Roberta on a rampage - social policies of Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Department of Housing and Urban Development

National Review, May 2, 1994 by Bruce Bartlett

BY 1984 it had become clear that San Francisco's bathhouses were a deadly venue for spreading AIDS. In October the city's public-health director, Mervyn Silverman, ordered 14 of the bathhouses closed over the objections of some gay leaders--including the lesbian lawyer and activist Roberta Achtenberg.

The bathhouses "are a sex positive environment where they [closeted gays] feel like human beings instead of being in the bushes," Miss Achtenberg told the Seattle Times. "They are institutions of tremendous symbolic significance to a sexual minority." As one of a group called Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom she fought the city's order in court. "We are primarily interested in the civil-rights issues here," she explained.

Her efforts would ultimately fail. Silverman's order was the death knell for bathhouses (although the last didn't close until 1987)--fortunately for gays more concerned about their lives than their "rights."

In 1993, after a bitter battle, Miss Achtenberg was confirmed as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, making her the highest-ranking openly lesbian official ever. But the real story isn't her sexuality but her world view: as the bathhouse case shows, her idea of civil rights is so abstract and far-reaching and her gay politics so myopic that she can in good conscience trample even the real interests of gays (let alone those of Boy Scouts or mortgage lenders).

Making of a Radical

FOR Roberta Achtenberg, a social conscience came early. Raised in Los Angeles, she remembers as a seven-year-old refusing to enter a restaurant with a picket-line outside. She went on to study history at Social Conscience Central, UC Berkeley, where she participated in anti-war protests and spent her senior year working as a legal intern on welfare-rights cases (and still graduated Phi Beta Kappa). She decided to become a lawyer "because I thought it was a way of doing social justice."

But her career took an unexpected twist in Salt Lake City. She was there at the University of Utah taking her law degree, 25 years old and married, when she realized she was a lesbian. She left her husband and moved to the Bay Area, where her life's work would become defending what she calls "the new family."

What's that? Take her own case. She has a partner, former San Francisco Municipal Court judge Mary Morgan (she resigned to join Miss Achtenberg in Washington), who bore the couple a son, Benjamin, through artificial insemination in 1985. They are not alone: the country is in the midst of a "lesbian baby boom." By one estimate there are 5,000 gay households with children in the Bay Area alone.

Miss Achtenberg is adamant about the equivalency--moral and legal--of these families with straight ones: "We are building our own tradition of family," she told a 1985 San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day rally, "for which we demand recognition and respect. We are entitled to love and to protect our partners, to keep the children we have, to have the children we want, to teach and counsel the children of others, and to stand up against anyone who tries to take these cherished rights away from us."

When Miss Achtenberg joined the Lesbian Rights Project (LRP) in 1982, she undertook to get the courts to buy her vision. For the most part it was a tough sell, with courts reluctant to ignore homosexuality in custody decisions or to recognize gays as parents of their partners' children. But the LRP became a lesbian-rights clearinghouse--publishing a widely circulated Lesbian Mother Litigation Manual--and by 1987 Miss Achtenberg could tell the National Law Journal that gay families were making legal inroads, especially in urban areas. In 1989 she won the right of a lesbian couple to adopt a child.

And all the lost suits didn't really matter because Miss Achtenberg was engaged in politics as much as law. She credits, for instance, a losing 1982 suit to get California to extend dental benefits to a gay man's partner with creating a "revolution in consciousness" about the existence of stable gay families.

She hit political pay-dirt on the issue in 1989 when she was appointed to head Mayor Art Agnos's Task Force on Family Policy. The task force argued that the "recognition of domestic partnership is the only way to treat [gay] relationships with the equal dignity to which they are entitled." Its June 1990 report--featuring epigraphs from Thomas Jefferson and Harvey Milk both--recommended extending health insurance, family and bereavement leave, and retirement benefits to the domestic partners of city employees. Then, says former Mayor Agnos, Miss Achtenberg was key "in the formulation of a legislative strategy" to enact the reports' proposals. By 1992 San Francisco's domestic partner policies were arguably the most liberal in the nation.

To be sure, not everyone views that as a recommendation. Equal status for gay families is part of what Frank S. Zepezauer, who tracks such issues for the Men's Defense Association, calls an assault on the "legitimacy principle"--the normative notion that families have mothers and fathers. Furthermore, there is credible research to support the common-sense conclusion that, all things being equal, a child will be better off with heterosexual than homosexual parents. "In our society you're under all kinds of pressure as a homosexual," says Brigham Young University family-sciences professor Craig Peery. "There's lots of data that kids pick all that up."