Do we need these laws?

Before I make myself irreparably unpopular, I might as well start with a concession. Almost all the arguments the fundamentalist right uses against gay "special rights" are phony ones. If there's legal protection for blacks, whites, Jews, Latinos, women, the disabled, and now men in the workplace, then it's hard to see why homosexuals should be excluded.

It's also true that such laws would ban discrimination against straights as well as gays, and so they target no single group for "special" protection. Nevertheless, there's a reason the special rights rhetoric works, and that is because it contains a germ of truth. However evenhanded antidiscrimination laws are in principle, in practice they're designed to protect the oppressed. So while the laws pretend to ban discrimination on the neutral grounds of sex, race, ethnicity, or disability, they really exist to protect women, blacks, Latinos, the disabled, and so on. They are laws that create a class of victims and a battery of lawyers and lobbyists to protect them.

The real question, then, is this: Are gay people generally victims in employment? Have we historically been systematically barred from jobs in the same way that, say, women, blacks, and the disabled have? And is a remedy therefore necessary? My own view is that, while there are some particular cases of discrimination against homosexuals, for the most part getting and keeping jobs is hardly the most pressing issue we face. Aided by our talents, by the ability of each generation to avoid handing on poverty to the next, and by the two-edged weapon of the closet, we have, by and large, avoided becoming economic victims. Even in those states where job-protection laws have been enacted, sexual orientation cases have made up a minuscule proportion of the whole caseload.

Most people--gay and straight--know this to be true; and so they sense that the push for gay employment rights is unconvincing and whiny. I think they're right. The truth is, most gay people are not victims, at least not in the economic sense. We may not be much richer than most Americans, but there's little evidence that we are much poorer. Despite intense psychological, social, and cultural hostility, we have managed to fare pretty well economically in the past few generations. Instead of continually whining that we need job protection, we should be touting our economic achievements, defending the free market that makes them possible, investing our resources in our churches and charities and social institutions, and politically focusing on the areas where we clearly are discriminated against by our own government.

The problems of gay and lesbian Americans are not, after all, systematic exclusion from employment. They are (to name a few off the top of my head): a recourse to the closet, a lack of self-esteem, an inability to form lasting relationships, the threat of another epidemic, exclusion from our own churches, and our own government's denial of basic rights, such as marriage, immigration, and military service. In this sense, employment discrimination is a red herring. National gay rights groups love it because they are part of the lobbyist-lawyer nexus that will gain from it and because their polls tell them it's the least objectionable of our aims. But anyone could tell them it's the least objectionable because it's the least relevant.

Of course, we're told that until we're protected from discrimination in employment, we'll never be able to come out of the closet and effect the deeper changes we all want. But this is more victim-mongering. Who says gay people can't risk something for their own integrity? Who says a civil rights revolution can only occur when every single protection is already in place? If African-Americans in the 1960s had waited for such a moment, there would still be segregation in Alabama.

Our national leaders should spend less time making excuses for us and more time challenging us to risk our own lives and, yes, if necessary, jobs to come out and make a difference for the next generation. An "equal rights" rather than "special rights" agenda would focus on those areas in which gay people really are discriminated against. After all, have you heard any fundamentalist "special rights" rhetoric in the marriage debate? Or in the military battle? Not a squeak. What you hear instead is a revealing mumble of bigotry in opposition. And in these areas of clear government discrimination, we stand on firm, moral ground instead of the muddy bog of interest-group politics. In an equal-rights politics, we reverse the self-defeating logic of victim culture. We are proud and proactive instead of defensive and cowed. And we stop framing a movement around the tired 1970s mantra of "what we want" and start building one around the 1990s vision of "who we actually want to be."

Sullivan is the author of Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality. His next book, Love Undetectable, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in September.