Save our children/let us marry: Gay activists appropriate the rhetoric of child protectionism

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 100, 2008, Pages 186-207

  McCreery, Patrick ^a,b  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 38849157910     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2007-030     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. The 2005 vote was the second step in the three-step, multiyear process of amending the Massachusetts constitution. Massachusetts law requires that the combined legislature pass proposed amendments in two consecutive years; if that occurs, the measure is then sent to voters as a referendum in the third year. Quote from Pam Belluck, "Massachusetts Rejects Bill to Eliminate Gay Marriage," New York Times, September 15, 2005.
2. See: Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962).
3. For a sociological analysis of the deployment of the discourse of child endangerment, see Joel Best, Threatened Children (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
4. For historical analyses, see Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America's Young in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
5. and Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
6. For analyses of how the rhetoric of child endangerment is used to police adult sexual activity, see James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998);
7. and Michael Bronski, The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (New York: St. Martin's, 1998).
8. Specifically, the amendment added the phrase affectional or sexual preferences to the list of protected conditions enumerated in the code's Human Right Ordinance. Protected conditions that already existed included race, sex, and religion.
9. The commission passed the amendment unanimously in December 1976, but county law required a second vote to amend the code. The January 1977 vote took place after Bryant first spoke out against the measure; that vote was eight to three. Coincidentally, the commissioner who proposed the amendment was Ruth Shack, a Democrat from Miami Beach and the wife of Bryant's longtime agent, Dick Shack. Bryant, who had publicly endorsed Ruth Shack in her campaign, later said she was appalled at the commissioner's political views. Bryant and Dick Shack parted ways professionally in the middle of the campaign. For a background on the events leading up to the amendment's proposal and initial enactment, see Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 293-95;
10. for similar characterizations, see John Loughery, The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 372-76.
11. Bryant herself wrote extensively about the campaign in two books. See Anita Bryant, The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation's Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1977);
12. and Anita Bryant and Bob Green, At Any Cost (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1978).
13. For more on Ruth Shack's support of the amendment, see Morton Lucoff, "Homosexual Groups Urging Anti-bias Law," Miami News, November 16, 1976.
14. Anita Bryant, Raising God's Children (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1977), 30.
15. A home-rule amendment in the Dade County Code exempted the county school board and all state and federal offices operating in the county from having to observe the county's antibias laws relating to employment. The gay rights amendment thus affected private schools, both religious and secular, but not public ones. See "How Ordinance Can Affect Gays and Everyone Else," Miami Herald, June 6, 1977.
16. See Alan Ebert, "Couples," People, January 24, 1977, 33-35.
17. Bryant, Anita Bryant Story, 114.
18. Bryant and Green, At Any Cost, 18.
19. Frank Greve and Gerald Storch, "Anita Bryant: Homosexuality Is a Sin," Miami Herald Tropic Magazine, May 29, 1977, 6-11
20. Miami saw several moral panics related to homosexuals in the years prior to Bryant's campaign. One occurred in 1954 after a young girl was kidnapped, sexually abused, and murdered. See Fred Fejes, "Murder, Perversion, and Moral Panic: The 1954 Media Campaign against Miami's Homosexuals and the Discourse of Civic Betterment," Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 305-47. Florida's infamous "Johns Committee," named after a state senator, waged a decade-long campaign against "subversives" in state employment. Although it was formed to identify communist sympathizers, it ended up targeting gay men and lesbians who worked in the state university system.
21. See James A. Schnur, "Closet Crusaders: The Johns Committee and Homophobia, 1956-1965," in Carryin' on in the Gay and Lesbian South, ed. John Howard (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 132-63.
22. For more on the panic, see Jenkins, Moral Panic, esp. chaps. 6 and 7.
23. Ray Moseley, "Child Porno: Sickness for Sale," Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1977.
24. The main text of Save Our Children's ad read in part: "Parents are confused and don't know the real dangers posed by many homosexuals - and perceive them all as being gentle, non-aggressive types. The other side of the homosexual coin is a hair-raising pattern of recruitment and outright seduction and molestation ... a growing pattern that predictably will intensify if society approves laws granting legitimacy to the sexually perverted" (Miami Herald, June 6, 1977).
25. Bryant, Anita Bryant Story, 62.
26. See "Pro-Ordinance Campaign Theme: Human Rights Are Absolute," March 1.5, 1977, a four-page press release issued by Miami Victory Campaign, located in the uncataloged files of the Stonewall Archives, Fort Lauderdale. Kunst and Alan Rockway, Kunst's business partner and also the codirector of Miami Victory Campaign, issued numerous press releases and several pamphlets during the course of the campaign.
