Reason Magazine - Topics > Gay/Lesbian Issues

'I may be straight, but I'm not narrow'

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:05:00 EDT

The live feed from today's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" hearing just ended. The curious can watch it here. (Warning, this thing went on forever: 2h35.)

The hearing went better than I expected, insofar as the Democratic witnesses, Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, retired Army Maj. Gen. Vance Coleman, and Marine Staff Serg. Eric Alva utterly outspoke Army Sgt. Maj. Brian Jones and Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, both of whom testitified (poorly, and in some places, damn near incoherently) on behalf of Republicans.

Donnelly managed, somehow, to answer every question from both the right and the left with, "Sexual urges would prevent unit cohesion." Jones, when asked whether or not he thought homosexuality was immoral, replied, "No, but if I'm 6'8" and I want to be a fighter pilot, I can't." Both think a gay-friendly military would bring on the end of the world.

As this hearing evidenced, the social conservative arguments for preserving DADT, letting the Department of Defense write its own policy, or banning gay service, range from paper-thin to non-existent. The only obstacle I see to passage of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act—the bill that would repeal DADT and implement a non-discrimination policy—is good ole' fashion homophobia.

Hopefully the 111th Congress makes repealing DADT a top priority, so that our military can get back to risking the lives of straights and gays in pointless wars.

John Cloud at Time.com wrote a great recap of the policy, and ended with this:

Do we want a military where Americans are not forced to lie about their most important emotional bonds?

I wrote about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" here.

Don't Mourn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

On July 23, the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House of Representatives will debate the future of the policy known to most Americans as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." As committee chair, Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.) is in for a busy day. The law, which was mostly intended to protect gay and lesbian soldiers from discrimination, is complicated and self-defeating. And the social conservatives who necessitated the policy aren't backing down.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has two parts. No one, regardless of rank, can ask or require a soldier to reveal anything regarding his or her sexual orientation. That's the simple part of the policy. More complicated is the "Don't Tell" clause, which promises to discharge any "member [who] has said that he or she is a homosexual or bisexual, or made some other statement that indicates a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts."

I had my first and only experience with the unintentional absurdities of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" during my very short stint in the Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC). I was sitting across the desk from Army Captain Bart Johnke, then a professor of military science and head of the ROTC program at Stetson University, reviewing my 6-year contract. Captain Johnke walked me through a checklist: Have you ever committed a felony? No. Have you ever used a mind-altering drug other than marijuana? No. Have you used marijuana in the last three years? Ye—er, no. And then Captain Johnke paused.

"Here we go," he said. "We don't need to talk about this next section. Just read this bit here"—he pointed to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," clause. "Remember what it says, and we'll move on to the next section."

I read the "Don't tell" section and wanted to ask Captain Johnke if sarcastic demands for fellatio from fellow male cadets revealed a "propensity to engage in homosexual acts," but he cut me off before I could elaborate on my query.

"Listen," he said. "I can't answer your questions and you can't tell me anything. If you tell me something regarding sexual orientation, no matter what you plan to say," here he raised his eyebrows until they blended with his flat top. "I can't let you in. The policy is very clear on that. So let's move on."

Enacted at the behest of President Bill Clinton, the Military Personnel Eligibility Act of 1993—"Don't Ask, Don't Tell's" official name—was hailed by civil rights advocates as a victory for gays and lesbians. But in order to implement Clinton's policy, Democrats found themselves bowing to congressional Republicans and banning openly gay soldiers.

Even opponents of an inclusive military point out that "Don't Ask" doesn't work. Elaine Donnelly at the Center for Military Readiness (an advocate of a "straight" military) argues that, in some cases, the 1993 law actually makes it easier to get rid of gays:

[T]he 1993 homosexual conduct law allows a military person to "rebut the presumption" of homosexual conduct, but only under narrow circumstances—i.e., a service member says or does something entirely out of character while intoxicated, or to escape military service. In general, however: "Discharging soldiers based solely upon their self-identification as a homosexual without additional evidence of homosexual conduct avoided the necessity for intrusive investigations and inquiries into the soldiers' sexual practices."

Thus, thanks to the "Don't Tell" clause, the military can boot gays more easily than before, under the auspices of sparing them from "intrusive investigations." In turn, the "Don't Ask" part of the policy rewards assumption over inquiry.

In the 15 years since the bill's passage, 12,000 service members have been discharged for refusing to abide by the policy. Granted, those numbers have been steadily decreasing in step with the waning popularity of the Iraq war, but gay rights advocates shouldn't confuse utility with acceptance. Just because half as many openly gay soldiers were booted in 2006 as 2001 doesn't mean the culture has changed. In fact, according to a recent Military Times poll, only 31 percent of active duty personnel think gays should be allowed to openly serve, while 57 percent think they should not. And the numbers aren't much different in the reserves, where 32 percent approve and 54 percent disapprove, or in the ranks of the retired, where 30 percent approved of gay service, and 60 percent disagreed.

Those numbers suggest that there's more to recent reports of openly gay soldiers going unreprimanded than gay rights activists would like to believe. Rather than a shift to liberal inclusiveness, the likely explanation is the reality of wartime: Officers need every warm body they can get. The return to a peacetime military will almost certainly bring a resurgence in career-minded enlistees, as well as less pressure on officers to overlook "undesirables" in order to maintain an effective fighting force.

Underneath the policy is the theory that gay troops strain the social order of the military. But the growing numbers of openly gay troops provides strong evidence that gay soldiers can perform their duties alongside straight soldiers in a cohesive unit. Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Clinton and a former opponent of open service, has since changed his tune: "I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces."

According to the Washington Blade, Rep. Davis has more on her mind than doing away with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Davis recently proposed the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, which would replace "Don't Ask" with a non-discrimination policy. The bill has widespread support among Democrats, and with a publicity push from Wednesday's hearing, could potentially get enough support to make it to the Senate. Such a bill would prevent the discharge of qualified soldiers, such as Arabic linguists, while vindicating the unknown number of soldiers who risk their lives "for freedom," yet are forced to hide their sexual orientation.

Mike Riggs is reason's 2008 Burton C. Gray Memorial intern.

Is the Price of Freedom the Closing of Lesbian Bars?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:20:00 EDT

Via the interesting and entertaining website NY Barfly comes this NY Times tale of the cost of social progress: Rubyfruit Bar and Grill, a 14-year-old establishment catering to lesbians is closing because the closet just isn't as full in these Sodomite end of days:

"Back then in 1994 there wasn't this liberation yet for lesbian women, so it became a haven with private, intimate dinners, great wines, a place to hold hands and feel comfortable being out and having dinner," said Rubyfruit's owner, Debra C. Fierro, who told customers of her decision to close the business at a private event last Monday, then publicly announced her decision over the weekend. "Here we are in 2008, where they no longer need to have their own place. They can go anywhere and do whatever they want. It's kind of a good thing, I guess."

