IGF CultureWatch

The 2008 presidential primaries and caucuses loom, so what's a gay Republican to do? For many, the answer has been to support Ron Paul. He's not going to win any primaries, but a vote for him could be thought a protest against the theocratic tendencies of the party. It could also be a vote for libertarian principle, which appeals to some. Yet while some of Paul's views are superficially appealing, he's a very bad choice.

Let's start with what's attractive about Paul. First, he's not the other GOP candidates. With the exception of Sen. John McCain, they're about as politically and ideologically unlovely a lot as one can imagine. They're nativist and anti-evolution. Several are running for National Pastor instead of president.

On gay issues, they're as bad as we've ever had. The two candidates with gay-friendly records -- Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney -- have abandoned their erstwhile principles to cozy up to religious conservatives.

All of them support Don't Ask, Don't Tell. All, except McCain, support some kind of anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment. Giuliani, who initially opposed any amendment, has since wobbled.

In walks Ron Paul, formerly a practicing doctor, promising to limit government and sticking by his principles. He would abolish the IRS, the income tax system, and the departments of Education, Energy, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services. He would eliminate Medicare and end student loans for education. He would even get government out of the medical licensing business. As he put it in an interview with Google, this means your neighbor could dispense medications.

Part of this is intriguing. If we were starting the world over again, it might make sense to do a lot of things very differently from the way we do them now.

But we are not at liberty to begin the world anew. Taken together, Dr. Paul's radical prescriptions would entail a massive disruption of life in the United States as we know it. Millions of elderly Americans depend on Medicare for basic medical needs. Student loans have given a college education to millions of middle- and lower-income students whose financial needs were not met by private markets. Every person a pharmacist? I'm sorry, but that's just loony. It's also typically reckless of Paul.

He wants the U.S. to quit the United Nations and withdraw from just about every important treaty it has entered. This sort of thing gets applause from conspiracy theorists who think U.S. "sovereignty" is endangered, but it's stupid foreign policy.

He says he supports free trade, but opposes the agreements that have made trade freer.

The best that could be said about a Paul presidency is that almost nothing he believes would become law. We might as well elect Daffy Duck.

But isn't Paul the best of the Republicans on gay issues?

Paul's opposition to a federal marriage amendment is welcome. But he voted for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as heterosexual for federal purposes. DOMA substantially reduced the legal significance of marriage even for same-sex couples in states where their unions might be permitted. In contrast to the federal marriage amendment, which has no chance of passing, DOMA has done actual harm to gay families.

In an interview with ABC's John Stossel, Paul said that he supports gay marriage. Then he explained what he meant: "Sure, they can do whatever they want and they can call it whatever they want, just so they don't expect to impose their relationship on somebody else. They can't make me, personally, accept what they do, but they can do whatever they want."

There's more than a whiff of homophobia in this. It's akin to, "They have a right to their disgusting behavior."

More importantly, it's not clear what he means by saying gay couples can call their relationships "whatever they want." If he means that gay couples can contract for certain legal rights and call what results a "marriage," that's nothing new. And full legal marriage "imposes" on people in all kinds of ways since married couples have state-granted rights and benefits others don't have.

Paul's answer to this is to abolish marriage as it exists, to "privatize" it. State-sponsored marriage is bound up in our law at all levels of government. Ending state involvement in it is has as little public support as any imaginable policy proposal. So it's naive at best and a cynical dodge at worst to offer gay families "privatized" marriage as the answer to the practical problems they face right now.

Paul says citizens should be able to serve in the military as long as their sexuality is not "disruptive." That suggests he'd apply the same standard to heterosexuals and homosexuals in uniform. But the whole point of opposition to gays in the military is the claim that homosexuality itself degrades unit moral and cohesion. Paul has had nothing to say about this.

Personally, I'd vote for McCain. While I disagree with him on a few things, including campaign finance regulation, he's the candidate in the GOP field with the most potential to be a good president. He has the integrity, the life experience, and the national-security credentials for it. Alone among the Democratic and Republican candidates, he has the credibility with military leaders to end or at least to weaken DADT, if he decided to do that. The others are all talk on the issue.

A vote for Paul, on the other hand, is a flight from responsibility. He is too ideologically hard and pure to be president. A conscientious voter should think harder about the serious choices.

On November 7, the House of Representatives passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The vote was 235-184, with 35 Republicans in favor and 25 Democrats against. It's the first time either house of Congress has ever passed a gay civil-rights bill. There are many people to thank for this accomplishment.

Some Senate Republicans are predicting ENDA has a good chance of passing early in the new year, assuming it's not expanded. The bill would then go to President Bush, whose spokesperson told the New York Times that the White House will examine changes made to the bill before a final decision is made about whether to sign it.

Only seven Democrats voted "no" because the bill did not include "gender identity," a provision that would have protected transsexuals and cross-dressers from employment discrimination. Six of those seven came from the New York City area. The vote thus exposed the political irrelevance of the United ENDA coalition of activist groups that tried to defeat the bill. They don't represent most gay people and don't have any sway in Congress.

The 35 Republicans supporting ENDA -- almost 20 percent of the Republican caucus -- more than made up for the Democratic defections and were critical to House passage. These Republicans mostly came from districts outside the traditionally conservative South.

