Gaybaiting

Jesus. Anybody who pretends to be a “progressive” but tries to exploit homophobia this way can go take a flying fuck. The “but he’s a hypocrite and so deserves to be outed” arguments about this sort of thing (and there’s a disgusting amount of that in the comments to Farley’s post) are despicable. People who play that game are relying on the existence of the very homophobia they pretend to be fighting.

Still, it would be interesting to find out if The Gay is an exception to IOKIYAR, and I would not mind in the least if McConnell were to lose for whatever reason. He’s not a nice guy.

Hmph. Outing a hypocrite is just leveling the playing field…

…One should try to always be the better man, and in the case of outing republican closet cases, this IS being the better man.

Hmph. Outing a hypocrite is just leveling the playing field…

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/241870.php

Friday night (which happens to be the start of our Sabbath) my wife answered the phone to hear a man stating he was from the McCain-Palin campaign. He asked who she was supporting. She replied that we will vote for Obama. He replied with “but he’s a f—–g n—er!”.

I assume that when leveling the playing field is called for Democratic phone banks should be ready with the “but he’s a fucking faggot” script.

That’s exactly what’s happening in Minnesota right now. I do not feel at all warm about the prospect of six more years of Norm Coleman, one of the nastiest operatives in the Senate. Coleman will win, if he does, in large part because he’s locked up the homophobe vote, not on that issue, but indirectly via right-to-life. He has run a 100% negative campaign — his main slogan is “Al Franken: Unfit to Serve”

So let me be the bad guy. Gay rights has become sacramental for the Democrats, so that it’s not just one issue, but the issue to which all the others must be sacrificed. With the result that we stand nobly and silently by while we are smeared by the four gay Republicans in the Senate (Coleman, McConnell, Graham, and Craig; are there more?), every one of whom is an especially nasty piece of work. The pot wins by calling the kettle black.

“But, the Republican won.”

You shouldn’t feel proud about that. Politics is about results. Your Dem Congressional candidate, at the last analysis, was more about feeling good about himself than he was about actually winning power for the downtrodden people he claimed to represent.

Another thing about politics is that if you accept responsibility for things that you can’t change, you’re really dodging it. Did this person’s refusal change the system? Would his acceptance have really worsened it? I’d say no to both.

Of course a system dominated by gay-baiters, racists, and crony capitalists isn’t optimal. Now that we’ve said that, what are people actually going to do?

Once you decide that you have to win first and have morals later, how far will you take it?

Should you carefully consider under which circumstances will political assassination actually be helpful?

A lot of voters definitely don’t want to be represented by a politician who refuses to make a strong response to attacks. If he won’t defend himself, can they depend on him to defend them?

So if you insist that your candidate must be polite, he needs a way to be politely effective. He has to defend himself and hit back in a way that works. It isn’t necessarily true that resorting to the same tactics the enemy uses will be effective. He might find ways to make those tactics backfire on them. If he can do that it’s better than playing me-too.

It might not be a choice between playing dirty and losing. But it’s definitely a choice between finding something smart versus something that doesn’t work.

Rich, where do you draw the line? You *could* talk about political assassinations with the same logic, but it wouldn’t apply as well, right?

The big ticking-time-bomb problem is that imaginary hypotheticals were being used to justify a general change in policy. We have actual cases. In Minnesota a gay social conservative has been egregiously smearing Bob Franken and may very well win.

In Minnesota a gay social conservative has been egregiously smearing Al Franken and may very well win.

That’s democracy for you. Perhaps Franken should have chosen the All Progressives Except the Fags Party so he could have really let loose.

Why don’t you own what you write, RB? You wrote that what I advocated was like saying that we should torture people because they might have critical information. That’s a smear, nothing more. But I’ve often found that people who are all high and mighty about how we should be nice to our political opponents are often quite handy with the smears themselves.

It’s sad that you find the truth despicable, but that’s really your problem, not mine.

