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You've got to love it.
The White House Easter Egg Roll went off without a hitch.
Maybe you've heard: hundreds of gay parents, in a tactically brilliant move, lined up en masse days early to snag free
first-come first-served tickets to Monday's annual Roll, traditionally an innocuous kiddie photo-op for grinning presidents
and first ladies that is, at most, cute. But with this year's ingenious gesture by gay parents, the stakes instantly skyrocketed.
A president who has allied himself with hard-right anti-gay forces found himself poised to be cast as the Easter Bigot. There
he'd be in front of the cameras, barring the White House gates the way that segregationist Governor George Wallace blocked
the doors of the University of Alabama 43 years ago, telling crying kids that they can't roll Easter eggs on the White House
lawn because their parents are going to hell.
It was triangulation worthy of Bill Clinton at his savviest. And for poor feckless W, with his you-know-whats caught in
a vise of his own cranking, there was only one honorable way out: Laura. Enter the First Lady, who announced sweetly to the
press corps that the Roll would welcome all families. She was as good as her word on the appointed day, as were the gay parents
who had pledged to not stage political theater and who identified themselves only with colorful rainbow leis. Eggs and cameras
rolled, kids laughed, Americans saw yet more proof that gay families are simply families, and Team Bush sweated and waited
for it to be over. Score one for the good side.
It is crazy, of course, for any of this to even be an issue. Imagine poker-faced reporters droning into cameras about
the "controversy" surrounding, say, blacks being visibly present at the Easter Egg Roll. It is a testimony to the
nation's broad acceptance of rank bigotry that we even treat such matters as subjects of debate.
Some folks in the Taliban wing of the Christian Right are still frothing over the perceived insult to Jesus and the Easter
Bunny, as we might expect. There are predictably histrionic quotes about morals and tradition and role models for children.
But to me the most striking, and revealing, statement in the entire brouhaha was a demure assertion made by one Mark D. Tooley
of an outfit called the Institute on Religion and Democracy, who told the Associated Press, "I think it's inappropriate
[for gays] to use a children's event to make a political statement."
Hmmm. "Use" an event to "make a political statement"? Well, let's take a closer look at who is actually
doing the using, politically speaking.
On the one hand, we have gay parents who want to be, well, parents. They want to raise kids. Some of them want to get
married. They want to buy houses and care for each other in sickness and health and go on vacation and take their kids to
Easter egg hunts without being abused or scrutinized or discriminated against. They want, basically, to not be politically
singled out by society because of their sexual orientation.
And we have, on the other hand, those on the far right who make it their very purpose to single out gays for special treatment.
They mount frantic political campaigns to tell gays, "You can't marry." They stage loud rallies to yell at gays,
"You can't have equal rights." They preach from pulpits to tell gays, "Your sexual identity is a sin."
They organize angry grassroots movements -- as a friend of mine in Ohio tells me is now happening in that state -- to tell
gays, "You can't adopt children." At every turn, while gay Americans struggle to gain the same treatment as everyone
else -- that is, to not be treated as if they are special -- the anti-gay forces continue to shriek to the heavens, and to
every reporter within earshot, that gays are in fact special, that gays are different, that gays are a threat that must be
politically targeted and morally attacked.
So who is it, exactly, who is making gayness into a "political statement?" As far as I can tell, it is not the
gay moms and dads on the White House lawn.
As with many blacks of my parents' generation -- a group of people whose middle-class ambitions were cast as activism
only by society's active obstruction -- the main force "politicizing" gayness in America is the obsessive, constant,
and unwanted attention showered upon gays by the hard right itself. Somebody needs to tell Mark D. Tooley that if he thinks
it is "inappropriate" to make political hay around issues of children and families, he ought to go tell the Bush
Administration and Focus On the Family to knock it off.
Meanwhile, let the Easter eggs roll.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 4/18/06)
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