End discrimination and increase productivity.

The attainment of justice for all is not the only reason we, as a society, should continue to reform ourselves in the area of gay rights, and women's rights, or the rights of any group. When society learns to accept any group as it is and strives to create an environment in which that group can thrive, there is a direct material benefit for society, which is that that group, with its unique gifts, can then begin to contribute at peak capacity. Discrimination is draining for everyone. We have been saying this for some time in The Washington Monthly, and it is my favorite Monthly reform.

Last fall I spent a great deal of time looking at schools for my 13-year-old son, an experience that has cast light on this very point from a perspective that has nothing to do with rights. My son is an unusual boy in that he is exceptionally intelligent in verbal areas and abysmal in other areas such as mathematics. This profile has a name now: He has a "learning disability," recently renamed a "learning difference." I do not mean to mock these terms. They have helped me understand my son and get him the help he needs. But even in euphemistic form, they define him by a weakness. They do not reflect his strengths, which are surely as important, and they do not capture the other unusual aspects of his personality: the quirkiness, the imagination, the somewhat unruly intellectuality.

In any event, up to the eighth grade this boy has done very well in the New York City public schools. The public schools were quick off the mark identifying the L.D.--a lot quicker than some very good private schools have been with the children of my friends--but public schools are also by nature inclusive. They don't have an agenda of sending as many children as possible to Harvard. They don't have an ideal "type" around which the school is structured. They seek to equally serve all children as they are, and in this perhaps they provide my son a more hospitable environment than a private school would. Besides, the tuition is terrific.

However, for reasons too complicated to explain here--but having to do with my son's unusual profile---it became clear this year that it would probably be best for him to switch to a private school if his parents could possibly manage it. But when we started searching for a school, everywhere we looked seemed wrong. The basic conflict was: Should he go to an academically excellent school where he would be defined by his weaknesses, or should he go to a school with supports for those weaknesses where he would not be able to fully develop his strengths? People of a therapeutic turn of mind told me that because of his deficiencies, my son would develop bad self-esteem in environments where the academic standards were very high. "What good will it do him if he gets a great education but feels like a piece of garbage?" they would say, and I could see their point. But I also found I didn't want to pay the kind of money private schools charge for anything short of excellence. I began to wonder if I harbored secret anxieties about status, if my real goal was that I wanted my son to go to Harvard regardless of whether that was where he belonged.

But the fact was that I didn't feel right about shoehoming my son into one of the "good" schools, either. It seemed like pushing a square peg into a round hole. In these schools, it felt as if both he and his parents would be constantly struggling in order to make the fit work. The prospect of paying thousands upon thousands of dollars in order to struggle in this depressing way was equally unappealing. The result of these sad choices was a growing feeling of heaviness and grimness, a sense of life as an uphill grind with meager re| suits. Without quite realizing it, I began to feel that there was something wrong with my son. Whatever road we took, his prospects seemed something quite far short of joyful.

Then I stumbled on a school that seemed to be designed for him: The requirement for admission was IQ alone; there were no grades; children were defined by their strengths (you could be in sixth grade math and eleventh grade history and no one would care), and yet the academic standards were as high, if not higher, than those of the other schools we had considered. "Everybody has imperfections," the headmaster said when I mentioned my son's learning disability.

During our tour of this school my son became excited about learning (not characteristic behavior), dancing lightly, talking about the projects he would embark on there. Having been in many environments that were wrong for him, we were now experiencing what it was like to be in the right environment: one that valued him for his strengths. It was as if we had left a meager universe for an abundant one. I felt a great bursting sense of my son as the brilliant, surprising boy that he is and great joy in his future.

And what do I know about that future? Not very much in one sense. Certainly not that he is going to Harvard: To my extreme relief I found out that I didn't care a fig about Harvard. This school sends plenty of kids to the Ivy League, but in this new universe the consideration of this college versus that college seems silly. Here the boy could flower as he was meant to flower, and no other issue matters next to that.

What has all this to do with women's and gay rights? It is that an affirmative situation releases megawatts of energy. I have a friend who, after many years of marriage, found in her forties that it was her nature to be with a woman. She has reported to me that she can go through a day in which the bombardment of heterosexual images from all sides can make her feel so fundamentally wrong that soon she feels the course she has chosen is literally insane and that she must immediately mn back to a heterosexual life. Yet that life was so at odds with her nature that in it she ground to a halt in all areas of her life, including work. It's no surprise, therefore, that on a day when she becomes scared about her lifestyle, she also becomes drained and slow-moving as tasks become more and more disheartening and difficult to accomplish.

On another day on which she is simply in her life as it is rather than sensing it as an abstraction, she feels so right, so whole, that it takes a tremendous effort to remind herself that her living situation is controversial--that, for example, her children might prefer that she not reveal it at the PTA. On a day like that, whatever it is that she is doing seems to feed her rather than drain her. Even fatigue, in a way, is an experience of fulfillment. She says that it is impossible to reconcile these two experiences, that she's either on one track or the other. Which track serves the interests of society?

The real substance of this point is that society needs the differences. And, furthermore, those differences, fundamentally, are lodged in individuals rather than in groups. It may be necessary for people to form groups in order to get political power, but in fact what is at issue is individual empowerment. It is an irony that in the course of rights reform stereotypes almost of necessity get put in place: We fight hard for the right of women to succeed in high-powered careers, for example, and somehow in the process the high-powered career becomes the "feminist" road, and there we are stuck with a "type" again, a type that like all types is going to amount to the "wrong school" for a lot of people. When my friend feels the rightness of her experience, she does not feel like the right type; she feels like herself. That' s what we want. For everyone.