Are we really asking for special rights?

On February 16 Charley Mitchell went for a jog in Falmouth, Me. He almost didn't come back. After Mitchell completed his five-mile run, he returned to his van, which is adorned with a rainbow flag, a pink triangle, and a bumper sticker for Maine Won't Discriminate, a group that had just failed in its attempt to defeat a referendum that removed the state's antidiscrimination protections from the books.

"I remember reaching for my keys to the van, and the next thing I know, I was in a CAT scanner at Maine Medical Center," says Mitchell. While he wasn't looking, someone sneaked up on him and hit him over the head, possibly with a bat or a two-by-four. He suffered two fractures in his face, a concussion, a black eye, and cuts.

Mitchell was not robbed and has no known enemies. A psychiatrist who does outreach at soup kitchens and homeless shelters, he has lived quietly with his partner of eight years and the three children they have adopted. The only explanation that police can come up with for the attack is that Mitchell's van gave him away as gay.

As is common in the wake of antigay campaigns, reports of bias attacks are up. "The fact of the matter is, there is not just one bigot out there who would hit people and vote to take away our rights," says Mitchell. "There's a lot, a lot, a lot. You can't put all of them in jail. The point is that people have to understand what we are talking about. They've been fooled by the rhetoric of the religious right."

According to those who fought to repeal Maine's antidiscrimination law, gays like the bruised and bloodied Mitchell are seeking "special rights." It would be hard to imagine the campaign against Maine's gay rights law without the phrase special rights. From radio programs to voter pamphlets to direct-mail appeals, the Maine Christian Civic League and other supporters of the referendum drive repeatedly hammered home the belief that nondiscrimination protections for gays amounted to an unfair and undue ad vantage denied other people.

"`Special rights' was just the mantra of their camp," says Tracey Conaty, field organizer at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, who worked with Maine Won't Discriminate. "It permeated any sort of interview or spin they were doing."

With great success, as it turned out. On February 10, voters went to the polls in a special election to determine whether to retain the nondiscrimination protections passed by the legislature last year. When the results were in, the protections were repealed, by a slim margin of about 6,000 votes. Afterward Gov. Angus King, who appeared in commercials against the referendum, provided his own explanation about the loss. "I think people were concerned about the phrase special rights," he said.

After a decade of remarkable advances and increased acceptance, gay and lesbian activists continue to be dogged by the idea that they are somehow asking for more than anyone else. Protection from being unjustly fired from a job or from being thrown out of an apartment are beliefs to which most Americans subscribe. Yet when those same protections for gay men and lesbians are tagged as "special rights," many people readily agree with that assessment.

"It makes perfect sense that people are not in favor of special rights," says David Boaz, an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "In America we're in favor of equal rights." (Indeed, the pro-referendum forces in Maine recognized as much. The title of their campaign committee was YES TO EQUAL RIGHTS.)

At the same time, notes Boaz, the appeal of the "special rights" phrase is not based purely on principle. "I think among some parts of the population, there's a feeling we've been creating too many rights and have to draw a line somewhere," he says. For many people, it's easiest to draw the line at gay rights. "There is an animus against gays that is touched upon by the campaigns against special rights," says Boaz.

"`Special rights' is an Achilles' heel for us right now," concedes Conaty. "We haven't been successful as a movement in countering it, and we're paying the price."

In Maine--as elsewhere--"special rights" played best to certain groups of people. "The people to whom the `special rights' argument was made were not a large portion of the population, but it was significant," says William Coogan, a professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine. "It basically appeals to white men who have a high school education or less, people who are insecure in their jobs, and people who feel that all kinds of other groups are getting a break. They see this not as an equal-protection question but as a zero-sum game, one in which the gains of one group will come at their expense."

The argument is often given a boost by the claims that gays and lesbians come from a privileged background to begin with. Citing surveys about the appeal of the gay market, opponents of gays rights are able to characterize gays as holding professional positions, earning above-average wages, and owning their own homes. They cite such claims that gays take more vacations than other consumers and are twice as likely as the general population to have a college education.

"There's a reservoir of belief that gay people as a whole are very privileged economically," says Mary Bonauto, an attorney at Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a legal group in Boston that provided legal assistance to Maine Won't Discriminate. "There are people who are still anxious about the future and their ability to hold a job. Those factors animate part of the `special rights' rhetoric. It's what gives the rhetoric any force."

To make the rhetoric still easier to take, opponents of the Maine nondiscrimination law were able to recruit Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr., to claim that gay rights falls outside the realm of acceptable civil rights. "No one is enslaving the homosexual or making them sit in the back of the bus," she said during her visit to The state. "Homosexuality is a moral, and not a civil rights, issue."

