Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice, Unless It's the Wrong Liberty

Where Christian martyrs were in fact driven to disobedience by sincere religious objections to the actions demanded of them, pagan authorities could see only contumacia, a stubborn and treasonous contempt for the emperor’s lawful command.  Ironically, as we shall see, the same disconnect would prevail under the Christian empire when secular authorities and establishment bishops looked at those they called “heretics” or “schismatics.”  They, likewise, preferred to characterize religious dissidence as a result of pride, obstinacy, or philoneikia (“quarrelsomeness” or “love of controversy”) rather than sincere belief.*

I've been trying to figure out what principles, if any, are involved in the matter of Brendan Eich and other right-wingers who've taken heat for their political beliefs lately.  I must say that the Right is tenacious: they're still yowling about the unfairness of it all, three weeks later, with no signs of fatigue.  I don't think the Left, let alone liberals, would still be setting the airwaves aflame with their indignation for such a long time, though in fairness the Left doesn't have the corporate-media access the Right has.

So, for example, the right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer just published a piece, "The Zealots Win Again," calling for an end to transparency in political donations.  (It was Brendan Eich's $1000 donation to the Proposition 8 campaign, you'll recall, that led to his removal as CEO of Mozilla.) Conor Friedersdorf discussed it at TheAtlantic.com, quoting Krauthammer's conclusion:

If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression. Our collective loss. Coupling unlimited donations and full disclosure was a reasonable way to reconcile the irreconcilables of campaign finance. Like so much else in our politics, however, it has been ruined by zealots.

What a pity.

You see, this is why we can't have nice things: the zealots ruin them.  Something's wrong here, though.  First, when did the Right begin to object to "the politics of personal destruction"?  Only when it began to hurt them, apparently: the Right has a long history of trying to destroy their political opponents.  (Analogously, liberals only object to it when it hurts them.)  Often they have relied on fabrications to do so, and professional liars who build careers on false accusations against their political enemies are considered heroes, not embarrassments to the faction.

Second, Krauthammer's argument makes no sense, because "free expression" means little if you have to hide your identity to express your views.  This makes me skeptical about the notion that campaign donations should count as free, protected "speech" in the first place, but even if they should, people should take responsibility for their speech and expect to be accountable for it.  By "accountable" I mean willing to give an account of the belief and their reasons for it, not that they should be fired.

I should acknowledge that I began writing this blog under a pseudonym (connected to my persona as a book reviewer for the gay press), partly because of concerns about repercussions against me in my workplace from other gay people.  There had been several attempts by gay managers and administrators in the University to shut me up around campus, though I had numerous allies as well, so those attempts came to nothing.  What worried me was that I might not be allowed to talk back to my critics.  But I soon put my real name on the blog.  (Or I thought I had; I must have changed it back.  My name is connected to the blog in many places on the Internet.  I've just edited my profile to put my real name back on it.)  Which feels odd, I admit, because before the Internet I wrote for the radical gay press under my own name, posted on listservs, Usenet, and electronic bulletin boards under my own name, and wrote opinion columns for the student newspaper under my own name.  I also spoke publicly to classes on GLB panels under my own name.  I knew that anyone who wanted to could track down my identity as a blogger; I just thought I'd put a small barrier up, which would only confound those who weren't determined.  And I do see it as a contradiction in my practice, and a failure of nerve.

Still, when you (or I) make a campaign donation under a regime of transparency, your name is on it, and you should be ready to stand by it.  Eich apparently was not.  When the controversy arose he issued a typical non-apology apology promising, or "committing," to continue the same Mozilla inclusivity you all know and love.  He preferred not to defend his support of a referendum initiative intended to attack the civil rights of same-sex couples, who already were marrying legally in California.  Just out of personal curiosity, I'd like to know how he justifies that in his own mind.

