How Hispanics Became
the New Gays
By FRANK RICH, OP-ED
COLUMNIST, NYTimes on the Web, June 11, 2006
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank
Rich. |
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HE never promised them the Rose
Garden. But that's where America's self-appointed defenders of family
values had expected President Bush to take his latest stand against same-sex
marriage last week. In the end, without explanation, the event was shunted
off to a nondescript auditorium in the Executive Office Building, where the
president spoke for a scant 10 minutes at the non-prime-time hour of 1:45 p.m.
The subtext was clear: he was embarrassed to be there, a constitutional
amendment "protecting" marriage was a loser, and he feared being branded a
bigot. "As this debate goes forward, every American deserves to be treated
with tolerance and respect and dignity," Mr. Bush said.
That debate died on the floor of the Senate less than 48 hours later, when the
amendment went down to an even worse defeat than expected. Washington
instantly codified the moral: a desperate president at rock bottom in the
polls went through the motions of a cynical and transparent charade to rally his
base in an election year. Nothing was gained — even the president of the
Family Policy Network branded Mr. Bush's pandering a ruse — and no harm was
done.
Except to gay people. That's why the president went out of his way to talk
about "tolerance" at this rally, bizarrely held on the widely marked 25th
anniversary of the first mention of an AIDS diagnosis in a federal report.
Mr. Bush knew very well that his participation in this tired political stunt,
while certain to have no effect on the Constitution, could harm innocent
Americans.
When young people hear repeatedly that gay couples aspiring to marital
commitment are "undermining the moral fabric of the country, that stuff doesn't
wash off," says Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Most concretely, the Washington ruckus trickles down into sweeping assaults on
gay partners' employee benefits and parental rights at the state level, as
exemplified by a broadly worded referendum on the Virginia ballot this fall
outlawing any kind of civil union. Had Mr. Bush really believed that his
words had no consequences, he would have spoken in broad daylight at the White
House and without any defensive touchy-feely bromides about "tolerance."
Mr. Bush prides himself on being tolerant — and has hundreds of photos of
himself posing with black school kids to prove it. But his latest marriage
maneuver is yet another example of how his presidency has been an enabler of
bigots, and not just those of the "pro-family" breed.
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Barry
Blitt |
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The stars are in alignment for a new
national orgy of rancor because Americans are angry. The government has
failed to alleviate gas prices, the economic anxieties of globalization or
turmoil in Iraq. Two-thirds of Americans believe their country is on the
wrong track. The historical response to that plight is a witch hunt for
scapegoats on whom we can project our rage and impotence. Gay people,
though traditionally handy for that role, aren't the surefire scapegoats they
once were; support for a constitutional marriage amendment, ABC News found, fell
to 42 percent just before the Senate vote. Hence the rise of a juicier
target: Hispanics. They are the new gays, the foremost political
piñata in the election year of 2006.
As has not been the case with gay civil rights, Mr. Bush has taken a humane view
of immigration reform throughout his political career. Some of this is
self-interest; he wants to cater to his business backers' hunger for cheap labor
and Karl Rove's hunger for Hispanic voters. But Mr. Bush has always
celebrated and promoted immigrants and never demonized them — at least in Texas.
In the White House, he sidelined immigration after 9/11, then backed away from a
"guest worker" proposal when his party balked in 2004. After bragging
about his political capital upon re-election, he squandered it on Iraq and a
quixotic campaign to privatize Social Security. Now Congress has acted
without him, turning immigration reform into a deadlocked culture war not unlike
the marriage amendment. A draconian federal law is unlikely, but the
damage has been done: the ugly debate has in itself generated a backlash
against a vulnerable minority.
Most Americans who are in favor of stricter border enforcement are not bigots.
Far from it. But some politicians and other public figures see an
opportunity to foment hate and hysteria for their own profit. They are
embracing a nativism and xenophobia that recall the 1920's, when a State
Department warning about an influx of "filthy" and "unassimilable" Jews from
Eastern Europe led to the first immigration quotas, or the 1950's heyday of
Operation Wetback, when illegal Mexican workers were hunted down and deported.
