Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry, but it was no less than 41 years ago that I began an editorial with the following paragraph:
“It is ironic that the Board of Curators feels a need to lock itself into something of a closet to discuss the subject of homosexuality.”
The issue of that day was whether a fledgling group of brave souls calling themselves Gay Lib should be provided recognition as a student organization at the University of Missouri in Columbia. All it would have meant was that tuition-paying students at a public university could have held meetings on their campus to discuss being gay.
The university wanted no part of it. As I observed at the time (as editor of The Maneater, the university’s student newspaper), the curators weren’t even willing to discuss such an untoward subject publicly.
Privately, they would eventually decide to commission an expert study on the possible effects of recognizing Gay Lib and a similar group in Kansas City, and they hired Cullen Coil, a respected Jefferson City attorney, to find the facts. After a six-month process—listening to both sides in open hearings—he concluded that recognition would “reinforce the personal identities of the homosexual members of these organizations and will perpetuate and expand an abnormal way of life,” thus discouraging them from seeking the “treatment” they needed.
As we at The Maneater reported in November 1973, Coil also said having Gay Lib on campus would:
• “tend to cause latent or potential homosexuals who became members of either proposed organization to become overt homosexuals”
• “tend to expand homosexual behavior in violation of Missouri law”
• “be undesirable because homosexuals would counsel other homosexuals… The sick and abnormal would be counseling others who are similarly sick and abnormal.”
I don’t even know what to say about all that now, but I did then, in an editorial 18 months after the first one. I began by calling the report “one of the unworthiest pieces of garbage we have ever seen publicized at the university,” and I concluded that “this issue deserves more than consideration by fools and in the case of Mr. Coil’s report, it got less than that.”
I guess I was a shy kid.
The curators, of course, accepted Coil’s report. That would lead to a court case that was resolved in the group’s favor in 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a 2–1 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals rejecting the university’s rejection.
(An interesting sidelight: The deciding vote on behalf of Gay Lib was cast by Judge William H. Webster, who eight months later would be named director of the FBI. “I have no doubt that the ancient halls of higher learning at Columbia will survive even the most offensive verbal assaults upon traditional moral values; solutions to tough problems are not found in the repression of ideas,” he wrote.)
Understand that Coil was not evil, nor even an extremist, in arriving at the repulsive conclusions in his report. He was simply a man of his time, although it’s amazing that his time was as recent as 1973, given that it sounded more like 1873 or 1773 or 1673.
I think it’s worth taking this trip down memory lane as a way to better understand the origins of the historic political tidal wave that is transforming the notion of gay marriage from unthinkable to unstoppable. The erstwhile Gay Libs of the world have been succeeding—slowly and painfully—in having their discussion.
It turns out that lots of gays and lesbians have been living double lives as sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, friends and co-workers. The more obvious that has become, the harder it is to accept a portrayal of them as sick or perverse.
There’s been an information revolution with regard to the lives of gays and lesbians, and with it has come an exponentially growing public understanding that “they” are “us,” regardless of our sexual orientation. That sort of realization can tear down walls pretty quickly.
That’s why poll after poll shows support for marriage equality to have more than doubled in the past decade or two, with no sign of the trend stopping. The more information people have, the more they realize there is no good reason to deny gay men, lesbians, or transsexuals the right to live their lives, pursue their loves, and form their family relationships as they please.
This should not be an issue, and it won’t be for long, because the same polls show a dramatic generational gulf on the subject. Young people simply aren’t buying into the language of 1973, or any other mindless bigotry against gays and lesbians, because unlike previous generations, they did not grow up in an atmosphere in which homosexuality was viewed as an illness or perversion not fit for discussion.
If they’re gay or lesbian, there’s a much better chance that they are able to be themselves, and not cower in a closet. If they’re straight, they probably have friends and relatives who are openly gay or lesbian, and everyone’s cool with it.
That’s why the trend lines aren’t looking good for those who would deny equality on the basis of sexual orientation.
No less an authority on bigotry than Missouri native Rush Limbaugh would seem to understand this. After all the years of likening gay marriage to bestiality and pedophilia and bigamy, he stunned his radio audience by shifting his tone on the subject.
Limbaugh waved the white flag of surrender.
“This issue is lost,” he told his radio audience. “I don’t care what the Supreme Court does. This is now inevitable. And it’s inevitable because we lost the language on this.”
Now, Limbaugh is working on his fourth marriage, so he does have some standing here as an expert witness. He explained that the term marriage was “bastardized” once it became permissible to modify it.
“Once we started talking about gay marriage, traditional marriage, opposite-sex marriage, same-sex marriage, hetero-marriage, we lost,” Limbaugh said. “It was over.”
Yes, it was as over as those three previous lifelong commitments made by Rush and his brides. Like millions of other divorces, these were never seen as a threat to the sanctity of a sacred institution, but a single gay marriage might bring it all down.
Limbaugh will continue to exploit homophobia for fun and profit, but it’s pretty clear that he and others of his ilk don’t see a winning hand in holding out against the rights of gays and lesbians to marry whom they choose. The real suspense is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will broadly strike down marital discrimination for gays like it did for interracial marriage in 1967—a dubious prospect at press time—or whether individual states will be free to perpetrate injustice.
If there is injustice to be perpetrated, count on Missouri as a leader. This was one of the last states that held out until the bitter end for the right to outlaw interracial marriage, and it was one of the last states that maintained its sodomy laws to prohibit private, consensual homosexual activity until the high court ruled such laws unconstitutional as well.
Just a month ago, Speaker of the House Tim Jones (R–Eureka)—sounding ever so much like a present-day Coil—indicated that he planned to stifle a bill that would make it illegal to discriminate against gays and lesbians.
“I’m not in favor of creating more protected classes and encouraging more litigation on our Missouri employers and job creators,” Jones said at a press conference at the state Capitol. Forget gay marriage: In 2013, Missouri legislative leaders cannot even bring themselves to ban discrimination against gays.
Assuming he goes forward with his anti-anti-discrimination stance—isn’t that pro-discrimination?—Jones will ironically be establishing employers and job creators as a protected class, a group free to fire or demote or pass over employees purely on the basis of their sexual orientation.
Jones didn’t use Coil’s forsaken language, labeling homosexuality as an illness and a perversion, but he certainly sounds like a man who still believes it. Why else would one be repulsed at the notion that a person’s sexual orientation should not be a legal basis of discrimination?
Nationally, politicians of both parties are rushing to jump on the gay-marriage bandwagon (as Sen. Claire McCaskill did in March), and often they perform 180-degree pirouettes away from their previous stances. But this doesn’t mean there won’t be pockets of resistance—Missouri will remain one.
Though even here, don’t expect Coil’s candid language to reappear. The new anti-gay code is to express indignation that the center has lost hold when marriage is no longer defined as a bond between “one man and one woman,” just like it says in the Bible.
Well, setting aside the detail that the Bible does not spell that out—and that, if you want to get technical, it contains passages such as Deuteronomy 22:28–29, where it goes downright Todd Akin by declaring that a rapist, if caught, must marry his victim and give her dad 50 shekels of silver—it’s a ridiculous argument in any case, because the nation isn’t governed by the Good Book.
For those troubled by the thought of two men or two women taking sacred vows to spend their lives together as a family—if that notion truly conjures fears that bestiality or pedophilia or bigamy must then be protected under marriage law—perhaps a visit to a Gay Lib meeting is in order.
Whether they admit it or not, too many people are buying the language that was sold to the Board of Curators in 1973.
It’s their orientation that’s the problem.
SLM co-owner is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
