OUT RIGHT

by Dale Carpenter

THE SKY IS NOT FALLING

Republican victory does not signal the end of our rights

Is the Democrats’ disaster also a disaster for gays? It’s not likely, but you wouldn’t know that from what gay organizations and pundits are telling us.

The Human Rights Campaign said the GOP victory creates “rocky political terrain” and vaguely hinted that “obstacles may emerge from a more conservative leadership.”

The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force similarly warned that gays are “in jeopardy of seeing more anti-GLBT legislation introduced.”

Ann Rostow, one of the most interesting and certainly one of the best writers among gay news analysts today (she is also a friend of mine), wrote what everybody on the gay left was thinking but most were too politic to say. In her weekly “News with a View” column, under the unsubtle title “Disaster,” she called the election “a fu--ing train wreck” and predicted “there’s no group that’s going to suffer any more than we will.”

Rocky terrain? Gays in jeopardy? A fu--ing train wreck?

We’ve been here before. When the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, we were treated to doom-and-gloom scenarios from gay Democrats unaccustomed to finding their party in the minority.

When Bush won the presidency, we were told he would never hire an openly gay person to a post in his administration and would repeal the executive order protecting gay federal employees from job discrimination. On its website, NGLTF even featured a mock “count” of Bush’s openly gay appointees starting with 0, which is where NGLTF imagined the count would stay. After a dozen or so openly gay Bush appointees, including an ambassador, the NGLTF counter is gone. The executive order is still there.

Every time the Republicans win an election, the Chicken Littles come out to cluck. What demons with pitchforks await us this time? What travails have they devised to make our lives but a vale of tears? What tyranny do we whiff in this new ill breeze?

It is first important to note what this election was and was not about. The main issues were post-9/11 domestic security, a possible war with Iraq, the Bush tax cut, and a few other things having to do with Social Security and Medicare. On these matters most voters appear quite sensibly to have trusted the Republicans more than they trusted the Democrats. It didn’t hurt that a popular Republican president with an outstanding foreign policy record campaigned hard for his party’s candidates.

Note carefully what is not on that list of 2002 election issues. Republicans did not run on preserving traditional moral values, much less on explicitly antigay pledges. They did not ask for, and did not receive, a mandate to subjugate gays.

The mandate Republicans did get is a hair-thin one. A difference of just 44,000 votes in three states would have allowed the Democrats to keep the Senate. The new majority can be lost as easily as it was won, and Republicans know it. They have marked well the lesson of 1994: Don’t overplay your hand.

Combine that with the fact that more moderate Republicans have replaced three of the Senate’s most inveterate antigay social conservatives—Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Bob Smith. My hunch is the GOP will move very cautiously on a range of issues, all of which have nothing to do directly with homosexuality.

So just what are the doomsayers predicting? HRC and NGLTF are short on specifics, but Rostow is characteristically forthcoming.

In the department of good-things-that-would’ve-happened-but-won’t-now-that-the-Neanderthals-are-in-charge, we have the long-suffering Employment Non-Discrimination Act (a proposed federal law protecting gays from job discrimination) and a federal hate crimes bill. “Goodbye ENDA and so long Hate Crime Bill,” writes Rostow.

It’s probably true that we won’t see either of these measures pass a GOP-dominated Congress in the next two years, but how likely were they to pass a Democratic Senate? In the two years Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, they failed even to consider, much less adopt, a gay civil rights bill. In the year and a half the Democrats most recently controlled the Senate, they once again failed even to consider either of these measures.

I know, I know. The Democrats would have brought them up for votes if only they had kept their precious majority. They are always promising to do things for us once we have again demonstrated our devotion to them in the next election.

In the department of bad-things-that-will-happen-now-that-the-Neanderthals-are-in-charge, Rostow says we face “a radical version of the faith-based social services bill” and a bunch of cloven-hoofed federal judicial nominees.

On the faith-based initiatives plan, endorsed by both Al Gore and Bush in the 2000 election, a proposal to exempt federally funded religious institutions from civil rights laws that protect gays and other groups has been shelved. There has been no effort to revive the exemption. We’ll see what happens, but I doubt the Republicans will risk offending the country’s burgeoning minority population for little or no political gain.

On the judicial nominees, a perennial cause for lefty teeth gnashing, a couple of them may be objectionable to some people on nongay grounds (like abortion) but there is no credible evidence Bush’s nominees have antigay agendas. Overwhelmingly, the nominees are supremely qualified moderate conservatives.

There are good reasons why the gay left might oppose the GOP’s tenuous ascendancy—from environmental to foreign policy, Republicans stand for everything they hate. But they can’t scare us again with antigay nightmares.

Writing from the conservative end of the political spectrum, Dale Carpenter began his column for OutSmart in 1994, when he lived in Houston. Now residing in Minneapolis, Carpenter is a University of Minnesota Law School professor. He can be reached at OutRight@aol.com.

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