More here.

Rita Mae Brown's groundbreaking novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, on sale here.

California Gay Marriage Redux

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:06:00 EDT

Columnist Ron Hart on gay marriage in California and the liberal and conservative responses to same:

If your hate of gays is religious based, then you need to examine the part of the Constitution that gives you your rights to pursue your beliefs. You are free to choose your religion. You are free to practice it as you see fit as long as it does not harm others. What is not sensible is for any one group to codify its particular religious beliefs into law. It is certainly the right for a church to forbid such gay activity in the church (or in the case of the Catholic Church to make them priests), but it is not its right to impose its interpretation of the Bible as civil law.
Liberals have to stop trying to legislate from the bench. Conservatives, who used to be about liberty and individual responsibility until they lost their way, have to put their personal and religious feelings aside. Back when it appealed to me, the GOP was for less government intrusion and more freedom. Both Parties need to rethink what they have become.

More here.

Let the Gaymes Begin

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:02:00 EDT

Ed Brayton of the terrific blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars has the find of the day, an hilarious goof from OneNewsNow, the news-ish publication of the American Family Association (AFA). AFA apparently has implemented a policy of substituting "homosexual" whenever the word "gay" appears in wire stories that appear on its website.

That resulted in a fantastic write-up of this weekend's Olympic track and field trials, which were dominated by sprinter Tyson Gay. AFA has since corrected the article, but before they did, it read like juicy, possibly libelous gay sports porn. A few excerpts, courtesy of Brayton:

Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.
His time of 9.68 seconds at the U.S. Olympic trials Sunday doesn't count as a world record, because it was run with the help of a too-strong tailwind. Here's what does matter: Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice he's certainly someone to watch in Beijing.
"It means a lot to me," the 25-year-old Homosexual said. "I'm glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me."
[...]
Wearing a royal blue uniform with red and white diagonal stripes across the front, along with matching shoes, all in a tribute to 1936 Olympic star Jesse Owens, Homosexual dominated the competition. He started well and pulled out to a comfortable lead by the 40-meter mark.
This time, he kept pumping those legs all the way through the finish line, extending his lead. In Saturday's opening heat, Homosexual pulled way up, way too soon, and nearly was caught by the field, before accelerating again and lunging in for fourth place.
[...]
After the race, Homosexual and Dix looked at each other and slapped palms, then hugged.

They Blame Gay Marriage

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:47:00 EDT

Sens. Larry "Wide Stance" Craig and David "Diaper Boy"* Vitter have signed on to co-sponsor yet another federal bill that would amend the Constitution define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Dan Sweeney at the Huffington Post thinks this is hypocrisy. I disagree. Vitter and Craig are clearly victims, here. As National Review's Stanley Kurtz has warned us, once the gays start marrying, it will set off a tidal wave of temptation, causing even the most robustly heterosexual men to consider cheating on their wives.

Craig and Vitter are clearly victims of Massachusetts legalizing gay marriage several years ago. We can't expect them to take personal responsibility for what they did. Society made them do it. In sponsoring this bill, they're merely trying to spare other straight, conservative politicians from falling victim to the chain-reaction of debauchery set off by allowing, for example, these two sinners to exchange vows. Craig and Vitter are heroes, not hypocrites.

(*allegedly!)

Golden State of Bliss

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:11:00 EDT

The L.A. Times has an interesting blog full of reported snippets from this week's historic gay marrying in California, my favorite of which might be this tale of the first gay couple to be married in the great military town of San Diego:

[Bob] Lehman, a former Marine, and [Tom] Felkner were married by Lehman's brother, Jeff, a retired Marine.
"I'm a Marine. I like to do things first," said Bob Lehman.

Link via Tony Pierce.

The Gay Science

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:14:00 EDT

The gay blogosphere is heralding the results of a new study from the Karolinska Institute that provides even more evidence that sexual orientation is biological, as "the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait."

According to the study, gay men's brains resemble those of straight women, and gay women's brains resemble those of straight men. But while victories like California warrant popping the cork on some champagne, this occasion is far more ambiguous.

Blogger Breaktheterror leads his post on the study by calling it something that the "Religious Right never, ever, ever wants you to see," but the truth is exactly the opposite. Opponents of gay rights have been steadily losing ground in the political fight to maintain a moralistic hetero-hegemony, and they're adapting their culture war strategies to the scientific frontier.

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has been pushing the anti-gay rights movement in this direction for over a year. In an essay published in March 2007, Mohler called for a revision of the Baptist Church's stance on interference in the genetic development of embryos, for one reason only:

"If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin."

The Karolinka Institute's study suggests that sexual orientation might result from too much or too little exposure to androgen in the womb, suggesting to some that it might be changeable using hormone therapy.

So, congrats to gays and lesbians. According to science, you're hardwired to prefer members of the same sex. I'm genuinely glad to hear it. But be mindful of the the ugly history of the use and abuse of science to justify persecution of gays, and tread warily.

Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey responded to Albert Mohler here last year.

First, They Came for Michael Medved. And I Didn't Speak Up, Because Michael Medved Is an Enormous Douche

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:46:00 EDT

Across the street from its massive Holocaust memorial, Berlin recently opened up a modest memorial to the approximately 10,000 homosexuals killed by Hitler. Such "moral equivalence" has Michael Medved all hot and bothered:

This commemoration follows a longstanding, misleading attempt to depict homosexuals as prime targets of Hitler. In fact, even historical material released with the memorial noted only “an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men deported to concentration camps” –and by no means all of them were killed. While homosexuals surely outnumbered the less-than-one-percent of the German population that was Jewish, Jewish victims of Nazi death camps outnumbered estimated gay victims by more than 500 to 1. Persecution of any group deserves condemnation and remembrance, but it’s wrong to exaggerate the extent of victimization for politically correct P.R. purposes.

