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The New York Times
Opinion
Smoke the Bigots Out
of the Closet
By FRANK RICH, Op-Ed
Columnist nytimes.com from the Web, February 7, 2010
A funny thing happened after Adm.
Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military:
A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes
story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark.
John McCain, commandeering the spotlight as usual, did fulminate against the
repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the press focus on McCain, the
crazy man in Washington’s attic, was misleading. His yapping was an
exception, not the rule.
Many of his Republican colleagues said little or nothing. The right’s
noise machine was on mute. The Fox News report on Mullen’s testimony was
fair and balanced — and brief. The network dropped the subject entirely in
the Hannity-O’Reilly hothouse of prime time that night. Only
ratings-desperate CNN gave a fleeting platform to the old homophobic clichés.
Michael O’Hanlon, an “expert” from the Brookings Institution, speculated that
“18-year-old, old-fashioned, testosterone-laden” soldiers who are “tough guys”
might object to those practicing “alternative forms of lifestyle,” which he
apparently views as weak and testosterone-deficient. His only prominent
ally was the Family Research Council, which issued an inevitable “action alert”
demanding a stop to “the sexualization of our military.”
The occasional outliers notwithstanding, why did such a hush greet Mullen on
Capitol Hill? The answer begins with the simple fact that a large majority
of voters — between 61 percent and 75 percent depending on the poll — now share
his point of view. Most Americans recognize that being gay is not a
“lifestyle” but an immutable identity, and that outlawing discrimination against
gay people who want to serve their country is, as the admiral said, “the right
thing to do.”
Mullen’s heartfelt, plain-spoken testimony gave perfect expression to the
nation’s own slow but inexorable progress on the issue. He said he had
“served with homosexuals since 1968” and that his views had evolved
“cumulatively” and “personally” ever since. So it has gone for many other
Americans in all walks of life. As more gay people have come out — a
process that accelerated once the modern gay rights movement emerged from the
Stonewall riots of 1969 — so more heterosexuals have learned that they have gay
relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers and co-workers. It is hard to deny
our own fundamental rights to those we know, admire and love.
But that’s not the whole explanation for the scant pushback in Washington to
Mullen and his partner in change, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. There is
also a potent political subtext. To a degree unimaginable as recently as
2004 — when Karl Rove and George W. Bush ran a national campaign exploiting fear
of gay people — there is now little political advantage to spewing homophobia.
Indeed, anti-gay animus is far more likely to repel voters than attract them.
This equation was visibly eating at Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from
Utah, as he vamped nervously with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC last week, trying to
duck any discernible stand on Mullen’s testimony. On only one point was he
crystal clear: “I just plain do not believe in prejudice of any kind.”
Now that explicit anti-gay animus is an albatross, those who oppose gay civil
rights are driven to invent ever loopier rationales for denying those rights,
whether in the military or in marriage. Hatch, for instance, limply
suggested to Mitchell that a repeal of “don’t ask” would lead to gay demands for
“special rights.” Such arguments, both preposterous and disingenuous, are
mere fig leaves to disguise the phobia that can no longer dare speak its name.
If gay Americans are to be granted full equality, the flimsy rhetorical
camouflage must be stripped away to expose the prejudice that lies beneath.
The arguments for preserving “don’t ask” have long been blatantly groundless.
McCain — who said in 2006 that he would favor repealing the law if military
leaders ever did — didn’t even bother to offer a logical explanation for his
mortifying flip-flop last week. He instead huffed that the 1993 “don’t
ask” law should remain unchanged as long as any war is going on (which would be
in perpetuity, given Afghanistan). Colin Powell strafed him just hours
later, when he announced that changed “attitudes and circumstances” over the
past 17 years have led him to agree with Mullen. McCain is even out of
step with his own family’s values. Both his wife, Cindy, and his daughter
Meghan have posed for the current California ad campaign explicitly labeling
opposition to same-sex marriage as hate.
