The outgoing head
of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
mixed liberal activism with gay rights -- but to what
end?
Matt Foreman, who
announced January 23 that he would be resigning as
executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force, was many things during his five years at the
top of one of the country’s preeminent gay
rights organizations. He was an outspoken opponent of the
war in Iraq. He fought against privatizing Social Security.
He stood foursquare against the erosion of abortion
rights.
But what any of
these issues have to do with lobbying for gay rights --
presumably Foreman’s job description -- is beyond me.
His job
description, though, was the problem. Foreman, after all, is
just a symptom of the larger problem with NGLTF: It's
a garden-variety liberal interest group posing as a
gay rights organization. In its mission statement,
NGLTF defines itself as forming "part of a broader social
justice movement," meaning that it seeks alliances with an
array of left-wing groups, from labor unions to
pro-choice organizations. Its worldview -- which will
be on display at its annual Creating Change conference
in Detroit starting February 7 -- is formed by a combination
of academic "queer theory" and Marxist rhetoric about
"systems of oppression." According to this outlook, the
United States -- and Western, liberal capitalist
societies in general -- are predicated on "oppressing"
the poor, nonwhites, "queers," and everyone else who
isn't a white male. So the battle for gay rights
suddenly becomes part and parcel of the battle to
redistribute wealth, weaken American sovereignty by
making the United States subservient to the whims of
the United Nations, and mandating racial quotas. In
this vision of the world, the fight for gay rights is
inseparable from the campaign to, say, oppose welfare
reform.
There is, of
course, nothing inconsistent with being gay and liberal --
the same can be said of being gay and conservative, but
that’s a point neither NGLTF nor its
ideological allies would ever concede -- yet the
group's crucial error is the conflation
of liberalism with the very notion of gay rights
itself. There are two problems with this approach.
First, it renders conservatism and gay rights mutually
exclusive, which is false and divisive. There are plenty of
elected Republicans in this country -- even at the
federal level -- who are supportive of gay rights
while holding conservative viewpoints on taxes,
foreign policy, and social programs. They should be embraced
by gay rights groups, not scorned, especially at a
time when antigay sentiment is receding in the GOP.
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Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New
Republic.