LGBT – Sheila Kennedy

Indefensible

Although the United States and Europe have made impressive strides, both culturally and legally, in the battle against homophobia, that progress has by no means been global in scope.

Homosexuality is illegal in over 70 countries, and in 13 of them, the penalty is death.

Very few of the issues that come before the United Nations are straightforward, but on September 29th, members voted on a Resolution that should have been a “slam dunk” for the U.S. The motion called upon countries in which capital punishment remains legal to take steps to ensure that the death penalty is not imposed “arbitrarily or in a discriminatory manner” or for forms of conduct such as apostasy, blasphemy, adultery and consensual homosexual relations.

As numerous outlets, including Newsweek, reported,

The United States was one of 13 nations, including some of the most repressive nations on Earth, to oppose a United Nations motion condemning the death penalty for those in same-sex relationships, blasphemers and adulterers.

Incredible as it seems, the United States voted in Geneva against that United Nations motion. We were joined by Botswana, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China, India, Iraq, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates in voting no. That’s the company we are evidently now keeping.

The measure passed anyway, with 27 votes, but that doesn’t make our vote any more palatable, or any less of a betrayal.

Rights activists have condemned the Trump administration and its U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, for refusing to back the measure, with the Human Rights Campaign slamming the decision as “beyond disgraceful.”

“Ambassador Haley has failed the LGBTQ community by not standing up against the barbaric use of the death penalty to punish individuals in same-sex relationships,” said Ty Cobb, director of HRC Global in a statement.

Susan Rice, ambassador to the U.N. under Barack Obama, said “shame on US!” in reaction to the vote.

“I was proud to lead U.S. efforts at UN to protect LGBTQ people, back in the day when America stood for human rights for all,” she tweeted.

The State Department denied animus toward the LGBTQ community, and defended the vote on the grounds of “broader concerns”– i.e., the resolution’s condemnation of the death penalty. (It called for countries which have yet to abolish the death penalty to “consider” doing so.) In the past, the U.S. has abstained from voting on condemnations of capital punishment, and we could easily have joined the seven nations that abstained from this particular vote. But we didn’t.

Abstention is one thing. A “no” vote is another. The U.S. has never previously voted against such resolutions.

Despite State Department insistence that the vote did not signal a change in U.S. support for the rights of LGBTQ persons,

The U.N. vote comes a week after the Trump administration argued in court that federal anti-discrimination law does not protect gay people from being fired by their employers because of their sexuality.

Nineteen states in the U.S. and two-thirds of the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty. In retaining capital punishment, we join countries like Uganda, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other nations not exactly known for their enlightened view of human rights. We not only retain the death penalty, we use it. A lot. The U.S. executes more people than most other nations; according to Amnesty International, of the 10 nations in the world that account for the highest number of executions, we rank seventh.

That enthusiasm for the death penalty, while incomprehensible to me, might have justified an abstention from the vote. It does not justify voting against the resolution. Claims that the vote isn’t a signal that the Trump administration is trying to roll back progress on gay rights ring hollow.

Not that an assault on yet another group despised by White Straight Conservative Christian Males should surprise us….

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It Really Isn’t About the Quality of Education

No one who watched Mike Pence dramatically expand Indiana’s voucher program at the expense of the state’s public schools, and certainly no one who has followed the appointment and appalling performance of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, could come away thinking “Boy, those people really care about education!”

Despite their rhetoric, Pence, DeVos and a number of other proponents of “educational choice” have a decidedly religious agenda. DeVos has been quoted as saying that vouchers will usher in “God’s kingdom.” Pence’s voucher program hasn’t improved educational outcomes, but it has financially benefitted the religious schools that participate.

And the religious schools that do participate in Indiana’s voucher program have seen to it that some children don’t even have that much-touted “choice.” As Chalkbeat recently reported,

When it comes to school choice, options are more limited for Indiana’s LGBT students.

