Originally appeared in June 2001 in Update (San Diego).
Accustomed as we are to gay activists' scathing critiques of George W. Bush - some justified, others wildly overblown - it's interesting to note that a conservative group is assailing the president for being too pro-gay.
The Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America, issued a report on June 14 titled "The Bush Administration's Republican Homosexual Agenda." They took Bush to task because he "failed to overturn a single Clinton executive order dealing with homosexuality" and "continued the Clinton policy of issuing U.S. Department of Defense regulations to combat 'anti-gay harassment.'"
Yes, that's right. In the view of the anti-gay far right, harassment against service members rumored to be gay is a good thing, and that darn Bush wants to put an end to it.
The report goes on to echo other anti-gay critics who condemned the appointment of openly gay Scott Evertz, a Wisconsin Log Cabin Republican leader, to head the White House AIDS office, and the appointment of Stephen Herbits, an openly gay man and gay rights supporter, as a temporary consultant to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Think that's all? Think again. The report also scolds the administration for supporting at the United Nations the "nongovernmental organization" status of the International Lesbian and Gay Association. Next, it speculates about the influence of Vice President Cheney, who has a lesbian daughter. "I think there's a personal connection," Robert Knight, longtime anti-gay activist and author of the report, ominously warned. The full report, by the way, can be found at cultureandfamily.org.
According to the Washington Post, "White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected the report's claims."
As well he might, for everything that the anti-gay activists charge the Bush administration with is, apparently, true. These are the same actions that the Log Cabin Republicans have been praising, in fact.
A more recent development, and one that would also inflame the anti-gay right (and delight those gays and lesbians who are not inveterate Bush haters) was this underreported fact: The president opposed anti-gay Senator Jesse Helms' amendment to strip federal financing from school districts that deny Boy Scout troops access to their schools. Almost buried in a June 17 New York Times story was that "Bush told lawmakers from both parties last week that he did not support the provision," which nevertheless eked out passage in the newly Democratic-majority Senate (which wasn't supposed to happen once the Democrats were back in control, or so we were told).
So what's up? Observes gay Republican activist Rick Sincere, "The gay-bashing 'Leviticus crowd,' as [pro-gay GOP presidential adviser] Mary Matalin puts it, simply doesn't get it. They don't understand that they've lost the culture war."
Now as it happens, there was one other recent Bush action, this time widely reported in the gay presses, and used to tar the president as a "bigot": the president's decision not to issue a Gay Pride Month proclamation, unlike former President Clinton. But in the not too distant past, a conservative Republican president would have dismissed the very notion of such a proclamation, declaring that an "immoral lifestyle choice" (or something to that effect) would of course not be given official recognition, lest deviancy be defended and perversity promoted.
That, however, is not what George W. Bush said. "The president believes every person should be treated with dignity and respect but he does not believe in politicizing people's sexual orientation," said White House spokesman McClellan. A sop to religious conservatives, perhaps, but hardly a clarion call for intolerance. Not by a long shot. And no one tried to stop lesbian and gay federal employee groups within various federal departments from holding very visible pride month celebrations - despite pre-election warnings by Democrats that such activities would no longer be tolerated should the GOP prevail.
Now comes word, as reported in the New York Times of June 19, that the Agriculture Department is advertising for a "gay and lesbian program specialist" to manage its Gay and Lesbian Employment Program, which seeks to improve working conditions for the agency's gay employees. Depending on experience, the permanent position will pay anywhere from $74,697 to $97,108.
According to press accounts, federal agencies in the past have created special positions to handle issues concerning employees who are Hispanic or women, for instance. But the Agriculture Department job appears to be the first comparable position for gay workers in the federal workplace - an advancement, in the face of all the rollback predictions.
Possibly the right wing will go ballistic and the position will be dropped. We'll see. The point isn't that Bush is the best president for gay Americans that he could be, or should be, but that his administration is not nearly as bad as we were told it would be. And that's because the culture winds have shifted so thoroughly that it's now become clear to mainstream conservatives, if not yet to the "Leviticus crowd," that there's no going back.