Heterophobia

The gay-rights movement is waging an all-out offensive against traditional culture, and its program, if enacted, would entail a massive violation of rights -- the rights to property, free association and control of the moral education of one's children.

The movement's latest assault on liberty, the Employment' Non-Discrimination Act of 1994, or ENDA, prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, is founded on three myths promulgated by the gay lobby -- three false premises that almost never are challenged. Underlying this mythology is the dubious notion that gays are a powerless and victimized minority -- a posture of passivity belied by the facts.

Myth No. 1: Gays are economically oppressed. Statistics produced by market research studies tell a different story. Concentrated in the higher income brackets, in the arts and in the professional classes, gay male couples earn a combined average income of $51,325 a year; the average lesbian couple brings in $45,927. In 1990, average household income in the United States was $36,520. Not surprisingly, 48 percent of gay men and 43 percent of lesbians are homeowners. While the rationale for passing antidiscrimination laws used to be helping the poor, today we are faced with the absurdity of a movement demanding an end to alleged economic discrimination against the one demographic group with the most disposable income.

Gay-rights advocates claim that ENDA will not lead to special treatment under the aegis of affirmative action. But that is what Hubert Humphrey said in 1964, arguing for passage of the Civil Rights Act. Since the idea of discrimination is necessarily subjective and unknowable -- unless government enforcers are mind-readers -- the only way to measure it is by examining statistics. Such judgments are especially subjective when it comes to sexual orientation. As columnist Mona Charen put it: "Forbidding discrimination against gays is like forbidding discrimination against mystery readers -- how does an employer know?"

Richard Tafel, national director of the gay Log Cabin Republicans, argues that ENDA reflects the ideas of those "who believe merit should be the sole basis for hiring." But the market economy automatically punishes irrational discrimination: In a most un-Republican manner, Tafel would replace market mechanisms with government regulations and give federal bureaucrats rather than employers the power to define standards of "merit."

Myth No. 2: Gays can't help it, they were born that way. This conception of gay people as a new kind of ethnic group is the central pillar of gay-rights mythology; it is what unites Bruce Bawer and Michelangelo Signorile, Act-Up and the gay Republicans. With the growth of the gay subculture as a commercial and ideological enterprise, the subjective feeling that being homosexual was almost like being a member of a race hardened into a political dogma. Against the fact that homosexuality is a behavior and not a trait such as blue eyes or red hair, the ideologues of the gay movement had to construct a single overarching concept that would unify a great many diverse individuals. What they came up with was the idea of homosexualty as an intrinsic quality, not a behavior but a state of being, and more than that -- an inheritable characteristic, genetically inscribed in every cell. Strangely, these very same people scream bloody murder whenever anyone attributes the behavior of other victim groups, such as women or blacks, to genetic factors.

The theory of intrinsic homosexuality is a fragile foundation upon which to build a movement, let alone a sense of self. For the inconvenient truth of the matter is that there is no scientific proof for the theory that homosexual behavior is genetically encoded. This lack of evidence, combined with a mass of cross-cultural data, strongly indicates that homosexuality is socially linked to the development of moral and esthetic values -- and that, therefore, a large element of choice is involved.

Myth No. 3: The gay lobby is a movement of the oppressed and the powerless, a crusade for tolerance, diversity and libertarian values. No one denies that the power of the state has been used as a bludgeon against gay people since at least the High Middle Ages. The great irony is that today, as tolerance of homosexuality seems to be growing, the leaders of the gay-rights movement seem to be saying, "Now it's our turn."

Their argument has by now become all too familiar: "We have been persecuted by the followers of an ascetic -- and vengeful -- desert god, and now we demand full status as an officially approved victim group, right up there with women, blacks and other U.S. government-approved minorities. And if the social mores will not yield to our assault, then we will use the battering ram of government power to storm the fortress and take the city. We are victims and now it is our turn."

To understand the political and cultural meaning of ENDA and the forces behind it, look at the hate campaign unleashed against the San Francisco Bay-area chapter of the Boy Scouts. Leading the charge was Roberta Achtenberg, then on the San Francisco City Council but later brought to Washington by the Clinton administration to serve as undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. While on the council, Achtenberg teamed up with fanatics on the school board to drive the Boy Scouts out of the city's public schools.

The anti-scout campaign was supported by the president of San Francisco's school board, Tom Ammiano, a gay public-school teacher who moonlights as a professional comedian. The rationale behind his edict banning Boy Scout activities from school premises was that they "discriminate" against gay members and counselors. While this may sound like a sick joke -- we are, after all, talking about mostly preteen boys here -- in San Francisco such a lunatic idea was and is taken seriously, and "gays in the Boy Scouts" became a local cause. Under threat of economic and political retaliation, several important local companies withdrew their financial support from the Scouts: the United Way, Bank of America and Levi Strauss all joined the lynch mob, and the fanatics were deluded into thinking they had scored a victory

Not so fast. Bank of America's phone was soon ringing off the hook, and the message came through loud and clear: Stop the attack on the Boy Scouts or face a boycott from irate parents. Ditto for Wells Fargo and Levi Strauss. Fifty members of Congress signed a letter denouncing the anti-Scouts campaign, and they weren't all Republicans. Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton, touted by the gay lobby as their Abraham Lincoln, backed away from their embrace, stating that, as a private organization, the Scouts have the right to set their own membership criteria.

