The “difficult and personal” decision of whether folks like these can decide if you can shop at a store or not. (cc photo: Nathan Rupert)
Ross Douthat has written for the New York Times (4/4/15) pretty much the same column that David Brooks wrote for the Times (3/31/15) a week before—both arguing that the question of whether or not to discriminate against gay couples is “difficult and personal” (Douthat) and that those who choose to do so should be met with “respect, tolerance and gentle persuasion” rather than legal sanctions (Brooks).
Douthat, unlike Brooks, acknowledges the obvious parallel between opposition to gay marriage and opposition to interracial marriage—and meets it head on with a full helping of historical ignorance:
This isn’t a structural system of oppression, a society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow; we’re talking about a handful of shops across the country. It seems possible, and reasonable, to live and let live.
Not a “structural system of oppression”? Until 1962, when Illinois repealed its sodomy law, it was illegal in every state to even engage in same-sex sexual activity. The Supreme Court upheld such bans in 1982, with Chief Justice Warren Berger asserting they reflected “millennia of moral teaching.” Not until 2003 did the Supreme Court strike down the criminalization of gay sexuality, when such laws were still on the books in 14 states.
During the Cold War, thousands of gay men and lesbians were purged from the military and hundreds lost their jobs elsewhere in government because, as a 1950 Senate report put it, “those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.” The American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” in the first edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it wasn’t removed as a disorder from the DSM until 1973.
Rules barring any gay enlistment in the military were relaxed in 1993—to admit gays and lesbians who remained in the closet. Over the next 17 years, more than 14,500 people were forced out of the military under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Only in 2010 could gays and lesbians begin to serve openly in the armed forces.
In 29 states, it is legal to fire, refuse to promote or harass someone on the job because of their sexual orientation. The same states allow landlords to refuse to rent to gay or lesbian tenants.
Fourteen states still have amendments in effect in their constitutions that deny their citizens the basic civil right of marriage on the basis of orientation. Yet Ross Douthat maintains with a straight face that discrimination against gays and lesbians is a matter of “a handful of shops across the country,” despite the obvious existence of a concerted, structural, systemic effort going back generations to marginalize and punish homosexuality—what you might call a “society-wide conspiracy”—that continues unto the present day.
