Friday, January 6, 2012
Yes We Can! (halt the gay equality movement in its tracks)
Words John McManus
Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 4:19 am
Editor’s note: This piece, which originally ran May 20, 2010, is being re-run as part of The Drive AltDaily Drive.
Every day lately seems to bring a new story suggesting that the White House and the Department of Defense are kicking the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal pebble further down the road.
Yadda yadda, you may be saying to yourself—and if so, that’s exactly the response President Obama is counting on from you.
Lately Obama has been raising the specter of “the crazy left” along with the “crazy right” when he wants to assure us that he, arbiter of calm sobriety, sees some true path that wisely steers between those two putative extremes. In the case of repealing DADT—one of his major campaign promises—the wise path consists of waiting for Republicans to control Congress before he stirs himself and those in his orbit into action. The Crazy Left, the president tells us, wants him to repeal it right now! while the Crazy Right wants him never to repeal; his Solomonic solution is to continue with a commissioned study whose vague intent is to change DADT by sometime in maybe 2013.
(Photo | Elizabeth Cromwell)
But Obama’s wise middle path is a rhetorical mirage, based on the purported existence of two extremes that don’t both exist. One of the two extremes simply is not real. Obama has invented it so that he can speak about the issue in his trademark binary code. (One can imagine our president as a paramedic at the scene of some terrible, fiery accident: “Let’s not rush headlong into rescuing these people! We must take time to perfect our response so that the fire remains put out!” While others around him are crippled by compassion, his focus on the endgame enables him to ignore the victims’ dying screams.)
The terrorist Eric Rudolph bombed a lesbian bar in Atlanta in order, as he said in a written statement, “to send a powerful message in protest of Washington’s continued tolerance and support for the homosexual political agenda.” The victims and their families, on the other hand, were presumably revolted by Rudolph’s cold statement of purpose. The ability to see both points of view in this situation wouldn’t speak to one’s preternatural collectedness or one’s political skill; it would just be depraved. Yes, that’s a quite literal and provocative example, and perhaps some will call it inappropriate. I realize politics can be so removed from our day-to-day lives as to seem virtually allegorical at times. But the lack of civil rights is indeed ruinous.
Look at international couples kept apart by discriminatory immigration laws. Look at gay kids who kill themselves at quadruple the rate of straight kids. Look at the weekly victims of hate crimes. If you’re removed from this sort of news, just read PageOneQ or 365Gay or the Washington Blade. Hint: most of the headlines aren’t about zany fashion moguls or well-dressed divas.
I get why Obama believes it’s best to throw gays under the same bus Bill Clinton threw us under when he energetically signed DOMA into law: 75 percent of us keep voting for his party regardless of what Democrats actually do in office. However, there’s only so much audacity the president can hope we’ll ignore. The party base is made up of many small interest groups, and he’s managed to betray his promises to nearly all of them. The interest groups overlap in that there’s a body of voters who believe in women’s reproductive rights, equal rights for all minorities, environmentalism, etc., but it usually takes the threat of losing one’s own hard-earned rights to call one into action. Most non-Latinos don’t march in the streets for Latino rights, and most straight people don’t march in the streets for gay rights. That’s just the way it is. Obama and Rahm Emanuel have read that political reality to mean they can rub dirt in our faces, because we’re between five and ten percent of the electorate and because over seventy-five percent of us vote Democratic.
More gay-friendly than Obama? (Photo | Craig ONeal)
Insanity, it’s said, is defined by repeated attempts to achieve something other than one’s same failed result. Laura Bush and Cindy McCain are now to the left of Obama on gay rights. If that’s possible, it’s also imaginable that some viable third-party candidate who supports gay rights will run in 2012. So-called moderate Democrats who haven’t grown fed up with Obama may be reading these words and feeling afraid: how can I be saying these things about a Democratic president? Don’t I remember what happened in 2000? Shouldn’t I maybe wait until 2011 when the Republicans have a Congressional majority to expect the president to stand up for what he claims to believe in?
Well, look at how Republicans behaved during the Bush presidency. It can hardly be said that George Bush didn’t receive overwhelming adulation from them as a Dear Leader who was fighting an elemental war for Our Freedom. Yet in 2005, when he nominated Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, there was a conservative outcry so loud that Bush quietly asked her to withdraw her nomination so he could replace it with Samuel Alito’s. Can you imagine a similar outcry from liberals leading to Obama’s withdrawing Elena Kagan’s name from consideration? If anything, opposition to Kagan from liberals will only help ensure her confirmation, due to the farcical idea of a “loud irrational left” balancing out the loud irrational right in that theatrically balanced equation that is Obama’s rhetorical calculus.
