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When
All of Us Are Free
Sissy Farenthold interviews Roberta Achtenberg
 Roberta
Achtenberg became known to the wider gay community and
the nation in 1993 when President Clinton nominated
her for the position of assistant secretary for Fair
Housing and Equal Opportunity, making her the first
openly gay person who was ever nominated by the president
and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In her career, she
not only has played an important role in the struggle
for lesbian and gay rights (she wrote the 1985 book
Sexual Orientation and the Law), but has also worked
hard for a panoply of other human rights struggles,
from housing to advocacy for children. She was on the
board of supervisors for San Francisco, and was a candidate
for mayor.
On
the occasion of Roberta Achtenberg’s visit to Houston
for the July 9 brunch benefiting An Uncommon Legacy,
we asked another pioneering female politician if she
would interview Roberta for OutSmart: Sissy Farenthold.
Sissy has been a trailblazing force in feminism and
opening up politics her whole life. She staged a high-profile
race for governor of Texas in 1972, and was the first
woman ever to be nominated for vice president, in that
same year. She was the chairperson for the National
Political Women’s Caucus in 1973–75, and was
president of Wells College from 1976–80. And she
is well-remembered by the gay community for her keynote
address to the 1978 Town Hall Meeting, the seminal gay
political convention, in the Astroarena: “No one
is free,” she said, “until all of us are free.”
More recently, she was a leader in the fight for Allen
Parkway Village. She’s currently very active with
Rothko Chapel, helping to create programs around human
rights and peace issues.
An
Uncommon Legacy Foundation’s Fifth Annual “Extra
Mile Award” brunch featuring Roberta Achtenberg
as guest speaker will be held July 9, 11:30 a.m., at
the Warwick Hotel, 4701 Main Street. $60 per person
includes full brunch and bottomless mimosas. For reservations
or information, call 281/850-1550. All proceeds benefit
local charities and scholarships.
Sissy
Farenthold: I thought maybe we’d start out with
your legal efforts. Your book Sexual Orientation and
the Law came out in ’85. Could you give us a brief
rundown on the different areas in what you see as the
change or the lack of change in the different areas
[you covered in your book]?
Roberta
Achtenberg: In 1985, I think it was accepted legal principal
that—except for a few private policies that pertained
in private workplaces against discrimination in the
workplace—there was no broad-based rule either
nationally or as a matter of state law. At least there
were very few states that had any rule in place that
guaranteed people protection against employment discrimination.
Now 15 years later, you have the federal Employment
Non-Discrimination Act. It is not yet the law of the
land, but last year, there were 51 votes in the United
States Senate for a federal law that would protect gays
and lesbians. If any of us had ever been asked in 1985
whether we would see the possibility of federal protection
against employment discrimination in our lifetime, I
think we would have said no. And I do believe, that
in the next year or two or three, there will be a federal
law to protect us against employment discrimination.
So in that arena we’ve made enormous progress.
...[Also] in 1985, the concept of domestic partnership
was a very, sort of nascent kind of thought in people’s
minds. We had lost lawsuits...
You had been counsel in some of
those suits, hadn’t you?
Yes, the two earliest suits. One was brought by Matt
Coles and one was brought by me for the Lesbian Rights
Project. And we lost both of those outright. Both the
newspapers and the courts of law treated us as if we
were absurd to assert that a gay or lesbian worker would
be entitled or should be compensated equally with a
married worker—so that a person’s partner
could be either the beneficiary of medical coverage
or dental coverage or bereavement leave. The notion
that there should be equal recognition of those relationships
was thought to be absurd.
Today, you have not only hundreds of private companies
offering domestic partner insurance benefits of all
kinds—including pension benefits, I might add,
in some cases—but you have many states recognizing
that principal and, recently, Vermont endorsing that
principal in toto. That’s an enormous change, a
real area where the recognition of the lesbian and gay
families has really increased exponentially far beyond
anything we could have imagined when I wrote Sexual
Orientation in the Law in 1985. So those are just two
of the radical changes that we’ve seen in really
less than 15 years.
I am anxious to see your book,
because I had once taught a course in sex-based discrimination
as far as women were concerned. But was there any other
issue in that book that we can compare to the situation
today?
That book dealt with criminal laws, sodomy laws. That
book dealt with child custody, adoption rights, foster
parenting. I don’t think we dealt with the concept
of second-parent adoptions, where a child could have
by law, two parents, both of the same gender, which
we have in a number of places. Now we have it in California.
And they have it in Israel, by
the way.
Yes, I saw that. And actually that is the case that
I am most proud of. Those cases were my cases, originally,
through the Lesbian Rights Project. We brought all the
first cases of second-parent adoption—and won them
all, by the way.
Well, that’s wonderful. Now
there are two areas that seem to me to be very spotty
and very painful in coming about, those of same-sex
holy unions, and the military.
Well, as far as the same-sex holy union is concerned,
I think it’s going on two tracks and it will proceed
down those two tracks over an indefinite time frame.
One is I think that we will see more and more denominations
allowing the recognition of gay commitments as an article
of religious faith and increasingly allowing their priests
and ministers and rabbis to perform those commitments
with their blessing. So, although some will say no,
my guess is that the ranks of those that allow it will
increase over time.
At the same time I think that, as Vermont has just done,
there will be pressure on Massachusetts and California
to act similarly and some of the other states where
gay political organizing has been effective in the mainstream
political parties for a very long time.
Although Vermont just did the whole thing at once, my
guess is most of the other states will be more incremental,
since they don’t have a supreme court that said,
basically, you’d better equalize this or we’re
going to force you to recognize gay marriage. So there
will be increasing movement toward these civil recognitions
of lesbian and gay partnerships that will fall short
of marriage. And I don’t believe the religious
and civil will combine, at least in the short term.
