"Ballot initiatives similar to [Amendment 2] were introduced this summer in California, Massachusetts, and Oregon. 'I think we're going to see more of these,' said Robert Bray, a spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF). 'Our enemies have mastered the referendum process.'

"Bray said the initiatives 'constantly put us on the defensive. When we use up scarce resources fighting off an attack, it distracts us and forces us to put out brushfires.' At a meeting in November [1991] NGLTF will consider a national strategy for dealing with initiatives, he said.

"Colorado activists admitted that countering the [Amendment 2] initiative will set them back. 'We will not have the resources available to lobby effectively on a whole range of issues, particularly HIV legislation and a hate- crimes act,' said Robin Miller, a Colorado Springs activist. "But Miller said that if activists successfully defeat the initiative, gay rights advocates could find their position enhanced. 'If we are successful, we can tell the legislature in 1993 that this was a plebiscite on the issue of gay rights statewide. Hopefully, we'll come away with much stronger state and local organizations and a strong network we can nurture for the future" ("Colorado Initiative Spurs Organizing Among Activists").

"U.S. News & World Report" Senior Editor John Leo comments on what he thinks society's response to the gay militant movement should be: "In law, it would mean no special legislation one way or another. No anti-sodomy laws. No measures like Oregon's Measure 9, which attempted to brand gays as abnormal or perverse. But no gay-rights legislation either. Just laws that cover all people, regardless of what they do in bed. What's wrong with gay- rights laws? Gay activists argue that they are neutral, merely guaranteeing rights already enjoyed by the straight majority. But don't they actually create a special protected class? A lot of bigots voted against gay-rights legislation in Colorado. But as Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason magazine, writes, the swing vote was provided by nonbigots who 'simply said "Stop" to the seemingly endless proliferation of protected categories that divide people into favored and disfavored classes...'

"Creating these categories has consequences. This path, taken for blacks, a truly victimized group, isn't necessarily appropriate for other groups. And we are not sure where it would lead. Could it provide the legal scaffolding for gay affirmative action and quotas, or attempts to establish same-sex marriages? No one knows... Few of us want gays, or anybody else, to be second-class citizens. But when gay-rights bills come up, there's that nagging feeling that 'something cultural is going on' and that something more than neutrality is being set in motion.

"The answer is to promote decency and oppose people who demonize gays. Let's continue the national conversation on homosexuality. But avoid special programs or laws at all costs" ("Gay tolerance, not approval," May 3, 1993, p. 20).

Mike Royko, "Chicago Tribune" columnist, commented: "[Gays'] difficulties look pretty meager compared to those of the poor, the uneducated and the unemployed. It may be a politically incorrect risk to disagree with those hundreds of thousands of homosexual demonstrators who gathered in Washington, but, no, this decade will not be 'The Gay '90s.' That's because there are so many people in this country who have far worse problems than do homosexual men and lesbians.

"Consider the issues that were raised at the Washington rally: the right to serve in the military; repealing state sodomy laws; allowing gay marriages; specific civil rights laws for sexual orientation and more money for AIDS research. Nothing about education. That's because the majority of gays are well-educated. Little said about jobs and economics. That's because gays can be found in all professions and occupations. In some, they appear to dominate.

"And nothing about poverty. That's because studies have shown that gays earn considerably more than the average middle-class American. They aren't raising families and trying to stash something away for college tuition, so they have far more left over. Housing? In Chicago and other major cities, the largest gay concentrations are in some of the most expensive parts of town... Federal civil rights laws based on sexual orientation? The lawyers can fight that one out, and I would think some of the arguments might be rather bizarre. And the remaining sodomy laws are about as sternly enforced as laws forbidding married couples the bedroom acrobatics of their choice" ("Gays' problems not all that bad," April 30, 1993).