However it comes out this session, the fact that the bill has passed even a single house of Congress is a sign of tremendous political progress for gay Americans. ENDA is the product of decades of work by gay advocates whose efforts once seemed quixotic. In 1974, Bella Abzug's original gay civil rights bill had only four co-sponsors and was completely ignored. Painfully slow political progress was then made in each session of Congress.

Now a strong majority of the House is on record in an actual recorded vote supporting the bill. This record can be used to reinforce their resolve should ENDA need to be reintroduced after the next election in 2009. The vote creates political momentum for eventual enactment.

Little noticed in the run-up to the House vote was the Labor Committee report that accompanied the bill. The report was prepared by attorneys who work for the committee.

In the committee report, there are a couple of passages relevant to the recent controversy over adding gender identity to the bill. The report notes that ENDA forbids discrimination based on "actual or perceived sexual orientation." Thus, says the report, "ENDA creates a cause of action for any individual - whether actually homosexual or heterosexual - who is discriminated against because that individual is 'perceived' as homosexual due to the fact that the individual does not conform to the sex or gender stereotypes associated with the individual's sex."

This interpretation of ENDA offers some protection to those employees -- including transgendered people -- whose gender nonconformity leads others to assume they're gay or lesbian and then suffer discrimination on that basis.

Additionally, the report puts to rest any fears that stripping gender identity from the bill would lead federal courts to conclude that Congress meant to reverse or weaken the protection already given to effeminate men and masculine women under Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, a 1989 case in which the Supreme Court held that sex stereotyping violates federal law.

The report concludes that Section 15 of ENDA "[p]reserves provisions in other Federal, state, or local laws that currently provide protection from discrimination. For example, Congress does not intend to overrule, displace, or in any other way affect any U.S. Supreme Court or other federal court opinion that has interpreted Title VII in such a way that protects individuals who are discriminated against because they do not conform to sex or gender stereotypes."

This sort of legislative report does not dispose of controversies over the meaning of legislation. But it does offer a reasonable and persuasive interpretation of the bill that will likely play a role in future litigation. The committee legal counsel who worked on this report anticipated many of the objections to ENDA from President Bush's advisors and from transgender and gay activists. They did an extraordinary job walking the fine line between an interpretation of ENDA that is unduly crabbed and one that is objectionably expansive.

Lots of other people deserve credit for passing ENDA, including gay activists (many long dead) and their heterosexual allies, law professors, lawyers, members of Congress and their staffs, and bloggers and commentators who refused to be cowed by the falsehood that "the community" opposed the bill. But one person in recent history, more than anyone else, is responsible for this historic and precedent-setting vote.

That person is Barney Frank. I disagree with Frank about many things. But without his work over the years, without his determination, without his eloquence and parliamentary skill, without his willingness to stand up to critics on his left and his right, and without his pragmatic understanding of the nature of incremental progress in civil rights, there would be no ENDA in any form. Period.

Thanks to Barney Frank we have taken one huge step closer to the day when all gay Americans -- especially the millions of them in the South, Midwest, and Mountain West who currently have no employment protection -- can live their lives without the debilitating fear and devastating consequences of losing their jobs because of whom they love.

Of the many arguments against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) - the version that doesn't protect "gender identity" - the most puzzling and counterintuitive one is that it doesn't even protect gay people. This appeal to gays' self-interest is unpersuasive. Not only does a gay-only ENDA protect gays, it offers limited protection to transgendered people as well.

Congressional vote-counters have argued that ENDA cannot pass Congress this session if it includes protection for both "sexual orientation" and "gender identity." Thus, in an effort to pass the first-ever federal gay civil rights bill, they restored ENDA to the sexual-orientation-only version that characterized gay civil rights bills pending in Congress for more than 30 years until last April, when "gender identity" was first inserted in the bill.

The restored version of ENDA prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of "actual or perceived sexual orientation," which is defined to include homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality.

In 31 states, covering about half of all gay Americans, there is currently no such job protection. Most of these states, in the South, Midwest, and West, are unlikely to protect gay employees anytime soon. Nobody knows how long it might take to persuade Congress to protect gender identity, so insisting on its inclusion means that about five million gay Americans will have to wait indefinitely for some job security.

In an effort to defeat ENDA, a number of gay legal advocacy groups, most notably Lambda Legal, have argued that a gay-only ENDA doesn't adequately protect homosexuals. Gays, they say, need the supplemental protection provided by adding gender identity.

Lambda explains this by noting that gay people often face discrimination because of their gender nonconformity. Effeminate gay men face discrimination because they are feminine in appearance or manner. Butch lesbians similarly face discrimination because they are masculine.

Unless protection for gender nonconformity is included in ENDA, Lambda asserts, effeminate gay men and butch lesbians would not be adequately protected. For example, an employer could argue that it fired the butch lesbian because she's butch, not because she's lesbian.

This argument is flawed as a matter of experience, logic, and law.

As a matter of common experience, discrimination based on gender nonconformity and sexual orientation almost always go together. It would be rare to see an employer fire a man for being effeminate without also seeing evidence of anti-gay discrimination. Common statements like, "that fag walks like a girl," indicate that these two forms of discrimination significantly overlap.

As a matter of logic, if there is evidence of both forms of discrimination, then even if ENDA doesn't include gender identity the evidence of sexual-orientation discrimination alone will sustain the employee's lawsuit.

