Could Gay Equality Finally Come From... The Right?
Though the gulf between gays and conservatives might seem deep and wide, leaders who embrace both identities have been working to create a bridge that will allow the blessings of liberty to flow to gay and lesbian individuals and their families. The key, one prominent conservative lesbian says, is for the love that once dared not to speak its name to learn a new language: That of conservatism.
America lags far behind some nations with respect to GLBT legal and social parity. Only six states currently offer marriage equality to families headed by two men or two women, and the slate of Republican candidates vying for the party nomination for next year's White House race have almost all said that they would support an amendment to the United States Constitution that would enshrine discriminatory language in the nation's bedrock law.
But some conservatives believe that even though the Republican party has become dominated by evangelicals who wish to impose "Biblical" law on the nation, supplanting civil law with religious mandates, the eventual achievement of full legal parity for gay individuals and their families will come about as the result of a very different agenda embraced by conservatives: The doctrine of small, non-intrusive government that steps out of people's way instead of dictating the terms of their private lives to them.
One such voice from the political right is Cynthia Yockey, who wrote an article for the October edition of The Advocate on how gay rights are more likely to be defended, and secured, by conservatives than by liberals.
But Yockey tempered her claim with the pragmatic observation that conservatives energized by anti-gay rhetoric may well overpower traditional conservative messages of personal responsibility and limited governmental interference unless the GLBT community "learn[s] how to talk to conservatives - both gay and straight - and listen to them in return."
Making a bold prediction, Yockey went on to write, "LGBTs on the left have only about a year to learn the language of conservatism and persuade the conservative movement that we have an unalienable right to equality. That's because conservatives now control a majority of state legislatures and probably will also control the White House and Congress come 2013."
If the gay community has not learned the language of conservatism by then and used it effectively to communicate with the people at the top, Yockey warned, gays could very well lose ground in the battle for full civil equality.
Part and parcel of such messaging, Yockey argued, would be for the GLBT community to throw its support behind gay and gay-friendly conservatives who are blazing the trail -- Andrew Breitbart, a straight conservative blogger was one name Yockey dropped. She also urged readers to support GOProud, a gay conservative group headed by Jimmy LaSalvia and Christopher Barron.
GOProud sits uncomfortably between conservatives and gays, though the group belongs to both camps. Fervently anti-gay conservatives dismiss GOProud as a counterfeit of conservatism, which the extreme anti-gay right views as innately exclusionary of gays, whom they see as "sexual deviants."
At the same time, GOProud's conservative political philosophy, especially as given voice by the sometimes-abrasive Barron, ruffles gay feathers. Many GLBTs view the group with suspicion, wondering how to square conservatism -- which is often closely associated with evangelical Christianity and in many high-profile instances has worked against GLBT equality, and demonized and scapegoated gays to boot -- with sexual orientation and a wish to live freely, openly, and unencumbered by anti-gay laws that target family equality, workplace protections, and other issues of importance to the community.
Indeed, the fact that the Republican presidential hopefuls spoke earlier this year about wanting a Constitutional amendment didn't stop GOProud from publicly and enthusiastically expressing support for those candidates, though the group did note that it would need to undertake efforts to educate the candidates about the issues.
"We absolutely have to begin talking to conservatives in a language they understand. It's what GOProud does every single day," LaSalvia told EDGE when contacted for this story.
As for the impression that GOProud blindly endorses conservatives even when they express a willingness to backhand the GLBT community, "That's completely and totally not true," LaSalvia stressed.
"GOProud has set forth a 10-point legislative agenda that would improve the lives of average gay people. Every single one of the candidates we have supported has overwhelmingly supported our agenda.
"The left thinks that they get to decide what's 'pro-gay' and that they are the arbiters of what's included in the 'gay agenda,' " LaSalvia added. "We reject that completely."
If conservatives have worked to limit gay rights and even strip them away, Yockey pointed out in her Advocate op-ed that there are more and more instances in which gay conservatives actually advance the cause of equality ore effectively than liberal equality advocates. Case in point: the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative gay group that filed suit against the anti-gay "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the 1993 law that forced gay and lesbian patriots in uniform to lie about their sexuality or be tossed out of the service. Yockey credited that suit -- which led to a verdict finding DADT to be unconstitutional -- with "provid[ing] momentum" for the Congressional vote late last year to repeal the law. (Final repeal is slated to take effect Sept. 20.)
