By Ann Rostow
Creating Chaos
The GLBT movement’s youth-dominated left edge has lost its focus. That is, if it ever had any focus to begin with. I’m talking to you: the dozens of crazy hateful GLBT screamers who yelled insults, crowded out and terrified the participants in a Jewish reception at the National GLBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change conference last week in Chicago.
The GLBT’s right edge has always been something of an oddity, in my humble opinion. And as for the center, most people are still engaged, but our agenda isn’t as captivating as it was when the lodestar of marriage equality sparkled before us. Here’s a Title VII case. There’s a girl in a lesbian t-shirt. Here’s a municipal referendum. There’s a state legislative fight. Here’s a custody dispute. There’s a mean bakery. It’s all important. It also represents the relentless slog that always underlies progress in the struggle for civil rights.
But who under the age of thirty wants to bother with this boring trudge when they could be protesting instead?! Don’t get me wrong. I’ve done my share of protests and lobby days and rallies, mostly as a reporter rather than an activist. But all of them served a specific purpose. Now, it’s protest for its own sake. To be part of a group. To let loose an incoherent spray of anger, full of sound and fury signifying who knows what.
I refuse to believe that the two hundred or so anti-Israeli demonstrators who disrupted and effectively cancelled that reception truly believed that the state of Israel should not exist. Even as some paraphrased Hamas, chanting: “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea,” I give these kids the benefit of the doubt. They are not anti-Semitic. No, they are clueless. They have reached chronological adulthood without a sense of history or a mature grasp of complex thinking. Paradoxically, they also lack compassion, although that could just be an age thing.
And they’re mad! Whether on campus or at a conference, they are exploding with indiscriminate outrage at every injustice the world coughs up, whether serious or inconsequential. Unarmed black men shot by police? Now, there’s something worth protesting. An email on whether or not authorities at Yale should pontificate on Halloween costumes? Not so much. Palestinian rights? By all means. One of Israel’s leading GLBT activist groups holding a reception? Um, no.
I guess the most dispiriting aspect of this phenomenon for our community is its uselessness. There’s no particular goal, save to silence someone on the other side of something. There’s no political action. No effort to get out the vote for a candidate. No lobbying for legislation. No fundraising. No campaigns, unless you count the campaigns for safe spaces at perfectly safe American universities. There’s just the anger.
Which reminds me of the Trump anger, which is also undifferentiated and uninformed—the flip side of the same coin.
Our community has always needed all of us to pull our weight in order and to get things done. Left and center and right. Young, middle aged, and old. Poor and rich. White and not white. Lesbian and bi; gay and trans. I’m thinking we don’t have that unity anymore.
So the question is: Have we made enough progress to coast forward through the next decade or two without a pragmatic contribution from the next generation? Maybe, maybe not.
Pink-colored Glasses
So here’s a larger question for the beginning of a new year: Are things getting better in this country, or worse? I’m still talking about the gay rights movement, but I’m also talking about America in general. Huge majorities say we’re going in the “wrong direction.” If you listen to the Republicans, it would seem that we’re a broken nation in steep decline, threatened by unchecked illegal immigration, massive job losses, with armed terrorists prepping for massacres in big cities and small towns alike.
As for the GLBT community, the pundits are full of warnings about how the fight is not over and the coming year will be an unrelenting battle with antigay legislators. Marriage is great, many say. But we can still get fired and thrown out of our homes!
At the risk of appearing less intelligent or smart, let me say that I’m stuck like a dope, with a thing called hope, and I can’t get it out of my heart. (That’s South Pacific! Guys, turn in your gay cards if you failed to recognize the line from “I’m Just a Cockeyed Optimist.”)
We have the strongest economy in the world. Unemployment is around five percent; we’ve added ten million jobs in the last six years. Illegal immigration has declined under Obama, from over twelve million to around eleven million. Plus, immigrants pay taxes and expand the economy, whether legal or not. Crime is down. The stock market, despite its recent dip, has soared. We have major long-term problems to deal with, including income inequality, intractable racism, stagnant wages, global warming and stability in the Middle East. But these require sustained effort and thoughtful policies, not crazy calls for bombing and border patrols. One hopes that general election voters will agree.
As for the gay community, we do indeed face draconian bills emerging in dozens of state legislatures. Some of these will fall of their own weight. Others will be challenged in court. I really don’t feel like going through the laundry list right now. But the gay community now enjoys record majority support from the American people across all demographics. The right to marry is far more than a stepping-stone to equality. It is a bridge, which not only gives us a specific “right,” but knits our families into the fabric of America and destroys the stereotype of the lone gay pervert who thinks of nothing but his or her next sexual encounter. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
I read an interesting piece on Huff Post by Dana Beyer, head of Gender Rights Maryland, who faults our leading gay organizations and commentators for dark talk about how we can be fired or face bias in half the states. The legal evolution of the last few years, she notes, basically means that transgender men and women, along with gays and lesbians, are indeed protected against discrimination under federal law, even though no one has explicitly added “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” to the text of our statutes.
