February 22, 1998|By STEVE SANDERS
Gays and lesbians were stung when Maine citizens voted earlier this month to remove sexual orientation from their state's anti-discrimination laws. And though Christian conservatives have claimed a major victory, for gays the defeat is not necessarily the setback it might appear.
The repeal exposed problems with one particular strategy for winning rights and legal protection - passing and defending statewide anti-discrimination laws. Meanwhile, gays are moving on several other fronts nationally to win what they see as the ability to be open and honest about their lives and to end a status many see as a form of second-class citizenship.
Add to this the rising visibility of gays in the media and culture - 32 years after network TV got its first double marital bed, Ellen DeGeneres gave prime time its 22nd gay character and its first gay lead - and it becomes easier to see why most gay advocates believe, despite frustrations and indignities, that the forces of time and history are on their side.
The Maine vote was hardly a true referendum on civil rights. After an overall turnout of only 31 percent, Christian conservatives were able to tip the vote and repeal by 52 percent to 48 percent a law that the legislature - possibly a more representative body than the older, more rural and conservative voters who ventured out for the Feb. 10 single-issue plebiscite - enacted last year.
A coalition including business leaders and the governor fought repeal, and pre-balloting polls showed more than 60 percent of Maine voters favored the existing law.
Yet experience has shown such support is passive: Most Americans say gay rights is OK with them, just don't expect them to mount the ramparts. The contest in Maine underscored Christian conservatives' powerful advantage nationwide: grass roots organization. In community after community, gays find themselves confronted by the best-organized, most disciplined and tenacious political machine the nation has ever known. Every conservative church is a potential ward hall, every sympathetic pastor a precinct captain.
By contrast, while gays have growing influence in Washington and lively networks on the Internet, their grass roots organization is spotty. Lack of strong political organization in each state is, says Urvashi Vaid of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, "our biggest structural weakness." The problem: It's difficult to enlist and mobilize a social group when most of its members are afraid to publicly identify themselves.
Conservative Christians have also been amazingly successful at muddying the terms of debate over gay rights and, with disconcerting earnestness, propagating often outrageous misinformation. Laws to keep individuals from being singled out for unfair and arbitrary mistreatment are characterized as "special privileges," and small-business owners are told they'll be forced to hire quotas of people who are demonized as mentally ill, sexually predatory and politically subversive.
This strategy works for two reasons:
* It plays on widespread misconceptions about the legal basis for nondiscrimination laws and how they work, as well as a lack of knowledge about the realities of gay lives.
* Gay advocates often haven't done a good job providing compelling proof of discrimination.
Carolyn Novak, an Ohio State researcher who has studied anti-gay ballot initiatives in Maine, Colorado and Oregon, found that "while gay activists I were occasionally able to use personal narrative to demonstrate discrimination in one-on-one encounters, stories of routine or institutionalized mistreatment failed to surface in the media and so were not effectively planted in the minds of the voting public."
This is not to deny that many gays and lesbians suffer harassment and discrimination at the hands of employers, landlords and storekeepers. But the discrimination is rarely as brazen as, say, that directed against blacks in the 1960s. As painful and humiliating as it might be to be fired or denied housing because somebody suspects you might be gay, the vast majority of Americans don't see the evidence on their televisions or in their daily lives. Moreover, the 10 states and 165 cities and counties that have gay rights laws on the books have seen relatively few complaints filed under them.
The District of Columbia and these states have such laws: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.
In Maryland, laws protect gays against workplace discrimination in Baltimore, Rockville and Takoma Park, and in Howard, Montgomery and Prince George's counties, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In the wake of Maine, no other statewide laws are thought to be in serious jeopardy.
For gays, campaigns to outlaw discrimination are often as much about visibility and public education as they are about meeting an urgent need to combat bias.
