Matt Foreman's Questionable Legacy

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.