1/29/01 9:55 a.m.
The Ashcroft-Logger Alliance
The significance.

By Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute

ohn Ashcroft and the Log Cabin Republicans have been working together to defend his nomination from attacks by gay-rights activists. You got a problem with that? I don't. Politics really does make strange bedfellows. But the Ashcroft-LCR alliance is an odd coupling we should all be happy to live with. It may point the way to a compromise on this difficult question of homosexuality and public policy.

The newly forged alliance between Ashcroft and the Loggers demands a significant adjustment from both sides. In one of the few press comments on this development, CNN correspondent Jonathan Karl noted what a change it was for a consummate social conservative like John Ashcroft to issue statements defending his willingness to hire gays through an organization that even George Bush shunned during the primaries. But consider the matter from the other direction. The Log Cabin Republicans are actively defending the nomination of a man who refused to follow their endorsement of James Hormel; who surely opposes gay marriage; and who considers homosexuality itself to be sinful. Log Cabin spokesman Kevin Ivers says, "I get all kinds of e-mails telling me I'm working with the Nazis." Sinners working with Nazis? Something interesting is going on here, something capable of giving the lie to that simple-minded bludgeon of a word, "homophobia."

What makes this issue of homosexuality so difficult is that it simultaneously does — and does not — resemble a classic question of civil rights. We're right to be concerned about discrimination against homosexuals. But sex is not skin color. Sex matters — and must matter — in a way that skin color cannot and should not. No society can endure without sexual restraint of some sort. For lack of it, families fall apart, children are traumatized, women are deeply wounded…the list goes on. Because sex matters, powerful and entirely legitimate arguments can be marshaled against gay scout masters, gay marriage, gays in the military, and many other legal reforms proposed by gay-rights advocates. Though they may not cite these arguments, religious conservatives understand — viscerally — that homosexuality threatens the values of sexual restraint upon which traditional families depend. Agree or disagree with his ultimate moral position, the Pope is right about the trade-offs involved in non-reproductive sexuality outside the context of marriage. The heightened emphasis on sexual pleasure for its own sake — symbolized nowhere more clearly than in a nonchalant attitude toward homosexual sex — cannot help but destabilize marriage.

So what we really face in this matter of homosexuality is a series of agonizing choices between the claims of a struggling minority and the stability and effectiveness of important social institutions. The goods on each side of this equation are real. The yearnings of gays for fairness are legitimate. But the concerns of sensible traditionalists for the central pillars of society are also far too serious to be dismissed with a silly scare word like "homophobia" — or by the libel of bigotry.

The hard part is that we need to hold together as a nation, despite the all-too-obvious fact that for 30-some years we've been unable to agree on how to strike the balance between traditional restraints and the new ethic of release. If we're going to live and work with one another, we'll have to find a way to grant good faith, even to those who deny our most basic assumptions about sex and society. That's exactly what John Ashcroft and the Log Cabin Republicans are doing.

But how should we strike the balance between tolerance, on the one hand, and institutional strength and stability on the other? I think we do it by blending reasonable tolerance with a firm defense of our current legal arrangements. We cannot and should not return to the fifties, when homosexuality was so shameful that gays were barred from sensitive government service for fear of blackmail. I may not like Barney Frank's politics, but it was wonderful to see him invited to address gay employees at the CIA last year. In another age, these people could not have served. But sex matters. CIA employees don't bunk together. Soldiers do. That's why gays in the military is a bad idea. So are gay marriage, gay scout leaders, and many other items on the agenda of gay activists, bad ideas. And sometimes even tolerance goes too far, as we've seen lately with the erosion of taboos against homosexual pedophilia.

The single significant exception to this policy of reasonable tolerance mixed with a defense of current legal and institutional arrangements is the question of sodomy. I do not believe that homosexual acts between consenting adults ought to be illegal. If there is one legitimate legal change we can make that will drive home the message of greater tolerance, without undermining our institutional arrangements, it is this. Our remaining sodomy laws need to be reconsidered. Of course there can be no allowances for the likes of pedophilia. (That's one reason to be wary of blanket prohibitions of discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation.") And religious conservatives will continue to consider homosexual acts sinful. But that judgement ought not to be codified in law, any more than it ought to be stereotyped as ignorant or bigoted.

But scaling back sodomy laws and carrying out the Bush-Ashcroft pledge to avoid hiring discrimination makes it that much more important to draw clear lines in defense of the family and society. Just a few months ago, Janet Reno ruled that an executive order forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation did not prohibit the Boy Scouts from using federal property. Reno was effectively forced into this ruling by public outrage at threats to punish the Scouts for their policy on gays. The public is right. It's vital that such non-discrimination rules as we institute not be used to undo the legitimate government interest in supporting traditional marriage, or preserving the right of private association. Attorney General Ashcroft will need to solidify and extend just the sort of distinctions his predecessor was reluctantly forced to make.

In this business of homosexuality, it's all about making careful distinctions. We're balancing difficult and cross-cutting goods and interests here. While it is not entirely inapplicable, the model of the civil-rights crusade for the battle over "gay rights" is deeply misleading. Last week, in a New York Times op-ed, gay activist Bruce Bawer pointed out that as social acceptance for gays has grown, the legal position of gay Americans has hardly changed. Bawer wants the law to catch up with changing social mores. He's wrong. We need to balance our welcome and new-found tolerance with a spirited defense of traditional institutional arrangements.

It will be said that such balance is contradictory, and therefore impossible to sustain. Tolerance will sharpen the call for legal change, just as it is doing now. True, the policy I'm recommending is difficult to sustain — but less so than either a return to the fifties, or a realization of the anomic, sixties-inspired utopia envisioned by radical gay activists. John Ashcroft and the Log Cabin Republicans understand.