AT every level of government, and in every region of the country, the Democrats are significantly better than the Republicans on the issue of defeating homophobia and protecting us against unfair discrimination. Why, then, the ambivalence on the part of gay men and lesbians about following the advice of Samuel Gompers, who in the early days of the labor movement in America announced the political principle that he said should govern those seeking to use the political process to advance important goals"reward your friends and punish your enemies"? For gays and lesbians in the current American political climate, this means strongly supporting Democrats nearly all the time.
Parties do mean something in American politics, more than ever in the last year, what with Newt Gingrich having made great strides (along with Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed) in hammering the Republican party into a disciplined right-wing organization. We have seen this in the Republican Presidential contest, in which there has been a stampede to the right, and in which the only arguably moderately conservative candidates, such as Pete Wilson and Arlen Specter, have been trampled. Which party controls the Congress makes an enormous difference, even beyond the fact that when we can receive 75% of the Democrats and 10% of the Republicans, we can win only if Democrats outnumber Republicans overall. When the Democrats were in control, the party leaders, the people who scheduled floor action, the committee chairs, the people who structured amendments, tended to be people who believe that homophobia is a bad thing.
With the Republicans in power, the levers are in the hands of people who want to strengthen discrimination, whether because they believe in it personally or because they think it will win them votes. Even for the Republicans who are not personally homophobicI would put Gingrich in this category because I do not think he is a man of very strong conviction on this or any other issuetheir need to activate their political base drives them to take homophobic positions. Had the Republicans been in power during the 80's, public policy regarding AIDS would be a nastier and meaner one by far. Should the Republicans win the Presidency, we would see an end to the appointment of openly gay and lesbian officials, and very possibly an end to the right to appeal discriminatory actions in the federal government, and a re-imposition of the ban on security clearances for gay men and lesbians. We would have a President who denounced gay rights legislation as "special rights." Presidential influence would go to helping pass anti-gay and lesbian referenda in the states rather than to opposing it.
Judicial appointments would be especially significant. Judicial decisions are critical in our efforts to win our rights. The Colorado case is pending. The Supreme Court decided by 5 to 4 that it was constitutional to make sodomy a crime, and at some point the nine Justices will be deciding on the constitutionality of the prohibition on our being allowed to serve openly in the military. The current Supreme Court is fairly closely balanced, with the side that would vindicate our right to full constitutional protection probably now in a 5 to 4 minority. The President elected in 1996 will almost certainly appoint two new Justices and possibly three. If Bill Clinton appoints the next two or three Supreme Court Justices, based on the sort of judicial appointments he has already made, a majority on the Supreme Court is likely to hold that discrimination solely on the basis on sexual orientation by government is inappropriate. Should Dole or any other possible Republican win, we will get another Scalia or Thomas or Rehnquist. And a similar effect will occur in the lower courts. When the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., dealt with gays and lesbians in the military, we were generally supported by those appointed by Democratic Presidents and opposed by those appointed by Republican Presidents. The pattern is similar elsewhere.
The basic political facts, then, are clear. Where there are differences between Democratic and Republican candidates on questions of discrimination, the Democrat is better in the great preponderance of cases. Outside white-dominated districts in the deep South and a few central city areas, there is increasingly likely to be such a difference between the parties' candidates. Even where the individual Republican has a record as good as his or her Democratic opponent, the Democrat is likely to have an advantage in fighting homophobia, since, where Republicans control executive and legislative branches, they are pulled by party ties to enemies of our rights. Democrats are pulled in the opposite directionto people who believe that gay people are entitled to the protection of their Constitution. Voting for a Republican candidate for the House who is simply about the same as his or her Democratic opponent on our issues makes sense only if you think it is really helpful for Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey to lead the House instead of Democratic leaders, all of whom have consistently voted to end bigotry based on sexual orientation. For example, two of the Republican House members with the best record in their party on our behalf, when asked by the Human Rights Campaign to be the lead sponsors of the bill to outlaw discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation, specifically refused. When I urged them to reconsider, they explained that they could not do so because they didn't want to anger Newt Gingrich. They did agree to be among the 150 cosponsors.
