Wilson’s Chance to Fix a Wrong

It may be that Scott Fitzgerald was right, that there are no second acts in American life. But, every once in a while, a second chance comes along.

Gov. Pete Wilson has one now. He can put behind him the great wrong he did one year ago, when he vetoed a bill that would have prohibited employment discrimination against gays and lesbians. He can sign AB 2601, which is on his desk.

That measure, written by Democratic Assemblyman Terry Friedman of Los Angeles, meets all the objections Wilson raised in his veto message. The bill simply codifies existing case law under the state labor code, which guarantees gay men and lesbian women equal treatment in the workplace.

It will not duplicate existing laws nor create broad new avenues of civil litigation, two things the governor abhors. Businesses with less than five people and churches and other nonprofit religious organizations will not have to comply with the proposed law, creating what is, in effect, a “conscientious exemption” that does not currently exist in the state labor code.

These are important things. But by signing AB 2601, Wilson will do something far more vital. He will signal that, as head of the California Republican Party, he is setting himself and the moral authority of his office against the permanent pogrom to which gays and lesbians are subjected every day.

Pogrom is a strong word, but it is justified in this context. It signifies bigotry so virulent and wanton that it expresses itself in murder. Nonetheless, it accurately describes the situation of this country’s gays and lesbians. Consider these facts:

According to the U. S. Department of Justice, the majority of hate crimes committed in the United States since 1990 have been perpetrated against gays and lesbians. In that year, the most recent for which comprehensive national statistics are available, there were nearly 3,000 hate crimes committed against gays and lesbians in the five most populous states alone. California was one of those and, in that year, 563 in this state were physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation.

For the last 12 years, the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations has monitored the kind and frequency of local hate crimes. Last year, for the first time, crimes committed against gay and lesbian people outnumbered those committed against African-Americans or religious minorities. This also accounted for the fact that, for the first time since such records have been kept, actual assaults outnumbered acts of vandalism or verbal threats.

Last year in this county, 169 gays and lesbians were victims of hate crimes. In 117 of those cases, homosexual men were physically attacked on public streets.

Sadly, the Los Angeles area is not unique. A survey of the nation’s five largest cities conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that gay bashing incidents increased by 31% in 1991. Eight of those “incidents” were murders; in 1990, the number was three.

Against this backdrop, the expressions of homophobic animosity spoken from the podium of last month’s Republican National Convention have assumed an ominous cast.

As a distinguished Conservative rabbi said to me recently, “Those speeches were like gasoline thrown on a raging fire.”

By instinct, Gov. Wilson does not subscribe to this intramural Republican tendency. Like Massachusetts’ Republican chief executive, William Weld--a forthright supporter of equal rights for gays and lesbians--Wilson’s own notion of limited government stops far short of the bedroom.

At the Republican National Convention, it was Weld who delivered the so-called “big tent” address that was to have been Wilson’s, had the state’s budgetary crisis not detained him in Sacramento. The tendency represented in both governors’ thinking--fiscal conservatism and an essentially libertarian approach to individual values--is one many moderate Republicans believe is critical to their party’s future.

In an important sense, it also is key to the future well-being of our national political system, which is predicated on the health of two contending parties.

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The cultural war being waged today is not, as some would have it, so much for the soul of the nation as it is for the soul of the GOP. Its leaders--Wilson among them--must decide whether the vision they offer of the nation’s future will be dictated by the product of their own reason and experience or by the sectarian impulses of a relatively small but active group of religious enthusiasts.

It is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of Americans affiliated with organized religions have no trouble conforming their consciences to the demands of both denominational dogma and equal opportunity. For example, the moral theology promulgated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith contends that homosexuality is an “intrinsically disordered state.” Yet, according to a recent national poll, 78% of America’s more than 58 million Roman Catholics oppose employment discrimination against gays and lesbians.

In fact, Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati recently pledged that the U.S. bishops “will continue to look for ways in which those people who have a homosexual orientation will not suffer unjust discrimination in law or reality because of their orientation.”

How the Republicans choose to read these “signs of the times” is a matter of some consequence, because watching the transformation of the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Pat Robertson is very much like watching the cat Heine observed chewing its tail: In the objective sense it was eating. But in the subjective sense it was being eaten.

That is precisely the situation with which Wilson must contend as he deals with a state Republican Party already much in thrall to the religious right, whose adherents now predominate on many central committees. As a prominent GOP political strategist said to me not long ago:

“Those folks are meat eaters. And, if you’re going to survive alongside them, every once in a while, you’ve got to throw them some red meat.”

What Wilson now must decide is whether gay and lesbian Californians will be the next sacrificial offering.