Jonathan Rauch Enters the Blogosphere ...

... well, sort of. The Brookings Institution's Jonathan Rauch -- who also writes for National Journal and The Atlantic Monthly -- has launched a web site that, for the moment, lacks a blog. Even so, it's still well worth a visit.

Rauch, the author of the recent Gay Marriage : Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America and of the earlier books Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought and Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working, decided he needed a place on the web to post his earlier articles and contributions to key public-policy debates of the day.

As Jonathan explains:

No popups. No javascripts. No sponsors. No blog. Yet. And I'll be damned if I know what a trackback is. But here is a selection of my journalism, handily compiled, gradually accumulating, and free of charge (sorry, no donations accepted--but see Independent Gay Forum). Also, links if you want to buy a book or host a speech. With the help of TypePad, even the severely HTML-impaired, specifically me, can build a website, and this kludge is my own artful creation. Please browse and enjoy and see if you can figure out why I haven't received a MacArthur Prize. Yet.

He'll be blogging before he knows it.

Congressman Bartlett's Great Idea

John McCaslin reports in "Inside the Beltway," his Washington Times column, that Representative Roscoe Bartlett (R-Maryland) thinks that American taxpayers are being shafted by having to bear the costs of the Republican and Democratic parties' quadrennial political conventions:

"Taxpayers, unfortunately, have had to bear the brunt of the cost for these conventions, which last year totaled almost a third of a billion dollars," says Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, Maryland Republican, one of several lawmakers who want the pickpocketing to stop.

"The conventions no longer serve the purpose they were intended to serve [when they] used to decide a political party's presidential nominee," the congressman says. "However, it has been a long time since there was any suspense or even pretense about the nominee from either the Republican or Democratic ... conventions."

Last year, taxpayers forked over about $40 million for the Republican convention in Gotham and almost $50 million for the Democrats' bash in Boston. And this does not count the tremendous costs that host cities coughed up to provide security, police protection and transportation services.

Is there anything more unfair -- or absurd -- than having U.S. taxpayers empty their wallets so that a lot of Republican and Democratic fat-cats can have four days of wining and dining in multi-star hotels?

If small-fry political parties like the Libertarians and Greens can afford to pay for their own nominating conventions -- at which, I might add, candidates are actually nominated for president and vice president, and platforms are vigorously debated (not merely rubber-stamped) -- why can't the far richer Republicans and Democrats?

Representative Bartlett has introduced a bill, HR 45, which aims to "amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to prohibit the use of public funds for political party conventions."

The bill, entitled the "Political Convention Reform Act of 2005," has been referred to the Committee on House Administration, chaired by Ohio Representative Bob Ney. The committee's telephone number is 202-225-8281; its fax number is 202-225-9957.

Let Chairman Ney -- and, while you're at it, your own Representative in Washington (202-224-3121) -- know you support Congressman Bartlett's bill to end the taxpayer subsidy of political party partying.

A Lesson in Timing, by Paul Theroux

In this past Sunday's Washington Post Book World, published three days after playwright Arthur Miller's death but apparently printed before it, novelist Paul Theroux says this in a special spread on writers' favorite books about love (a Valentine's Day billet doux, of sorts):

When I read recently that Arthur Miller, nearly 90, was engaged in a dalliance with an artistic woman in her mid-thirties ("I had thought he was dead!" she confided to an interviewer), my mind raced back with pleasure to one of the last short stories V.S. Pritchett ever wrote, "On the Edge of a Cliff."

If Miller's young paramour "thought he was dead", what must have been the reaction of most Americans to Friday's news? "Wasn't he the guy who married Joe DiMaggio's ex-wife?"

At least Theroux's minor faux pas can be attributed to printing schedules. It's not like the CNN reporter who contacted a publicist to request (the late) Rodney Dangerfield's reaction to Johnny Carson's passing last month. That's just bumbling journalism.

Maybe It's the 24/7 Formalwear

In his book, Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, Wayne R. Besen exposes the fraudulent nature of the "ex-gay" movement and the reparative "therapy" that promises, against all standards of professional ethics, to turn homo- into heterosexuals.

Now some European scientists who tried their own form of reparative therapy with an unusual niche of patients have thrown up their hands in frustration. According to an article on the British news site, Ananova:

A German zoo's plans to tempt its gay penguins to go straight by importing more females has been declared a failure.

The female penguins were flown in especially from Sweden in an effort to encourage the Humboldt penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo to reproduce.

But the six homosexual penguins showed no interest in their new female companions and remained faithful to each other.

Zoo Director Heike Kueck said: "The relationships were apparently too strong."

It must be the penguins' snappy way of dressing -- tuxedos are always such a turn-on.

North Korea's Nukes

Overheard:

"If the North Koreans use their nuclear weapons on any target, anywhere, the United States should bomb them forward to the Stone Age."

I See London, I See France ... I See Silly Laws about Underpants

Just as Charlottesville's Live Arts theatre company completed a run of Steve Martin's play, The Underpants, whose farcical plot is set off by the inadvertant sight of a woman's bloomers by onlookers at a royal parade, the oldest legislative body in North America has passed a law that would ensure that Martin's hapless heroine would be fined $50 for her embarrassment.

Drawing national (AP, Chicago Sun-Times, ABC News, Neal Boortz) and international (The Scotsman, BBC News, Der Spiegel) attention -- and ridicule, it goes without saying -- the Virginia House of Delegates has passed a bill, HB 1981, patroned by Norfolk Democrat Algie Howell, which states:

Any person who, while in a public place, intentionally wears and displays his below-waist undergarments, intended to cover a person's intimate parts, in a lewd or indecent manner, shall be subject to a civil penalty of no more than$50.

The bill is designed to inhibit, if not prohibit, the wearing of "low-riding" jeans and the above-waistband display of boxers and thongs -- a popular fashion trend among young people, in particular young African-Americans. (Delegate Howell himself is African-American.)

Not having more important things to do -- such as ending intrusive business regulations or cutting taxes for Virginia's workers -- the House voted 60 to 34 to send this bill to the state Senate.

Delegate Lionel Spruill, also a black Democrat, opposed the bill, reminding his colleagues, to no avail, that youthful fashion trends come and go. He asked if any members of the House can look at their high school yearbook pictures without laughing -- or cringing. As reported in the Washington Times:

Mr. Spruill conducted an informal survey of his colleagues, asking about their youthful fashion fads and faux pas. The responses, he said, ranged from Afros to platform shoes to polyester leisure suits.

"Please, let these kids express themselves," he said. "It will pass on. Don't fine these young kids. You had your time, let them have their time."

On a more serious note, Spruill argued:

"This is a foolish bill because it will hurt so many," said Mr. Spruill, who is black.

"This will be a bill that will target blacks."

At one point, Mr. Spruill suggested that lawmakers who vote for the bill "should be ashamed" and said Mr. Howell has let his constituents down.

His view was echoed by civil libertarians. The Times again:

However, Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said the bill "clearly targets" black men.

"African-Americans are going to be the ones who are harassed by police under this law," Mr. Willis said yesterday.

"Another concern is that legislators may have started a trend where they are designating themselves the arbiters of taste for Virginia, maybe even the fashion police," the ACLU director said. "This is simply not the kind of detail legislators should be addressing."

In June, Louisiana's Legislature rejected a bill that would have made it illegal to wear sagging pants that exposed a person's underwear. According to published reports, the Louisiana House voted 54-39 to reject the bill, which was later parodied on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." That bill would have imposed a $175 fine.

A little bit of parody is good for the legislative soul. (Although it's hard to see how a bill like HB 1981 is anything less than self-parody.) Jon Stewart, call your Richmond bureau.

Health Insurance Bill Passes Virginia Senate

A bill that amends the Virginia code to permit private businesses to provide health insurance coverage to the domestic partners of employees or to other family members besides spouses and children under the age of 25 passed the Virginia Senate today with a vote of 26-14.

