by Karen Ocamb

During their separate pre-Prop. 8 trial interviews with Frontiers in L.A., attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies both mentioned the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill pending in the Uganda Legislature as an example of how historic anti-gay animus continues to this day. The bill would criminalize homosexuality and punish gay sexual relationships with imprisonment and even death.

Thanks to bloggers and MSNBC’s popular openly gay host Rachel Maddow, the bill has received considerable attention and its author, MP David Bahati, was disinvited from attending the upcoming National Prayer Breakfast by members of the Fellowship Foundation, aka The Family, according to Warren Throckmorton, a conservative Christian pundit and Associate Professor of Psychology at Grove City College. Throckmorton also reported on Jan. 21 that there was a “heated debate for over two hours” over the bill in a Uganda committee hearing with 21 Cabinet members.

“Those who expressed reservations fear the cutting of aid by Western governments,” said a source who preferred anonymity. “Those for it argued that we need to maintain our independence and values as a country.”

Also on Jan. 21, openly gay Congressmembers Tammy Baldwin, Jared Polis and Barney Frank, co-chairs of the Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus, held a hearing on the bill and issued a letter to President Obama and Ugandan President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni to intervene.

“The pending Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda is an appalling violation of human rights and it behooves us, as Americans and members of Congress, to do all we can to prevent its passage,” Baldwin said in a press release. “We fervently hope that President Obama will use the full force of his office to oppose this hateful and life-threatening legislation in Uganda and send a clear message to other countries that such discrimination must not be tolerated. And, we hope that Ugandan President Museveni recognizes that this legislation is morally untenable and politically harmful to his nation.”

Frank was more frank: “Vicious unleashing of persecution of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people should and will be an obstacle to any future Congressional initiative to provide aid to that country,” he said.

The Congressional letter to Obama said they applauded the recent statements by the White House and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing concern and indicating opposition. “However, we strongly believe that the severity of the legislation under consideration in both Uganda and Rwanda requires that you do more,” they wrote, noting that Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom also have condemned the bill and made financial threats. “We ask that you use all means available to seek to deter these bills from passage, and that a tangible and meaningful bilateral response be undertaken should either bill be passed into law.”

The fact that the bill has received so much attention may make it seem as if the LGBT political establishment holds power enough to impact the fortunes of another country. Obama’s State of the Union address is on Jan. 27 and The Family-sponsored National Prayer Breakfast is on Feb. 4, so it remains to be seen if the bill is mentioned or prevented from becoming law by then.

But “seeming” is not reality, and while Bahati may have been disinvited, Museveni is reportedly still attending the National Prayer Breakfast. According to Religious Right researcher Bruce Wilson, Museveni is closely associated with the international anti-gay Christian evangelical movement that is using Uganda as a model and testing ground for its “eliminationist” mission — that is, they are not trying to hurt gays, just eliminate the “demonic” presence within them. (Please see Wilson’s short but important documentary on the “transformation” movement — lgbtpov.com/2010/01/will-uganda-hearing-expose-international-antigay-movement.)

Additionally, the letters sent by Baldwin, Polis and Frank to Obama and Museveni had “more than ninety” of their colleagues’ signatures—out of 435 members. Among the names missing were Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Reps. Maxine Waters and Judy Chu. And there were no signatures of senators.

Two letters, an hour and a half-long human rights hearing, some air time on MSNBC—and lots of words with little concrete action.

I asked both Ted Olson and David Boies if they were going to discuss the Uganda “Kill the Gays” bill during the federal Prop. 8 trial. They said no—they already have plenty of evidence to prove that there has been sustained discrimination against gay people, which should then afford gays the right as a “suspect class” to equal protection under the U.S. Constitution. But the lawyers are seeking to prove that there is no rational basis for same-sex couples to be denied the fundamental right to marry and indeed Protect Marriage improperly used a twisted message of moral animus to pass an unconstitutional law, Prop. 8.

And through trial briefs, documents and testimony, the Olson/Boies team have entered into evidence the long-tortured history of anti-gay discrimination, as well as shown how the institution of marriage has evolved and how granting the stability of marriage to same-sex couples also helps stabilize the family unit, including children.

