There's more to the battle for LGBT basic human rights than same-sex marriage

Bobby Griffith (Ryan Kenney) tries to survive the "Christian" intolerance of his mother (Sigourney Weaver) in the Lifetime movie Prayers for Bobby. Amid the public outpouring prompted by the TV movie were too many indications that teens all over the country still think of suicide as a "solution" to the "problem" of being gay.

"In Indiana . . . we have no hate crimes protections or employment, housing, public accommodations, or even hospital visitation rights. . . . It's a completely different world that several on the coasts just don't get."

-- Bil Browning, on The Bilerico Report yesterday

by Ken

There is, as I'm sure you know, an important vote coming up in Maine, where the usual forces of reaction are trying to overturn their legislature's historic legalization of same-sex marriage, which was to have taken effect this month but has been put on hold pending the homophobes' November 3 referendum on "Proposition 1," which would vaporize the new law.

The "Vote No on 1" campaign is important for a number of reasons, not least -- in my view -- because it's a simply horrible idea to put people's basic human rights up for a vote (it has often been suggested that if the rights guaranteed us by the Constitution's Bill of Rights were put to a vote, odds are that we would lose them), and an even worse idea to have them voted down. (But isn't democracy by definition "majority rule?" you ask. No, democracy is majority rule with protection for minority rights.)

So please don't let anything that follows suggest that I'm anything less than 100 percent in favor of the gallant and necessary struggle being waged by Mainers in their No On 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign. It's just too easy to let the bigots who are sick of them damn homes have their way by casting a simple vote of hate.

And wherever else there are comparable battles against those forces of bigotry and reaction, yes, of course, it's crucial to fight them.

Still and all, I read something yesterday that I haven't been able to get out of my head. It was a lament by Bil Browning, founder and editor-in-chief of The Bilerico Report -- the source of the quote at the top of this post. I have a bad feeling that the situation in Indiana is far more representative of the country as a whole than that in the places where LGBT people do have those basic protections Bil mentions: hate crimes protections and employment, housing, public accommodations, and hospital visitation rights. Here's the part I especially want you to read:

The View From Here

The last positive thing to happen in Indiana was the overturn of the sodomy laws. We have no hate crimes protections or employment, housing, public accommodations, or even hospital visitation rights. Two gay men or women together are often still denied hotel rooms, apartments, or - as in the case in Louisville recently - a McDonald's sandwich. It's a completely different world that several on the coasts just don't get.

Years ago when I was gang raped and went to the police, I was told "Men don't get raped and you're gay so you probably wanted it. You should be glad we don't arrest you for sodomy."

While state law requires police agencies to monitor and report cases that "could be" hate crimes (to see if we need a hate crimes law, of course!), but rarely do. Indianapolis, for example, reported a big fat zero for years until we made a huge stink about it on Bilerico-Indiana and other local blogs.

Employment vs Marriage in the Heartland

Both Jerame [Davis, Bilerico's co-owner and webmaster] and I have lost jobs for being out and active in the community. Yet, while we're pushing strongly for ENDA [the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act] on Bilerico Project, what big blog from a coastal state is matching us for ENDA coverage? Those states already have those protections and could care less about ENDA mostly. They've got theirs.

We have a large crowd of transgender and middle American readers who do care about protections we don't have. I've begged for other blogs to pick up Jillian Weiss' Daily ENDA updates targeting legislators. No one has. (We have it as a middle column item so you can see the last 7 posts in case you missed one. It's at the top of the main page.)

Only Pam's House Blend - from a southern state even if it is coastal - has stayed on ENDA with anything more than lip service to news tidbits. What has been the big focus instead? Maine. California. Marriage.

What has marriage done for Indiana? Well, it lost us hate crimes protections and employment protections to start with. All of our dollars sent to the state org has been used to fight off an amendment for years now without any progress on basic rights. We've been stuck playing defense instead of offense - spending thousands of dollars and untold man hours - every time another coastal state with protections we don't have takes a step forward for their citizens.