How much the "special rights" rhetoric mattered in Maine is a subject of debate among political analysts. The unique nature of the referendum in Maine--a single-issue special election held at an unusual time of year--meant that only motivated voters were likely to show up. Paul Volle, a leader of the referendum movement, predicted that the election would be "decided by ideologues" on both sides of the issue.

Only 30% of the registered electorate voted, about half the usual turnout in Maine elections. "People have their day-to-day lives," says Bill Nemitz, a columnist for the Portland Newspapers. "Many people turned on the 11 o'clock news that night and said, `Damn, I forgot to vote.'"

The "special rights" rhetoric had the power to energize conservative Christians, the referendum's core of supporters. Indeed, most of the Christian Civic League's focus was on getting those voters to the polls. With an advertising budget that was, at best, one third that of Maine Won't Discriminate's, the group did little to target a mass audience. Instead, in effect, it preached to its own choir. For example, the Christian Coalition of Maine distributed 240,000 fliers at 900 conservative churches. The fliers underscored the implicit threat of pedophilia with such questions as "Do you want to send your children or grandchildren to day cares, preschools, and schools that are forced to hire homosexuals?"

Sometimes the implied threat is made explicit. In Fairhaven, Mass., Leo and Jackie Pike hung signs on their porch when they discovered that two of their neighbors, Brad Sousa and David Brunelle, were gay. In a kind of vigilante warning system that equated homosexuality with pedophilia, the Pikes' signs informed passersby with the message WARNING!! THERE ARE KNOWN HOMOSEXUALS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. WATCH YOUR YOUNG BOYS AT ALL TIMES. THEY ARE LOOKING FOR CHICKENS.

On February 11 the Pikes were convicted of violating Sousa's and Brunelle's civil rights under a statute covering anyone protected under state law. The conviction was only possible because Massachusetts has a law prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians--exactly the kind of law repealed in Maine.

"I think they were able to scare some people," says Robin Lambert, a gay activist in Portland. "They talked about whether homosexuality should be taught in school."

The referendum forces made no secret of the fact that they were running against homosexuality in general, not just the legislation on the ballot. "We said homosexuality is immoral and it's wrong," said Michael Heath, head of the Christian Civic League. For the most part and by design, that message was only by conservative Christians.

"The Christian Civic League used Jesus a lot," says Lambert. "They said Jesus would not approve of our lifestyle, Their core of supporters was very energized by this. I don't think they changed many minds."

"The primary argument was based on religious grounds," says Coogan. "I think that `special rights' could be more powerful." Coogan says that when conservatives mounted an antigay initiative in 1995, the argument was used to greater effect among voters. The effort failed in the general election that year. "The argument was met at the time by a strong argument of the economic impact of turning down civil rights," he says. "That argument wasn't made this time."

The "vote no" effort was hampered by a number of other strategic missteps. Although the Christian Civic League began gathering signatures for a referendum last summer, the campaign against the referendum did not get off the ground until after the special election was called. Activists around the state complained that rural counties were written off, allowing the antigay side to go unchallenged and rack up huge vote margins. Similar problems contributed to the gay activists' loss in battling Colorado's antigay Amendment 2 in 1992.

The Maine referendum's success provided a much-needed boost for the Christian Coalition, which has been reeling from financial woes and an uncertain sense of direction since the departure last year of its director, Ralph Reed. The week after the election, the coalition announced a Families 2000 plan to recruit 100,000 church liaisons in time for the November 2000 elections. Among the issues the strategy plans to target is gay rights.

For gay activists, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the Maine loss is that the same argument, and especially the "special rights" charge, has been used with devastating effect over and over again during the past ten years. The phrase has been employed continuously in contemporary gay rights battles since 1988, when Lon Mabon of the Oregon Citizens Alliance formed the No Special Rights Committee to run one of his antigay campaigns. Despite its long history, activists have yet to develop an adequate response to "special rights" rhetoric.

"It's brilliant," says Donna Red Wing, national field director of for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay group, who first encountered the phrase in 1990 as head of the Lesbian Community Project in Portland, Ore. "I remember the first time I saw the banner that said, NO SPECIAL RIGHTS FOR HOMOSEXUALS," she recalls. "I remember thinking, Right, no special rights for anybody. It resonates with everyone."

