Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 12:40:33 -1000
From: ramsey@math.hawaii.edu (Tom Ramsey)


	Andrew Sullivan Takes On Bill Bennett
	        In The NEW REPUBLIC

Where:  New Republic, Jan. 5 and 12, pages 15 and 16

Titles:  False Bennett, Gay-bashing by the numbers.

WEB version:
http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/tnr/archive/0198/010598/sullivan010598.html

From the second and third paragaphs from the end:
	"He [Bennett' believes, as he wrote in the STANDARD, that gay men
and lesbians are entitled to rights 'owed all Americans as Americans.'"
        "But that does not, apparently, include the right to serve one's
country [in the military] ... And it does not include the right not to
be fired from one's job merely because one is gay ... And it does not include
the right  not to be imprisoned  because of private, consensual sex.  And
it does not include the right of mothers to custody of their own children.
And it does not include the right to visit a spouse of many years who is
dying in an intensive care room.  And it does not, critically, include the
right to marry, a right declared by our Supreme Court to be one of the
'basic civil rights of man' ...[which is denied] to gay and lesbian Americans
for something that even Bennett concedes is 'hard-wired' into their identity...."

	Bennett is testing what is, as far as I can tell, new anti-gay
rhetoric.
        A.  concede that, yes, it is probably genetic ("hard-wired") for
            some percent of the population (my own guess is that this is about
            3 per cent of males and 1.5 percent of females, but that is a GUESS!)
        B.  Some people are more "educable" in sexual behavior, and need to
            be encouraged to choose to be straight.  So, to protect these
            borderline people we must deny civil rights to all gays and lesbians.
            We must send a clear societal message that society prefers people to
            be straight.
Bennett, to his eternal shame, leads with sound-bites created from the flawed
statistics of Paul Cameron.  Of course, the sound-bites are what get quoted and
headlined.  New rhetoric, same challenge:  gay-bashing as a way to build a certain
kind of Republican party.
	
						Tom Ramsey
						Ex-Officio, BoD
                                                Marriage Project Hawaii
						PO Box 11690
						Honolulu, HI 96828
						808 942 3737