The State of Civil Rights

They don’t want to be first or last to do most anything. They want to be modern, but not radical; traditional, but not backward. So, because states see one another moving toward embracing their gay citizens, the momentum for progress is starting to snowball.

The 2000 presidential and congressional campaigns certainly demand attention, yet our day-to-day lives are shaped in large measure by state politics. State laws and courts, for example, normally control who can marry, who can adopt, whether unmarried couples have legal rights, how hate violence is punished and whether adults’ sexual privacy is invaded.

And since Congress has yet to protect basic gay civil rights, whether gay people are shielded from bias in employment, housing and public accommodations depends on state and local governments.

The good news is that the state’s lawmakers and judges are responding more favorably than ever before to gay pleas. Advances in state laws, judicial rulings, corporate employment and benefit policies, and public opinion are creating a gay-friendly synergy. The 1999 legislative season, which broke all records for gay state-level progress, pointed toward even better years.

As National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Director Kerry Lobel points out, today’s breakthroughs are a result of gay people’s willingness to be out at home and at work, in small towns and big cities.

“As more of us are living openly, we touch the lives of people who are closest to us, who touch the lives of people closest to them. Our visibility is a ripple in a pond. It reverberates in ways we can’t even measure,” she says.

When we do try to measure progress, using one giant federal yardstick probably isn’t the best approach. Ironically, as NGLTF notes, a set of smaller state and local yardsticks provides a better indication of how far we’ve come as a nation — and how far we still have to go:

·      Protective job gear:

Laws in 11 states, 18 counties and more than 100 cities protect 103 million Americans from anti-gay job discrimination and often from bias in housing and public accommodations. That’s 38 percent of the U.S. population.

·      Fair play mandates:

Following San Francisco’s hugely successful lead, Los Angeles and Seattle are telling would-be city contractors, “If you want to play ball with us, you must give the same benefits to gay and straight workers.”

·      Bedroom snooping:

Only 18 states still have sodomy laws — archaic, privacy-violating sex laws primarily used as an excuse to discriminate in, for example, custody decisions. Georgia’s top court hastened the demise of sodomy laws nationwide by striking down its infamous law in 1998.

·      Saying no to hate:

This year, new states will likely join the 23 with hate-crimes laws covering anti-gay attacks.

·      Family matters:

Even among gay-marriage foes, there’s a growing realization that gay couples haven’t been treated fairly. Seven states and 83 localities offer domestic partner benefits to their own workers. California and 41 local governments have domestic partner registries.

A recent Vermont court decision requiring the state to offer same-sex couples all the legal benefits of marriage “will cause lots of other state legislatures that have made clear they are not open to (gay) marriage to start reconsidering whether they ought to be doing something in terms of domestic partnership,” predicts Matt Coles, chief gay-rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.