Gay and lesbian appointees and staffers of Republican officials and candidates are under sustained pressure to stay in the closet. More and more these days their Democratic counterparts feel free to be honest about their sexuality. There are dozens of openly gay and lesbian people serving responsibly and well in policy-making positions in the Clinton administration; I can think of none in the Bush and Reagan years. All but two or three of the members of the Congressional Gay and Lesbian Staff Caucus work for Democratic members of Congress; all but two of the elected officials who are honest about their homosexuality are Democrats. Even Bob Dole's inexplicable gay defendersthere appear to be no lesbians in this groupacknowledge that all of his gay employees are deeply closeted.
This is not an argument for merging the movement for gay rights with the Democratic Party. It certainly doesn't mean that we should support in any way homophobic Democrats. Before Sam Nunn decided to quit the Senate, I was urging supporters to do whatever they could to defeat him next year, even if that meant supporting a Republican, since any replacement would be less influential. Straining a commitment to gay and lesbian rights through a pre-existing partisan screen is a betrayal of our cause. But so is straining that commitment through a predetermined, anti-partisan screen.
The argument against supporting Democrats as a general rule goes something like this: that while the Democrats are better than the Republicans in resisting homophobia, they are not nearly "better enough"; we should not reward the Democrats with any permanent commitment so long as the party falls short of full support for our rights. The short answer to this is that gay men, lesbiansm, and bisexuals should support the Democratic Party most of the time not as a favor to the Democratic Party, but as a favor to ourselves. The problem may be partly semantic. This point might be easier to make if Samuel Gompers had used a different word than "reward" when urging groups like oursnot that he had us particularly in mindto throw our support to our friends in the electoral process and then try to defeat our enemies. Given the state of American politics todayand for the foresee-able futureour support for the Democratic Party is not a reward; it's a strategy. The more Democrats who serve in the House and Senate, the better able we'll be to fight homophobia and win our rights.
A similar pattern is true in most of the states, and there are no states in which the reverse holds. More Democrats in office also means more gay, lesbian, and bisexual appointees free to be honest about their sexuality, and to work for equal rights with the passion and dedication that comes from having experienced bigotry firsthand. Choosing Clinton over Dole means preferring a President who has banned discrimination based on sexual orientation in the granting of security clearances, required all federal agencies to reject sex discrimination in federal employment, provided remedies for federal employees who have been discriminated against, appointed openly gay men and lesbians to a wide range of positions, including judgeships, extended protection to persecuted gay men and lesbians overseas, and spoken out strongly against anti-gay and lesbian referendaversus a man who has been on the oppositei.e., the bigotedside of virtually every gay and lesbian rights issue that has come before Congress in the past twenty years. And given the current field of Republican candidates, Dole is the best we can expect.
Part of the problem is that many Americans, with the distaste for "partisanship" that they grew up with, misunderstand what it means to identify as a Democrat, and to be generally supportive of the Democratic Party. When I was a Democratic state legislator in Massachusetts in the 70's, I won office entirely on my own and received no great favors from the Democratic legislative leadership. I therefore felt free to support Republicans when they came close to my viewsthat was at a time when there was still a healthy moderate faction within the Republican Party. In 1978 I publicly supported a Republican candidate for governor of Massachusetts and the U.S. Senate. When I sought election to the U.S. House, covering a much larger district, I entered into a somewhat different relationship in which I incurred a set of obligations to my fellow Democrats both in the party structure in my Congressional district and in the House leadership. I believe that incurring these obligations has in fact enhanced my ability to fight for the values I most care about, but I recognize that they constrain me somewhat. Consequently, I no longer feel free publicly to support Republican candidates, but neither am I obligated to support Democrats of whom I disapprove. In William Weld's race against John Silber in 1990 for governor of Massachusetts, given among other things Silber's anti-gay record as president of Boston University, I confined my activities on behalf of the Democratic ticket that year to posing for one picture with Silber and my Congressional colleagues in Washington, and issued no statements urging anyone to vote for him. When asked at one gathering, I said that on gay and lesbian issues Weld was a better candidate. The model here is that of the conservative Democratic leader in New York when confronted with the candidacy of the radicalby his standardsWilliam Jennings Bryan as the Democratic nominee for President in 1900, who was heard to comment, "I am a Democrat still. Very still."