Meaning that, right now, although the two coincide for
straight people, I think we’re going to be operating
on a separate and unequal track, two tracks, for a long
time to come.
The other question was gays in the military. The organization
that monitors the military’s compliance with “don’t
ask, don’t tell” has been drawing the attention
of the Department of Defense, of the Clinton administration
itself, to how badly that policy does not work. I mean
how much it doesn’t work. Obviously that is the
kind of thing that pushed Al Gore and, at the time,
Bill Bradley to commit to leadership of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff that they would be open to a sort of revision
of that policy.
I think if George W is elected, I don’t know, we
will probably see that policy remain in place, or maybe
a more egregious policy put into its place. If Al Gore
is elected president, my guess is that they’ll
try to loosen the policy in some ways without directly
challenging the Congress, who I think is really probably
unwilling at this point to address it. I think we’re
much more likely to get ENDA passed than we are to get
the Congress to revisit its “don’t ask, don’t
tell” compromise.
But then, scarcity sometimes can
do remarkable things for justice. You know it was the
case with women [first entering] the public universities
in the 1870s and so forth.... The scarcity of volunteers
is such that it may make the Defense Department...
Maybe so, I never thought about the demographics of
the situation.
Yes, they’re giving people
bonuses to join and all that kind of thing.
Well, from your mouth to God’s ears, as we say.
I have been so taken with the
different facets of your public life to date, and one
thing I was very interested in was your work, when you
were a supervisor in San Francisco, and the fact that
you were not a single-issue candidate. I think it’s
a great example to anyone holding public office because
a holistic approach makes a lot more sense. But I was
interested in that work you did on a “children’s
budget” [for San Francisco].
Well you know, San Francisco is increasingly becoming
a city of the well-to-do and the low income and very
low income. There’s not a lot in the middle. And
what that means, there are growing numbers of low-income
kids, kids from racial minority homes, kids from immigrant
homes, that are coming increasingly to rely on the public
school system and the social service agencies. When
I was on the board of supervisors, we certainly recognized
that we hadn’t dedicated sufficient city resources
to making sure our kids have everything that they need.
So we said that we wanted a percentage of the city’s
general fund dedicated to supporting children’s
services—we were able to accomplish that, and that
percentage remains in effect to this day. And so you
have after-school programs funded as a result of the
budget, and Beacon Schools funded as a result…
And what are Beacon Schools?
[Started about eight years ago], Beacon Schools are
taking school sites and keeping them open 14 hours a
day and making sure that the constellation of social
services that are necessary can be available. It’s
a place where parents can go. They have computer labs
there. Parents and kids can work on community projects
together. They’re wildly successful. It’s
sort of trying to recreate community. And we’ve
been able to fund those through the children’s
budget.
My, what a wonderful thing, with
this greater and greater dichotomy in our economic grouping.
Yes, and it’s been one way that we’ve been
able to, if not bridge the digital divide, at least
begin to address it for our low-income kids and for
their parents. I mean, everybody nowadays needs to have
access to a computer and to the Internet and needs to
be able to know how to use it. But we don’t have
many mechanisms in place for achieving that for low-income
people. And Beacon Schools has been one of them and
other kinds of after-school programs—midnight basketball
programs and the like have all been funded by this program.
So it’s been wildly successful.
Of course, I guess you’ve
received more publicity (if you want to call it that)
and so forth with your appointed position with HUD.
Well, when you’re the first, as I know you know...
Yes, yes. But what exactly were
your responsibilities in that position?
Well, I had probably the most sacred responsibility
I’ve ever had in my professional life: I was the
chief law enforcement officer for the Federal Fair Housing
Act. Which was the act that guarantees nondiscrimination
in housing on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender,
disability, or being a family with children. And so
my job was to enforce the Federal Fair Housing Act,
and to train all the people in our various 54 offices
of HUD to receive the citizen complaints about discrimination
in housing, whether you go to rent a house or an apartment,
and you believe that you’ve been offered the apartment
on different terms because of your race or ethnicity.
You try to buy a house, you try to purchase insurance,
all of those things are covered by the Federal Fair
Housing Act.
And the red lining [an illegal
policy in which banks discriminate on giving loans to
lower-income areas of town, drawing a “red line”
around them]...
Yes, the red lining. We did an initiative with the mortgage
industry which actually led to a good bit more credit
being extended into areas that they had up until then
been red lined. I worked with Henry Cisneros...and we
accomplished a lot for racial minorities in terms of
much more strenuous enforcement of the federal antidiscrimination
law and much more proactive work with the various industries—so
explain to them how better, more expansive lending practices
would add to their bottom line. And it turned out in
hindsight that that was probably one of the most constructive
things that we did. Because that opened up markets that
are still yielding great results from minority home
buyers, for renters, etc. So those were my responsibilities,
and I guess the other thing your readers would be interested
in is that Henry and I were the driving forces behind
the integration of public housing in Vidor, Texas. That
was one big civil rights accomplishment in the first
term of the Clinton administration.
Oh yes indeed. We kept track of
that closely down here in Houston.
Yes, I can imagine that you did. So when I think of
the accomplishments of my tenure and having had the
opportunity and responsibility to be fair housing assistant
secretary.... I can’t think of anything more important
to have been asked to do by the president of the United
States.
Well I hope that there’ll
be another opportunity for you shortly, because we certainly
need you in public life, whether it’s elected or
appointive…
Thank you very much.
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