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Written by David Crary, AP writer
Jun 16, 2011
As the gay-rights movement advances, there’s increasing evidence of an intriguing role reversal: Today, it’s the conservative opponents of that movement who seem eager to depict themselves as victims of intolerance.
To them, the gay-rights lobby has morphed into a relentless bully – pressuring companies and law firms into policy reversals, making it taboo in some circumstances to express opposition to same-sex marriage.
“They’re advocating for a lot of changes in the name of tolerance,” said Jim Campbell, an attorney with the conservative Alliance Defense Fund. “Yet ironically the tolerance is not returned, for people of faith who don’t agree with their agenda.”
Many gay activists, recalling their movement’s past struggles and mindful of remaining bias, consider such protestations by their foes to be hollow and hypocritical.
“They lost the argument on gay rights and now they are losing the argument on marriage,” said lawyer Evan Wolfson, executive director of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry. “Diversions, scare tactics and this playing the victim are all they have left.”
Among the recent incidents prompting some conservatives to complain of intolerance or political bullying:
Olympic gold medal gymnast Peter Vidmar stepped down as chief of mission for the 2012 U.S. Olympic team in May following controversy over his opposition to gay marriage.
After coming under fire from gay-rights groups in April, the Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding pulled out of an agreement with House Republicans to defend the federal ban on same-sex marriage.
In New York, state Sen. Ruben Diaz, a Democrat from the Bronx, contends he’s received death threats because he opposes legislation to legalize same-sex marriage.
Apple Inc. recently withdrew two iPhone apps from its App Store after complaints and petition campaigns by gay-rights supporters.
One app was intended to publicize the Manhattan Declaration, a document signed in 2009 by scores of conservative Christian leaders. It condemns same-sex marriage as immoral and suggests that legalizing it could open the door to recognition of polygamy and sibling incest.
The other app was for Exodus International, a network of ministries that depict homosexuality as a destructive condition that can be overcome through Christian faith.
In both cases, gay activists celebrated the apps’ removals, while the apps’ creators contended their freedom of expression was being unjustly curtailed.
“The gay-rights groups have shown their fangs,” wrote Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure turned born-again Christian who helped launch the Manhattan Declaration. “They want to silence, yes, destroy those who don’t agree with their agenda.”
The campaign that pressured King & Spalding to withdraw from the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act case was criticized by a relatively wide range of commentators and legal experts, not just conservative foes of gay marriage.
“To think it’s a good idea to attack lawyers defending unpopular clients – I don’t have words for how stupid and wrong that is,” said Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and writer who formerly served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union.
However, the gay-rights activists involved in pressuring King & Spalding were unapologetic.
“If we made it such that no law firm would defend the indefensible, then good for us,” said Fred Sainz, the Human Rights Campaign’s vice president for communication. “When you have people talking about the fact that it’s no longer politically correct to be anti-equality, it’s a show of progress.”
Sainz said it was important for activists to pick their targets carefully.
“We understand there are good-hearted Americans in the middle who are still struggling with these issues,” he said. “Different activists have different ways of getting to the same end, and some of those are bound to make certain people feel uncomfortable.”
Though same-sex marriage is legal in only five states, it has for the first time gained the support of a majority of Americans, according to a series of recent national opinion polls. For some gay activists, this trend has fueled efforts to make their opponents’ views seem shameful.
“Their beliefs on this issue are very quickly becoming socially disgraceful, much in the way white supremacy is socially disgraceful,” wrote Evan Hurst of the advocacy group Truth Wins Out. “They are certainly entitled to cling to backwoods, uneducated, reality-rejecting views ... but their ‘religious freedom’ doesn’t call for the rest of us to somehow pretend their views aren’t disgusting and hateful.”
However, some gay-rights supporters see the public opinion shift as reason to be more magnanimous.
“The turn we now need to execute will be the hardest maneuver the movement has ever had to make, because it will require us to deliberately leave room for homophobia,” Jonathan Rauch, a writer and guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote recently in The Advocate.
“Incidents of rage against haters, verbal abuse of opponents, boycotts of small-business owners, absolutist enforcement of anti-discrimination laws: Those and other ‘zero-tolerance’ tactics play into the ‘homosexual bullies’ narrative,” Rauch wrote. “The other side, in short, is counting on us to hand them the victimhood weapon. Our task is to deny it to them.”
As ideological foes spar over these issues, the American Civil Liberties Union is confronted with a delicate balancing act. Its national gay rights project battles aggressively against anti-gay discrimination, but, as a longtime defender of free speech, the ACLU also is expected to intervene sometimes on behalf of anti-gay expression.
For example, the ACLU pressed a lawsuit on behalf of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church, which has outraged mourning communities by picketing service members’ funerals with crudely worded signs condemning homosexuality. The ACLU said the Missouri state law banning such picketing infringes on religious freedom and free speech.
James Esseks, director of the ACLU’s gay rights project, said the First Amendment protection of free speech only comes into play when a government entity is seen as curtailing speech rights – which did not occur in the Vidmar or King & Spalding cases.
