Supreme Court Shows the Way

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that gay sex is not illegal. Former Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina died several hours later.

Well, he was 100 years old.

While denying basic rights to gays wasn’t the hallmark of Thurmond’s political life (denying them to blacks was), let’s just say he didn’t trumpet the “homosexual agenda,” the term used scornfully by dissenting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in describing gays’ efforts to be treated as law-abiding citizens.

The point here isn’t to pick on the dearly departed -- in his later years Thurmond gave up the segregationist views that had dominated his political life -- but to use the Supreme Court’s ruling and Thurmond’s death as a reference point.

Thurmond and his ilk knew with moral certainty that blacks shouldn’t mingle with whites. Shouldn’t eat in the same restaurants, swim in the same pools, go to the same schools and, especially, date and marry them.

Not to be melodramatic, but I wonder how many individual lives on this planet were severely damaged by that kind of thinking. That is, people who had one shot at life -- just like the rest of us -- but had to spend it as second-class citizens.

Lo and behold, Thurmond came around. If his lack of venom in later years was a reflection of what he thought, he realized he’d been wrong. Much too late for the countless lives he affected adversely, but that’s the way it goes.

Now comes the Supreme Court decision, essentially telling people that what gays do in the privacy of their homes -- including the basic human act of having sex -- can’t be called criminal activity.

To people like Jean Littlefield -- who is 80 now but was nearly 50 when her teenage daughter told her she was gay -- the ruling may ease the pain that is often as real to the parents of gays as to gays themselves.

“You don’t want society to hurt your child,” Littlefield says. “I’d find her [as a teenager] crying in her bedroom. She was one of the most popular kids in school. We adopted her late in our lives, she was the center of our lives. We’d find her crying and we didn’t know why.”

What the Littlefields found was that their daughter, now 48, knew she was different from her girlfriends who were boy-crazy. Thus began her parents’ transformation.

“I didn’t know what I knew,” says Littlefield, a 22-year member of the Orange County chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. “I only knew what society and the church told me. But I knew she was no abomination. She was a normal 15-year-old who had feelings she didn’t understand.”

Anger at having a child scorned has dogged Eleanor Cyr, a Lake Forest resident and mother of twin sons both gay and now in their 40s. “People are so prejudiced,” she says with a sigh, adding that many people don’t bother to learn about homosexuality unless one of their children is gay. Then, it is a simple choice: get educated or “the child goes away from home,” Cyr says.

It’s not that either mother thinks the court’s ruling will trigger waves of understanding. Nor is it even that police routinely crash into people’s bedrooms. It’s just that the ruling chips away a bit more, perhaps, at the moral certainty that the antigay forces muster.

Just as the Old South had the law to fall back on -- as it segregated blacks and called it God’s will -- so have antigay forces.

Now, they’ll just have to proceed without the Supreme Court.

“If we change the laws, even if the hearts and minds of people don’t change that fast,” Littlefield says, “it gives them protections they didn’t have. We’ll take what we can get, and that’s a step forward.”

*

Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, dana.parsons@latimes.com and The Times’ O.C. edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.