Look too at how the right felt about Bush’s support for the 2008 federal bailout of the financial system, which probably helped avert a depression. If Bush had been up for reelection that year, would he have acquiesced to it? And recall the conservative reaction to the contract that Bush wanted to award to Dubai Ports World. His base was enraged about that, and let the Republican leadership know it. There wasn’t a huge body of Republican centrists shouting the infuriated activists down; thus they won the day against the White House, for better or worse.
It seems to me another form of insanity entails drawing line after line in the sand, telling the big bully he’d better not cross the line, then watching him cross it and in response only drawing a new line. Barack Obama campaigned as a “fierce advocate for gay rights” (his own words). Obama’s own parents’ marriage was illegal in thirty-nine states when he was born. Not until he was eight years old did the Supreme Court strike down the law that made it so. He now stands in vocal opposition to equal marriage rights and has nominated a woman to the Supreme Court who has said she believes, along with four other sitting justices, that there is no federal right to gay marriage. How is his stance not the very definition of hypocrisy?
I know some will read my words here and think I have trouble seeing things in perspective, or don’t have my priorities straight. I witness this sort of response all the time when others make arguments similar to mine, and so I’m familiar with such reactions—yet I don’t understand them. I don’t understand how straight people who nominally support gay rights can sit back and claim that blatantly discriminatory laws like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are acceptable in any fashion. (The idea that DADT strengthens the military is so breathtakingly stupid that I can hardly begin to address it here; to do so will require a separate column.) I don’t get how straight people who have gay friends or family members can treat gay rights as some kind of vanity issue. I especially didn’t get it in 2000 when I lived in Virginia and gay sex was still a felony that carried a 20-year prison sentence, and I don’t get it today, either. Is it because prominent gays in the media tend to be financially well off? Upper-middle-class gay people are more likely than others to figure out ways to live as if there were equality, it’s true, but a huge invisible underclass is being hurt in very real ways by laws that most in our Democratic government don’t intend to repeal.
A DADT protest. (Photo | Peter Gene)
I keep mentioning Democrats because they’re in power, but there’s no reason this needs to be a partisan issue. There used to be a branch of the Republican party not beholden to the strain of fundamentalist wingnuts whose politics now seems centered around bringing about the apocalypse, and if there are any of those Republicans left, they can and should support gay rights. David Cameron, the new Tory prime minister of the U.K., doesn’t support marriage but does favor civil unions. (Britain has allowed gays to serve in its military for years.) And this week the right-wing leader of Portugal announced that he will soon sign gay marriage into law in his country. Why? Because the marriage debate, he says, “would only serve to deepen the divisions between the Portuguese and divert the attention of politicians away from the grave problems affecting us.”
That president, Anibal Cavaco Silva, agreed to the new law just days after Pope Benedict XVI visited his deeply Catholic country. While there, the beleaguered Pope called gay marriage one of the most “insidious and dangerous” threats facing the world today. (No deviation during that visit from his mealy-mouthed talking points on the scandal involving endemic child-rape by priests and the cover-up of those acts.) One might expect Cavaco Silva to feel beholden to the Pope, yet he has announced that he would like to focus instead on battling the economic crisis.
Those opposed to gay rights might try to use Cavaco Silva’s point against us: the economic crisis, they might say, feels more viscerally important to voters than ending DADT. And indeed there are worse problems facing the world. In Haiti parents are abandoning children because they can’t afford to care for them. Every six seconds on earth a child dies of malnutrition. I’m not arguing DADT is the defining injustice of our time, It is, however, an injustice that’s about a billion times easier to correct than the others I’ve mentioned. It can be made right by means of a Congressional vote and a signature: easy as that. And yes, the military will have to figure out how to implement the new policy, but how can one honestly state that that’s too much to ask of an organization which we also ask to conduct two simultaneous foreign wars?
We have a government that was elected in part to end discriminatory, harmful policies like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, yet that government has shown that it has no intention of carrying out the job we hired it to do. In fact the Obama Justice Department spends much time and money arguing in court in favor of DADT and the DOMA. Our tax dollars at work, as the cliche goes. So yes, ending DADT may be less urgent to some voters than the 10% unemployment rate, but replacing it with an ethical policy will take virtually no time away from the government’s struggle to create jobs. All it will take is a bit of conviction and courage: two things easier to find in our politicians if alleged supporters of gay rights actually behave as if they care about the issue.
