Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

I don’t want to necessarily defend Democrats for their inaction on gay rights issues. However, it’s wrong to merge complaints about them with complaints about HRC and other “gay leaders.” Fix the rot within gay political leadership before complaining about the politicians who’ve failed the cause.

I think Democrats would be more aggressive on gay issues if there was at least one recent ballot box win on gay issues. Prop 8 opponents managed to snatch defeat from the jaw of victory, 30 years after the triumph over Briggs. That set the tone for Obama and the Democrats’ apathy on the issue.

I watched gay friends dutifully attend some meaningless protest a week after the 2008 election. In Michigan. A fat lot of good that did anyone. I asked these friends if the protest organizers (or anyone else) had reached out to them before the election for campaign donations, to make phone calls, or even to go to California to campaign. No one had.

History repeated itself with the Maine vote. It’s a little hard to expect national politicians to step up and do the right thing when gay activists can’t close the deal in places like Maine and California. Again, I’m not excusing Obama and company, I’m just stating a political fact. I’m all for marriage equity, repealing DADT, etc, but gay rights activists need to get their shit together. Otherwise gay issues will never be legislative priorities.

Where is the nationwide TV campaign featuring gay former servicemembers? I hear plenty of rhetoric about “allowing these brave men and women serve their country,” but that’s an abstract argument. A gay ex-Marine talking to camera during a Wheel of Fortune commercial break actually drives that message home.

Gay voters should probably, for the moment, ignore gay rights issues when choosing candidates for office. Obviously write-off the true homophobes, but otherwise it doesn’t really matter. Until there’s dramatic changes at places like HRC, unless gay rights issues are framed, by gay rights activists, in bold and human terms designed to appeal to American notions of fairness and decency, there’s no reason for President Obama, et al to NOT disappoint on gay issues. Why should he burn political capital on issues so poorly framed by the very people who stand to benefit most from the change?

Look: we have massive polling majorities for ending the gay ban. There is no political risk in supporting it. Ditto employment discrimination which polls around 80 percent. As for marriage, I agree it’s a state issue, but the campaign in Maine was superb and we still lost narrowly. It’s a long battle and we only truly started two decades ago. This is to be expected. But through exactly the kinds of campagns and media my reader cites, we have already pushed marriage equality over 50 percent in the national polls and have full equality in five states and Washington DC. No social movement has achieved change so rapidly. And yet the Democratic party still treats us as if we are radioactive, and this president shows total indifference in public to our needs (apart from pukeinducing cocktail parties at the White House for Gay Dem Inc), and has allowed the military and the Republicans to determine the fate of the gay military ban. I fear my prediction that he will be firing gay servicemembers till the last day of his first term will be proven true. So forgive my anger. Another writes:

A suggestion about how you can help end DADT. Put out a call for bios and obits for fallen LGBT soldiers. I bet you will get some very interesting submissions, some current, some from Vietnam or even earlier. The Atlantic is a forum where these profiles will get the presentation and respect they deserve.

Another:

Would you please make a YouTube video for the “It Gets Better” project that Dan Savage did? You speak so eloquently on these things, and I know your voice could be exactly what a teenager needs to hear.

I’m flattered. My only problem is that I really wasn’t desperate as a gay kid. I was desperate and suicidal as a kid, but not because I was gay, which in my family was the least of my concerns. My only issues really emerged after I came out and felt the gay community had few places for someone like me – and had dumb arguments and left-wing agitprop instead of the powerful case we could have been making for our equality. But that’s not the same as those poor kids bullied and threatened and mocked for their gayness. It didn’t happen to me, even in an all-boys rugby-dominated high school, where I don’t think I ever experienced an anti-gay remark or hazing (unless I’ve blocked it out). They all thought I was just a nerd, and my nerdiness overwhelmed any of my visible gayness. In fact, I had great friendships with straight boys, loved my interaction with them, and felt totally at home among them. I’m not minimizing the pain of so many others and have tried to help by being public and with my advocacy and interviews etc. But I can’t fake a misery I didn’t feel.

Yesterday on his show, Glenn Beck sourced some anti-Fed comments to a dubious historian. No surprise there. But Graeme Wood helps explain just how abhorrent the source is:

Mullins was an open purveyor of blood libel: he claimed that Jews kidnap Christian children, ritually puncture their veins, and drink their blood as a restorative for their own degenerate bodies. During Pound's involuntary commitment in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington in the Fifties, Mullins visited him frequently, and under his direction, Mullins authored foundational texts in Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. Those theories have proved impressively durable. In addition to Glenn Beck's citation yesterday, Pat Robertson's books peddled variations on them in the 1980s, and elements of the Tea Party echo them now. (Short version: the Federal Reserve controls the world, and the UN is taking over the US via the New World Order.)

