NEWS ANALYSIS : President Shows He Won’t Duck Gay Rights Fight

When crowds of gay-rights advocates march down Constitution Avenue and swing past the White House on their way to the Capitol on Sunday, President Clinton will not be at home.

Yet, while sidestepping direct involvement in the march, Clinton has demonstrated that the politically explosive question of homosexual rights is one of the few issues that he considers non-negotiable.

Although avoiding endorsement of the activists’ full agenda, he has steadfastly expressed a belief in equal treatment for homosexuals and has quietly let the Pentagon know that it must come up with a serious plan for carrying out his decision to end the ban on gays in the military.

Those actions stand out for a President whose first months in office have more often been marked by a pragmatic willingness to shrug off campaign promises--to spare the middle class a tax hike, to ease immigration for Haitians and to adopt a more aggressive policy on Serbia.

“I believe that this country’s policies should be heavily biased in favor of non-discrimination,” Clinton said at a news conference Friday in response to a question about gay rights.

“I believe when you tell people they can’t do certain things in this country that other people can do, there ought to be an overwhelming and compelling reason for it,” he said. “I just have always had an almost libertarian view that we should try to protect the rights of American individual citizens to live up to the fullest of their capacities, and I’m going to stick right with that.”

As a result, this issue--marginal for most voters--may be among those that define Clinton’s presidency, both while he is in the White House and in the longer view of history.

“This won’t end this month. It won’t end in July,” said Robert Dallek, a UCLA history professor and author of books about former presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “(Clinton) is going to have to struggle with this through all his time in the White House.”

Clinton sees the issue in terms that parallel the moments of decision some of his predecessors faced over the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Neither President Dwight D. Eisenhower nor most Americans saw racial integration in the schools as a critical national issue when Eisenhower hesitated at applying federal authority to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Similarly, President John F. Kennedy met with little public outcry when he tarried for two years before offering civil rights legislation, although he had promised in his 1960 campaign to end discrimination against blacks “with the stroke of the pen.”

Yet history has judged both Eisenhower and Kennedy to have fallen short on the issue--just as Johnson’s championing of major civil rights laws is viewed as a saving grace of his troubled five years in office. Clinton apparently sees his position on gay rights in that light.

Espousal of gay rights is wrapped up in the President’s political identity. Clinton came of age during the civil rights movement and is from the generation of Southern politicians who have clearly broken with their region’s segregationist past.

And while even many staunch advocates of gay rights acknowledge profound differences from the civil rights movement, Clinton has said that his attitudes on gay rights “have nothing to do with politics, and it has everything to do with the fact that I grew up in a segregated society.”

Last January, in a private meeting with an old friend, Taylor Branch, author of a massive history of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his leadership in the civil rights movement, Clinton said that ending the ban on gays in the military was a matter of morality.

And, Clinton told Branch, his view would be vindicated by history, although he acknowledged ruefully that it was a distraction from his intended focus on economic policy.

“Taylor,” his friend remembers him saying, “I never thought I’d spend so much time thinking about gay people as I have in the last two weeks.”

As governor of Arkansas, Clinton was never known as especially supportive of gay rights. Nor has he supported such activist demands as legally recognizing homosexual marriages.

During the campaign, however, Clinton promised not only to lift the military ban but to fight the AIDS epidemic with all possible vigor and to advocate federal anti-discrimination laws that would cover homosexuals.

That has made him, in the words of Thomas B. Stoddard, coordinator of the Campaign for Military Service, a gay-rights group fighting the ban, “the best friend we’ve ever had in the White House--or any federal office of significance.”

Polls suggest that most Americans do not regard gay rights as a critical issue. But Clinton believes that public attitudes will move in his direction.

He said in January that he has been struck by how far the country has come in the last two or three decades, from the time when even open discussion of the subject was taboo.

However, polls also suggest that any change may be slow and hint at how much trouble the gay-rights issue could yet hold in store for Clinton.

As Clinton’s own poll-takers have noted, many voters tend to resent the political right for attacking gays and the left for promoting their rights. In short, they would prefer that the subject be left alone.

That is unlikely to happen in this presidential term.

Sunday’s march is intended as the beginning of a new age of gay-rights consciousness. “This march is going to launch a new era--the next phase of the civil rights movement,” said Torie Osborn, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) is expected to introduce legislation to end anti-gay discrimination, a proposal that could set off a lengthy confrontation.

If, as expected, Clinton orders an end to the military-service ban in July, it will begin a long process of setting forth new rules about the treatment of openly gay service members. The inevitable flare-ups stemming from those rules are likely to be highly publicized.

Political strategists predict that Republicans will try to use the controversy to promote their political aims in Congress and to gather ammunition for the 1994 and 1996 elections.

“There is already a sotto voce murmuring among Republican consultants about why they didn’t better exploit this issue in 1992,” said Michael Beschloss, an author and specialist on the presidency. “They may not make that mistake next time.”

The greatest near-term political risk for Clinton will be what happens this summer when he is expected to have both his economic package and his health care package before Congress. Should conservatives decide to wage a major fight over Clinton’s executive order on homosexual military service, the partisan passions over the three issues could become intertwined.

If that happens, the issue of gay rights could consume even more of Clinton’s waking hours than it has so far--and cast an even bigger shadow over his presidency.