Since Oregon, "special rights" has been used regularly in the battle over gay rights. The phrase was a staple of the 1992 antigay campaigns in Colorado and Oregon. The name of the 1993 referendum effort to repeal Cincinnati's nondiscrimination ordinance was EQUAL RIGHTS, NOT SPECIAL RIGHTS. "It was the only billboard the Right had during the campaign," says Betsy Gressler, former president of Stonewall Cincinnati, a gay group. The phrase has also been employed in statewide electoral battles in Washington and Idaho as well as in numerous local controversies and is enshrined as the title of the antigay video Gay Rights/Special Rights.

The expression has even shown up in presidential campaigns. In 1996, for example, Sen. Bob Dole, the Republican nominee, announced, "I don't favor creating special rights for any group."

The phrase plays on the belief, borne out in polls, that gays and lesbians are already protected under current law. "When you hear about gay rights and you think gays are already protected, it's not a huge leap to think it's special rights, especially if someone is feeding you that phrase," says Red Wing.

Useful as shorthand as it may be, the phrase gay rights may only fuel the "special rights" argument. "It reached the point whenever I wrote about it, I made a very conscious effort to get away from gay rights," says Nemitz. "Every time I referred to it, I would write `equal rights for gay people.' Gay rights implies something different from other rights."

"I think we have to get away from calling it gay rights," agrees Lambert. "It wasn't called black rights. It was called civil rights or equal rights. Gay rights feeds into the `special rights' rhetoric."

Boaz says that, as a libertarian, he believes that nondiscrimination laws in general are inappropriate. "There are unfortunate things that happen in our lives that the coercive force of government should not be applied to," he says. "On the other hand, it seems we continue to create new special rights for groups ranging from the disabled to people of Appalachian origin, and none of those create the backlash that creating rights for gays and lesbians does."

"Special rights" was dealt a severe blow in 1996 when the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the idea as an accurate depiction of the protections gays are seeking. In his majority opinion striking down Colorado's Amendment 2, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, "We cannot accept the view that Amendment 2's prohibition on specific legal protections does no more than deprive homosexuals of special rights. To the contrary, the amendment imposes a special disability upon those persons alone. Homosexuals are forbidden the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint."

Few are acquainted with the opinion, however. "The lawyers are all gratified that the phrase was exposed as ridiculous," says Bonauto. "But Justice Kennedy doesn't work on the stump."

One reason the phrase has remained potent lies with its use in campaigns, where strategies are short-term. "In the heat of a campaign, you often don't have the opportunity to do education work," says Red Wing. "But the fact is, for ten years we have had the opportunity. An education campaign should probably be much further along. It's not as though we heard `special rights' for the first time in Maine."

Some gays are more pointed in their criticism of the movement's shortcomings. "Homosexuals are the least effective minority group in presenting their point of view to the majority," says David Brudnoy, an openly gay radio talk show host in Boston. "Blacks have marched and died for their rights. Gay people just simply will not speak up. Defeat is caused as much by the lassitude of the homosexual population as it was by the craziness of the religious right."

Activists believe that the loss in Maine is a call to redouble basic education efforts. "We have made tremendous cultural progress, but politically we lag behind," says Kerry Lobel, executive director of NGLTF. "We need to get back to the basics of telling our stories in ways we don't often do anymore. You tell your story for a long enough time, and you think that surely everyone understands. But clearly people don't understand it unless we tell them over and over again."

"We have to get back out ahead on this," agrees Elizabeth Birch, executive director of HRC. "That message of `special rights' is very, very potent, and we have to be more muscled and more clever in dealing with it."

Ultimately, the phrase special rights may best be countered not with another, equally catchy sound bite but with increased gay visibility, something that relies more upon individuals than organizations. "We say it over and over again, but it's absolutely true," says Birch. "When someone knows someone who is gay, their support goes way up. The more people come out, the more we will be on a quicker path to protection."

Mitchell agrees that given the proper knowledge, most people will back protections for gay men and lesbians. He points to a patient of his, "a good-hearted guy," who voted for the repeal because he believed the Right's assertion that teachers would be teaching students homosexuality. At the same time, the patient, who only discovered Mitchell's sexual orientation after the publicity surrounding his beating, told him, "The next time somebody bothers you, call me up, and I'll beat the crap out of him."

"He doesn't wish us harm, but he doesn't know enough," says Mitchell. "It seems to me there are lots of innocent people who hear things and don't know how to interpret them. There are probably more people who are uninformed than there are those who are hateful. If we can convince the uninformed, the hateful can do what they want. We'll be OK."