The infamous Paragraph 175 of the Reichstag Code also allowed for the castration of thousands more homosexuals. But let's have a look at this memorial that Medved says is indicative of efforts to "depict homosexuals as prime targets of Hitler," over Jews. Here's an aerial shot of the main Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It consists of 2,711 stone slabs. For comparison, note the size of the memorial next to the people walking around the outside of it:

Here's a photo of the new homosexual memorial, which consists of a single concrete slab located across the street:

Heather Has Two Mommies and a Daddy

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:05:00 EDT

A U.K. research team is making serious progress in the production of three-parent embryos. A few three-parented children already walk among us, the product of some work done in the late 1990s. But the process was banned by the Food and Drug Administration shortly thereafter. Research continues in the U.K.

The goal is to prevent children inheriting a rare group of serious diseases caused by faulty mitochondria, the powerhouses in our cells, [which are inherited from the mother only]. Mitochondrial diseases affect at least 1 in 8000 people, probably more, and there are no treatments.

Here's how it works:

The procedure would involve fertilising a woman's egg by in-vitro fertilisation outside the body and transplanting the fertilised nucleus to an egg from another woman which has had its nucleus removed.
Any child born following implantation of such an embryo would have cells containing a nucleus with genes from both parents, and mitochondria from a woman other than their mother.

So while a certain stripe of social conservatives are wringing their hands and fretting about the possibility that gay marriage might open the door for polyamory, scientists are on the verge of assembling babies with three biological parents. (Most of the genetic material will be from the two parents of the first fertilized egg, of course, mitochondria have only a smidge of genetic material. Still...)

I can't help but feel that this whole thing is just an elaborate joke on the Leon Kasses and Stanley Kurtzes of the world.

Goldwater Unfiltered

mccarthydp@gmail.com (Daniel McCarthy) — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Pure Goldwater, edited by Barry M. Goldwater Jr. and John W. Dean, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 416 pages, $27.95

Even though the names on the cover of Pure Goldwater are those of Barry Goldwater Jr. (son of the senator) and John W. Dean (military academy friend of Barry Jr. and later a key Watergate figure), this book is not written by either of them. In fact, it’s that rarest of artifacts within the vast body of literature by and about the 1964 presidential candidate—a book that, unlike more famous works such as The Conscience of a Conservative, was actually written by Sen. Barry Goldwater himself. Well, sort of.

Starting in 1939, when Barry Jr. was born, Goldwater pere intermittently kept a private journal. At first the idea was that the stray thoughts he recorded might be of some use to his son: a guide to business matters in case Goldwater died before his offspring could learn the family trade of managing a chain of Arizona department stores. From the beginning, though, Goldwater included much more than just business advice. He filled the journal with his observations and feelings about the land and people of Arizona. He recorded his experiences as a pilot in World War II. Most important for history, he put down his inner thoughts about his political career: 28 years in the U.S. Senate, interrupted by the most influential failed presidential bid in American history.

Goldwater’s 1964 campaign transformed America more profoundly than many a successful White House run. It propelled the conservative movement into national politics (putting to rout the GOP’s big-government Rockefeller wing) and won the senator a place second only to Ronald Reagan in conservatives’ hearts. Not a few libertarians got their start in the 1964 campaign as well. If they sometimes blanched at Goldwater’s saber-rattling Cold War stances, they nonetheless admired his anti-socialist, small-government rhetoric, which was backed up—not always, but often enough—by his Senate votes.

Goldwater was for liberty, as he conceived of it. “Our country, of course, was born on the very simple idea that freedom is our only cause,” he wrote in his journal, “and that freedom was not given to us by government.” In another entry, he declared, “The American economic system could only work well, and at its best, when it was unhampered by government and was allowed to be controlled only by the marketplace.… Thus, the core of my economic philosophy is the free market system—when it is working as it should.”

John Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr. have excerpted the journal and packaged their selections with a smattering of Goldwater’s letters, speeches, and other literary remains. Pure Goldwater is so called because it presents Goldwater’s own words, unscripted and (mostly) unpolished. The book also includes lengthy passages from Goldwater’s testimony in the 1968 libel suit he brought against the journalist Ralph Ginzburg, who in 1964 had published a psychiatric survey that purported to find the senator paranoid, sexually insecure, suicidal, and “grossly psychotic.” (Goldwater won the suit, although the jury awarded damages that covered only his legal fees.) In their introduction, Dean and Goldwater Jr. describe Pure Goldwater as “a scrap book of important thoughts; it is more nuggets than narrative.”

That’s all too true. Goldwater’s journal doesn’t cover every key period of his life; there is virtually nothing in it about the 1964 campaign, for example. Dean and Goldwater Jr. do not plug this astonishing gap with much supplemental material: There are just two items here from 1964, a letter and a press statement, both of them complaining about the media’s biased reporting. For the rest of the story, the editors suggest books like What Happened to Goldwater?, by Goldwater adviser Stephen Shadegg, and A Glorious Disaster, by campaign treasurer J. William Middendorf II. As abundant as the literature about the ’64 race may be, that campaign is a hell of a thing to omit from any book about Barry Goldwater.

Despite the fragmentary nature of the journals, a bare-bones narrative does emerge. Pure Goldwater opens with a 1923 letter the 14-year-old Goldwater wrote to Thomas Edison telling the inventor about his interests in radios and electricity—interests that would prove to be lifelong. Selections from later recollections fill in the picture of Goldwater’s youth: his work in the family department store as a boy; his father’s death in 1929, which led the 20-year-old Goldwater to abandon his studies at the University of Arizona and return to work; his marriage in 1934 to Peggy Johnson, a young woman he met in the department store. The journal itself begins in 1938, when Goldwater was 29. Around the same time, he began writing guest editorials for the Phoenix Gazette, which reveal a confident young businessman adamantly opposed to the New Deal. “The worst thing about your labor plan,” Goldwater wrote in an op-ed addressed directly to Franklin Roosevelt, “has been that you have turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions the future of the working man. Witness the chaos they are creating in the eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital.” That’s pure Goldwater all right.

The early journal entries are less polemical, more personal. In 1939 Goldwater was glad when he could get away from business and politics, escaping into a weeks-long tour of the Arizona desert. Several sources (not just Ralph Ginzburg) have suggested that Goldwater suffered a nervous breakdown before embarking on this desert odyssey. Maybe it was nothing as dramatic as that, but in his journal Goldwater writes of getting himself “into such a stew that this trip became a necessity.” In 1941 Goldwater, who had been an Army reservist since 1930, enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and a dozen journal entries from 1943 tell of his flight across the Atlantic from Delaware to Scotland by way of Greenland and Iceland in a single-engine P-47, part of an operation to fly fighters to Britain. Goldwater didn’t see combat, but his trans-Atlantic jaunt and later Air Corps service in Asia had risks enough of their own.

