Originally appeared in The Weekly News (Miami) on August 31, 2000.
I'M OFTEN AMAZED by the lack of historical memory, even among people who should know better. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in our attitudes toward the two political parties.
To hear some people talk, you would never realize that the Democrats were once the party of slaveholders, and then the party of Jim Crow segregationists. Clearly, things change. The Democrats found a majority constituency that supported equal rights for African Americans and then rode it to power, leaving the Republicans to play catch-up.
That's why I hold out hope that the GOP's glacial moves this year toward gay "tolerance" and "accommodation" might indicate a gradual but real movement that will escalate into support for gay equality. The reason won't just be that they've discovered the error of their ways, but that they're smart enough to realize which way the winds of popular opinion are blowing. After all, politicians are notorious for realigning their most deeply felt views in order to achieve their supreme goal - victory.
If that sounds both harsh, consider a few recent transformations in the American political scene. Just four years ago, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader refused to denounce the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that forbade the federal government from recognizing gay unions. As the bill was snaking its way through Congress, Nader infamously dismissed concern for the rights of gays as mere "gonadal politics" that would be beneath his dignity as a true progressive to comment upon. Today, however, he claims that supporters of gay rights would have no stronger advocate in the White House than himself should he be elected. Dream on, Ralphie boy.
Or take Al Gore, perhaps the ultimate finger-in-the-wind politico. At the outset of his Congressional career in 1976, Gore called homosexuality "abnormal." In 1980 he voted for an amendment prohibiting the Legal Services Corp. from assisting homosexuals whose rights were denied because of their sexual orientation. As a senator, Gore repeatedly backed anti-gay measures devised by Jesse Helms that sought to deny legal protections for gay people, and supported an amendment to use HIV tests to discriminate against immigrants and people seeking health insurance. Even worse, Gore voted with Helms to restore the anti-gay sodomy law in the District of Columbia after the local city council tried to repeal it.
Gore presumably repudiates these positions these days, but even now he stands behind his support of DOMA - while contradictorily saying he opposed California's statewide version of DOMA that passed in a voter referendum last fall. Gore's opposition, of course, was announced only after Bill Bradley spoke against the California initiative, putting into play lots of gay voters in the state's Democratic primary. But for now, he still is opposed to gay marriage (as are Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats). No doubt if and when public opinion shifts nationally on gay unions, Gore will discover he's in our court on that issue, too.
And then there's Joe Lieberman, who prior to winning the veepstakes had supported school choice and privately held social security accounts, and opposed some types of racial preferences, but who is now backtracking on these issues quicker than a ballerina can pirouette. As columnist Hastings Wyman reported, Lieberman has also had his share of anti-gay votes. In 1993, he, too, voted to prohibit HIV positive people from immigrating to the United States and to kill a domestic partners law that had passed in the District of Columbia. And, going back to 1989, he voted to prevent schools from using educational materials that "promote homosexuality" or portray homosexuality as "normal, natural, or healthy."
My point is not to argue that, in 2000, Democrats aren't clearly more supportive of gay equality than Republicans. Rather, it's to question the attitude that Democrats have always been better, and the corollary that they always will be better. In fact, if you can characterize the Democrats as the party of expansive government and the Republicans as the party of freedom from government and for individual liberty, then a GOP not tethered to anti-gay reactionaries could have much to offer gay Americans - and not only in terms of gay rights. We're not there yet, but I suspect it's where the wind is blowing.
And if so, perhaps we need to call into question our movement's policy of making gays into a Democratic Party caucus. That strategy was exemplified by the Human Rights Campaign, the big Washington-based lesbigay lobby, which endorsed Al Gore for president before the GOP had even nominated a candidate - and at a time when John McCain was actively soliciting gay support in his maverick GOP bid.
The bellwether of progress, let's remember, isn't how warmly our current friends and allies embrace us, but the tentative steps toward acceptance taken by our traditional adversaries. And as long as we have a two-party system, gaining equality for gays and lesbians will require support not only from liberal Democrats, but from the more conservative party as well.
From the end of the Civil War until the 1940s, African-Americans were solidly in the Republican camp. Of course, they usually couldn't vote in the South because Southern Democrats had repealed Reconstruction-era civil rights reforms and actively promoted anti-black discrimination. How strange that now seems. But politics is about change, and as gay assimilation into the mainstream grows, the GOP, with a little encouragement, will come along on gay issues, too. It's blowing in the wind.