And here's a curious declaration in Eich's post: "And I will not tolerate behavior among community members that violates our Community Participation Guidelines or (for employees) our inclusive and non-discriminatory employment policies."  Oh, really?  So Brendan Eich himself is intolerant of intolerance, and is prepared to impose Touchy-Feely, Politically Correct standards of behavior on Mozilla "community members" and employees?  Compare the current backtracking in some prominent sectors of the Right from support of the rancher and welfare moocher Cleven Bundy, now that he's made some classically racist remarks.  Conor Friedersdorf wrote a post explaining why opponents of same-sex marriage should not be treated like racists.  But why should even racists be "treated like racists"?  Why is it okay to stigmatize and penalize one set of political beliefs but not others?  There has, after all, been a lot of fussing when white racists got into trouble for expressing their views.  Even debating the issues is considered unfair by many.  Okay, maybe these people shouldn't have been "stigmatized," to use Friedersdorf's term, but this is why I find a lot of the defense of Eich problematic: the goalposts keep moving.  First we shouldn't pick on racists, then we should or at least we may pick on racists, but not on antigay bigots.

So it appears that even defenders of Brendan Eich (and of Paula Deen, Alec Baldwin, Phil Robertson, and others) think it's okay under some circumstances to penalize someone for his or her political views and actions.  I'm having a hard time sorting out what those circumstances are, however, and I think they need to be defined.  In practice it appears, as I suggested before, that the exact circumstances are defined by the partisan position of the critic: freedom of political views for me, but not for thee.  Which is certainly a familiar stance, but it's not a principle.


*Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (California, 2005), 34.

Ding Dong, the DOMA's Dead?

Just a quick addendum, recycled after I found myself saying the same thing repeatedly on Facebook today:

I've been seeing a lot of GLB people crowing that DOMA has been struck down, that it's dead, and the like.

Sorry, folks, DOMA yet breathes.  It is not dead, but sleepeth.  The court only struck down one provision, albeit a key one.

This is a constant annoyance to me, the way people overstate changes. Back in the 90s I was always hearing how "gay marriage" was now legal in states and countries that had simply recognized domestic partnerships and civil unions. Then as now, I and other cranky ol' meanies would point out that civil union, however nice, is not marriage. The widespread eagerness to confuse the two (or three) casts some doubt on SSM advocates' indignant refusal later on to accept civil unions as a separate-but-equal substitute for the Real Deal. If civil unions were "marriage" in their eyes a decade ago, why not now?

And I don't harp on this just to harsh people's buzz, or because I'm mean. (Though I am.) It's because if everybody goes "Ding Dong, DOMA is dead!" then many other people, gay or straight, will believe that the war has been won and there's nothing left to do. Over the years I've talked to many people who'd say, "But don't gays already have marriage in Colorado and Hawaii and Vermont?" I had to explain that no, gays don't already have marriage. Those who want it still had work to do, and they still have more work to do.

P.S. I see that the Court also dismissed the appeal to sustain California's Proposition 8 today. But even that was on narrow procedural grounds, namely the standing of the appellants. They didn't rule on the Constitutional question of "marriage equality."

Ooooh, Snap! Oh, Wait ...

There's a confusion at the heart of the controversy over same-sex marriage, and it's noticeable in this question by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, posted online in an image file too damn bloated for me to put into this post.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Outside of the marriage context, can you think of any other rational basis, reason, for a state using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexuals benefits or imposing burdens on them?  Is there any other rational decision-making that the government could make?  Denying them a job, not granting them benefits of some sort, any other decision?

MR. COOPER: Your honor, I cannot.

The site where this quotation appeared touted it as "A Supreme Court Justice Takes Down An Anti-Gay Marriage Argument in 1 Minute."  It includes a one-minute, twenty-second audio clip of the exchange, with another question that adds nothing substantial to the question already quoted.  I don't understand how that headline follows from Sotomayor's questions.  Nor does the site's comment connect, as far as I can tell.

During a Supreme Court hearing to determine whether Proposition 8 (marriage shall only be between one man and one woman) was constitutional, a number of anti-gay marriage arguments got spectacularly demolished.

I don't see any demolition, spectacular or otherwise, in Sotomayor's remarks.  Maybe I'm missing something.

The confusion I'm referring to is between the issue of same-sex marriage and the concept of "sexual orientation."  It's true that homosexual and bisexual persons are probably more likely than heterosexual persons to want to marry someone of their own sex, but the issue isn't sexual orientation, it's the sexes of the people involved.  It's been a popular derisory line of antigay bigots that homosexuals are free to marry, they just can't marry someone of their own sex.  That line shows a deliberate cluelessness on the bigots' part, but it also is true.  Quite a few homosexually or bisexually-inclined people have married spouses of the other sex.

