The White Peril 白禍

Sometimes I think I should learn to spaz more. I seem to miss out on so much fulminating, which I'm given to understand is very cleansing and restorative. Evil Queen Rosemary, along with everyone else and his decorator, posted about Bush's apparent change of stance on gay unions:

You can call if a flip-flop if you wish but I prefer to think of it as evolution.

Now, he and Cheney are simpatico and I am much pleased. It's a baby step but it's an important baby step.

Well, okay, she's not fulminating--just take a look at those comments, though! Now, what I don't get is this. The FOXnews article quotes him as saying:

"I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so," Bush said in an interview aired Tuesday on ABC. Bush acknowledged that his position put him at odds with the Republican platform, which opposes civil unions.

"I view the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights," said Bush, who has pressed for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage (search). "States ought to be able to have the right to pass laws that enable people to be able to have rights like others."

Great! Fine by me. But is this new? If I recall correctly, he said something similar on Larry King in August (how long ago in the life cycle of campaign-related unpleasantness that seems now!):

"That's up to states," Bush told CNN's Larry King Thursday night. "If they want to provide legal protections for gays, that's great. That's fine. But I do not want to change the definition of marriage. I don't think our country should."

When asked about federal benefits for same-sex couples Bush pointed to inheritance taxes which are lower for people who are married Bush said gays should support Republican moves to get of inheritance taxes altogether.

The president told King that gay couples should work with Congress not depend on 'activist judges'.

See? We already spazzed about this. It's true that this ABC interview is just before the election and less likely to be forgotten, and that Bush's phrasing makes him sound a bit more personally supportive of civil unions, but the idea that it's something he's hauled out without warning...unless there's a significant dimension I'm missing here, it's not.

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BTW, what does it mean when someone tells you you "dress like a Republican"? Not a compliment, I don't think from context; but don't all those DNC-loyalist trial lawyers shop at Brooks Brothers, too?

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Atsushi's flying in for the three-day weekend tomorrow. No typhoon at either end this time. One hopes.

Added at 20:30: I wasn't the only one to remember--one of GayPatriot's readers did, too. This is very odd.

Added at 00:31, 30 October: As Atsushi reminded me when we spoke on the phone, this is not, actually, a three-day weekend. :( On the bright side, he is, in fact, coming, having dispatched his end-of-the-month crunch work.

Susanna Cornett posted about Gay Patriot's allegation that the Log Cabin Republicans' political director, Chris Barron, may be a Democratic plant.* Well, that he was an Edwards supporter who may not have been working sincerely to further Republican goals for gays. Things are looking as if this story may check out, and if it does, bully for GayPatriot for pursuing it.
* I have to say that I don't entirely share Susanna's confidence that GayPatriot doesn't engage in unsubstantiated partisan attacks. He links to a faxed version of a web page and seems to assume his readers will just take it at face value, when any of the bloggers I'm used to reading and trusting would have looked for the Google cache, which isn't difficult to find (the page I found dates to February, not to August 9, but GayPatriot seems to be saying that the page he was faxed came up in an August 9 search--in any case, "Edwards for President" was a meaningless concept by then), and posted it. I also haven't seen any confirmation that the assumptions underlying his "Someone threw a bottle at my car--obviously a disgruntled Kerry campaign worker!" post were borne out--and how the hell does one manage to be "straight-acting" while driving, anyway? I don't have a problem with his running an anonymous website, but he doesn't seem to understand that that makes it more, not less, important for him to give as much objective evidence for his contentions as possible. (Well, unless he just wants to reach those who already agree with him, and it doesn't look that way.)

Just mailed in my absentee ballot. Nobody here but us chickens.

Added on 18 October: Per Janis Gore's instructions, I decided to celebrate my ballot-casting by being an unpredictably shameless vodka martini-drinking homosexual Democrat.

Well, okay. Those weren't her instructions, exactly. I improvised. But I'm happy (if not entirely a Democrat). About the vote and the martinis.

