In 1972, the Democratic Party made a fateful decision from which it has never recovered: it nominated George McGovern for president. The gay rights movement is on track to emulate this disastrous choice.
Later this month, Congress is expected to vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would make it illegal to fire someone based upon his or her sexual orientation, as it is currently legal to do in 31 states. ENDA has existed in some form or another for more than 30 years, but only now does it have the votes to pass Congress.
The bill's chief sponsor is Rep. Barney Frank, the greatest champion of gay rights in Washington (full disclosure: I was an intern in Frank's district office in high school, many moons ago). Frank, oddly enough, is now being assailed by a coalition of nearly 300 gay rights organizations across the country calling itself "United ENDA," whose supporters have called him names like "sell out" and "traitor" because he opposes adding a provision protecting gender identity to the bill.
Frank does not disagree with the notion of protecting transgender people from workplace discrimination; he just realizes that a bill with such language has no chance of passing. For more than a decade, he has tirelessly worked to build a coalition of liberal and conservative Democrats along with moderate Republicans to support his version of ENDA. But this is not good enough for the all-or-nothing McGovern wing of the gay rights establishment.
Many of these activists would do well to brush up on the history of the 1972 Democratic presidential primary. For liberals, it felt redeeming to nominate an ideologically pure leftist like McGovern, whose mantra in the '72 campaign was "Come Home, America." But America overwhelmingly rejected this message and re-elected Richard Nixon in a landslide, giving him the second largest popular vote margin of victory in the history of the United States (McGovern won a single state, Massachusetts, losing his own, South Dakota).
It's not that the Democrats had a dearth of eligible candidates at the time.
There was Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a champion of organized labor and a hawk on defense in the mold of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Or Hubert Humphrey, vice president under Lyndon Johnson, the party¹s nominee in 1968 and a hero of the civil rights movement. Either of those men could have presented a formidable challenge to Nixon.
Those who supported McGovern, like those who support inclusion of the transgender provision, were no doubt motivated by their desire to have clean consciences; McGovern believed in everything they did. But how clean could their consciences have been for enabling the re-election of Nixon, and how clean will the consciences of Barney Frank's critics be if their insistence on the transgender provision leads to ENDA's failure? People's jobs are at stake here, not just the lofty abstractions of "solidarity" and "justice" about which the anti-ENDA forces so melodramatically whine.
The objective position of Frank's critics is that gay people should continue to be fired just because a miniscule minority (transgender people) is not included in this bill.
Those comprising United ENDA characterize the people who oppose a transgender-inclusive bill as "selfish." But who's really being selfish? The pragmatists like Frank who want to pass a good bill rather than fail with a perfect one, or the noisy activists claiming that all our rights be put on hold until they get their way? One expects this sort of political naïveté from grassroots activists and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. What's appalling is that ostensibly wiser heads at organizations such as Lambda Legal, National Stonewall Democrats and even the Human Rights Campaign (which has withheld support, but does not openly oppose the current version of ENDA) are acting so irresponsibly.
Let us all praise the faux-heroics of the gay rights movement¹s McGovernites; fawning recognition, after all, is what they seek. Don't get me wrong: These folks are perfectly entitled to go down in a blaze of glory, ideologically pure on the road to abject political failure. But they should not expect to drag the majority of gay people down with them.
19 Comments for “Our McGovern Moment”
posted by Clyde on
I couldn’t agree with James Kirchick more. This extreme all-or-nothing stance by LGBT rights groups is the reason why I don’t belong to or give money to any of these groups. First, transgenderism is not the same thing as sexual orientation, so the transgendered should never have been lumped in with lesbians and gays in the first place. Second, incrementalism has worked with other groups. Third, thank goodness for IGF as one of the voices of reason, intelligence, and pragmatism. It’s too bad we don’t have more of these characteristics in the political groups that supposedly support us.
posted by Rhywun on
While I think there is some “common cause” between the gay and transgendered communities, I agree with the article that an “all or nothing” approach to ENDA is the wrong way to go. I remain hopeful that cooler heads will prevail in the end, a successful bill will become law with nothing but positive consequences, and the transgendered community will be able to use this success as ammunition for their struggle to pass a more inclusive bill. It sucks to have to wait, but hey, that’s life.
posted by ETJB on
(1) Many a gay conservative opposes ENDA and civil rights in general.
