Interesting arguments at the US Supreme Court yesterday, concerning whether or not the Texas sodomy law, which criminalizes various acts, but only when the participants are both of the same sex, should be struck down as unconstitutional. Based on the questions they put to the two sides, the court is “deeply divided,” with folks like Rehnquist and Scalia probing for ways to justify what is clearly, at least to my way of thinking, a bogus law, and folks like Breyer and Souter apparently taking the other side. But we’ll have to wait until late June or so to hear what the decision is.

In the meantime, in the interest of recognizing high-profile falsehood, I feel compelled to point out the op-ed piece Norah Vincent has running in today’s Los Angeles Times: ‘Rights Just for Us’: The Gay Left’s Self-Serving Agenda (stupid free login required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works). I get the feeling Vincent would like to chime in on the side of those who portray the current court challenge as somehow being about getting “special rights” for gays. Which it isn’t, of course; the law in question functions as exactly the opposite: a codification of special rights for heterosexuals. That is, after all, one of the two bases on which the law is being challenged.

But Vincent finds another way to make the same case: She points to the actions of groups like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which have been active in using boycotts and negative publicity to target sponsors of anti-gay talk show hosts like “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger and Michael Savage, and claims this constitutes a curtailment of free-speech rights.

Which is completely ludicrous. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. Nobody’s passing laws to muzzle homophobic speech here. Schlessinger and Savage are free to spout off whatever bigotry they like. And people who disagree with their views are similarly free to speak out against it, including banding together to pressure advertisers not to support them.

Update: I confess to not having a clue who Norah Vincent was when I wrote the above. I vaguely remembered seeing her byline on previous LA Times op-ed pieces, but had just dismissed her as another right-wing anti-gay crusader. That point of view fueled my pissy rant, above.

Well, duh. Norah Vincent, upon further investigation (thanks, Janus), turns out to be, among other things, gay. She’s written extensively on the intersection of gender and politics, and seems pretty likely not to have been trying to make the particular coded-language appeal to the “gays want special rights” position I accused her of.

I still think she’s wrong to protray the attempted boycotting of companies that sponsor anti-gay talk show hosts as a violation of First Amendment rights. But given that she’s a lesbian who’s 1) out, 2) outspoken, and 3) positioned somewhere significantly off the main left/right axis that defines most politically active types in this country, I’m going to have to plead guilty to my own brand of bigotry in how I interpreted her column, above.

I confess I felt an inclination to just edit my comments, Dave Winer-like, to erase the evidence of my lame-osity. But I won’t. I’d rather leave it as a reminder to myself of my own fallibility (which I will predictably ignore next time an opportunity to do so comes up). Oh well.

This entry was posted by jbc on Thursday, March 27th, 2003 at 10:24 am and is filed under love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.