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Now ease up, Anita

WASHINGTON

Militant leaders of the gay rights "movement" cannot minimize the defeat they suffered at the polls in Miami last week.

They wanted national publicity on this and got it; they wanted a big. turnout at the polls and got it. As a result, Dade County, ordinarily the most liberal bastion in Florida, voted 2-1 against the gays and in favor of Anita Bryant's "crusade" against sexual permissiveness.

Homosexuals framed the issue as civil rights versus outright bigotry. The overwhelming majority did not see it that way.

Nor was the majority vote a demonstration of redneck power, or machomania, or the unreasoning fear of child molestation by hated queers," or a wave of fundamen talist, morality — although a little of all of those appeared.:

Most of the voters framed the issue, as I did, between tacit toleration and outright approval of homosexuality. Most Americans are inclined to let consenting adults do what they like, short of injury, in private, but the gay activists wanted more: The basic "right" they sought was the assertion by society that what they were doing was right.

But they are wrong. In the eyes of the vast majority, homosexuality is an abnormality, a mental illness, even to use an old-fashioned word a sin. Homosexuality is not the "alternative life-style" the gay activists profess; it may be tolerable, acceptable but not

even

approvable.

This don't-ask-for-respectability judgment is not limited to homosexuality. Adultery is gleefully if guiltily practiced by who knows? perhaps a majority of married persons, but if an approving statute were proposed by Activist Adults for Adultery, voters on their way home. from trysts would vote it down overwhelmingly.

Hypocrisy? No, civilization, the understanding that certain moral standards are worth recognizing and perhaps even striving for, even with the knowledge that most people, one time or another, fall short.

Gay activists want more than this; they want the seal on their housekeeping to say "good." That is a moral judgment they have the right to make but not to insist upon from the rest of society, which has the right to make its own contrary judgment and to persuade its children of its value.

Part of that persuasion by society takes place in school. Many of us think that gays should be permitted to teach, provided they do not avow their homosexuality.

Gay activists counter by asking: "Why lie to the children?" One reason is so that private homosexuals can have jobs. If avowed gays were to be teachers, the example they would set to children might well induce some toward emulation of their abnormality, which society wants to discourage.

But the gay militants did not want privacy, they wanted publicity; not content with toleration, they wanted. approval. And so the voters reacted the way most of us do as when war resisters refuse pardons until the U.S. government admits it was wrong by digging in our heels.

The trouble with Miss Bryant's victory is that she now intends to treat the Miami landslide as a license to launch a vast national crusade. That means that the ringing answer given to the activists' demand for moral legitimacy might lash back into an invasion of their legitimate civil rights.

No bluenose moralizer should have the power to tell consenting adults of the same sex they cannot live together in public housing. Gays pay taxes: if they want to love each other, society should get away from the keyhole; if they want to profess their love, that's their free speech. As long as "straights" are not forced to underwrite a homosexual sales message in the classroom, the straights have no right to penalize private citizens for their personal behavior. Let Miss Bryant and her own militant crusaders not misinterpret their victory: No mandate has been given to put the gays on the run or to: repress their right of free expression. She has turned back a danger posed by wrongheaded gay activists and deserves credit for that; she does not deserve to be the matriarch of a new movement that would pose a new danger to those homosexuals who want only to be let alone.

That new danger would be the justification of, the issue as the gay activists originally (and wrongly) framed it: civil rights versus bigotry. If Miss Bryant's nationalized crusade were to take on the trappings of a

William Safire

political party (here comes the federal funding), and if private homosexuals were intimidated to pay. for gay militants' demands, martyrdom would be theirs, and libertarians would be forced to their defense.

So ease up, Anita Bryant; you were given a vote of confidence, not a flaming sword.

• New York Times