Avowedly gay journalist Jonathan Rauch, employing criteria remarkably consonant with those used earlier in this analysis, comments in "The New Republic":

"The standard political model sees homosexuals as an oppressed minority who must fight for their liberation through political action. But that model's usefulness is drawing to a close. It is ceasing to serve the interests of ordinary gay people, who ought to begin disengaging from it, even drop it. Otherwise, they will misread their position and lose their way, as too many minority groups have done already...

"Denial of political franchise [for gays] is resoundingly not met. Not only do gay people vote, they are turning themselves into a constituency to reckoned with and fought for... If gay votes didn't count, Bill Clinton would not have stuck his neck out on the military issue during the primary season...

"...Denial of education -- is also resoundingly not met. Overlooked Opinions, Inc., a Chicago market- research company, has built a diverse national base of 35,000 gay men and lesbians, two-thirds of whom are either not out of the closet or only marginally out, and has then randomly sampled them in surveys. It found that homosexuals had an average of 15.7 years of education, as against 12.7 years for the population as a whole. Obviously the findings may be skewed if college-educated gay people are likelier to take part in surveys (though Overlooked Opinions said that results didn't follow degree of closetedness). Still, any claim that gay people are denied education appears ludicrous.

"...Relative impoverishment -- is also not met. In Overlooked Opinions' sample, gay men had an average household income of $51,624 and lesbians $42,755, compared with the national average of $36,800. Again, yuppie homosexuals may be more likely to answer surveys than blue- collar ones. But, again, to call homosexuals an impoverished class would be silly.

"...Human rights violations without recourse -- is also, in the end, not met... The fact is that anti-gay violence is just one part of a much broader pattern... Since 1965 the homicide rate in America has doubled, the violent crime arrest rate for juveniles has more than tripled... No surprise, then, that gay people are afraid. So is everyone else.

"Chances are, indeed, that gay people's social class makes them safer, on average, than other urban minorities. Certainly their problem is small compared with what blacks face in inner-city Los Angeles or Chicago, where young black males are likelier to be killed than a U.S. soldier was in a tour of duty in Vietnam.

"'I'm a gay person, so I don't live in a free country,' one highly successful gay writer said recently, 'and I don't think most straight people really sit down and realize that for gay people this is basically a totalitarian society in which we're barely tolerated.' The reason straight people don't realize this is because it obviously isn't true. As more and more homosexuals come out of hiding, the reality of gay economic and political and educational achievement becomes more evident. And as that happens, gay people who insist they are oppressed will increasingly, and not always unfairly, come off as yuppie whiners, 'victims' with $50,000 incomes and vacations in Europe. They may feel they are oppressed, but they will have a harder and harder time convincing the public.

"They will destroy their politics, too, twisting it into strained and impotent shapes. Scouring for oppressions with which to identify, activists are driven further and further afield. They grab fistfuls of random political demands and stuff them into their pockets. The original platform for April's [1993] March on Washington called for, among other things, enforced bilingual education, 'an end to genocide of all the indigenous peoples and their cultures,' defense budget cuts, universal health care, a national needle exchange program, free substance- abuse treatment on demand, safe and affordable abortion, more money for breast cancer 'and other cancers particular to women,' 'unrestricted, safe and affordable alternative insemination,' health care for the 'differently-abled and physically challenged' and 'an end to poverty.' Here was the oppression-entitlement mentality gone haywire" ("Beyond Oppression," May 10, 1993, pp. 18 ff.).

"Two truths (at least) profoundly alter the way the process of discrimination takes place against homosexuals and against racial minorities and distinguish the history of racial discrimination in this country from the history of homophobia. Race is always visible; sexuality can be hidden. Race is in no way behavioral; sexuality, though distinct from sexual activity, is profoundly linked to a settled pattern of behavior.

