Subject: archiveable op-ed

From: "Richard D. Mohr" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 07:06:33 -0600

Ron,

Below is an op-ed you can archive on my home page. Thanks.

Richard Mohr
__________________________________________________________________________

                        "The Case Against Clinton"
by Richard D. Mohr
(December 1995)

     Bill Clinton is the weakest President in U.S. history.  He
makes Jimmy Carter look like Stonewall Jackson and Andrew Johnson
look like Jesus Christ.  In less than a year, Clinton will ask
you to re-elect him.  Any gay person who does vote for him is a
traitor to gay existence.

     The errors of Clinton's ways are not (or not chiefly) that
his policies reduce people's material circumstances, happiness,
and well-being (as, say, bad economic planning might).  No, his
policie have degraded the value of human life itself.  This
degradation is most evident in his uncannily twinned policies on
gays in the military and Muslims in Bosnia.

     The old ban on gays in the military treated gays like devils
-- doers of evil deeds.  The morality of Clinton's new ban is
different and worse.  "Don't ask, don't tell" treats gays as
scum.  Through the very institution by which America has
traditionally assigned full personhood to individuals -- military
service -- Clinton has established a national ritual that tells a
whole class of people "you are less than fully human, your being
is degraded."  It is exactly around things that a culture
considers abject, loathsome, disgusting beyond naming that it
sets up social rituals of the form "don't ask, don't tell."   In
establishing the ban, enforcing it, and doggedly defending it
before the courts, Clinton treats gay people as shit.

     Similarly, Clinton's Bosnia policy holds that some people,
quite independently of their deeds, count for so little that
their existence can simply be written off.  During the 1992
elections, Clinton unequivocally spoke of the slaughter in Bosnia
as genocide, but once elected his actions have treated genocide
as morally acceptable. Even as he now argues for sending troops
to Bosnia, he defends his past policy of doing nothing during the
killing.  Gays and all minorities should take note: thanks to
Clinton, the moral lesson of the Bosnian War is that World War II
had no moral lesson.

     In comparison to Clinton's institutionalized degradation of
gays, his other failings are small potatoes yet warrant mention. 
In 1994 Clinton wrote a letter to the Victory Fund stating his
opposition to anti-gay referendum initiatives.  Yet when push
came to shove, Clinton again said gays and their rights don't
matter.  His Justice Department refused to throw its weight
behind the constitutional challenge to these referendums now
before the Supreme Court.  In a similar grab at cheap moral
credit, Clinton recently sent a letter to Senator Kennedy stating
his support for federal gay rights legislation.  But history has
shown that Clinton's word is worth less than nothing.

     Some gay leaders have pointed to Clinton's gay appointments
as a record of action, not mere words.  But Clinton's gay
appointees, like his judicial ones, have been completely
undistinguished and so low of visibility that if their profile
was that of a patient's cardiograph, the patient would be dead. 
Can you name even two?  Even more telling than the invisibility
of his appointees is Clinton's withdrawing the nomination -- a
month after the 1994 elections and in the face of Senatorial
bigotry -- of the tycoon James Hormel, who would have been
America's first openly gay ambassador.  But capitulation to
bigotry simply makes bigotry stronger.   Gay and other "liberal"
appointments, including those to the judiciary, have now entirely
dried up.

     Consider the White House's other contacts with gays.  When
gay elected officials went to thWhite House in June 1995 to
talk with Clinton's underlings, they were met by guards wearing
yellow rubber gloves.  The message was pretty clear: "We view you
as lepers and pariahs -- unclean, unclean."  Clinton apologized,
but not without setting up another _cordon sanitaire_ around
himself.  He appointed the non-gay Marsha Scott as a liaison to
the gay community.  After initially refusing interviews to the
gay press, she recently admitted in _Frontiers_ that she isn't
"up to speed" on gay issues.  But this ignorance hasn't prevented
her from serving as an apologist for Clinton.  She doesn't "get"
the moral issues any more than her boss does.  She's not a
liaison, she's a flunky.

     True, Clinton did officially end discrimination based on
homosexual status in security clearances, but as Frank Kameny,
who has worked on these issues since the 1950s, put it, Clinton
simply brought "closure" to a process that had been unfolding for
many years -- most of them Republican ones.  More indicative of
Clinton's embarrassing uneasiness with gays is his having
regulations against anti-gay governmental discrimination drawn up
only department by department, while he himself steadfastly
refuses to sign a  comprehensive executive order -- an action
that would require him to take a stand and show some moral
courage.

     It seems likely that gay political progress will now mainly
be made within the expanding interstices of the Republican Party. 
In each of the last three states to establish gay civil rights
(Minnesota, California, and Rhode Island), it was a Republican
governor who signed the legislation into law.

     And one of the grand ironies of civil rights history is that
George Bush's record on gay issues has in retrospect turned out
to be better than Clinton's.  To the consternation of
conservatives, Bush invited gays to the White House -- they were
not met by rubber gloves.  He signed gays into the National Hate
Crimes Act -- the first and still only mention of gays in federal
civil rights legislation.  Unlike Clinton, who signed anti-gay
discrimination into federal law, Bush signed it out -- by
eliminating the law barring gay immigration.  Even when Bush was
Vice-President, openly gay appointments were made -- like that of
Frank Lilly to the President's AIDS council.

     Nonetheless when in the 1992 campaign Bush embraced the far
Right's family values agenda and did nothing to staunch the anti-
gay hatred spewing from the Republican National Convention, the
Log Cabin Club nobly took a principled stand: even at the risk of
losing credibility within their Republican Party, the Club
refused to endorse Bush's re-election.  Gays more generally now
can do no less for Clinton.

     You are in the voting booth.  Your hand is on Clinton's
lever.  Imagine him, all smiling and chatty, as he grinds your
face into dog shit.  That is what his kind words and compromises
have done to you.  Go ahead and flip the lever, but only if you
believe that you and all other gay people are worthless scum. 

______________________________

Richard D. Mohr is the author of _Gays/Justice_ and _Gay Ideas_.