From r-mohr@uiuc.edu Wed Nov 29 05:07:18 1995 Received: from postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu (postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu [128.174.5.11]) by abacus.oxy.edu (8.6.10/8.6.11) with ESMTP id FAA09318 for ; Wed, 29 Nov 1995 05:07:04 -0800 Received: from mailhost.uiuc.edu (ruger.gw.uiuc.edu [128.174.22.10]) by postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id HAA73100 for ; Wed, 29 Nov 1995 07:06:33 -0600 Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 07:06:33 -0600 Message-Id: <199511291306.HAA73100@postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu> X-Sender: r-mohr@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 2.1.1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Ron Buckmire From: "Richard D. Mohr" Subject: archiveable op-ed Content-Length: 6903 X-Lines: 136 Status: RO 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_.