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Today's
Stories
February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan
Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10, Morris
0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's Revelations
and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the Mafia
|
February
6, 2004
The Beauty Queen of Bigotry
Anita
Bryant's Legacy
By JOANNE MARINER
Remember
Anita Bryant, the Miss America runner-up turned orange juice tout turned
anti-gay campaigner? Though she long ago faded from public view, her
legacy survives in Florida.
Bryant,
who condemned homosexuality as immoral and “against God’s
wishes,” is best known for her 1977 campaign to repeal a Miami
ordinance banning anti-gay discrimination. Her organization, Save Our
Children, claimed that gays -- or “known practicing homosexuals,”
in her lingo -- were converting children to homosexuality. It was thus
no surprise that after Bryant succeeded in her self-described crusade
against the bias ordinance, she turned her sights on Florida’s
adoption laws.
“Since
homosexuals cannot reproduce,” Bryant reasoned, “they must
recruit and freshen their ranks.” Fanning the flames of anti-gay
hysteria, Bryant helped convince the Florida legislature to pass a law
that entirely barred gays from adopting children.
Fast
forward more than two and a half decades. In the intervening years,
Miami finally passed an anti-gay bias ordinance, the U.S. Supreme Court
struck down Texas’ ban on gay sodomy, and Anita Bryant slipped
into obscurity.
Last
week, nonetheless, a federal appellate court upheld Florida’s
anti-gay adoption law against a constitutional challenge. While its
language was more guarded then Bryant’s ever was, the court relied
on the same discriminatory rationale: that gay adoptive parents might
create gay adoptive kids.
The
case began in 1999, when four gay men who were serving as foster parents
or legal guardians filed suit in federal court claiming that Florida’s
exclusionary adoption rule was unconstitutional. The lead plaintiff,
Steven Lofton, is a registered pediatric nurse who has raised from infancy
three children who were born HIV-positive. As the court was later to
acknowledge in its opinion, “by all accounts, Lofton’s efforts
in caring for these children have been exemplary.”
The
district court threw out the suit in 2001, and the men appealed. Their
claim got what might have seemed like a decisive boost last summer,
when the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Lawrence v. Texas that Texas’
gay sodomy statute was unconstitutional.
One
of the factors the Court emphasized, in striking down the Texas law,
was the unjust stigma it engendered. By making gay sodomy illegal (or
in the Court’s euphemistic language, by “making it a crime
for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual
conduct”), the law was an “invitation to subject homosexual
persons to discrimination both in the public and in the private spheres.”
Much
of the Supreme Court’s reasoning presumes that gays and lesbians
have the right to be free from discrimination. Yet its ruling is grounded
in privacy concerns rather than anti-discrimination protections. Sounding
almost apologetic, the Court explained that a decision based on equal
protection grounds would have left heterosexual sodomy unprotected.
“Were we to hold the statute invalid under the Equal Protection
Clause,” the majority opinion noted, “some might question
whether a prohibition would be valid if drawn differently, say, to prohibit
the conduct both between same-sex and different-sex participants.”
Sodomizing
heterosexuals no doubt rejoiced, but the Court’s failure to decide
the case on equal protection grounds left important questions unsettled.
The issue of gay marriage was, of course, foremost among them, at least
in the public debate. Yet in other areas, as well, the constitutional
footing of rules discriminating against gays remained less than wholly
clear.
The
federal appellate court ruling last week is one of the first post-Lawrence
cases to address such questions. In upholding Florida’s discriminatory
adoption law against an equal protection challenge, the court disappointed
anyone who expected Lawrence to bring about a sea-change in the courts’
treatment of anti-gay restrictions.
Like
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote a concurring opinion in
Lawrence on equal protection grounds, the appellate court examined whether
the anti-gay rule established by the law had any rational basis. But
whereas O’Connor, in her opinion, concluded that Texas had no
legitimate reason for its discriminatory restrictions, the appellate
court found that the Florida legislature might rationally conclude that
gays, as a group, are less fit than heterosexuals to raise children.
Nowhere
is the court’s opinion is Anita Bryant’s undisguised homophobia
on display. Indeed, the opinion’s language is circumspect and
its message is carefully modulated. But what it finally asserts, albeit
in a cautious, roundabout way, is that gay parents might adversely influence
the development of their children’s sexuality. They might, in
other words, make their children gay, too.
The
court cites no scientific data to support this supposition. Indeed,
it never even states categorically that parental sexual orientation
has a bearing on that of children. But in concluding that “the
influence of environmental factors in forming patterns of sexual behavior”
is an empirical issue, not amenable to judicial resolution, the court
allows that the mere hypothetical possibility of such parental influence
is enough to bar gays and lesbians from eligibility to adopt.
3,400
Florida children now languish in foster care, waiting for a permanent
home. But for all of the Eleventh Circuit’s high-minded talk about
nurturing families and the “best interests of the child,”
the real basis for its damaging ruling was ignorance, bias and homophobia.
Anita
Bryant would be proud.
Joanne
Mariner is a human rights lawyer in New York and a columnist
for Findlaw, where this essay originally appeared.
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