4408
(1 vote, average 5.00 out of 5)
Written by Jamakaya
Feb 10, 2012
Thirty years ago, on Feb. 25, 1982, Republican Gov. Lee Dreyfus signed the first statewide bill in the United States to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing and public accommodations.
We Badgers take pride in being the "first gay rights state." The saga of how we won passage of the civil rights measure and how our GOP governor did not hesitate to sign it is an important and happy history lesson.
As early as 1970, state Rep. Lloyd Barbee of Milwaukee introduced a bill to de-criminalize "victimless" crimes such as prostitution, marijuana and homosexuality. Attacked as the "garbage" bill, it went nowhere. An omnibus sex law reform bill proposed by the attorney general died in committee in 1975.
In 1977, state Rep. David Clarenbach sponsored a bill to decriminalize sexual conduct between consenting adults, which was aimed at overturning the state's sodomy and fornication statutes. It hit a brick wall initially but gained votes in subsequent sessions. Support grew in the context of the increasingly public gay activism of the period, including Harvey Milk and the first March on Washington for Gay Rights. The argument that government had no right legislating what people did in the privacy of their homes gained traction.
Short of votes for passage of the consenting adults bill, Clarenbach and others turned their focus on a bill banning job and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation. The idea was that a broader civil rights measure was likely to gain more support than a bill focused on sexual behavior.
Concerted public education and lobbying and critical endorsements of the legislation by religious denominations (a years-long strategy led by Milwaukee activist Leon Rouse) won the day. The Assembly passed the civil rights bill in October 1981 and the Senate in mid-February 1982.
Dreyfus came under heavy pressure from anti-gay zealots and many GOP colleagues to veto the bill. For reasons of principle and to get on with the business of government, this proud son of a suffragette and former chancellor of UW-Stevens Point signed the bill.
"Frankly, it wasn't a courageous decision at all," Dreyfus told me in an interview for Wisconsin IN Step in 2003. "It was just simply the right thing to do."
Dreyfus said he told fellow Republicans: "You ought to take a firm stand that no government or employer or any individual has the right to ask anyone that (about their sexual orientation). I have some very strong notions about how far the government ought to be intruding into our lives, and that's fundamental Republicanism."
I asked if he knew many gay people at the time he signed the bill, and he laughed in astonishment: "Of course. I'd been a university president!"
Then he shared a story about how, at the time of Pearl Harbor, he hated the Japanese. But at the end of the war, when his duty in the Navy involved escorting Japanese back to their homeland from China, he got to know some of them and realized, "This person's like I am."
"Once you have that experience and start brushing with other people, that changes all the rules," Dreyfus said. "The less parochial you are, the better you have a sense of tolerance."
From his avid promotion of overseas exchange programs at the UW-Stevens Point to his vocal support of marriage equality for same sex couples in the years before his death, Gov. Dreyfus really walked the walk. What a guy!