Those of us who have some positions where we have incurred obligations to the party ought not explicitly to support Republicans. But no such constraint applies to the great majority of Democrats. It is entirely reasonable for advocates of gay and lesbian rights to support the Democratic Party most of the time, and to support Republicans where that better advances the cause. Indeed, I wish Democratic supporters of gay and lesbian rights were more frequently confronted with a situation in which the Republican was the better candidate on our issues. Sadly, given the right-wing grip on today's Republican Party, that is very rarely the case anywhere in the country.
Paradoxically, while this argument against identifying with the Democrats is based on the Democrats not being good enough and not deserving our support, there is a variant of it which builds on the fact that the Democrats have in fact been much better than the Republicans. This is the argument that we should hold the Democrats to a higher standard because we have a right to expect more of our friends. The problem here is that it states only half of a sensible political approach. It becomes whole only if you couple it with a recognition that because your friends are in fact your friends, you have an interest not just to criticize them but also to help them win.
The argument that we should not give the Democrats full support because they aren't good enough is an emotional oneand it's an emotion I fully share, having experienced it myself much of the time over the past 25 years in which I have been working my legislative colleagues and Executive Branch officials to persuade them to oppose homophobia. It's bad enough having to plead, trade, and argue for rights that we should be able to take for granted. And as with any cause that is important, it's especially aggravating to have to argue with someone who you think should know better. The statement "we expect more from our friends" is not so much a statistical prediction as it is a value judgment. Harry Truman said that being President meant spending an enormous amount of time persuading people to do what they should have been smart enough to do on their own in the first place. That is true of all politics. I understand how frustrating it is to have to persuade someone who should know it already that ending officially sanctioned homophobia is very important. I wish that it weren't necessary. But I also wish that I could eat more without gaining weight, and that I could work as long and hard today as I could 25 years ago without getting tired. But I restrict my food intake and say no to invitations and proposals that I would like to accept. And I spend time pushing my friends to do better when I wish I could simply insist that they behave appropriately and have them instantly respond.
If this were simply a matter of some Democrats having their feelings hurt because they weren't given enough positive reinforcement, it would not be worth mentioning. But taken with the intellectual error that it reinforces, it diverts us from the best use of our political energies. Intellectually, the argument that we should expect more from our friends translates all too often into a strategy of ignoring the need to help our friends get into office or to stay there. Indeed, those supporters of gay and lesbian rights who are articulating this viewpoint that the Democrats should be held to a higher standard seem to be operating with an implicit model that assumes a world divided into friendly elected officials who are Democrats and unfriendly elected officials who are Republicans. In this model, the role of activists is to criticize our friends when they are less than perfect, and cheer for our enemies when they are less than terrible.
The problem is that this ignores the most important political goal, which is to increase the number of your friends in office. As we relearned in the 1994 elections, there is nothing pre-ordained about Democratic majorities in the Congress. One reason that the number of hostile Congresspeople increased in 1994 was that we were more focused on criticizing our friends' failings than on helping them stay in office. Not just gay activists but other groups as wellcivil libertarians, feminists, environmentalists, supporters of racial fairnessacted as if they assumed that a given number of Democrats would be in office, and that their job was to make the officeholders' lives somewhat miserable until they improved their position. Instead, they undermined their friends and wound up with people in power much less sympathetic to their causes.