Bisexuality throws a bit of a monkey wrench in this whole mess, by the way, not least because of the hostility to bisexuals so common among many gay people.  A bisexual person isn't obliged by his or her "sexual orientation" to marry, if anyone, someone of his or own sex; it's possible that they'll marry someone of the other sex.  If sexual orientation were the driving force in choosing a spouse, then logically bisexuals must be allowed two spouses at the same time, one of each sex.  But that's a reductio ad absurdum, not a recommendation.

I've mentioned before the relevance of Loving v. Virginia to this controversy.  In overturning state laws against interracial marriage, the Supreme Court did not postulate a "racial orientation" that drove the Lovings to marry someone of a different race, though given the virulent racism of the United States in those days it would have been a reasonable claim that they must have had a different nature to want to mix races like that.  But that seems not even to have been thought of.  (Ironically, by tying same-sex marriage to status, the same-sex marriage movement is assuming an "intraracial" model for marriage: gay people will marry other gay people, sticking to their own kind.)  "Sexual orientation" was invented largely to claim that lovers of their own sex are driven to do so by a different (but murky and incoherent) biological nature, and that concept frames the debate about homosexuality in the US today, so much so that many if not most gay people think it's absolutely necessary if we're to claim our rights as citizens.  Not only bisexuality as a separate "sexual orientation" but the more recently-added category "men who have sex with men" pose serious difficulties to the status approach, which is why most advocates of gay rights and same-sex marriage prefer to ignore them.  But since bisexuals have been subsumed into the GLBTQ alphabet soup, it takes some serious thought control to bring that off.

In the context of a Supreme Court case it's easier: the issues are framed as narrowly as possible, and I don't expect the Court's resident bigots, Scalia and Thomas, to try to widen the frame; that would necessitate an intelligence about human sexuality and a subtlety of thought that neither ever seems to have displayed before.  But I can't help wondering, and would love to ask Ms. Justice Sotomayor: what if it were established definitively that homosexuality is not a "status" but something else?  The concept of sexual orientation, after all, is tied to very dubious and probably bogus science.  After all, people are entitled by the Constitution to choose their religious affiliation, to speak their minds freely and not by inner compulsion.  Why must the choice of one's spouse be thought to be so different from the exercise of other rights and freedoms?

Everything Else Being Equal

There's just too much going on to write about, and besides I've been spending too much time writing comments elsewhere instead of tending my own garden. In fact, I'm cannibalizing most of this post from a comment I wrote on a post at Emptywheel that celebrated today's Ninth Court decision overturning the anti-same-sex marriage amendment Proposition 8. As usual, bmaz did a fine job, clearly explaining the legal issues involved in the decision. It's good to see that the Ninth ruled that Judge Vaughan Walker was qualified to sit as the trial judge in Perry v. Brown, even though Walker is gay. The people who'd argue otherwise don't seem to realize what a can of worms they're opening: if a gay judge is (supposedly) biased to rule in a case involving gay people and the law, then so is a heterosexual judge, and that would mean that such a case could never go to court; for that matter, N. Randy Smith, the sole dissenter in today's ruling, is a Mormon, and should have recused himself given the Mormons' role in the passage of Proposition 8.

I'm glad to see Proposition 8 go down, just because (as I've said before), it's not a good thing to have discrimination of any kind enshrined in a state constitution. But I'm still uneasy about same-sex marriage and its rationales, as exemplified by some remarks in today's decision. Hence my comment, pasted in below with some modifications and additions.

This is probably a foolish question that has been asked and answered before, but I'm going to ask it anyway. It has to do with something in one of this quotation from today's decision:

Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those opposite-sex couples.