Lighthouse Christian Academy in Bloomington recently made headlines for promising students an excellent, “biblically integrated” education — unless they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The school also received more than $650,000 in public funds last year through the state’s voucher program.

In Indiana, over 34,299 students used vouchers to attend a private school last fall, making it the largest such program in the country. It’s also a program that U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has applauded — which means Indiana offers a helpful glimpse at how a DeVos-led national expansion of vouchers might shape up.

Many private, religious schools are also accredited by a group that provides advice about how to turn away LGBT students. Given that nearly 20 percent of schools do not publicize their admissions policies, the true number of schools with anti-LGBT policies is unclear.

Of the 27 schools with explicitly anti-LGBT policies, 14 were accredited by the Association of Christian Schools International, a pro school-choice group that provides its members with a handbook titled “Steps Your School Can Take When Dealing With Homosexual Issues.”

The Chalkbeat article quotes religious school officials who stress the importance of respecting the religious views of schools operated by different denominations. I have no quarrel with respecting their right to teach their beliefs; I do have a quarrel with their right to have those beliefs subsidized with my tax dollars.

In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Supreme Court ruled that vouchers to religious schools did not violate the religion clauses of the First Amendment, because the vouchers (theoretically) went to the parents, who were free to use them at either religious or secular schools. The problem with this approach is the same as the problem facing gay children in Indiana: the “choice” is illusory, because virtually all of the participating schools are religious.

Charter schools–which are still public schools– manage to operate while being subject to the same constitutional and civil rights constraints that apply to traditional public schools. There’s no reason that private schools–religious or not– that benefit from voucher dollars shouldn’t be required to do likewise.

Of course, at some point, Hoosiers are going to have to face up to the fact that although vouchers do not improve student’s test scores, they certainly do improve the bottom lines of participating religious schools.

Despite being marketed as a way to give parents a “choice” to enroll their children in “better” schools, Indiana’s vouchers are simply a financial windfall for religious schools at the expense of our public schools. And if a few LGBTQ kids face discrimination, well that’s just too bad.

It certainly doesn’t bother DeVos and Pence.

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The Culture of Inequality

This month, we have had two reminders of the ways in which culture and cultural assumptions shape notions of equality.

For the first time ever in the United States, a woman was nominated for the Presidency by a major political party. And in much of the country, Pride Week was celebrated in June—a time for public celebrations of the LGBT community’s movement toward civic and legal equality.

When Americans talk about the social marginalization of a group of people based upon their identity, we tend to think in terms of individual rights and fundamental fairness. Those of us supporting civic inclusion and legal equality point—justifiably—to the importance of treating people as the individuals they are, judging people on their personal merits and not dismissing (or elevating) them on the basis of their group identity.

Those opposed to equal treatment for members of minority populations often justify disparate treatment on religious grounds (“the bible says”), or—like a certain deceased Supreme Court Justice—on the stabilizing effect and social importance of tradition. (These tend to be white heterosexual men who have been socialized to see women, blacks, gays, Jews, Muslims, etc. as “other;” as members of a class enjoying more privileged status, they see no reason to disturb a status quo that benefits them.)

What sometimes gets lost in these discussions are the very practical, very tangible economic consequences of membership in a disfavored minority.

The economic gap between whites and blacks has been too pronounced to ignore, of course; the legacy of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow and the more subtle but no less devastating results of the “new Jim Crow”—the drug war—are vivid examples of what happens to people when you make it difficult or impossible for them to compete on a level playing field. Only people determined to ignore reality refuse to recognize the economic consequences of that degree of systematic oppression.

That economic inequality is also a consequence of the marginalization of women and LGBT citizens, however, is less widely appreciated.

When women point out that they make 78 cents for each dollar a man earns, those defending the status quo point to the fact that women disproportionately “choose” lower-paying professions, or take time out of the workforce to raise families. The conversation rarely considers the role culture plays in constraining women’s “choices” or shaping employers’ expectations. Occasionally, an academic study will compare women’s status in countries where the cultural assumptions facilitate government provision of day care and other safety-net supports for working women. (Not so coincidentally, several of those countries elected women to high office years ago.)

