Laura Sjoberg informs us that she is working to form a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Queer, and Allies  Caucus of the International Studies Association (the premier organization of academic IR scholars) in order to:

A. To promote fair and equal treatment of members of the Lesbian, Gay, Transgendered, Bisexual, and Queer and Allies (hereafter LGBTQA) community in the International Studies Association (hereafter ISA) and in the profession of international studies, in areas including but not limited to graduate school admission, financial assistance in schools, employment, tenure, and promotion.
B. To combat discrimination against and provide support for LGBTQA faculty, student, and professional members of the International Studies Association.
C. To encourage the application of the skills of scholars and students of international studies to combat discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
D. To promote the recruitment of new members to the Caucus specifically and ISA generally.

Leaving aside that the last of the four goals amounts to a self-licking ice cream cone (not that there’s anything wrong with that) how needed are these? Is there really rampant discrimination on the basis of sex in the academy these days? Homosexuality is mainstream in our broader society at this point, much less the relatively liberal halls of academe.

Do LGTBQ types face discrimination in financial aid or grad school admissions?  If so, how?  That is, how would the bureaucratic offices who make these decisions even know that the people were LGTBQ?  (One presumes, irrespective of the answer, that Allies are safe in this regard.)

I suppose that a man showing up for a job interview wearing lipstick and a dress might still be poorly received in many departments across the land.  But so might a man showing up with a mustache or blue jeans or a too-nice suit.

Beyond this, what has any of this to do with ISA?  It was “was founded in 1959 to promote research and education in international affairs.”  Its current purpose is still along those lines:

I.    Provide opportunities for communications among educators, researchers, and practitioners in order to continually share intellectual interests and meet the challenges of a changing global environment

II.    Develop contacts among specialists from all parts of the world in order to facilitate scientific and cultural change

III.    Provide channels of communication between academics and policy makers to promote a successful link between the production of knowledge and its utilization

IV.    Improve the teaching and dissemination of ideas, concepts, methods, and information in the field of International Studies

Rather than hijacking a purely scholarly organization with grievance issues, why not form a caucus within, say, the American Association of University Professors?

One possible explanation:  Sjobert is also chair of ISA’s Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section.  In April, she expressed concern that some LGTBQ members of ISA might chose not to attend the 2010 annual meeting in New Orleans on the grounds that “there is a substantial risk of a lack of equal protection of the laws in the most dire possible situations, including but not limited to critical medical emergencies.”  Apparently, this concern was not heeded and the meeting’s still on.

But, if LGTBQ activism can already take place (albeit, not successfully in this case) within the context of an existing organized section, why the need for a caucus?

Tyler Cowen points me to an interesting discussion on the subject “Why So Few D.C. Residents Are Married.”

Washington City Paper’s Amanda Hess cites a Pew survey finding that “Only 23 percent of women and 28 percent of men and in D.C. are married, compared to 48 and 52 percent nationwide. The rates in D.C. are so low that they lie entirely off the Pew map’s color key. The closest states to D.C.’s numbers are Rhode Island, where 43 percent of women are married, and Alaska, where 47 percent of men are married.”

While Pew’s D’Vera Cohn attributes this to D.C. residents getting married later than those in any state,  Hess argues that an overlooked factor is that D.C. has the nation’s highest concentration of homosexuals, who are not permitted to marry.

Newsweek blogger Katie Connolly retorts that “Both those explanations are plausible, but they give the data short shrift.”  Instead, she thinks the answer lies in the “nature of race and class in D.C.”

Anyone who’s lived in D.C. is aware of the city’s dirty secret: it essentially operates under an unwritten form of apartheid. In general, affluent, college-educated white folks with decent, steady incomes are clustered in the northwest quadrant. Their needs are serviced by a massive underclass, consisting largely of underprivileged immigrants, African-Americans, and Hispanics, that inhabits the remaining three quarters. Visitors to the city rarely glimpse this side of the city because there’s little reason to venture beyond the fancy hotels, restaurants, and attractions.

[...]

But only around a third of D.C.’s population is white. African-Americans make up 56 percent of the population, and marriage rates among African-Americans have been steadily dropping since the 1960s. The last census found that just 36 percent of African American women were married, down from 62 percent in 1950. Marriage rates for white women also declined over the same period, but only from 66 percent to 57 percent. A large proportion of D.C.’s African-American community is low income or underemployed, both of which are often indicators of low marriage or high divorce rates.

All those explanations strike me as contributors to the puzzle.  All of them, though, miss one crucial issue:  Suburbanization.

