Double-Edged Sword

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Beware of the unintended consequences of anti-discrimination mandates. That's what some folks are discovering in Santa Fe, where the residents of the RainbowVision development, created to provide a secure and affirming environment for gay seniors, fear it could soon be overrun by heterosexuals. New Mexico law bars housing discrimination based on sexual orientation, and so the home owners association can't maintain a balance toward gay people (and it seems that the management company is just as happy to rent to whomever).

RainbowVision includes a mixture of condos and rental units plus an assisted-living facility. Interestingly enough, the New York Times recently reported on discrimination against gay seniors in typical assisted living facilities, including one in Santa Fe, finding that gay seniors:

have been disrespected, shunned or mistreated in ways that range from hurtful to deadly, even leading some to commit suicide. Some have seen their partners and friends insulted or isolated.

So it would seem that the right to create gay-focused retirement institutions might be worth preserving.

And its not just gay seniors who fall victim to "fair housing" over-reach. Activist in the past succeeded in forbidding those seeking home or apartment roommates from indicating a religious or age preference in their classified ads, and the same issue has popped up with gay people seeking gay roommates.

To which some housing commissar wannabes simply shrug and say why not force an 80-year-old Catholic grandma to rent her spare room to a 20-something wiccan? It'll be good for the old gal, and it's not like there's any need to respect archaic concepts like property rights or freedom of association or any other impediments on the road to the progressive total state, is there?

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Barney Frank ‘Not Gay Enough’?

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Just to be clear... By pushing ENDA toward an inevitable Bush veto, the Democratic leadership anticipates not only galvanizing the LGB (if not T) bloc behind Hillary, but also putting GOP front-runner Giuliani on the spot-if he stays true to his principles and urges Bush not to veto, he hurts himself with the GOP base (and because Bush will veto anyway, it hangs over him during the general election, should he be the nominee). If Giuliani equivocates, he hurts himself with his more socially liberal supporters. It's a win-win for Democrats, which is why Pelosi and the leadership are pushing so hard for a T-less (and thus passable) bill.

Update. But wait, now it seems like Pelosi is saying that the bill will only move with Ts included-which means that in all likelihood it won't be going anywhere soon. They're in, they're out...they're in (for now). Update to the Update: Ok, maybe they're still out, with Pelosi saying she's fully committed to moving an inclusive ENDA forward once the votes are there (don't hold your breath), but then adding that the bill minus Ts is going forward in any event. If so, then we're back to the situation described below...

(Original post) They're out; they're in; they're out... Looks like Rep. Barney Frank wants to push through committee a version of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act that does not include transgenders, yelping activists be damned. The two key points in the New York Times report, Liberal Base Proves Trying to Democrats (and I paraphrase below):

(1) There is almost no chance that President Bush would ever sign the bill.

(2) Some Republicans in the House wish the bill had included language on transpeople because it would have made it easier for them to vote against it (and demagogue it-think of employers being forced to hire bearded men wearing dresses).

The Times reports that gay rights groups are "angry and bewildered, especially because the compromise involves a bill unlikely to be signed by Mr. Bush." But Barney Frank and party leaders want to pass ENDA knowing Bush will veto it, because they believe it will energize gay and gay-friendly voters in the 2008 election. The great "T" debate complicates that, but they still seem committed to this strategy.

In the real world, however, ENDA (with or without Ts) seems increasingly less relevant. As a story on 365gay.com, The Gay Glass Ceiling, notes:

When it comes to the workplace, gay and lesbian activists have focused mainly on ending overt and obvious harassment and discriminatory hiring, firing, and promotion practices.... [But] formal policies are less of a predictor of gay and lesbian happiness at work than are informal measures, such as whether someone feels comfortable bringing a partner to a company event.

It's the corporate culture that counts most, regardless of official nondiscrimination policies (mandated or not). At best, passing nondiscrimination laws may indicate that a shift in attitudes has occurred. In other words, by the time you can garner enough support to pass an ENDA, it's not really needed.

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ENDA Now. Transgenders Later.

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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.

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“Dear Abby” for Gays Getting Married

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An endorsement of marriage equality by "Dear Abby" columnist Jeanne Phillips is a harbinger that the nation is, slowly, beginning to come around. That's why educating Americans by working through the state legislative process is, I believe, far more likely to lead to same-sex marriage than relying on liberal judges to force the issue (typically provoking a backlash that results in state constitutional amendments banning recognition of all gay partnerships).

