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Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture
WASHINGTON — For 15 minutes in the Oval Office the other day, one of President Obama’s
top campaign lieutenants, Steve Hildebrand, told the president about
the “hurt, anxiety and anger” that he and other gay supporters felt
over the slow pace of the White House’s engagement with gay issues.
But
on Monday, 250 gay leaders are to join Mr. Obama in the East Room to
commemorate publicly the 40th anniversary of the birth of the modern
gay rights movement: a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in
New York. By contrast, the first time gay leaders were invited to the
White House, in March 1977, they met a midlevel aide on a Saturday when
the press and President Jimmy Carter were nowhere in sight.
The
conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay
issues reflect a broader paradox: even as cultural acceptance of
homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights
remains full of crosscurrents.
It is reflected in the surge of
gay men and lesbians on television and in public office, and in polls
measuring a steady rise in support for gay rights measures. Despite
approval in California of a ballot measure banning same-sex marriage, it has been authorized in six states.
Yet
if the culture is moving on, national politics is not, or at least not
as rapidly. Mr. Obama has yet to fulfill a campaign promise to repeal
the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The
prospects that Congress will ever send him a bill overturning the
Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a
woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to
include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters:
Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, sent a letter to
clerics in his state arguing that it would be destructive to “faith,
families and freedom.”
“America is changing more quickly than the
government,” said Linda Ketner, a gay Democrat from South Carolina who
came within four percentage points of winning a Congressional seat in
November. “They are lagging behind the crowd. But if I remember my poli
sci from college, isn’t that the way it always works?”
Some
elected Democrats in Washington remain wary because they remember how
conservatives used same-sex marriage and gay service in the military
against them as political issues. The Obama White House in particular
is reluctant to embrace gay rights issues now, officials there say,
because they do not want to provide social conservatives a rallying cry
while the president is trying to assemble legislative coalitions on
health care and other initiatives.
Tony Perkins, the president of
the Family Research Council, a group that opposes gay rights
initiatives, said Mr. Obama’s reluctance to push more assertively for
gay rights reflected public opinion.
“He’s given them a few minor
concessions; they’re asking for more, such as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’
being repealed,” Mr. Perkins said. “The administration is not willing
to go there, and I think there’s a reason for that, and that is because
I think the American public isn’t there.”
Conservative Democrats
have at best been unenthusiastic about efforts to push gay rights
measures in Congress; 30 Democrats voted against a bill prohibiting
discrimination based on sexual orientation that passed the House in
2007. (It died in the Senate.) And a half-dozen Democrats declined
requests to discuss this issue, reflecting what aides called the
complicated politics surrounding it.
Still, there are signs that
the issue is not as pressing or toxic as it once was. “I don’t think
it’s the political deal-breaker it once was,” said Dave Saunders, a
southern Virginia Democratic consultant who has advised Democrats
running for office in conservative rural areas. “Most people out here
really don’t care because everybody has gay friends.”
Interviews
with gay leaders suggest a consensus that there has been nothing short
of a cultural transformation in the space of just a few years, even if
it is reflected more in the evolving culture of the country than in the
body of its laws.
“The diminution of the homophobia has been as
important a phenomena as anything we’ve seen in the last 15 years,”
said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who is gay.
Democrats
now control the White House and both houses of Congress for the first
time since 1994, increasing the chances of legislative action. Mr.
Frank said that over the next two years, he expected Congress to
overturn the ban on gay service in the military, pass legislation
prohibiting discrimination against hiring gay workers, and extend the
hate-crime bill to crimes involving gay couples.
There is also an
emerging generational divide on gay issues — younger Americans tend to
have more liberal positions — that has fueled what pollsters said was a
measurable liberalization in views on gay rights over the past decade.
A
New York Times/CBS News poll last spring found that 57 percent of
people under 40 said they supported same-sex marriage, compared with 31
percent of respondents over 40. Andy Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center,
said the generational shift was reflected in his polling, in which the
number of Americans opposing gay people serving openly in the military
had dropped to 32 percent now from 45 percent in 1994.
David Axelrod,
a senior Obama adviser, said, “You look at polling and attitudes among
younger people on these issues are startlingly different than older
people.”
“As generational change happens,” Mr. Axelrod added, “that’s going to be more and more true.”
In
the view of many gay leaders, the shifts in public attitude are a
validation of the central political goal set by the dozens of gay
liberation groups that sprouted up in cities and on college campuses in
the months after the Stonewall uprising: to have gay men and lesbians who had been living in secret go public as a way of dealing with societal fear and prejudice.
But
there is considerable evidence that this is still an issue that stirs
political concerns. Gay leaders have increasingly complained about what
they call Mr. Obama’s slow pace in fulfilling promises he made during
his campaign. Some boycotted a Democratic Party fund-raiser recently to show their distress.
“I have been really surprised how paralyzed they seem around this,” said Richard Socarides, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay issues.
Mr.
Hildebrand did not respond to calls and e-mail messages asking about
his encounter with Mr. Obama, which he described in a private e-mail
forum for gay political leaders. (The meeting was confirmed by senior
White House officials.)
Still, David Mixner, a longtime gay leader, said he was struck by how things had changed.
“Listen,”
Mr. Mixner said, “in 1992, what we were begging Bill Clinton about —
literally — about whether he was going to say the word ‘gay’ in his
convention speech. Even say it. We had to threaten a walkout to get it
in.”