(2) The ENDA bill would have done better if their was not so much trans-phobia within the gay community who basically celebratws keeping out gender identity.
posted by Clyde on
To ETJB: Your assertion that “Many” gay conservatives oppose ENDA and civil rights in general is patently false. The Log Cabin Repulicans, the largest group of gay conservatives, supports ENDA. Let’s use facts, not rhetoric.
posted by Brian Miller on
Clyde is correct — the LCRs do support ENDA.
Gay Libertarians oppose ENDA because it violates our constitutional right to freedom of association.
In addition, we oppose the excessive emphasis on it by machine politicians like Frank because it doesn’t square with the priorities of everyday gay people. In polling research conducted over the last three years, ENDA is at the bottom of the list, with marriage equality, military service equality, and other serious issues of real equality under the law ranking far higher (and being completely ignored by the Republicrats and Demopublicans alike).
ENDA isn’t just bad law.
ENDA isn’t just an unconstitutional violation of the rights of everyday people — gay and straight.
ENDA is, even worse, irrelevant to most gay and lesbian people.
ENDA is also serving as a platform for rich white guys on the right and the left to promote transphobic bigotry.
And worst of all, ENDA’s backers already concede that special-rights laws like ENDA don’t work. They simply believe that by making the laws that don’t work national instead of state or local, they’ll magically transform into something effective.
It not only lacks substance, constitutionality, logic, and legality, but it lacks dignity and ethics. What a bad piece of legislation.
posted by Thinker on
James Kirchik makes sense until you realize that without drag queens in New York and San Francisco, there’d have never been a gay rights movement to begin with. In which case, Kirchik would be telling us to appreciate the opportunity to meet in gay bars once a month under continual threat of police harrassment, blackmail, and worse.
Show some respect, Mr. Kirchik. Social change is often fomented by people who have nothing more to lose, as opposed to those obsessed with their respectability.
posted by Clyde on
To Thinker: I’m disappointed that you like some others don’t know the facts. You are perpetuating a myth. Most gay historians say that drage queens were NOT the primary or majority of people who took part in the Stonewall uprising. If no drag queens had been involved, the gay rights movement would still have existed. Our movement did not and does not depend on drag queens. Let’s be serious.
posted by Thinker on
Clyde, gay Republicans like you really need to stop lying. The U.S. gay rights movement began in San Francisco when a drag queen got more than 6,000 votes in a race for the city’s board of supervisors. It was a joke campaign, but the number of votes got the attention of local politicians, particularly Diane Feinstein, who went on to become mayor and then U.S. senator.
In New York, some travestites barricaded themselves into the Stonewall Inn after NYPD officers harrassed them. The protests set off the gay rights movement in the East. I’m sorry, Clyde, but the tactics that you amd James Kirchik love — men in suits, women in skirts, politely carrying signs in front of the White House — never worked.
posted by Clyde on
Thinker, I am not lying. I know gay history very well. Any basic research can confirm the historical facts. The specific time and place the US Gay Rights Movement started are subject to honest, reasonable disagreement. What is not subject to honest disagreement is that MOST of the people involved in the start of the movement were not drag queens. Harvey Milk was not a drag gueen. I’m not saying drag queens were not involved at all, nor am I saying they should not have been. It’s great to include as many people as possible. However, to represent our movement as being started by drag queens is either uniformed or disengenuous. Also, your assumptions about what tactics I support for social change are false, just like your drag-centric claims are false. The tactics that work are those that represent all segments our entire community in proportions that actually exist. In other words, drag queens don’t represent most of us. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against them. They played a generally helpful role. They just are not the majority of us today, nor have they been central or pivotal to our movement.
posted by Thinker on
Do some research on the Stonewall riots, and you’ll see that they started when the NYPD arrested some drag queens at a gay bar there in 1969. Also do some research on Jose Sarria, the San Fraancisco drag queen who ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1961 and got 5,600 votes, paving the way for future serious gay influence there.
