Symbolic Affirmation: Big Deal. One of the bigger stories of Lesbian and Gay Pride Month has been the issuance, or non-issuance, of government proclamations marking June's pride celebrations as "official" (i.e., government recognized). This controversy plays out in localities, states, and at the federal level as officials who court the gay voting bloc sign Pride proclamations, while those who fear alienating social conservatives forgo the exercise. However, when proclamations are issued by cities and states -- or even when Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to formally recognize Pride Month -- the move gets barely any media play. The world at large just doesn't consider this a big deal. However, among lesbigay activists and organizers, it's a very big deal indeed, and much effort is directed into securing proclamations -- and denouncing those officials who choose not to make them.
Which brings us to President Bush, who again declined to issue an official Gay Pride Month proclamation. Said White House Spokeswoman Anne Womack, "The president believes every person should be treated with dignity and respect, but he does not believe in politicizing people's sexual orientation."
"Bush
won't recognize Gay Pride month," declared a story on the
planetout.com website:
"[Bush"s] refusal to issue a proclamation is a big deal to us," said Rob Sadler, a board member of Federal GLOBE, a group for GLBT federal employees. "Issuing a proclamation is totally a symbolic act, it doesn't give us any additional tangible rights, but it helps people who work for the federal government feel valued as an employee and it makes us feel like we're doing a good job," said Sadler.
See, I told you it was a "big deal." After all, how can you "feel valued" without an official government proclamation attesting to your inherent worth?
A different view, as you might expect, was voiced by the
pro-Bush Log Cabin Republicans. LCR spokesman Kevin Ivers responded
in the same article that:
the absence of the proclamation shouldn't be such a big deal. In fact, while the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is a well-known Republican conservative, his second in command, Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson, will speak at the gay pride celebration on June 19 in the Justice Department's Great Hall. "This shows that the country is changing for the better," said Ivers." We shouldn't get so hypersensitive about symbolism. Symbolic acts are important, yes, but we have more important things to work on."
But for the activist-minded, symbolism -- and its alleged power -- IS what matters. That's why many activists will admit that even if hate crimes bills and anti-discrimination laws won't actually have much impact in terms of actual litigation, they are important because of the symbolism of "inclusion."
Bush's Balancing Act. Aside from the gay pride celebration at the Justice Department, the Washington Post reports that at the Commerce Department, management is allowing gay employees to proceed with events but has withheld official sponsorship. Official pride proclamations, however, have been issued by Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (ok, he's a liberal, anti-profiling-at-airports Democrat) and by Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman. And the State Department co-sponsored with the group Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies (that's GLIFAA) a talk by Rep. Jim Kolbe, the openly gay Republican congressman from Arizona, on the global challenge of HIV and AIDS.
For symbolism counters, you"d think this was a fairly good haul. But the negative always trumps the positive, and a group of gay employees at the Commerce Department has now filed a complaint charging the agency with discrimination based on sexual orientation. According to another Washington Post story, "Part of the complaint"can be traced to a Commerce decision last year to end official sponsorship of gay pride activities," and the fact that this year the Patent and Trademark Office, a Commerce agency, pulled back its sponsorship of gay pride activities. "Gay pride events will go forward", the Post reports, "but will be sponsored by a gay employee group."
Well, I"m all for symbolic inclusion, but elevating the issuing of pride proclamations into a top movement goal strikes me as identity politics at its silliest. This is the deal: Politicians who are elected with a big gay bloc are more likely to issue proclamations. Bush's constituency, on the other hand, includes a much larger bloc of social conservatives. He"d like not to alienate them will symbolic kow-towing to gay activists, but he"d also like to court a larger share of GOP-leaning gay voters, too. So this administration, which has made several high-level openly gay appointments -- from the head of national AIDS policy to the ambassador to Romania -- is allowing more pride recognition events, with and without "official" sponsorship at the Cabinet level, than any previous GOP administration, but is withholding the big proclamation by the president himself.
Know what? If more gays vote for Bush in 2004, you can bet that
he"ll go even further. That's politics, folks.