1. Being a closeted gay person and choosing to be the candidate of an openly homophobic party is an act of rank hypocrisy.
2. Hypocrisy is wrong and bad, especially when it enables the victimisation of others.
3. Denouncing and exposing such hypocrisy is good.
4. Gay republicans who run homophobic campaigns [i.e. pretty much all such campaigns] should have their hypocrisy exposed to public judgment.

Please point out at which stage this argument is invalid, for you.

Once you decide that there anything moral about losing, how far do you expect to get?

Democracy: it’s not for losers.

Geoff Hoon, English Transport Secretary, said a couple weeks ago viz. government data harvesting that the usurpation of rights and freedoms in order to prevent terrorist violence was not only permissible but imperative, and that “The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist” .
This does not comport well with Patrick Henry and his “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
It is in fact the diametrically opposite sentiment. It is an inversion of it, and the moral stance from whence it originates a perversion of the heroic posture called for by Mr. Henry.
No doubt someone taking a stand like that will “feel good about themselves” as Mr. Puchalsky has it, and a minor case could be made that that’s why they take it at all, but really, no.
What it’s about is honor, fealty, service to ideals beyond the self-gratifying.
Refusal to out a gay hypocrite and a willingness to take the loss rather than get down in the slime is about a lot more than tactically winning or losing a particular campaign.
It’s about an imperceptible slide into craven self-worship and fearful accommodation.
We’re way down that slope already. It’s why this conversation is even happening.
Something that rarely gets factored in is the long line of the fallen, those who lost because they wouldn’t compromise principle to win.
Fools in the eyes of the already-compromised and rationalizing.
Yet Rosa Luxembourg called her desperately heroic little band the Spartacus League.
Spartacus being one of history’s biggest losers.
Rosa Luxembourg, also, big loser.
That’s the point, though, isn’t it? What links them isn’t loss but principle, the refusal to compromise with a superior but less-principled force.
Liberty or death, death before dishonor etc. etc.
It starts somewhere, obviously, or it never starts at all.

“There isn’t anything particular involved in your arguments about ends justifying means.”

Nonsense. What you chose to argue with in what I wrote was “Your Dem Congressional candidate, at the last analysis, was more about feeling good about himself than he was about actually winning power for the downtrodden people he claimed to represent.” That’s a statement of fact, a description of his admitted behavior. He didn’t take the risk of trying an attack on hypocrisy rather than orientation per se. He didn’t do anything, except go along with someone saying “No way”. Sure, you could describe it as “he made a brave stand on principle” rather than “he wanted to feel good about himself” but it comes down to the same thing, because he didn’t help anyone except himself and his staffers with his stand.

…what I wrote was “Your Dem Congressional candidate, at the last analysis, was more about feeling good about himself than he was about actually winning power for the downtrodden people he claimed to represent.” That’s a statement of fact, a description of his admitted behavior.

I agree. He didn’t take a principled stand that could win, he didn’t take an unprincipled stand that could win, he plain didn’t respond adequately to the attacks.

I can imagine principled stands that might win, but I don’t have the experience to say what their chances would be. But you have to do something.

Imagine you’re fighting a war and you find out your enemy is torturing and then killing POWs. You might or might not feel like you get too big a disadvantage unless you torture and kill POWs too. But regardless whether you respond that way, it’s your responsibility to come up with a strategy that will win.

First of all, it’s not the case that every right-wing Republican is actively anti-gay, in their own campaigns or other activities.

But secondly, the goal isn’t only to elect Democrats. It’s the build a movement, to mobilize people around a particular vision of a better world. So a certain consistency between means and ends is constitutive of the whole enterprise. Right-wing politics can be directed from the top down through the marvelous organizing properties of money, so they can afford to deal with their base in a purely instrumental way (well, up to a point.) For our side, on the other hand, principles aren’t something we can hold in reserve until after the election, they’re the integument of our movement; without them, why should people bother working for a candidate at all? There’s no point in running for office if you can’t win, but you need to win in a way that leaves people energized, not cynical and demoralized, and that leaves some kind of institutional legacy. Otherwise, you’re eating your seed corn. In other words, IMHO, winning an election by mobilizing people around a positive program is qualitatively different from winning through attacks that conflict with our side’s basic principles (e.g. that sexuality is a private matter).

