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The present danger
Advocate, The, Feb 15, 2005 by Richard Goldstein
For years I've been operating under the assumption that the Republicans are our enemy. I still believe that, but the last election has created a new situation. After decades of standing up for GLBT rights, some prominent Democrats may be having second thoughts. They're not about to break up with us, but they do seem inclined to keep their affection on the down low.
After the election, our good buddy Bill Clinton put out the word that "gay marriage was an overwhelming factor" in John Kerry's defeat. Other Democrats made similar statements, and I suspect that the marriage issue is just the tip of their tarnation. When the people at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council urge the party to "make tough choices that ... take on sacred cows," you can bet they have gays and lesbians in mind. If these backlash Democrats prevail, by the next presidential election we may be looking at a candidate who regards us with something between embarrassment and resentment.
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There's much to be said for reclaiming the faith-and-frostily agenda. But the way the Democrats are going about it reads like a primer on Church Supper Etiquette for Beginners. I'm waiting for Bill Clinton to maintain that he was shocked--shocked--by that glimpse of Janet Jackson's breast and that marriage should be between a man, a woman, and their ghostwriters. This spectacle of repentance would be funny if it didn't involve real human fights.
I'm not suggesting that the Democrats will line up with antigay conservatives. But they may slip-slide away from anything queer. Can we count on them to raise the issue of gay rights with a right-wing judicial nominee? Will these newly reverent donkeys dare to oppose faith-based programs that allow churches to discriminate against GLBT people in hiring? (This isn't a hypothetical question; hundreds of thousands of us work in the helping professions.)
We are the most fragile minority in the United States. Our rights are revocable to an alarming degree because they aren't specifically enumerated in the Constitution. This U.S. Supreme Court has taken steps toward including us in the equal protection clause, but that could change as George W. Bush makes his mark on the judiciary.
Don't kid yourself into believing these shifts won't affect your life. We will all suffer if judges send a message to homophobes that they are free to vent their bigotry on us, especially in the name of religion.
The situation will be infinitely worse if the Democrats refuse to stand against the tide. That's essentially what they did in the McCarthy era, colluding in wholesale violations of civil liberties to prove they weren't soft on communism. Something similar could happen to us if the Democrats see us as an albatross. That is the present danger.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson put his muscle behind a historic civil rights act even though he was convinced it would cost his party the South. His fears were spot-on, but that didn't stop him from doing the right thing. We'll see whether this impulse guides the Democrats to resist the predations of the religious right. There is no more urgent test of the party's soul than its commitment to equality. But we can't count on principle to trump the lust for power. We have to let the party know that our commitment is contingent on theirs.
I say this as a lifelong Democrat. But I'm also a believer in the maxim Robert Kennedy often quoted: "If I am not for myself, who will be?" If the Democrats repudiate their principles in 2008, I'm open to a sane third-party candidate--or even a progressive Republican, if such creatures aren't extinct by then. I don't think it's selfish to vote with my future in mind, because a party that abandons its commitment to queers is likely to do the same to other vulnerable constituencies. Our loyalty must go to those who fight to free us.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Liberation Publications, Inc.
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