Lambda and other opponents of ENDA have been challenged to come up with cases in which a law covering only sexual orientation was used successfully by an employer to defeat a gay employee's legal claims because the law did not include gender identity as well.

We have three decades of experience with sexual-orientation-only laws. If such laws were inadequate on the grounds Lambda claims, there should be many cases demonstrating this fact. So far, the gay and trans opponents of ENDA have come up with nothing.

Thus, as a matter of experience and logic, the employer who loves gays but hates gender nonconformists is a legal Unicorn: you can imagine it, you can describe it, and nobody can absolutely prove it doesn't exist. But nobody has actually seen one.

The legal argument against ENDA is even worse. Gender nonconformity is already protected under existing federal law because it is considered a form of sex discrimination. Thus, the macho woman and the effeminate man already have legal claims if fired for their gender nonconformity.

ENDA closes a loophole under which gay men and lesbians have been forbidden by some courts to make these gender-nonconformity claims because of their sexual orientation. And it adds protection for masculine gay men and feminine lesbians who so far have no protection under federal law.

Further, even a gay-only ENDA offers some limited protection to transgendered people. Because it prohibits discrimination based on actual "or perceived" sexual orientation ENDA protects the cross-dresser or transsexual whose gender nonconformity leads her employer to "perceive" that she's homosexual and then fires her for her perceived homosexuality. It doesn't protect transsexuals from discrimination based on their transsexuality, as adding "gender identity" to the bill would, but it moves in that direction.

Lambda and the other groups spending gay donors' money to fight ENDA acknowledge that their main reason for doing so is that, as a matter of principle, they believe gay civil-rights bills must explicitly protect transgendered people as well. They don't care how long five million gays are made to wait for this idea to be accepted by Congress.

I think this principle overstates the relationship between sexual orientation and gender identity. It is also oblivious to the history of incremental progress in civil rights. However, it's at least a coherent and consistent principle to stand on.

But ENDA's gay and trans opponents should stop trying to claim that laws protecting gay people from discrimination don't really protect gay people from discrimination. That's a makeweight argument. ENDA, if enacted, will be a historic victory for the basic civil rights of gay Americans and will presage broader protection in the future.

In the recent debate over ENDA, it has frequently been said that "the community" solidly opposes the first-ever federal gay civil rights bill unless it includes transgenders.

The evidence for this surprising unity is the fact that more than 300 organizations have signed an online petition, available at UnitedENDA.org. "United ENDA," the website boasts, "effectively communicated the strong opposition of hundreds of organizations and millions of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community."

The correctness of an all-or-nothing approach to civil rights is not determined solely by the number of organizations or people who favor or oppose it. The strategy could be wrong even if everybody supported it; conversely, it could be right even if everybody opposed it. But in a society that values representative politics, claiming that you speak for millions of people lends moral authority and democratic legitimacy to your cause.

So is it true that United ENDA speaks for the community? The answer depends on which "community" we mean.

If we mean "the community of gay and trans activists" who lead organizations like the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and Queers for Economic Justice, the answer is "yes."

This is a small and select group of people, however. They are very liberal, highly educated, and unusually politically aware. They long ago bought the idea that the "T" is necessarily part of the "GLB." This view is strongly influenced by academic queer and gender theory that, whatever its merits, is probably not widely understood or actively embraced.

This does not mean that the leaders of these organizations are wrong; their dedication to their beliefs is admirable. It is only to suggest that they may not be representative of many people.

But, it might be answered, they lead more than 300 organizations that collectively do represent millions of members of the community. To determine whether this might be true, I looked at the organizations listed on the United ENDA website. The list is much less impressive than it first seems.

Some of the groups are well-known players on the national stage, like NGLTF and Lambda Legal. The vast majority are very obscure local and state groups. For example, one is called "Coqsure," described online as a "social group" in Portland, Oregon, "for people who were born or raised female who don't presently identify as totally female."

Missing from the list is the largest and most influential gay political group, the Human Rights Campaign. There are no gay Republican organizations listed, yet more than 25 percent of gay people regularly vote Republican in national elections.

The list is padded. The National Stonewall Democrats are there, but so are a dozen of the group's state and local chapters, including both the Colorado chapter and that chapter's "Transgender Caucus." The national PFLAG organization is listed, but so are more than half a dozen of its subsidiaries. On and on it goes like that.

The list also includes numerous non-gay organizations, like the Alliance for Jewish Renewal and a single local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. They're free to oppose a bill that protects gay civil rights, of course, but they don't represent the gay community.

There are about ten million gay Americans, of whom perhaps 7.5 million are adults. How many of them are "represented" by the United ENDA signatory groups?

One way to determine that is by asking how many active members the groups have. Unfortunately, membership figures are mostly unavailable and are often inflated when they are available, consisting of little more than a mailing list. Membership in the listed organizations also overlaps.

The active membership of most of these groups, especially the more than 70 transgender groups listed, is probably tiny. Even many of the gay groups aren't very large. To take just one example, the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, "representing" gays in a metropolitan area of more than four million people, regularly gets fewer than 30 people at meetings.

Let's assume very generously that the 300 groups average 1,000 non-overlapping members each. That's a total of 300,000 people-well short of "millions" and less than five percent of the 7.5 million gay adults in the country.