Under considerable pressure, Bank of America relented, restored funding to the Scouts -- and immediately came under attack from groups who announced a boycott and threatened retaliation against any local politico who failed to go along. It was at this point that Achtenberg introduced legislation cutting back the extent of the city's dealings with Bank of America. Although Mayor Frank Jordan succeeded in deflecting the anti-Scout jihad, what is significant here is the unhesitating impulse of the gay movement to use government to further its own cultural and political agenda.

The gay culture warriors use government not only to punish their perceived enemies, but also to subsidize their own. During her tenure on the city council, Achtenberg was instrumental in using part of a HUD grant to finance the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, or LYRIC, to the tune of $500,000.

In fiscal year 1993, HUD granted $22,041,000 to San Francisco through its Community Development Bloc Grant, or CDBG, program. Since local communities are free to spend CDBG money any way they choose, Achtenberg simply exercised her political clout and managed to divert a good chunk of this money to LYRIC.

What is the purpose of LYRIC? The San Francisco Independent quotes LYRIC Director Dan Barutta: "Ever since we started this program, we decided that youth need a variety of things. A lot of the boys want a homey atmosphere where they can do homework and talk to older adults and hang out." Loaded with federal tax dollars, LYRIC is looking to buy a three-story Victorian in the heart of San Francisco's gay Castro district.

Destroy the Boy Scouts and create a government-funded gay youth program -- what kind of an agenda is this? Pat Buchanan was widely reviled for supposedly starting a culture war in his speech to the 1992 Republican convention. But who really fired the first shot? We hear much about "homophobia" these days. The gay lobby plays fast and loose with the term, using its clinical accusing tone. Very little is said, however, about the other phobia, the Phobia That Dares Not Speak Its Name.

I refer, of course, to heterophobia: fear and loathing of heterosexuals.

We haven't heard very much about heterophobia for a couple of reasons. To begin with, it took a while for heterophobia to rear its ugly head. After all, it wasn't that long ago that gay bars routinely were raided by the police. And not only bars, but also gay political organizations, were shut down. The first gay political group in the country, the Society for Human Rights, founded in Chicago in 1923, was closed down by police raids two years later. In fighting a strictly defensive war for nearly half a century, the gay movement was too busy surviving to think about going on the offensive. It took awhile before the idea of launching an all-out assault on straight society's most sacred institutions occurred to anyone. It was only after homosexuality had been thoroughly legitimized (and politicized), at least among the elite, that heterophobia was able to make any headway.

The Boy Scouts were singled out because there is no better symbol of middle-class American life and values. Here is a sacred symbol of all that is good and wholesome, the traditional American icon of virtuous male conduct -- a perfect target for a school-yard bully looking for a fight. The hate campaign against the Boy Scouts is emblematic of the heterophobic fervor that afflicts the gay-rights movement, for it occurred in a city where homosexuals, far from being a powerless and oppressed minority, are perhaps the single most influential factor in local politics. While unique in many respects, San Francisco serves as a kind of sociopolitical laboratory in which we can project what would happen if the gay-rights movement achieved its goals on a wide scale.

As the leader of Log Cabin, an ostensibly Republican organization that did everything it could to put Clinton in the White House, Tafel presumes to advise the GOP on how to build a new Republican majority. Rather than give advice, perhaps he will heed some. If gay Republicans would fight for conservative principles instead of tailing after every leftist initiative, they would have the moral and political authority to make real gains. Instead of smearing Christians in their own party and entering into a de facto alliance with Clinton, conservative gays must reach an accord with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Buchanan and others who object to homosexuality on moral grounds.

A cease-fire will last as long as both sides agree to stop using the state to enforce their particular moral vision. This means no ENDA, no "fair housing" legislation, no "gay-positive" indoctrination sessions in public schools and no more subsidies to the Robert Mapplethorpes of this world. On the other hand, conservative Republicans of faith must understand that it also means getting government out of our bedrooms as well as our pocketbooks. This could be encoded in the GOP platform as a call for the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults.

Unfortunately, the gay movement is not going to be satisfied with that. In his book, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in America, gay neocon-servative Bawer repeatedly declares that what he wants is not to be tolerated but accepted. What he wants, he says, is a world "in which every heterosexual can look at a gay couple and say: `What they feel for each other is a good thing. Let us rejoice in it.'"

Besides being unrealistic, this expectation is oddly contradictory. It is a perverse kind of "gay pride" that seeks the approval of others as a precondition for its own fulfillment. This question of endowing homosexuality with some sort of moral sanction, to be bestowed by official act of government, is what the fight over gay-rights legislation is really all about -- not the merits of ENDA, but its symbolic meaning. Stamped with the moral imprimatur of government sanction, gays will be given their place at the table and served their fair share of government favors, special rights and subsidies.

ENDA would project the heterophobic agenda of the gay rights movement onto the national scene; it would put an end to private organizations, such as the Boy Scouts, that insist on setting their own moral standards. As such, it should be opposed by conservatives and all right-thinking people -- of whatever sexual "orientation."

COPYRIGHT 1994 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group