The Dish

“It could not have been clearer if it had quoted from the Bible,” – John C. Green, a University of Akron professor who studies religion and politics. According to the Washington Post, “Green described one piece of mail from the Bush campaign that featured a beautiful church and a traditional nuclear family. It was headlined, ‘George W. Bush shares your values. Marriage. Life. Faith.'” That’s how they did it. The war was not the issue. Gays were.

“Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Have mercy. Have mercy!” Those were the last words of Theo Van Gogh, a fearless liberal critic of traditional Islam’s brutal treatment of women, as Jihadist thugs murdered him on an Amsterdam street. Mercy? From these maniacs? Van Gogh was shot several times and then had his throat cut. The culprits were a gang of Islamists:

Piet Hein Donner, the Dutch justice minister, said the suspect “acted out of radical Islamic fundamentalist convictions” and added that he had contacts with a group that was under surveillance by the Dutch secret service. The suspect is allegedly friends with Samir Azzouz, an 18-year-old Muslim of Moroccan origin awaiting trial on charges of planning a terrorist attack against a nuclear reactor and Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, NOS Dutch national television reported. Azzouz was part of a group arrested in October 2003 but released for lack of evidence. He was re-arrested in June.

This is a useful reminder of the danger that has not gone away. Will Europe’s secular liberals condemn it? And can Europe face up to what is happening within its own admirably tolerant society?

STAT OF THE DAY: Gays: Kerry 77, Bush 23. Jews: Kerry 74, Bush 25. You can hear the ghost of Jim Baker now, can’t you?

Another small loss for the coalition in Iraq. Poland is also phasing its contribution out.

TWO OPENINGS: There are two vacancies looming in the world: Chief Justice Rehnquist and Yassir Arafat. Obviously, I don’t mean to compare them substantively, but the president’s response to each will be instructive as to his future course in the next few years. A vacancy on the Supreme Court will lead to a revealing new pick. Will the president cater to his Christian-right base and nominate someone steadfastly opposed to abortion rights and gay rights? You bet he will. I cannot imagine him choosing a Souter or a Kennedy, especially now after his convincing win. Arafat’s looming death suggests another choice. If a less noxious Palestinian leader emerges, will Bush use the shift to become more engaged in the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a means to encourage the U.N. or other European leaders to play a more conciliatory role in Iraq? Will he tilt against Sharon? Again I doubt it very much. The great mystery now is whether this president will use a second term to moderate somewhat or to forge ahead to the right. My bet is on the latter.

I’m off to the West Coast for the season finale of Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO this Friday night. I’m on with comedian D.L. Hughley and Noam Chomsky. God help me. Thanks also for the incredible readership over the past two days. Our previous traffic high was around 150,000 daily visits. Yesterday, we hit 330,000, and today something in the same ball-park. I remember blogging the last election (yes, I was blogging before it was so cool) and was thrilled to get 10,000 visits. I’d still be thrilled to get 10,000. But thirty times that number is sweet. Blogging really comes alive at times like these – because we’re all going through these things together in real time. Thanks for being there. As someone once remarked, it makes it all ress ronery.

TWO EMAILS: Reading my in-tray today has been an experience. It’s not just that I’m tired from being up all night. It’s that I didn’t expect the emotions I felt today. And readers have chimed in – well over a thousand emails. Yes, many have focused on the gay issue, and, given what has just happened, and the strategy that underpinned it, why not? Heading out to dinner last night, in a mainly gay neighborhood, I was struck by how many people looked shell-shocked, frightened, grim. Here’s an email I got minutes before I left that helps provide some context:

“I wonder if you noticed that yesterday all eleven states that considered the question of gay marriage voted to ban it. ALL ELEVEN. I think this sends a very clear message — true Americans do not like your kind of homosexual deviants in our country, and we will not tolerate your radical pro-gay agenda trying to force our children to adopt your homosexual lifestyle. You should be EXTREMELY GRATEFUL that we even let you write a very public and influential blog, instead of suppressing your treasonous views (as I would prefer). But I’m sure someone like yourself would consider me just an “extremist” that you don’t need to worry about. Well you are wrong — I’m not just an extremist, I am a real American, and you should be worried because eleven states yesterday proved that there are millions more just like me who will not let you impose your radical agenda on our country.”