On the other hand, I’m sure there are elections where outing a gay Republican would be the right call. This stuff is hard.

The Abu Ghraib / ticking bomb analogy is a bad one (as well as being merely insulting) because there’s so many different reasons why it’s the wrong thing to do. I could, for instance, claim to believe that the ends justify the means in all circumstances, and that morality has no place in war or police work — two things that I certainly don’t actually believe — and I’d still condemn them, because they are so incredibly ineffective.

But in terms of generalizing from this political race to others, and from one case of prospective outing to another, yes, I’m willing to generalize. Outing works, it’s a time-honored political tactic within the gay community against closeted Republicans, and if you’re serious about politics, it’s not something that you just don’t do.

Once you decide that you have to win first and have morals later, how far will you take it?

Every politician makes this kind of choice repeatedly. Apparently the only moral value that exists any more is an absolute scrupulousness about never gaybaiting.

Pretty much every politician denounces drugs and almost none of them are willing to put any energy into reforming our drug laws. Our drug laws hurt a lot more people than gaybaiting. (How many people are in jail for illicit sexual relations?) For whatever reason, this issue is not really on the table and hundreds of Democrats make opportunistic, thoughtless, harsh statements about drugs, and their statements have harsh effects.

But when one union makes one homophobic appeal in one state, against a supremely horrible politician, it’s the end of the world.

If you like sausages, you don’t want to see them made.

42: For the record, according to NORML there are 11,200 first time marijuana offenders in prison. I also know someone who never went to jail but lost his house, his marriage, and almost his sanity when he was busted.

Almost every politician in the country is actively or passively complicit in this. But no big deal.

I don’t like last-minute smear campaigns, which is one reason I’ll always wait until Election Day to vote. A friend of mine running for City Council has just been attacked for not liking goats. Seriously.

That said, I really enjoy the prospect of the dilemma facing conservative Kentuckians: if they don’t abjure the smear tactic and ignore the allegation, they have to decide whether to accept the senator’s sexual orientation, which would in some ways be good for them, or else choose not to vote for a conservative, which might be better for the rest of us.

With the result that we stand nobly and silently by while we are smeared by the four gay Republicans in the Senate (Coleman, McConnell, Graham, and Craig; are there more?), every one of whom is an especially nasty piece of work.

This has been an unusually surreal Crooked Timber argument for me, and this line sort of crystallises why that is. How do you have a loud acrimonious public argument about whether to out somebody, without outing them?

I guess we could be more blatant about it. Somebody could get a guest editorial in Time magazine arguing that Democrats should not out Coleman, McConnell, Graham, or Craig. And then after we decide not to out them, the media could report it as news. “The Democratic Party has decided not to out Coleman, McConnell, Graham, or Craig. They have decided it is wrong to let these Republican legislators be subject to the public harassment that would result if it was generally known that they were homosexuals.”

For that matter, why is this something that a Democratic campaign would be doing? Why wouldn’t the outing be done by somebody with no direct links to the campaign, somebody the campaign didn’t control? Like, maybe, the media? Why wouldn’t they publish the facts on their own? Does it only become news if Lunsford claims it?

This is a serious issue because McConnell is subject to blackmail as long as he’s afraid his voters will find out. He could be blackmailed by the communists or by anybody. Entirely apart from whether it’s A-OK for McConnell to be a homosexual, I don’t want US senators to be blackmailed by foreign powers. But if the voters already know then he can’t be blackmailed about it. So he really ought to step out of that closet.

So, is it true? Is there evidence that would persuade republicans? I haven’t seen the evidence. Could it in fact be a lie?