I’m about as far from a drag queen as you can get, but unlike the Log Cabinettes and other “independent” gay Republicans, I remember who helped me get where I am now. Clyde, it’s a damn shame that you and Kirchik, and some others, choose to forget your friends when they need you.
Not me, not ever. Loyalty still counts in my world.
posted by dalea on
How is being a drag queen part of transgendered? AFAIK, the drag queens I have known have been male identified men. And drag was a hobby, or spoof. To equate drag queens with people who want reassingment surgery seems out of the loop. I can not remember any trans people in gay and lesbian activist circles in the 70’s and 80’s. Or maybe I don’t understand the concept.
Barney is correct. We should take what we can get.
posted by Thinker on
Gimme a break. Transgendered and drag queens might be different, but when it comes to “independent gay Republicans,” they are both just too embarrassing for words, along with telling the truth about Larry Craig, David Dreier, Mitch McConnel, Richard Lugar, and all the other self-hating respectable closet cases they stand for.
You’d better be careful how you treat people on the way up, because you’ll meet them on the way back down.
posted by Clyde on
Thinker, you are a far-left ranting and raving lunatic. I don’t know why you even bother coming to this site. It’s left-wing extremists like you who slow down progress. Most lesbians and gay men are just everday people. We are not drag queens and we are not PC mythologists. I think you need to go to this link to get the facts. You are wrong to say transgendered and drag queens MIGHT different. They almost always are. Drag queens are performers. Most drag queens are happy being men unlike transgenders are people who feel like they are the gender they are not. This is different. I did my research and reverified that you are wrong. Here’s one link:
http://www.indegayforum.org/news/show/26644.html
posted by Thinker on
Sorry, Clyde, but I think I can do without your closeted respectability. Go have a nice lunch in that phone booth (or toilet stall) with your buddies like Larry Craig and David Drier. Just don’t call yourselves representatives of anything other than your own fearful selves. You’ve done enough damage already.
posted by Clyde on
Thinker, you don’t know me, just like you don’t know what you’re commenting about. I’m openly gay, and I think gays and lesbians should be open about who we are. Why you went from your revisionism of gay history to closeted gay Republicans, I don’t know. Just more of your nonsense.
posted by Brian Miller on
The idea that the gay rights movement “started” at Stonewall is ancient mythology — an origin story as the anthropologists would call it.
It’s not historically accurate, it’s simply a piece of common history that people have chosen to use as a focal point.
posted by Brian Miller on
And while it’s true that the exclusion of transgender people from ENDA by Democrats and Republicans is evidence of transphobia, ENDA itself is a bad law. So if it’s derailed by the transphobic machinations of the two old parties, it will be doing all queer people a favor.
posted by Thinker on
So, Brian, why is it bad law? Are you and Larry having a post-coital self-hatred attack again?
posted by Ignacio on
I’m an “openly” gay male for whom it was extremely tough to come out in an intolerant Catholic Mexican home. I didn’t do it until I was 30. And we all have our own unique stories. Mine was particularly devastating. But Jesus, to think of how much more hated and reviled transgendered persons are, and to see them walk into a hostile work place or go to the mall or into a restaurant, they wear their identity on the outside. Fear can allow me to “hide it” or “tone it down” if I so choose to try. I don’t have courage. They have courage. Hearing some opponents to the inclusion of gender identity in ENDA I’m reminded of the condescending and ugly attitudes we in the gay community have amongst ourselves. Just like in my Mexican culture where dark skinned Latinos are looked down upon by lighter skinned Latinos, the proclivity for turning our noses up at the more feminine or disimilar among us is disheartening. I say all this because the rhetoric being used tends to always be of this condescending caliber. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound disrespectful but it does smells of disdain, snottiness and a little cowardice.