The bill (SB 1338), is patroned by Janet Howell (D-Reston) and copatroned by a bipartisan list of state Senators (Republicans Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, H. Russell Potts, and John Watkins, as well as Democrats John Edwards and Richard Saslaw). The bill now goes to the House of Delegates, where it will be considered by the Commerce and Labor Committee. The House patrons are Republicans Vince Callahan and James Dillard and Democrat Robert Brink.

Virginia is the only state in the country that forbids private businesses from offering health insurance coverage to anyone they wish (unless those businesses are self-insured).

Last year a similar bill passed the House but died in the Senate for lack of action. Let's hope that this year a better fate awaits it. The legislature of a state that purports to encourage and promote free enterprise should do no less. As an "issue brief" distributed during last year's General Assembly session explained:

In a classic example of government interference in the private sector, Virginia law currently prohibits private employers from offering health insurance benefits to persons other than a spouse and their children. For example, both United Airlines and Kroger offer such benefits to their employees nationwide. Their employees who live in Virginia, however, are unable to get these health insurance benefits, because Virginia's Bureau of Insurance prohibits private employers who are not self-insured from offering their Virginia employees such benefits to anyone other than a spouse and their children.

This interference with a private employer's choice about what healthcare benefits it will offer its employees costs Virginia residents valuable healthcare benefits and is a direct attack on free enterprise. It should be ended.

To urge your Delegate to vote in favor of SB 1338, send an email through the House of Delegates web site here.

John Edwards Concedes Election

Virginia State Senator John Edwards (not the failed U.S. vice presidential candidate), a Roanoke Democrat, has effectively conceded his party's nomination for state Attorney General to his opponent, fellow Senator R. Creigh Deeds of Bath County.

Edwards, whose office adjoins that of Deeds in the General Assembly building, was one of only ten members of the Virginia Senate to vote against a constitutional amendment that prohibits gay marriage. The amendment (designated SJ 337) reads:

That only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions. This Commonwealth and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effect of marriage.

While many people, including myself, wish that the political and cultural climate were different, the fact is that in states like Virginia, opposition to same-sex marriage is overwhelming. For a politician with ambitions for statewide office to vote against "one-man, one-woman" legislation -- even for the best of reasons -- is simply political suicide.

Creigh Deeds now only has to tell voters across the state that Edwards is "soft on gays" or "pro-homo" or "anti-marriage/anti-family" and he'll win the nomination in a landslide. And that's true even though Republicans will be holding a primary for their own statewide nominations on the same day.

At this point, Edwards might as well pack up his campaign bag and go home.

For the record, the ten brave souls who voted against the amendment were these Democrats:

John Edwards (Roanoke)
Janet Howell (Fairfax County)
Benjamin Lambert (Richmond)
Mamie Locke (Hampton)
Louise Lucas (Portsmouth)
Henry Marsh (Richmond)
Toddy Puller (Fairfax County)
Richard Saslaw, (Springfield)
Patricia Ticer (Alexandria)
Mary Margaret Whipple (Arlington)

It may be significant that 40 percent of the "nays" came from four of the Senate's five African-American members. Given the animosity toward same-sex marriage in the African-American community, these votes either signify the Senators' confidence that their seats are absolutely safe or their genuine reliance on principle.

The amendment now goes to the House of Delegates, where it will also be approved with only token opposition. In order for the amendment to take effect, it will have to be approved by the General Assembly again next year (after an intervening election for the House of Delegates), and then it will go to the voters in the form of a referendum in the November 2006 general election.

The Edwards-Deeds primary for Attorney General will take place on June 14.

Cutting Amtrak's Subsidy: It's About Time

In a rare display of a politician being true to his word, President Bush today proposed a budget that cuts more than a hundred programs. Among the programs to be cut is Amtrak. As reported in the Oakland Tribune:

President Bush is set to unveil his budget Monday, one which would eliminate the entire government subsidy for Amtrak. Without naming the publicly funded rail corporation, Bush made his intentions clear in his State of Union address last week.

"My budget substantially reduces or eliminates more than 150 government programs that are not getting results ... or do not fulfill essential priorities," the president said. "The principle here is clear: Taxpayer dollars must be spent wisely or not at all."

Bush's proposal will not be politically popular. Some powerful Senators and Representatives from the Northeast corridor, the only part of the country where Amtrak is useful and economical, will fight it tooth and nail.

But it's about time that a president offered to cut the Amtrak subsidy. If any use of taxpayer's money puts a greater burden on the poor and working class to benefit the affluent, this one does.

Eight years ago, I wrote an article that reported on a Cato Institute study, "Amtrak at Twenty-Five: End of the Line for Taxpayer Subsidies," which made this point precisely.

For the benefit of my readers and legislators who need the case spelled out for them, here's what I wrote for The Metro Herald and other newspapers in January 1997:

Amtrak: Burden on the Poor, Benefit to the Rich
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Is there anything more scandalous than learning that rich corporate executives have their business and leisure activities subsidized by poor and working-class taxpayers? It is indeed a scandal when the government empties the pockets of the poor to fill the wallets of the rich. And that is precisely what our government does in its growing subsidy of Amtrak, the quarter- century-old national passenger railway.

According to a recent report from the Washington-based Cato Institute, supporters of Amtrak in Congress and the bureaucracy assert that Amtrak's heavy subsidy -- more than $1 billion last year -- is needed to provide the poor with intercity and commuter transportation. This assertion is demonstrably false. Only 13 percent of Amtrak's riders have annual incomes under $20,000.

Nearly three-quarters have incomes over $40,000, while about 33 percent have household incomes exceeding $75,000, and 20 percent earn over $100,000 per year. The Cato study observes: "For intercity travel, low-income Americans are much more likely to ride buses, which serve more communities, are cheaper, and are operated privately by profit-making, tax-paying firms."

Passenger subsidies on Amtrak are shocking. In fact, the Cato report notes, "Amtrak's subsidies are so large that they would be more than enough to pay the fares of all intercity bus riders with less than $20,000 annual income." Some examples of the individual subsidies: taxpayers provide $1,270 for every Amtrak round-trip between New York and Los Angeles, although discount airfares between those two cities are usually around $400. Similarly, the taxpayer subsidy for Amtrak passengers between Chicago and St. Louis is $113, while Chicago-to-St. Louis airfares fall below $100. Between Chicago and New Orleans, typical airfares are $175, but the per-passenger Amtrak subsidy is $370. For the Denver-Chicago route, discount airfares are under $300; the Amtrak subsidy is $650 per passenger.

No wonder the authors of this report -- Cato fiscal analyst Stephen Moore and independent transportation consultants Wendell Cox and Jean Love -- suggest that "it would be cheaper for taxpayers to close down expensive [passenger rail] lines and purchase discount round-trip airfares for all the Amtrak riders."

As it is, Amtrak makes a negligible contribution to the nation's transportation network. It accounts for just 0.007 percent of daily commuter trips (that's seven-one-thousandths of a percentage point) and just four- tenths of one percent of all passengers making trips between cities. Amtrak serves only three-quarters of the country's 100 largest urban centers. There are one and a half times as many airports as there are Amtrak stations, and nearly 10 times as many bus stations. Cities as large as Dallas and Houston receive Amtrak service fewer than three days a week. Notes the Cato report: "The smallest of the nation's 10 major airlines, for example, has double the intercity market share of Amtrak."

Given Amtrak's minuscule role in U.S. transportation, it is only natural to point out that closing down Amtrak entirely would have no impact on either pollution or energy usage. Moore, Cox, and Love write that "even a doubling of train ridership would reduce energy consumption and traffic congestion by less than 0.1 percent." They add that "because transportation-related pollution is closely correlated with energy intensiveness, Amtrak provides little or no benefit in reducing air pollution."

