Box Turtle Bulletin

Are gay issues today “fundamentally conservative”?

Writing an op-ed in the Washington Times, a newspaper that presents its stories with a decidedly conservative perspective, Log Cabin Executive Director Clarke Cooper presents a notion that may not sit comfortably with many in our community:

Our community’s goals today are fundamentally conservative, and it will take conservative voices, like Paul Babeu’s, to achieve them.

About “conservative voices”, there is no question. Clarke is absolutely correct in noting that Conservatives – such as the readership of Washington Times – are not open to listening to organizations that are in alliance with immigrant rights advocates or labor unions or whose executive directors co-chair Democratic election campaigns.

If such people are to be reached, it will be through those who are not perceived as part of “The Establishment Left” and therefor the enemy, but by those with whom they find agreement on other issues.

But what about the idea that community’s goals today being fundamentally conservative?

I believe that Cooper’s assertion has some merit. While marriage and family and tradition and social assimilation and military service are not the property of any party or ideology, ideas that relate to more structure and increased formality are understood to be conservative in both a general and a political sense. It seems to me that “I should be free to sleep with whomever I want” and “I should be free to marry whomever I want” are in very different places and speak to people in very different ways.

Of course both are aspects of the bigger issue that gay people should be equal, whether that equality applies to sexual freedom or marriage freedom. But most political activists who have been engaging in the battle for equality will acknowledge that there is a marked difference in our community’s immediate goals and objectives.

Of course, Conservatives such as the leaders (though not the attendees) at CPAC, reject the idea that anything gay could possibly have any conservative elements. Which leads to fascinating assertions such as “I don’t really believe homosexuals want to get married, they just want to destroy marriage”.

And of course, some in our community have been subjected to abuse from Conservatives for so long that they will find it challenging to apply the word “conservative” to anything they favor.

But, nevertheless, Cooper’s point is worth considering. What do you think?

Washington Times’ Dishonest Anti-Gay Insinuation

The Washington Times was started by the Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon and is known as a conservative paper. For many years the Times ignored the AP Stylebook and refused to use the word “gay” when referring to same-sex attracted persons, preferring “homosexual”, and put quotation marks around the word “marriage” if it applied to a same-sex couple, even when such marriage was legal and recognized by the state.

At the beginning of 2008, the Times brought on a new editor-in-chief, John Solomon, who sought to remove some of the more obvious bias from news stories, including a change in the words used to describe gay people. At that time, Solomon expressed an intent to remove editorializing from the news stories and make them about, well, news.

The only point I have made with the reporters and editors who write for the news pages is there must be a bright line between opinion and editorializing that rightfully belongs on the op-ed and commentary pages and the fair, balanced, accurate, and precise reporting that must appear in the news sections of the paper.

While that is a commendable goal, an article in the paper today shows that the Washington Times is still willing to insert opinion into their news stories and will even go so far as print insinuations to do so.

The story in question is about the adoption of an infant by a gay couple. In late 2005, the child was born prematurely in Shreveport, LA, and after a month in the hospital was given to the New York couple. They began adoption procedures in their home state and on April 27, 2006, the State of New York made the adoption final.

State law in Louisiana requires that the Office of Vital Records reissue a birth certificate with the adoptive parents’ names when receiving a notice of adoption. However, the state refused, saying that their state laws don’t allow for two unmarried people to adopt a child together so they were not going to recognize the adoption. On Monday, a US District Judge ruled that the US Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause requires that Louisiana record both parents on the revised form.

This is, in itself, an interesting story. But what I found more interesting was the way in which it was misreported and distorted by the Washington Times. Although the AP reported the story in a straight-forward manner, in the middle of the Times version, the following paragraphs appeared:

In the national debate over gay marriage, one often-cited scenario involves a federal court using similar logic to require states that bar such unions to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, as all states now do with each other’s marriages under the federal Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause.

Such a federal ruling would effectively impose same-sex marriage on the entire nation, and homosexual activists celebrated this decision as requiring every state to recognize any other state’s gay adoptions.

This story has nothing to do with marriage, and as the law currently stands the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) allows states to ignore marriage in other states. But reporting the story wasn’t good enough for the Times; they needed to insinuate and scare and demonize.

What the Times is insinuating in that rather astonishing last paragraph is twofold. First, that the celebration of adoption rights somehow portends marriage rights and, secondly, that “homosexual activists” are out to get you and impose things upon you. If the “homosexual activists” are celebrating, you should be afraid.

Sorry, Mr. Solomon, but the homophobia and bigotry for which the Washington Times has always been known doesn’t seem to have gone away and your “news” is still chuck-full of opinion and editorial.