"For lesbians and gay men, the option of self- concealment has always existed and still exists, an option that means that in a profound way, discrimination against them is linked to their own involvement, even acquiescence. Unlike blacks three decades ago, gay men and lesbians suffer no discernable communal economic deprivation and already operate at the highest levels of society: in boardrooms, governments, the media, the military, the law and industry. They may have advanced so far because they have not disclosed their sexuality, but their sexuality as such has not been an immediate cause for their disadvantage. In many cases, their sexuality is known, but it is disclosed at such a carefully calibrated level that it never actually works against them. At lower levels of society, the same pattern continues. As in the military, gay people are not uniformly discriminated against; openly gay people are."

"Moreover, unlike blacks and other racial minorities, gay people are not subject to inherited patterns of discrimination. When generation after generation is discriminated against, a cumulative effect of deprivation may take place, where the gradual immiseration of a particular ethnic group may intensify with the years. A child born into a family subject to decades of accumulated poverty is clearly affected by a past history of discrimination in terms of his or her race. But homosexuality occurs randomly anew with every generation. No sociological pattern can be deduced from it. Each generation gets a completely fresh start in terms of the socioeconomic conditions inherited from the family unit" (pp. 34-35).

In its March 12, 1993, issue, "The Washington [D.C.] Blade," which calls itself "The gay weekly of the nation's capitol," ran a banner, front- page article headlined "We are in a lot of trouble." Quoting from the article:

"Anti-Gay statewide initiative efforts are underway in at least seven states this month, inspired by the success of Colorado's Amendment 2 and spurred on by the group which failed to get Measure 9 passed in Oregon last November... Initiatives in the seven other states are likely to be on the ballot in November 1994...

"'It's like a seven-headed hydra,' said openly Gay Oregon State Rep. Gail Shibley... 'We cut off one head and seven more grow back...'

"'We are in a lot of trouble,' said Oregon activist Scott Nakagawa, who is working as a consultant for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to help fight these initiatives. 'They're incredibly serious and stand a very good chance of passage,' he said. It's an assessment echoed by a number of other activists.

"...Nakagawa, of Oregon, says the anti-Gay initiatives are showing an ability to divide the Gay community in almost every state. Colorado's Gay community has been badly splintered by the success of Amendment 2 -- some favor the current boycott, some don't; and many in the community are pointing fingers to blame others for the passage of Amendment 2.

"'These measures have such a tremendous ability to divide us,' said Nakagawa. 'We're beginning to divide up along our bigotries -- with good Gays and bad Gays, Gays who should participate and those who should not. We're starting to see ourselves as our enemies see us, and see where we are exploitable.'"

"...[The documentation about gay affluence, political power, etc. supporting Amendment 2] threatens to drive a wedge between the civil rights coalition of blacks and gays... In a recent Cincinnati referendum, won by "gay rights" opponents who repealed a "gay rights" ordinance there, "Sixty-two per cent of the electorate [of whom 40% are African Americans] voted to repeal the city's gay rights law... In Cincinnati, blacks voted Yes for 3 [i.e., against "gay rights"] in about the same proportion as whites."

In another remarkably frank Village Voice article ("The Coming Crisis of Gay Rights," June 28, 1994), avowedly gay reporter Richard Goldstein wrote:

"This is the paradox of Stonewall 25 [the July 1994 celebration of New York City's "Stonewall riots," generally regarded as having sparked the modern, 'activist' phase of the 'gay rights' movement]. At the very moment when our pride is at its peak, our political agenda is in jeopardy. We face the greatest threat to gay rights since the election of Ronald Reagan, in the form of ballot initiatives denying us basic protections against discrimination [?]. In Congress, the situation is no less ominous. As the right rolls over the Republican party, and Democrats scramble to hold the center, our freedom is on the line....

"As if that weren't ominous enough, the Supreme Court could soon rule on the constitutionality of antigay [?] ballot initiatives. So far, lower courts in Ohio and Colorado have kept those measures from becoming law, but this fall, voters may get to consider similar provisions in Oregon, Washington, Maine, Missouri, Nevada, Michigan, Montana, Idaho, and Arizona. These measures typically override gay rights laws, as well as forbidding public agencies, schools, universities, and libraries from 'advocating' homosexuality... [T]he fact that [these measures] usually pass by wide margins is an ominous sign of how formidable the resistance to gay rights remains [emphasis added]."

