First published on Nov. 17, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.
Many gays and lesbians, even after two or three weeks, are all too obviously having trouble coming to terms with the results of the national election and state ballot initiatives prohibiting gay marriage.
As National Gay & Lesbian Task Force director Matt Foreman said at a post-election conference in St. Louis, "There is hurt, there is bewilderment, there is trauma, there is betrayal." No doubt - and all sorts of histrionic behavior like wailing and moaning and whining and finger-pointing and victimhood-clutching and enemy-mongering as well.
Well, some people - and you know who you are - need to get a grip. We have what bureaucracies like to call a "situation," meaning a serious problem, and wailing and moaning dissipates energy that needs to be channeled into productive effort.
It is not as if there was reason to doubt that 11 anti-gay amendments would pass. Nowhere did opposition poll at 50 percent or more, and polls usually overstate gay supportive sentiment because people lie about politics almost as much as they do about sex.
But it was news to Kate Kendall, director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who told the St. Louis conference, "I had thought as a matter of just public education that the nation was further along," Well, it's probably a little hard to judge those things if you live in San Francisco.
As for the national election, it was plausible to predict as far back as July that Bush would win, although those predictions were denounced by the pure of heart as loathsome, shameful and reprehensible. Yes, by all means let us protect our illusions from awareness of how the world really is.
People living in the urban bubbles insisted they knew Bush voters in 2000 who were switching to Kerry in 2004 and none switching the other way. But at the same time the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" column was hearing about heaps of switches from Gore in 2000 to Bush in 2004. And indeed Bush in 2004 won 8.6 million more votes than he did in 2000 - obviously a large number of switches as well as new voters.
We can draw three quick conclusions:
- The fact that with just 140,000 more votes in Ohio Kerry could won in the electoral college even though he would still have lost by more than 3 million votes nationwide will cool Democratic ardor to abolish the electoral college.
- Even if every gay voter who told exit pollsters he or she voted for Bush had voted for Kerry, the results would have been the same. Even in Ohio the result would be the same.
- Whether or not Karl Rove's succeeded in drawing 4 million new evangelical voters to the polls, it seems likely that concerns about terrorism and Islamic fanaticism played a bigger role in Bush's victory than anti-gay evangelicals.
In any case, there is a more important conclusion to draw from the election. Many years ago, after an election that portended a move in the opposite direction from policies and values she believed were just and moral, the revolutionary philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand wrote an essay to hearten her dismayed colleagues. She titled it, "It Is Earlier Than You Think."
Rand's point was that the election showed that her and her colleagues' efforts to promote their views had not been sufficient. They needed to continue working to make their ideas part of the national culture, to reach new people, to present their ideas through new means, and offer clear reasons. And this process would take far more time than they had initially expected or hoped.
For Rand, in short, the vote was less a defeat than a valuable index of how much more work they needed to do and where they needed to put their effort.
In our case, it seems clear that same-sex marriage, as distinguished from civil unions, is not going to happen very fast. Legislatures will not enact it and court decisions mandating it will be reversed by popular referendums in almost every state. To hope for gay marriage with the full panoply of federal rights any time in the next 20 years seems a pipe dream.
But some rights are better than no rights. Most European countries began with partial civil unions and have moved by steps toward gay marriage. The same thing is happening now in California where each legislative session adds new rights to the civil unions legislation. And in Vermont, where voters would likely have overturned gay marriage, civil unions were grudgingly accepted and now command considerable public support.
So the best tactic seems to be to get a law passed with some single component of partnership rights, and then add to it over time as public sentiment accustoms itself to the change.
But this can only be accomplished in tandem with unceasing, labor intensive, and time-consuming personal and personalized outreach programs designed to familiarize more people with our lives, ourselves, and our positive contributions to the wider community.