To me it’s a different question to out somebody falsely, even if the election results are the same. But all it takes to get it clear we aren’t doing that is to publish a link to the evidence.

#45

Two things:

I do not see it as an issue of outing, I see it as an issue of perpetuating homophobia and fear mongering.

Why should I care what the majority of the gay community thinks about this? Does making them gay give them a special moral insight on this issue? Do gays and lesbians own this issue? Are you suggesting a kind of morality by consensus. If the majority of gays and lesbians did not think it was proper to out someone, would that cause you to change your position? If not why bring it up? If so, then how is it not morality by majority rule?

If the issue is being polite to gays, then what they think is central.

All of them or a portion of them?

“If the issue is being polite to gays, then what they think is central.”

All of them or a portion of them?

The ones you communicate with.

Politeness has some ambiguities, and there are times when communication is more important, when politeness is intended to prevent communication rather than allow it. So I’m not sure how to make completely general suggestions.

Here’s an example. Once I used the term “eskimo” around Teresa Nielsen-Hayden and company, and I got challenged over it. The proper term is Inuit, “eskimo” is a foreign term applied to inuits by outsiders, a derogatory term that implies they eat fish. It’s rude to call an inuit an eskimo.

I asked if there was a single inuit in present company who was offended by the term, and no one spoke up about that. I didn’t see that it was my place to reform my language to avoid offending people who weren’t involved. But there were people present who were offended by proxy for people they had never met. I don’t have a general solution for that. I won’t talk about colored people when there are no blacks present. But I don’t consistently call mormons saints, or astrologers seers, or west virginians mountaineers, etc. I’ll go out of my way not to offend people and yet I won’t go *way* out of my way.

Franken ran a lot of TV ads, and he could have gone the character-assassination route. There’s lots of ammunition. He chose not to, and maybe he was right.

In Hatfield’s case, by the time people were trying to out him, he was iconic in the state. And Oregon isn’t Kentucky.

Emerson, since I don’t vote myself, my only contribution to the democratic process this time around has been to convince the wife to vote for neither Franken nor Coleman (she was gonna vote a straight democratic ticket). My suggestion was to leave that one blank but she ended up checking Dean Barkley (some people have a very high psychic cost of not voting). Since you’ve vehemently defended Nader in the past, I’m assuming you’re cool with this.

Franken will probably do alright as a politician (assuming he wins) though he does come off as an arrogant prick at times. He’ll definitely be less sleazy and corrupt than Coleman. The main thing I got against him is that he’s not funny but thinks he is.

Madia seems like a bland middle of the roader. That’s a very good thing in my book.

Ellison’s definitely to my left on many things but the US Congress needs someone like him and he’s mostly right on on foreign policy. Plus he comes off as a sincere and intelligent politician which is rare. Since Barb Davis is just crazy, I’d support Ellison based not on his political views but character, uniqueness (I think it counts for something to have a Muslim in congress) and on who he’s running against.

“I do not see it as an issue of outing, I see it as an issue of perpetuating homophobia and fear mongering.”

cjs, I think you are making a facile equation between homophobia as a personal psychological dysfunction and homphobia as a political tactic. The first matters only as much as the afflicted individual matters, which is usually not very much at all. The second matters to whole societies. The first may in fact be perpetuated by “playing to homphobia”. The second will almost certainly become more and more ineffectual as it is used against homophobes and homophobic political groups, either because it is inaccurate and is discredited, or because it deprives the homophobic group of leaders.

‘Why should I care what the majority of the gay community thinks about this? Does making them gay give them a special moral insight on this issue? Do gays and lesbians own this issue?”

As the people who are directly affected in a way you never can be, yes, gay people own the issue. As people who have thought the issue through far more deeply than you will ever be motivated to, yes, gay people own the issue.

RB, yeah that’s why I said “at times”. But I never thought he was funny.

I’m not sure where I am on this, but I wonder what you all would think of other, broadly similar situations. To borrow from Chappelle’s Show, would it be permissible to point out that a leader of a white supremacist movement was himself black?