After the war, Goldwater launched his career in politics, getting elected to the Phoenix City Council in 1949, managing the successful gubernatorial campaign of John Pyle the following year, and defeating Democratic Sen. Ernest McFarland, the Senate majority leader, in 1952. A 1949 journal entry expresses Goldwater’s belief that campaigning and governing could be, and should be, “clean”: “I think…that politics can be governed by the same set of laws or rules that govern our actions towards each other. I believe that things can be done outright and not on the sly cloak and dagger treatment politics have always carried. I think that people who work under [city] politicians, the clerks, the police, the engineers and all the others, they will work for men and women that they admire and trust much better than for those they fear and distrust.”

“Clean politics” meant, among other things, that in 1964 Goldwater would not make a campaign issue out of Lyndon Johnson aide Walter Jenkins, who was arrested for homosexual activity in a YMCA bathroom. In the 1980s, the cause of clean politics led Goldwater to call for strict campaign spending limits; he even went so far as to propose a constitutional amendment to get around the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that Congress could not place limits on federal campaign spending. “The Court held that such a campaign lid is an invasion of the opportunity of individuals and organizations to exercise free speech,” he said in a 1983 Senate floor speech included in Pure Goldwater. “My answer is that we should try again.… The success of our national experiment in self-rule is on the line.” That’s not to say Goldwater would have seen eye to eye with his Senate successor, John McCain, on campaign finance. For one thing, Goldwater opposed public financing of elections, warning “it could lead to a loss of all freedom, with the government gaining power to manipulate elections.”

Clean politics is not a theme anyone would associate with Richard Nixon, but Nixon had campaigned loyally for Goldwater in 1964, and Goldwater returned the favor in 1968 and 1972. But the senator brooded extensively on the 37th president, well before Watergate. “Nixon was the most prevalent subject in his private journal,” Dean and Goldwater Jr. note, “suggest[ing] that Richard Nixon was something of a puzzle to Goldwater, which he continued to work on until he gave up in disgust.”

Goldwater was frustrated by President Nixon’s reluctance to consult him for advice. Whenever the two did meet, Goldwater always told Nixon the same thing: The president had to rid the State Department and other government agencies of Kennedy and Johnson holdovers who were preventing Nixon from implementing conservative policies. Nixon, in turn, would always tell Goldwater that he wanted to meet with him more regularly, but he never did.

By the time the Watergate scandal erupted, Goldwater’s patience with Nixon had frayed. At first he blamed the press and Nixon’s staff for the affair, but he soon came to suspect Nixon as well. He wondered in his journal whether Nixon had engineered the downfall of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, who resigned after being accused of taking bribes. “Many of us in Washington have felt for some time that someone was out to get the vice president,” he wrote. “That someone could well be the president of the United States wanting to get rid of Agnew so he could replace him with either [Texas Sen. John] Connally or [former New York Gov. Nelson] Rockefeller…as the person to succeed him.”

Still, as late as the summer of 1974, Goldwater did not believe Nixon should step down over Watergate. But on August 7, Goldwater and the Republican leaders in the House and Senate, Rep. John Rhodes of Arizona and Sen. Hugh Scott of Tennessee, told the president what he could expect from impeachment proceedings. “I told him I doubted if he would get as many as fifteen votes” in the Senate, Goldwater recorded in his journal, noting that he was unsure how he himself would vote. Shortly after their meeting, Nixon resigned.

Prior to Watergate, Goldwater had planned to retire from the Senate in 1974, and Nixon had offered to make him ambassador to Mexico—one of a few minor revelations contained in Pure Goldwater. Another nugget is that when Gerald Ford became president, he asked Goldwater whether he should appoint an African American or a woman as vice president—or even Goldwater himself. A black V.P. might work, Goldwater replied, if Ford “could find a competent black Republican,” but the country wasn’t ready for a female vice president, even though “women are excellent in politics.” Goldwater, who elected to stay in the Senate post-Watergate to be a force of stability, didn’t want the job himself. According to his journal, his desire to ensure stability was why he supported Ford over the more conservative Ronald Reagan in the 1976 Republican primaries.

Regrettably, Pure Goldwater tells us little about the senator’s relationship with Reagan. The book’s historical sequence breaks off after the Ford administration, and the last three chapters survey, in scattershot fashion, Goldwater’s views on a handful of controversial issues: foreign policy, abortion, homosexuality, immigration, and campaign finance. The policy thought on display here and throughout the book will by turns delight and infuriate every part of the political spectrum. When he first came to the Senate, Goldwater abhorred France’s colonial meddling in Indochina. “It seemed rather inconsistent to me, inconsistent certainly with the principles of this Republic,” he wrote in his journal, “that we, who have fought so hard for freedom against Britain, would now be supporting openly a country like France with colonizing ambitions.” Later he ardently supported the U.S. war in Vietnam—in the name of anticommunism rather than colonialism—urging Nixon to mine the harbors and bomb the dikes of North Vietnam.

His business experience and military service taught Goldwater to be skeptical of government spending, especially military spending. In his first Senate run, his statement of principles included a plank declaring, “The military is the greatest waster of money and manpower we have. They must be made to conduct their affairs in a businesslike manner.” But during the Nixon years, Goldwater became a fierce advocate for a civilian aeronautical boondoggle: federal aid for the development of an American supersonic transport to rival the British-French Concorde and (believe it or not) a Soviet commercial SST. Goldwater’s reaction upon seeing the instrumentation in the Russian prototype is a vintage slice of Cold War paranoia: “What I saw in the Russian 144 appeared to be very old and extremely unsophisticated but, frankly, no one knows what they had hiding under the floor.”

Today’s conservatives will balk at Goldwater’s social views. He initially welcomed the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. “I think that abortion should be legalized,” he wrote to a constituent in 1973, “because whether it is legal or not, women are going to have it done.” He quickly adopted a vaguer stance, dropping his talk about legalization and telling constituents “the issue [is] squarely up to each state legislature.” After leaving the Senate in 1986, however, he came out explicitly in favor of abortion rights. He also became an outspoken advocate of gay rights, not only calling for an end to the ban on homosexuals in the military but endorsing anti-discrimination legislation as well.

Decades earlier, Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act precisely on the grounds that its anti-discrimination clauses would infringe on states’ rights and individual property rights. His turnaround on anti-discrimination legislation has never been fully explained, though a 1994 statement included in Pure Goldwater supports the idea that his reasons were more personal than philosophical. “My grandchildren and great-grandchildren are growing up in Arizona,” he said. “Some of them are gay, some of them aren’t. But because Arizona doesn’t have a law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, they may not all get a fair shake.”