Do the listed groups even represent their own members? A fascinating recent article in the Washington Blade about growing defections from the United ENDA front quoted gay Democratic activist Peter Rosenstein as saying that few of the 300 groups canvassed their members before taking a stand.

For example, Geoff Kors, head of Equality California, acknowledged that his group did not poll its members. But, he added, he had received lots of supportive emails. Getting email from people who agree with you is not a vote.

United ENDA could assert that it speaks for many in the community who aren't members of the signatory groups. The problem with claim that is that there are no reliable polls telling us how many gay people would forego their civil rights until "gender identity" is included.

More than two-thirds of the United ENDA signatories appear to be headquartered in states or cities where gay people are already protected from discrimination. I'm confident many members of the Harvard University Transgender Task Force and the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club of San Francisco fully support making gay people in Mississippi wait until ENDA is ideologically pure, but they don't speak for anyone outside their privileged precincts.

In short, there is simply no good evidence for United ENDA's claim that the community opposes an incremental approach to civil rights.

Should gays wait for civil rights until transgendered people can be included? That's the question in the recent controversy over the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The answer depends on how much weight one gives the concept of a single "GLBT community" against the practical need to make incremental progress in civil rights.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and leaders in the House of Representatives maintain that ENDA will pass if it is limited to protecting gay people from employment discrimination. But, they say, it cannot pass if it also includes protection for "gender identity," a term that refers in part to the transgendered. Frank and House leaders might be wrong about this, or they might be too cautious, but nobody has yet offered a more reliable vote count. What I have to say here assumes the correctness of their political calculation.

Passage of ENDA is possible only because gay people have organized politically to educate Americans about homosexuality and to elect sympathetic representatives. When similar federal legislation was first proposed in 1974, it was an exotic cause. After more than three decades of hard work, the votes are finally there.

There has been no comparable effort - in terms of duration, intensity, or effectiveness - to educate or to organize for trans rights. This is partly because the idea is relatively new for most people. ENDA itself did not include "gender identity" until very recently. Trans protections have passed in a few (mostly) liberal states, but we don't have a liberal congressional majority.

Nevertheless, lots of activists and organizations are vowing to work to defeat ENDA unless it includes gender identity. They believe gay people should wait until "everybody" in the "GLBT community" is included.

On principle, they argue that all GLBTs transgress traditional ideas about men and women. Gays do so by being attracted to the same sex; the transgendered, by acting and appearing as the opposite sex. Gays and transgendered people also have the same enemies: those who believe in traditional and strict gender roles. It thus makes no more sense to pass ENDA without trans protection than it would be to pass ENDA without lesbian protection.

But this view is too simplistic. The differences between gays and the transgendered, in terms of daily living, are profound. Gays do not reject the sex into which they are born. They also don't necessarily reject many traditional gender expectations. It's true that there is some rejection of gender norms in both groups, but there are huge differences of degree. So saying that gays and transgenders have "gender nonconformity" in common is like saying Miami and Minneapolis have winter in common.

Yes, there are some common enemies. But unfortunately even many gay-friendly people still find the idea of, say, a male-to-female transsexual very unnerving. That's slowly changing.

As a matter of principle, then, it makes sense to deal with trans legal rights separately from gay rights far more than it would make sense to deal with the rights of gay men separately from the rights of lesbians. The idea of an indivisible "GLBT community" is thus more a philosophical aspiration than a practical reality.

That brings us to pragmatic considerations. The relevant choice, if Barney Frank is right about the temperature of Congress on this issue, is not between a limited ENDA and a comprehensive ENDA. It's a choice between a limited ENDA and no ENDA. It's hard to see how it serves any principle at all if it can't be enacted.

In other words, ENDA doesn't "include" anybody if it can't pass. Nobody knows how long it might take to educate Congress about trans issues. In the meantime, in 31 states there will be no job protection for gay people. After working so hard for this moment, shall we make them wait another year? Five years? Forever?

Just how much are activists' uncompromising principles worth in terms of the lives of gay Americans in 31 states?

Some observers have noted that even if a gay-only ENDA overcomes a filibuster in the Senate, President Bush might veto it. That's certainly possible and maybe probable, but a trans-inclusive ENDA would make both Senate passage and presidential approval less likely. Even if Bush vetoed ENDA, simply winning in the House would be a historic victory. It would build political momentum for more advances later, including eventual coverage for gender identity.

Progress in civil rights has never been an all-or-nothing proposition. If it were, we'd still be waiting to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protected blacks from job discrimination, but left out the aged and disabled people. When the law was expanded in 1991, but still excluded sexual orientation, gay people didn't picket the NAACP.

Even an "inclusive" ENDA won't include lots of groups subject to systematic discrimination, like homely, short, or overweight people. Other nonconformists often thought part of the GLBT community, like leather fetishists and sadomasochists, won't be protected. Why shouldn't we wait for them too?

Ironically, many of the activists demanding trans inclusion live in states where an incremental approach to gay and trans rights is well understood. California adopted gay civil rights laws long before trans protections. One of the groups opposed to a gay-only ENDA is the Empire State Pride Agenda, the New York gay-rights group, which just four years ago lobbied successfully for a gay-only state antidiscrimination law because a trans-inclusive one couldn't pass.

