Gay Professor Loves Big Groups, Small Groups

Some gay activists can be represented by the inch worm.
AB: I want to talk about something that’s been going on since the beginning of the gay rights movement – we wrote about it last week and it certainly pertains to what you write about: the argument that a gay rights organization should only focus on gay rights. James Kirchick penned an article in The Advocate recently in which he argues against the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. He gripes that they they cast too wide of a net by opposing racism, the war in Iraq and things like that. And Matt Foreman, who’s the outgoing director of the Task Force, his argument is that the end goal should be a more just society. Others think we should only be concerned with gay rights. We saw this last year with ENDA – this is very important with the idea of finding a balance between identity politics and creating a true liberal society. What’s your opinion on that sort of debate?

AA: It’s perfectly fine to have organizations that talk about gay issue, it’s fine to have organizations that talk about all kinds of things – there’s nothing wrong with that. If you have – as I think you should – a cosmopolitan argument in relation to lesbian and gay rights – an argument that’s founded in equality – than it’s just immature to argue to bring equality norms to bear for gay people and not be brought to bear to other groups. You should at least be on their side. On the one hand it’s fine if you don’t want all the gay and lesbian organizations to become universal rights organizations. But, in the end, we’re appealing to a norm that all these struggles have to appeal to and we should not allow ourselves to be seen as special pleading, because then people can say, “Well, you don’t actually really care about equality, you only care about gayness.”

AB: I think that identity politics can breed incrementalism and that’s not necessarily the best approach to healing democracy or to healing Liberalism. It really distresses me as somebody who is – I was very pro a trans-inclusive ENDA. ENDA only exasperated the problem that’s been lingering for thirty or forty years. People become so concerned with their own individualism that they can’t realize that they have to live in a society with other people…

AA: I think a key thing is that if you’re arguing for a right, you can’t be arguing for you. They have to have rights that you ought to have because people are entitled to them. If I say “I have human dignity,” that requires me to recognize the human dignity of others humans. And if I don’t, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t say to me, “You obviously don’t believe in human dignity, so why should I grant it to you?” That’s the abstract level of argument. Practically speaking, look, this goes back a very long way in the pages of this country – there was that big debate between Frederick Douglas and the feminists in the 19th century about whether to accept black male suffrage rather than waiting for women’s suffrage to come as well, which didn’t come for a long time. You know, you can see why the men were in favor of the man’s vote – “We’ve been offered black male suffrage and we think we should take it. We’ll be on the inside now and we’ll be part of the coalition that argues for women’s rights”. The fundamental thing is that the norms that we appeal to when asking for our rights are norms that apply to everybody.