RELATED ARTICLE: NO PROTECTION: A YEAR'S WORTH OF ABUSE

February 1997

* A bomb rips through the Atlanta lesbian bar the Otherside Lounge, injuring at least five. A bartender says, "It sounded like a cannon at a circus."

March 1997

* CVS Pharmacy in Concord N.H., is found guilty of sexual harassment after a gay male employee there filed suit against his female supervisor, saying she regularly called him "faggot" and "queer" and exposed her breasts to him in an effort to make him a "real man."

* Shots are fired into Casa Nova, a gay bar near, Jenner Township, Pa., injuring two with flying debris.

April 1997

* A high school football player in Fairfax, Va., beats up a male student he saw kissing another boy. The brawl takes place on the school's football field in front of almost 3,000 students and faculty.

May 1997

* New York state senate majority leader Joe Bruno, who is pushing to end New York City's rent control law, calls homosexuality an "abnormal lifestyle" and says he doesn't believe gay men and lesbians should be allowed to pass rent-controlled apartments on to surviving partners.

June 1997

* Donald Sutherland's Detroit home is firebombed. An animal breede, Sutherland loses not only his home but seven dalmatians and 43 angora rabbits.

* A lesbians school board member in Westland, Mich., loses her bid for reelection after opponents distribute campaign literature calling her "butch" and "dyke."

July 1997

* Remington's, a gay bar in Washington, D.C., is hit with tear gas. Five marines are under investigation.

August 1997

* About 20 newspapers refuse to run the comic strip "For Better on or Worse" when a gay characteristic deals with the departure of his partner.

* A 12-year-old boy in Pacifica, Calif., sues his school district, alleging that officials did nothing to stop classmates from taunting his with antigay slurs. The student says he endured taunts of "faggot," "girl," and "gay-gay."

October 1997

* More than 200 students at a high school in Rutland, Vt., sign a petition urging the school to do something to stop harassment. The petition reads: "Homophobia runs rampant at Rutland High School. The word `faggot' is shouted in the halls every day, and yet there are no repercussions."

* Lesbians teacher Wendy Weaver is told by her school district in Spanish Fork, Utah, to keep quite about her sexual orientation, in and out of school.

November 1997

* Pro-gay commissioner Becky Carney is greeted by a pig's head when she returns home to Charlotte, N.C., from vacation. Stuck to the pig's head is a note referring to gays as pigs.

December 1997

* Timothy R. McVeigh announces that the Navy is trying to discharge him because of information it found on his America Online member profile indicating that he is gay.

January 1998

* A former Washington, D.C., police lieutenant pleads guilty to theft, fraud, and extortion of money from customers of a gay bar. Jeffrey Stowe would sit outside to those parked outside, and then order the drivers to send him money or risk having photographs exposing their homosexuals sent to their families or coworkers.

* A federal judge rules that a karate-school owner in Richmond, Va., has the right to ban a 12-year-old with HIV from classes with other children.

February 1998

* A 63-year-old Edneyville, N.C., man finds a mutilated rabbit in his mailbox. Charles Merrill, who says he has been the subject of vandalism and rock throwing for a year, considers the dead animal a response to his "being active in fighting for gay equality."

* Robert Hernandez is shot to death while walking through an apartment complex parking lot in Phoenix. Police officers say his death is the second fatal attack in north Phoenix in two months against men thought to be gay.

March 1998

* A Brownsboro, Tex., man who bragged to his friends about "queer hunting" was sentenced to 30 years in prison and fined $10,000 for shooting a man just because he was gay.

RELATED ARTICLE: A patchwork of protections

Some U.S. cities and counties have laws banning discrimination against gay men and lesbians, but the record is very spotty. A few cities--Atlanta, Dallas, and Honolulu, for example--prohibit discrimination in public employment but not in other areas. Palo Alto, Calif., keeps discrimination out of only classrooms; Austin, Tex., has discrimination bans in all areas except education.

The following cities and counties offer comprehensive protections, meaning they ban discrimination in public employment, public accommodations, private employment, education, housing, credit, and union practices:

California

* Cathedral City

* Laguna Beach

* Los Angeles

* Oakland

* Sacramento

* San Diego

* San Francisco

* Santa Monica

* West Hollywood

Connecticut

* Hartford

* New Haven

* Stamford

Iowa

* Ames

Maryland

* Howard County

* Rockville

Massachusetts

* Amherst

* Cambridge

Michigan

* Detroit

Minnesota

* Minneapolis

* St. Paul

New York

* Alfred

* Ithaca

* Tompkins County

Pennsylvania

* Harrisburg

* Lancaster

Washington D.C.