And BTW, I'm not the first gay guy named Sean Ki--- to vote by absentee ballot. The "secret ballot" thing worries me a bit, though. I mean, the instructions from the Lehigh County Board of Elections did say you couldn't talk to anyone about the process, but people don't get in trouble for participating in exit polls, do they? I haven't been particularly secretive about whom I was likely to vote for, at least in the presidential and senate races. I'm willing to start cultivating an air of teasing mystery around the whole thing if necessary, though.

I wasn't going to say anything about Andrew Sullivan's recent piece on political outing, but Dale Carpenter has also gotten into the act, and there's something disturbing about both their positions. Here's Carpenter on when outing is justifiable:

Hypocrisy by an officeholder meets this test, as when a closeted politician opposes gay equality for homophobic reasons. An example would be a legislator who declares marriage must be �defended� from gay couples while he has extramarital homosexual affairs.

It is not enough, however, that a closeted politician opposes a gay-rights proposal if the basis for the opposition is non-homophobic. For example, an officeholder might oppose an employment non-discrimination law on the grounds that such laws are counterproductive or too costly for employers. She may be wrong; hypocritical she is not.

So all a closeted politician has to do in order to avoid being a fair target for outing is to make sure the stated reasons for her positions don't sound anti-gay? There's a bright-line ethical distinction we can all have confidence in!

Not even gays can always agree over what is and is not "anti-gay," after all. A legislator who supports sodomy laws that he expects to violate pretty clearly fits Carpenter's criterion here. Citing the marriage issue muddies things up, though. I'm as gay as it gets, and (for those who are new here or haven't been paying attention) I don't support gay marriage. I wouldn't put it in terms of "defending" the institution from us dissolute homos, no, but neither would I be persuaded that my views are hypocritical.

And then suppose--surely Carpenter, who did not just come out yesterday, has encountered a few people who think this way--the legislator in question sees his homosexual impulses as being confined to sex but that his only meaningful bond is with his wife. It's incorrect to assume the rest of us also do or should think that way. You could even say it's hypocritical. But it doesn't involve the sort of double-dealing deception and intent to break the law that are the only possible rationales for outing. (And even that justification is only theoretical. In practice, we have the additional problem that the sort of itchy-trigger-finger activists who are most eager to do the job have the least trustworthy ethical judgment.)

Andrew Sullivan took a harder line. His line of reasoning, however, still bothers me:

Anyone who knows the psychological torment of gay men in the generations that came of age in the 1950s, 1960s or even 1970s, must surely understand that things are often a little more complicated than that. Gay men who have lived their lives in shame and deception may not have come to terms in any profound way with the inner conflicts that are propelling their outward actions. They may be in such acute denial that they are barely aware of their deceptions. They may have split their psyches in so many different ways that their ego is scarcely aware of what their id is up to. Or they may somehow believe they are not gay; or that they are doing the minimum necessary to keep their lives in one dysfunctional piece; or they may be fully aware they are gay inside while cynically advancing their political self-interest at the expense of other gay people.

Does any of this describe someone you think is fit to submit bills and vote on laws that run the lives of 300 million Americans? It seems to me that a rather fundamental requirement for being a member of congress is having an ego that keeps tabs on what your id is up to--otherwise known as being in possession of all your adult faculties.

I do think Sullivan's right to remind other gays and lesbians that coming out is difficult for everyone and exacts the heaviest price from the weak-willed. I also don't disagree with him over whether self-deceiving people should be outed. They should not be. But there has to be a better way to argue that than "Maybe he's not hypocritical, just delusional!" At some point, we have to come to terms with the fact that (1) some homosexuals who wish they weren't try to exorcise their impulses by being publicly hard on those of us who share them, (2) they know exactly what they're doing, and (3) there is no way of punishing them. There's not even a reliable way of figuring out who they are, especially if Sullivan's going to raise the possibility that some of them are blacking out their gay encounters.

The answer here, as it so often is, is for people who believe in the privacy of personal life to live by their principles. Teaching by example works slowly, and it means that some people get away with some appalling things. But it also produces more lasting change, which is what we should be interested in if we care about gays who come of age in the future as well as in the '50's, '60's, and '70's.