Mullins died in February at 86, and when I visited him in Staunton, Virginia, six years ago on assignment for The Jewish Daily Forward, he was already slowed by age, living in a creepy, dark rat-trap filled with religious icons, votive candles, and old newspapers. The wallpaper curled down off the wall in two-foot sections, and the chairs coughed up decades' worth of dust when we sat down.

The point isn't that Beck is an anti-Semite. There's no evidence for that charge whatsoever. It's that, whether he is a liar or a huckster or an earnest idiot, he regularly feeds his audience indefensibly dubious information (and never corrects it). But he's good for Hayek sales, so the conservative movement makes itself complicit in lending him legitimacy.

When I see disgusting ads like the GOP one in New York here; or when I hear some of the rhetoric coming from a Newt Gingrich, demonizing Islam in broad brush strokes as somehow evil or inherently violent or indistinguishable from al Qaeda, my mind returns to those days not so long ago when the Muslim chant "Allah-O-Akbar" rang from the rooftops in Tehran. I think of a day like this one. Or nights like the one captured below.

Yes, Mr Gingrich, Mrs Palin, Mr Giuliani, this too is Islam:

A reader writes:

You've pointed out twice now that "[n]ot a single prosecution of an anti-gay hate crime has occurred under the law in the year since it [the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009] was passed."  May I point out that, as a criminal statute, the Act can only operate prospectively, under the Ex Post Facto Clause of the Constitution?  As a former public defender, I'm aware that judging a statute by the number of prosecutions within a year of its enactment is a pretty bizarre metric, since only acts committed after passage are even arguably subject to prosecution under the Act.  Since you earlier noted that there are investigations pending of criminal acts which might result in charges under the Act, I think the ill-founded nature of this contention is self-evident.

By contrast, I think your complaint that "it took Obama over a year to begin a year-long Pentagon review. If he had acted sooner, the review would have been done in time for the vote" is not entirely divorced from reality, but is a bit naive.  Doesn't it make sense that President Obama would have wanted to forge relationships with the military brass prior to starting the review, in order to avoid the blatant, insubordinate–and successful!–sabotage that Bill Clinton was subject to?

You know, I admire the lucidity of "The Conservative Soul,"  the passion you've brought to your anti-torture campaign, and much you've written about Palin.   But I think that you're projecting responsibility for the villainy (no other word fits) of the GOP and its demonization of GLBTs onto a single man who is trying to coax a fractious party that has been in a defeatist crouch for decades into strong action.  He's not a god-king.  And your reaction is, I'm sorry to say, both over the top and helpful to the Party of No.

I will gladly report any prosecutions that occur in the future that clearly would not have occurred without the Hate Crimes Act. As my reader noted, there are several investigations in process and some may get somewhere. But this act was sold as a vital defense against gay-bashing. I call bullshit on that now as I did then. It was a fundraising tool for HRC primarily and a way for the Democrats to do nothing substantive for gay equality, except treating us as victims in need of their protection. Nonetheless, I promise to provide an annual update on prosecutions to measure its impact, along with data on anti-gay hate crimes, to see if it has any effect whatever on their incidence. As to the final point, where is there evidence that the president has done a single thing to "to coax a fractious party that has been in a defeatist crouch for decades into strong action"? I see none. No speeches defending gay equality, except to the pathetic tool of the Democrats, the Human Rights Campaign. No public support on marriage equality, which he formally opposes, even as a majority of the public backs it. He even prevented anyone in the administration from celebrating the end of the HIV travel ban before it was passed, so scared was he of Republican bigots. I know. I tried to report on the record about progress but was told shhhh – we might alert the right.

I don't think anyone can possibly accuse me or the Dish of excusing or ignoring the virulent and disgusting homophobia of the Christianist GOP. There is no comparison on the merits between their hate and contempt and the president's indifference and cowardice. But I refuse to have their bile held over my head as a reason to shut up about the Democrats' uselessness and this president's betrayal of almost every single promise he made about gay equality in the campaign.

A photo essay.

A reminder of the vast financial risks they take to save and improve lives – risks which so many refuse to acknowledge or credit.