Between 1970 and 1995, Amtrak received more than $13 billion in federal tax subsidies. In addition, 36 states routinely provide public funding to Amtrak. This is a tremendous waste of the hard-earned dollars of working people, who pay for but do not benefit from Amtrak's meager services.

The Cato Institute has performed a sterling service by analyzing Amtrak's inputs and outputs so thoroughly. Its report, "Amtrak at Twenty-Five: End of the Line for Taxpayer Subsidies," is available for examination on line. Anyone who has doubts about Amtrak's feeble contribution to American transportation should read it.

The time has come to end taxpayer funding of Amtrak and either eliminate this rathole of a railroad completely or sell it off to the private sector, perhaps by first offering its managers and employees a chance to purchase it, much as privatized industries in the former Soviet bloc have been sold to their workers, who are now authentic owners. The new Congress should put ending Amtrak's huge subsidy high on its agenda, so that workers in America's inner cities no longer pay the fares of suburban elites.

If Amtrak is to succeed and provide safe, efficient, and economical services to railroad passengers, it must do so in a competitive environment, freed of the shackles of both taxpayer subsidy and heavy government regulations. If bus lines, airways, and other private transportation networks can succeed without massive government transfusions of taxpayer money, why couldn't passenger rail?

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Richard Sincere is author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise and other books.

Let me make a comparison: the taxpayer subsidy for Amtrak is the equivalent of housing subsidies that go toward luxury townhomes in exclusive urban or suburban neighborhoods at the expense of "affordable housing" for the poor and working class. (Don't get me wrong: I oppose housing subsidies and requirements for "affordable housing," too. I'm just trying to put the inequity in terms that liberals will understand.)

A more recent Cato Institute publication, The Cato Handbook on Policy (published earlier this year), has this to say about Amtrak:

Passenger Rail: Subsidies to Amtrak were supposed to be temporary after the passenger rail agency was created in 1970. That has not occurred, and Amtrak has provided second-rate passenger rail service for 30 years while consuming more than $25 billion in federal subsidies. Reforms elsewhere show that private passenger rail can work. Full or partial rail privatization has occurred in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and other countries.

Cutting subsidies is a good start. Full privatization is the goal we should seek.

Survey on Blogging Ethics

I received a random email tonight from Andy Koh, who describes himself as "an undergraduate from the School of Communications and Information, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)."

Mr. Koh explains that his "fellow course-mates and I are conducting an online survey to study the practices and attitudes of bloggers on ethics and blogging as part of our honours thesis" and invited me to take part in the survey.

I did take the survey, which was in two parts. The whole thing took about twenty minutes.

Mr. Koh goes on to request "if you would just give us a little additional support, you can mention our survey by posting our link on your weblog post, or forward this e-mail to your friends. We are working hard to have our survey disseminate globally across countries so that a wide demographic can be collected."

So here is the link to the survey. And this is where you can see the final results once they are compiled.

Good luck to Mr. Koh and his team at Nanyang Technological University.

Over-the-Rainbow Adoption Policy

Poor Adam Ebbin! The Democrat from Virginia's 49th House of Delegates district revealed in a floor debate yesterday that he is culturally deprived. He admitted to all present that he does not possess a boxed set of Judy Garland CDs!

Some context:

The Virginia House of Delegates has approved a bill that would require adoption agencies to investigate whether prospective adoptive parents are homosexual. The measure (HB2921) is a watered-down version of Delegate Dick Black's proposal to ban outright any adoptions by gay couples or individuals in Virginia. (Black might have trouble with that terminology: In an interview with Washington radio station WMAL-AM on January 26, he used this phrase: "homosexual couples or whatever you call them." My friend, Tim Hulsey, who was listening to the radio with me when we heard this, said "That's precisely what you call them." But enough -- making fun of Dick Black's ignorance is not sporting.)

As reported in Sunday's Washington Times ("House considers gay adoption screening"):

Delegate Richard H. Black said his bill would require state officials, during a standard background check, to report to the court whether the applicant is "currently engaged in voluntary homosexual activity."

Mr. Black, a Loudoun Republican, said children "deserve the greatest opportunity to experience the natural love of a mother and father" and that his bill just tightens existing law and state tradition.

"In these politically correct times, I think it helps to make the law very, very explicit," he said.

And here is where we learn of Delegate Ebbin's pop-culture lacunae:

Delegate Robert H. Brink, Arlington Democrat, challenged Mr. Black's bill.

He asked if an investigator would check the applicant's compact-disc collection to see whether it included "mostly show tunes or includes a Judy Garland box set." His colleagues laughed.

"This bill is another attempt to marginalize, stigmatize and demonize folks, fellow Virginians, who happen to be gay," Mr. Brink said. "It has nothing to do with what should be the bedrock principle of adoption — to give a kid a chance to grow up in a loving, caring environment." Delegate Adam P. Ebbin, the legislature's only openly homosexual member, also opposed the measure.

"This legislation moves our investigators into the bedroom and turns them into the new sex police," said Mr. Ebbin, an Alexandria Democrat. He also said he does not have a Judy Garland box set.

I propose that, after the moratorium on campaign fundraising by elected officials ends with the final vote of the General Assembly on or about February 26, we should pitch in to purchase a set of Judy Garland CDs for the unfortunate Mr. Ebbin. I would suggest starting with Judy At Carnegie Hall: Fortieth Anniversary Edition or Judy Garland In Hollywood: Her Greatest Movie Hits - Original Soundtrack Performances 1936-1963.

Or we could simply go whole-hog and present him with Judy Garland: The Complete Decca Masters, a box set of her early recordings. No self-respecting gay legislator's home should be without at least one Judy Garland collection. With proper training and assistance, Mr. Ebbin should then be able to own and enjoy the classic Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli: Together (one shouldn't dive head-first into such unadulterated camp without preparation).

Full disclosure: In a 1991 special election and again in the 1993 general election, I ran for the 49th District House seat now held by Adam Ebbin, and the two of us have had a passing acquaintance for more than a decade.

But seriously ....

Now that I've got that out of my system, I want to address the substance of Black's blacklist bill.

Regardless of the claims of the bill's supporters, legislation like this -- particularly in its more virulent, unamended form before it came out of the Committee on Health, Welfare, and Institutions -- is nothing more than an attempt to codify undeserved animus against one type of law-abiding citizen. At best it is a form of heterosexism; at worst it is pure homophobia.

In an article about the state of Florida's similar ban on gay adoptive parents, columnist Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune wrote:

Normally, the state assesses applicants individually, on the crazy assumption that it should focus on what's best for the child. But when the prospective parent is gay, the interests of the child go out the window. Despite everything Lofton has done for the boy, the state is trying to place him in another home.

This approach is not the preference of the people charged with looking after the needs of kids. When the state's chief adoption official was asked under oath if there is any "child-welfare reason at all for excluding gay people from adopting children," she answered: "No."

The original impulse, it turns out, was not to protect children but to penalize gays. The measure, passed in 1977, was an offshoot of singer Anita Bryant's successful campaign to repeal a Dade County ordinance banning discrimination against homosexuals. The bill's chief sponsor explained it as a valiant effort to open lines of communication with gays: "We're trying to send them a message, telling them: 'We're really tired of you. We wish you'd go back into the closet.'"

Chapman concludes:

At any rate, the choice for many adoptable children in Florida is not between a homosexual couple and the ideal heterosexual household, but between being adopted by homosexuals and not being adopted at all. This policy is one reason so many Florida youngsters are growing up without a permanent home.

The policy handed down by policymakers in Florida has two components, which can be summarized as follows: Kids are better off with no parents than with gay parents, and if there is evidence to suggest otherwise, we don't want to hear it.