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ENDA to a “T”

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Dale Carpenter, a law professor and IGF contributing author, has posted on the Volokh Conspiracy a detailed response to the expressed concerns of some gay groups, including Lambda Legal, that a gay-only ENDA might not adequately protect gays: He writes:

we now have decades of experience with state laws that protect gay people from discrimination based on sexual orientation but not gender identity. If the inadequacy of sexual-orientation protections were a real problem-as opposed to a hypothetical or theoretical one-we should expect to see many such cases. But neither Lambda nor any other organization has yet produced a single instance in which an employer successfully argued around a gay-only employment protection law by claiming that it really fired the person for gender non-conformity.

The ENDA "T" or not-to-"T" debate, and the wider assertion about the existence of a progressive "LGBT community," is mostly about gay cultural politics and whether the activist/academic-inspired focus on gender-identity will prevail over the "assimilationist" goals that are of actual concern to most gay people.

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Columbia’s Hypocrisy

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According to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "we don't have homosexuals like in your country … In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you we have it." This has become the most infamous portion of his infamous speech at Columbia University last Monday.

A cynical explanation of Ahmadinejad's statement that Iran does not have gays "like" those in the United States is that Iran's friends of Dorothy don't wear Diesel jeans, listen to Christina Aguilera or drink Cosmopolitans. But I doubt that's what the Iranian president meant.

Rather, he claims that homosexuality itself does not exist in Iran, and, presumably, the rest of the Muslim world. This is obviously preposterous (homosexuality is a part of human nature and has existed in most, if not all, cultures throughout history) but the purported absence of Iranian homosexuals is certainly not for Ahmadinejad's lack of trying. His regime has presided over the widespread arrest, torture and murder of homosexuals; according to Iranian human rights groups, the Iranian government has murdered as many as 4,000 gays since the Islamic Revolution came to power in 1979.

The Columbia student body applauded Ahmadinejad throughout his rant, a display that should go down as one of the most shameful moments in the annals of American academia. To their credit, however, the audience laughed in Ahmadinejad's face when he uttered his assertion about gays. But Columbia's invitation to Ahmadinejad (who kills gays) and its near four-decades-long banning of the military (which merely prohibits them from serving openly) is no laughing matter.

In 1969, Columbia University expelled the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program from its campus in response to the demands of a faculty and student body radicalized by the Vietnam War. Today, the University maintains its opposition ROTC (as well as the Judge Advocate General Corps at its law school) based on the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which prevents openly gay people from serving in the armed services. Columbia and other elite schools claim that allowing the military to recruit on campus would violate their non-discrimination policies.

While it is difficult to persuade supporters of this policy on patriotic grounds (for instance, that having a strong military is more important than sending a feel-good, yet ultimately futile, message about homophobia), the most effective argument in favor of bringing the military back to campus is that banning it actually hinders the cause of ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

The policy can only be changed by Congress (it was an act of Congress in the first place) and Congress will only change the policy once the military supports its repeal. The easiest way to change the attitude of the military is to staff its ranks with fair-minded people the likes of which are more likely to be found at a place like Columbia than amongst the rural Southerners who overwhelm the military ranks. As I wrote in these pages two years ago, "The military brass itself is far more likely to empathize with someone who once wore a uniform and risked their life than they are to heed the hectoring of a liberal faculty member."

The least that can be said in Columbia's defense is that its opposition to ROTC and JAG is a good-faith effort to oppose homophobic policies. If that's the case, then how can those supporting the school's position on ROTC and JAG possibly justify President Lee Bollinger's invitation to Iranian President Ahmadinejad?

The Iranian regime's crimes against homosexuals are long and documented. Homosexuality is punishable by death, though some Iranian gays have escaped with mere lashes.

How dare this vicious thug come to our country and deny the existence of the thousands of gay people his regime has murdered. And how dare the students in the audience, who - had this been 1939 and it were Adolf Hitler speaking (as the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs Dean John Coatsworth says he would have liked), would have fecklessly applauded the Fuhrer - cheered and clapped for this murderer.