Bryan Curtis's excellent review of Woodward's book is disturbing in its portrayal of how out of control David Petraeus is getting:

[Woodward] demonstrates convincingly that the men in uniform—that would be David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, and Mike Mullen, along with Bob Gates—dangled very few battle plans in front of Obama, and used bureaucratic jujitsu to make sure he didn’t see others. For example, Obama never had a fully fleshed-out proposal for sending fewer than 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan. And even the final proposal he crafted himself, lowering the military’s demands a tad. As Petraeus says, after being informed of a slight from Pennsylvania Avenue, “They’re fucking with the wrong guy.”

Jason Mazzone goes after the military, for its refusal simply to accept the end of DADT as something the broader public wants and the president has favored:

The President should not need to win “the support” of military personnel. And military officers should not be contradicting the President’s decision that repeal of DADT will not undermine the effectiveness of troops. Civilian control of the military means that the military doesn’t get to weigh in separately on issues of policy.

The canonization of Petraeus has got to stop. He follows in the footsteps of Colin Powell who mastered the art of Beltway schmoozing and press management. But at least Powell won a war where Petraeus has so far lost two (can anyone now believe, as Iraq descends into political chaos and increasing violence, that the surge was simply a face-saver to get most, but not all, of the US troops out, after failing to achieve the original war goals?).  

And the Palin meme – that somehow members of the military have some kind of special status in a civilian republic and their political views demand more respect than those of others – is just as repugnant.

We owe servicemembers immense respect and gratitude for their courage and service – but we also owe them – to honor the civilian democracy they serve – no more influence or status in the political arena than anyone else. The idea that the military is given an effective veto over a Congressional and presidential decision is a dangerous precedent. Truman would not have stood for it, and didn't. Neither did Eisenhower.

The left is just as guilty, with the whole, cheap "chicken-hawk" theme, as if a record of military service (or lack of it) is somehow in any way relevant to the merits or misjudgments of a politician's decisions on war and peace.

It is utterly irrelevant. This is a country run by civilians, whose elected offices are as valid regardless of their military experience, and the military's job is to take orders, to offer private and confidential military – not political – advice to their commander-in-chief. Their role after that in public is quite simple: to shut the fuck up.

The way in which Petraeus is leveraging his Iraq experience – an experience which, as every day reveals, ended in total failure except as a temporary face-saver for partial withdrawal – and his media clout to force an elected president into an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan is deeply disturbing. It's long since time we put these commanders and their enablers in their place.

(Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty.)

Felix Salmon sees the "tension, in this film, between relatively serious bike commuters, on the one hand, and slow hobbyists, on the other":

There’s safety in numbers, when it comes to cycling, and a similar phenomenon is likely to happen with regard to pedestrians and car drivers being increasingly conscious of bicyclists in their midst. Already, the First Avenue bike lane has reportedly cut injuries to all street users by 50%. But as the number of cyclists rises, the average speed of cyclists necessarily falls. Everybody thinks of northern European cities like Copenhagen as bicycling paradises — and they are. But if you’re biking around Copenhagen, you’re going to go a lot more slowly than if you’re biking the same distance in NYC.

A must-read from Clive. Money quote:

On taxes, it promises to "stop all job-killing tax hikes" — that is, to retain all of the Bush tax cuts– but says nothing about the comprehensive tax reform that will be needed to raise new revenues and balance the budget without avoidable damage to growth. The Pledge maintains the pretence that spending cuts can do all the necessary fiscal lifting — and even here it is slippery. It promises to "roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels", which seems fair enough. But it also promises "common-sense" exceptions for "seniors, veterans, and our troops". Those common-sense exceptions are the whole ball of wax. The idea that you can control public borrowing without higher taxes and by squeezing only non-defense discretionary spending is, I'm afraid, delusional.

Not delusional, I fear. Cynical. No one who cares about the debt should treat this document with anything but contempt. And, yes, Krugman is dead-on. The Republican party's current incarnation is a threat to fiscal sanity, to national security and to civil peace. It is unhinged. When Crook and Krugman and Libertarian David Boaz agree, take notice. David:

“They are continuing the problem that I think everybody in Washington, including Democrats, understands."

Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition:

“It’s a net increase in the deficit, because extending all of the tax cuts is a huge hit on the deficit, and they are not making anywhere near the magnitude of the spending cuts you would need to justify extending those tax cuts on a permanent basis.”