Because LGBT employees are not immediately recognizable, there is an assumption that they do not face the same sorts of employment discrimination as women or African-Americans. That, of course, is true only for those who remain in the closet. In many states, including my own Indiana, LGBT people are not protected by civil rights laws, so the decision to come out can be risky. When your continued employment and/or promotion depends upon the goodwill of your boss rather than your legal entitlements, your economic situation is precarious. As American cultural norms have changed, and bias against LGBT people has diminished, more companies have instituted anti-discrimination policies, and more states have expanded their civil rights protections, but it is still a work in progress.

Bottom line: social inequality is almost never only social. It translates into fewer job opportunities, a reduced likelihood of promotion, less access to credit and the kinds of networks that work to the benefit of privileged populations—all of which means greater economic insecurity.

In a society where some are more equal than others, some will be more economically secure than others. A culture that treats individuals equally, no matter what their gender, race, religion or sexual orientation, is a society that is more likely to offer employment security and equal pay for equal work.

Of course, a culture that values all of its citizens is also unlikely to countenance a huge disparity between the rich and the rest. But that’s a post for another day.

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It Really is All or None….

At its most basic, government is a mechanism for living together. Politics, as the old saying goes, is war without the weapons–the process of mediating the demands of various interest groups and constituencies. Some governments are expressly established to privilege members of certain groups over others; America’s legal system, in contrast, is based upon a belief that people should be treated as individuals–that government should treat its citizens based upon their behavior, rather than their identity.

Being true to that ideal has always been a struggle; there have always been Americans who want to single out others as “less” not because those individuals have behaved badly, but simply by virtue of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. That–as Paul Ryan recently noted–is the textbook definition of bigotry.

In the Age of Trump, those voices of bigotry are in danger of being legitimized. They are certainly being amplified.

From Talking Points Memo, we learn that

The same Republicans who have argued that gay couples should not be allowed to marry, that LGBT Americans don’t need federal anti-discrimination protections and that trans people should not use the bathroom that matches their identity are now claiming that they — not Democrats — are the party on the LGBT community’s side.

Their reasoning? That somehow, in the wake of the Orlando shooting at a gay night club that left 49 people dead, there’s now a mutually exclusive choice between supporting Muslims and protecting gay people, and Democrats have chosen the former.

The unlovely premise of that rationale is that all Muslims are terrorists, as one Republican congressman has baldly stated.

It is hard to think of anything more un-American–or more dangerous– than treating any group of people as a monolithic whole. The truth of the matter is that–idealism and fundamental fairness aside–no one in any group is safe in a society that allows government to pick and choose which identities are to be privileged and which marginalized and demeaned.

The effort to set one marginalized group against another is particularly despicable, although politically understandable. (You guys go fight each other and don’t pay any attention to the fact that we “real Americans” are running the show.)

Fortunately, the LGBT community understands–and rejects–the tactic. An essay titled “We Are Strong, but We Are Not Okay” posted in the wake of the Orlando massacre, included this paragraph:

We are not okay when you criminalize the Muslim community because of the actions of one evil man. We have been the Muslim community: hated, feared, misunderstood. Questioned, berated, threatened, afraid to show our faces. Why would we condone treating an entire community as poorly as ours has been treated in the past, and in many scenarios, still is? When you come for one minority, you come for us all.

Treating citizens as individuals, refusing to discriminate on the basis of group identity, is a central premise of this nation’s approach to government. An attack on that premise is an attack on America.

Unfortunately, that’s a lesson we keep having to learn.

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Who, Exactly, Is Susan Brooks?

Yes, Indiana is a reliably red state. But there are measurable differences among our urban, suburban and rural Republicans.

