Originally published Nov. 15, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.
REGARDLESS OF THE RESULTS of any particular election gays and lesbians seem to make ongoing progress toward legal and social equality.
The reason is simple: Politics has a limited, and declining, ability to shape society and social attitudes. Instead, it is social changes and social attitudes that shape politics.
Ultimately politics can only adjust to changes that have already taken place at deeper levels in society; politics can hasten or retard those changes a little, but it cannot alter their direction.
Politics and elections are like the froth on ocean waves. The froth bobs up and down and gets blown around a bit, but the real movement is the great currents moving slowly and inexorably far beneath the surface.
In that light, it seems useful to remind ourselves of a few of the fundamental social, cultural and economic currents that tend to encourage liberty or equality for gays.
1. Increasing gay visibility. As we notice almost every day, gays and lesbians are ever more visible as ordinary parts of society, living lives that are similar in competence and virtue to those of their heterosexual friends, neighbors and co-workers.
In addition, gays have become more visible in the mass entertainment media. This provides gay visibility even for people in conservative parts of the nation whose gay friends have yet to make themselves visible. And it provides mild encouragement for those closeted friends to make themselves visible.
The gays and lesbians people live near and see every day they tend to become used to and comfortable with, especially when they work on projects together and have to depend on one another for their successful completion.
2. Natural demographic changes. Absolutely every poll touching on gay issues shows that young people (18-29) are far more accepting of gays than are older people (65 and above).
Both inclinations are understandable. People tend to accept as normal and natural whatever they grow up experiencing. Young people have grown up in a culture where gays are visible among their friends and in the mass media (see No. 1), so they do not see our existence as a problem.
Older people are more likely to see gays as strange, new, possibly threatening element in society and to think there must be many more gays than formerly because they are seeing more now than they did when they were young.
Overall social attitudes will slowly change as the older people die and the younger people carry their gay-friendly attitudes with them into their adulthood and maturity.
3. Psychology is gay affirming. Psychologists and other therapists firmly reject the idea that homosexuality is anything to regret. Instead they now focus on helping gays accept themselves and flourish in their lives and work.
The change reflects the decline of Freud and neo-Freudian doctrines as well as realizations that "conversion therapies" do not work and that gays normally do not exhibit evidence of pathology.
But is also reflects a greater individualism in psychology - a shift from compelling the individual to adjust to the majority (always for his own good, of course) to a new focus on helping the individual achieve self-acceptance and self-actualization.
It is no accident that the new "personalist" focus owes much to the individualist psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and to the libertarian psychologist Nathaniel Branden, the "Father of the Self-Esteem Movement" and a long-time associate of novelist Ayn Rand.
4. The Protestantization of religion. There is an increasing tendency for people to make up their own minds about questions of doctrine and morality and not automatically accept traditional (and usually anti-gay) church teachings.
This tendency is visible in the growing number of (and denunciations of) "cafeteria Catholics" who pick and choose which church teachings to accept. Similarly, Taxes Baptists recently asserted their rights of individual conscience and rejected Southern Baptist attempts to impose doctrinal orthodoxy.
One reason for this is that as people become better educated they develop an increased confidence in their own ability to decide such things for themselves.
But the growing presence of a variety of religions in America and the presence of their adherents even among many people's friends also probably unsettles and weakens the unthinking dogmatism of most people's convictions.
Finally, 5. The new technology-driven economy. The current economic expansion has created increased competition for skilled workers and pressures companies to identify and develop new markets.
The competition for skilled employees not only decreases employers' propensity to discriminate (as spelled out in Gary Becker's book "The Economics of Discrimination"), it also encourages employers to offer partnership benefits and other equalizing inducements to gay and lesbian employees.
The concurrent pressure to target new domestic markets can encourage corporations to seek our patronage as an identifiable "niche market." Part of that includes offering support to gay non-profits and doing nothing to offend us or to aid the opponents of gay equality.