Rich Mintz  

L. Ian MacDonald’s sunny sum-up of the Canadian Liberal Party’s biennial convention in Ottawa, which I attended, reflects my own views of the event. Far from feeling like an opportunity for communal wound-licking or rumination, which might have been understandable given the drubbing the Liberals took in this past cycle, the convention was proud, hopeful, raucous, at times jubilant. I noticed what MacDonald noticed, which was that the deeply engaged crowd was overwhelmingly young, which is the best possible indicator of a healthy future for a political movement.

The Liberals are the guardians of Canada’s soul. They brought Canadians universal healthcare; they steward Canadian tolerance and respect for diversity; they protect communitarian values. All North American progressives benefit when they are strong, because they pull the midpoint of public discourse to the left. I’m proud to have been present at this symbolic rebirth of Canada’s greatest political movement, and wish the Liberal Party well as it moves into the future.

It is a moral stain on the United States of America that there is a law on the books at the federal level that treats families like mine as though we are less worthy than others. We are taxed disproportionately and unjustly; we are excluded from basic rights of family and inheritance; we risk losing our children. Over a thousand protections, rights, and benefits are denied to us, with no public policy justification, no justification at all other than tribal panic on the part of a mostly elderly minority of Americans; and in an increasing number of states, they are denied to us over the objections of the people in our own communities.

And, in this Republican primary season, the candidates are competing to out-pander each other by saying things about families like mine that most of them (excepting Rick Santorum) probably don’t even believe.

DOMA will not be law in ten years; demographics will see to that. But in the meantime, it is a disgusting shame, the worst kind of political pandering codified into statute.

For more information about the damage done by DOMA and the families who are hurt, visit Why Marriage Matters, a project of Freedom to Marry. The Legal Stranger Project is attempting to document the ways in which DOMA damages families and betrays the so-called ideals of its supporters. Please learn, then fight back: tell your legislators that you support DOMA repeal, follow the campaign, speak up in your own community, put your money where your mouth is. Your voice matters.

I’m reading the detailed press release about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State address, and I have to say I’m impressed. (No, I’m not watching the video; who the hell has time for that? but you can, if you want, here.) I was prepared to be impressed, based on the buzz, but I’m quite a bit more impressed than I expected.

The guy has turned out to be a better communicator than I expected, a better political operator than I expected (hello! gay marriage in New York!), and a much more committed progressive than I expected. I suppose the latter should have been expected — he was quite progressive at HUD — but after a few years in the governor’s office (or “on the second floor in Albany,” as I recently learned the insiders say), he’s really hitting his stride.

This isn’t a PlaNYC 2030, but there’s still a lot of meat in here — “no kid hungry,” “Office for New Americans,” economic development, energy efficiency, public service training. He proposed building an enormous convention center in Queens, for God’s sake, and freeing up the windswept Javits zone on the West Side for dense mixed-use development, patching a hole in the city and bringing organic life to a part of Manhattan that’s gone artificial. In a year in which my home state of California seems mired in budgetary troubles that seem they may never end, it’s exciting to see the governor of my adopted state reaching so high.

I have to admit that I’m of two minds on last night’s NYPD clearing of Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the Occupy movement — which happens to be three short blocks from my apartment building.

Obviously (and in case it isn’t obvious, I’ll say it) I support the movement. I’ve gone from being one of those mildly curious “what are their demands?” people to being impressed by the extent to which this movement has made inequality a legitimate subject for serious public debate — for the first time in a generation. So, good on them.

But as someone who lives close enough that I was awakened at 2am today by helicopters and sirens, and that people were arrested in the early morning hours at a police line right at the end of my street, well — I’m not so sure an indefinite and semi-organized domination of a public space by a loud and intimidating (yes, intimidating) band of grubby, confrontational people is something you’d want in your neighborhood. People live down here. For weeks I’ve avoided turning left at the end of my block instead of right, because going left just wasn’t worth the anxiety. And I’m a six-foot-two man, sympathetic to the occupiers, and someone who, in ordinary circumstances, isn’t much bothered by anything or anyone.

Bloomberg’s been in an impossible position for weeks — not because of his “girlfriend” or his “cronies,” but because even a liberal mayor (which, duh, have you ever paid attention to anything the guy has said?) is obligated to protect public order for everyone. There are times when “public order” is a cover for an anti-idealistic crackdown, but this isn’t one of them. Camping on private property without the consent of the owner is in clear violation of the law. (If it were a public park, the violation would be even clearer.) And when an EMT doing his job is assaulted, you’ve reached a point where public order has broken down.

The media blackout was a terrible idea, and is being rightly treated as such in the public debate. But I suspect a silent majority of Occupy’s supporters — and certainly of the hundreds of thousands who live and work in lower Manhattan — are ready for the next phase of the Occupy movement. The Zuccotti occupation has achieved what it needed to.