Indiana’s Fifth Congressional District lies largely in Hamilton County. If survey research is to be believed, many Hamilton County Republicans tend to be “old-fashioned” members of the Grand Old Party, in the sense that they have more in common with the party of Hudnut and Lugar than that of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

Presumably conscious of the character of this portion of her constituency, GOP Representative Susan Brooks has generally presented herself publicly as “moderately moderate”–an unthreatening throwback to the good old days when Republicans who described themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” were still welcome in the party.

Those of us who knew her before she ran for Congress certainly believed her to be a moderate, and the positions she chooses to publicize do little to disabuse voters of that impression; they tend to address issues having broad bipartisan appeal, like her recent statements on opoid addiction. Her voting record, however, is very different.

Indeed, her voting history was virtually indistinguishable from that of Michelle Bachmann, before the latter left Congress.

Most recently, Brooks participated in a GOP turnaround (aka “dirty trick”) in order to protect federal contractors who discriminate against LGBT employees:

The hugely symbolic fight on the House floor that most Americans probably missed is worth revisiting. The provision at issue seeks to repeal nondiscrimination protections that President Obama extended to LGBT employees of federal contractors in 2014. And although the final vote tally originally showed a majority of lawmakers—including 35 Republicans—voting against the measure, the Republican leadership did some quick arm-twisting among its members, resulting in a seven-vote turn around that kept the anti-LGBT portion intact.

Chaos momentarily erupted on the floor with Democrats chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer taking to the floor to demand answers for how the vote changed after the clock had run out.

It was the capper to a week in which GOP lawmakers across the country made clear that they will indeed force LGBT issues into the headlines this election cycle, even though it originally appeared that gay and transgender issues would mostly be on the back burner.

Brooks was one of the seven who “turned around” their votes, and went on record as approving of discrimination against LGBT workers.

I would never have anticipated that the reasonable Susan Brooks I thought I knew would become a steadfast opponent of civil rights for gays and lesbians, or that she would sponsor a measure prohibiting abortion after 20 weeks, or vote against the Lilly Ledbetter Act requiring equal pay for women, or that she would vote repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or to prevent the EPA from regulating toxic emissions, or join in the discredited and dishonest Benghazi witch hunt, or vote to defund Planned Parenthood, or …well, the list goes on.

(UPDATE/CORRECTION: I received an email from Rep. Brooks office, saying that–despite the newspaper report I read that triggered this post, she was not one of the seven “switchers” identified in the article I relied upon. I asked a lawyer friend to check that assertion, since I’m out of town in full-day meetings, and this was his response: “Here’s what I’ve found; it is true that Susan was not among the 7 who switched their votes at the last minute from “yes” to “no” on Thursday — but that’s because she voted NO at the outset. Here’s roll call on it: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2016/roll226. This is apparently a “switch” in position–hence the language in the article you saw– but it relates to the fact that she apparently supported some similar non-discrimination measure last year, but this year (last Thursday) she voted against the similar measure. I’m not entirely sure what the difference was in the two measures, but apparently the one last week would have withheld funding to discriminating organizations. So did she switch from yes to no LAST WEEK? Nope. She voted “NO” at the outset, having “switched” her position from last year. This probably accounts for the confusing newspaper report you read.” I was also mistaken about the Lilly Ledbetter vote–although all Republican House members did vote against it, that vote occurred prior to Brooks’ election. Although I regret my errors–I really try to be accurate in this blog–none of this rebuts my central point about the Congresswoman’s overall voting record.)

I don’t know who the “real” Susan Brooks is. Perhaps–as many Hamilton County voters obviously believe–she doesn’t really believe in the regressive measures she consistently supports. Perhaps she’s just constructing a voting record intended to avoid a potential primary challenge, or to ingratiate herself with Congressional colleagues who can advance her career, or to position herself for a Senate race in which appealing to more rural, deep-red GOP voters will be important.

Or perhaps she really is a somewhat less crazed, blond version of Michelle Bachmann.

In other words, she is either utterly devoid of integrity, or a genuinely right-wing ideologue.

Either way, she’s been a massive disappointment to those of us who once thought much better of her.

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