The vast majority of those of us who work in the District actually live in Virginia or Maryland.  Some even commute from as far away as West Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Delaware.   Those of us who are married — and especially those of us with children — are much more likely to be in that category.

If you’re young, single, and affluent, D.C. proper — or at least, a handful of gentrified neighborhoods therein — is a great place to live.  It’s not Manhattan but there’s a decent nightlife, a plethora of restaurants, and plenty of things to do.  But unless you’re very well off financially, you’ve either got a roommate, live in an incredibly small space, or both.  And there’s essentially no such thing as a single family home in the District.  (Note for non-urbanites:  A “single family home” is  a “house.”  In places like D.C., even wealthy people tend to live in condos or townhouses.) Let alone a yard.

Oh, and unless you can afford to send your kids to Sidwell Friends, the schools are simply awful.

UPDATE:   Commenter Ugh observes, “I think the problem here is treating the District of Columbia as a state, and then comparing it to real states, each of which is infinitely more rural than the District (even Rhode Island). A more proper comparison would be to the marriage rate in Baltimore proper, or San Francisco, or Oakland, or Manhattan, etc.”

Yes, that’s exactly right. The Pew piece footnotes that point and Connolly uses it as a throwaway line but it’s really important.  Indeed, it’s really another way of making my point about suburbanization:  The same is more or less true in most of our major urban centers but, since the unit of analysis for the other 50 entities is a whole state, the impact is different.

Republican Bob McDonnell enjoys a rather sizable lead over Democrat Creigh Deeds in his race for Virginia’s governorship. But the Washington Post, which went after George Allen with amazing fervor in his 2006 race against longshot Jim Webb, is doing what it can to fix that. First, it ran a series of articles about a master’s thesis McDonnell wrote during the Reagan administration. With that having not done the trick, it’s digging up a new charge:

In January 2003, then-Del. Robert F. McDonnell helped gavel in one of the most extraordinary judicial reappointment hearings in Virginia history: a seven-hour, trial-like affair that led to questions about whether the future Republican gubernatorial candidate thought gays were fit to serve on the bench.

As chairman of the House Courts of Justice Committee, McDonnell sat at the head of the proceedings, with his Senate counterpart next to him and committee members on both sides. Facing them was Verbena M. Askew of Newport News, the state’s first black female Circuit Court judge, whose reappointment was in jeopardy because of allegations that she had sexually harassed a female colleague.

[...]

In comments before the hearing, McDonnell indicated that Askew’s sexual conduct was relevant, telling one newspaper that “certain homosexual conduct” could disqualify a person from being a judge because it violates the state’s crimes against nature law. The words were widely published at the time, and his remarks contributed to a lasting view that sexual orientation was at least one reason for Askew’s ouster.

[...]

McDonnell’s role in the hearing has attracted renewed scrutiny after the publication last week of a 1989 graduate school thesis in which the 14-year lawmaker and former attorney general had criticized working mothers and homosexuals and urged the promotion of traditional values through government. In one passage, McDonnell wrote: “Man’s basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter.”

[...]

McDonnell was credited by Republicans and Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly at the time for making sure witnesses supporting Askew were present at the hearing.

He also became known for telling the Daily Press of Newport News that certain homosexual activities could disqualify a person from the bench. “It certainly raises some questions about the qualifications to serve as a judge,” he said. “There is certain homosexual conduct that is in violation of the law,” McDonnell added. “I’m not telling you I would disqualify a judge per se if he said he was gay. I’m talking about their actions.”

What’s particularly rich here is that the Post is arguing that it’s own opposition research on a candidate is grounds for doing more of the same because, after all, it “attracted renewed scrutiny”!  Imagine that.  Indeed, they title the piece “After Thesis Uproar, McDonnell’s Strongly Worded Comments on Gays Resurface.”  One has to love the use of the passive voice to obscure the fact that it’s the Post itself creating the uproar and doing the resurfacing.

Like Allen, McDonnell has run numerous races, including statewide races, before.  He’s faced the scrutiny of the voters and the slings and arrows of opposition campaigns.  These issues have therefore been bandied about over and again.

In what possible sense is a twenty-year-old graduate thesis news? Or even six-year-old public hearings that were widely covered at the time?  This is a smear job, not journalism.

Since well before I thought the matter one for serious consideration, Andrew Sullivan has been making insightful, compelling arguments in favor of same-sex marriage.  This, alas, is not one of them.

A reader makes an excellent point:

One thing that struck me about the DOJ’s argument that DOMA does not violate the equal protection clause since homosexuals are still able to marry people of the opposite sex, is that this ignores the existence of same-sex marriage on the state level. If two women get married in Iowa, they can no longer enter into opposite-sex marriages, even though they still don’t have federal recognition.So right now, there exist a specific class of people (those who are married to a person of the same sex) who are totally excluded from federal marriage benefits.

