A small debate in a California town sets the stage for my first post here at SLACE about LGBT issues. The New York Times reports:
The mayor of Porterville (CA) did not give it much thought when a local gay activist in this remote Central Valley farming town asked her to proclaim June a month of gay pride. But when the mayor, Virginia R. Gurrola, settled into her seat at City Hall to sign the proclamation, people were pouring out of the chambers and into the hallways, citing Scripture in opposition to what she had thought of as a simple ceremonial gesture. Her four fellow City Council members announced they would not join her in signing the document.
The Times goes on to note that Ms. Gurrola was removed from her mayorship by fellow Council members, who took back the gay pride proclamation and issued in its stead a general notice calling for ‘good will to all.’
A common topic of debate about the nature of minority rights in America revolves around how successful we as a polity have been (or not been) in achieving substantive social progress. Whether we are concerned with equal concern and respect, as well as rights, on the basis of race, sex, gender identity or sexuality, to name only a few, the measures of how far we have come and how far we have left to go are difficult to pin down and frequently contested. One of the more interesting discussions that has taken place within political science (disclosure: my home discipline) has centered around the operation of what Desmond King and Rogers Smith call racial institutional orders. At its core, the argument King and Smith make asserts that there are two political orders in the United States (what they call on one hand the ‘white supremacist’ or ‘anti-transformative’ orders, for those who compose a political order that, while perhaps not explicitly racist, favor policies and political arrangements that preserve and entrench the power and status of the white population, and on the other hand the ‘transformative egalitarian’ order, for those who compose a political order that, to varying degrees, subscribes to conceptions of racial justice).
More recently, some historians and political scientists have begun to employ King and Smith’s concept of racial institutional orders (sometimes in combination with Smith’s earlier work on ascriptive Americanist hierarchies) to inform analyses of the politics of gender and sexuality in the United States. One of the key insights this work offers are the historical roots of modern rights struggles and the parallels between the struggle for racial justice (or, in King and Smith’s work, the struggle between the two racial institutional orders) and modern debates over a variety of issues, racial and otherwise. Particularly important is the insight King and Smith offer in the transformation that has taken place in American politics: where once the transformative egalitarian order had once been weaker, principles of racial equality have penetrated our culture and politics so deeply that the very terms on which debates now take place have changed.
In particular, what was once the ‘white supremacist’ order has become, rather, an anti-transformative order: accepting (at least facially, though often substantively) of many of the principles of racial equality and egalitarianism, the anti-transformative order now often takes a stand that can best be summarized as ‘We’ve come this far, let’s go no farther.’ Rather than invoking antiquated language about racial hierarchy or discrimination, the anti-transformative order often argues for a truly color-blind society, arguing against what may be termed special treatment or rights. Recent decisions about the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action programs at the University of Texas (both majority opinions and the dissents) are indicative, to varying degrees, our continuing battles on racial matters.
In my own research, I work (among other things) on analyses detailing the historical parallels between America’s racial struggles and the institutional and legal regimes built up around them and concurrent/subsequent disputes over what might be termed gender and sexuality regimes. The Porterville case strikes me as a perfect micro-level demonstration of this work. What looks on its surface to be a relatively minor dispute over the issuance of a gay pride proclamation by a town government presents a useful insight into the continuing dispute between two ‘sexuality institutional orders’ quite similar to King and Smith’s racial institutional orders: on the one hand, the (former) mayor represents an actor in an egalitarian order that would further in some small way an LGBT friendly agenda and environment, while on the other her dissenting fellow-councillors represent a group that may be described as anti-transformative.
The most interesting part of this is the terms on which the debate takes place. Egalitarian impulses have subsumed so much of our attitudes towards minorities that they often take place not in starkly discriminatory terms, but are rather framed in traditional liberal terms. Note here the parallels between the rhetoric employed by opponents of affirmative action (including justices of the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Roberts famously noting: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”) and the opponents of the gay pride proclamation here (with their proclamation of good will toward all). This is similar to the political and legal disputes over Colorado’s Amendment 2, which culminated in Romer v. Evans, where the supporters of Amendment 2 couched their preferred policy as a denial of special treatment for gays and lesbians, while opponents based their arguments on equal treatment. Scratching beneath the surface of even a relatively minor debate over a gay pride proclamation in a small California town can yield important insights into the deep historical trends of American political that are still operative today.