Then I got this:

“I’ll tell you, being a 16 year-old gay kid in Michigan just got a hell of a lot worse. When I woke up this morning and saw the anti gay marriage proposal had passed, I was shocked. I realized the situation I’m faced with everyday in school – the American people have just shown my classmates that it’s perfectly fine to discriminate. A direct quote from a ‘friend’ at school today: ‘It’s so cool that all these states just told all the faggots to eat shit and get the hell out…’ Because of the above events, I am at a crossroads … I’m the youngest card-carrying Republican in the county, and am constantly asked to get others involved for Bush/Cheney. Herein lies a problem, I can’t bring myself to do that. Bush totally lost all my support (I know I can’t vote – but I make a hell of a campaigner) when he supported the amendment to ban gay marriages, and I felt bad that in straying from Bush, I was abandoning Cheney, who I have an amazing amount of respect for. Many would say go Democrat… but I can’t do that (that signals the absence of a spine up here), and in the next year, I’m considering dropping my membership to the party. Especially this year, despite how undercut and violated I feel as a gay person, I couldn’t be happier that I am. I’ve got a stronger will because of it, and will lead my life just as strongly.

How do you stay calm and upbeat after two emails like that?

Kerry won the center and the left. Over to Noam:

Not only did Kerry win by an 86-13 margin among self-described liberals, he also won by a 55-45 margin among self-described moderates. So how’d Bush pull it off? He won 84-15 among self-described conservatives, and, more importantly, he made sure conservatives comprised a much bigger chunk of the electorate than they did in 2000. (Conservatives comprised about 34 percent of the electorate yesterday, versus 29 percent in 2000 — a huge shift, raw numbers-wise.) Anyone anticipating a conciliatory second Bush term should stop and consider how much Bush owes his base.

There you have the Rove strategy in a nutshell. If the ideological demographics had stayed the same as they had been in 2000, Kerry might have won. Two other small points: all those predictions of gay marriage moving African-Americans toward the Republicans didn’t pan out. All those predictions of the youth vote going for Kerry did pan out – but they were trounced by seniors shifting to Bush (I think the gay issue mattered there as well). The GOP’s weak spot is that they aren’t winning over the young; and that they won’t have gays to kick around for ever. I notice that in California and Massachusetts, marriage equality candidates all won big. The polarization continues. Let federalism work.

Not too encouraging:

The Bush administration announced Wednesday that it will run out of maneuvering room to manage the government’s massive borrowing needs in two weeks, putting more pressure on Congress to raise the debt ceiling when it convenes for a special post-election session.

Oh, well.

MARY’S BACK! With her wife on the stage with the Cheneys and Bushes.

WAR WAS NOT THE ISSUE: I have to say it’s almost funny that for the past few months, I’ve been harangued about the selfishness of gays who put their issues ahead of pressing matters like the war, and yet the exit polls show something rather different. The gay vote for Bush was – amazingly – only slightly down on 2000. Many of them obviously thought the war or the economy was pre-eminent. But for evangelicals, the issue of “moral values” trumped the war! It wasn’t about the war on terror for the Bush base. It was about the war on gay unions. Oh, the ironies.

“To hell with being gracious, EAT SHIT SULLIVAN! Despite all your oh so noble commentary today, when things started getting rough, you bailed. I hope Soros eased you pain with a little green.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “I am a 25 year-old gay man, and I can’t even describe how saddened I am today by the re-election of President Bush and the numerous state amendments banning gay marriage that were passed on election day. I’m not really angry… just very sad and afraid. I don’t know what country I live in anymore. I thought this was the land of freedom. I thought I was free to pursue my own happiness. But right now I feel like my country hates me. What is going on?”

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “So, George W. Bush won. And he’s done so by a solid margin. The Democrats’ attempted coup managed to last all of eight hours. Not only is the President the first candidate to win a majority of the vote in a Presidential Election since 1988, but he also won more popular votes than any other candidate in history. The Democrats spent months telling us that high voter turnout would equal a win for them but, as it turns out, when 60% of the electorate showed up at the polls it translated into a Bush lead of nearly four million votes. In short: take that, you sons of bitches.
The Democrats are now talking about how this is a signal that Bush should ‘bring the country together’. Translated into American, this means ‘now that you’ve won, you should surrender to us.’ The hell with that. We’ve won. Winning means not having to say you’re sorry… Those who didn’t support Bush can go and perform a certain anatomically impossible act. They lost, now they can sit in the back of the bus. Thank God Almighty.” – Adam Yoshida, calling it as he sees it, on his popular blog.