Yes. That would be me and my husband. And we may be forced to separate as a result.

So . . . absent the right to marry the man he loves, Andrew would marry a chick in order to get “federal marriage benefits”?  Really?  What benefits are those, exactly?  The right to pass on half his Social Security check some decades hence to some random woman he’s not in love with?

Why would he want to do that?

The only other benefits that come to mind for someone who isn’t a military retiree, disabled veteran, or the like — which Andrew isn’t — are the right to leave property without a will and deathbed hospital visitation.  The first of those is a matter for the states and the second a matter of hospital policy; both are easily remedied.  But even if we grant artistic license here, I’m not sure what a sham marriage to an unspecified woman would accomplish.  I suppose having someone visit you in the hospital is better than no one; but it’s hardly the same as having your life’s partner there.

And this has them seriously considering abandoning their marriage?

Being unable to form a legal union with the person you love and/or being denied the benefits that traditional marriages convey is a legitimate gripe.  I’m not sure, however, that the fact that being legally married — with all attendant benefits — to that person  in one’s state denies one the right to also be married to someone one doesn’t wish to marry is a substantial additional burden.

Photo: Australian News and Information Bureau

Ana Marie Cox interviewed John McCain this afternoon and reports via Twitter that “if he were POTUS, he would have already ordered Joint Chiefs of staff to investigate efficacy of DADT.”

DADT is, of course, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military that has been in place since the early days of the Clinton administration, replacing the old policy whereby potential recruits and security clearance seekers were directly asked if they were homosexual and denied if they answered in the affirmative.

If this is correct, he’s done a 180 in the last two years.

At the 2007 GOP debate at Saint Anselm College on Jun 3, 2007, McCain said, “We have the best-trained, most professional, best- equipped, most efficient, most wonderful military in the history of this country, and I’m proud of every one of them. There just aren’t enough of them. So I think it would be a terrific mistake to even reopen the issue. The policy is working. And I am convinced that that’s the way we can maintain this greatest military. Let’s not tamper with them.”

Here’s the video.

Cox writes, ” I believe McCain on this. I think one of the reasons he got so testy was that he knows he’s arguing the wrong side.” Could be.

Gays looking to get the Supreme Court’s help in being allowed to openly serve in the military have been rebuffed.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a challenge to the Pentagon policy forbidding gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, granting a request by the Obama administration.  The court said it will not hear an appeal from former Army Capt. James Pietrangelo II, who was dismissed under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

[...]

In court papers, the administration said the appeals court ruled correctly in this case when it found that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion.”

During last year’s campaign, President Barack Obama indicated he supported the eventual repeal of the policy, but he has made no specific move to do so since taking office in January. Meanwhile, the White House has said it won’t stop gays and lesbians from being dismissed from the military.

@anamariecox is miffed but this is hardly surprising.  It has been settled law for generations that the military has a “good order and discipline” interest that allows it to do things that other government entities can’t.  The homosexual exclusion policy has been tested time and again and been deemed consistent with that goal.  There was no basis for taking this case and ruling differently.

Ultimately, this is a policy decision that Congress will make.  Given the trendlines on this, it’s only a matter of time.  For example, a Gallup poll released June 5th:

The movement in favor of gays serving has been positive among all demographics, with more than two-thirds overal and even a sizable majority of self-identified conservatives in favor.    No group gave less than 58 percent approval.

President Obama has clearly decided not to make Bill Clinton’s mistake of sparking a distrating controversy by tackling this early.  With an economic crisis and two wars to deal with, that’s wise if not particularly courageous.

UCSB political scientist Aaron Belkins‘ HuffPo piece “Obama To Fire His First Gay Arabic Linguist” has drawn quite a bit of blogospheric attention.

Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and officer in the Army National Guard who is fluent in Arabic and who returned recently from Iraq, received notice today that the military is about to fire him. Why? Because he came out of the closet as a gay man on national television.

[...]

I spent a day with Dan Choi last month, and he is not someone we want to fire from the military. He loves the armed forces. He served bravely under tough combat conditions in Iraq. His Arabic is excellent, and he used his language skills to diffuse many tough situations and to save lives, both Iraqi and American. All of his unit mates know he is gay, and they have been very supportive of him. But he doesn’t want to live a lie.

Belkins anticipates my rejoinder:

Some readers might think it unfair to blame Obama. After all, the president inherited the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law when he took office. As Commander-in-Chief, he has to follow the law. If the law says that the military must fire any service member who acknowledges being gay, that is not Obama’s fault.