And if one of America’s prominent conservatives should take President Anibal Cavaco Silva’s stance, he or she might find him- or herself at the vanguard of a popular new movement. Obama’s failure to sign a DADT repeal into law before the 2010 midterms will cause gays, if not their allies, to think twice about voting Democratic again. Some will refuse to vote, or disengage from the political process entirely. Others will turn to third-party candidates: Greens, Libertarians, et al. Still others may vote Republican against their self-interest. A shame that it should come to this under a president who’s a “fierce advocate for gay rights.”
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ABOUT THE WRITER
John McManus is the author of the novel Bitter Milk and the short story collections Born on a Train and Stop Breakin Down. His fiction has appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Harvard Review, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Columbia, Grist, and American Short Fiction. He lives in Norfolk and teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Old Dominion University. Links to his publications can be found at his website, http://johnmcmanus.net/ .
Other posts by John McManus.
Other posts by John McManus.
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Bitter? With friends like these, who needs enemies…
Perhaps you could explain more about what you mean by “friends like these.” The assumption behind your brief comment seems to be that those who voted for Obama are his “friends” and shouldn’t criticize him, whereas those who opposed him are his “enemies.” I can’t think of any sentiment that more clearly articulates the Versailles-like Beltway mentality that treats political power as an achievement in itself rather than a means to an end.
I did not mean like that. I meant that he has way more then enough people out there that will support him that it will always overtake the amount of people that will not.
Not so bitter, just righteously pissed off and for good reason. This is wonderful writing. Your point about Obama’s parents’ marriage being illegal in many states at the time is extremely effective and really gets to the shocking complacency he’s displayed.
I do feel that if DADT were to be summarily rolled back, that some kind of protective measures would need to be put in place for the inevitable vicious backlash. Especially in rural and isolated areas, I feel scared that without an infrastructure of preventative measures, that horrible violence could ensue temporarily.
One difference I see between the US and England & Portugal, is that one legacy of American slavery is a vicious sense of masculine disenfranchisement, one that protects and defends itself by gross invalidation of what is “not a man”. This spectre still haunts our ability to feel safe as we make way for civil rights for everyone.
gwackie: thank you for your comment. i certainly agree that a repeal of DADT could conceivably result in some sort of backlash, perhaps even a “vicious” one as you say. but isn’t the military’s primary purpose to provide security? i grant that there are dangers in repealing DADT without proper safeguards against possible backlashes. however, to give an example that i think speaks well to this issue, the frequently reported instances of sexual assault against female servicemembers hardly come together to comprise a reason to limit women to only “safe” areas of service. if women in the military are unsafe in their jobs, it’s a terrible problem. but telling them that they need to take long leaves of absence while the military prepares a safer environment for them would be the absolute opposite of a reasonable or good or just solution.
You’re entitled to your opinion John, that is your right and the rights of all Americans. I however disagree with your stance on DADT.
I have served in the military for 21 years, I was there during the time when and if a service member was found or declared gay they were thrown out within 24 hours without even a thank you for your service. They were lucky to leave a post/base/ship without getting their butt kicked. It’s just the way it was…the policy of DADT came along and was more accepted as a way of dealing with those that were gay in the military. Even though you might know who was gay, 99% would never tell on them, because you do not tell on your fellow service personal that you have to depend on everyday to watch your back, and you’ll watch theirs…again, it is just the way things are today.
Ok, so let us take this a step further as you suggest, let us abandon to policy of DADT…(and please don’t site well the British and other countries do it, because next to our military only China is as strong or going to be, which makes a case for the way our military is today, if it isn’t broke, don’t mess with it…)..Ok, we get rid of DADT, woooo hoooo, let’s celebrate? Hang on, why stop there, because I’m straight, he’s gay, she’s straight, she’s gay, well, to hell with it, lets get rid of all the separation, barracks/berthing/showers/jobs no discrimination at all, in fact, since we’re on that course of giving complete equal rights to those in the military why stop there. Service members should be allowed to have more than one significant other as dependents. Another words, you advocate that a marriage should not be limited to one man/one woman, then you should support me if I want to have more than one wife. If you say I am wrong, then I say you are discriminating against me.
You’re rebuttal ?
People sit back because although they believe people shouldn’t be discriminated against, they feel that there must be a reason these people are being discriminated against.
Pingpong: Indeed, discrimination can become a kind of feedback loop in which the expectation that discrimination will exist comes to help set a standard “middle ground” for those who write & speak about the issue. The fact that there’s no longer any standard “middle ground” in American media when it comes to most types of racism actually is the result of a long and hard-won battle that’s still being fought on some fronts. My hope is that more people will start realizing that homophobia, too, isn’t an acceptable political position, nor is it grounds for he-said-she-said “balanced” reporting; it’s just egregiously wrong.
p.s. that was me (john). the wi-fi network i’m on in rural southern spain doens’t like to keep me logged on to websites. i’m not good with computers but i think it has to do with the fact that spanish people tend to pronounce it “wee-fee.”