As reported in Friday's Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, "According to the Child Welfare League of America, nearly 500,000 children were in foster care in 2001, but only about 35,000 were adopted that year." The newspaper quotes Elizabeth Cramer, a professor of social work at Virginia Commonwealth University, as testifying that "lesbians and gay men are adopting children that other people don’t want.”

When gay sex was illegal, one could make an argument for prohibiting gay people from adopting children -- or at least subjecting such prospective parents to greater scrutiny. But since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that states have no constitutional authority to regulate private, consensual, non-commercial, sexual behavior, those types of arguments no longer hold water. Gay and lesbian couples are no longer presumptive felons. They live and work and pay their taxes on the same legal footing as heterosexual couples do (lacking, of course, the right to marry in the sight of the law).

As long as unmarried individuals or couples are permitted to adopt children -- and they are, in Virginia and all other states -- there should be no prohibition on or heightened scrutiny of gay individuals or couples who seek to adopt children. Gay men and women have been good and great parents for centuries. No law designed to stigmatize them will end that long record of nurture and accomplishment.

The Queen's Speech

Like the Queen's Speech at the State Opening of Parliament, the President's State of the Union Address is usually little more than a laundry-list of legislative items -- or, more often, a wish list.

Now, since the President is a politician and the Queen is not, his delivery tends not to be quite so monotonous as hers. And he shies from phrases like "my government will seek to . . .," since he knows that the moment such words fell from his lips, his legislative agenda would be on its way to the trash bin.

Still, State of the Union speeches are remembered less for their golden oratory than ... strike that: State of the Union speeches are remembered less. Period.

The most surprising aspect of George W. Bush's 2005 State of the Union Address is that he used it for a sustained, concise but thorough, coherent presentation of his plans to reform and reinvigorate the Social Security system.

Troglodytes on the Democratic side of the aisle moaned audibly (Tim Russert of NBC News said they were yelling "No, no, no" in the manner of British backbenchers during the Prime Minister's question time) but the President was not moved by their heckling.

In 1,109 words, Bush set out an agenda to bring Social Security into the 20th century. He explained carefully and cogently how the system began, how it developed through to the present time, and how it will be bankrupt by the time today's 20-somethings are ready to retire.

It was quite masterful -- and totally unexpected.

In anticipation of the speech, Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post trotted out all the liberal bogeymen in an op-ed piece entitled "Assault on Social Security" -- as if anything designed to reconstruct the broken-down relic of the 1930s is meant to destroy it and all it stands for.

Meyerson's worst fear is that Bush may fulfill the decades-old work of conservatives and libertarians, who have been pushing for Social Security reform (let's call it by its true and honest name, privatization) since the 1970s:

And the plans to privatize Social Security, it's important to note, have been devised by people who are ideologically committed to its destruction. When Milton Friedman was calling for privatization a half-century ago, it wasn't because he feared the system would run out of money when the boomers retired. (The boomers were at that point just midway through being born.) It was because he was a committed advocate of laissez-faire capitalism.

Similarly, the advocates for privatizing Social Security have for the past quarter-century been housed at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute -- the nation's leading institutions of economic libertarianism. But since 1983 -- when a commission appointed to augment Social Security's solvency declined to consider privatization, though it was appointed in part by Ronald Reagan and headed by Ayn Rand-acolyte Alan Greenspan -- they have understood that the only way to realize their libertarian hearts' desire was to convince the American people that the system was teetering on bankruptcy.

To Harold Meyerson, "ideology" is a dirty word. But why? Ideology is nothing more than the organizing principles that inform politics and policymaking. The "pragmatism" that Meyerson so admires in American voters is an ideology itself, the ideology of practicality and practicability. Was John Dewey's philosophical pragmatism any less ideological than Ayn Rand's philosophical Objectivism?

By identifying the roots of Social Security reform with the nonagenarian Milton Friedman -- why did he leave off the usual honorific, "Nobel laureate economist"? -- Meyerson tries to suggest that the idea is past its use-by date. That's just laughable.

If anything, Social Security reform is recognized as both necessary and inevitable -- as well as desirable -- by younger thinkers. Here's one example.

In an article dated January 24, Anthony Dick, a columnist for the Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia, wrote:

Our country's current Social Security policy has a place amongst the most mind-bogglingly, hair-pullingly, eye-gougingly insipid monstrosities ever to occupy a place in the pyrite pantheon of American legislative travesty.

Amid all of today's talk about the practical issues of Social Security reform, commentators rarely step back to appreciate the absurdity of Social Security as a matter of pure principle. Under the status quo, every time you get a paycheck, a percentage of it is forcibly taken from you and put into a collective Social Security fund. If you selfishly try to keep this money that your employer has voluntarily given to you, men with guns and badges will come to your house and drag you off to jail. After many years of this lovely process, once you've reached an age that the government deems to be sufficiently old and crusty, some money from this collective fund will be doled back out to you in a monthly allowance from your kind old Uncle Sam. You may be getting robbed today, proponents say, but you'll sure be secure tomorrow. It's for your own good.

The most obvious and ugly assumption at the heart of this system is the paternalistic idea that the government knows better than you do what's best for your life and your future.

Dick concludes:

Today's defenders of the Social Security status quo urge you to ignore the quaint old idea that you should be free to form and pursue your own conception of the good life by deciding how to spend or invest your own paychecks. Such pleas make them yet another sad contingent in history's parade of callow conspirators who have claimed to serve the people's interests while at the same time severely limiting the people's freedom to control their own lives. It's time we reject this model of condescending paternalism and reclaim our financial security from the claws of stilted bureaucrats.

I, for one (and I'm obviously not the only one), am grateful for the yeoman work performed in obscurity for so many years by policy analysts at the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, for the politicians in Chile and elsewhere who had the courage and good sense to ignore the U.S. example and modernize their social-security programs, and for the young voters who are willing to sneer at the reactionaries manning the liberal barricades against progress.

Let's just hope that George W. Bush has earned the political capital he needs to make Social Security modernization happen. Members of Congress may have erupted in applause 9 times during that section of his speech, but we know better than to trust them to do the right thing. As a group, they lack both principles and fortitude -- in a word, Mr. Meyerson, ideology.

Citizens Should Remain Ignorant, Says Government

The top headline in Wednesday's Washington Times reads: "Loophole threatens Virginia red-light program."

The article explains that, according to current law, in order for a ticket issued upon evidence of red-light running acquired by a red-light robot-camera, the summons must be delivered by hand to the accused motorist, not by mail. As the Times puts it, "tickets can be sent by mail, but the state law requires that an official hand-deliver the ticket before the motorist can be arrested or considered in contempt of court."

Most Virginians do not know this, and the government wants it to remain that way.

In a taxpayer-funded $95,000 report commissioned by VDOT (the Virginia Department of Transportation) but kept under wraps until the Washington Times discovered it, officials express fear that widespread knowledge of the law could "undermine" the program's effectiveness.

The report cautions, according to the Times:

"The average citizen is probably not aware of this ... but if word were widely disseminated, such knowledge could completely undermine the effectiveness of red-light camera programs."

Translation: Citizens should remain ignorant of the law so they are unable to assert their rights under it. It's our job to make sure they don't find out.

Lesson to us ignorant subjects: The government is our servant, not our master. The time when slaves were forbidden to read and to learn was long ago. We must learn the law, and the government must obey it.

Which Finger Is That?

Syndicated radio talk-show host Neal Boortz is suggesting that, in a gesture of solidarity with the Iraqi people, Members of Congress should dip their index fingers in purple ink and wave them in the air during tonight's State of the Union Address by President Bush.

Given the attitude of most Members of Congress toward us Americans, wouldn't it be more appropriate (and accurate) for them to wave their middle fingers in the air?