From any vantage point, Barry Goldwater was far from perfect and far from perfectly consistent. Yet he still finds admirers among conservatives, libertarians, and even liberals. If everyone can find something to object to in his record, nearly everyone also can find something to like. And imperfect though he was, Goldwater at least tried to live up to his ideal of clean politics. He wasn’t always candid, but he shot from the hip often enough that voters could tell themselves they were hearing something like the truth.

No Goldwater fan can do without a copy of Pure Goldwater; but no one who isn’t already a fan will get much out of it. This book is a stopgap at best, until the journal itself is published—assuming there’s any more substance to it than what’s on display here, which may or may not be the case. An edition of collected letters is much needed as well. But until those come along, readers can get their fix of the unscripted, unghosted conscience of a conservative from Pure Goldwater.

Daniel McCarthy is associate editor of The American Conservative.

And They're Off!

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:28:00 EDT

An early front runner for worst political ad of the 2008 election. Or is it....the best?

I'm trying to figure out how the three dancers are supposed to represent "San Francisco values." Maybe the black guy in the cowboy hat is gay? But then why is he dancing with two women? Maybe it's because one of the women is white. But then, the white woman also has a lesbian haircut. Maybe it's the dancing itself? Or they're all illegal immigrants? Maybe they're planning a visit to the abortion clinic after happy hour.

The Sam Graves campaign should really be clearer about whom were supposed to be hating, here, and why.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell Doesn't Pass Legal Smell Test

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 22 May 2008 08:32:00 EDT

The military cannot automatically discharge people because they're gay, a federal appeals court ruled in the case of a decorated flight nurse who sued the Air Force over her dismissal.
The three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not strike down the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But they reinstated Maj. Margaret Witt's lawsuit, saying the Air Force must prove that her dismissal furthered the military's goals of troop readiness and unit cohesion.
The "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue, don't harass" policy prohibits the military from asking about the sexual orientation of service members but requires discharge of those who acknowledge being gay or engaging in homosexual activity.

More here. If the case goes forward, it'll be interesting to see what evidence the military puts forward in defense of the Clinton-era policy.

reason on the issue.

Supremely Convenient

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 21 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In a recent speech to the National Rifle Association, John McCain presented himself as an advocate of judicial restraint. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee decried "activist judges" who override the will of the people as expressed by their legislative representatives, in the process "shrugging off generations of legal wisdom and precedent."

Yet that is exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court will be doing if, as the Arizona senator urges, it overturns the District of Columbia's gun ban. Evidently some kinds of judicial activism are better than others. Perhaps activism vs. restraint is not the best measure of what makes a good judge.

The most recent Supreme Court decision addressing the Second Amendment is ambiguous but has often been read as an endorsement of the view that "the right to keep and bear arms" pertains only to state militia service. That is the position taken by most federal appeals courts, and until relatively recently it was the conventional wisdom among legal scholars.

McCain nevertheless is right that the Supreme Court should reject that view—not because doing so epitomizes judicial restraint but because a thorough examination of the Constitution and its historical context shows that view is wrong. It is wrong no matter how many legislators, academics, and judges have endorsed it, no matter how long it was widely accepted.

What about the California Supreme Court's conclusion, announced the day before McCain's speech, that the state constitution requires official recognition of same-sex marriages? McCain criticized the ruling for overriding the people's will, reflected in a 2000 ballot initiative that reaffirmed the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Although the four judges in the majority acknowledged their decision was inconsistent with the way marriage had always been understood under state law, they argued that long acceptance does not make a policy constitutional.

To buttress that point, they cited the 1948 decision in which the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on interracial marriage that had been in place since 1872. But that decision was based on the 14thAmendment, which was passed after the Civil War with the aim of guaranteeing the residents of every state, regardless of race, the "privileges or immunities of citizens," "due process of law," and "equal protection of the laws."

It was not much of a stretch to conclude that the 14thAmendment, which the U.S. Supreme Court had said protected "the right of the individual...to marry," barred anti-miscegenation laws. By contrast, the California Supreme Court now is redefining that right to mean something it never has meant, treating two people of the same sex, as opposed to a man and a woman of different races, as "similarly situated" and therefore entitled to identical treatment in the name of equal protection.

As a matter of policy, I favor an arrangement similar to the one mandated by the court, in which the government treats couples equally without regard to sexual orientation. The California legislature already has done that in almost every respect, extending to gay "domestic partners" all the rights and responsibilities that apply to heterosexual couples under state law while withholding the "marriage" label.

So why does it matter if a court pushes the state a bit further in this direction, requiring equal nomenclature as well as equal treatment? Because the state constitution leaves that decision to the legislative process, and a constitution that can be ignored to reach good results also can be ignored to reach bad results.

As McCain noted in his NRA speech, many gun control advocates claim the Second Amendment is "archaic," no longer relevant in modern America. Advocates of campaign finance regulation, including McCain himself, argue that the contemporary threat of big money in politics requires revising the First Amendment's command that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech." For courts confronted by laws based on such constitutional revisionism, judicial restraint is no virtue.

Stuff Gay People Like

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:23:00 EDT

Over at the Opinion L.A. blog, emeritus reasoner Tim Cavanaugh makes the (bi-)curious case for gay marriage as a home-wrecking ball aimed at the straights:

One personal confession: I've always had two journalistic reservations with the whole gay marriage issue. The first is that it's practically impossible to come up with an illustration for a gay marriage story that is not either two men embracing, two women embracing or a wedding cake with two grooms on top. The second is that I've always found the people I agree with on this issue (pro-gay marriage) to be completely boring, and the people I disagree with (anti-gay marriage) fairly interesting. [...]
Gay marriage supporters trip over themselves in their hurry to declare that polygamists or polyandrists or other sexual renegades can never be welcome in good society.
As a political tactic, that rush to conformism makes sense, but I fear it's more than just an act. If I learned anything during my long San Francisco sojourn, it's that gays can be every bit as boring and conservative as straights. Now I don't demand that anybody has to become a bomb-thrower just to get the tax breaks and other privileges straight couples enjoy. But it would be nice for somebody to acknowledge that gay marriage would be worth supporting even (or especially) if it did lead to the parade of horribles, or some consenting-adults portion of that parade, that opponents find so scary and so fascinating.

