Groups Debate Slower Strategy on Gay Rights (Human Rights Campaign and other Democrats)

Leaders of the gay rights movement are embroiled in a bitter and increasingly public debate over whether they should moderate their goals in the wake of bruising losses in November when 11 states approved constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriages.

In the past week alone, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian advocacy group, has accepted the resignation of its executive director, appointed its first non-gay board co-chairman and adopted a new, more moderate strategy, with less emphasis on legalizing same-sex marriages and more on strengthening personal relationships.

The leadership of the Human Rights Campaign, at a meeting last weekend in Las Vegas, concluded that the group must bow to political reality and moderate its message and its goals. One official said the group would consider supporting President Bush's efforts to privatize Social Security partly in exchange for the right of gay partners to receive benefits under the program.

"The feeling this weekend in Las Vegas was that we had to get beyond the political and return to the personal," said Michael Berman, a Democratic lobbyist and consultant who was elected the first non-gay co-chairman of the Human Rights Campaign's board last week. "We need to reintroduce ourselves to America with the stories of our lives."

But others involved in the drive for gay and lesbian equality say the Human Rights Campaign's approach smacks of pre-emptive surrender and wrong-headed political calculation.

"For a certain segment of the movement, for which I would certainly elect the H.R.C. as poster child, it means that the error was that we were wanting too much too fast," said Jonathan D. Katz, executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale. "It is entirely characteristic for them to believe that what is required is a sort of retrenchment and a return to a more moderate message. They are, of course, completely wrong."

Mr. Katz and other aggressive advocates of gay rights said they believed that marriage rights were the key to winning fundamental equality for gay men and lesbians and that retreat from that struggle was self-defeating.

George Chauncey, director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago, said the marriage debate had galvanized gays more dramatically than any other issue in recent years.

"It is inescapable that marriage is the central issue facing the gay movement now and, given the strength of the right wing, there is no way the movement can run away from it," said Professor Chauncey, author of "Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality." "There is no escaping the fact that marriage is going to be one of the central terrains on which this conversation has to take place."

The gay rights movement, like other battles through history over individual rights, has made progress in fits and starts, in the culture and in the courts, in legislatures and in families. And like most political movements, it has always been riven with dissension on strategy and tactics, on questions of how far and how fast the movement can push without provoking a backlash.

The Human Rights Campaign, which is based in Washington, was instrumental in the defeat this year of the federal marriage amendment, which would have defined marriage as a union only between a man and a woman. The group was not as active in the ballot initiative battles in the states this fall.

Some gay rights activists, including the leadership of the Human Rights Campaign, said they believed that aggressively pursuing same-sex marriage only played into the hand of Republicans and religious conservatives, who skillfully used the issue this fall to energize their voters.

Steven Fisher, the campaign's communications director, said the group's emphasis in coming months would be on communicating the struggles of gays in their families, workplaces, churches and synagogues. The story of gay men and lesbians in the United States is often told through the prism of sensationalism and stigma, Mr. Fisher said.

"When you put a face to our issues, that's when we get support," he said. "We're not going to win at the ballot box until we start winning at the water cooler and in the church pews."

He also said the group would adopt a selective and incremental approach to winning rights rather than reaching for the gold ring of marriage right away. He mentioned that the group would press more immediately for Social Security survivor benefits, hospital visitation privileges and tax breaks for gay couples.

Lawyers representing some gay groups have concluded that challenging antimarriage amendments in individual states is a losing proposition even if they win in some courts because American society is not yet ready to accept the idea of same-sex partners sharing the same rights as heterosexual couples.

"The legal strategy to win marriage rights is a decade ahead of the political strategies to educate the public and the legislatures," said Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "Putting a fundamental right up for a popular vote is always extremely difficult to win, no matter what the cause. And when you are talking about something as recent as marriage equality, the bar gets raised even higher."

Mr. Foreman said that whenever the gay rights movement made progress, it generated a "pushback" in the form of hostile legislation, hate speech and even violence.

But he disagreed with what he called the defensive posture of some gay advocates. He said gay men and lesbians had to remain on the offensive, even if it meant proceeding one state at a time, one gay couple at a time.

"A lot of gay people understand the concept of bullies," Mr. Foreman said. "The worst thing you can do with a bully is not fight back because you'll only get hit harder the next day."

Pragmatists and politicians are more inclined to support the Human Rights Campaign's measured approach. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, said it was important for the movement to sensibly pick its fights. "You take risks for your gains," he said, "but you don't take risks for no gain."

In recent weeks Mr. Frank has been particularly critical of Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco for his decision earlier this year to allow thousands of gay couples to wed at City Hall. The marriages, which Mr. Frank called "spectacle weddings," were later invalidated by the California Supreme Court.

Representative Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin who, like Mr. Frank, is openly gay, said the gay rights movement was caught unprepared for the ballot initiatives this year. She also endorsed an incremental approach to winning rights for gay couples, securing the "component parts" of marriage benefits one at a time.

"When you look at the civil rights that make up the civil institution of marriage, there is significant public support for extending those protections to same-sex couples," Ms. Baldwin said. She also said she would continue her support for an end to workplace discrimination against gay men and lesbians and support efforts by unions to extend benefits to same-sex partners.

The Human Rights Campaign has shown itself to be an effective lobby on Capitol Hill and successful in raising money to work for and publicize gay causes. The group's annual budget is about $30 million. But it finds itself in a difficult environment, with larger and more conservative Republican majorities in Congress and a White House that knows how to use same-sex marriage to its political advantage.

Trevor Potter, a Republican elections lawyer and a member of the Human Rights Campaign's board of directors, said the group's new approach was not a retreat but an acknowledgement of changed circumstances.

"It's a wake-up call," he said. "Just continuing to do what we were doing would not be productive."

NJ Same-Sex Marriage Ban May Be Overturned

As state after state has adopted constitutional bans on gay nuptials - by 3-1 margins in some referenda - and momentum toward amending the U.S. Constitution to outlaw gay marriage has gained steam, it has seemed in recent months that perhaps gay marriage advocates were outmatched. But they have re-trenched to pursue targeted tests in carefully chosen state courtrooms. By keeping the fight in state courts about state laws, they are trying to avoid having the "wrong" federal case reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
The strategy is intended to produce a patchwork of rulings, with some states condoning and others condemning gay marriage, a muddle that could persist for a decade or more. The strategy's success hinges on the gamble that a strong federal case eventually could emerge to inspire a Supreme Court ruling that broadens the definition of marriage. That was the strategy that eventually removed laws against interracial marriage from the books.
"We're trying to pick the best plaintiffs in the best places at the best time," said David Buckel, director of the marriage project for Lambda Legal, a gay-rights legal advocacy group, and lead counsel in the New Jersey case. "We have to move like any other civil-rights movement, and that means carefully."

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