Via Bruce Bawer on the Daily Dish, a troubling but not-at-all-surprising recent Orange County Register report from the Crystal Cathedral, the Reagan-era bastion of what then passed for “conservative” Christian worship….

Like so much about the 1980s, in retrospect the Crystal Cathedral of my youth seems positively liberal compared to the panicked rigidity of contemporary political Christianity. Witness this account, from earlier this year, of the attempt by church leadership to get choir members to sign what amounts to an anti-gay, anti-outsider loyalty oath as a condition of participation. The recently ousted church patriarch Robert Schuller found this odious, making clear in quite emphatic terms that he strongly disagreed with such exclusionary tactics.

Similar sentiments were expressed to the Register by several longtime church members:

Ann Moore Waltz, a long-time church member and the Cathedral’s first soloist to stand and sing on top the snack shack in Robert H. Schuller community church at the Orange drive-in said, she does not agree with the statement in the covenant.

“If I were still in the choir and if that was presented to me, and if a gay person had walked out, I would have walked out with him or her,” she said. “If you are a Christian group and people come to you, you should be a good servant, love them and shine the light of Jesus on them – regardless of who they are.”

If you’ve ever read anything about, you know, Jesus Christ, the guy they named the religion after, you’d find this sentiment familiar. (Remember “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me”?)

From another choir member:

The choir member says she doesn’t agree with the statement that choir members should be “Christian” either.

“We have had members in the past who had personal problems, but turned their lives around and accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior after they sang in the choir,” she said.

Basically, here we have a situation where old people, who have been in this (quite traditional) church for a long time, are the ones speaking out for the legitimate Christian values of inclusion and hope, while the new generation just gets nastier.

In 1986, when I was demonstrating against Ronald Reagan outside the Federal Building in Scollay Square, and in 1991, when i was standing up to the LAPD on horseback outside the Century Plaza — in a period in which it felt that the right wing was as tight and crabbed as it could ever be — I never would have thought that a time would come when I’d long for the days of Robert Schuller’s brand of Christianity. But just twenty years later, here we are.

For all its “conservatism,” the Christianity of Robert Schuller and those of his ilk was genuinely inclusive. Although it had a clearly articulated moral point of view, its emphasis was on the universal hope of transformation, not on the shame and stain of sin. And the very Western (as in West Coast) physical cathedral that Schuller had built (designed by the larger-than-life homosexual architect Phliip Johnson), with its soaring brightness and clean lines, is the very physical instantiation of the hope to ascend. Inside a building like this, you can see beyond your stain and envision that the message of Jesus might have been meant even for you. But I’m sad to see that purity has now come to be more important to the “faithful” than adherence to the message of Jesus Christ.

(In other news, how can Wikipedia’s biography of Philip Johnson not contain the word “gay” or “homosexual”? Surely this fact about one of America’s great architects is neither in dispute nor particularly controversial, right? I should fix that… but maybe I’d better read the Talk page first.)

After a few days in Scotland talking to people, the outcome of the May elections seems more unsettling than ever, and where things will go from here seems even more uncertain. Nobody I spoke with was in favor of Scottish independence from Britain. True, this is partly a function of the sorts of people I happened to speak with (mostly people whose salaries are paid at least in part by the cultural sector, i.e., the state). But I was still struck by the extent to which devolution was described to me as a mixed blessing for Scotland, symbolically meaningful but of little practical value and possibly harmful in the long run.

I found the 3-article series in the June 2011 issue of Prospect magazine (one of the three stories is here) to be the most thoughtful analysis yet of the advantages and disadvantages of devolution and independence. Certainly Alex Salmond has his work cut out for him.

I’m annoyed to see professional NYC gay Allen Roskoff attempting to pick holes in the increasingly visible and viable pro-marriage-equality coalition in New York State.  With a coalition of politicians, dozens of celebrities, and now a bunch of rich white people on board, marriage equality is cruising toward real feasibility for the first time.  As an actual gay person in New York who would like to marry someone here (I mean an actual identified someone, not a theoretical one) and can’t, I have as much stake in this issue as Roskoff, and I for one am thrilled to see people like Mike Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo (and Bill Clinton, a Kentuckian, etc. etc.) come down, out loud, on the right side of history.

This is politics.  It’s hard, and everyone is caught between competing priorities and obligations.  Why dig for reasons to be angry at people?  Accept your victories, and be gracious to those who lend their voices to your cause.  (Incidentally, thanks, Lynne Cheney and Laura Bush.)  Would a stronger pro-marriage-equality stance from Bill Clinton have been better earlier? Sure, but that doesn’t negate his current activities — in fact, I think I appreciate them more.)