Free-Market Wireless Beats Government Telecom Monopoly

An amusing front-page story today in the Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Virginia) reports how University of Virginia officials lament the multiplication of cell-phone use among students who live in the dormitories on grounds.

It seems that for years, the University ran a monopoly on telephone service for dorm rooms, providing land lines and charging a premium price for long-distance service. The monopoly pricing was incorporated into the University's budget, with the money going toward telecommunications infrastructure projects.

What the University did not count on was the desire for freedom -- freedom to choose, freedom to move -- on the part of students, who increasingly use cell phones to communicate both locally and distantly with friends and loved ones. Consequently, the revenue from long-distance phone calls in dorm rooms has plummeted precipitously.

Reports Kate Andrews of the Daily Progress:

"The volume of student long distance calling has been dropping for many years," said James A. Jokl, director of UVa’s communications and systems. "I suspect many reasons, including e-mail and calling cards in the past and additionally cell phones more recently."

In the 1997-98 academic year, students spent more than 5 million minutes making long distance calls. That rate fell to 600,000 minutes last year, bringing in only $30,000.

Look at those numbers: Long-distance call-minutes have diminished to only 12 percent of their numbers of only seven years ago.

This may be a small example, but it is one more strong piece of evidence that, when government creates or facilitates a monopoly, some competitor in the private sector will come along to undercut prices or provide better service. Monopolies cannot and will not (and must not) be maintained.

U.S. Postal Service, take note.

Ayn Rand Centenary: February 2, 1905-2005

This Wednesday marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand.

Rand -- whose birth name was Alice Rosenbaum -- arrived in this world on the eve of the first Russian Revolution, lived as a teenager through World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the civil war that followed, and escaped from Communist Russia at the age of 21, coming to the United States, where she learned English and became, in short order, a screenwriter, playwright, novelist, and essayist. She created a philosophy called Objectivism and her writings are a tour d'horizon of epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, economics, and politics.

One hears over and over that a 1991 survey -- sometimes attributed to the Book-of-the-Month Club, sometimes to the Library of Congress -- ranked Rand's 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, as the second-most influential book among American readers, after the Bible. (Does anyone have verification of who actually sponsored the survey? Could it have been both the Library and the Club?)

Needless to say, we are seeing a flurry of activity to celebrate Ayn Rand's birthday. The Objectivist Center is hosting a half-day conference at the Library of Congress on the actual anniversary, Wednesday, February 2, with a number of distinguished speakers, including two Members of Congress -- Edward Royce of California and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Other speakers include Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation, Ed Crane of the Cato Institute, and Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Information about the event can be found at the Objectivist Center's web site.

A number of pundits and cultural critics are also beginning to weigh in on Rand's legacy in the popular press. In the past few days, articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and New York Sun, among other papers, and we can expect to see more as the week progresses.


What is particularly praiseworthy about these articles is that, although the writers invariably admire Rand either for her ideas or for her persistence, they are not shy about criticizing the artistic quality of her work. The fact is, Rand's novels are as popular (and as provocative and controversial) as they are not for their style, but for the substance of their ideas.

Here for instance, is the Chicago Tribune's cultural critic, Julia Keller, writing in the newspaper's Sunday edition:

Rand's fiction has been critically scorned in some quarters, her philosophy reviled, but her influence is undeniable.

Did somebody say "influence"? Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, counts himself among her devoted flock. Rand's books, vastly popular in her lifetime, continue to sell at a nifty clip: More than 5.5 million copies of "Atlas Shrugged" have been snapped up since its initial publication, and in the last few years, sales have averaged about 150,000 copies annually, reports Richard E. Ralston, publishing manager for the Ayn Rand Institute. "The Fountainhead" has sold more than 6 million copies, with annual sales currently topping 130,000, he adds.

Wooden characters

Clearly, then, Rand knew what she was doing when she created dreadfully wooden characters to represent her philosophical and economic ideas, when she put long, impossibly windy speeches in the mouths of those characters. Because for all that, for all the technical flaws that even moderately attentive readers could red-pencil in their sleep, for all the narrative rules Rand breaks -- the novel just won't leave you alone. Of how many books can that be said?

Read at the right moment in one's life -- usually in late adolescence, when the world seems like a tangled mess of hypocrisy and confusion, and you hate your parents and especially that stupid assistant principal who is seriously on your case -- "Atlas Shrugged" is a tonic, a dream, a throat-scalding draft of pure, radiant clarity. You feel as if you've been walking upside down for most of your life, seeing things the wrong way, and now -- now – suddenly you're right-side up again and everything starts to make sense. Turns out it was the world that was upside down, not you.

But here's the funny thing: Re-reading Rand as an adult in 2005 is not what you thought it would be. It's not a "Oh, wow, what a chump I was!" feeling.

In fact, the ideas from "Atlas Shrugged" you thought you had outgrown don't seem all that outlandish, after all. The themes you abandoned as hopelessly naive and almost comically operatic -- all those fist-shaking tirades about human destiny, all those "Greed is good!" screeds that predate Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" by three decades -- somehow start making a bit of sense again, in a world upended by religious fanaticism and a nation crippled by soaring government deficits.

Flaws and all, "Atlas Shrugged" still is a powerful novel, a sweeping epic that either pulls you into its sphere or scares the bejesus out of you, or maybe both.

In a review of a new biography of Ayn Rand in the New York Sun, Andrew Stuttaford of National Review Online writes:

Rand herself, alas, was no beauty; her glorious heroines, ridiculously gorgeous, impossibly named, remarkably lithe, are less the template for -- as some allege - a sinister eugenic agenda than the stuff of Ayn's randy dreams garnished with a dollop of Art Deco kitsch. The first, extraordinarily violent, coupling in "The Fountainhead" of Howard Roark with Dominique Francon is not a general prescription for the relationship between the sexes but merely Rand's own erotic fantasy ("wishful thinking," she once announced, to the cheers of a delighted crowd).

Likewise, her sometimes-overwrought style is no more than - well, judge this sentence from "Atlas Shrugged" for yourself: "She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance - and then she thought she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him." Call Dr. Freud.

If sex in Rand's fiction can be savage, so is argument. Her sagas deal in moral absolutes, her protagonists are the whitest of knights or the blackest of villains, caricatures of good or evil lacking the shadings of gray that make literature, and life, so interesting. Yet "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," at least, have a wild, lunatic verve that sweeps all before them. Like Busby Berkeley, the Chrysler Building, or a Caddy with fins, they are aesthetic disasters, very American aesthetic disasters, which somehow emerge as something rather grand.

There is plenty in Rand to make a modern reader queasy, though you would not know so from Mr. Britting's worshipful text. For example, there is something to the claim that like so many of the intellectuals, left or right, of her time she succumbed to the cruder forms of social Darwinism. For a woman who worshiped man, Rand did not always seem that fond of mankind.

But the accusation by Whittaker Chambers in National Review that there was a whiff of the gas chamber about her writings is wrong. Rand lived in an era of stark ideological choices; to argue in muted, reasonable tones was to lose the debate. As a graduate of Lenin's Russia, she knew that the stakes were high, and how effective good propaganda could be.

Rand's nonfiction may have a greater claim to intellectual respectability, but it was the lurid, occasionally harsh, simplicities of her novels that would deliver her message to the mass audience she believed was out there. She was right. Her key insight was to realize that there was an appetite among Americans for a moral case for capitalism. In a restless age that believed in the Big Answer, neither historical tradition nor utilitarian notions of efficiency would suffice. Ayn Rand gave Americans that case, perhaps not the best case, but a case, and she knew how to sell it.

The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism." Oh, but she did, and so did those millions of Americans who bought her books, books that played their part in ensuring that the dull orthodoxies of collectivism never prevailed here.

Imagine the audacity of telling a refugee from the Soviet Union that she does "not understand socialism"! Of course, this was more than a decade before The God That Failed and Witness. (Not that those books had much effect on the Left's squishy views of Stalin, Mao, and Fidel.)

