Don’t Blame Clinton’s Troubles on Gays : Politics: There are lots of reasons for the Nov. 8 debacle, but the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy isn’t one of them.

The words “gays-in-the-military” are being hung around President Clinton’s neck like a hangman’s noose as a direct result of discrimination that lesbians and gay men face.

In the frenzy of post-election finger-pointing, the history of efforts to lift the gay ban are being rewritten by journalists, happy-to-pile-on Republicans and eager-to-blame Democrats to illustrate President Clinton’s perceived culpability in the Democratic debacle of Nov. 8. It would be another thing if the President actually did make lifting the ban his first priority. He didn’t. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is the same ban, and poor management of the issue has caused a public-relations quagmire for the White House from the beginning.

The phrase “gays-in-the-military” is slowly but surely experiencing a metamorphosis from a simple campaign promise to treat people fairly to the monster that could kill a presidency. Each time it appears in print or is spoken on radio or television to describe “where the Clinton presidency went wrong” it becomes a form of gay-bashing. The President becomes a victim of anti-gay discrimination.

Dave McCurdy, the former Oklahoma Democratic congressman, and chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, subscribes to the theory that the President’s effort to end the ban contributed to his own loss to Republican James Inhofe in the race for David Boren’s Senate seat. Presidential pollster Stan Greenberg in a widely quoted post-election survey for the Democratic Leadership Council said 54% were disappointed in President Clinton, and 51% of that number indicated they were disappointed because he “pursued a liberal agenda like gays in the military.” A computer search of the phrase “gays in the military” produces hundreds of references since Nov. 8, as pundits of every stripe grope for their own analysis of the Republican upset.

It’s time to get real.

Sen. Chuck Robb (D-Va.) supported lifting the ban, and supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act banning job discrimination against gay people. Oliver North, a notoriously anti-gay zealot, tried to use the issue against Robb and it failed. Virginia is hardly less conservative than Oklahoma. While it can be said that North had other baggage that might have overshadowed Robb’s support for gay rights, the bottom line remains that North’s anti-gay positions did not prevail.

When you crunch the numbers in Greenberg’s poll, you find that about 26% of all respondents felt that “gays-in-the-military” was a source of disappointment in Clinton. This is consistent with other polls that show less than one-third of the voting public is solidly anti-gay. But two-thirds are not, consistent with polls commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the nation’s largest gay political group, that show more than 70% opposing job discrimination against gays.

Pundits and politicians should stop and realize the harm they are causing thousands of gay men and lesbians in the U.S. military and throughout the country by continuing to create a mythological monster out of a then-new President’s efforts to do the right thing.

The question now is whether the newly Republican-dominated Congress will continue the myth-making and use gay issues to bludgeon, or will it agree with most Americans and reject policies that institutionalize discrimination? Will Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich overcome the inevitable pressure from the extremes of his party to capitalize on the anti-gay prejudice of a vocal minority? Early in 1992, Gingrich said there was no reason to expel people from the military “for purely private behavior that’s sexual.” But a year later, he changed his position, saying “I’ve decided to go with the guys (generals) who won the wars in Panama and the Gulf.”

“Gays-in-the-military” must stop being used by political opportunists and analysts searching for easy answers to the vexing outcome of Nov. 8. If it continues, it will be at the expense of American citizens who are gay or lesbian.