Yockey also pointed to no less a conservative luminary than Ted Olson, the lawyer who argued George W. Bush's side in the 2000 Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore, and won. Olson's opponent in that legal tussle was David Boies. Years later, the two teamed up to take Proposition 8 to court, where a federal judge found the anti-gay California ballot initiative that stripped existing marriage rights from gays to be in violation of the Constitution.
A Congruence of Principles
Yockey laid out the principles of conservatism that dovetail with arguments for GLBT equality.
"Fiscally conservative social liberals and libertarians generally support LGBT equality," she wrote. "These groups believe individuals should not be subject to the coercive powers of government, either economically (through taxes and regulations) or socially (through an established state religion or laws regulating sexual behavior).
"While fiscal conservatism is usually defined as being about small government and lower taxes, those are merely policies that grow out of the fundamental axiom of fiscal conservatives," Yockey went on to note. "Fiscal conservatism is founded on the belief that wealth originates from the ideas of an individual who can compete in a free market and has the incentive of getting to keep most of the wealth generated by his or her creativity. Well, I ask you, who is more creative than LGBT people?"
Yockey went on to note that the prospect, and practice, of workplace discrimination leads many gay Americans to establish their own businesses. And business owners, Yockey wrote, understand better than anyone the downside of high taxes and overly burdensome regulations. In other words, gays are America's entrepreneurs as a matter of necessity, and should be naturally allies with conservative causes.
But the widely held perception that liberals have a lock on civil progress and are more in tune with equality struggles, Yockey wrote, has been a giant hindrance.
"The deadliest mistake has been to unite LGBT rights with the economic and social policies of progressivism in the minds of conservatives by supporting only Democrats, no matter how much they abuse and betray the LGBT community," Yockey wrote. "Right-wingers who are willing to grant that LGBT equality is a matter of individual liberty and an inalienable right will fight it to the death when it is chained to the stagnation of a planned economy and the tyranny of a nanny state."
But the issue goers beyond politics. There's another widespread perception that says conservatives are automatically hostile to gays because many of them are religious, and the doctrines of their faiths condemn gays.
Yockey addressed this issue briefly, writing that gays "should shoo them out of government and back to their proper place in the realm of persuasion, where religions reside in America thanks to the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom."
But that would be a task far easier said than done, to judge from the response overtly religious leaders such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have received -- and the way in which non-evangelical conservatives such as Mitt Romney have been treated with suspicion by the evangelical faith.
Still, the rift between gays and the religious needn't be unbridgeable -- certainly no more so than that between gays and conservatives. Indeed, Dr. Patrick Chapman, who wrote a book on the issue -- "Thou Shalt Not Love: What Evangelicals Really Say to Gays" -- told EDGE in 2008 that the GLBT community needs to learn to speak to evangelicals in their own language in order to gain acceptance -- a message virtually identical to Yockey's suggested approach to communicating with conservatives.
"Evangelicals believe that Psalm 139:13-14 implies God 'knits every person together in the womb,' " Chapman told EDGE, noting that the idea that gays are innately who they and do not choose their sexuality "challenges the very foundation of evangelical opposition to homosexuality: How can a Christian condemn something God intentionally created in a person?"
Chapman went on to make a prediction that even now seems, in some ways, to be coming true. "As evangelicals increasingly accept the scientific evidence that sexual orientation is inborn, they will have greater difficulty in justifying their opposition to homosexuality."
LaSalvia told EDGE that matters of faith didn't need to come between the gay community and conservatives.
"First off, we have to recognize that just because someone disagrees with us on an issue that it doesn't make them anti-gay," LaSalvia said. "There are a handful of truly anti-gay folks, but the gay left constantly wants to paint anyone who disagrees with them as 'bigots' or 'homophobes.' "
"Second, the gay community must stop treating religion or religious people as the enemy," LaSalvia added.
At the same time, Yockey suggested, self-preservation might be enough to stop Americans from handing too much power to those who would like to replace civil law with religious law.
"If the religions fighting marriage equality succeed in grabbing the power to define marriage away from the government, instantly they will become totalitarian governments unto themselves," Yockey wrote -- an outcome as unacceptable to conservatives as liberal "totalitarianism."
Yockey went on to put into words a feeling of neglect and even exploitation that leaders in the GLBT community have increasingly experienced over the last several years.
"Meanwhile, Obama's bus has two places for LGBTs," Yockey wrote tartly, "at the back or under."