The opposition to ENDA is coming mostly from a cadre of articulate, politically aware, and protected gay activists living in cocoons on the coasts and in large cities. They are imposing gender and queer theory on the lives of millions of gay Americans throughout the South, Midwest, and West. They charge that a gay-only ENDA manifests a selfish willingness to throw transgenders out of the boat.

Instead, the all-or-nothing ENDA manifests a self-satisfied willingness to sell the fly-over gays down the river. Hearts pure and integrity intact, elite activists who already have their rights will defend their high-minded principles right down to the last gay Alabaman.

Whenever one of these morality scandals erupts - whether it involves homosexuality, adultery, or being on a list compiled by someone the media calls a "Madam" - it often involves a Republican. Critics love to charge Republicans with hypocrisy - preaching traditional family values to the rest of us by day while trolling bathrooms and pressing sweaty palms to computer keyboards by night.

Whatever explains these other public moral dramas, hypocrisy doesn't fully capture the GOP's plainly dysfunctional relationship to homosexuality. Yes, there are many prominent Republicans whose private actions are inconsistent with their traditional-values personas and thus are properly called hypocrites. Sen. Larry Craig is the latest of them. Jim West had an aggressively anti-gay record both as a Washington state legislator and as mayor of Spokane, yet cruised for gay sex and anonymously told an online acquaintance that he hated the "sex Nazis" who try to regulate people's private lives. There are many other examples.

But there are also many closeted gay Republicans not closely associated with the party's religious right for whom the hypocrisy charge is ill-fitting. Mark Foley, of last year's congressional page scandal, was not an anti-gay member of Congress. While he didn't support everything I wish he had, I'd take his record on gay issues over many Democrats'.

Most gay Republicans despise the party's anti-gay rhetoric and actions. They're Republicans because they're pro-life, support low taxes, want a strong national defense, or for any of a hundred other reasons. You could call it hypocrisy to be gay and work for a generally anti-gay political party, regardless of the gay person's own views or what she does within the party to oppose its anti-gay policy positions, but if so, this is surely a watered-down form of the vice.

What unites these scandals is not really hypocrisy. It's two other things. First, nearly all the gay Republicans working in Washington or elsewhere are to one degree or another closeted. Second, at a personal level, very few Republican officials around them care whether someone is gay.

From the top of the party hierarchy to the bottom, few Republicans personally and viscerally dislike gay people. President Bush has had friends he knew were gay. Vice President Cheney's daughter is gay. Even the most prominently and vigorously anti-gay Republican, Sen. Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum, had a gay spokesperson whom he defended when his homosexuality became known.

The big, open secret in Republican politics is that everyone knows someone gay these days and very few people - excepting some committed anti-gay activists - really care. It's one of the things that drives religious conservatives crazy because it makes the party look like it's not really committed to traditional sexual morality.

So to keep religious conservatives happy the party has done two things. First, it has supported anti-gay public policies.

Second, to keep the talent it needs and simply to be as humane and decent as politically possible toward particular individuals, the party has come up with its own unwritten code: you can be gay and work here, we don't care, but don't talk about it openly and don't do anything to make it known publicly. It's the GOP's own internal version of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

This is ideological schizophrenia: private acceptance welded to public rejection. It's a very brittle alloy.

For the closeted gay Republican, this alloy means a life of desperation and fear and loneliness, of expressing one's true feelings only in the anonymity of the Internet, of furtive bathroom encounters, of late nights darting in and out of dark bars, hoping not to be seen. It means life without a long-term partner, without real love.

Worst of all, it may mean a life of deceiving a spouse and children. Most of the men caught cruising in parks, bathrooms, and other public places are deeply closeted and often married. They don't see themselves as having many other options.

Nevertheless, it seems to work until the day you get caught tapping your toe next to an overzealous cop. Desperation sets in and you say things that bring everyone great joy at your expense, like, "I'm not gay, I just have a wide stance."

For the GOP, this alloy of public rejection and private acceptance means enduring more of these periodic public morality convulsions. How to end it? The private acceptance will continue and, I predict, become even more common as young conservatives comfortable around gay people take over. There will be no purging the party of gays. There is no practical way to purge them, and even if there were, most Republicans would be personally repulsed by the effort.

These closeted politicians, staffers, and party functionaries will periodically be found out and again will come the shock, the pledges to go into rehab, the investigations, the charges of hypocrisy, the schadenfreude from Democrats and libertines, and the sense of betrayal from the party's religious conservatives.

The only practical way out of this for the GOP is to come to the point where its homosexuals no longer feel the need to hide. And _that_ won't happen until the party's public philosophy is more closely aligned with its private one. That will be the day when the GOP greets its gay supporters the way Larry Craig, with unintended irony, greeted reporters at his news conference: "Thank you all very much for coming out today."

The undeniable success of gay Democrats was on full display in the August 9 presidential candidates' forum. The questions were pretty good, interrupted only by the emotions of Melissa Etheridge. No new positions were taken but the candidates all said pleasant things. The question is, what did the event really accomplish?

In order of appearance, here's how I think the candidates (excluding the quixotic ones) did:

Barack Obama. Obama now orates like a politician, which means his speech is stunted with "ahs" and "uhs" and that he tends to fall back on stock phrases. He's the most interesting and thoughtful of the candidates, but you'd hardly know that nowadays.

