Tomorrow is Oakland Gay Pride, an event I attend whenever I can. It is always a reminder to me that gay people who are also racial minorities – a group to which I do not belong – face special challenges. But it is also a reminder to me, a relatively late arriver to the cause of gay rights, that we stand on the shoulders of giants, and that however little we may increase their heights, we must continue standing.
So yesterday, to get myself in the mood, I went in search of articles about gay rights. I came across one by Wayne Anderson, a veteran and an activist, in the Huffington Post titled “Why I’m Sticking With Hillary Clinton.”
The good news is that we live in a democratic republic and Anderson can stick to whomever he pleases. The bad news is that the glue is weak. I haven’t read a more incoherent jumble of non sequitur, mixed metaphors and impoverished reasoning since the last time I read Lewis Carroll. But it does present us with an opportunity to revisit and rebut some of the most common arguments against Bernie Sanders.
Anderson gives us two reasons for supporting Clinton: “Her record on the issues I care about” and her opponents, who “are not only disappointing but sometimes downright scary.”
On the issues, Anderson briefly mentions “Health care, gay rights, women’s rights, immigration, the economy,” but his real concern here is that second one, gay rights.
Anderson begins his argument for Hillary by listing Bill’s accomplishments. Put aside the obvious incoherence of that. Let’s look at the evidence of Bill’s gay rights agenda.
He naturally points first to the military’s well-intentioned, if ill-advised, don’t ask, don’t tell policy that was implemented during the Bill Clinton administration. He also naturally omits the Defense of Marriage Act. And the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the model for state laws that serve the noble purpose of shielding business owners from the homosexual terror. And the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which has the dubious distinction of being one of the few things that unite right, left and center in their condemnation.
But frankly, I don’t want to hang Bill’s albatrosses around Hillary’s neck – she did not sign those bills. So let’s look at her long, four-year history of supporting the queer community.
Anderson quotes Hillary Clinton’s 2011 speech in front of the U.N. (“Gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights”) and says, “Hillary Clinton’s politics have pretty much always seemed in step with my own.”
That’s possibly because Clinton’s politics have pretty much always seemed in step with the majority of the country’s, at least as reflected in Pew polling: in 2011, when she made that speech, support for gay marriage essentially equaled the opposition to it for the first time (45 percent versus 46 percent, well within the margin of error).
And I wonder if Anderson also waited to support gay marriage until 2013, as did Clinton (according to a video released that year on March 18) and 49 percent of Americans (according to a Pew poll published two days later).
I really don’t mean this to be a polemic against Clinton. Her heart, I believe, was always in the right place, and her public declaration of support – like all public declarations of support – did matter.
No, I am incensed, rather, by Anderson’s tired attack on Sanders and his neglect of Sanders’s enduring commitment to the queer community.
He writes, “I cannot support a socialist for president. I love America.” Let’s skip over the unsupported assertion that these two positions are mutually exclusive, because it is beside the point. As has been well rehearsed before, Sanders is not a socialist, who would advocate state seizure of the means of production. He is a democratic socialist, who advocates an economy with a robust safety net, checks on the concentration of wealth in order to promote capitalist entrepreneurship, and a political system with strong civil liberties.
Which, note, sounds like the America that obtains whenever Congress feels inclined to take a break from its pursuit of infamy and funds the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program. Or Social Security. Or the highways.
To explain his love of America, Anderson recalls the American dream – the Henry Ford legend that we can be born poor and die rich: “America is one of the few countries where you can be born poor yet rise to the highest of heights in our society.”
I say “recalls” because the American dream hasn’t been anything more than an idle lie we tell our school children for some some time. To cite just one report of many, in 2010, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development studied the link between parents’ earnings and their children’s in 12 European and Northern American countries (plus Australia). Only in Great Britain and Italy is the relationship between what your parents made yesterday and what you make today stronger.
I suppose I should be happy that Americans have strong family ties in at least one respect. While Anderson is right to call America exceptional, he is wrong to say that American-style capitalism makes hard work pay. And that’s the whole point of Sanders’s campaign – we have to rethink how we structure our economy so that even if you grew up on skid row, your twilight years might be spent on Nob Hill.
Look, I love America too. I think we have enormous potential. We are an exceptional country in many ways – we have the strongest protection of civil liberties, in my opinion, of any Western developed country. But Anderson doesn’t seem to realize how bad our economy has gotten, how minuscule our middle class is and how corrupt our politics has become.
But strangest of all, since he spends so much of his piece singing the praises of Clinton’s record on gay rights, Anderson omits any mention of Sanders’s record. In the 1970s, a time when many states still banned gay sex, Sanders published a letter to a newspaper calling for an end to laws that regulate homosexuality. In the 1980s, as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders supported measures authorizing a gay pride parade and banning discrimination in housing based on sexual orientation, among other identities. As a Congressional representative in 1996, he voted against DOMA.
I wonder what this record falls under – Anderson’s rubric of “disappointing” or “dangerous.” I suspect the latter, in that it makes Bernie a threat to Hillary.
All this matters. The public support of our leaders – cultural or political – leads to a kind of self-fulfilling cycle, a perpetual motion pendulum with an ever-widening arc. We gay people sometimes live in small towns, are members of small churches, have few friends. Sometimes, the only gay people we see are those tall public figures. And when they or their allies argue publicly that we are not child-molesting devils incarnate, we decide to test the theory out on our friends and family. And when we do, our friends and family reconsider their positions on homosexuality. When they also conclude that we are not child-molesting devils incarnate, the public on average begins to accept our sexuality more. This encourages more people coming out. Shampoo, rinse, repeat.
But public support of our leaders matters much more when it is a minority opinion. It was in the years of Stonewall, of Matthew Shepard, of prohibitions on gay immigrants that we needed the public support of our leaders. In March 2013, with Glee on its way to its fourth season, a majority of citizens refusing to condemn homosexuality and even a Republican congressman proclaiming his support of gay marriage – the support feels about as authentic as the use of an equals sign as a Facebook profile picture. Thanks, sweetie, but where were you.
I write the above with all due respect to Anderson. I know gay veterans who served during the 1980s and 1990s, and I respect and appreciate his and their bravery and stoicism in the face of oppression. It takes courage to serve in the military; it takes adamantine chutzpah to have served as a gay person. And of course Anderson is free to support Clinton.
But the evidence he marshals to that support is just plain wrong. If the gay rights movement struggled to change the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens, Hillary Clinton is, at best, one of millions of its success stories. Bernie Sanders is one of its participants.
I always benefit from my friends at Bay Area for Bernie, but special thanks go to Caely B. and Jess P., who provided extensive comments, and sometimes actual wording, to this post. Anything you particularly like is probably theirs.
The header image is adapted from “OakPride-38” by Flickr user Chris Witte. It is distributed under Creative Commons licenses CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.