The New Yorkers for Marriage Equality campaign, helmed by the able Brian Ellner (seconded from HRC), is racking up public support and mainstream credibility much faster than anything Empire State Pride Agenda ever did on its own. A year ago ESPA was pressured (by Roskoff, as it happened) to drop Ellner from the running for its own executive director position — apparently Ellner didn’t hate Mike Bloomberg enough, or something.  ESPA made a mistake (again: what is the purpose of loyalty oaths that make our coalition smaller?), but it all worked out in the end, as Ellner was quickly picked up by HRC and is now at the front of a strong and effective visibility campaign.  (Also note: the donations I used to give to ESPA are now going to HRC.)

My advice to Roskoff: Get out of the way and let success happen. Or, better yet, turn your anger at people who are actually impeding the cause.  Who cares what Andrew Cuomo or Bill Clinton feels in his heart? What I care about is what they say and what they do.  With demographics inexorably pulling the public in the direction we want to go, this is the moment to welcome and encourage the broadening of the coalition, not to fear it.

I was dismayed, but not surprised, to read that the death of Osama bin Laden this past weekend has resulted in a ramp-up of security theater in New York and around the country. If Mike Bloomberg, who presumably has no particular political aims (he surely doesn’t want to be President; what a terrible life compared to that of a billionaire; and he would never put up with extended periods in Albany or Washington), can’t call publicly for a rollback of the most pointless and theatrical protections, then who can?

Obviously there’s a short-term threat of reprisal attacks, but it seems that (absent a dedicated and politically unpopular effort on the grounds of American ideals by someone with the credibility to do it, such as President Obama) the security-industrial complex appears to be here to stay independent of that. When the successful achievement of your stated goal (the capture of bin Laden) leads only to ratcheting up of the alert status, just as its non-achievement would, you’re stuck in an unbreakable feedback loop of regulatory capture.  Sigh.

Our first-tier targets (the symbolic ones that mean something to lunatics halfway around the world, like the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge) will always need special attention. And the competent and professional NYPD needs to continue to do the fine job that it always does.  But as Matt Yglesias has pointed out repeatedly (along with James Fallows and dozens of others), our airports have mountains of conspicuous security at the “security checkpoint,” but almost none at the curb.  Or in the Starbucks.  Anyone can walk onto the platform at Penn Station carrying virtually anything.  Anyone can walk into Disneyland with a Thermos full of anthrax.  At 5pm on a Thursday anyone can walk into the mob of PATH pedestrians at Church and Vesey, right in front of the main WTC construction gate, and sneeze leprosy or tuberculosis bacilli into a thousand communities across three states.

In a free society, that’s as it should be. The most important security safeguard isn’t the TSA, it’s people paying attention and being willing to speak up.  (Or as Yglesias put it, “Whatever it is that explains why we don’t have constant truck bomb attacks on the streets of Washington it has nothing to do with building security at second-tier federal agencies.”)  The two times in New York I’ve seen something and said something, once in Penn Station and once on the streets of Brooklyn, police (Amtrak and NYPD) mobilized immediately, and in both cases went out of their way to say to me, “don’t ever hesitate to tell us if you see something that doesn’t look right.”

At the end of the day, we decide what kind of society we want to have.  I’m willing to say that I want a society where freedom of association and freedom of movement are valued so highly that we are willing to accept a moderate amount of risk of small disruptions to the public peace as part of their price.  I felt that way while Osama bin Laden was alive, and I feel the same way now that he isn’t.

Now this is interesting: my old friend Jonathan Miller, former Kentucky State Treasurer and author of The Compassionate Community, is leaving state government and entering the blogosphere, with The Recovering Politician set to launch on April 1.

If the content is as expected (and if it can compete with the visuals on the website, which are already striking), this will become a daily read. Jonathan’s a smart guy, thoughtful and articulate about policy, and committed to the public welfare deep in his bones. So sign up, subscribe, and read…

The judge in the Log Cabin Republicans’ “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” suit in California ruled for the plaintiffs tonight, concluding that the policy of dismissing gay and lesbian members of the military is unconstitutional on both First and Fifth Amendment grounds. She says she will issue a permanent injunction against its enforcement within a week. Not clear yet whether DOJ will appeal.

Associated Press story here; opinion itself is here. The opinion is worth leafing through; among other things, the judge finds that the Government’s claims about unit cohesion are directly contradicted by the evidence, including evidence that the Government has delayed the discharge of gay and lesbian servicemembers until after their combat tours are over.

Stuff like this is obvious to gay people, in the same way that mixed-race couples in 1940 found it obvious that prohibitions against their marriage are inherently unconstitutional. But it’s a relief to see the culture as a whole acknowledging it. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends toward justice — I believe that that is true fundamentally, and not just contingently or locally, among a human race that is wired for communitarian living — and we’ve seen a lot of positive social change for gay people in just a few short years.