McCain aside, the most common last-ditch argument for preserving “don’t ask”
heard last week, largely from Southern senators, is to protect “troop morale and
cohesion.” Every known study says this argument is a canard, as do the
real-life examples of the many armies with openly gay troops, including those of
Canada, Britain and Israel. But the argument does carry a telling
historical pedigree. When Harry Truman ordered the racial integration of
the American military in 1948, Congressional opponents (then mainly Southern
Democrats) embraced an antediluvian Army prediction from 1940 stating that such
a change would threaten national defense by producing “situations destructive to
morale.” History will sweep this bogus argument away now as it did then.
Those opposing same-sex marriage are just as eager to mask their bigotry.
The big arena on that issue is now in California, where the legal showdown over
Proposition 8 is becoming a Scopes trial of sorts, with the unlikely bipartisan
legal team of David Boies and Ted Olson in the Clarence Darrow role. The
opposing lawyer, Charles Cooper, insisted to the court that he bore neither “ill
will nor animosity for gays and lesbians.” Given the history of the
anti-same-sex marriage camp, it’s hard to make that case with a straight face
(so to speak). In trying to do so, Cooper moved that graphic evidence of
his side’s ill will and animosity be disallowed — including that notorious,
fear-mongering television ad, “The Gathering Storm.”
The judge admitted such exhibits anyway. Boies also triumphed in
dismantling an expert witness called to provide the supposedly empirical,
non-homophobic evidence of how same-sex marriage threatens “procreative
marriage.” In cross-examination, Boies forced the witness, David
Blankenhorn of the so-called Institute for American Values, to concede he had no
academic expertise in any field related to marriage or family. The only
peer-reviewed paper he’s written, for a degree in Comparative Labor History, was
“a study of two cabinetmakers’ unions in 19th-century Britain.”
In another, milder cross-examination — on “Meet the Press” last weekend — John
Boehner, the House G.O.P. leader, fended off a question about “don’t ask” with a
rhetorical question of his own: “In the middle of two wars and in the
middle of this giant security threat, why would we want to get into this
debate?” Besides Mullen’s answer — that it is the right thing to do —
there’s another, less idealistic reason why President Obama might want to get
into it. The debate could blow up in the Republicans’ faces. A
protracted battle or filibuster in which they oppose civil rights will end up
exposing the deep prejudice at the root of their arguments. That’s not
where a party trying to expand beyond its white Dixie base and woo independents
wants to be in 2010.
Polls consistently show that independents, however fiscally conservative, are
closer to Democrats than Republicans on social issues. (In May’s Gallup
survey, 67 percent of independents favored repealing “don’t ask.”) This is
why Scott Brown, enjoying what may be a short-lived honeymoon in his own party,
calls himself a “Scott Brown Republican.” A Scott Brown Republican isn’t a
Boehner or Hatch Republican. In his interview with Barbara Walters last
weekend, he distanced himself from Sarah Palin, said he was undecided on “don’t
ask” and declared same-sex marriage a “settled” issue in his state,
Massachusetts, where it is legal.
It’s in this political context that we can see that there may have been some
method to Obama’s troublesome tardiness on gay issues after all. But as we
learned about this White House and the Democratic Congress in the health care
debacle, they are perfectly capable of dropping the ball at any moment.
Let’s hope they don’t this time. Should they actually press forward on
“don’t ask” in an election year with Mullen and Gates on board — and with even
McCain’s buddy, Joe Lieberman, calling for action “as soon as possible” — they
could further the goal and raise the political price for those who stand in the
way. Recalcitrant Congressional Republicans will have to explain why their
perennial knee-jerk deference to “whatever the commanders want” extends to Gen.
David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal on troop surges but not to Mullen,
who outranks them, on civil rights.
The more bigotry pushed out of the closet for all voters to see, the more likely
it is that Americans will be moved to grant overdue full citizenship to gay
Americans. It won’t happen overnight, any more than full civil rights for
African-Americans immediately followed Truman’s desegregation of the armed
forces. But there can be no doubt that Mike Mullen’s powerful act of
conscience last week, just as we marked the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro,
N.C., lunch counter sit-in, pushed history forward. The revealing silence
that followed from so many of the usual suspects was pretty golden too.
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