Majority opinion and the gays

In the ongoing ripples of dissent over the recent passage of a major gay civil rights legislation in the US House (ENDA), an interesting issue has arisen as to whether it's ever appropriate to "take a poll" where civil rights is concerned.

The obvious answer is no. You never put the rights of the minority up to the majority. But that's not the issue at hand. The question that's arisen is whether gays should be polled about their own rights, and some in gayland think the answer should be no.

Between the Lines, the gay weekly in Michigan, just published the following editorial about ENDA and a poll the Human Rights Campaign conducted that showed that 70% of gays wanted ENDA to pass (even without language protecting transgender people), and only 16% of gays supported the position of United ENDA, a bloc of groups that wanted to kill ENDA unless and until transgender people were added back in (the reason they were dropped from the legislation is that it didn't have the votes to pass with trans included in this year for the first time ever). Here's what Between the lines had to say:

The day before the vote in Congress, HRC released the results of a poll they commissioned that found over 70 percent of LGBT Americans preferred passing ENDA without transgender protections rather than not passing the bill at all. The poll release was stomach-wrenching in its timing. It read like all the polls used to discriminate against LGBT people through the years. It was a jaw-dropper for this paper and was in appallingly poor taste.

First, as a community we know that principles should never be subject to polls. As a movement we have all struggled hard to fight majority tyranny. Here in Michigan we recentlty felt the impact of such a tyranny in 2004 when the majority of voters in Michigan passed Proposal 2, the anti-gay marriage amendment to our state Constitution. One of our key arguments was that it was patently unfair to vote on minority rights. Why then, should we be expected to embrace the results of the HRC poll as anything other than the majority of LGBT people "voting" away the rights and the very voices of a minority community within the larger LGBT community? We shouldn't accept that, and we don't.

Yes, but. The polls that harm the gay community are not polls of gay people, they're polls of the public at large deciding they don't want to give us rights. That's an entirely different matter from a poll of gay people about gay people and our rights. I mean, it's hard to argue that we're oppressing ourselves by doing what the majority of our own community wants us to do to ourselves.

Some will say, oh no, the poll in question was asking gays what to do about the rights of transgender people - so it is the same comparison, asking a non-trans person to judge what happens to a trans person. Not so fast. The poll was asking gay people if the landmark gay rights bill should be pulled, if their rights should be put on hold for years if not decades, pending the trans community upping its own poll numbers in Congress and nationwide. We were polling gay people on whether gay people should give up their own rights.

Now, that doesn't mean that the majority of the community can't get it wrong. But, to suggest that somehow polling gay people about whether they want to kill their own civil rights bill is the same as polling straight people about whether to pass an anti-gay ballot initiative, well that's just absurd. If anything, gay groups, especially HRC, are criticized most often for NOT listening to gay people at large. The one time they do, their critics now argue that HRC is listening too hard to the public it serves. Methinks someone won't be happy no matter what HRC does. To wit, this criticism of HRC re: ENDA from a Chicago gay paper that says that HRC isn't listening to the majority of gays enough:

Even more sobering is that officials at the Human Rights Campaign gave them [Dem leaders in Congress] the OK to do it [drop trans from ENDA]. HRC, after all, gets a lot of money from the GLBT community—some $25 million a year—precisely to represent us in Washington. That implies that HRC officials would understand GLBT community politics and sentiments and be able to convey those things clearly and forcefully to our allies in Congress.

So now HRC is supposed to do what the majority of the community wants, but when they poll to find out what the majority of the community wants, then that's wrong too.

Putting aside the issue of HRC, which is always an incendiary topic in the community, this issue of polling the community goes to the heart of the ENDA controversy. What does the community - not the activists, not the heads of national organizations and their staffs - but what do real gay Americans who don't live in Chelsea, San Francisco, or other cushy neighborhoods where it's safe to selflessly offer up one's rights for a few decades (it's not that selfless when you're already covered by local civil rights laws and are thus offering up other people's rights and not your own), what do the rest of the gays think? That's a valid question. And it's one that our groups should be asking far more often than they do.