Dan Savage has a provocative post here at the Slog discussing the recent increase in anti-gay rhetoric and bashing. He cites a few examples, including comments by that actor on “Grey’s Anatomy” and Tim Hardaway, as well as Ann Coulter’s warm regards for John Edwards. Some events that have gotten less notoriety are gay-bashing incidents and a weird tale from Florida where a city is going to fire its City Manager because he is preparing to undergo a sex-change procedure.
Savage suggests that some (much?) of the blame for these events should be on conservatives who have made demonizing gays part of their political platform. If one sows fear and loathing of gays, Savage says, well, one day those chicken will come home to roost. Okay, maybe I’m mixing metaphors there. But you get the idea. Savage really churns the waters when he compares all this to the conservatives spewing anti-federal-government fervor in the eighties and nineties and the perhaps not entirely unrelated bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.
Now, that’s a controversial position itself, and I’m not trying to re-argue that case. But it got me curious about what the Tim McVeigh equivalent of gay-bashing would be. I don’t think Savage is implying that these events are the equivalent of McVeigh’s crime, but he may be saying we’re headed there. And of course I don’t want to see something like a truck bomb in the Castro district or anything.
But where I think Savage’s comparison might be a little off is not only that we don’t want the anti-gay sentiment to get that heated, but also that the Oklahoma City bombing didn’t seem to usher in an era of big government-loving good feelings, Bill Clinton’s re-election notwithstanding. So I think maybe the better comparison might be with the civil rights movement.
I think there are plenty of differences between the gay rights movement and the black civil rights movement. But events like the incident at the Edmund Pettus Bridge (in the news again this weekend) and people like Bull Connor evoked sympathy and support for the movement. And of course, there were events that were even more tragic, like bombings and assassinations. But the end result, both from the rightness of the cause and the wrongness of their opponents’ tactics, is that nowadays it’s unthinkable to suggest Bull Connor was right.
On the other hand, people are probably always going to debate the proper scope of federal government power, not to mention whether the government is acting intentionally maliciously against us. Tim McVeigh didn’t really change that. So maybe, instead, Dan Savage should compare Tim Hardaway to Bull Connor. Again, the analogy isn’t perfect, but I think in the long run it would better serve the gay rights movement.