The executive director of the Objectivist Center, Ed Hudgins, explained the central facets of Ayn Rand's philosophy in the Boston Globe last weekend:

Rand's plots taught economic lessons better than do most college textbooks, showing exactly how one government regulation after another can punish productive individuals and destroy a country. Even more important, in her novels and her nonfiction works she developed a philosophy -- Objectivism – that provided a moral defense of free markets.

Rand began with the observation that since the ultimate alternative for human beings is life or death, the ultimate moral goal for each individual is survival. That might not seem so radical, but Rand went on to observe that because we are humans, the goal is not just physical survival; it is a happy, joyous, and flourishing life. Further, the means by which we discover how to achieve this goal is our unique rational capacity, not instincts, feelings or faith. Thinking allows us to produce food, clothing, shelter, medicine, printing presses, computers, rockets, and theories to explain everything from atoms to galaxies.

Rand developed an ethos of rational self-interest, but this ''virtue of selfishness" was not an antisocial creed for predators. Instead, it led Rand to her great insight that there is no conflict of interest between honest, rational individuals.

Since individuals are ends in themselves, no one in society should initiate the use of force or fraud against others. All relationships should be based on mutual consent. This became the credo of the modern libertarian movement, found today in think tanks, publications, and public policy proposals.

True individualists would not debase themselves by living the life of a thief, whether robbing a store with a gun or their fellow citizens with a government mandate or wealth-redistribution scheme. Rather, they would take pride in taking responsibility for their own lives, actions and moral character. Rand wrote, ''As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul."

Thus an ethos of rational self-interest justifies and supports individual liberty; a free market -- not a communist, socialist, fascist, or welfare-state system -- is the only one that protects the rights of each individual. Entrepreneurs, workers, professionals, and all others need not justify their quest for the highest wages or profits or to seek permission from ''society" or their neighbors; they are free to live their lives as they please as long as they respect the similar freedom of others.

The result of such self-interest is a peaceful, prosperous society of achievers. Such a society would be a joy to live. Not only would we each benefit materially from the goods and services we purchase from others, we would obtain spiritual fuel from their inspiring examples. As one of Rand's characters states, "Don't work for my happiness, my brothers -- show me yours . . . show me your achievement -- and the knowledge will give me courage for mind."

Meanwhile, syndicated columnist Steve Chapman asks, "Has Ayn Rand gone mainstream?" His partial answer begins:

The radical champion of individualism and capitalism, who died in 1982, is no longer an exotic taste. Her image has adorned a U.S. postage stamp. Her ideas have been detected in a new mass-market animated comedy film, "The Incredibles." And Wednesday, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, there will be a Rand commemoration at the Library of Congress--an odd site for a ceremony honoring a fierce anti-statist.

In her day, Rand was at odds with almost every prevailing attitude in American society. She infuriated liberals by preaching economic laissez-faire and lionizing titans of business. She appalled conservatives by rejecting religion in any form while celebrating, in her words, "sexual enjoyment as an end in itself."

But her novels found countless readers. "The Fountainhead," published in 1943, and "Atlas Shrugged," which followed in 1957, are still in print. In 1991, when the Book-of-the-Month Club polled Americans asking what book had most influenced their lives, "Atlas Shrugged" finished second only to the Bible. In all, Rand's books have sold about 22 million copies and continue to sell at the rate of more than half a million a year.

Rand emerged in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II--which were taken as proof that the free market was obsolete, that prosperity required an all-intrusive government, and that national success demanded the subordination of the individual to collective purposes. After the traumas of the 1930s and '40s, America was intent on building a well-ordered welfare state based on compromise and consensus.

In that setting, Rand resembled the female athlete in Apple Computer's 1984 Super Bowl commercial, who sprinted into a mass assembly of oppressed drones to hurl a sledgehammer at the Big Brother orating from a giant TV screen--smashing it and bathing the audience in a dazzling light.

* * *

Looking back, it's hard to recapture how jarring that phrase was a generation ago, when altruism and self-sacrifice were seen as the central elements of an exemplary life. Today, Americans take it for granted that they are entitled to live for their own happiness, without apology.

It may seem curious to honor a writer who merely defended free markets, preached the superiority of reason over blind faith and extolled the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness. David Kelley, head of the Rand-oriented Objectivist Center, jokes that he's reminded of the theatergoer who complained that "Hamlet' was full of cliches. Rand's beliefs have been so widely disseminated and absorbed that we have forgotten where they originated.

The truth is that for all she did, they are no longer her ideas. To a large extent, they are ours.

There is a book called It Usually Starts with Ayn Rand, which tries to explain how young people, in particular, come to accept and act on libertarian philosophy. In my own case, I was already a diehard libertarian before I read any of Rand's novels. I began with We the Living (cheating a bit, I saw the movie first), then moved on to The Fountainhead and Anthem, and ended -- after considerable effort -- with Atlas Shrugged. During this time I was delighted to discover that a play I had worked on in college, The Night of January 16th, had also been written by Ayn Rand. Back then, I was unaware of Rand's reputation as a philosopher and had no idea that the play were were doing was anything more than a run-of-the-mill courtroom drama with the twist of letting the audience act as the jury. The things one learns when one grows older.

Censorship? What Censorship?

The Washington Times today has a front-page story about church leaders and conservatives who are fretting about how the media -- both print and broadcast -- are engaging in a kind of "censorship" by denying religious advertisers the opportunity to place their advertisements on TV or in magazines like Rolling Stone.

The article ("Churches decry 'commercial censorship'"), written by correspondent Donna De Marco, begins:

The ongoing controversy between the media and religion heated up this month with Rolling Stone's initial rejection of an ad for a new version of the Bible.

The decision was reversed, and the ad will run next month, but religion-based advertising is becoming an increasingly heated issue as morals and ethics move to the forefront of the political debate.

The media, whether broadcast or print, have the right to turn down ads, but religious organizations and church groups say that right is a form of censorship. They say media must act in the public's interest and not dictate what can or cannot be seen and heard.

It then goes on to list several examples of this "censorship." And in every single example, the media outlet that initially refused to run an ad ended up relenting, permitting the advertiser to place the ad either in its original form or with minor changes.

The complaints have a sort of ironic misdirection, since they emanate largely from conservative groups.

Why is that? Well, for instance, one of the most widely publicized cases of "censorship" was an ad from the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination, which wanted to demonstrate its inclusivity. The ad shows, among other things, a gay couple being turned away by a beefy bouncer at another, unnamed church's door -- along with Hispanic, black, and handicapped individuals. That ad was refused by "liberal" networks NBC and CBS, but accepted by "conservative" Fox. And, the Times notes, "CBS and NBC did accept a second ad from the UCC that ran at the end of December. " (You can see the UCC ad here; click one of the options under "Watch 'Bouncer' commercial.")

So what's the beef? If the complainers can't come up with a single example of a refused ad placement that sticks, they have no complaint.

Moreover, let's not forget that the publications and broadcast outlets have a right, acknowledged by the First Amendment to the Constitution, to control their own message. Do the religious groups want to see a day when their church bulletins must carry advertising for Satanic cults and sex toys?

A 'Dissenting' View on Gay/Lesbian 'Priorities'

GayPatriotWest links to an article in The Cornell Daily Sun by graduate student Brian Holmes, "The Language of American Values," in which he takes to task some of the tactics and positions of mainstream gay-rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign. Holmes writes, in part:

The national gay rights groups have issued a "unity statement," pledging to work toward "Civil Rights, Community, Movement." There are two problems with this approach. First, there is the problem of focus. These groups should be striving to ensure that gay and lesbian Americans and their families can live and work and contribute fully to society without fear of retribution by the state; this is priority one.