Obama avers that we should separate the word "marriage," which he says is religious, from the legal rights associated with marriage. But marriage as religious rite and as legal right are already separate. So Obama is really saying that only for gay couples should the law distinguish rights from marriage. Like the other candidates, he never explains why.

Civil unions, which he supports, may be the best next step. But to say that it is simply a matter of "semantics," as Obama does, suggests either that he is being disingenuous or that at a very deep level he doesn't get it.

Obama made several references to his race ("When you're a black guy . . .") as if this is supposed to immunize him from criticism or give us the sense that he feels our pain. But it has the opposite effect, suggesting that he has not thought very deeply about applying the lessons of his experience to others. When he says, for example, that gay couples should be satisfied with civil unions, it's worth asking whether he thinks his interracial parents should have been satisfied with calling their marriage a civil union.

John Edwards. Edwards is like Phil Hartman's "Caveman Lawyer" from the 1990s Saturday Night Live skit. He stresses humble origins and simulates empathy. Still, he might be good at this as president. Edwards wore his plastic heart on his sleeve as he described meeting homeless gay youth at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and criticized parents who disavow their gay kids. Presidents need to speak in moral terms, not just policy terms, and Edwards comes closest to realizing this.

He committed the only real policy gaffe of the night, insisting that the president could reverse "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" all by himself. That's been untrue since 1993, when the ban on gay service was made federal statute. Even with a Democratic Congress and president it will be very difficult to repeal that law, requiring a president willing to explain publicly why the change is in the country's best interests. But first the president has to understand the policy.

Edwards opposes gay marriage, for no particular reason. Earlier in the campaign he explained that he opposes it for religious reasons, which is probably the only honest account we've heard from any of them. At the forum, he apologized for his earlier candor. He painted this as a matter of separating church from state, but left us with no substitute explanation.

Bill Richardson. On substance, Richardson shined. Especially impressive was his emphasis on actual accomplishments over rhetoric. After the Clinton presidency, many of us are unimpressed by promises; we want results. When it comes to actual accomplishments, Richardson has done more for gay equality than the other Democrats.

I wasn't troubled by Richardson's suggestion that homosexuality is a choice since it seemed that, in context, he was trying to say only that people should be free to be gay. He was also correct, by the way, that we really don't know what causes someone to have a particular sexual orientation. For this bit of honesty, he was flayed by pundits. He did seem tired and listless, so he lost badly in the eyes of those who demand flash and charm.

Hillary Clinton. Clinton's policy positions on gay issues are probably as good as any viable candidate's could be right now. Her problem in general is that she has a hard time conveying personal warmth. This, combined with her association with the last president named Clinton, leaves one wondering whether she's really committed to anything.

Clinton was the cleverest of the lot. She both defended and distanced herself from her husband's two signature anti-gay acts, DADT and DOMA. She painted DADT as an improvement on what came before, which it was not. She was correct that DOMA helped stave off a federal constitutional amendment in 2004, but that was not the rationale when it passed in 1996. These answers were dishonest.

Clinton said she opposed gay marriage for "personal reasons," which tells us nothing except that she is a careful politician.

The truth is, in contrast to the Republicans, there's nothing in the Democratic ethos circa 2007 that justifies opposing gay marriage. The leading contenders oppose it only because it's politically necessary. When the political calculus changes so will they, but not a moment sooner. But it's hard to blame them for not committing political suicide.

All of the Democrats are better on gay issues than any of the Republicans. But we have many times seen these paper commitments decompose in the slightest heat. This presidential forum left us little reason to believe it will be any different this time.

"Sicko," Michael Moore's indictment of America's healthcare system, proposes healthcare for all. Free treatment. Free drugs. All provided by the government. What's not to like? Before gay Americans rush to embrace state-run healthcare, we ought to think very hard about it.

Start with the basic proposition that healthcare is something gay Americans need more than most other Americans. For gay men, the need is obvious and the stakes are very high. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 232,000 gay men in the U.S. are living with HIV/AIDS. In 2005, male-to-male sexual transmission accounted for about 70 percent of new cases among males.

HIV disease is chronic and potentially fatal. Keeping it under control requires frequent visits with doctors, monitoring of blood, and a very expensive regimen of prescription drugs. All of this places disproportionately large demands on the healthcare system, including on patients, nurses, doctors, drug manufacturers, insurance companies, and taxpayers.

Over time, the life-saving drugs that have been available for a decade now often stop working effectively. HIV develops resistance to them. That means new drugs must replace the old ones.

Somebody has to provide, and to pay for, all of this expensive care. How do we do it? America's answer so far has been a hodgepodge of private insurance and public subsidy. In countries Moore would like us to emulate, the answer has been government-controlled healthcare.

I don't have answers about how to reform America's system, if at all. And it's difficult to talk about the issue in the abstract, since the devil will be in the details. But here are a couple of things that gay Americans, especially, ought to think about.

First, as a general matter, we should be wary of any proposal calling for greater government control. Historically, government has been an enemy of gay people. While that has begun to change, there is no reason to believe that government at the federal level and in most states will not continue to be an adversary for some time.

What might this adversary do to our healthcare? Any state-run system will mean government funding of hospitals, doctors, and drugs. With funding comes control.

