Last month’s stunning Supreme Court decision in the Obergefell v. Hodges case has many on the right apoplectic. The turnabout in American public opinion on the issue of same-sex marriage has been swift and dramatic, and some conservative leaders are threatening massive civil disobedience against it. One of the most strident opponents is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Although running for president as a Republican, he has threatened to leave the Republican Party if it does not continue to oppose marriage equality, and he has warned of God’s retribution against the United States for allowing it.
According to Huckabee, gays and lesbians in America haven’t experienced “true discrimination” like blacks have. He recently told a Louisiana radio station that calling SSM a civil right is an insult to blacks, “who were hosed in the street, who were beaten, who were truly discriminated against with separate restrooms, separate drinking fountains, separate entrances,” not to mention the legacy of slavery. The social invisibility of many in the GLBT community has certainly protected some from the overt brutality of Jim Crow laws, but Huckabee’s history of gays in the United States is naïve at best, dishonest at worst. And it ignores the broad support black civil rights leaders have given to gay rights for many years.
To be sure, the gay rights movement has made enormous strides over the past few decades. Tolerance of homosexuality and support for gay rights are now widely accepted, even among Republicans, and a large majority of Americans say they know someone who is gay. But this relatively recent history does not negate the often brutal treatment of gays and lesbians and their lack of basic human rights for most of this nation’s history, including the ’50s and ’60s, the heyday of the black civil rights movement Huckabee was extolling.
Gays and lesbians were still relatively invisible in American society: many lived in ghettos of their own in major cities, and most lived in the closet, concealing their sexual orientation to keep their jobs or prevent eviction. Few commercial establishments served openly gay customers, and many that did were owned or operated by organized crime, required to pay off police in order to operate what were often illegal establishments.
Police were rarely sympathetic to gay victims of violent crime, and police themselves were often the perpetrators. Sodomy laws were on the books in every state except Illinois (after 1961), and some convicted of the crime of sodomy were sentenced to long prison terms. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disorder in 1951, and gays were routinely characterized in the media by crude stereotypes.
Because of the APA designation, 29 states had laws that allowed gays to be detained by the police simply on the suspicion they were gay. According to historian David Carter, sex offenders in California and Pennsylvania could be confined to mental institutes, and in seven states they could be castrated. Electroshock therapy and lobotomies were sometimes used to “cure” homosexuals in the ’50’s and ’60s, and “in almost all states, professional licenses could be revoked or denied on the basis of homosexuality, so that professionals could lose their livelihoods,” Carter writes in his book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution.
Known gays and lesbians were forbidden from working for the federal government, and President Dwight Eisenhower formalized this policy of discrimination with an executive order in 1953. Those were the days of the Red Scare and fear of communist infiltration of the U.S. government, so the U.S. Senate and other official bodies routinely held hearings to investigate how many “sex perverts” worked for the feds because they were considered security threats. According to Carter, between 1947 and 1950 alone, 1,700 federal job applicants were rejected, over 4,300 members of the armed forces were discharged, and 420 were fired from their government jobs simply for being gay or on the suspicion they were gay. The FBI and even many police departments maintained lists of known homosexuals, and sexual minorities were barred from most police forces and many civilian jobs, especially in public schools.
Today, it’s hard to believe such a time existed, but it was not until the late 1980s that routine police persecution of gay people in most large cities ended. Only with the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003 were state sodomy laws finally declared unconstitutional. The prohibition against openly gay people serving in our armed forces ended less than five years ago. Employment discrimination is still widespread, and the legacy of virulent homophobia and legal inequality still looms large in many parts of this country.
Mr. Huckabee’s vitriolic dismissal of any comparison between gay and black civil rights, therefore, is shameful. Such ignorance of American history, not to mention his histrionic opposition to gay rights, should disqualify him from occupying this nation’s highest office.
David Lampo is author of A Fundamental Freedom: Why Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians Should Support Gay Rights and serves on the national board of Log Cabin Republicans.