OutRight
By
Dale Carpenter
Excuses,
Excuses
When Democrats do bad things
A governor criminalizes gay sex, yet gay leaders say
nothing. An elected official backs antigay marriage
legislation, yet a gay group says he’s blameless.
Another governor vetoes legislation giving gay employees
the right to take time off from work to care for a sick
lover, yet the state’s gay lobbying organization
yawns.
Welcome, my friends, to the world of the Democratic
double standard.
Under it, a Republican who even hints at doing something
that might adversely affect a gay person somewhere is
instantly denounced as a homophobic hate-monger. When
a Democrat does much the same thing? Well, nobody’s
perfect.
Consider former Texas Governor Ann Richards. To the
gay political establishment in Texas, the colorful Democrat
is a saint. Yet despite Richards’ ability to wow
gay audiences at black-tie dinners with her winning
smile and folksy accent, her legislative legacy is darkly
antigay. It’s her signature you’ll find on
the state’s antigay sodomy law, after all, one
of only a handful in the entire country that specifically
targets gay sex. Two men in Houston were recently prosecuted
for violating Richards’ law in a private home.
(Note: a state appeals court has held the law unconstitutional.)
If George W. Bush had signed such a hideous law, gay
activists would have blockaded every road between the
Alamo and the Astrodome in protest. Yet the excuse factory
rolls into production for Richards. Despite the fact
that she did nothing to lobby the Legislature to defeat
it, gay advocates explain she was forced to sign the
law because it was part of a larger overhaul of the
criminal code. Despite the fact that Democrats controlled
both houses of the Texas Legislature at the time, they
complain it was really the Republicans’ fault.
Another example of this blame-the-GOP defense came recently
from the Stonewall Democrats. In a press release extolling
the Clinton-Gore administration, the group excused Clinton
and Gore’s support of the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA) by arguing that the congressional Republicans,
under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, made them do
it. “Sure, Clinton signed the bill, but only in
a political reality created by Republicans,” huffed
Stonewall.
Never mind that Clinton publicly agreed to sign DOMA
before it was even drafted, much less introduced in
Congress. Never mind that after Clinton signed DOMA,
he and Gore trumpeted their support of the measure in
campaign ads on Christian radio stations. Did Gingrich
make them do that, too?
When blaming Republicans won’t fly, some gay groups
try minimizing the importance of the Democratic betrayal.
Witness their supine reaction to California Governor
Gray Davis’ recent rejection of a domestic partners’
bill.
Because Democrat Davis and most officeholders of both
parties oppose same-sex marriage, gay Californians are
left trying to approximate the benefits of marriage
by creating a domestic partnership system that confers
a series of limited rights to gay couples.
Earlier this year, Davis approved a state-sanctioned
registry for same-sex couples that grants no benefits
to them other than the right to visit a partner in the
hospital. To give the system some content, legislators
have subsequently proposed a series of piecemeal bills
that would accord domestic partners a few of the privileges
of marriage.
One such proposal, which passed the California Legislature
and went to Davis for his signature in May, would have
expanded the state’s family medical leave law to
allow an employee to take unpaid time to care for an
ailing domestic partner—just as the employee could
do for a spouse.
Davis vetoed the bill. In a statement, he criticized
it for going “far beyond what any other state has
permitted to a relationship outside the family,”
underlining the words “outside the family.”
I had to read that twice to make sure it wasn’t
a position paper from the Family Research Council. Outside
the family? What are our families, potted plants?
It wasn’t Davis’ first foray into antigay
territory. Earlier this year, he suggested that he might
demand the resignations of judges he appoints if they
don’t share his opposition to gay marriage.
There are sound reasons to oppose employer mandates
like a family leave law: They’re expensive for
business and therefore costly to consumers and employees
alike. But there are no good non-homophobic reasons
to support family leave requirements for married couples
(as Davis does) and oppose them for gay couples (as
Davis’ veto implies he does).
Yet the California Alliance for Pride and Equality (CAPE),
the statewide gay lobbying group, reacted to the veto
by saying the measure had not been a priority anyway.
“We knew the governor was going to veto the bill,”
said CAPE’s executive director, as if that foreknowledge
matters. She then characterized as “minor”
four other pending proposals for domestic partners,
presumably giving Davis a pass on these bills as well.
That was too much for one non-partisan activist, who
told the Bay Area Reporter that “our community
has been accepting too little from the Democrats, too
easily.”
Why the double standard? One possibility is that our
leaders are willing to sacrifice gay equality on liberalism’s
altar for the sake of other issues they care about.
But that’s too cynical.
I suspect it’s more like the battered wife syndrome:
We keep coming back because we think they won’t
abuse us again and, after all, they love us.
One of these days we’ll have a civil rights movement
that doesn’t look at partisan labels before deciding
what to say and do. That day is not here.
Writing
from the conservative end of the spectrum, former Houston
resident and law professor Dale Carpenter began his
column for OutSmart in 1994 and has won three Vice Versa
awards for excellence in gay writing. Currently living
in San Francisco, he can be reached at OutRight@aol.com.
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