Efforts will be made to control costs and decisions will be made about how to allocate limited budgets. Politics will govern those decisions, yet gays' political clout is small. Questions will be asked: How much of the public fisc should be devoted to paying for new drugs for people who continue to get themselves infected with an avoidable disease? How many HIV specialists do we really need and how much should we pay for their services? If we have to pay to treat their disease, shouldn't we be monitoring their lives more closely to prevent it?

There are rational ways of discussing these sorts of questions, but given our history with government, there is little reason to believe reason will dominate the political discussion. The questions will be answered by the people who gave us bans on immigration by HIV-positive people and the military exclusion.

Other countries with government-run healthcare - notably Moore's favorite countries, like Canada, Britain, and France - have much more enlightened attitudes toward homosexuality. There is comparatively less reason to fear turning such an important matter over to public authorities in these countries. The U.S. is different.

The private sector, by contrast, has led the way for equality. Unlike the federal government and most state governments, most large private companies now ban discrimination against gays and many offer health benefits to same-sex couples. That's not because they're nice; it's because they compete with each other for the best employees.

But if the government were the only game in town, as it would be under some proposals for healthcare reform, there would be no competitive pressure to ensure gay Americans are treated fairly. It's hard even to know how sweeping the consequences might be in a political environment still quite hostile to homosexuals.

Second, America is now the leader in medical advances of all kinds: education, treatment, and most importantly for our purposes, the development of new drugs. One of the reasons America spends so much more on healthcare than other nations is that it is a leader in these areas. Other countries free-ride on American research and development.

Tens of thousands of gay men in this country are alive today because profit-seeking private companies, with the help of public investment, researched and developed life-saving anti-HIV drugs.

But drug development is risky. Most new drugs are scrapped because they don't work or are dangerous. Creating and testing them costs a lot of money. Unless private investors can be tempted with the possibility of large profits, they won't take chances and drugs won't get developed.

Government-controlled healthcare doesn't mean drug development will stop. But there will be strong efforts to limit drug costs, which will limit profits, which will have some stifling effect on development. There will be some risk that not as many expensive new AIDS drugs will enter, or get through, the development pipeline. That could mean lives lost as resistance to existing drugs sets in.

None of this is decisive, even from a gay perspective, against all reform of healthcare. But nobody should pretend the choices are risk-free. And we should not indulge the fantasy that healthcare will ever be "free."

Michael Moore's documentary, "Sicko", has started a new round of thinking about reforming America's healthcare system. For gay Americans, especially gay men, the stakes in this debate are unusually high and the answers are not obvious.

"Sicko" has two basic messages. The first is that America's system of privately run healthcare is broken, leaving millions without insurance and many of the rest frustrated by inadequate and expensive coverage. The result is a country that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), ranks 37th in healthcare.

The second message of "Sicko" is that other countries - like Canada, Britain, and France - do a much better job of giving all citizens quality healthcare through government-run programs.

Along the way, Moore tells us horror stories about Americans whose insurance companies would not cover some life-saving treatment they need, about elderly and sick people dumped by the side of the road, and about 9/11 rescue workers who have to go to Cuba to get medical care.

These anecdotes are compared to happy tales from countries like France, where doctors make house-calls (!) free of charge, new mothers are given a state-paid assistant to do the laundry, and life expectancy soars.

All of it is punctuated by Moore's trademark humor, sarcastic and sardonic, which alone makes the film worth seeing. He is the funniest propagandist in the country.

Funny, but not terribly effective. A really good propagandist would give one the sense that the other side has been given a hearing, been considered, and been found wanting. With Moore, you get beaten over the head by clear good and evil. While Moore just wants cancer patients to get the treatment they need, the other side is all rapacious plutocrats putting profits ahead of lives.

If you're thinking at all during a Moore documentary, you're constantly wondering, what is he not telling me? I'm no healthcare expert, but I know enough to be wary of the direction Moore suggests.

His comparison of the U.S. to other countries is misleading, to say the least. The WHO report that ranks the U.S. just above Cuba looks at five factors: overall population health, including life expectancy; responsiveness of the system to patient needs; "inequality" of health within the population; "distribution" of responsiveness within the population (how people of varying economic status are served); and the "fairness" of the system's financial burden (who pays).

The first two factors can be measured objectively, and on these the U.S. does very well. Americans live longer on average than almost all other people. We're just a half year behind the British and 1.5 years behind the French in life expectancy. It's hard to say how much of even this modest gap is attributable to the countries' healthcare systems, as opposed to diet and exercise habits.

The U.S. ranks first - first - according to the WHO in healthcare responsiveness. Responsiveness means things like "respect for the dignity, confidentiality and autonomy of individuals and families to decide about their own health," and "prompt attention, access to social support networks during care, quality of basic amenities and choice of provider." Even with all the problems in their healthcare system, Americans report higher levels of patient satisfaction than citizens of any other country.

Of course, the U.S. loses out on the remaining three egalitarian and more subjective factors weighed by the WHO's international staff. Nations with government-run healthcare systems like France - and oil-rich Oman and socialist Cuba - do much better providing everyone healthcare and spreading the costs to those who can afford it. That's why the overall U.S. score is comparatively low.

It's a point Moore stresses. Everybody in those countries gets "free" healthcare, regardless of ability to pay, while some 47 million Americans have no health insurance and many receive needed care only when they go to the emergency room.

But this indictment by itself suggests no obvious reform. There is no such thing as free healthcare. Consider the example of Moore's favorite country.