Another problem with this model is that it betrays a very unsophisticated notion of how to get people to move closer to your position. Several times this year I have heard angry complaints from Democrats who were confronted by gay and lesbian activists criticizing them for the shortcomings of Democrats. In one case, a Democratic leader was criticized because only 76% of all Democrats supported D.C.'s domestic partners ordinance. Given that 85% of all Republicans had voted the wrong way, he was understandably distressed to be treated as a laggard in need of correction. In another case, some supporters of sensible AIDS education spent a good deal of time denouncing Democrats for not being unanimous in opposing a Republican effort to undermine AIDS education. Again, the vote on the critical issue was lopsidedly in our favor on the Democratic side and overwhelmingly opposed on the Republican side. But because the Republicans had produced nearly 20% of their membership, close to an all-time high, the response was to leave them alone and denounce the Democrats for not being unanimous. The final example comes from the Washington Blade. On March 1 they reported on the anti-gay marriage bill in Colorado. The vote was, among Republicans, 31 in favor of the bill and 9 opposed. The Democrats opposed the bill by a margin of 22 to 2. How did the Blade report this? The subhead read "Two Democrats Blamed for Narrow Passage." That is, on a bill where more than 70% of the Republicans voted against us, while more than 90% of the Democrats supported us, the conclusion of the Blade was that this was the Democrats' fault. It is factually true that, if the Democrats had been unanimous, apparently the bill would have lost. It is also true that this demonstrates the central point: the more Democrats we have in virtually all legislative bodies, the less likely we are to be victimized by anti-gay and lesbian legislation. To give the Republicans credit, as the Blade article does, because only about 70% of them voted against us, and to blame the Democrats because only 90% of them voted for us, is indicative of the kind of confusion that hurts our efforts.
There is a version of game theory which says that you should, if you're trying to get people to do something, never appear to be satisfied with their efforts until they are 100% on your side. In this view, one should always be pressing for more and never express too much satisfaction lest people "take you for granted." This is very poor human relations and very bad politics. Groups that adopt this attitude tend to take themselves out of the political marketplace. Elected officials who find themselves criticized because they are only 80% on your side are much more likely to figure that they might as well stop trying to please you as to make an extra effort to accomplish the remaining 20%. The counterproductive nature of this effort among Democrats is compounded when the Human Rights Campaign, one of the major proponents of this view, contributes $5,000 to the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. Contributing to individual Republicans who support gay and lesbian rights is a perfectly sensible thing to do. Giving $5,000 to the entity whose job it is to provide funds for all Republican candidates makes no sense at all. It certainly is not an effective way to persuade Democratic incumbents to do more.
Holding your friends to a higher standard is half an argument. The other half is recognizing that they are your friends, that you and they have common interests, and in particular in the political context that you have an interest in helping them win. This is why the Human Rights Campaign finds itself overwhelmingly supporting Democrats, not from any partisan predisposition, but as an inevitable consequence of their commitment to advance fairness for lesbians and gay men. Where individual Republicans are supportive, the Human Rights Campaign respondsindeed it looks hard for Republicans it can support. This is reasonable, but even with this accommodation, their fealty to the cause results in the HRC supporting Democrats more than 90% of the time. The unfair criticism the HRC received from some Republicans because of this probably contributed to the rare error they made recently when they contributed to the Republican Campaign Committee. Contributions to individual Republicans who have been strongly supportive of our fight make sense, but the attempted outreach to the broader Republican Party was futile, given its relentless march to the right.
While the Human Rights Campaign has on the whole struggled sensibly and effectively with this dilemma, the record of the Log Cabin Republicans is a much less defensible one. Given the vast disparity between the two parties in their support for gay and lesbian rights, these Republicans have a dilemma of their own. How do you urge gay men and lesbians to vote Republican when that will almost always mean a strengthening of those dedicated to enacting homophobia into law? This dilemma was made worse by the 1994 elections. Gay Republicans can point to our defeats on issues such a domestic partners and gays in the military when the Democrats controlled Congress, despite the fact that, on the roll call on these issues, we received the support of a significant majority of Democrats, only to lose because of the extremely heavy percentage of Republicans voting against us. But once the Republicans took control of Congress, the Log Cabin Club and their allies understood not only that there was no chance that the Republicans would be supportive of us, but that we were also likely to suffer significant setbacks in some of the areas where we had previously been successful. That has in fact been the case: we have seen significant cutbacks in housing for people with AIDS; the Ryan White Bill has still not been re-enacted into law as of March 1996 and, whereas the House in 1993 under the Democrats rejected the effort by Congressman Robert Dornan to expel military people who are HIV-positive, in the current Republican Congress we lacked the votes to prevent this vicious, bigoted piece of legislation from being enacted. And, of course, only President Clinton's veto has prevented the Republicans from abolishing the federal Medicaid program, which has been the single greatest source providing care for people with AIDS.