But in proving that LGBT people are a vulnerable minority needing constitutional protection—the Olson/Boies team also revealed and entered into evidence the truth that dare not speak it’s name: the LGBT community is actually politically powerless.

And on Jan. 20, day seven of the federal Prop. 8 trial, Gary M. Segura, a Stanford Political Science professor and an expert on the subject of the political power and powerlessness of minority groups in the United States—and of gays and lesbians in particular—counted the ways LGBT people are politically powerless.

In and of itself, this is not shocking. The facts are well known—but taking those facts as a steady drip, drip, drip of information, pretty soon the news is torture. While the evidence and this expert’s opinions may well help win the Prop. 8 case at this district trial level, the political ramifications may yield unintended consequences as more and more politicians and allies consider the LGBT community too politically insignificant to bother with.

Here is just some of Segura’s testimony:

“[In] my view, when we consider the U.S. political system, gays and lesbians do not possess a meaningful degree of political power. They are not able to protect their basic interests into law and to secure those. [They] currently ... effectuate their interests relative to some other groups’ protection. Gays and lesbians are actually, in the statutory and constitutional sense, worse off than some of those groups were when they were granted judicial protection.”

Because heterosexuals have held power “essentially forever,” he said, “it is difficult, with the resources that they have, for gays and lesbians to press their cause in the political system ... [they] just simply don’t have the numbers and the resources to be effective advocates in a lot of political arenas.”

The passage of the federal hate crimes law, he said, was not a huge victory. “We’re talking about sort of ameliorating a real serious element of disadvantage that gays and lesbians face in American society. The other thing is that, in order to get it passed, it was attached as a rider to the Defense Authorization Bill ... Even though it was attached to the Defense Bill, 75 percent of the Republicans in the United States Senate voted against it. They voted against the Defense Authorization Bill, which is not a customary Republican position in the Senate. So I think that when we consider how the hate crimes bill was passed, and the fact that we’re talking about criminalizing pretty vicious behavior, that would weigh against a judgment for political power.”

Segura also spoke extensively about the initiative system, noting that “initiatives have been used to roll back legislative gains by gays and lesbians over and over again. In fact, between 1990 and the middle part of the 2000s, there’s been probably like 150—not even counting the same-sex marriage votes, there’s been like 150 votes ... on gay and lesbian anti-discrimination protections. And they lose about 70 percent of the time.”

Segura looked at the markers of political powerlessness. “If there are laws hurting you and there are no laws helping you, that would be evidence that you have a lack of power.”

He looked at statutory disadvantages at the federal level. “So there is no federal-level anti-discrimination protection for housing and employment. There’s no federal-level protection, really, on any level beyond the recently passed Hate Crimes Bill. There is federal legislation prohibiting gays and lesbians from receiving partner benefits in federal employment, as an incident of the Defense of Marriage Act.

“There is the exclusion of gays and lesbians from service in the military ... So if we look at a hate crimes protection or we look at an anti-discrimination ordinance, the purpose of that is to ameliorate a disadvantage, ameliorate a wrong that exists. While it’s certainly good to have that, it’s difficult to conclude that that’s a measure of political power in and of itself.

“It would be akin to saying that because you have more prescriptions, clearly you’re healthier. No. You have prescriptions because there’s a problem.

“And the same would be true here. We have anti-discrimination statutes because there’s discrimination ... So I’m not sure I would conclude on the basis of some positive statutory outcomes, ameliorating some severe disadvantages, that that alone constitutes political power.”

And no group has been target for initiatives more than gays and lesbians. “The number of ballot initiative contests since the first one in the late 1970s is probably at or above 200. Gays and lesbians lose 70 percent of the contests over other matters. They have essentially lost a hundred percent of the contests over same-sex marriage and now on adoption,” he said. “The initiative process has been really the Waterloo of gay and lesbian politics.”

Segura also noted that gays and lesbians are underrepresented in political office—“only six people have ever served in the House of Representatives who have been openly gay and only two of those were elected as openly gay”; there has never been an openly gay senator or cabinet member or president; and only about one percent of the state’s legislatures are gay and about one percent local elected officials.

