First published in the Chicago Free Press on Nov. 15, 2006
During 12 years of congresses disproportionately influenced by the GOP's religious right "core constituency" gays and lesbians became so used to tempering their political expectations that it is hard to know how to react to the sudden change in party control wrought by the Nov. 7 election.
Giddy excitement would be one possible reaction. Cautious optimism would probably be better. After all, gays won some and lost some. And George Bush is still president and can wield a veto pen.
Two results stand out: Gays and lesbians will no longer always need to play defense and an implicit rebuke to the religious right for overreaching.
The party switch places gay-friendly Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House and gay and gay friendly chairmen such as Barney Frank and Henry Waxman in charge of some congressional committees. And because gays are a constituency of the Democratic party, Congress is unlikely to approve any specifically anti-gay legislation.
Nor is a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage likely to get further than being introduced. It would be blocked at the committee level. In a related gain, the amendment's major fan Rick ("man on dog") Santorum went down to substantial defeat (Thank you, Pennsylvania voters), and although amendment co-sponsor Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave was reelected, she won only 46 percent of the vote, so she is likely to take a lower profile role.
Can we expect any positive actions from a Democratic congress? Among the possibilities that have been mentioned are overturning the military's ban on openly gay service members, inclusion of gays in a federal hate crimes law and passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Certainly public opinion supports all three.
The Hate Crimes law is perhaps the likeliest since it produces the least opposition. Both ENDA and repeal of DADT are possibilities, but are more likely to be vetoed. Something very limited for same-sex partners has also been mentioned, but seems unlikely.
To be sure, many of the new Democratic legislators are more socially conservative than the Democratic leadership--Rep. Rahm Emanuel recruited them specifically to counter the GOP's appeal on social issues.
But simply because they originally joined the Democratic rather than the Republican party, they may not be as hostile to equal treatment for gays as the Republicans were. Whatever they may believe about guns, abortion, or tariffs, they tend--if only "tend"--to think that discrimination is wrong--unlike most Republicans who approve of discrimination if it is called "values." Even if Bush vetoes such enactments, congressional passage itself is a powerful precedent to build on in the future.
We can even dare to hope for greater congressional insistence that federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Drug Enforcement Agency begin to tell the truth about marijuana, condoms, oral sex, abortion and a host of HIV issues. And that the National Institutes of Health might finally be adequately funded to research vaccines for syphilis and gonorrhea.
As to the religious right: With their remarkable capacity for self-pity and victim mongering when they do not get every jot and tittle they want, some religious right figures claimed to be devastated by the election. The New York Times quoted the head of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue describing it as "Bloody Tuesday" because South Dakota turned back a state law banning almost all abortions, California and Oregon rejected parental notification of a minor's abortion, and Missouri rejected a ban on stem-celll research.
Yet they managed to pass seven out of the eight state amendments barring same-sex marriage. Even though gays were heartened by Arizona's rejection of a gay marriage ban, a national first, they should be kicking themselves that they lost by 52 to 48 percent in South Dakota.
It may be that the October 25 New Jersey civil unions/marriage decision influenced the vote in some states. Heterosexuals who say they support civil unions or marriage in the abstract--even if they are telling the truth--seem to get skittish when confronted with the actual possibility. Is it an accident that of states with marriage bans on the ballot Arizona is the farthest away from New Jersey? Perhaps more important, Arizona retains a strong Goldwater/Kolbe libertarian tradition of live and let live.
It is hard to know how effective gay groups' anti-amendment efforts were in states such as Wisconsin, Colorado and Idaho. A friend reports that he walked into the Wisconsin group's Madison headquarters prepared to donate a few hundred dollars. Although people were standing around in the office, they all ignored him, so after a few minutes he walked out, keeping his money. When are gay advocacy groups going to stop depending on untrained volunteers and get serious about our lives?