Reading between the lines of the gay marriage victories

Two groundbreaking decisions in favor of gay marriage in two weeks - and several in the works across the country have got to be a good thing.

The Iowa decision, of course, is important because it has finally infiltrated the debate to the so-called "hinterland," and might also provide an impetus for other states in the region. In fact, a lot of thought seems to have gone into picking Iowa as the state that would effectively press this case, and it seems to have paid off, at least for now.

Vermont is significant because it is the first legislature to pass the law, as opposed to court rulings that are less democratic.

Hopefully these decisions will open up debate in other states; Chris Sanders of the Tennessee Equality Project reasons that when married gay couples from such states move to other parts of the country, they would take up the fight there. New York, for instance, is already reviewing cases to allow recognition of out-of-state gay marriages.

More significantly, DC’s city council voted in favor of recognizing marriages from other states. This would lead the debate directly to the Congress since it has the final word on DC’s legislation.

The Iowa decision may also help in California where a ruling on Prop 8 is expected in the coming weeks.

However, as always in such issues, there is a valid concern that these decisions may lead to a backlash. Since the recent results themselves are considered by many to be repercussions of the California Prop 8 ruling, this is indeed a real worry.

In fact, some gay activists have suggested that part of the reason for Prop 8 was moving too hard and too fast to strike down the marriage ban. As this Time article elegantly explains, the California ruling last year was quite categorical in declaring that any discrimination against gays was presumptively unconstitutional, and hence subject to “strict scrutiny” - a condition so far reserved to discrimination based on race and religion. Iowa took a softer stance, deciding instead that the gay marriage ban did not hold up to a lower level of constitutional analysis – “intermediate scrutiny” (usually accorded to gender discrimination cases) - and hence qualified for strict scrutiny, thus ultimately fulfilling the same objective.

The important question is, as more and more states begin to allow same-sex marriages, will it continue to be a significant political issue? Top Republican leaders like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have already decried these decisions, but as Chris Cillizza points out, GOP strategists seem to vary on what the political implications could be.

It’s hard to imagine that Republicans can ruffle enough feathers again with this issue in order to win elections - one, because there are more important things to worry about, two, because more and more Americans are beginning to accept the idea of gay marriage, and three, it remains a dicey issue to run a presidential campaign on because reconciling positions between a candidate’s base in the primaries and then packaging it for general election voters is extremely hard for both parties.

However, the matter is complicated by the fact that Iowans have started lobbying legislators for an amendment to the ruling, which, if placed, would be ripe and ready for the 2012 election season. Since Iowa law requires amendments to get approval in two legislative sessions followed by ballot voting, the process takes two years. And, considering the hawkeye state’s strategic importance in the presidential elections, this decision might throw the next race in the country directly into the moral-values, social-issues quagmire.

That might be a good thing in sort of a convoluted way because candidates will finally be forced to take a real stand – no more getting away with half-baked, civil-union, cat-on-the-wall positions.

Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has an optimistic prediction, however, saying it may not get that far: based on a model measuring the religiosity of states, and hence their likeness to vote for or against it, he envisions that about half the states would have voted against the gay marriage ban within the next four years (though Iowa itself doesn’t seem to come around until 2013 in his model).

It’s tempting to believe it considering the general trend seems to be towards allowing for same-sex marriages, and seriously, it’s about time!

If nothing else, this economy argument should work...

The newer and scarier (?!) face of GOP

We all know that’s always possible.

Rachel Maddow made an important point last night about the familiar theme among the “new faces” that the GOP has chosen to project the last few months, one of them of course being Bobby Jindal.

Jindal, son of Indian immigrants, raised a Hindu, and a teenage convert to Catholicism, infamously – or famously, depending on your perspective – wrote about his experiences participating in an exorcism in 1994. In 2003, he declared in the Time Picayune,“I am 100 percent anti-abortion with no exceptions. I believe all life is precious.” This would mean that Jindal does not make an exception even if the woman were raped or if her life were at risk.

This would also mean that he actually makes Sarah Palin look reasonable, with her exceptional ability to consider exceptions for life-threatening situations.

Then there’s Michael Steele who has declared in no uncertain terms that he believes that embryonic stem cells are “life” and is absolutely opposed to embryonic stem cell research. He is staunchly pro-life including in cases of rape and incest.

Of course, we are all used to Republicans that espouse these views, but what makes this scarier is that like Maddow and Ana Marie Cox said last night, this new face is changing in terms of color of skin and gender, but the viewpoints are still the same.

For instance, Jindal opposes hate-crime legislation - a brown-skinned son of immigrants who grew up in Louisiana - wants to repeal laws that would mandate penalties on crimes inspired by hatred toward certain groups or races. These younger, fresher, "more diverse" faces are probably going to inspire younger Republicans from all backgrounds to follow suit, and think it's OK to have ideologies that make no pragmatic sense. That's why it's scarier.

The connection between reason, information, and political ideology

The Washington Post has a story about a recent experiment conducted by two political scientists:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

(You can read some more commentary about this article at Mother Jones, and find a link to the study)

This study adds to another recent finding in Larry Bartels' new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press, 2008). Among the many interesting findings in Bartels' new book, he found using survey data that perceptions of growing economic inequality in the United States over the last twenty years were far different among liberals and conservatives. Not particularly surprising on the face of it, but he also found that political information had a substantially different effect among liberals and conservatives. The income gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. has increased over the last twenty years, this isn't a debatable fact. But, Bartels found that among liberals, they were increasingly likely to recognize increasing economic inequality as they became more politically informed. Among the least informed liberals involved in the survey, about 70% recognized that inequality had increased, compared to 80% of the least informed conservatives. Among the most informed liberals, about 95% recognized that income inequality had increased, compared to about 60% of the most informed conservatives.

Am I really surprised by these findings? Not particularly. But it is still pretty disheartening that the likelihood of rational debate and reasonable compromise between liberals and conservatives, especially at the elite level, is pretty unlikely given that factual evidence has no impact on the most die-hard conservatives. If you combine these findings with other research that demonstrates ideological polarization between liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans) has also increased since the 1980s, especially at the elite level, the implications for the quality of public debate and public policy in this country are downright depressing.