She is correct. And it’s hard to argue with the implication that HRC and others want to exaggerate the continuing risks to our community in order to keep the pressure on the grass roots and lawmakers. On the other hand, we need more than agency interpretations and court precedent to secure our place in federal law. While many courts may rule in favor of gay plaintiffs under Title VII, there will still be some who stick to the letter of the law or find a way to distinguish a case to our disadvantage. The fight does continue, and we cannot let the Equality Act languish ENDA-like for decades. (The Equality Act will specifically add the GLBT community into a range of federal anti-bias laws.)
But the arc of history doesn’t bend towards justice like a sapling, ready to spring back at the first opportunity. Once it passes the apogee, gravity pulls it inevitably towards justice, as will be the case for us now that we are well on the downside of history’s ill treatment.
Sing with me! I have heard people rant and rave and bellow…That we’re done and we might as well be dead. But I’m only a cockeyed optimist! And I can’t get it into my head.
Roy Moron at It Again
You heard, I’m sure, that Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore issued a legal statement telling state probate judges that they are under no obligation to perform same-sex marriages because the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling only applied to the four states under review.
Yes, this is like saying Court-ordered desegregation only applied to the schools in Topeka, but Roy Moore is the same man who defied federal authority when he refused to dismantle a two ton decalogue in the rotunda of the Alabama courthouse. He basically does whatever the hell he wants to do, regardless of legal niceties.
Nothing Roy Moore says or does will roll back marriage rights in Alabama, but his annoying proclamation clogs up the process, allowing fringe judges to buck the High Court based on the alleged “confusion.” Most judges have continued to follow the Constitution, but there are 13 counties where scofflaw judges still maintain that they are not bound by the Supreme Court.
They’re not alone. In Tennessee and in other spots around the country there are Kim Davis-like renegades, who have yet to be forced into court by gay couples. I’m not sure why. In truth, I have spent the last month watching football, and although I read about this or that bad judge, I haven’t read about any major lawsuits against them.
Back At The Bar
But speaking of major lawsuits, we’ve had a few interesting cases since last we met. In one of them, a federal judge in California ruled that two lesbians could sue Pepperdine University for anti-gay discrimination under Title IX. This is exactly the sort of lawsuit we were referring earlier to when we noted that gays and lesbians are de facto covered by federal laws, including Title IX, Title VII, and the Fair Housing Act. Indeed, Lambda is relying on the Fair Housing Act to sue a homeowner in Colorado who refused to rent to a transwoman and her family. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just secured a six-figure settlement in a Title VII case for a transwoman who was harassed on the job at Phoenix-based check cashing company Deluxe Financial Services.
We’ve also seen more victories in our war against unfriendly business owners, with a ruling by a New York appellate court against a farm that refused to let two women use its commercial wedding services for their marriage.
A month or so ago, cake baker Sweet Melissa and her husband Aaron Klein, were finally forced to shell out the $135,000 in damages they owed to the state of Oregon and the two women they dissed several years back. The money will sit around through additional legal appeals, and lest you feel sorry for them, they’ve picked up half a million in crowd funding from their sympathetic co-religionists.
Meanwhile, the florist in Washington, accused of the same nefarious bigotry, is appealing her conviction to the state’s high court. Barronnell Stutzmann has also raised nearly $100,000 online, but claims her $1,000 fine will send her into bankruptcy.
State attorney general Bob Ferguson just filed a 64-page brief defending the Washington anti-discrimination law and urging the court to tell Barronnell what’s what.
This is not all, by any means.
We won a t-shirt case in Tennessee.
We won a federal court ruling January 4 in California in the case of a widow denied her wife’s pension by FedEx.
And we won a significant victory in Massachusetts, where a state court judge said that a Catholic girls’ school could not rely on a First Amendment right to freedom of religious expression to justify the dismissal of a gay food service worker. If the guy was a teacher, it might be a different story. But the presence of a gay catering employee does not undermine the school’s capacity to represent its religious views. Notably, the school in question, Fontbonne Academy, did not limit itself to Catholic students.
So, our marriage equality lawsuits may be settled. But as you can tell, our adversaries are not finished with us quite yet. At the same time, our court precedents have given us an arsenal of powerful legal weapons and our lawyers are all seasoned veterans. Bring it on, as George W. would say.
arostow@aol.com
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