Will everyone in California and around the country please take a deep breath? It appears gay groups and leaders, especially in California, badly misjudged the recent election recalling Democratic Governor Gray Davis and stridently overstated their case against his replacement, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. The recall was not about gay issues, it was about economics. And Schwarzenegger is in no sense "anti-gay," he's the kind of Republican who could help change the GOP for the better.
There were sensible reasons why a good citizen might have opposed the recall and might have been dubious about Schwarzenegger. The recall process undermines representative democracy, the basic design of our political system. There were also good reasons to be nervous about Schwarzenegger, a novice who offered generalizations as a platform.
But the fear that Schwarzenegger would bring a right-wing Black Death to gays, a fear expressed by some gay politicos during the campaign, was not sensible.
There were, first, the attempts by gay groups to use guilt-by-association arguments to dismiss the election as a "right-wing recall" because it was initially funded by a politician with anti-gay views. It was not that. In the end, the recall was supported by a strong majority of the state's voters in a high-turnout election. Solid blocs of Latinos, union members, the poor, and women supported it.
Even 42 percent of gay voters backed it in a state where they are probably even more liberal than elsewhere in the country. No wonder. The recall had nothing to do with voter resentment over social issues like domestic partnerships or gay rights generally. Not every election is about us.
There were, second, the hysterical denunciations of Schwarzenegger as some kind of crypto-fascist out to repeal all gay-rights laws and then perhaps to exterminate us. Openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano predicted that gay-friendly state laws "would be jeopardized." Geoff Kors, the leader of Equality California, the state-wide gay lobbying group, cautioned that a win for Schwarzenegger would "empower" the "right wing" to recall "not just the governor, but the gains we have made for LGBT civil rights during his administration." In a front-page story on the eve of the election, one gay newspaper published completely unsubstantiated, last-minute "rumors" by anonymous sources that Schwarzenegger "supported apartheid."
Hyperventilating harder than anyone else, however, was openly gay state assemblyman Mark Leno, who knows better. "Our community needs to come out and vote as if our lives depended on it," he warned, "because they do." Get that? Schwarzenegger is out to kill you.
All of this was at stark variance with the facts. Schwarzenegger is a moderate, even liberal, Republican on social issues like abortion and gay rights. A statement on his official campaign website affirmed this: "I am for equal rights for all," said the supposed Hitler wannabe. "I do believe that gay couples are entitled to full protection under the law and should not be discriminated against based on their relationship."
Sounds like support for anti-discrimination laws and for domestic partnerships to me, views Schwarzenegger repeated in live television interviews. It's no surprise that fully one-third of gays voted for Schwarzenegger. And even that number, relying on an exit survey of self-identified gays, is probably an undercount of the gay vote for Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger opposes gay marriage, true, but so do the leading Democratic contenders for president and so does Davis himself. It's also true that, again on the eve of the election, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Schwarzenegger "would not have signed" the comprehensive domestic-partners legislation recently enacted in California. But the story gave no source or rationale for this purported policy view, and I have seen no confirmation of it from Schwarzenegger's camp.
What counts now is whether Schwarzenegger would support a repeal of the new domestic-partners law, something being pushed by one of California's genuine far-right-wingers, State Sen. Pete Knight.
As of now, there is no reason to believe Schwarzenegger will back a repeal. He has publicly supported domestic partnerships. Further, he does not owe the far right anything; their candidate was social-conservative State Sen. Tom McClintock, who finished with just 13 percent of the vote compared to Schwarzenegger's 49 percent.
Many gay leaders and organizations in California and around the country seem to lack any understanding of the GOP, particularly the active struggle between those in the party who see no reason to hound gays and those who think they are commanded by God to do so. They have no appreciation of the significance of electing a gay-friendly Republican governor in the nation's most populous state. Schwarzenegger's election demonstrates how much the national party can gain by embracing a big-tent strategy.
Blind to this, gay organizations know only one rule: all Democrats good, all Republicans really bad.
This cartoonish world-view reminds me of what historian Richard Hofstadter had to say about the excesses of the far right in his 1964 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Extreme conservatives, he argued, took sound positions - like anti-Communism - and warped them into conspiratorial lunacy. The extremists lacked any sense of proportion.
When it comes to the GOP, gay activists often exhibit their own paranoid style. Reasonable concern about the party is morphed into take-no-prisoners rage. Where there is nuance, they see stealth. Where there is clear support, they see outright opposition. Where there are potential friends, they see bigots. Their paranoia is discrediting them, burning bridges, and hurting us.