27. With Kunst gone and Campbell, the bathhouse king, hardly the person to counter Bryant's moralistic arguments, the coalition hired as its managers two well-known activists from opposite ends of the country, Ethan Geto from New York and Jim Foster from San Francisco. One of Geto's first moves was to drop the word gay from the group's title, changing it to the simpler and less divisive Dade County Coalition for Human Rights. Geto was an aide to the New York politician Robert Abrams; Foster had been the political chairman of San Francisco's Society for Individual Rights (SIR), one of the city's first gay-rights organizations.
28. See esp. Loughery, Other Side of Silence, 378-79.
29. Dade County Coalition for Human Rights, "Don't Let Them Chip Away at the Constitution," Miami Herald, June 5, 1977. The ad appeared in the Herald on other days as well.
30. Dade County Coalition for Human Rights, "Freedom in America Begins and Ends Here," Miami Herald, June 3, 1977.
31. Clergy and Laity for Human Rights and Dade County Coalition for Human Rights, "Clergy and Laity for Human Rights," Miami Herald, June 2, 1977.
32. Miami Victory Campaign, "The Underdog Is Your Best Friend," Miami Herald, May 19, 1977.
33. Miami Victory Campaign, "NO is the answer ... the question is HUMAN RIGHTS." The ad originally appeared in the Weekly (Miami), May s, 1977, 23.
34. Kunst reprinted it in an undated pamphlet now located in the uncataloged files of the Stonewall Archives, Fort Lauderdale. Interestingly, this advertisement was one of the very few in the campaign that was produced by a gay-rights group and that also mentioned children. It asked in part: "Would you sacrifice your children to Anita Bryant? ... Could you allow the creation of official second-class citizenship for your children and grandchildren and other American citizens?"
35. Dade County Coalition for Human Rights, "Myths and Lies," Miami Herald, June 6,1977.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Bryant specifically invoked the phrase special privileges in Bryant and Green, At Any Cost, 131.
39. Theodore Stanger, "Dade Approves Ordinance Banning Bias against Gays," Miami Herald, January 19, 1977.
40. "Vote FOR Repeal of Gay Ordinance," Miami News, June 6, 1977. The Miami Herald also questioned the extent to which homosexuals faced discrimination. In an article published one week before the referendum, the newspaper reported that only three complaints of antigay discrimination had been filed in the five full months in which the ordinance had been in effect.
41. See Theodore Stanger, "Only a Few Gays Filing Bias Complaints," Miami Herald, May 30, 1977.
42. Beth Dunlop, "Bryant's Fight against Gays Costs Her a Host Spot oil TV," Miami Herald, February 25, 1977.
43. Ralph Renick, "The Blacklisting Returns:' Channel 4 News, CBS-TV, WTVJ, February 24, 1977.
44. John McMullan, "Anita versus Gays: Who's Discriminated Against?" Miami Herald, February 27, 1977.
45. Ibid.
46. Bryant, Anita Bryant Story, 62.
47. For several such examples, see Carl Hiaasen, "Out of the Closet, and Then Some," Miami Herald Tropic Magazine, June 5, 1977, 8-14.
48. I purposely studied well-established multi-issue organizations because I believe they are more representative of their respective movements than are newer organizations that focus solely on marriage. Such single-issue organizations do exist, however, especially on the part of those advocating same-sex marriage. See, for example, the Web sites of the Freedom to Marry Collaborative, www.freedomtomarry.org (accessed May 15, 2007); and of Marriage Equality USA, www.marriageequality.org (accessed May 15, 2007).
49. A major conservative organization that focuses on same-sex marriage is the Arlington Group, a coalition of so-called pro-family organizations (www.thearlingtogroup.org; accessed October 15, 2005).
50. James Dobson, "Eleven Arguments against Same-Sex Marriage (Part 1 of 5)," www.family.org/cforum/extras/a0032427.cfm (accessed October 15, 2005).
51. Ibid.
52. Glenn T. Stanton, "Are Same-Sex Families Good for Children? What the Social Sciences Say (and Don't Say) about Family Experimentation," Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs, 5;
53. see www.citizenlink.org/pdfs/fosi/marriage/Citizen_Health_of_SSF.Pdf (accessed May 17, 2007).