Let's be clear: Bilerico supports all the pro-LGBT initiatives as actively as it can. But Bil is clearly frustrated, verging on desperate, that LGBT activists don't seem to hear what he and people in places like Indiana are saying: that where they are, people can be ridiculed, harassed, and fired for being LGBT, can have crimes against them ignored by law enforcement, can be denied housing, medical visitation rights, and so on.

And I have to agree that an awful lot of LGBT activists, engaged in their important labors, aren't hearing. I hear strategic talk of how crucial the Maine vote is because financial donors need to see "wins" to open their wallets. Which I'm sure is true. I hear endless arguments about whether 2010 or 2012 is the better year for a Prop 8 repeal drive in California. Which I guess is a question that has to be asked. I've heard an argument that sort of addresses concerns like Bil's: that the situation in places like Indiana will only be fixed by eventual federal legislation, and that won't happen until a national "tipping point" happens on the marriage issue. Which I think is maybe true.

I don't claim to have deep insight into the rights and wrongs of cutting-edge LGBT strategy. But I do know that somebody's got to hear what people like Bil are saying.

I'm as guilty as anyone of marveling at the transformation in American attitudes toward homosexuality and homosexuals, which has unquestionably been extraordinary. We see a level of acceptance now that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, maybe even 10. But (a) the change has been very unequally distributed geographically, and (b) as we've known, the hard-core minority, principally the hard-core pseudo-religious, who just about define their existence by homo-hating, will fight to the death, or nearly so, to preserve the demonology of their cosmos.

My take on the transformation in American attitudes is that as more and more Americans become aware that they are personally acquainted with LGBT people who aren't in any respect different from anybody else -- some swell, some awful, and lots in between, all of this having nothing to do with their sexual orientation -- they have come to see their LGBT relatives, friends, neighbors, and coworkers in a human rather than an abstract way.

Just to pick one glaringly obvious example: the incredibly passionate loyalty Rachel Maddow has developed in the short time she has been doing her MSNBC show. Oh sure, if you visit the wingnut precincts of the Internet, you'll find the expected rabid filth about her sexual orientation, but those are the unreconstructed, and probably unreconstructable, mental left-behinds. Rachel's viewers love her because she is stupendously good at what she does: incredibly smart, hard-working, blunt, principled, funny, respectful, and empathetic. I'm tempted to say charismatic, because it does seem to be true in TV that there is a "grabbing" quality you either have or you don't, but charisma is a tricky business, and I don't want to get into that. I think Rachel's viewers identify with her, and feel that she's speaking for us. My guess is that she still has viewers who don't know that she's a lesbian, because except on specific issues involving that, it doesn't matter. She has earned viewers' trust and even love by being who she is.

In January I wrote about the huge public outpouring prompted by Lifetime's TV movie version of the book Prayers for Bobby, about a mother who gets about as monstrous a wake-up call as a parent can get when her adored oldest child, her son Bobby, commits suicide, in good part because he can't escape her church-mandated homophobia, which in turn prompts the devastated Mary to reexamine her, and her church's, basic beliefs. [In this clip, a bereaved Mary (Sigourney Weaver) tells her story publicly.]

I noted in particular the outpouring of personal stories on the LIfetime website: from writers who had known people who went through the "should I kill myself because I'm gay?" agony, from writers who had themselves gone through it, and most importantly from teenagers WHO WERE GOING THROUGH IT AT THAT TIME. Back then it seemed marvelous that all those people had been reached by this wonderful "reach out" tool to show them that they're not alone and that they don't actually have a "problem," that it's the people who torment and demean them who do. Obviously this was especially true in the case of the young people contemplating such drastic action. There's no question in my mind that Prayers for Bobby saved lives -- and I hope will continue to on DVD.

But look at it the other way: that in our "enlightened" time, all over the country there are teenagers who think that suicide is not only a reasonable solution, but possibly the best solution, to the "problem" of being LGBT. How do we live with that?

In the matter of sexual harassment, laws have changed to the point where, at least in my workplace, we have mandatory annual training sessions, taken very seriously by our management (no doubt in part because of fear of lawsuits), trying to develop sensitivity to the issue, and if nothing else strict compliance as to what we can and can't say and do. But in most places you can still say or do anything, on up to firing, to anyone whose sexual orientation is "different." How do we live with that?

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