This matters in conveying a larger message about the acceptibility of LGBT people. “[I]f two U.S. senators compare same-sex marriage to bestiality, that makes that part of the mainstream conversation. That’s not the fringe. That’s a United States senator. And as a consequence, it legitimizes some of these deeply hostile beliefs,” Segura said. And, he added, there just “simply aren’t enough gays and lesbians in any jurisdiction of any size to shape outcomes.”

“Do the attitudes of other people towards gay men and lesbians affect their political power?” He was asked.

“I think that the role of prejudice is profound,” Segura said. “[I]f the group is envisioned as being somehow or another morally inferior, a threat to children, a threat to freedom, if there’s these deeply-seated beliefs, then the range of compromise is dramatically limited. It’s very difficult to engage in the give-and-take of the legislative process when I think you are an inherently bad person. That’s just not the basis for compromise and negotiation in the political process.

“The bottom line: The conclusion I reached is that the American public is not very fond of gays and lesbians.”

And—no surprise here: “I think that religion is the chief obstacle for gay and lesbian political progress, and it’s the chief obstacle for a couple of reasons. The first is that after government, it’s difficult to think of a more powerful social entity in American society than the church. Religion is something that deeply connects to people’s lives. Indeed, America is a very church-going nation compared with other Western democracies. It provides the opportunity for people to meet together on a weekly basis. So it’s a very powerful organization, and in large measure they are arrayed against the interests of gays and lesbians ... [H]omosexuality and the teaching that gays are morally inferior on a regular basis to a huge percentage of the public makes the political ground, the political opportunity structure very hostile to gay interests. It’s very difficult to overcome that.”

Difficult to the point of even getting the President of the United States to follow through on his campaign promises. “Does President Obama count as an ally to the gay and lesbian community?” Thompson asked after playing a video excerpt of Obama speaking at the Human Rights Campaign dinner last October.

“I think President Obama is perhaps the best illustration of an ally who cannot be counted upon, an ally whose rhetoric far exceeds his actions,” Segura replied. (Find the transcripts of all the testimony at the American Foundation for Equal Rights website—equalrightsfoundation.org.)

Courage Campaign founder Rick Jacobs, who was live-blogging the testimony, was also struck by the conclusion.

“Protect Marriage attorney David Thompson is trying to show that gays do have power because we give money, have access to public figures like Speaker Pelosi, have marriage in a few states and raised $43 million against Prop. 8,” Jacobs wrote on Prop8TrialTracker.com. “But juxtapose this with the amazing revelation of documents (prop8trialtracker.com/2010/01/20/an-explosive-afternoon) earlier this afternoon that show how clearly the Mormon and Catholic Churches coordinated and ran the field campaign for Prop. 8. We knew the churches were involved deeply, but now we see that they essentially made the campaign work.

“The summary from both sides reduces to this: After 30 years, we have a hate crimes bill,” Jacobs said. “And even though Mr. Thompson keeps touting the Human Rights Campaign’s own writings promoting HRC, we see that we have little real power.”

Jacobs noted that there has been no repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or the Defense of Marriage Act, or passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).

“As Mr. Thompson for the defense inadvertently points out by having played excerpts from Obama’s speech, the gays get politicians to show up and get invited to parties. But nothing happens. We see that the hundreds of millions of dollars that the LGBT community has spent has resulted in very little real power—the kind of power that can actually conjure fear in the minds of elected officials. As a friend and senior advisor to Obama remarked to me recently, not one federal office holder worries in the least about what the gay community says or does,” Jacobs wrote.

As the political season heats up and politicians once again come to the LGBT community as an ATM without a receipt, grassroots activists and LGBT leaders and organizers must consider this testimony a “wake up call” and shake out of self-congratulatory denial.

This testimony reveals what society and the political world really thinks of us, no matter how many pats and strokes some LGBT people get. If there are going to be political repercussions from this trial, what will they be—more of the same, loss after loss? Or will a political strategy be developed that shifts the consequences of continuing LGBT inequality onto the political system itself? Will Prop. 8 wind up being an LGBT political Waterloo or a turning point? There’s no time to waste—the National Organization for Marriage is planning ahead. It is time that the LGBT community unite, get creative and develop a new politics of inclusion.