Dukakis and the homosexuals - Michael Dukakis speaks with homosexual activists in Los Angeles

National Review, June 10, 1988

Dukakis and the Homosexuals

MICHAEL DUKAKIS spoke in Los Angeles a week ago to a meeting of homosexual activists, and the headlines told it all--or seemed to. GAY ACTIVISTS CONFRONT DUKAKIS (Washington Post). DUKAKIS IS QUESTIONED BY GAY RIGHTS GROUPS (New York Times). The careless reader will get an impression--an impression the Dukakis campaign will not wish to dispel--that there is some tension here, some running conflict; that Dukakis does not sit well with radical homosexuals, and vice versa.

Anyone who has followed Dukakis's career for the last 15 years--or the reader who reads to the end of the stories--will know there is more to it. Dukakis's disagreements with a fringe of the homosexual movement stem from a decision he made as governor to give preference, in placing foster children, to "heterosexual couples" (strange phrase, when one thinks about it) with child-rearing experience.

This is his lone deviation, as Jean O'Leary, executive director of the National Gay Rights Advocates, recognizes. "We have in Mike Dukakis a candidate who is instinctively supportive," O'Leary told the meeting, "who has a good record on gay rights issues, who wants our support, and who can win.... Let's stop comparing Michael Dukakis with Jesse Jackson and start comparing him with George Bush."

Bush handlers, take note--and return the favor.