He responds:

A new study, about to be published by a group of experts in military law, shows that President Obama does, in fact, have stroke-of-the-pen authority to suspend gay discharges. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” law requires the military to fire anyone found to be gay or lesbian. But there is nothing requiring the military to make such a finding. The president can simply order the military to stop investigating service members’ sexuality.

An executive order would not get rid of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, but would take the critical step of suspending its implementation, hence rendering it effectively dead. Once people see gays and lesbians serving openly, legally and without problems, it will be much easier to get rid of the law at a later time.

I know a little something about military law but am by no means an expert.  But homosexual conduct by members of the Armed Services is manifestly proscribed by federal law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  The procedures are clear.  It’s true that the current implementation, the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, was implemented under Bill Clinton. It is not, however, a mere executive order — and thus subject to the whim of his successors — but rather black letter statutory law (Pub.L. 103-160 [10 U.S.C. § 654].).
By announcing that he’s gay on national television, Choi gave his commanders little choice but to investigate.  (Simply “being” gay isn’t a violation of UCMJ; it has to manifest by “conduct.”)

Regardless, it’s absurd to claim that Obama “fired” Choi.  That’s a decision made echelons down the chain of command and, again, one that was a fait accompli once Choi made his announcement. Further, for Obama to order the military to stop following black letter law might take “guts” but it would create a minor Constitutional crisis. Failing to break the law isn’t “cowardly.”

It is, however, perfectly fair to blame Obama for not having taken action to overturn existing law, as Matt Corley, GayPatriotWest, and Andrew Sullivan do.  But that’s what he needs to do:  Burn political capital and use his extraordinary popularity and huge Democratic margins in Congress to change the law rather than flouting it.  Is my memory faulty or were Democrats recently opposed to presidents ignoring laws they found inconvenient?

Obama, reasonably enough, wants to avoid Clinton’s mistake of dealing with this issue right out of the gate.  It’s politically charged, will generate tremendous opposition from retired generals and other veterans, and will be a distraction from more pressing issues.   Then again, as Matt Yglesias points out, “The fact of the matter is that on any given week, it’ll be more convenient to deal with this issue next week. But that just means you never get around to dealing with it.”

UPDATE: Upon re-reading the law, there may be a workaround more in keeping with Congress’ intent than simply ordering a suspension of investigations.  Again, IANAL, but the only loophole I see in the law is (e)(2), which provides that “Nothing in subsection (b) shall be construed to require that a member of the armed forces be processed for separation from the armed forces when a determination is made in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense that . . . separation of the member would not be in the best interest of the armed forces.“  The only problem with this, really, is that adopting a broad policy of “the law is silly, so we’ll deem all enforcement to be against the best interests of the armed forces” is that it would be in clear contravention of the “Findings” that serve as the law’s preamble.

UPDATE II:  Glenn Reynolds quips, “You know, if someone asked me to go hire a a gay Arabic linguist, I wouldn’t know where to start. But the federal government seems to be firing them every time I turn around.”  A clever entrepreneur could likely put 2 and 2 together and start a service.

UPDATE III (Dodd): It’s true that we cannot countenance “a broad policy of ‘the law is silly, so we’ll deem all enforcement to be against the best interests of the armed forces’”. But what we can — and I think should — do is implement a policy that, all other things being equal, it is not “in the best interest of the armed forces” to summarily discharge service members with crucial skills (like, just to take an example totally at random, Arabic language skills) merely because they are gay. A review process that weighs the individual’s value to the overall mission would be in keeping with (e)(2).

Video via AllahPundit.

Kevin Drum observes,

When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes.  We know what’s right, we know what’s wrong, and even if there’s a price to pay we can’t shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing.

But when the subject is torture, suddenly it’s all about carefully weighing the costs and benefits.  Having an honest debate about how far we should go to protect ourselves.  Understanding the context of what happened.  It’s just not possible to flatly say that waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions are barbarisms unfit for use by a civilized country.  It’s much more complex than that.

I’m both anti-torture and generally opposed to the government mucking around in our bedrooms.  But even leftists, ranging from Alan Derschowitz to a goodly portion of the Democratic congressional leadership, think that there may be occasions when extreme measures are called for in protecting our national security. Conversely, I’m hard pressed to think of occasions when adultery, rape, bigamy, incest, or pedophilia would become circumstantially necessary.  For that matter, while I don’t oppose the right of homosexuals to have sex with each other or form legal unions, there isn’t exactly a “ticking time bomb” equivalent.