As a native and recent resident of the Golden State, and a confirmed judicial-activism hypocrite, I'm nothing but tickled pink that for a few months anyway our homosexualist friends (and enemies) will be able to marry and receive full recognition for it from state and local governments. At some very basic level denial of marriage is one of the true Last Acceptable Prejudices, and to the extent the guvmint is in the paper-recognition business, I have never understood why a legal prohibition against Heather's Two Mommies marrying isn't the worst kind of discrimination -- i.e., state-enforced.

I'm glad to be living in a brave new world in which, as this fascinating New York Times magazine feature details, some young gay people won't even know what it's like to live a furtive life of secrecy and shame. Unless they want to, etc.

Steve Chapman made the case against California judicial activism yesterday.

No Reason to Rush

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In the old story, a preacher gives an inspiring sermon, which he concludes by asking his congregants to stand up if they want to go to heaven. Everyone rises except one nervous-looking fellow. "Brother," asks the incredulous pastor, "don't you want to ascend to paradise when you die?" Says the holdout: "When I die? Sure! I thought you were getting up a group to go right now."

That's pretty much how I feel about the California Supreme Court's decision granting the right of same-sex couples to marry. The destination is a good one. I just wish the court weren't in such a hurry to get there.

In recent years, the country has been moving at a steady pace to affirm a once-unthinkable concept—namely that as a matter of both individual rights and social good, gays should be free to make the same commitments as heterosexuals. According to a 2007 CBS News/New York Times poll, 60 percent of Americans now support allowing same-sex couples to enter into civil unions or marriage.

Radical changes don't happen overnight. But the speed of this one has been impressive. It's been only 22 years since the U.S. Supreme Court said states may criminalize homosexual conduct. It's been only 15 years since the Supreme Court of Hawaii shocked the country by ruling that gays might have a constitutional right to marry.

It's been only eight years since Vermont became the first state to admit same-sex couples to the rights and responsibilities of matrimony through civil unions. It's been only three years since California followed suit by letting gays enter into domestic partnerships.

But all of a sudden, the justices have discovered that their state constitution not only allows but requires that marriage include homosexual couples—even though in 2000, 61 percent of the state's voters rejected that option.

The majority is not always right, and in that instance, I thought the majority was wrong. But democracy doesn't say the people will always be right. It merely says they have the right to decide most matters of public policy. Here, by contrast, the California Supreme Court says the citizenry has no right to define marriage the way it has been defined by custom and law for eons.

At stake was not whether gay couples may acquire the rights and duties of marriage in a state-sanctioned framework. As the court acknowledged, they can already do so under the domestic partnership law. But it's not enough for them to get the substance of marriage. The court said they must also get the same terminology.

It reached this conclusion through a lot of philosophizing about "the right of same-sex couples to have their official family relationship accorded the same dignity, respect and stature as that accorded to other officially recognized family relationships." But the state constitution (like the federal one) does not traffic in mushy terms like "dignity" and "stature." When a court puts such heavy reliance on amorphous concepts, it telegraphs that it will not be tied down by the actual words of the state charter.

For further proof, consider that while the California constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of "sex, race, creed, color, or national or ethnic origin," it does not forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The justices somehow found something in the document that the authors thought they omitted.

Prudence and caution, which are virtues in the executive and the legislative branch, are no sin in the judiciary, either. What those attributes dictated here is that the court give civil unions a fair interval to show their merits or flaws in practice, rather than rushing in to pronounce them inadequate.

The justices would have been wise to mark time while the people of California continued on their path toward full equality for gays. Instead, the court has practically exhorted them to stop the journey. Opponents of gay rights have mounted a drive to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November, which stands a good chance of passing.

The exercise may end up not only overturning the Supreme Court's presumptuous decree but hardening public attitudes against the whole idea for years to come. In time, Californians would probably be inclined to embrace gay marriage. But if you insist they go there today, don't be surprised if they refuse.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Libertarians for Gay Marriage—Including Bob Barr!

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:43:00 EDT

From the chair of California's Libertarian Party:

People who truly cherish freedom see today's Supreme Court decision as a victory for liberty and common sense. There's no reason why consenting adults should not be allowed to marry so long as their arrangement doesn't interfere with any other individual's ability to live their life in any way they want to.

Many supporters see the decision as a repudiation of bigotry and narrow-mindedness. But Libertarians also see it as a step towards a revision of the larger public policy issue surrounding marriage. Californians should start asking their elected officials why government is involved in granting marriage licenses at all.

And here's Libertarian presidential hopeful Bob Barr (via Marc Ambinder):

Regardless of whether one supports or opposes same sex marriage, the decision to recognize such unions or not ought to be a power each state exercises on its own, rather than imposition of a one-size-fits-all mandate by the federal government (as would be required by a Federal Marriage Amendment which has been previously proposed and considered by the Congress). The decision today by the Supreme Court of California properly reflects this fundamental principle of federalism on which our nation was founded.

The Center of Britain

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

To get a broad sense of what Britain once was, just what necessitated the rise of Margaret Thatcher, ignore the frequently referenced punk lyrics of the late 1970s, so full of manufactured rage at the ruling class (White riot! England’s dreaming! Guns before butter!). Instead, drop Yes, Minister, the classic early 1980’s television comedy of Whitehall perfidy and ministerial incompetence, into the Netflix queue. Or just find the episode “The Compassionate Society”—season two, episode one—in which the show’s protagonist, Minister Jim Hacker, attempts to halt a massive National Health Service (NHS) hospital project which bequeathed to London 500 full-time nurses and doctors but housed not a single patient. Arrayed in defense of the plan are the usual interests: the tub-thumping left-wing union leader (a send up of the militant socialist head of the mineworkers union, Arthur Scargill), Downing Street spinmeisters, and various members of Parliament shilling for self-interested constituents. An advisor defends the project, telling Hacker that one must “sort out the smooth running of the hospital. Having patients around would be no help at all.” It was, unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Thatcher’s favorite episode.

It isn’t hyperbolic to say that this was more or less the government the Iron Lady inherited—a bloated, free-spending state, full of make-work jobs jealously guarded by union toughs. It was a system that Thatcher would help delegitimize and then effectively destroy. The heavy lifting was done (thank you very much) by those heartless Tories, though by 1997 voters decided it was time to return government to the more compassionate hands of Labour.

And Tony Blair’s “New Labour” didn’t win the 1997 election so much as they pushed the Conservative Party to the edge of oblivion. The Tories retreated having lost a massive 178 seats, its biggest defeat in almost a century. For the Conservative Party leadership, it was an existential crisis.

