Mr. Bush's cautious embrace? - George Bush and gay rights movement

National Review, May 28, 1990 by William McGurn

ON A SUNNY Monday afternoon in April, George Bush sat down at a mahogany desk in the Old Executive Office Building, picked up his pen, and signed into law the Hate Crimes Statistics Act. Sponsored by Senator Paul Simon (D., Ill.), the new law requires the Attorney General to begin collecting information on hate-motivated crimes based on religion, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Unlike most bills, this one got a public signing by the President, and unlike any previous ceremony it was attended by more than twenty gay activists, the first time gay activists had formally been invited to a presidential bill signing.

Few were surprised at the signing itself, inasmuch as Bush had made his views clear back when his delegates were ordered to reject even the mildest reporting requirements on AIDS when they were writing the Republican platform. But at the eleventh hour the White House opted for the public ceremony. Twelve invitations were sent to the Human Rights Campaign fund (a national gay-rights lobby), seven to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and three to Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. The only departure from normal protocol was that Senator Simon was not standing behind the President during the ceremony, a nod to Simon's Republican challenger for his Senate seat, Representative Lynn Martin.

For the moment gay-rights activists are delighted with Bush; in marked contrast to their earlier treatment (he was rudely interrupted by a heckler during a March 29 speech on AIDS), they were well behaved and respectful. But this rapprochement is doomed to collapse once it becomes clear to the gay community that Bush will not deliver what it is really after, which is an endorsement of homosexuality itself. Meanwhile, his overtures in that direction may alienate his own base. At a time when the Republican Party is in the thick of a campaign to build a new majority grounded in the values of Middle America, the President's stand on these and other questions suggests that the party's Washington leadership is as out of touch with the ranks as, say, the black establishment is with the black population.

There is a deep divide here," says the domestic policy advisor to the Reagan White House, Gary Bauer. "If you went to the average person who worked for the Republican Party at the precinct level or supported them at the polls and showed them Mapplethorpe's pictures or explained to them what the Administration is doing on gay rights, you'd find that more than 90 per cent would be outraged."

THE Hate Crimes bill is just on example. Ostensibly it is about requiring the government to keep statistics on hate crimes, but its real significance is that it writes "sexual orientation" into federal law for the first time (the Washington Blade, the capital's gay weekly, called it a "landmark development"). Nor was it something the President backed into. To George Bush the issue is tolerance of homosexuals, but what the bill is really all about is legitimacy for homosexuality. Indeed, for a bill that claims to combat Ku Klux Klan or skinhead types of aggression, the signing ceremony drew but a handful of blacks.

"I was encouraged and the organization [NGLTF] was pleased that the Bush White House is not afraid to talk to or deal with gay and lesbian organizations," said the NGLTF'S executive director, Urvashi Vaid, who was not invited because she was the one who heckled Bush in March. "It is a very positive step and represents a qualitative leap forward from the Reagan Administration."

She's right. Increasingly AIDS is treated not as a public-health question-witness the coverage of Ryan White, the young boy who was infected by a blood transfusion-but as a means to set up special privileges for homosexuals, abetted by the Bush Administration. In 1987, for example, the Senate passed by a 96 to 0 vote an amendment by Senator Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) to deny entry to HIV-infected immigrants. But this spring the White House, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, pushed through a special ten-day waiver for those who wish to attend an AIDS conference in San Francisco in June. Now it is trying to get the Public Health Service to remove AIDS from the list of "dangerous contagious diseases." On top of this the President supports the Americans with Disabilities Act, which, under the guise of protecting AIDS victims, gives all gays the privileges of the handicapped.

This may appeal to the patrician streak in Bush, but the gay community is not looking for compassion. Just ask John Cardinal O'Connor, the Catholic archbishop of New York. The cardinal has opened the 14 hospitals o the archdiocese to treatment of HIV-infected inpatients, set up a number of clinics to deal with outpatient services, and been at the bedside of well over a thousand of those near death. Yet Cardinal O'Connor is hated by the gay community because he withholds the approval of homosexuality itself.

By the time Bush finds himself in the same position, he may have already alienated most of his friends. Already there is considerable grumbling on the Hill because of the White House's imperious disregard for traditional constituencies and its habit of making pre-emptive deals with the staffs of Senators Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) and George Mitchell (D., Me.). The larger concern is that the Administration's positions on everything from gay rights to federal funding of art offensive to the majority of Americans subvert Republicans who are trying to launch a 1992 takeover of the House on a program based on conservative solutions to local problems.