The Log Cabin's response has been twofold: using a double standard to judge the parties; and blaming the victimour-selveswhen even that double standard cannot justify a pro-Republican stance for gay and lesbian rights advocates. The Log Cabin Club asserts that the Democrats should be more supportive in gratitude for the votes they have received from our community. In their version of history, in which liberal advocates led gay and lesbian voters into the Democratic Party years ago, but we have not been adequately compensated. But that gets history exactly backwards. As I noted in Part I of this essay, up until 1970 there was no organized gay or lesbian activity in either political party of any significance, and neither party was at all responsive to our claims. Gay and lesbian support for Democrats has resulted in large part from the greater responsiveness of the Democratic Party to our quest for fairness. Gay men and lesbians have been more active in the Democratic Party not out of some predetermined partisan commitment, but because Democrats, with a greater orientation towards human rights and using the government to protect minorities against discrimination in general, have been far more hospitable to our efforts than have the Republicans. Thirty years ago there were virtually no openly gay or lesbian political figures in either party. Today, there are a large number of us who feel free to be honest about who we are, and well over 95% of us are Democrats.
Based on inaccurate history, the Log Cabin Club consistently criticizes Democrats more harshly than Republicans on the record. A recent statement from the Log Cabin Club noted the defeats we suffered in Congress in 1993-94, with no mention of the fact that this came because 80 to 90 percent of the Republicans generally joined 30 percent of the Democrats to inflict these defeats. When Bill Clinton takes firm executive action to ban discrimination in federal employment based on sexual orientation, appoints openly gay and lesbian officials to office, and writes a strong letter opposing anti-gay referenda in the states, the Log Cabin Republicans criticize this as inadequate. When Newt Gingrich compares gay men and lesbians to alcoholics in a grudging assertion that we should be tolerated, or when Bob Dole says in a fourth reversal that he is now sorry he returned the Log Cabin Club's campaign contribution, the Log Cabin response is to congratulate them for their open-mindedness.
This one-sidedness in judgment hit a peak recently when the Log Cabin Club issued its analysis of Republicans in Congress. Recognizing that you cannot make an intellectually honest case for voting Republican if your primary concern is advancing gay rights, the Log Cabin Club did an analysis of only the Republican Members of Congress. Their purpose was to show that the Republicans are not nearly as bad on gay and lesbian rights as we think. Having worked with very little success over the past 15 years to try to get any significant amount of Republican support on the floor of the House to fight homophobia, watching the last few Republican conventions and national Presidential campaigns, and looking at the data the Log Cabin Club itself puts forward, when I read their conclusion that the Republicans are really not so bad, I am reminded of the question Chico Marx asks in a movie: "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"
If you apply the extraordinarily generous criteria that the Log Cabin Club uses to rate Republicanspeople who make homophobic remarks and almost always vote against us are rated as "tolerant"the Democrats come out as the Legion of Superheroes. While they understand how fatal it would be to their arguments if they actually compared the parties, the Log Cabin Analysis attempts to discredit the pro-Democratic result by pointing to regional and urban/rural differences. Specifically, they argue that their "report also demonstrates that rating scores have more to do with regional demographics and culture than with political affiliation." In other words, it's not fair to compare Democrats and Republicans because Democrats tend to come from areas that are more supportive of gay and lesbian fairness issues than Republicans. Unfortunately for them, there is one set of statistics that completely demolishes this argument. It is one that they scrupulously avoid.
We have a very large number of political constituencies in the last two Congresses that have had both Democratic and Republican representatives in exactly the same district. Thus, we have a basis for comparison in which only partisanship is at issue. And the results, not surprisingly, show an overwhelming Democratic superiority. We have 56 House seats where Democrats who served 1993-4 were replaced by Republicans in 1995. It is true that these districts are on the whole less supportive of gay and lesbian rights than those districts which are solidly Democratic, because demographics are a factor. But this gives us a chance to see what difference it makes in those districts that do not swing between the parties.
