Condoning Bigotry With a Straight Face

So Ross Perot, the man who would be President, tells Barbara Walters on national television that he would not knowingly appoint a gay or lesbian to a top position in his would-be administration because lots of Americans wouldn’t look too kindly on that.

“No, I don’t want anybody there that will be at a point of controversy with the American people,” Perot said. “It will distract from the work to be done.”

And naturally, the reaction from the populace, the pundits and the politicians to this amazing insight into the mind of the little big man has been, uh . . . has been, uh . . . virtually inaudible.

Truth is there’s hardly been a whimper of pique or even surprise. Oh, sure, Perot’s Democratic opponents huffed and puffed a little and said that in their Cabinets it wouldn’t matter one iota if you were straight or gay just as long as you were good at your job.

“I wouldn’t discriminate,” said Jerry Brown on “Meet the Press.” Even Pat Buchanan, the thunderer from the right, said there shouldn’t be any personal litmus test for public service, including the “no adulterers” standard that Perot said he also would uphold.

And a gay activist who organized a fund-raiser for Bill Clinton described himself in a front-page story in this newspaper as being “stunned” by Perot’s comments and then predicted that they would “become a major issue.”

The cynical question, of course, is, “Oh yeah? Major issue to whom ?”

See, it’s homo-sex-u-als we’s talking about here, the Americans it’s still OK to openly bash.

Even Dan Quayle’s joust with a fictional Murphy Brown, the tramp, stirred up way more indignation than this. And it was Quayle’s press secretary, incidentally, who told a lesbian joke to a Bush-Quayle fund-raiser last fall.

This was after candidate Bob Kerrey told his lesbian joke in a private conversation at a political roast. Both jokes bombed, both guys said they hadn’t meant to offend. All in all, it was comparatively small potatoes kind of stuff.

So why so little outrage here? Is it Perot the man, the myth, the guy whose warts look like beauty marks even when they start to ooze? This is a billionaire populist who seems so easy to like.

“Well, at least Perot’s honest,” I’ve heard it said, more than once, by way of an excuse as to the man’s feelings about gays.

Yes, Americans really are desperate for a white knight to pull on his cowboy boots and go kick some you-know-what. But I think there is more to that here.

We, as a nation, are phobic about gays.

Let me put it another way. Suppose a major presidential candidate had said that he wouldn’t consider naming a woman, or a black, or an American of Asian or Latin descent, to the top jobs at the departments of Treasury, or Education or Defense?

And let’s say that this candidate said he wouldn’t do this because he figures that some Americans would protest--say, like they did when blacks ate at the same lunch counter as whites, or when women were given the vote, or when practically any other civil right was granted to Americans accustomed to others directing their lives.

You think there would be a stink, followed by some major back-pedaling--not to mention all the blaring radio talk shows and pundits railing about what a dangerous Neanderthal this candidate is?

Suffice to say that it would be a very big deal. So what’s different about gays?

Even among many who describe themselves as “having an open mind,” the idea of affording homosexuals equal rights and obligations--one sure way to beat the draft is to tell the military that you’re gay--is downright queer.

Logic is often a casualty here. “So far as I’m concerned, what people do in their private lives is their business,” Ross Perot told Barbara Walters in the same interview the other night.

Yet it is this very contradiction that appears to be key. “I don’t want to know,” is what Perot, and millions of other people, are really saying about Americans who are gay. “They flaunt it,” I’ve heard time and again.

But what, possibly, would a gay or lesbian do on the job that a heterosexual would not? Are gays more likely to hold hands by the water cooler? Could, say, a lesbian with top security clearance be “compromised” if her sexual orientation were not a secret at all?

The answer, of course, is NOT!

Still, because millions of gays and lesbians, out of a mixture of fear and prudence, make their private lives “invisible” to those of us who talk openly of our husbands, our wives, our exes and current main squeezes, we, the majority, can dismiss gay rights as a minor concern.

“You would be amazed at the number of legislators who tell us when we’re up in Sacramento, ‘I don’t have any homosexuals in my district,”’ says Libby Cowan, co-chair of the Elections Committee of the County of Orange, a gay and lesbian political action committee.

And yet I’ve heard many variations of this “I don’t know any” theme, even from people I love. This always makes me wonder if they really know the mailman, or the librarian, or the lawyer who lives down the street.

“Gay people are just ordinary folks, who live and work same as we do,” says high school teacher Ted Biller, 60, who adds that it took a few years to overcome the grief he felt upon hearing that his only son, Ray, a social worker, is gay.

Now Biller asks to be quoted by name.

“I think I understand what Ross Perot is saying,” he says, “but I don’t think he has been around many people that he knows are gay. I don’t think he’d say something like that if he knew the quality of people that he’d be cutting out.”

Ted’s son, incidentally, was recently ordained a lay minister in the family church, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. For this, his father said, many hearts had to be opened and minds changed.

Ross Perot: take a cue.