"What a repellent spectacle," the Fox News anchor Brit Hume said when surveying
masses of immigrant demonstrators, some of them waving Mexican flags, in April.
Hearing of a Spanish version of "The Star-Spangled Banner," Lamar Alexander, a
Republican from Tennessee, introduced a Senate resolution calling for the
national anthem to be sung only in English. There was no more point to
that gratuitous bit of grandstanding than there was to the D.O.A. marriage
amendment. Or more accurately, both had the same point: stirring up
animosity against a group that can be branded an enemy of civilization as we
know it.
The most pernicious demagogues on immigration often invoke national security as
their rationale, but no terrorist has been known to enter the United States from
Mexico. Even the arguments about immigrants' economic impact are sometimes
a smokescreen for a baser animus. As John B. Judis of The New Republic
documented in his account of Arizona's combustible immigration politics, the
dominant fear in that border state has less to do with immigrants stealing jobs
(which are going begging in construction and agriculture) than with their
contaminating the culture through "Mexicanization." It's the same
complaint that's been leveled against every immigrant group when the country's
in this foul a mood.
That mood was ratcheted up last week by the success of Brian Bilbray's strategy
in winning the suburban San Diego House seat vacated by the jailed Duke
Cunningham. Mr. Bilbray, a card-carrying lobbyist, was thought to be
potentially vulnerable even in a normally safe Republican district. But by
his own account, his campaign took off once he started hitting the single issue
of immigration, taking a hard line far to the right of the president who
endorsed him. Mr. Bilbray goes so far as to call for the refusal of
automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants — a repudiation of
the 14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to ensure citizenship to
everyone born in the United States.
His victorious campaign set a tone likely to be embraced by other Republicans
fearful of a rout in 2006. The election year is still young, and we
haven't seen the half of this vitriol yet. Some politicians, like Senator
James Inhofe of Oklahoma, are equal-opportunity bigots: when he isn't
calling for the Senate to declare English the national language and demanding
that immigrants be quizzed on the Federalist Papers (could he pass?), he is
defending marriage by proclaiming that in his family's "recorded history" there
has never been "any kind of homosexual relationship." (Any bets on how
long before someone unearths the Inhofes' unrecorded history?) Vernon
Robinson, a Republican Congressional candidate challenging the Democratic
incumbent Brad Miller in North Carolina, has run an ad warning that "if Miller
had his way, America would be nothing but one big fiesta for illegal aliens and
homosexuals."
The practitioners of such scare politics know what they're up to. That's
why they so often share the strange psychological tic of framing their arguments
in civil-rights speak. The Minuteman Project, the vigilante brigade
stoking fears of an immigration Armageddon, quotes Gandhi on its Web site; its
founder, Jim Gilchrist, has referred to his group as "predominantly white Martin
Luther Kings." On a Focus on the Family radio show, James Dobson and the
White House press secretary, Tony Snow, positioned the campaign to deny gay
civil rights as the moral equivalent of L.B.J.'s campaign to extend civil
rights. James Sensenbrenner, the leading House Republican voice on
immigration policy, likened those who employ illegal immigrants to "the
19th-century slave masters" that "we had to fight a civil war to get rid of."
For that historical analogy to add up, you'd have to believe that Africans
voluntarily sought to immigrate to America to be slaves. Whether Mr.
Sensenbrenner is out to insult African-Americans or is merely a fool is a
distinction without a difference in this volatile political climate.
Mr. Bush is a lame duck, but he still has a bully pulpit. Here is a cause
he has professed to believe in since he first ran for office in Texas, and it's
threatening to boil over in an election year. Imagine if he exercised
leadership and called out those who trash immigrants rather than merely mouthing
homilies about tolerance and dignity.
Tolerance and dignity are already on life-support in this debate. If the
president doesn't lead, he will have helped relegate Hispanics to the same
second-class status he has encouraged for gay Americans. Compassionate
conservatism, R.I.P.
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