New York Newsday - Thursday, January 5, 1995
1994: IT WAS A GOOD YEAR FOR GAY RIGHTS
by Gabriel Rotello
	New York - As the new Republican Congress gets under way, lesbians and gays
are bracing for the worst. There are plans to eliminate aid to public schools
with supposedly pro-gay curricula, slash AIDS funding, even possibly reinstitu
te a full ban on gays in the military. Political justification for all this
stems in part from the widespread perception that President Clinton's support
of gays in the military was a chief cause, perhaps the chief cause, of the
Democratic debacle in November. If voters were trying to throw out the gay
baby with the Democratic bathwater, the theory goes, Republicans have every
right to finish the job. But there are problems with this theory. Namely the
facts. And the facts are that 1994 was the best election year ever for gay
rights.
	In Oregon and Idaho, for example, anti-gay initiatives were voted
down.What's more, conservatives couldn't even gather enough signatures to
place initiatives on the ballot in Washington, Arizona, Michigan, Missouri,
Ohio, Maine, and Nevada. In Virginia, the only state where gay rights emerged
as a major issue in a senatorial race, anti-gay Oliver North lost to pro-gay
Chuck Robb. Of the thirteen senators running for reelection who cosponsored
the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the bill that would ban
workplace discrimination against gays, all were reelected. In the House, 110
of the 120 ENDA cosponsors were reelected, and ten newly elected members
pledged to support the bill. 
	As to gays in the military, all the  Senators who most vocally supported
ending the gay ban were reelected, including Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein,
Frank Lautenberg, Joe Lieberman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In the House,
most were reelected too, including openly gay representatives Barney Frank
and Gerry Studds. Even Wisconsin congressman Steve Gunderson, who stunned the
GOP by coming out of the closet during the campaign, was reelected, becoming
Congress' first openly gay Republican. In state houses and big city
governments, 24 openly gay officials were elected to major positions.
	If this hardly sounds like a nationwide repudiation of gay rights, a poll
helps explain why. The firm of Mellman Lazarus Lake, Inc. surveyed 800 voters
on election night to determine their views on gay issues. A whopping 70
percent agreed that gays should have "equal rights in hiring and firing," 78
percent favored "increasing efforts for AIDS research, prevention and care,"
and a solid 57 percent supported the passage of ENDA. Only 21 percent worried
about a "gay agenda," while 40 percent worried about a "religious right wing
agenda." These results seemed to bolster a pre-election study by the Times
Mirror Center for The People and The Press, which found "at least one
important change in public tolerance in the last four years - a sharp decline
in homophobia."	
	Why, then, the perception that gays in the military was fatal to the
Democrats? Apparently because of the inept way President Clinton handed the
issue. According to the Mellman Lazrus Lake poll, voters were irate that gays
in the military "seemed to be the primary and sole focus of the
administration for a very long period of time," and was "the first thing the
administration appeared to focus on." The crisis atmosphere it fostered in
Washington just as the administration began, the fact that members of
Clinton's own party successfully opposed him, his ultimate,
unsatisfactory-to-everybody compromise, and the fact that the whole mess was
on a fairly (to most people) marginal issue rather than on one of those
laser-beam-to-the-economy issues he campaigned on, created a searing
impression of presidential incompetence. 
	But it is one thing to blame Clinton's handling of the issue for last fall's
rout, quite another to blame gay rights themselves. It may be conventional
wisdom that gays sank Clinton, but the electorate's growing acceptance of gay
rights and open homosexuals in public life makes this conventional wisdom
sound like conventional scapegoating.