JANUARY 10, 1997 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 9
SPEAK OUT
There's confusion on gays in conservative ranks
by Marvin Liebman
"There they go again," I said to myself the other day, paraphrasing Ronald Reagan's zinger from five elections back. Only this time, it was Reagan's own party-and some of my former colleagues in Republican politics-who provoked me.
On the issue of homosexuality, it seems, conservatives may have strong passions but very little intellectual common ground, and almost no political consensus. The GOP camp, of course, does not have the corner on conflicting, sometimes contradictory viewpoints in its ranks or even in the minds of individual members. Gays elicit all sorts of ambivalence and discord among Democrats, independents, and the unregistered. But what makes cases involving conservatives so interesting are the tendencies to oppose what they often admit is a personal issue in political terms and to deny the parallels between anti-gay prejudice and other sometimes violent forms of intolerance.
Take Norman Podhoretz, former editorin-chief of Commentary, an initiator of neoconservatism, and author of the lamentation "How the Gay-Rights Movement Won" in the magazine's November issue. From the abundance of notes and allusions, the writer, a longtime conservative political insider, deserves credit at least for bothering to read what gay people have to say about the complicated state of our movement for dignity and equal rights. He also acknowledges that in his own experience homosexuals "tended to be amusing companions." Well might he say so after conversations with such typical right-wing wits as Lou Sheldon, Paul Cameron, and James Dobson.
The goodwill that Podhoretz appears to feel for some gays on a personal level (as do
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many of his peers) makes his political stance on homosexuality seem all the more callous. In deploring the progress gays have made towards acceptance and full citizenship, he bemoans.that "not even the knowledge of its connection with AIDS can tarnish or compromise its [homosexuality's] new reputation as a normal and healthy 'orientation'."
November to political musings by stalwarts of the right about the role of the courts in shaping public policy. Several identified the Supreme Court's May ruling in Romer v. Evans (striking down Colorado's anti-gay Amendment Two) in contemplating action to overthrow the government. The publica-
The goodwill that Podhoretz tion cited "the necesappears to feel for some gays on a personal level (as do many of his peers) makes his political stance on homosexuality seem all the more callous.
Podhoretz, still, like many conservatives trying to find a grounding for antigay politics, extrapolates from a twisted conception of gay men only, casting them as disease-spreading creatures for whom the "danger of infection" obscures almost every other reality and hope. He mentions AIDS twentyone times in the article. As a kind of selfevident dismissal, he raises the specter of the doom the disease poses over the lives of three individuals whose work he cites.
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Of gay men, he opines flatly that "the life they live is not as good as the life available to men who make their beds with women.' And, in what may strike some readers as simply a matter of perspectives and others as an unwitting condemnation of sexism, he asserts that "men using one another as women constitutes a perversion."
But Podhoretz is not alone in trying to cut his way, albeit clumsily, through the thicket of mixed feelings that have grown up around conservatives with the emergence of the gay rights movement.
First Things, another monthly journal with a conservative following, opened its pages in
sary conformity of civil law to moral truth" and called for "civil disobedience" or more aggressive means to achieve it. Fellow conservative Midge Decter (Mrs. Podhoretz), no defender of gays, later leaped into the fray over the First Things essays, chiding her cohorts' girding for revolution as "reckless." "We are still America, not ‘Amerika'," responded William Bennett, no stranger to anti-gay diatribes of his own. And none other than Norman Podhoretz voiced similar contempt for the direction of the debate.
Yet the rhetoric of Podhoretz's own article reminded me of appeals to anti-Semitism rooted in the idea that there was something unhealthy and menacing about Jews. Like Podhoretz, those promoting such scare tactics-derived from centuries-old undercurrents that emerged as the hideous overtones in the 1930s and 40s-seemed to take for granted that the prevailing standard for Jewish identity should be shame. It was with seeming nostalgia that Podhoretz recalled how just a few decades ago, homosexuals "mostly seemed to share in the almost universally held assumption that there was something wrong with homosexuality." This is a
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strange parallel to be found in the pages of the official publication of the American Jewish Committee.
The First Things debate reminded me of the far right's finger-pointing after George Bush's landslide loss in 1992. It wasn't that the party, after its disastrous convention in Houston, was slouching towards theocracy and alarming broad sectors of the American people. "Not at all," asserted several anti-gay GOP stalwarts like Phyllis Schlafly and Gary Bauer, with an earnestness that suggested they were not just keeping a stiff upper lip. The real problem, they insisted, was that Bush and other Republicans had not hoisted the anti-gay banner high enough.
While those on different parts of the political spectrum have their own hang-ups with homosexuality, conservatives hasten to put their anxieties in political terms. Those terms are becoming increasingly full of fractures. Gay rights supporters, rather than simply writing off all anti-gay conservatives as "extremists," would do well to refute their assertions when possible and probe those splits at every opportunity. For as divisions widen, anti-gay politics loses not only credibility but its very core.
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