That’s Bill Bennett’s conclusion. He won’t be the only one. What we’re seeing, I think, is a huge fundamentalist Christian revival in this country, a religious movement that is now explicitly political as well. It is unsurprising, of course, given the uncertainty of today’s world, the devastating attacks on our country, and the emergence of so many more liberal cultures in urban America. And it is completely legitimate in this country for such views to be represented in public policy, however much I disagree with them. But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful. Our safety valve must be federalism. We have to live and let live. As blue states become more secular, and red states become less so, the only alternative to a national religious war is to allow different states to pursue different options. That goes for things like decriminalization of marijuana, abortion rights, stem cell research and marriage rights. Forcing California and Mississippi into one model is a recipe for disaster. Federalism is now more important than ever. I just hope that Republican federalists understand this. I fear they don’t.

Here’s an email with which I concur entirely:

I didn’t vote for Bush for lots of reasons. But it seems to me that maybe the result, much as it was not what I wanted, will be good for the country. We are in the middle of a war whose outcome is very much in doubt. We have a fiscal policy that may or may not prove successful. Issues that have seemed remote to many like abortion and the Patriot Act’s definition of rights and privacy are likely to become more immediate over the next few years. Had we changed leadershop now, it would have been difficult to assign accountability, for good or bad, for these policies and decisions. I always feared, in fact, that Kerry would have had little chance of success in the face of a conservative chorus of “everything was going in the right direction in Iraq when we handed it over to you”. Whatever the result, over thee next few years we all will be better able to asses the success or failure of many things that are unfinished now, and hold one team accountable.

Exactly. My main fear with a Kerry victory was that the hard right would never have given him a chance in the war, and would have savaged him as commander-in-chief in order to pave the way for a victory in 2008. Ratcheting the country back to fiscal sanity would also have been a thankless task. Now, Bush will face the consequences of his own policies and we will be able to judge him on that. He has no excuses any more. I hope he succeeds in Iraq, in reforming social security. But no one should give him an easy pass if he fails.

I’ve been trying to think of what to say about what appears to be the enormous success the Republicans had in using gay couples’ rights to gain critical votes in key states. In eight more states now, gay couples have no relationship rights at all. Their legal ability to visit a spouse in hospital, to pass on property, to have legal protections for their children has been gutted. If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated by strangers. I’m not surprised by this. When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses. But it is deeply, deeply dispiriting nonetheless. A lot of gay people are devastated this morning, and terrified. We have seen, and not for the first time, how using fear of a minority can be so effective a tool in building a political movement. The single most important issue for Republican voters, according to exit polls, was not the war on terror or Iraq or the economy. It was “moral values.” Karl Rove understood the American psyche better than I did. By demonizing gay couples, the Republicans were able to bring in whole swathes of new anti-gay believers into their party. With new senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, two of the most anti-gay politicians in America, we can only brace ourselves for what is now coming.

FEDERALISM WORKS: At the same time, gays can still appeal to the fair-minded center. After fanning the flames of fear for much of the year, the president himself recently came out in favor of civil unions. That puts him at odds with the initiatives passed so easily across the country. I do not believe a majority exists for denying gay couples legally protected relationships. The national exit polls showed that 27 percent support marriage rights, 37 percent support civil unions and only 35 percent want to keep gay couples from having any rights at all. There are still many states where it is safe to be a gay couple or an openly gay person. We have the right to marry in one state, and in that state, pro-equality legislators were all re-elected handily. In California, we are on the brink of having almost-equality under the law. Around the civilized world, gay relationships are increasingly accepted as worthy of dignity and respect. The passage of so many anti-gay amendments in so many states reduces the need, by any rational measure, for a federal amendment that would scar the Constitution with discrimination. We need therefore to be even more emphatic about the need for a federalist response to an issue best left to the states. If we can avoid the FMA, we can live to fight another day.

STAND TALL: But one more thing is important. The dignity of our lives and our relationships as gay people is not dependent on heterosexual approval or tolerance. Our dignity exists regardless of their fear. We have something invaluable in this struggle: the knowledge that we are in the right, that our loves are as deep and as powerful and as God-given as their loves, that our relationships truly are bonds of faith and hope that are worthy, in God’s eyes and our own, of equal respect. Being gay is a blessing. The minute we let their fear and ignorance enter into our own souls, we lose. We have gained too much and come through too much to let ourselves be defined by others. We must turn hurt back into pride. Cheap, easy victories based on untruth and fear and cynicism are pyrrhic ones. In time, they will fall. So hold your heads up high. Do not give in to despair. Do not let the Republican party rob you of your hopes. This is America. Equality will win in the end.