Right on. I have been fighting my feelings of disappointment in the Obama administration, particularly in regard to DADT and DOMA, and I haven’t wanted to admit even to myself that things are not happening the way they were sold to me. No disappointment could cause me to vote for Republican candidates (unless they were liberals in disguise–but even that would be problematic, since it’s often true anyway), but despite my devotion to my hard-won voting rights, I might stay away from the polls, it’s true. What we need we don’t have enough of–constant protest, all over the country, big and loud, and we need straight people to participate because an American denied his or her rights is everyone’s business. For God’s sake, Glenn Freaking Beck even said that our latest terrorist deserved his Miranda rights because he’s an American, yet we continue to deny basic rights to gays because…oh, wait, I have no idea why.
Thanks for this article.
Given the news that has come out in the last 24 hours, it sounds like a repeal might be in the works. If so, I applaud the White House’s action and look forward to my argument in this piece being proven wrong. However, I maintain that the White House, if in fact it’s embracing a repeal, is doing so against its own interests. As AmericaBlog reports, “according to Peter Orszag’s letter to the Hill, ‘ideally’ the White House didn’t want a vote until the Pentagon’s study was completed.” Hence, politics was being placed over justice and the righting of wrongs that do affect military men and women in visceral and tragic ways. Also, without the widespread and very vocal concern at Obama’s inaction that has arisen from the gay community in the last twelve months or so, I doubt that the White House and Congress would be getting ready to act on anything at all. But like I said above, I would love to be proved wrong about this.
Taylor: When you are able to stop equating being gay with wanting multiple spouses, you might be able to understand. Until then, enjoy your wallow.
I agree with you Claudia – Taylor needs a reality check. We are not talking about multiple spouses or bestiality here.
It is about equality. If Taylor wants to deny a right to a fellow service member, he should not be entitled to it either. Period.
Taylor, I stopped following this comment thread after about four days, and so I didn’t see your rather outlandish argument until just now. It’s a common canard among people opposed to gay rights to toss out the notion that granting equal rights to gays pushes us off a slippery slope that will lead us to polygamy, bestiality, and a general collapse of morals. That’s flat-out ludicrous. For one thing, you’re equating an immutable condition (sexual orientation) with a state of mind (sexual excitement). Why does sexual orientation have anything to do with showers? Do you honestly think a mob of crazed and horned-up gay soldiers is going to be assaulting the poor, defenseless straight soliders in the shower? Or is it your terrible fear that someone might look at someone else and have a sexual thought? If so, doesn’t that happen anyway by your logic, since “that’s just the way it is” as you so callously say?
If you believe gay people and polygamists are the same, there’s probably no use arguing with you, but surely you can at least see the following logic, bent to the shape of your illogical argument: there’s no rule in the military against polygamous attraction. There IS a rule against homosexual attraction. Yes, the military can give dishonorable discharges to bigamists, but not to men who simply want to have more than one wife. Gay people, on the other hand, need only give voice to some desire, however abstract, to be expelled from the military.
As for the idea that we need to keep gays out of the military so we can defeat China in a war, well, that’s at least a lot more original than the old gays-are-like-polygamists trope.
Homosexuality does not usually lead to multiple spouses or bestiality but it does often lead to pedophilia.
We need to stomp out homosexuality to protect our children. It takes a village to raise a child, a village of heterosexuals.
We can certainly be more tolerant of each other. And I firmly believe that government ought not to be involved in everyone’s business. Who cares what you’re doing in your own bedroom?
That said, can we really treat everyone the same? Aren’t there always basic inequalities among different persons? The gender of the person I am attracted to, for instance, will likely be unequal to the gender of the person that a homosexual man is attracted to; doesn’t this warrant some unequal treatment? Do we open the door for the homosexual man’s partner? Do we expect the homosexual woman’s partner to use a stand-up urinal? What about basic differences between men and women themselves; shouldn’t we, when we’re all treating each other uniformly according to policy, expect the same number of pull-ups from a woman that we’d expect from a man?
There are differences and policy must always consider them. Thus the pursuit of “equality” is a fiction. What we need is greater tolerance. This will not come from grouping people, then comparing the groups, actions which are divisive by nature.
The concept of equality is like the concept of social justice. Run quickly from anyone promising either. They are naive, or seeking to take advantage of you, because until they day that your DNA and mine are exactly the same, equality is, and will always be, impossible to deliver.