I lean towards saying that there are situations in which ‘outing’ people like this is justifiable, but it depends on how it’s done. I agree with some other posters that it’s wrong to simply argue that “Republican X is gay, so don’t vote for him”. We can’t adopt the logic of ‘race traitors’ – a gay Republican is not by virtue of his orientation a worse person than a straight Republican, and doesn’t deserve to have his political career ruined on that alone.

My thoughts are confused on this point, but I think I have much less of a problem with attacks on the electorate. If the tone is more “look, you idiots, this guy that you picked to represent you is one of those horrible homosexuals that you go on about, and his orientation clearly hasn’t had an effect on his public life or on his ability to further your goals”, then I think you’re taking steps to demolish homophobia. Yeah, it’ll hurt the politician, but it’ll also get people thinking. My concern is that the politician needs to deserve this, and it can’t just be because of the ‘hypocrisy’ involved in being a gay Republican. Maybe I’m talking nonsense, though.

Coleman’s smear campaign won. Franken didn’t gaybait him. heartwarming. Let joy be unconfined. A perfectly fine Christian gentleman defeated a pornographer who was unfit for office. The people have spoken. Send your congratulations to wherever Franken will be instead of the Senate.

I’m also sorry that Franken lost. But note that any hypothetical alternate strategy would only hypothetically win.

I can imagine Democrats pointing out that the other guy was gay, and Republicans say, “Prove it.” They aren’t going to accept swiftboating without solid evidence. So then a collection of gays speak up and declare that Coleman had sex with them. The Republicans say, “Look at the evil Democrats, it’s a pervert parade.”

So finally the public does decide that Coleman is gay, and the GOP says “Vote for him anyway, you don’t want a Democrat to get in.” That approach maybe worked in alaska, where a convicted felon who can’t serve as senator may have been elected on the promise that some other republican will be chosen to serve the term. Essentially, “You’ll vote for any random Republican over this Democrat, won’t you?” So they hold their noses and vote for Coleman, and maybe they get rid of him in the primary before 2014, or maybe he does the right thing and resigns and they get some unknown republican. Character. That’s the important thing.

We can’t tell whether it would have worked or not. But I’d be interested in the details of how to do it. Would it be better for the Franken campaign to do it, with Franken’s name on it? I could imagine doing it that way. “I’m concerned that if my opponent has a secret that he can’t reveal, our nation’s enemies might blackmail him over it. We don’t want the KGB to blackmail a US senator. So if there’s any secret that Senator Coleman could be blackmailed over, he should reveal it now so that threat to the republic is removed.”

Or would it be better to maintain deniability, and let somebody push the swiftboat who has no official connection to the campaign?

Is there any polite, tasteful way to prove that Coleman is gay? Get too raunchy about it and the target audience will reject you utterly. I didn’t do much of a lit search but the evidence I saw was a photograph of somebody that looked like Coleman surrounded by a bunch of strangely-dressed men who might have been gay. If I was inclinded to disbelieve it, my first thought would be Photoshop.

Maybe the first approach is better. Point out that being closeted is a threat to Homeland Security, and if Coleman is later found guilty of that during a previous term it’s potentially a felony with jailtime, and see if he sweats.

So John, I’m not clear what the best way to run that campaign would be. Can you help us out? This surely won’t be the last chance to do it.

But at least we can be very proud of our honorable losing effort.

What prevented you from following Coleman around with a COLEMAN IS GAY sign?

Nothing, Bubba. Be stupid if you want to.

It’s not stupidity: if this was the right way to go, why weren’t people going that way, Saintly 61% included?

Probably because they cared about what people like you would think.

Back to what I said: if Franken had put out a questionable ad and had won with it, Iit, I’d be happy, and a lot of people here would be upset. That’s the difference I’m talking about. As I’ve said, Franken might have had perfectly good reasons for taking the high road.