The only issue that “has anything to do with sex” where the comparison would be at all apt is abortion.  I’m personally largely ambivalent on very-early-term abortion, including the so-called “morning after pill,” and am pro-contraception.  I even think there are circumstances, such as extreme risk to the life of the mother or extreme deformity of the child, where later term abortions are morally reasonable.  But I can understand the logic of those who are anti-abortion absolutists.   If one truly believes that at a human being exists at Point X (whether conception or some biologically logical later point), then it’s hard to make the case for exceptions.

Conversely, one can believe that torture is morally wrong and bad public policy and still countenance doing it to very bad people to prevent very bad things.   Most people aren’t Kantians.

Photo by Flickr user kharied, used under Creative Commons license.

Matt Yglesias, responding to my statement yesterday that “We’ll always have a strong ‘conservative’ movement. It’s just that Ronald Reagan and Alex P. Keaton wouldn’t quite recognize it,” one-ups me and posits that “American politics in the future will mostly be dominated by a center-right political coalition just as it always has.”

While he’s riding the progressive horse and yelling “Faster! Faster!” and I’m sitting athwart history  yelling “Stop!” we’re essentially in agreement.   The fact of the matter is that conservatism, within the American political context anyway, is mostly reactive and the question is not whether they’ll lose on public policy but by how much.   Yet, “conservatives” nonetheless manage to win more national elections than not because the movement simply absorbs the status quo as the new thing which must be conserved.

1920s or even 1970s style conservatism simply no longer exists as a national force in American politics.  Furthermore, mainstream conservatives now hold views on homosexuality, gender, and race that no serious liberal politician would have espoused publicly in 1972.

As Matt puts it:

If we succeed in achieving major progressive reforms in 2009 and 2010, we’re going to create a situation in which the existence of a workable national health care system deprives the Democrats of a winning electoral issue. A certain number of voters who have conservative views on some other topics but who liked progressive ideas on health care will vote for more Republicans.

It happened decades ago in Western Europe.  Even thirty years ago, Margaret Thatcher wasn’t trying to undo the National Health Service.  British conservatives simply accept that socialized medicine is the norm and the bickering is on the margins.

It’s probable that American conservatives will stop Obama from going nearly that far — indeed, the American political climate is still conservative enough that he won’t even try — but we’ll edge closer than we’ve ever been to government-guaranteed health care for all.   What that means, from a conservative standpoint, is that we’re never going to be more free with regard to health care than we are right now.  Once Obama and the Democrats get whatever compromise that they can passed, we’ll never undo it; indeed, we’ll almost surely edge further in that direction with the next Democratic administration.

But, yes, to the extent that middle-of-the-road Americans are demanding just a little more government involvement in health care, that issue will go away until such time as a groundswell builds up for another surge.

Similarly, the Andrew Sullivans of the world may give the GOP another look down the road once, inevitably, gay marriage becomes normalized.

For “progressives” to win, they need to constantly come up with ways to change the status quo that a plurality of voters want.  More importantly, they have to do it without creating a cultural backlash. “Conservatives,” by contrast, can win either by appealing to the extant culture or charging that the “progressives” are moving too fast.

UPDATE: My colleague Dave Schuler offers a useful addendum to the above:

[J]ust as 1920’s conservatives wouldn’t recognize the conservatives of today the progressives of 1920 would scarcely recognize today’s progressives.  Yesterday’s progressives believed in eugenics and free speech. Today’s progressives reject both, the latter in favor of political correctness and laws against hate speech.

The shorter way of saying this is that things change but the labels stay around forever, becoming less true to their original meanings with the passage of time.

That’s quite right.    While conservatives have permanently lost quite a few fights, we’ve actually permanently won a few, too.  We tend to remember our losses more clearly than our victories.

Cartoon: RWeiser @ Michigan Republicans

I’ve followed the discussion about the Bill Moyers “scandal” (see, for example, today’s (WSJ piece “Bill Moyers’s Name Is Linked to J. Edgar Hoover’s Abuse of Office”) out of the corner of my eye for the last couple of days  and am having trouble seeing what the big deal is.

Basically, as I understand it:

• Back in 1964, then-30-year-old Moyers was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson who carried out orders to assist in some vague way an investigation by then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about allegations that Motion Picture Association president Jack Valenti was a homosexual.

• Decades later, as a PBS talking head, Moyers is a preening lefty who has “gone on to promote himself as a political moralist, routinely sermonizing about what he claims are abuses of power by his ideological enemies.”

• This constitutes hypocrisy.

Am I missing some key point?

Because, if not, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly big deal.  People’s attitudes change between the time they’re 30 and 70.  They learn from their own mistakes and their other life experiences.  Furthermore, once-respectable views and attitudes become discredited.