Good point. Too many goals set by self-styled gay-rights organizations depend on taking advantage of state action rather than opposing the intrusiveness of the state.

The "unity statement" to which Holmes refers, for instance, was coordinated by the Human Rights Campaign and lists these "common priorities" that the groups intend to pursue in the "months and years to come":

* We must fight for equal employment opportunity, benefits and protections — and the federal and state laws that safeguard them.
* We must fight against anti-LGBT violence and for the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal hate crimes law that already protects Americans based on race, religion and national origin.
* We must fight — in both the private and public sectors — for better access to health care and insurance. We must advocate for HIV/AIDS policies — including age-appropriate, LGBT-inclusive comprehensive sexuality education — that effectively address this epidemic at home and abroad.
* We must insist on safe schools, where youth can learn free from bullying, harassment and discrimination.
* We must fight for family laws that give our children strong legal ties to their parents.
* We must work to overturn the military’s discriminatory anti-LGBT ban, which dishonors service members who serve their country with valor and distinction.
* We must continue to expose the radical right’s efforts to advance a culture of prejudice and intolerance, and we must fight their attempts to enshrine anti-gay bigotry in our state and federal laws and constitutions.
* And we must continue our vigorous fight for the freedom to marry and the equal protections, rights and responsibilities that safeguard our families, strengthen our commitments and continue to transform understanding of our lives and our relationships.

It's hard not to notice that fighting anti-gay laws is second from the bottom of the list, while expanding the federal government's role in labor-management relations is at the top, followed immediately by expanding the federal government's role in prosecuting crimes that are normally left to state and local authorities.

Believe it or not, there are gay Americans who oppose these "priorities." For instance, Reason magazine's Washington correspondent wrote in a 1999 column: "Two and a half years in Washington and I've finally found the free marketeers in the Republican Party--they're gay." Quips aside, Lynch went on to report on the substance of a Log Cabin meeting in Northern Virginia:

The second Wednesday of each month, in the basement of the Rhodeside Grill in Arlington, Virginia, anywhere from 30 to 60 gay men, a few straights, and a couple of women gather under the auspices of the Log Cabin Club of Northern Virginia. I dropped by yesterday to catch the featured talk, "Freedom for All: The Case Against Employment Non-Discrimination Laws," by Nigel Ashford, a professor of American politics in England.

I assumed they had to go all the way to England to find a gay conservative willing to argue against making homosexuality a protected class under federal discrimination law. But this hunch was wrong. The vast majority of the 40 or so gentlemen and two ladies present appeared to agree with Ashford. This puts them at odds with the national Log Cabin Club and probably every other gay advocacy organization.

Bookended by a dartboard and a TV showing local news, Nigel began his talk by saying he had 15 minutes to give 12 reasons why the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), was a bad thing. "Start with a principle," he said. It is wrong to discriminate, but it is wrong to force people not to discriminate. Since he has no right to a particular job, being denied it is not a denial of his rights. Said Nigel, "Even bigots have rights."

Nigel then laid out three more specific reasons to oppose ENDA: It's a threat to civil liberties, to society as a whole, and to gays. "It is intended to increase opportunity, but perversely, and I said perversely, not perversity, it will have the opposite effect," he said. This is because employers will be less likely to hire openly gay individuals if they fear they cannot let them go without risking a lawsuit.

So what is the proper agenda for politically active gays? Gays should work for equality before the law, Ashford said, by attacking sodomy laws and promoting gay marriage, gays in the military, and gay adoption laws. That's not exactly a Republican agenda, but then, Ashford has the benefit of being British.

Not everyone agreed with Ashford's libertarianism. A dissenter said he supported equality and therefore he wanted to be equal with minorities and women. Someone else in the audience clapped. Nigel answered that such group rights were damaging to America, adding that he thinks anti-discrimination laws for other groups should be abolished as well.

And then there's the question of hate crime laws. A lot of gay Republicans, I'll admit, support this sort of thing. But gay libertarians do not. In my capacity as president of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty, I wrote a column in reaction to the horrible murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in October 1998. Picked up by the Houston Chronicle, the article was spotted by Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who inserted it in the Congressional Record. Here is how it appeared there:

HATE CRIMES AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS -- (BY RICHARD E. SINCERE, JR.) (Extension of Remarks - October 16, 1998)


HON. RON PAUL
in the House of Representatives
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1998

Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I commend to my colleagues in Congress as well as citizens everywhere an article authored by Richard Sincere, Jr., President of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty. Mr. Sincere aptly describes how the very essence of hate crimes undermines a pillar of a free and just society; that is, equalt reatment under the law irrespective of which particular group orgroups with whom an individual associates. Ours is a republic based upon the rights of the individual.


[FROM THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE, OCT. 14, 1998]
(BY RICHARD E. SINCERE, JR.)

The wicked murder of Matthew Shepard by two thugs, assisted by two equally contemptible accomplices, has resurrected a debate about the need for hate-crime laws.

Shepard, an openly gay University of Wyoming student who had been widely praised for his talents, ambitions, and personality, last week was beaten senseless and left for dead, tied up like a scarecrow along a fence on a little-traveled country road. Miraculously, he was found by passers-by many hours after the attack, still struggling for life when he was rushed to a hospital in Fort Collins, CO, where he died Monday while on life support.

Local law enforcement officials in Laramie, WY, where the crime took place, quickly arrested the alleged perpetrators--two men who performed the assault and two women who helped them hide their deed--and it looks like they will be punished to the full extent the law allows if they are convicted. With Shepard's death, they face a possible death sentence.

Laramie, a university community of 27,000 people, is feeling both shame and outrage, a sentiment shared by all right-minded people throughout the country, indeed around the world. News of this brutal assault has appeared everywhere in print and broadcast media.

The crime against Shepard has renewed calls for passing hate-crime legislation, both in Wyoming and nationwide. Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer and President Bill Clinton have said that this attack shows the need for such laws.

This would be a mistake. It would be a mistake because hate-crimel aws, however well intentioned, are feel-good laws whose primary result is thought control, violating our constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and of conscience. It would be a mistake because it suggests that crimes against some people are worse than crimes against others. And it would be a mistake because it uses a personal tragedy, deeply felt by Shepard's family and friends, to advance a political agenda.

Hunter College Professor Wayne Dynes, editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, notes that hate-crimel aws, if they are to be applied in a constitutional manner, must be content-neutral. He notes this example: "Countless numbers of people, aware of the unspeakable atrocities under his leadership, hated Po lPot. This hate was surely well warranted. If one of the Pol Pot haters had killed him, would this be a hate crime ? Why not?"

Dynes adds: "In seeking to exculpate the killer, we would get into the question of whether some hate is 'justified' and some is not." He concludes that hate-crime prosecutions "will be used to sanction certain belief systems--systems which the enforcer would like, in some Orwellian fashion, to make unthinkable. This is not a proper use of law."

Under our system of justice, everyone is equal before the law. Those accused of crimes are entitled to certain constitutional protection, which we must cherish, and the victims of a crime--whether a Bill Gates or the poorest street-sweeper in a slum--are entitled to the same respect. (In the Middle Ages, the law required a greater punishment for killing a rich man or noble than it did for killing a peasant or a laborer. Our law recognizes no such distinctions.)

So, too, with class- or group-based distinctions. Is it worse to kill a man because he is foreign-born than it is to kill him to steal his car? Is it worse to kill a woman because she is black tha nbecause she cut you off in traffic? Is it worse to beat up a fat sissyboy if the bullies think their victim is gay, or if they dislike him because he is fat? Crime is crime; assault is assault. All deserve punishment.

Hateful thoughts may be disagreeable, but they are not crimes in themselves. The crimes that result from hateful thoughts--whetherv andalism, assault, or murder--are already punishable by existing statutes.