But scratch Minnesota off the list of states where “negative politics doesn’t work”. People say that this was the “most negative campaign in Minnesota’s history”, but the truth is that Coleman’s campaign was the most negative campaign in history. Franken criticized Coleman on the issues, but Coleman’s campaign attacked Franken as personally “Unfit to Serve”.

As I’ve said, Franken might have had perfectly good reasons for taking the high road.

One would hope.

By “perfectly good reasons”, of course I meant “besides Righteous Bubba’s reasons”. We regret the misstatement.

Yeah, and everything else is just dirty political stuff.

Granted that it’s negative politics, would anything be wrong about it, including the word “straight”, if it were directed against a homophobic heterosexual (which is what McConnell pretends to be) who left the service early for some unknown but probably embarrassing reason? No.

Yes. It’s pretty obvious what the spin is and what “straight” is intended to mean.

I just can’t see creating a protected class as nasty as that.

The protected class is “everyone” and unfortunately nasty people are in it.

No, it’s not “everyone”. It’s closeted gay reactionaries.

It’s everyone.

You can ask anyone else to “talk straight”

You can ask EVERYONE to “talk straight”; it’s understood when you’re blowing the dog whistle.

and you can ask anyone else to show their service records, but not them.

That seems like fair game to me.

What if you asked Barney Frank to “talk straight”?

I dunno John, what if he gave an answer you didn’t like? I’d imagine he’d then be fair game if a primary challenger called him a mincing sissy.

He avoids the question and lives a lie so that he can continue his destructive work

Who could have thought that a right to privacy would engender problems?

I like Barney Frank’s answers, except when he talks about finance.

So imagine Farney Brank, who is straight, and in all respects has Barney Frank’s positions except he’s better on finance. He thinks he can win by pointing out that Barney Frank is a fag. Does he get a $10 donation from you?

“So if you want Democrats to go ahead and use blatantly homophobic appeals (NB – this, esp. the church flyer was not outing – this was saying that there is something bad about being gay )to win elections, go ahead.”

That’s incoherent, Henry. If the outed weren’t worried about homophobia, then there would be no outing. Every outing is, in a sense, using homophobes to remove one of their tools from public life.

And so much of this thread is so ignorant. Follow Coleman around with a sign? Please. Look up ACT UP, Mark Hatfield, 1989. No outing is real until it is reported by mainstream media. Franken could have forced the media to report on it by putting out a campaign ad on it. No one else really had the power to do so.

I note that Minneapolis’s gay weekly was not so interested in outing Coleman.

Minneapolis’s gay weekly

Typical me, unwilling to acknowledge that there exist bi-weeklies.

No, because you don’t think there should be any line. Naughty bits related activities are transcendent and taboo.

Well, yes and Lewinsky Lewinsky Lewinsky.

Well I guess I disagree with the Minnesota gay biweekly. Is that permitted? We all make our choices.

We do and we don’t: you’ve said you’ve done nothing but wish others had. Democracy in action.

This is about Lewinsky for you?

No, it’s about the right of everyone – even the odious – to use their genitalia as they see fit.

“So John, I’m not clear what the best way to run that campaign would be. Can you help us out?”

Is this sarcasm? Are you playing dumb? I’m not a strategist. I have no advice and make no claims to know what Franken should have done.

No, it isn’t sarcasm. I’m genuinely interested in the details about how to do it and how well to expect it would work.

I’m just pissed off by the whole prissy, genteel, goo-goo tone of this thread and the one on LGM. My take on the Senate elections is that the Democrats missed their chance to gain decisive control of the Senate

I get that. You assume that this tactic would have worked, and the world would be much better off if it had been tried. You are upset that it was not carried out well.

I don’t see that it would have worked, but I’m ready to look at the details.