54. Daniel Allott, "Questions and Answers about Homosexual'MaTriage:'" American Values, Washington, DC, July 23, 2004, www.amvalues.org/press_releases.php.
55. For more on the construction of social problems (and a fascinating analysis of the role of the child victim in contemporary U.S. culture), see Best, Threatened Children.
56. All three organizations made clear that the census figures were rough estimates given that the census itself did not include questions about sexual orientation. The figure of 594,000 includes only those situations in which the person filling out the census form identified as his or her "husband/wife" or "unmarried partner" a person of the same sex. Single lesbians and gay men raising children are therefore not included in this figure.
57. See Gary Gates, "Same-Sex Couples and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Population: New Estimates from the American Community Survey," Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, October 2006, www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/publications /SameSexCouplesandGLBpopACS.pdf;
58. see also Lisa Bennett and Gary Gates, "The Cost of Marriage Inequality to Children and Their Same-Sex Parents," Human Rights Campaign, April 13, 2004, 2-7, www.hrc.org/Content/ContentGroups /Publicationsi/kids_doc_final.pdf.
59. Bennett and Gates base their theory of a census undercount of same-sex couples on the belief that some same-sex couples would not identify themselves as such to a government agency, while others would eschew the "husband/wife" and "unmarried partner" terminology the Census Bureau employed. They base the figure of 3.1 million people living together in same-sex relationships on an estimate that 5 percent of the U.S. adult population is gay or lesbian and that 30 percent of those individuals are coupled. Both figures are conjectural. See Bennett and Gates, "The Cost of Marriage," 5. Nonetheless, the HRC actually uses the 3.1 million figure in its publication "Answers to Questions about Marriage Equality." In a note, the group states that the "estimated number of people in same-sex relationships has been adjusted by 62 percent to compensate for the widely reported undercount in the Census."
60. See Human Rights Campaign, "Answers to Questions about Marriage Equality," updated 2005, www.hrc.org/Content/ContentGroups/ Publications1/marriage_brochure_2006.pdf (accessed May 17, 2007).
61. Bennett and Gates, "Cost of Marriage," 3.
62. Human Rights Campaign, "Answers to Questions about Marriage Equality" offers no basis for this figure.
63. General Accounting Office, "Defense of Marriage Act: An Update to Prior Report," Washington, DC, 2004, www.gao.gov/new.items /d04353r.pdf.
64. See, for example, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's fact sheet titled "Why Civil Unions Are Not Enough," www.thetaskforce.org/ downloads/reports/fact_sheets/WhyCivilUnionsAreNotEnough.pdf (accessed May 15, 2007).
65. A notable exception is a group of activists and intellectuals loosely affiliated with the organization Queers for Economic Justice. In a 2006 position paper titled "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships," the group called for "separating basic forms of legal and economic recognition from the requirement of marital and conjugal relationship." See www.beyondmarriage.org/BeyondMarriage.pdf (accessed May 15, 2007).
66. Bennett and Gates, "Cost of Marriage," 13.
67. Ibid., 3.
68. Cheryl Jacques, "A Message from HRC President Cheryl Jacques," in Human Rights Campaign, "Answers to Questions about Marriage Equality" Jacques was president of the HRC for only one year. She was ousted shortly after the 2004 elections, in which same-sex marriage bans passed in the eleven states that had them on the ballot. In her time at the HRC, Jacques had focused on defeating both the same-sex marriage bans and also George W. Bush's reelection efforts.
69. Ibid.
70. In raw figures, the census data actually suggests that cohabitating same-sex couples raising children constitute less than 0.5 percent of all households with children in the United States. This is decidedly not a figure that advocates of same-sex marriage advertise. See Bennett and Gates, "Cost of Marriage," 14-15.
71. See esp. Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (New York: Knopf, 1995).
72. Lambda Legal, "Decisions, Decisions: Deciding Whether to Get Married in Canada or Massachusetts," November 29, 2004, wwwlambdalegal.org/our-work/Publications/facts-backgrounds /page.jsp?itemID=31988461.
73. For two important studies, see Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey, "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" American Sociological Review 66, no. 2 (2001): 159-83;
74. and William Meezan and Jonathan Rauch, "Gay Marriage, Same-Sex Parenting, and America's Children," Future of Children 15 (2005): 97-115.
75. The newsletter is located at www.colage.org/prograins/justforus/ JFUspo4.pdf (accessed May 15, 2007).
76. For an informal ethnography of young people involved in COLAGE, see Abigail Garner, Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).