In 1964, people trusted government much more than they would a decade latter, owing to Vietnam and Watergate.   So, “trust me, I’m the FBI director and know what’s good for the country” becomes “abuse of power.”

On the issue of homosexuality in particular, I often turn to a single, anecdotal example of how times have changed.   In 1967, lefty folk singer Arlo Guthrie, son of lefty folk icon Woody, released the Thanksgiving classic “Alice’s Restaurant.”  It contained the line, “And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them.”  Within maybe a decade, nobody respectable would use the word “faggot” in public in this manner.  (Although, as frequently happens, the epithet eventually came back into vogue as shock language acceptable for use by people in the targeted group.)

It seems perfectly plausible that young Bill Moyers did something that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time that he’d condemn if it were happening in 2009.

The last Democratic president began his administration by starting the controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military.  His successor may start by ending it.

President-elect Barack Obama will allow gays to serve openly in the military by overturning the controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that marred President Clinton’s first days in office, according to incoming White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

The startling pronouncement, which could re-open a dormant battle in the culture wars and distract from other elements of Obama’s agenda, came during a Gibbs exchange with members of the public who sent in questions that were answered on YouTube. “Thadeus of Lansing, Mich., asks, ‘Is the new administration going to get rid of the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy?’” said Gibbs, looking into the camera. “Thadeus, you don’t hear a politician give a one-word answer much. But it’s, ‘Yes.’”

The Obama transition team declined to elaborate on that one-word answer when asked by FOX News on Wednesday about a timetable for repealing the policy, which was enacted by Clinton after a protracted public debate. Obama officials also would not explain which lawmakers or Pentagon officials would attempt to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Clinton, who initially sought to overturn the longstanding ban on gays in the military, ended up enacting the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as a compromise that made it illegal for commanders to ask about the sexual orientation of service members, who were also barred from announcing they were homosexual. If a service member’s homosexuality becomes known anyway, he or she is expelled.

One of the great misconceptions about DADT is that people think it began the ban on gays in the military.  In fact, it was an attempt to allow gays to serve if they kept their sexuality to themselves.  Perversely, however, it led to a witch hunt mentality in which suspected gays had to be “caught” since they couldn’t be asked.

As I’ve noted here more than once over the years, one of the more bemusing experiences I had in the military was the questioning for my Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance as a cadet about to be commisioned as a military intelligence officer (albeit one detailed to the field artillery).   This would have been late 1987 or early 1988, several years before DADT.   There were a whole series of questions on homosexuality — Was I gay?  Was I even a little bit gay? Had I ever thought about becoming gay?  Could I envision myself turning gay?  Was I sure?    The rationale, apparently, was that, since gays were not allowed in the military and homosexual acts were subject to court martial, a closeted gay was subject to blackmail by the enemy.

While I believe that the cultural barriers that made the DADT compromise more palatable than removing the ban on gays still exist, they’re certainly lower than they were in 1993.  The military is a microcosm of the larger society, whose values on the matter have changed considerably.

It’s worth noting, however, that the president can’t overturn the ban on gays in the military on his own.  That’s contained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is codified in federal law.  Indeed, DADT itself is codified in Public Law No: 103-160.  It will, quite literally, take an act of Congress to change.

My Palin Derangement Syndrome post got a number of thoughtful responses, especially for a weekend post.

My fellow Jacksonville State alumnus Stacy McCain, a Palin fan, thinks the internal debate on her role in last week’s defeat and her future as a Republican Party standard bearer is one we should have.  He objects strenuously, though, to the tone of some of her opponents.  His difference with me is that he thinks I place too much emphasis on foreign policy wonkery, both because the wonks are often wrong and because foreign policy debates are a moving target and a dicey strategy for building a winning coalition.

Domestic politics is permanent. The economy is always relevant. The ceaseless growth of the Washington bureaucracy continues to intrude into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Department of Education is still an unconstitutional travesty that ought to be abolished. Social Security is still a disastrous Ponzi scheme. The entitlement mentality is still an insult to the Tocquevillean spirit of the nation. These arguments may not be as popular in the short term as pointing at a mustachioed foreign dictator and screaming “Hitler!” but they have the basic virtue of being true.

From a center-left perspective, Kevin Drum believes more of my fellow conservatives should share these concerns about Palin but, alas, he thinks I’m clinging to an old view of Republicanism, writing, “For a movement that decided long ago that slogans and shibboleths mattered while serious policy discourse was merely a distraction, a candidate who showed no interest in domestic policy before the age of 44 is the perfect public face.”