Pop stars that, 10 years previous, excelled in writing songs about the forgotten British miner were now popping champagne corks at Number 10 Downing Street. These would be the years of “Cool Britannia”; Red Wedge was dead. But the honeymoon of pop and politics was mercifully—and predictably—short. Noel Gallagher, guitarist of the seminal 1990s Britpop band Oasis and early adherent of New Labour, soon grumbled that the prime minister was forgetting the working class and acting like an American president. This Tony talked god, was chummy with President Bush, and fancied himself a liberal internationalist. Indeed, the rebranding of Labour, according to Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, resulted in far more criticism from the traditional left than the Tory right. Blair would govern from the center.

Fast-forward to early 2008: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is wildly unpopular and local council elections resulted in Labour’s worst showing in 40 years. Barely a week after the catastrophic defeat, a YouGov poll put Conservative Party support at 49 percent and Labour at 23 percent, its lowest rating since polling records began in the 1930s. (Though it is tempting to blame an easy culprit like Iraq, Labour was 11 points ahead of the Tories just eight months ago, and this week’s Economist leader, which asks if “Gordon Brown is doomed,” doesn’t even reference the war.)

A certain amount of this Labour collapse is attributable to a palatable alternative: Conservative leader David Cameron, the Eton-and-Oxford party boss who professes a love of The Smiths and began a recent Times editorial with the cringe-inducing line “Radiohead are one of my favourite bands.”

But it’s not the pathetic hipster pose that has attracted so much positive attention from both voters and Fleet Street journos, but Cameron's bold (some say facile and opportunistic) attempt to rebrand conservatism in the style of New Labour: "I made changes to and with the Conservative Party over the last 18 months for a very clear purpose, to get us back into the centre ground, to get us into a position where people listen to what we were saying, where we are more in touch with Britain as it is today."

It’s getting crowded in the center of British politics.

Even after his stunning local election victory, Cameron continued to burnish his centrist credentials, writing this week in the lefty paper The Independent that "If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment—forget about the Labour Party…If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change."

Cameron didn’t always consider himself a “true progressive.” When running for Parliament in 2000, he repeatedly dealt the social conservative card, grumbling about legislation that was "anti-family" and warning that it would force the "teaching of homosexuality" into British schools. When he took over the party leadership, Cameron jettisoned the tradition talk and spoke of welcoming gays and lesbians into the party fold, admonishing the Tory old guard for not supporting domestic partnership arrangements. The perpetually peeved Thatcherite Norman Tebbit grumbled that he didn't think "Tory supporters have gone soft, but I think the Tory leadership believes the electors are too soft to take the hard decisions which the country is now facing."

Others argue that the dash to the center—the “modernization”—is vindicated by recent electoral success and recent polling data. "The modernisers were right,” Times columnist and former Tory policy wonk Daniel Finkelstein trumpeted after the election. “Their critics were wrong."

It’s hard to argue with success.

The days following the Conservative rout saw nearly every political columnist on the island considering the future of Gordon Brown. The Spectator wondered what Brown “could learn from Hillary Clinton.” In the 1990s, when Labour was emerging from its punishing wilderness period, it took on countless Clinton operatives as consultants to micromanage its Clintonian rightward drift. But perhaps it’s time for American politicos—i.e. Republicans—to tear a page from the British political playbook.

The political landscape in America is hardly analogous to that of England. Despite Blair’s public piousness, fealty unto God isn’t a prerequisite for a presumptive prime minister. Nor do issues like abortion, the death penalty, or stem-cell research dominate the political culture. British conservatism is in many important ways distinct from its American cousin. But as many American conservatives have noted—David Frum in his book Comeback and his National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg—America too is becoming more socially tolerant and, if the Republican Party is interested in a successful future, a Cameron-like shift to the center on issues such as gay marriage and the drug war is advisable.

As political scientist Morris Fiorina points out in his book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, both residents of red and blue states are “basically centrists”; American's aren't "red" or "blue" but various shades of purple. As conservative commenter David Brooks pointed out in 2001, "Although there are some real differences between Red and Blue America, there is no fundamental conflict."

Pat Buchanan's declaration at the 1992 Republican convention that there was a "religious war" raging in America, a "war for the soul" of the country, seems preposterous in retrospect. With a strong majority of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade, a clear majority supporting civil unions for gay couples, and the very real possibility of the country electing an African-American president, it's time for the Republican Party to borrow from the Tories if they want to recapture the center ground.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Compensate Much?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:32:00 EDT

Via Reddit, the 50 most popular pages on "Conservapedia," the reference wiki for right-wingers.

I Wasn't Actually Born That Way, But the Preacher's Boy Was

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:44:00 EDT

Andrew Sullivan suggests that Carl Bean's "I Was Born This Way" might be the gayest song ever. I thought the gayest song ever was "I Love My Fruit," or maybe Tiny Tim's "I'm Gonna Be a Country Queen," but we can set that aside. The interesting thing about "I Was Born This Way" is that it was composed by a heterosexual. As The Advocate reported in 1978,

[T]he lyric was written by Bunny Jones, a straight black woman with a family. Jones employed gay people in her New York hairstyling salon, and many of them became her close friends. When the gay rights issue got hot and heavy she decided that it was time for a positive statement.

"She is the opposite of Anita Bryant," states Bean.

I found that clip on the Queer Music Heritage website, which also informs us that the songwriters Ronnie Wilkins and John Hurley were lovers. Wilkins and Hurley wrote two major hits, one of which was "Son of a Preacher Man," which takes on new dimensions if you imagine it sung by a guy rather than by Dusty Springfield or Aretha Franklin. It may well be autobiographical, since Hurley himself is a gospel singer. (As is Carl "I Was Born This Way" Bean. That's Archbishop Carl Bean to you.) So I take back what I said about Tiny Tim: "Son of a Preacher Man" is the gayest song ever.

The other big hit written by Wilkins and Hurley? It's "Love of the Common People," which is, depending on how you prefer to think of it, a great country song by Waylon Jennings, a great soul song by the Winstons, a great reggae song by Nicky Thomas, or a great '80s pop song by Paul Young. Also, this guy plays it on the accordion, which is totally gay.

Separating Marriage and State

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:00:00 EST

The historian Stephanie Coontz offers a brief but potent description of how and why the state seized control of marital contracts.

Elsewhere in Reason: Julian Sanchez reviews Coontz's most recent book. I observe the ongoing evolution of marriage. And Jonathan Rauch makes the Hayekian case for gay unions.