No doubt because I'm an old gay liberationist, I'm worried about the way the gay movement has hitched its (and our) wagon to the idea of sexual orientation as a "status" -- that we are biologically different from straights, and deserve to be equal because we can't help ourselves, we were born this way -- and that we should be allowed to marry each other because we are incapable of marrying someone of the opposite sex. It has always seemed to me dangerous (politically, if not legally) to base our claims for "equality" on what has always been known to be very shaky science, to put it charitably. I recall seeing a passage from a Canadian ruling on same-sex marriage which justified letting gays marry on just those biological grounds. But what happens if that bad science is ever definitively disproved? Will we lose our rights? One mark of how perilous these claims are is the hysteria and waves of personal attacks that result whenever someone (Cynthia Nixon, most recently) challenges these claims and the notion that people have no right to make sexual choices; if everybody doesn't agree that GLBTQQA people are born that way, then They can change us skree skree skree!

As far as I know, Loving v. Virginia was not decided on the ground that the Lovings were born with "racial orientations" that rendered them incapable of marrying a person of the same race. Nor does religious freedom mean that God made me a Methodist or a Quaker or a Papist and God doesn't make trash. Nor did the unquestioned fact that women and people of color are Born That Way ever do them any good against bigots who saw them as less than full citizens; on the contrary, biological determinism was used to argue that they were inferior breeds. I really believe that the born-gay claim has dug us into a deep and scary hole.

Same-sex marriage is not a matter of status, it's a matter of structure. If it means that gays/lesbians can marry other gays/lesbians, it does something strange. It even supports the bigots' derisory claim that homosexuals can marry, as long as they marry a homosexual of the other sex, which would be a "gay" marriage because neither partner would be heterosexual. And where do bisexuals fit in here? If two bisexuals marry, is that a bisexual marriage? Can it be argued that only 'pure' homosexuals can avail themselves of same-sex marriage, since bisexuals could marry heterosexually if they 'chose'? Will people seeking same-sex marriage be required to prove themselves Kinsey Sixes to avoid letting people of the wrong status game the system? To paraphrase Mr. Justice Stewart's concurring opinion in Loving v. Virginia, the case is not the sexual orientation of the actors -- it's about their sex. Fixating on sexual orientation as status simply confuses the issue.

This is also why the term "marriage equality" makes me nervous. The function and effect of marriage is precisely to designate some relationships as inferior to others: unmarried couples don't have the same status or dignity as married ones, no matter how much they love each other or how long they've been together. (And I've seen enough "marriage equality" proponents fume about heterosexuals who don't want to sanctify their coupledom with marriage to be wary of their openness and tolerance, however much they demand them for themselves.) But then, the inclusion of 'marital status' in antidiscrimination statutes isn't meant to imply that married couples shouldn't be granted special privileges and benefits that unmarried couples can't access; generalized, that could complicate things drastically. As IOZ once asked, not so rhetorically, if health care is a human right, why should you have to get married to get it?

My question, in the end, is why the question of same-sex marriage got tied to our "status" as gay people. It's not logically necessary -- compare Loving v. Virginia, or other areas of non-discrimination -- and it makes assumptions about the people involved that probably aren't true. While I'm perfectly happy to see Proposition 8 be overturned, I think that the reasoning is important, and bmaz' post shows that to be true in at least certain respects. It seems that it's because so many gay people are obsessed with the idea that we have a different nature than straight people do, while being not different at the same time. They're two contradictory claims, and that can't be good for the politics, or even for our own self-image.

Stokin' Rage

David Ehrenstein is, like, totally pissed off, and I don't blame him. (Photo above ripped off from his Fablog post, I don't know where he got it.) That doesn't mean I don't have some disagreements with him, of course.

At this point I'm not even sure how substantial my disagreements are. So let's have a look; like some writer (Saul Bellow?) once said, I won't know how I feel about it until I write about it.

Ehrenstein is pissed off about the passage of California's Proposition 8. I've been mildly surprised by how un-pissed off I am by it. The enshrinement of discrimination based on sexual orientation in a state constitution is a disturbing development, after all. Maybe it's because I didn't choose this battle, and for years I've been listening to respectability-minded Homo-Americans yammer that we shouldn't do things that upset straights, like having Gays Gone Wild Pride Marches with half-nekkid people simulating intercourse in public and stuff like that. The thing is, the issue of same-sex marriage upsets straight people too. If we should be modest in public because of Teh Str8, then maybe we shouldn't try to get married either, because of Teh Str8. But when it gets down to it, advocates of marriage don't really care about upsetting straights -- they care about being upset themselves. Many gay people also object, for public-relations purposes at least, to public displays of buttcheek or mammary gland, on their own account.