The first problem is that any attempt by any Democratic candidate to use out-and-out homophobia would have not only lost him support from gay and gay-friendly Democrats, but would have started precisely the sort of divisive argument you have started now — but before the election. I agree that this is a stupid way for Democrats to behave, but particularly from what you say and the responses you get it looks like that’s how they would behave. In the middle of a political campaign they’d split up and argue with each other about whether homophobic attacks are OK, and nationally Republicans would gleefully point and laugh. “Look at the stupid Dhimmis. They’re so upset about upsetting gay Dhimmis that they don’t do anything else! Their whole campaign is bogged down while they soothe their gays’ feelings. Their gays are more important to them than anybody else. Poor, poor losers.”

If that’s the reality we have to work with, then Frankin was right not to set that bomb off during the campaign. And you are right to try to fix it, starting right after the election. To fix it, having somebody fulminating about how the current approach doesn’t work is one good thing. But we also need somebody dispassionately looking at how to make the alternative work. As a first step toward that I claim that if you out somebody because they are a national security risk while they have a blackmailable secret, you are not being homophobic. A legislator who is secretly gay and who has a hydrophobic constituency, is open to blackmail. An openly gay legislator who has a nonhomophobic constituency is not. It isn’t anti-gay to out the former. And he has no right to personal privacy when he is a great big security risk.

No outing is real until it is reported by mainstream media. Franken could have forced the media to report on it by putting out a campaign ad on it. No one else really had the power to do so.

If Rich Puchalsky is right, Franken would have had to put his personal reputation on the line. He would have had to affirm what his standard of evidence was. Lots of ways to lose there. The details would matter a whole lot. It is, after all, unfalsifiable. No possible way for Coleman to prove he isn’t gay. Though if Coleman did claim he wasn’t and it could be proven he was, they could get him for lying.

When I think about it, Coleman could use the Jesus defense. He could say that yes, he used to be gay, and he knew all along it was wrong so he properly did homophobic legislation etc. But Jesus has come on to him and washed away his sins, and he isn’t gay any more. I expect that defense would work fine, and then they could go after Franken for being so mean.

Practically the only Democratic constituencies that have done well in the last two or three decades are the gay and choice constituencies. Environmentalism, labor, peace Democrats, and civil libertarians have broken even at best, but mostly lost.

Could the GOP have something to do with that? Two goals that they can’t make money on, that excite their base? So they make a big show about opposing those two but don’t actually accomplish much. And they make progress on the issues their strategists care about.

Obama gave up gun control as a useless goal. The gun nuts are numerous and passionate, the anti-gun-nuts are numerous and calm, it won’t go anywhere and it works for the GOP. Could we compromise abortion and gays? If states can forbid abortion within their borders, so all across the midwest you have to go to nevada or louisiana to get one, that would be bad but would it be worse than losing elections? If we put off nationwide gay marriage for another 8 years, is that worse than a GOP congressional majority in 2010 and president Palin in 2012?

The question of whether Franken actually could have done better by gay-baiting Coleman, and the specifics of how he would have gone about it, are not things I know about. But negative campaigning, especially by proxies, can and often does work. The point of argument here is that if Franken or some unauthorized surrogate had found a way to do that, I would have been happy rather than indignant, whereas many people here would have been mostly indignant. As it is, Franken will probably lose to a closeted gay smear artist, and I’m pissed off about that. And a lot of nice pious old Democrats have been suckered.

Making this an issue of personal privacy, as opposed to use of homophobia

Part and parcel.

Saying that Republicans can bring up such things, but that we are too good to because we are moral, is morally corrupt.

Who said that?

This is such a weird argument to be having, but one thing is is clear: There’s a great market opportunity here. If someone set up a vaguely MoveOn-ish organization specifically devoted to gaybaiting (and otherwise attacking in more or less off-limit ways) Rs in close races, there’d be a decent pool of donors out there and the potential for productive, albeit informal, relationships with Dems who don’t want to (and generally shouldn’t) go there themseves. That’s how you get the best of both worlds. (AFSCME was sort of doing this with McConnell but unions have too much of their own reputational capital at stake for this role to be a good fit for them.)

That such an organization would instantly become a popular hate-object on the Right is part of the business plan.