Fifty-seven percent of the Democrats who held these seats in the 103rd Congress voted to allow the District of Columbia to continue its domestic partnership law. In 1995, when the Republicans proposed an even harsher anti-domestic partnership motion concerning the District of Columbia than they had in 1993, only six percent of the Republicans who replaced these Democrats voted with us. A second important issue in the previous Congress was the Republican effort to penalize school systems that treat gay and lesbian students with compassion. Some 78 percent of the Democrats who were replaced by Republicans in the current Congress voted against bigotry in that instance. While there was not comparable vote in 1995 because no bill came up that could have been a vehicle for such an amendment, we did have a vote on a Republican motion to restrict severely the administration's AIDS education program, in which similar anti-gay and lesbian sentiments came into play. On this vote, only nine percent of those Republicans who had replaced Democrats upheld the sensible AIDS education program.
In the Senate, there is a similar measure. In 1993-94, there were 20 states where one Senator was a Democrat and one was a Republican. In 1995, there were 18 such states. In 1993-94, in 19 of the 20 states where there was divided representation, the Democratic Senator had a better voting record than the Republican on gay and lesbian issues. In one state they were tied. Last year the Republicans did better. There was one state where the Republican was marginally better than the DemocratStrom Thurmond got a 25 percent record in 1995 while Ernest Hollings got a 0 percent in South Carolina. And in five states the Republican and Democratic votes were the same. But in twelve states, the Democrat was better than the Republican. So, in both years, there are large, statistically significant differences between Senators from the same state and different party when it comes to supporting our rights. In 31 instances over the two Congresses, the Democrat was better than the Republican. In once instance the Republican was better than the Democrat, and six came out even.
The final argument that the Log Cabin Club advances is that a Republican who's supportive of gay rights will do more good than a Democrat because he or she will be able to influence fellow Republicans. That argument has some appeal in theory but has produced no success in practice. After fifteen years of serving in the House, I can think of no Republican other than Steve Gunderson who has consistently and actively worked with any success to bring other Republican votes to our cause. The anti-gay and lesbian feelings among Republicans are so deeply rooted that even when a powerful and strongly supportive person like Governor Weld tries to be helpful, the results are nil. Thus Weld failed when he tried to get his fellow moderate Republican John McKernan not to veto a gay and lesbian rights bill. And Governor Weld, Congresswoman Connie Morella, Congressman Chris Shays and others of the small handful of Republicans who are consistently supportive of our rights find themselves pressured by the partisan necessity overwhelmingly in support of strong anti-gay and lesbian Republicans for other offices. Personally they are with us. Politically, their influence when they are not themselves on our ballot is almost always used to hurt our friends and help those oppose to our rights.
Of course, it is important for us to have lesbians and gay men who are in agreement with the Republicans on a range of issues but who are also willing to fight against the tide within that party for gay and lesbian rights. It is essential for our ultimate success that Republicans know that if and when they are prepared to move to a less homophobic position, they will receive support for it. My problem is not with the Log Cabin Club trying to move Republicans into a more sympathetic position, but the fact that they pretend to a far greater degree of success than they have accomplished. In fact, during the period the Log Cabin Republicans have been the most active, the Republican Party has if anything gotten worst on the issues of concern to us. It is not the Log Cabin Republicans' fault that they have had no influence. It is their fault that they pretend to a greater influence than they have, because this misleads other gay and lesbian voters.
The problem is that few political organizations can succeed forever if they are unable to claim any success. Having had no success in moving the Republican Party to a less bigoted position, the Log Cabin Club instead claims credit when the Republicans do not dismantle the Ryan White bill. And while Ryan White is a very important piece of legislation, it is defended in Congress by a wide range of interests, including the major metropolitan areas where most of the funds are spent. At the same time, the Log Cabin Club is absolutely silent on the Republicans' dismantling of Medicaid, which is a far more important source of funds for treating people with AIDS than is Ryan White.
It would be very useful to us if we had an organization that succeeded in preaching gay rights to Republicans. Sadly, over the last few years the Log Cabin Club has been much more notable for preaching Republicanism to gay and lesbian activists.