France, which ranks first in healthcare according to the WHO, pays for its generous system with very high tax rates that absorb large portions of household income. That limits the freedom to spend on other things - like education or housing or travel - that some people value more highly.

High taxes and heavy regulation of business and labor markets, requiring extended paid leave for things like convalescence, produce anemic growth rates and chronically high unemployment. France is now having one of its periodic existential crises about falling behind more market-oriented countries.

The WHO report does not even consider a country's contribution to advanced medical education, new technology, innovative treatments, and drug research - all areas in which the U.S. unquestionably leads the world. The 36 countries ranked ahead of the U.S. enjoy such good health in part because of American creativity and profit-seeking American companies.

The tradeoff - more evenly distributed healthcare in exchange for some sacrifice of individual liberty and economic dynamism - might be worth it. But we at least must recognize the tradeoff exists.

Given the heavy need for healthcare among those with HIV infection, an expensive, chronic and potentially fatal illness, a question for gay readers is this: are there any special reasons to be concerned about reform? And given that the gay experience with government has not been happy, should we worry about state-run healthcare? That's the subject of the next column.

An Internet dating service called eHarmony.com matches people based on a very long list of questions they answer about their likes and dislikes, lifestyle, philosophy, religious and political views, and so on. That's par-for-the-course with these services, but this one adds a twist. Unlike almost every other dating site, it will not match people with members of the same sex.

This upset a California lesbian, who sued eHarmony, claiming that this practice amounted to illegal anti-gay discrimination under state law. While eHarmony's practice is indefensible and likely bigoted, the lawsuit trivializes the serious phenomenon of anti-gay discrimination.

I support antidiscrimination laws that prohibit certain types of group-based discrimination by government, including discrimination based on sexual orientation. I also support extending these principles to the private sphere on important matters like employment and housing, with some limitations and exemptions. Generally speaking, employers should not be allowed to fire someone simply for being gay and apartment managers or home sellers should not be allowed deny housing to gay people.

I have no view on whether eHarmony's practice of excluding persons seeking same-sex mates violates any California antidiscrimination law. California courts should apply state antidiscrimination law regardless of whether they think it's good policy under the circumstances.

Some people have questioned whether eHarmony is even engaging in "sexual orientation" discrimination at all. Gays can join the site, they just have to settle for being matched with opposite-sex dates. That's not very persuasive.

Discriminating on the basis of a trait or conduct (seeking same-sex mates) that is intimately tied to the status (homosexual) is the sort of discrimination that a sexual-orientation antidiscrimination law is properly concerned about. A policy that forbade yarmulkes, and only yarmulkes, is anti-Jewish even though Jews themselves aren't forbidden.

Few policies that disadvantage gays take the form of, "No gays allowed." Even the Texas sodomy law, which outlawed only to same-sex sodomy and was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court four years ago, did not prohibit homosexuals from having sex. Gays simply had to choose opposite-sex partners for the identical sexual activity. Yet I have no hesitation saying that law was anti-gay.

I'm also dubious about eHarmony's rationale for its practice: that its questions and answers are based on research tailored to heterosexuals that may not fit well for homosexuals. The dynamics of gay and straight relationships are very similar if not identical: the same sorts of problems arise (e.g., financial, division of labor, differences over child-rearing), the same traits are desired in mates (e.g., honesty), and so on.

Given that eHarmony's founder is a Christian evangelical with longstanding ties to James Dobson and the anti-gay group, Focus on the Family, the real objection is probably that eHarmony does not want to facilitate what it regards as immoral and unbiblical relationships. The business about its heterosexuals-only "research" seems pretextual, crafted to fend off litigation.

But regardless of whether it is viable under California law, the suit against eHarmony is a bad idea.

Modern antidiscrimination law is expanding in two ways that are very unhelpful. First, it is being applied in ways that infringe important liberties outside the commercial context. The Boy Scouts case decided by the Supreme Court in 2000, involving the exclusion of an openly gay scoutmaster, was an example of this. While the harm and indignity done to the gay scoutmaster, who'd been an Eagle Scout, was not trivial, requiring that the Boy Scouts let him lead troops violated the Scouts' associational and speech interests in very important ways.

Second, antidiscrimination law is increasingly being applied to trivial and/or fairly harmless discrimination that goes well beyond core concerns about things like employment and housing. The exclusion of Catholic Charities from offering adoptions in Massachusetts last year was unjustified because it was difficult to show how the group's anti-gay policy actually hurt gay couples seeking to adopt.

The eHarmony lawsuit is an example of the trivialization of antidiscrimination law. It doesn't involve a core concern like employment or housing or even a traditional public accommodation, like discrimination in a restaurant or hospital. It's also very hard to see how any gay person is really harmed by the policy. Gays aren't lacking for match-making sites, either general ones or those tailored just to same-sex pairs. And personally, I wouldn't give my money to eHarmony regardless of what policy they adopt at this point.

The suit allows some opponents of antidiscrimination law to point, with some justification, to excesses as evidence that the underlying idea is bad. It also allows anti-gay activists to belittle claims that gays are subject to serious and ongoing discrimination that should be remedied in law.

The claim against eHarmony forgets the four most important words in public policy: up to a point. That point is passed when we make trivial and harmless discrimination, however dumb or prejudiced it is, a matter of legal concern.