Harry Potter and the Tattoo of Regret (A.K.A. "It seemed like a good idea at the time" Edition)

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:41:00 EDT

Ernest Hemingway once said that all true stories end in death. In my experience, all tattoo stories end with the slowly sobering-up recipient opining, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

The latest instance of this takes off from the recent revelation by Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling that the esteemed headmaster of Hogwarts Academy, Albus Dumbledore, was in fact gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, especially for a guy who really knew how to use his wand. But it has complicated at least one man's life.

From the U.K. Sun:

PROUD Paul Croft got a tattoo of Harry Potter wizard Albus Dumbledore on his back - but is now being teased by pals after he was outed as GAY.
Proud Paul, 36, spent a YEAR having the Hogwarts headmaster etched into his skin as a surprise for his five kids.
But the factory worker has been the butt of jokes ever since Harry Potter author JK Rowling revealed last week that Dumbledore was in love with a fellow male sorcerer.
Paul, of Nottingham, moaned yesterday: "It's been terrible. I've always liked Dumbledore - just not in that way.
"I went into work and everyone was sniggering....

"There were wisecracks about ‘Watch your backs, lads.' Someone asked me if I was planning to get a tattoo of Graham Norton. I thought, ‘Why me?' "
The huge £500 tattoo shows Dumbledore holding a scroll bearing the names of his Harry Potter mad children - Charlotte, Deanna, Brandon, Tamzin and Paris.
Paul said: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

More here. Note to fans of the movie series, the tatt is of the Richard Harris rendition of Dumbledore, which Croft thinks is the "original and best." Oddly, the Sun's reporters didn't think to ask about the George Lazenby Bond tattoo on his scrotum. Go figure.

Hat Tip: Reader Jim Bob tipped me two weeks ago about the Rowling revelation. I can't remember how I stumbled across the tattoo story itself.

Shepard, Show the Way

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 06:42:00 EDT

Politicians are often accused of being irrelevant. But rarely has a group of them been so intent on proving that charge than the senators who voted last week for the "The Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007."

This bill is supposed to be a brave and pioneering piece of legislation. According to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights organization, "Congress has taken an historic step forward and moved our country closer to the realization that all Americans, including the GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender] community, are part of the fabric of our nation."

The bill, passed by the Senate Thursday, is named for a gay man beaten to death in Wyoming in 1998. In explaining the need for this bill, co-sponsor Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., declared, "What happened to Matthew should happen to no one."

You know what? He's right. Which is why murder is against the law, even in Wyoming, and why Shepard's attackers are now serving sentences (life in prison) that would not be any longer if this law had been in effect then.

As it happens, the bill will not likely ever become law, because the president has promised to veto it. But it would be a mostly cosmetic exercise even if it were enacted.

It targets crimes based on a host of illegitimate factors, including the victim's race, religion or national origin, as well as "gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability." Some of the latter categories have earned the bill the fervent denunciation of the Traditional Values Coalition for allegedly "catering to the homosexual/drag queen lobby."

That may win it the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani and John Travolta, but the bill has other shortcomings. The first is the defining defect of hate crimes bills: It is intended to provide extra penalties for criminals who think incorrect thoughts.

It's already illegal, after all, to deliberately injure someone with a gun or an explosive. But this measure establishes special punishment for anyone who carries out such an attack because the victim has certain traits. It's like slapping extra jail time on those who assault people who demonstrate against the Iraq war but not people who demonstrate in favor.

The most important feature, though, is one that the sponsors are loath to publicize. For all its grand intentions, it doesn't really do much at all. Supporters would like to make every hate crime a federal offense. But they can't. And the ones they can outlaw are so few and far between that it's hard to see why they bother.

The problem is that ordinary crime is mainly the purview of state and local governments. Over the last century, the federal government has usurped a lot of functions once assigned to lower levels of government, but there are limits on how far it can go.

Back in 2000, the Supreme Court struck down a major part of another high-minded statute, the Violence Against Women Act, which allowed anyone attacked because of her gender to sue the attacker in federal court. The reason the court gave for overturning the law was simple: The Constitution doesn't give Congress the power to legislate against crimes of a purely local nature.

Said the court, "We can think of no better example of the police power, which the founders denied the national government and reposed in the states, than the suppression of violent crime and the vindication of its victims." Only if such crimes are clearly connected to interstate commerce—which is rarely—can Washington intervene.

So if Congress can't legislate on violence against women, how can it legislate on violence against women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals and the disabled? The truth is, it can't—except when such offenses are connected in some way to interstate commerce.

So the authors of the hate crimes bill were forced to restrict it to incidents that fit this tiny exception. The provision in question thus snares only those crimes in which someone crosses state lines, uses "a channel, facility or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce," or uses a weapon that has traveled across state or international boundaries.

What's the relevance to the murder of Matthew Shepard, or to most of the other attacks on gays? None whatsoever. You might think it's better to do nothing than to do something irrelevant. But for a lot of senators, there's no gesture like an empty gesture.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:57:00 EDT

Larry Craig goes to court to fight his sex rap later this week. Frank Rich -- the only readable regular in the New York Times opinion district now that John Tierney has moved to the science pages -- sticks up for the embattled senator:

What Mr. Craig did in that men's room isn't an offense either. He didn't have sex in a public place. He didn't expose himself. His toe tapping, hand signals and "wide stance" were at most a form of flirtation....

Yet gay civil rights organizations, eager to see a family-values phony like Mr. Craig brought down, have been often muted or silent on this point. They stood idly by while Republicans gathered their lynching party, thereby short-circuiting public debate about the legitimacy of the brand of police entrapment that took place in Minnesota. Surely that airport could have hired a uniformed guard to police a public restroom rather than train a cop to enact a punitive "Cage aux Folles" pantomime.

Camille Paglia on "sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman's relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard, squirt, goo, spunk, splooge..."

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:21:00 EDT

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes (coff, coff) this Chronicle of Higher Education review-essay by Camille Paglia about three new books about male sexuality:

A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women's-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on.... despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men - or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness....
Gender studies, for all its trafficking with porn and pop, too often paints a bleak, condescending picture of ordinary human life. Alternate views (even from among dissident feminists) are not considered or evidently even imagined. When any field becomes a closed circle, the result is groupthink and cant. The stultifying clichés of gender studies must end. But in the meantime, all faculty members should vow, through their own scholarly idealism rather than by external coercion, not to impose their political or sexual ideology on impressionable students, who deserve better.

More here, including the circumscribed everlasting gob-stopping litany of terms cited in the title of this post.

reason writers on "the man who marketed sperm" and Impotence: A Cultural History.

reason interview (1995) with Paglia here.