Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 14:10:01 -0500 From: "Richard D. Mohr" "Those Liberal Democrats" by Richard D. Mohr (April 1996) Liberal Democrats are proving a hazard to gay people's dignity and well-being. Our national organizations are asking us to line up again with the Democratic Party. But by fixating on the rhetoric of the far Right, our organizations have remained blissfully ignorant of the real world damage the Democratic Left has wrecked on gay people. Take three examples of liberal Democrats at work: *Barney Frank (D.- Massachusetts).* You will remember that it was Frank who in an act of political hotdogging opened the flood gates to current discrimination against gay people in the armed forces. Grandstanding to the press, he broke ranks with the gay community and held that some version of don't-ask-don't-tell was acceptable. In doing so, Frank completely undercut gays' efforts to hold Clinton to his principled promise to lift the Pentagon's ban on gays and triggered the stampede in Congress to write the degradation of don't-ask-don't-tell into federal law. Frank has never apologized or taken responsibility for his actions. Rather, he continues to blame the victims. He holds the gay community itself responsible for the military defeat. He fails to note that the corpse has his knife in its back. Frank's problem is that he doesn't understand the concepts of dignity and self-respect. For him everything is just politics and power, money and votes. The result is that he sold gays' dignity down the river. Doing so won for him the role of Democratic Party pitbull terrier after the 1994 elections -- until, that is, Dick Armey got away with calling him a "fag." The lesson: once you compromise other people's dignity, you don't have the moral resources left to defend your own. *Pat Schroeder (D. - Colorado) and other Democratic censors.* Gay progress so far has chiefly taken the form of breaking up shaming taboos and getting gay issues and lives into public awareness. Such progress requires a free flow of ideas and information in society. But now come the liberal censors banning so-called indecenc on the internet and setting into motion the repression of sexuality on television. The V-chip is really an H-chip. The purported aim of the current federal communications act is, in the words of Anita Bryant's slogan, to "Save Our Children." But what it really does is to block life-saving information from reaching gay kids, to restore taboos blanketing sexuality, and to infantilize national discourse. This legislation's chief sponsor was Democratic Senator James Exon of Nebraska. Its biggest backer was President Clinton. But it was ultra-liberal Congresswoman Pat Schroeder who got the legislation passed. In the joint House-Senate committee which had to reconcile the extreme Senate version of censorship with the largely symbolic House version, she cast the decisive vote for the Senate version. Anyone who has ever pecked out an e-mail message should be glad that she is not seeking re- election in the Fall. It was moderate, "opportunity" Republicans, like Newt Gingrich, who blocked internet censorship for as long as possible. But in the end, they could not hold out against the mutually reciprocal, mirroring forces of the far Right and Democratic Left. *Steven Breyer and Ruth Baeder Ginzburg -- Clinton'sappointees to the Supreme Court.* Gays have no constitutional privacy right to have sex -- or so wrote Democratic-appointee Byron White for a five-justice opinion in 1986; the four-man dissent was written by a Republican-appointee Harry Blackmun. The case has had dire consequences for gays in other areas the law, like child custody cases and in equal protection cases. But don't look for this decision to be overturned any time soon, especially since Clinton's appointees to the Supreme Court have proven a disaster on privacy issues. Last year, they provided the decisive votes in a decision that upheld random drug testing of student athletes. As a condition of playing ball, the athletes had to expose their bodies' inner workings to the government. It was left to a Reagan-appointee, Sandra Day O'Connor, to point out what a gross violation of privacy rights this was. It goes without saying that Clinton's appointees last year also voted against gays' right to march in St. Patrick's Day parades. They epitomize the adage: scratch a New Deal Democrat, find a fascist. There is nothing new is all this. Liberal Democrats and the communitarian forces which shadow them have never been good on gay issues. Remember that it was the national ascendence of the Democratic Party in the early 1930s that crushed the vibrant gay life that had developed in America's urban centers during the previous thirty Republican-dominated years. The Democratically- initiated telecommunications act of 1996 is the direct descendent of the Hollywood Production Code, which was enforced only after te Democrats swept the 1932 elections. When in the mid-1960s the Democrats were again to come into national political dominance, gays again got clobbered. In 1965, the Democratic Congress and President fearing that the Supreme Court might hold that gays were not statutorily barred from immigrating to America, re-wrote immigration law to make the bar explicit. Liberal democrats spat in our faces then, just as the Democratically-controlled Congress and Presidency of 1993 spat in our faces with don't-ask-don't-tell. Gays can't afford to be in the pocket of the Democratic Party. It is time for gays individually to do the independent thinking that our national organizations are unable or unwilling to do. -30-