewer Steve Parry for the most part lets Koering explain his decision without baiting him. And Koering's dignified responses to the questions are admirable for a conservative politician who at first blush might be judged cynical and hypocritical:

CP: Has this episode changed your attitude about your public role, as a politician or a citizen? Now that you're identified as a gay politician and a gay Republican, does it create any obligations or burdens you didn't face before?

Koering: No, I don't believe it does. I believe I'm still the farm boy from Fort Ripley, Minnesota, who happens to be representing Brainerd and Little Falls, who happens to be pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, Republican, and who happens to be gay. I don't think the latter makes any difference in my job representing my district. I don't think that my job has changed at all. I just opened myself up, inside and out, and people can make a judgment if they want to, but I'm still going to focus on the issues I think are important. To me that's health care, making sure that we provide some type of a safety net for folks that are the poorest in society. I'm going to continue to fight for education, and make sure we've got good funding for our schools so that kids can get out and get a good education. I'm going to continue to fight for agriculture and the pro-life movement and to do the job I always did.

[...]

CP: You said that you do not favor gay marriage. What about other sorts of legal protections--the whole area of civil unions?

Koering: I do support that.

CP: How do you rationalize belonging to a political party that's increasingly made a habit of scapegoating gays and gay-rights issues for electoral gain?

Koering: First of all, I'd say that I don't know the Republican Party is necessarily--at least the senators I know and work with are very good and kind people who are trying to look out for their constituents the best that they can.

CP: But there are larger issues than ones of personality here.

Koering: I don't agree with everything that the Republican Party stands for 100 percent of the time. I know for a fact that there are Democrats who don't agree 100 percent with the Democrats. It would be easy for me to say I was going to bail out because I don't agree with the Republican Party on this or that issue. I just think it's important for me to stay where I'm at. And I'm hoping the folks back home will send me back for another term.

I'm sure some people would say I should be an activist for gay people. Well, why should I? That's not my job. I'm not up there bashing anybody, however, and I never have. But I'm not a flag-waver. I don't need to wave the flag and throw it in somebody's face. This is just who I am, and I can't change the way the Lord made me, nor would I. I'm totally comfortable with who I am and I like my work.

And if by chance I don't get reelected, life is going to go on for me. There are a lot of people out there who are miserable. They'll be just as miserable after I'm gone. Life is good, you know. I have people on both sides who disagree with me, but at least they can't say I'm a hypocrite. I don't say one thing and do another.

I am not in Koering's district, so I can't vote for him in the next election cycle. And I know very little about him beyond this interview. But he strikes me as a stand-up guy and I was enormously impressed by the way he states his core principles and lets the chips fall where they may. I wish more politicians had his brand of candor and courage.