Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 08:52:07 -0500 From: mohr richard d +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Gay Affirmative Action by Richard D. Mohr In April at a national gay leadership conference, the executive directors of the Human Rights Champaign Fund (HRCF) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force both expressed support for affirmative action programs for blacks and women, but thought affirmative action irrelevant when it comes to gay people. They are wrong. What is astonishing about the claim coming from the HRCF is that the organization had just made a brilliant employment decision that can only be understood as affirmative action cranking in high gear. They hired as spokesperson for their National Coming Out Project, Candace Gingrich, the lesbian sister of the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. She is now on the lecture, talk-show, and photo-op circuit. There the former UPS package handler gave Raleigh's gay newspaper FRONT PAGE a long, card-tipping interview. When asked what her job qualifications were -- what talents, skills, and experience she had in the movement that made her the best person for the job -- she answered: "Since I realized that I was a lesbian, I really didn't pay much attention to the issues and to what was going on. I'm kind of appalled that I've been so inactive." She had gone to the 1993 March on Washington, to a local march, and to some local Pride Festivals. By any standard, that's pretty thin beer. For her tour, HRCF has taken out huge display ads that tout: "Your Brother Doesn't Have to Be Speaker for Your Voice to be Heard in America." But let's face it: the only reason SHE is being heard in America is because she has the nonchosen and immutable property of being Newt Gingrich's sister. She was not hired based on deeds of her own doing. She was hired because by accident of birth she was ideally suited to garner media coverage, to draw attention to the key issue of gay family life, and to drive home the point that we are everywhere. Merit and desert had nothing to do with it. Were other people with more skill, talent, and experience treated unfairly when they were passed over for the job? Obviously not. Candace Gingrich's hiring is an example of forward-looking affirmative action programs, future-directed programs designed to improve conditions either by increasing social utility and happiness or by prodding the nation toward a realization of its principles of justice. Her case also reveals a major moral point about equality. Drawing distinctions with regard to immutable and nonchosen properties is a frequent feature of legitimate and desirable public policy making and there is nothing unfair about it. Grandfathering provisions provide a classic example: the state ceases issuing new vendors licenses, but allows people who already have licenses to keep and renew them. This arrangement means that many people simply in consequence of the nonchosen and immutable date of their birth will be denied opportunity and freedom which other people have. But no one thinks these policies are unfair or inequitable even though they burden some people without regard to their deeds. Forward-looking gay affirmative action programs that would promote both the realization of justice and the increase of social utility include the hiring of openly gay people on police forces, in newsrooms, and as teachers and professors. Northeastern University in Boston and a number of law reviews have initiated such gay hiring programs. Two additional sorts of affirmative action programs are not only legitimate for but positively deserved by gays: backward- looking programs that compensate for past discrimination and present-focused programs which aim to ensure procedural fairness in current hirings. As long as gay people have existed in America as a socially marked group, they have all been discriminated against individually in virtue of their group membership. This is most obviously the case with laws and social customs that hinder the creation and prompt the destruction of gay families, especially the universal ban on gay marriage. Gays, each and every one, deserve recompense for the material damage done by these inequities, just as you deserve compensation when someone unjustly crashes into and damages your car. Further, if current hiring procedures are to be fair, open or suspected gays deserve weighted consideration in hiring decisions. Plenty of empirical evidence shows the existence of widespread anti-gay prejudice that is unacknowledged by or even unknown to those who harbor it. And frequently anti-gay prejudice is unintended, but effective none the less. Dick Armey's Freudian slip about Barney "Fag" is a star case. People with unacknowledged and unintended prejudices most certainly cannot be counted on to be fair when hiring gay people. In a tight competition, even a little prejudice is dispositive. Civil rights legislation alone cannot address such discrimination, especially if it requires a "smoking gun" as proof of discrimination. In hiring decisions, therefore, gays deserve weighted consideration, like bonus points given to veterans on civil service applications. Since the late 1980s, sponsors of federal gay civil rights bills have gone even farther than the HRCF and NGLTF in distancing themselves from gay affirmative action. The bills do not simply hold that their provisions do not require gay affirmative action. They make it illegal. This move and the statements by our national leaders are tactical rather than principled. And they may well eventually return to explode in gays' faces, just as famous but ill-chosen phrases about race discrimination by Hubert H. Humphrey and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s have returned to haunt debates over black affirmative action and to give comfort to bigots in the 1990s. _________________________ Richard D. Mohr is the author of GAY IDEAS, whose last chapter takes an extended look at gay affirmative action.