In a speech at the University of Texas last year [1997], libertarian activist Gene Cisewski said: "We should be anti-violence, period. Any act of violence has to be punished swiftly and severely and it shouldn't matter who the victim is. The initiation of force is wrong and it doesn't matter why--the mere fact you had a motive is enough."

Cisewski acknowledged the good intentions of those who propose hate-crime laws. He noted that "the reason for the call for (such laws) comes from bad enforcement of the laws." Police and prosecutors have been willing to look the other way when victims came from unfavored groups. Luckily, in the Shepard case, the authorities seem unwavering in their prosecution. This is, unfortunately, not always the case.

The answer, Cisewski suggested, and I agree, is that "we hold every law enforcement official and every court official who administers justice to the standard that every American is guaranteed equal protection under the law."

Hate-crime laws set up certain privileged categories of people, defined by the groups to which they belong, and offers them unequal protection under the law. This is wrong. It is sad to see a young man's personal misfortune used by various special-interest groups to advance such an agenda.

We are all shocked and dismayed by the assault on Shepard. Such brutality cannot, should not be countenanced. Let us not multiply the crimes of his attackers by writing bad law in response.

GLIL -- Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty -- also set itself apart, and proudly so, in 2000, when it was the only gay organization to submit a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court's case of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. That is, we were the only gay organization to submit an amicus curiae brief arguing that the Boy Scouts had the right, under constitutional guarantees of free association, to set their own membership and hiring policies even if that meant excluding gay Scouts and Scoutmasters. While we decried the policy, we defended the Boy Scouts right to be wrong.

The brief can be found here (in PDF format). This is the news release that GLIL used to make its position more widely known:

Gay Organization Praises Supreme Court Ruling That Favors Boy Scouts
"Freedoms of Association and Expression Were Protected Today," GLIL Leader Asserts

(WASHINGTON, June 28, 2000) --- The president of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL) today praised the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that says the Boy Scouts of America are free to choose their own leaders, even if it means excluding gay men as Scoutmasters.

Richard Sincere, president of GLIL since February 1998, stated that his organization was pleased that "by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court recognizes that freedom of expressive association is protected under the U.S. Constitution. Despite what others might say, this is a victory for the rights of gay men and lesbians to form groups, gather for expressive purposes, and pursue their own visions of happiness with freedom and dignity."

GLIL had filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale, arguing that the Boy Scouts of America have a constitutional right to set their own standards for membership and leadership positions, even if that means the Boy Scouts may exclude openly gay Scout leaders from participation in the organization.

Sincere said GLIL leaders were pleased that Chief Justice Rehnquist seemed to follow the reasoning in the group's brief when he wrote that: "We are not, as we must not be, guided by our views of whether the Boy Scouts' teachings with respect to homosexual conduct are right or wrong; public or judicial disapproval of a tenet of an organization's expression does not justify the State's effort to compel the organization to accept members where such acceptance would derogate from the organization's expressive message."

"Our brief had emphasized our disagreement with the Boy Scouts' policy of excluding gay members and leaders," said Sincere, a former Boy Scout himself. "But if government forces the Boy Scouts to change that policy, the constitutional rights of all of us -- not just the Scouts, but everyone, gay or straight -- will be diminished. Freedom does not belong only to those with whom we agree. Gay men and lesbians have suffered when freedom of association has not been respected. We benefit when freedom of speech and freedom of association are vigorously protected. A Supreme Court ruling against the Boy Scouts would have had the perverse effect of hurting gay and lesbian Americans."

GLIL's brief before the Supreme Court was prepared by the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest law firm. GLIL's amicus brief is available on-line at http://www.gayliberty.org.

Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty was founded in February 1991 to advance the ideas of economic and personal freedom and individual responsibility. It has members across the United States and in several foreign countries.

As a final example of work I've done in the past to demonstrate that the words "gay" and "liberal" are not synonymous, I offer this article that appeared (by invitation of the editors) in the Virginia Advocate, a conservative student publication at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In it, I try to show that it is possible to be gay and conservative or gay and libertarian without suffering from psychic dissonance.

You Think You're Gay?

You do have a choice (of political affiliation)

by Richard E. Sincere, Jr., GLIL President, April 2001, vol XXV, no. 2

On Easter Sunday, 2000, members of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL) participated in a protest in front of the White House, demonstrating their disdain for the previous day's kidnapping of Elián Gonzalez by heavily armed government thugs, in a pre-dawn raid at the behest of Attorney General Janet Reno.

So far as we know, no other gay organization took the time to protest this particularly vicious manifestation of the heavy hand of government. Sadly, this example explains why, for many Americans, their gay compatriots have been stereotyped as belonging to one, monolithic political category: liberal Democrats. This simply is not the case. Like all Americans, gay men and lesbians hold a wide range of views on political, social, and economic issues. For various reasons, however, the images presented by the media-and reinforced by some conservative activists-tend to favor the liberal Democratic pigeonhole.

GLIL, a non-partisan organization founded in 1991, is one of the alternatives that represent some politically aware gay Americans. In February 2000, GLIL filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Boy Scouts of America have a constitutional right to set their own policies for selecting leaders, even if this means excluding openly gay scoutmasters. Freedom of association, GLIL argued, is of paramount importance to gay Americans. If the Boy Scouts lost their case, gay people would end up losing, too.

In a speech sponsored by Students for Individual Liberty at the University last spring, GLIL executive vice president Odell Huff noted that "only through our ability to freely associate with one another" are gay people "able to come to terms with our own sexuality, deal with the social hostility we inevitably face, create safe places for ourselves where we can feel comfortable and secure, and meet one another so that we might form happy and stable relationships."

Over the past ten years, GLIL has sponsored forums on our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms; on why the Food and Drug Administration should allow people to choose to use home-testing kits for HIV; and, as early as 1991, in a debate between Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic and Tom Palmer of the Institute for Humane Studies, on the question of equal marriage rights for gay and lesbian citizens.

GLIL also sponsored a debate on hate-crimes laws some six years before the murder of Matthew Shepard brought the issue to national prominence and, at the time of Shepard's murder, an article explaining GLIL's opposition to hate-crimes laws was reprinted in the Congressional Record.

GLIL members oppose laws like the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which interfere with the rights of employers and workers to decide conditions of employment but also support the rights of gay and lesbian Americans to serve openly in the military.

GLIL is not a lonely non-left voice in the gay and lesbian world. There is also the Independent Gay Forum, which publishes the views of a wide range of non-left writers such as U.S. Representative Jim Kolbe, Jonathan Rauch, Jennifer Vanasco, Norah Vincent, Bruce Bawer, and others.

On January 19, 2001, the Republican Unity Coalition was launched, as a gay-straight alliance for Republican activists. Former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming emceed the breakfast, which featured U.S. Representative Tom Davis (R-Va.) as a speaker. Davis stated the obvious: "Politics is about addition, not subtraction," pointing out that if the Republican Party wants to win elections, especially in toss-up suburban areas, it must not exclude any potential voters or activists.

And, of course, there are the Log Cabin Republicans, who have been active in Virginia politics since 1997. The Log Cabin Republican Club of Northern Virginia is now spinning off clubs in Central Virginia and Hampton Roads.

Michael Lynch of Reason magazine wrote of the group: "Two and a half years in Washington, and I've finally found the free marketeers in the Republican Party-they're gay." Former Prince William County GOP chairman Bill Kling noted that LCRC/NoVa meetings are "fast becoming a 'must' campaign stop for many GOP candidates."

So there are alternatives for politically active gay and lesbian Americans. If you're gay, you do have a choice. You are not stuck in an endless, downward spiral of socialism, irresponsibility, and dependency. You can embrace free minds and free markets instead.

Charlottesville resident Richard Sincere is president of the Washington-based Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (www.glil.org).