Mark Lilla expands on that view at some length in a must-read WSJ piece, “The Perils of ‘Populist Chic.’”

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on “The New American Right” that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter’s influential “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963).

But over the next decade and a half all that changed. Magazines like the Public Interest and Commentary became required reading for anyone seriously concerned about domestic and foreign affairs; conservative research institutes sprang up in Washington and on college campuses, giving a fresh perspective on public policy. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz — agree or disagree with their views, these were people one had to take seriously.

[...]

So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It’s a sad tale that began in the ’80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an “adversary culture of intellectuals.” It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with “ordinary Americans” whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that “populist paranoia” was “subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government.” But by the mid-’80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the “common sense” of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by “our disoriented elites,” which is why “so many people — and I include myself among them — who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”

Stacy jokes that Jax State grads shouldn’t be siding with the elites.  Recently, Ace had a lengthy diatribe against self-anointed elites in a memorable comments thread.  But Lilla identifies the elitism with which I side:  a meritocratic, intellectual one rather than one of birthright and pedigree.  A movement built on know-nothingism — indeed, outright hostility to higher education — is bound to fail.

The Republican Party will be consigned to permanent minority status if it continues down its present course.   It is increasingly becoming a white, Southern party.  Even though I’m both white and Southern, it’s obvious to me that we have to expand our appeal beyond hard-core Evangelicals and anti-elitists that to get back Virginia, North Carolina, the Midwest, and West.

I’m not advocating turning the GOP into a centrist party.  For reasons John Hawkins identifies and others, it won’t work.  Rather, I’m calling for a return to Ronald Reagan’s vision of a Big Tent that offers enough to attract a broad coalition.   It’s not 1980.   We can’t simply dust off Reagan’s platform.   The bottom line is that, however unappealing it is to die-hards, Social Security and the Department of Education are here to stay.

Quite likely, so is legal abortion.   Roe v. Wade was seven years old when Reagan ran.  When Bill Clinton came to office after twelve years of Republican control of the White House, it was twenty years old.  George W. Bush is leaving, after eight more years of Republican control, with Roe still largely intact and 36 years old.  The younger generation, then, have grown up with abortion as a simple fact of life and have no interest in changing that.

Nor is the boogeyman of homosexuality going to do it.  Despite another string of victories last Tuesday for anti-gay marriage amendments, the fact of the matter is that for those under 50 — certainly, under 40 — homosexuality is normal.  While a majority still oppose granting gays the right to enter into an agreement with the name “marriage,” most support gay unions under a less sacred label.  A decade from now, the debate will seem silly and running on the issue will further marginalize the party.

A majority Republican Party, then, is going to have to figure out a way to keep social conservatives without abortion and gays as shibboleths and without alienating libertarian-minded right-of-center voters.  It’s inconceivable how it’s done so long as the Democrats are winning among college graduates.

A return to fiscal sanity is perhaps the best rallying cry in the short term, one that’ll be made easier in opposition.  (After all, it’ll be Democratic priorities that we can be frugal about rather than our own.)   Beyond that, though, there will need to be a lot of spade work in rebuilding an intellectual rationale for conservatism beyond cutting taxes and anti-elitism.

Note:  An outline form of this post was inadvertantly published earlier. My apologies for the confusion.

Tyson Homosexual ran 100 meters in a wind-aided 9.68 seconds at the U.S. Olympic trials today, in what would have been world record time. I mean, Tyson Gay.

Leftie People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch blog reports that,

In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don’t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” in any of the AP stories they run … leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed “Tyson Homosexual”

As Steve Benen observes, “auto-replace is not your friend.”

I checked and, apparently, someone tipped off OneNewsNow and they have rendered Gay’s name as Gay in updated stories such as “Gay runs 100 in windy 9.68 to make US Olympic team.”  Which, in this context, is still a pretty funny headline.

via memeorandum

A group “dedicated to ending discrimination against and harassment of military personnel affected by ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’” reports that Darren Manzella has been discharged under said policy.

Decorated Army Sergeant Darren Manzella has been discharged under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law banning lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans from military service, effective June 10. The Iraq war veteran was one of the first openly gay active duty service members to speak with the media while serving inside a war zone. In December 2007, Manzella was profiled by the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes. He told correspondent Lesley Stahl that he served openly during much of his time in the Army, with the full support of his colleagues and command.

[...]

Sergeant Manzella said, “My sexual orientation certainly didn’t make a difference when I treated injuries and saved lives in the streets of Baghdad. It shouldn’t be a factor in allowing me to continue to serve.”

This is causing a stir in the blogosphere.