If gay people are not angry at the spectacle that transpired on Morningside Heights last week, then they are not paying attention. It is disingenuous for Columbia to claim that it bans the military from campus in deference to the aggrieved dignity of gay people while simultaneously inviting a murderer of homosexuals. This is the farce that Columbia University has now become: a place where those wanting to serve their country are shunned while a man who murders gays is welcomed and applauded.

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Romney: In His Own Words

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Log Cabin has a nifty TV ad reminding primary voters that Mitt Romney, a social-issues liberal when running for office in Massachusetts, has turned on a dime as he panders to the GOP's socially conservative base. I think this is appropriate, since Romney is now the most vocally anti-gay GOP candidate in the race, relentlessly beating the anti-gay marriage, traditional "family values" drum.

And by the way, this ad is very different from the leftwing YouTube attack on Rudy Giuliani, which used anti-gay stereotypes to gin up opposition to Giuliani's pro-gay record. The key distinction: Giuliani is the GOP candidate who is pushing the envelope, relatively speaking, toward gay inclusion within his party. The gay lefty YouTube activists want the GOP to nominate the most homophobic candidate; Log Cabin is hoping the party will nominate the least.

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“The Transgender Fiasco”

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John Aravosis, no conservative he, takes on what he terms the transgender fiasco:

Anyone who says that transgendered people have always been accepted as part of the gay community is simply wrong.... I think that the transgender community was added to ENDA the same way the T got added on to the LGB. By force, and attrition, rather than by popular demand....[W]hen I speak to friends and colleagues privately, senior members of the gay political/journalistic establishment, and just plain old gay friends around the country (and our own readers), the message I hear is far different from what I'm hearing from the groups. I'm clearly hearing three things. Well, four: 1. I feel empathy for transgendered people, and support their struggle for civil rights. 2. I want ENDA to pass this year even if we can't include transgendered people. 3. I don't understand when transgendered people became part of the gay community? And then there's always #4: Please don't tell anyone I told you this.....

What I'm hearing is a message far different from what you hear from NGLTF and some of the louder activist claiming to speak for the enlightened masses. I think that a lot of gay people never truly accepted the transgender revolution that was thrust upon them. They simply sat back and shut up about their questions and concerns and doubts out of a sense of shame that it was somehow impolite to even question what was happening, and fear that if they did ask questions they'd be marked as bigots. And now, that paper-thin transgender revolution is coming home to roost.

He warns, ominously:

There is a climate of fear and confusion and doubt about the transgender issue in the gay community. And no one wants to talk about it. And when you don't talk about your small concerns, when you're afraid to talk about them, when it's not considered PC for you to talk about them, one day those small concerns turn into big problems and the revolution comes tumbling down.

From experience, I know that many leftwing "progressive" LGBT activists (and their allied academic-indoctrinators) live in a world where status among their peers is predicated on being ever-more ideologically pure and cutting-edge. And they don't care what the unenlightened gay masses think; they're confident that since they're the only game in town, the money spigot is going to stay on. I hope they're wrong.

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Crime and Punishment

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Libertarian columnist Steve Chapman explains why he's against hate crimes bills. It's an argument I tried to make, but stumbled over, in the previous post. Chapman writes on "the defining defect of hate crimes bills: It is intended to provide extra penalties for criminals who think incorrect thoughts."

I'm also reminded that a few years back activists supported a hate crimes bill that would have required a step-up in punishment. Matthew Shepard's killers were given life in prison, and so the step-up would, presumably, have been death. But these activists, including the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, were against the death penalty, too, so it wasn't clear exactly what they wanted to inflict on those who murdered Shepard. It's reminiscent of today, with the Human Rights Campaign wanting the feds to ensure more robust prosecutions of hate crimes, but also demanding to "Free the Jena 6" despite these thugs' vicious, unprovoked, racially motivated attack on a white teenager. It's a red flag of how "hate crimes" prosecutions rapidly become politicized, one way or the other.

Changing gears, the Wall Street Journal has an excellent op-ed, "The Queerest Denial," on the Iranian government's murderous homophobia-and the American left that figures any regime that really, truly hates us (that is, the U.S.) can't be bad.

More on hate crimes laws and why they're such a bad idea, from IGF's archives, here.

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