The Gay Debate

Some readers want my reax. I didn’t watch the thing in full. I don’t have Logo. I figure: if you’ve got Bravo, who needs a gay channel? But I did peruse YouTube and read various accounts. It was frustrating to read even someone like Ryan Sager perpetuating the idea that this was the first such debate. It wasn’t. It was more frustrating to hear the night described as a debate. It wasn’t. It was a series of interviews. Still, I thought the questions were mostly good ones, and Solmonese was tougher than I expected, even with his own candidate, Clinton. Etheridge was surprisingly good too.

My own sense, however, is that we haven’t moved the Democrats much in many years. They need and want gay money, so they will talk to us. But none of the leading candidates supports our civil equality in marriage, the Ground Zero of the movement. And, more frustrating, none will say why. If you’re for civil unions but not civil marriage, you need an argument. One is simply the semantic one that your commitment to the heterosexual meaning of the word trumps your understanding that gays are also family members and deserve not to be shunted into a "separate-but-equal" institution. But none of them will admit that. The other answer is that they do support equality in marriage but fear losing votes if they publicly say so. As president, of course, they have virtually no role in the matter – it’s for the states. But they’re scared of the Rove machine – still. So they can’t say that either. So they all seem illogical. You can say this: if any of them does believe in marriage equality, their conviction is not as strong as their calculation. I guess that tells you something even about a candidate like Obama. If one becomes president and the Democrats maintain the House and Senate, we may get the trivial (and unecessary) hate crimes act passed. I’m not hopeful for much else in the first four years. I think the gay movement should concentrate on supporting and building on marriage rights in the states, shrewdly backing and financing inclusive candidates, Republican and Democratic, and further engaging the under-30s, who will give us equality when they have their moment in the sun. Some no-brainer reforms – removing HIV as a bar to entering the US, for example – could also be pushed. Along with wartime suspension of DADT (they won’t abolish it in a first term – political post-traumatic stress disorder will strike again). 

The other aspect of the "debate" was the fact that no Republican candidates are prepared to make a similar case to gay voters. Gays apparently don’t exist for the GOP: a constituency they won’t touch, let alone appeal to. That’s bad for gays, for Republicans and for the country. But it’s the party Rove and Bush built: a party whose foundations are exclusionary and divisive.

What Happened?

The Cheney conundrum is intensified by this YouTube:

Scott Horton cites a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe:

"I read the statement that Brent Scowcroft made, where he said ‘I don’t recognize this Dick Cheney’ and thought ‘how true.’ I also knew and worked with Dick Cheney for years. He was alert, serious, sober and cautious. And nothing at all like this man who sits in the White House today. It’s enough to get one thinking about the ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ Something happened."

The obvious answer is 9/11. History will judge whether Cheney massively over-reacted.

Greenwald Interviews O’Hanlon

It’s well worth reading. Glenn rightly reminds us that Pollack and O’Hanlon were, like me, strong supporters of the war in the first place but, unlike me, also supporters of what I thought was the insufficient and too-late "surge" of troops this year. Then this:

But the far greater deceit involves the trip itself and the way it was represented – both by Pollack/O’Hanlon as well as the excited media figures who touted its significance and meaning. From beginning to end, this trip was planned, shaped and controlled by the U.S. military – a fact inexcusably concealed in both the Op-Ed itself and virtually every interview the two of them gave. With very few exceptions, what they saw was choreographed by the U.S. military and carefully selected for them.

Propaganda, in other words. For what?

The Other War

The NYT had a must-read on Afghanistan the other day. I caught up with it today. Hilzoy responds:

Some problems aren’t solved all at once; still, you can see points at which things turn slightly from despair towards hope, and then, if you’re lucky, a point at which the process of transforming some problem that has haunted the world for what seems like forever into history starts to look irreversible.

Afghanistan had been one of those problems for decades. We weren’t in a position to do much about it earlier — naively, I believed that you don’t just go around invading countries out of the blue, ha ha ha — but suddenly we actually had a really good reason to invade, and there we were, the Taliban was in flight, the people seemed overjoyed, and I thought: dear God, we are actually going to do try to right by Afghanistan, whose people have suffered so much for so long. And back in that era of lost hopes, what gave me real confidence that we would do our best to actually help Afghanistan to transform itself from a failed state into a normal, functioning society was that for once, making a serious effort to do this wasn’t just a wild aspiration. It was feasible, it was the right thing to do, but most importantly, as far as its actually happening was concerned, it was clearly, obviously, overwhelmingly in our interest.

It still breaks my heart just thinking about it.