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Americans are Changing Their Views on Gays
June 15, 2000

By Sheryl McCarthy

   Last week, they celebrated gay pride day at the CIA.
   The most stuffy and insular of all government institutions, the intellligence community routed out gay employees in the 1950s on the theory that they could easily be blackmailed and therefore posed a security risk.
   But last week, gay Central Intelligence Agency employees and a busload of employees from the National Security Agency gathered at CIA headquarters in Virginia for the gay pride event, and even the director of the CIA showed up.
   Last week, the nation's three largest automobile manufacturers - General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler - announced that they're extending medical and dental benefitss to the partners of their gay employees.  The reason, company executives said: so that they can continue to attract good employees in a tough market.
   And in the New York State Senate, which has rejected hate-crimes bills covering attacks on homosexuals for more than a decade, finally approved one last week.  The reason:  Republican senators are afraid that, if there's a local incident similar to the Wyoming murder of Matthew Shepherd in 1998, a gay man, it will hurt them in this year's election.
   In April, Vermont's governor signed a law allowing same-sex couples to enter civil unions, with the same rights and benefits that married heterosexual couple get.  And "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger, the radio call-in guru, has had her show dropped by several corporate sponsors because she vilifies gays and lesbians.
   There are still plenty of Americans who dissaprove of gay sex, but we are increasingly willing to say that gays ought to be treated just like everyone else.
   An Associated Press poll, whose results were released this month, found that while 51 percent of Americans say gay couples shouldn't be allowed to marry, just as many think they should have some of the same legal rights as marrieds - such as health insurance, inheritance rights and Social Security bebefits.
   Gay bashers may rant and rave about sin and debauchery and about how homosexuality undermines traditional marriage, but the country has shifted to the center on gay rights and away from the rigid view that gays belong to some subhuman species.
   Because gays and lesbians have been so vocal about asserting their rights, just about all of us now realize that we know people who are gay and for that most part they're just regular folks.
   This is a drastic change from a few decades ago.  When Evan Wolfson, an attorney with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay advocacy group, went before the U.S. Supreme Court last month to argue that the Boy Scouts had violated the constitutional rights of a gay Scoutmaster by firing him solely because he's gay, he noticed a distinct change in the attitude of the justices from 10 years ago.
   When Lambda filed the case in New Jersey in 1992, the discussion in the news media and among the public was about why the group was attacking the Boy Scouts.  By the time it reached New Jersey's Supreme Court last year, the conversation was about why the Boy Scouts were persecuting this Scoutmaster and why they wanted to keep gays out, Wolfson said.
   I've predicted before that before the end of this century gay marriage - the last frontier in gay rights - will be legal in all states.
   Like the resistance to full civil rights for blacks and women before them, the barriers to gays are crumbling.  And people are getting used to the idea that the sky won't fall when they're gone.
 
 

ELECTION NEWS

 

"We are poised to expand the circle of human dignity yet again, to say that it will no longer be permissible to discriminate against someone because of who he or she falls in love with or because of that person's sexual orientation." -  U.S. Vice President and Presidential candidate Al Gore in Des Moines, Iowa, Dec. 21.
 

Bush bashes gays
from "Briefing", issue 23 of XY Mag
Despite his slogan of "compassionate conservatism," presidential candidate George W Bush is among the most anti-gay presidential campaigners seen in recent years, according to his recent campaigning.
   Bush doubts he will appoint gays ["If they have a political agenda I am uncomfortable with, they're not going to get appointed.  That would include an agenda pushed by the gay lobby."]
   Bush has refused even to meet gay Republicans in his own party.
   Bush opposes including anti-gay offenses in hate-crime laws.  He refuses to rule out efforts to strip gay parents of their adopted children.
   Bush says homosexuality "tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family, and leads to the spread of dangerous diseases."
   Finally, Bush says he wants to keep Texas's sodomy law on the books - the law which makes gay sex illegal in Texas.  "It is a symbolic gesture of traditional values," he says.