But having written that, I must qualify it, since I know perfectly well that not all gay proponents of same-sex marriage want respectability -- many just want the legal perks that go with a civil marriage. They themselves may get down and dirty in Pride Parades, or at least know that it is possible to blow drunken kisses from a float and still want to file a joint tax return or share Social Security benefits. For such people, the issue is one of equal rights, though as I've said before, it's really one of equal access to special rights given to couples who register with the State, which I'm not sure I want to support, let alone advocate, since it turns singles or unmarried couples into second-class citizens.

What comes closest to bothering me seriously about the success of Proposition 8, aside from the aforementioned enshrinement of discrimination in the California State Constitution, is the ineffectual campaign waged against it, which apparently was run by the usual bunch of human-services professionals and diversity managers who've sunk gay-rights causes before. One problem with these professionals is that they are evidently most comfortable in a corporate environment, where people have few if any rights and where they can be coerced into going along with a diversity agenda. Anyone who's worked in such an environment will know the drill: posters, videos, employee training sessions, etc., with disciplinary action as backup. That's not an approach that's going to work very well to persuade voters in the voting booth. (It doesn't even work very well in GLBT corporate environments like large urban community centers, as Jane Ward shows in her book Respectably queer: diversity culture in LGBT activist organizations [Vanderbilt, 2008].)

Anyway, back to David E. First he tears into the openly gay director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey) for saying in the L. A. Times:

“If you’re asking, ‘Do we take discrimination against gays as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews?’ . . . the answer is, ‘Of course we do.’ But we also believe that some people, including Rich, saw Prop. 8 not as a civil rights issue but a religious one. That is their right. And it is not, in and of itself, proof of bigotry.”

As Ehrenstein says, "we" (it's unclear who "we" are) don't take antigay bigotry as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews. (Hell, racism is still alive and well in white America, including white gays.) But then Ehrenstein goes on to say,

To speak of their hatred as a “right” is unacceptable. More imp[o]rtant you would do well to keep in mind that all homophobia is premised on the perception of our being weak and powerless and therefore neither willing or able to fight back.

I've already had some things to say about "hate." Both Condon and Ehrenstein are wrong. Bigotry is not "hatred," contrary to Ehrenstein, but even hatred is a "right." (Our Christian opponents claim that they love us while hating our sin; gay Christians don't even seem to go that far, though they also love to wave the word "love" around.) According to the principles of free speech and press, people aren't obliged to say or write or do only loving things -- indeed, these freedoms guarantee our right to be outraged and offended -- or else Ehrenstein's expression of fury would itself be endangered. Or "themselves" -- his blog often vents his rage at various targets, often quite hatefully, which is fine with me. But he feels, as do his opponents on the Right, that his expression of wrath and condemnation is just and righteous: it's okay when he does it, because he's the Good Guy; but it's not okay when they do it, because they're the Bad Guys. It's very dangerous to let the state decide whose righteous wrath is proper, and whose improper. I myself don't have any faith that it would decide in my favor.

But Condon is also wrong. The word "bigot" first was used in contexts of religious disagreement, centuries ago, and most liberal Americans nowadays, at least, would agree that it would be bigotry to disenfranchise Roman Catholics or Presbyterians or Quakers or any other religious group because their beliefs or practices violated the religious standards of the majority. Yet in the past, such persecution was considered not only proper, but an obligation. And because of the respectability of religion, and the feeling that many believers have that religion should rule all aspects of their lives, racial and other forms of bigotry have been justified by religion. American white supremacists of the 1950s and 1960s had Biblical arguments to support their opposition to racial integration. (Those arguments were dubious, selective and self-serving, of course, but so are everybody's Biblical arguments. Believers don't base their positions in scripture: they pick and choose from scripture to support the positions they already hold for other reasons. [That's a slight oversimplification too -- sometimes people are struck by a scriptural passage that contradicts their prejudices, but I'd bet that on some level they were already ambivalent about their positions, which are based in real-world experience as much as in theology.]) Hence the racially-segregated Christian "academies" established in large areas of the US to evade school desegregation. Would a nice liberal like Bill Condon care to claim that these white racists saw Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Bill "not as a civil rights issue, but a religious one"? I rather doubt it. But they did. As was their right. It was also their right to build their segregated Christian schools, but not to demand to be subsidized with tax exemptions. They just did not have the right to impose their views on others, or to demand that their views be respected.