Steve Benen notes that Manzella was serving quite openly, “even introducing his Army buddies to his boyfriend.” His bosses knew, too, and didn’t care. But “now that Manzella’s revelations have become embarrassing to the Army, he’s been discharged.” Pam Spaulding goes further, claiming, “The Pentagon has decided that it was time to boot yet another decorated service member from its ranks not simply for being gay — but for exposing the fact that the boots and the ground and most COs don’t give a damn about someone’s sexual orientation.”

Well . . . not so much. By going on “60 Minutes” and drawing public attention to the fact that his commanders were breaking the law, of course they were backed into a corner.

Benen asks a reasonable question, though: “Which poses the great risk, Manzella being deployed and serving honorably, or Manzella not being deployed? Which is better for the troops? Which does more to help those in uniform? Which leaves the military stronger, and which leaves it weaker?”

The countervailing argument, which struck me as perfectly reasonable when DADT was passed in 1993, was that openly gay personnel, especially males in combat arms specialties, would disrupt unit morale. Having recently left the Army at that time and quite cognizant of its organizational culture, I had no doubt that this was the case. Recall, too, that DADT was actually criticized as a liberal social experiment on the part of the dope smoking (but not inhaling!) draft dodger Bill Clinton. Prior to DADT, soldiers were subject to being asked, for no apparent reason, whether they were gay. (Indeed, one of the more surreal experiences of my military career was going through the interrogation for my Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information clearance and being asked a whole host of questions along the lines of whether I was gay, had ever been gay, or thought it conceivable that I might at some point in the future become gay.) DADT was designed to end the witch hunts.

That was fifteen years ago and society’s views on homosexuality have changed dramatically. The military is more socially conservative and slower to change its culture than the society as a whole but the vast majority of the enlisted soldiers and most of their officers have joined the Service since DADT was passed. As Amanda Terkel points out, such luminaries as JCS Chairman Mike Mullen and* former Senator Sam Nunn (a DADT sponsor) have indicated that the military might be ready for rethinking this policy. She even cites a recent Zogby poll [PDF] showing 73 percent of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan being “comfortable with gays and lesbians.” Then again, only 26 percent in the same survey thought gays should be allowed to serve, compared to a plurality of 37 percent opposed.

It should be noted, too, that the number of people being discharged under DADT is less than half what it was during the last year of the Clinton administration. Still, 612 people (the number in 2006, the last year for which data are available) is a lot to lose during wartime when we’re struggling to meet recruiting and retention goals. One highly qualified medic who wants to stay in, whose unit members and leaders want him to stay in, is too many.

As to Manzella, personally, though, it’s not unreasonable to ask why the hell did he go on “60 Minutes” to talk about this if he wanted to remain in uniform?

__________

* UPDATE: Actually following the link, I see that Terkel merely links to her own account of Mullen’s remarks. What he actually said was that the military is following the law now and, if Congress changes it, they’d follow the new law. That’s hardly advocacy for changing the law.

In reference to James’ post below, it’s worth pointing out that a biological cause for homosexuality does not, in any sense of the word, make for a birth defect, and we should be careful how we define the phrase. Calling homosexuality a “birth defect” (as some will no doubt begin to do so), implies that homosexuality causes some interference in a person’s flourishing or capabilities. Clearly, it does not. Calling homosexuality a “defect” is akin to calling left-handedness a “defect”–it doesn’t make sense, because being left-handed doesn’t affect health or flourishing. Neither does homosexuality. Homosexuality is just a difference from the norm. But from a purely biological perspective, there’s nothing wrong with it.

It’s worth considering, too, that calling homosexuality a “defect” is based purely on the Judeo-Christian moral sense. Homosexuality is certainly not a taboo in many human cultures, and has been celebrated in many. Additionally, from a pure empirical perspective, you’ll have a tough time convincing me that being gay would be bad for my kids when you consider that homosexuality appears to be based partially on brain structure. Given how intwined the various aspects of brain function are, you have to consider that if a “cure” had been available and used throughout history, there’s a good chance that human culture would have been deprived of the works and ideas of:

* Michaelangelo
* Socrates
* Alexander the Great
* Desiderius Erasmus
* Francis Bacon
* Walt Whitman
* Oscar Wilde
* Cole Porter
* Leonard Bernstein
* T.E. Lawrence
* Christopher Marlowe
* Leonardo da Vinci
* Horatio Alger, Jr.
* Hans Christian Andersen
* Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
* Alan Turing

And many, many others. How sad this world would be if parents tried to change the very structure of their children’s brains because of a primitive superstition regarding love between persons of the same sex. If you ask me, a desire to mold your child into being a person who satisfies your own selfish desires is the defect, not homosexuality.