Nevertheless, with nearly 45 years of momentum behind them, gay militants can be fully expected to press the fight for "gay rights" at all levels of government -- especially now, when they have friends in the highest seats in our Nation's capital. Though President Bill Clinton has backed off considerably from vocal public support of the "gay rights" agenda, he has not forgotten gay militants' $3.5 million gift to his presidential campaign war chest. States News Service reports:

"WASHINGTON -- Gay and lesbian groups are using a letter of support from President Clinton to fight ballot measures similar to Colorado's Amendment 2 in 11 states. The letter, written Monday, supports the fight against measures like the Colorado initiative and urges the groups to continue to oppose discrimination.

"'You have demonstrated through your actions that this is not an issue of "special rights" for any one group,' Clinton wrote. 'This is a battle to protect the human rights of every individual. Those who would legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientaton or any other grounds are gravely mistaken about the values that make our nation strong,' Clinton wrote. 'The essential right to equality must not be denied by a ballot initiative or otherwise.'

"William Waybourn, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, said, 'The president's backing brings a measure of hope to those who are fighting in the trenches every day to defeat these anti-gay measures'" ("Clinton backs fight against limits on rights of gays," Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, Feb. 16, 1994, p. A-4).

Apparently heedless of these considerations, and knowing that the American public is far from ready to allow passage of comprehensive federal "gay rights" legislation, the Clinton administration seems intent on advancing "gay rights" quietly, piece by piece, federal department by department, largely out of public sight, by executive "fiat." Human Events (December 18, 1993) reported:

"New evidence has emerged demonstrating that the Clinton Administration continues to take powerful governmental action to bring about the legitimization of the militant homosexual agenda. The Clintons have steadily pursued this course since they came to town last January, most notably in their effort to lift the ban against homosexuals serving in the armed forces.

"That attempt was largely thwarted by opposition in the Senate Armed Services Committee led by Sam Nunn (D.Ga.) and Dan Coats (R.Ind.). But there is little chance the Senate and the House will undo a series of administration policy changes that have swept through the federal bureaucracy over the last two weeks.

"On November 23, the Office of Personnel Management issued formal recognition to a homosexual employees group within the federal government, saying that any future questions about homosexuality in background checks of applicants or employees would be prohibited.

"Simultaneously the White House announced that it had revised its Equal Employment Opportunity Statement and bestowed protected class status on homosexuals.

"These policy changes take place against a backdrop of homosexuals frequently being appointed to important executive branch positions, such as the tapping of radical lesbian activist Roberta Achtenberg to become assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"The most disturbing of these new policy directives, however, is the order that the Atty. Gen. Janet Reno issued to the Justice Department on December 2 that forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation.

"Seasoned observers instantly grasped that this order will not just apply to file clerks and attorneys. It will also change Federal Bureau of Investigation procedures for screening recruits and dismissing agents that have been in place since the bureau's founding.

"Whatever Clinton & Co. may be saying publicly about remaining neutral on questions of morality, the language of Reno's directive makes it clear that homosexual conduct is not in the least considered to be a moral failing by this administration. Unlike Clinton's arguments for lifting the military ban, Reno's terse directive contains no qualification about homosexual status being distinct from homosexual conduct."

The Washington Times (December 15, 1993) reported:

"President Clinton will require every federal department and agency to include homosexuals as a class protected against discrimination, White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers confirmed yesterday. In his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Clinton had promised to institute such a policy by an executive order; but Miss Myers said an agency by agency approach will ensure that sexual orientation is included in all goverment personnel manuals. 'We feel a directive is effective,' Miss Myers said. 'The president has spoken out on this'" (emphasis added).