The occasion for Ehrenstein's tirade was the resignation, under pressure, of the director of a nonprofit music theatre in Sacramento, who had donated (as an individual, not officially) a chunk of money to the Yes on 8 campaign; and the calls for the removal of the Mormon head of the Los Angeles Film Festival, who'd also donated to the campaign. Condon was being critical of these developments, but as I have explained, his arguments don't work. Even if their support for Proposition 8 was based solely in their religious beliefs, it is still bigotry when it attacks the rights of other people (assuming for the sake of argument that marriage is a right). The real question, then, is whether people should lose their jobs because of their religious beliefs, no matter how loathsome those beliefs are.

The answer is probably no, and I'd guess that both of these men would have a case under civil rights law that they were discriminated against for their religious beliefs. (The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment because of an "individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin".) Boycotting Cinemark Theaters because its CEO donated to Yes on 8, whatever his reasons, is okay, just as it would be okay to boycott the LA Film Festival because it's run by a bigot. (Back to the corporate environment, though: if a corporation fires an officer because his or her religious beliefs caused the corporation to lose money through boycotts, that is probably legal under the strict letter of the law -- as would firing an officer who took any other public stand that hurt profits, like supporting gay rights.)

"We’ve taken names and we’re kicking ass", Ehrenstein crows in boldface. I've seen that tone of type before. It's about power (or not being "powerless", as Ehrenstein says), not about right or wrong. Whether I like it or not, disputes like this often come down to who wields the power -- but as the passage of Prop 8 showed, it's not obvious that gays do wield the power in California. And both sides can play that game, as "The Vote Yes Crowd Turns to Judicial Intimidation" and opponents of same-sex marriage take names and prepare to kick judicial ass, "threatening to lead a statewide recall against any and all justices on the CA Supreme Court that vote to overturn the outcome of the referendum (and thus re-legalize same-sex marriage in California)." Joe Moag, the writer of that piece, blusters and fusses about "hate" and other usual suspects, but that's how it goes in politics, and I'm not nearly as sure as Moag that the recall efforts would fail.

Next, Ehrenstein reprimands producer Christine Vachon for saying that she "can’t quite stomach the notion that you fire somebody because of what they believe. It doesn’t feel right to me." Ehrenstein ripostes,

Well being attacked by those who claim a Big Invisible Bi-Polar Daddy-Who-Lives-in-The-Sky is the ultimate moral authority and has condemned me to death, doesn’t feel right to me and a great many others. What also doesn’t feel right, Christine, is when you say

“Many straight people really don’t understand it’s a civil rights issue. . . We didn’t do our job well enough. We need to do it better.”

Honey I’m 61 years old and have been talking to straight people all my life. If they don’t understand by now they can go fuck themselves.

It’s really just that simple.

Hm, I knew I'd seen that tone of type before -- it's typical of right-wing, especially Christian right-wing tract writers, from the use of boldface down to the sloppy punctuation and the onward-Christian-soldiers braggadocio. You know, David, I largely agree with you. But many of the opponents of Prop 8 also believe in a Big Invisible Bi-Polar Daddy Who Lives in the Sky; just look at that one sign in your photo, "Would Jesus Spend Tax Free Dollars to Spread Hate and Injustice?" No one knows what Jesus would do, and anyone who claims to know is a liar, whether they're Yes on 8 or No on 8. I feel fairly sure that a sign like that isn't going to sway a voter in favor of same-sex marriage, any more than celebrity talking-heads in commercials or outspending the opposition is going to do it by itself. Christine Vachon is right. I'm almost as old as you are, David, and I know how frustrating it is that straights haven't understood yet, just as it's frustrating that after an even longer time, men don't understand and whites don't understand. And getting people fired for their beliefs isn't going to work -- it hasn't worked on the gay movement, after all. It only creates martyrs. It may make you feel better for a few minutes, but the bigots will find other jobs and the California Constitution will still be amended to make queers into second-class citizens.

