Return to Normalcy

Walter Olson from the January 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Other employment lawsuits have been at least as troubling. The biggest court award came in Collins v. Shell Oil, a case so embarrassing that gay activists seldom cite it. It involved a man who was fired after he left on an office printer the sort of blush-to-relate material about his private life that could easily have gotten a straight man fired mutatis mutandis under current sexual harassment rules curbing the circulation of lewd matter in the workplace. Instead a court handed him $5.3 million.

Then there was John Dill's complaint that former employer Bryan Griggs had harassed him at the office by 1) playing conservative talk radio shows; and 2) posting a letter from a local Congresswoman skeptical of gay service in the military. (Dill hadn't objected to either
the radio or the letter posting at the time.) A spokeswoman for the Seattle human rights commis sion said the claims might well fly under the city law. After Griggswho said he didn't know Dill was gay at allhad spent $5,000 on legal defense, Dill dropped the charges, explaining that his point had been made.

The Seattle Times called Dill's complaint a "scary assault on the First Amendment," which did not prevent Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) from telling The Advocate that "you see a record of zero horror stories" under these laws. This may be the sort of thing Florence King had in mind when she wrote: "I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat."

It's not that Sullivan opposes ambitious gay rights measures. In particular, he's become famous for arguing the case for same-sex marriage and acceptance in military service (and does so again in Virtually Normal). Both, he believes, would help assimilate homosexuals into the matrix of society. Moreover, both would move the government itself toward a position of neutral ity between gay and straight citizens, and neutrality is a suitable demand for classical liberals to place on their government.

But most bias fights are over the application of laws to private actors, not the government. And even a cursory look at recent controversiesover the Boston Irish parade and the Boy Scouts, for instancesuggests that, as Sullivan observes, anti-bias measures have "seemed to intensify the hostility shown toward homosexuals rather than mollify it." And no wonder: Their aim is to "educate a backward majority in the errors of its ways" at the cost of some of its liberty. Observing the complex range of not always rational emotions in gay-straight relations, they seek to "reduce all these emotions to a binary bigoted-tolerant axis, and legislate in favor of the tolerant."

Yet, Sullivan argues, using the government to enforce some citizens' views of virtue and the good life over others' is what liberalism was "invented specifically to oppose." Having reversed its policy, its modern successor "has now come to seem a fomenter of social division," "deeply implicated" in growing societal warfare. "It has come, in other words, to resemble the problem it was originally designed to fix."

Hence what Sullivan aptly calls his "peace proposal." He suggests "disentangling from each other legally, by avoiding any actual interaction in which citizens seek legal redress from other citizens about homosexuality." There'd be "[n]o cures or re-educations, no wrenching private litigation, no political imposition of tolerance." Instead there'd be liberty, amid purely formal legal equality.

Sullivan does not always seem to realize that when it comes to the government's own operationswhom to employ, how to tax, what methods to recognize for the legitimation of childrenfixing on a goal of formal neutrality is only the first, not the last, step in analysis. Anti -bias norms enforced by litigation carry major costs even when applied to public employment; most citizens will feel that efficacy rather than neutrality should rule in the military if the two happen to clash. Indeed, announcing a goal of neutrality merely purchases a ticket to a maze of practical considerations that in a fair-minded system will not always be resolved in the direction of gay equivalency, in family law or anything else.

Though short on research and on consideration of practical details, an essay like Sullivan's can hardly be every sort of book at once. Enough that it raises at long last the right sorts of questions about its subject. Its author can bask in the compliment paid him by London's Independent: "Sullivan is a political thinker and yet every sentence is imbued with a sense of the limita tions of politics."

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