It may be that what doesn't feel right to Christine Vachon and what doesn't feel right to you cancel each other out. Your fury seems to have blinded you to that. (Oh dear, someone stop me before I say that two wrongs don't make a right.) This has nothing to do with religion -- many atheists are just as obsessed with getting even as Christians. ("Forgive your enemies" has hardly won much lip service among Christians, let alone observance, but then the gospels' Jesus looked forward to casting his enemies into Hell anyway, so they haven't had a good example to go by.) It's sheer practical politics to bring about change by grass-roots face-to-face work. That's why the radical gay movement that inspired both of us rejected professionalism and expertise in favor of coming out, not just to other gays but to straights. And you're complaining because we haven't won in 40 years? Not to mention that most gays are still closeted and would rather hire other queers to do the work for them from above, at a safe distance. There's still a lot of work to be done.

An Expensive Proposition

So there were nationwide demonstrations against Proposition 8 last weekend. Isn’t that just a wee bit of trying to slam the barn door shut after the horses have gotten out? (No, I didn’t attend the local demo.)

I gather from Sherry Wolf’s fine article at Counterpunch that the opposition to Proposition 8 in California was run by diversity-management professionals who preferred to avoid any grass-roots work, things like “knock[ing] on doors and hold[ing] rallies and actions to publicly denounce the bigotry of the measure – though in a few cases, activists took the initiative to do so on their own. … Adhering to the false notion that the Democrats lost the 2004 presidential election due to the assertiveness of gay marriage activists, the heads of the No on 8 campaign avoided even using words like ‘gay’ or ‘bigoted.’”

It might be a good idea to remember some history. In 1978, California State Senator John Briggs introduced an initiative, which became Proposition 6 on the ballot, to ban gay men and lesbians from teaching. The initiative was so broadly written that it threatened the livelihood even of pro-gay heterosexual teachers, which was probably one factor in its defeat. But it was widely expected to pass: polls showed overwhelming support for the measure. Among the factors which prevented its passage, by a landslide, were door-to-door campaigning in San Francisco and possible elsewhere in the state, organized by San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk. (You can see some of the campaigners in action in this clip from the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. See also chapters 13 and 14 of Randy Shilts’s biography of Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street [St. Martin’s Press, 1982]; it’s a flawed book, written by a conflicted but openly gay reporter who covered the events it describes as they happened.) Milk was a controversial figure, but he was an aggressive and effective debater who wasn’t afraid to use the words “gay” or “bigot.”

(It helped that the Briggs Initiative was opposed even by an arch-rightist and homophobe like Ronald Reagan. That made it safe for a cowardly Jimmy Carter to follow suit, as you can see in the documentary clip linked above. Interestingly, according to Shilts in The Mayor of Castro Street, “it was stars with huge gay followings like Barbra Streisand and Liza Minelli who would not take a stand on the issue, following the old Hollywood dictum that taking positions on controversial issues can hurt audience appeal and, therefore, cut profits” [244]. However, that “dictum” didn’t inhibit other celebrities, including Shirley Maclaine, Dennis Weaver, Paul Newman, James Garner, Cher, and Carol Burnett, from opposing the initiative.)

No on 8 should have learned something from the success of the opposition to Proposition 6 thirty years ago. Even though No on 8 had a lot more money than their opponents – $43.6 million against the bigots’ $29.8 million, again according to Wolf – they lost an important vote which now puts antigay bigotry into a state constitution. There’s been a lot of yammering among GLBT folk about African-American and Latino support for Prop 8, which is enabling the expression of some nasty and drearily familiar racism among white gays. So much for the repudiation of hate! Not to stereotype – there has also been effective refutation of anyone who wants to assign all blame (or credit) for the passage of Prop 8 to racial minorities. The Homo-American professionals of No on 8 deserve more recognition for their own failure; they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to dodge their responsibility by blaming African-Americans, and stirring up a white gay population whose longstanding complacency about its own racism needs to be criticized, not encouraged.