THE QUILL
Published by Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty Vol. 6, No. 1March 1998
SHOWDOWN ON CRITICAL ISSUES FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
Afoot and lighthearted,
I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before.
Henceforth, I wish not good fortune -
I myself am good-fortune
Strong and content
I travel the open road.
--Walt Whitman
IN THIS ISSUE
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD:
Onward··..
When should individual liberty depend on a person's meeting "social" obligations? And where does the state belong in answering this question? Nowhere!
HARDWICK v. BOWERS:
There is a prostitution case, Roe v. Butterworth, from Florida which may go before the Supreme Court. Briefs will be submitted asking the Court to overturn the 1986 sodomy law decision on Hardwick v. Bowers.
In Britain, seven men convicted of private consensual gay sex barely avoided a prison term. Consensual gay sex between two adults has been legal in Britain since 1967, but when more than two people are present it is considered "public sex" and the age of consent for homosexuals is greater in Britain than for straights. (However, anal sex became legal for heterosexual activity in Britain only recently, in 1994).
MARRIAGE:
A state judge in Alaska has ruled that a trial challenging Alaska's law to ban same-sex marriages must go forward. The judge indicated that there may be a fundamental right for any adult to choose an intimate partner, even to the point that the state may not undermine this choice by refusing to recognize its legitimacy (as in marriage). The judge may have been referring to language in Hardwick which requires sexual intimacy to occur in a socially recognized and useful context (marriage) before it is viewed as a fundamental right. It does not appear that the judge implied that the privileges that go with marriage are themselves "fundamental rights."
It would be good to have a principled debate on "natural" or fundamental rights. Are they really self-evident? Do they have to be deeply rooted in social tradition? Do they have to be good for society ("family values") as well as for the individual's own self-direction? Or do they reflect the right of a person to do or express what he chooses until he harms others?
There is in incentive built into our case law to depend on equal protection arguments, rather than arguments based on fundamental rights (related to substantive due process). This has the practical (if paradoxical) effect (as when discrimination laws lead to affirmative action) of encouraging people to see their rights as privileges bartered by politicians or labor leaders to groups to accommodate for past oppression or for social utility rather as something they already possess and can strengthen for themselves.
FAMILY VALUES:
An ABC News report on Feb. 15 pointed out that the United States is one of six developed nations that does not require employers to supply paid maternity leave. European countries typically require 8-16 weeks of paid leave at 55% or more of salary. The United States government allows civil servant pregnant women (but not prospective fathers) to "borrow" up to 30 days of sick leave. But several questions arise. If expectant mothers get paid benefits, should new fathers also? Would companies do this for long term employees out of a desire to invest in stable key staff? (A few large companies do this for long-term career associates.) This may be fine if voluntary, but should the state be involved in making people who don't have children help people who do in the private workplace? Many heterosexual people with traditional families seem hardly aware that some people don't have children, that there are gay people who can't legally marry adults of their own choosing and who may not be allowed to become parents. "Normal" people seem hardly aware that they expect "outliers" to help support them.
A variation of this idea would be to force coverage of some maternity leave benefits as well as other "family leave" situations such as caring for ill family members, with mandatory unemployment insurance which would go up for everyone at least $20 for all workers in most private companies. This could have the somewhat desirable result of pressuring people (especially only children like me) into stay closer to their families!
Unions have sometimes been able to bargain for 100% payment of health insurance premiums. This benefit amounts to a "family wage" payment since people with families to support effectively are compensated more for the same base "salary" without offsetting loss in take-home pay. A recent strike against Honeywell in Minneapolis was predicated on the objection to Honeywell's insistence that new associates pay part of their health insurance (which reduces take-home pay for those with families). Gay strikers (assuming the inability to marry and relative unlikelihood of parenting) were expected to support a contract provision that would effectively discriminate against them.
MILITARY BAN:
A recent incident may cause the courts at least to hold the military services accountable when they break the "don't pursue" rules. In late 1997, the Navy tried to discharge Boat Chief Timothy McVeigh (no relation to OKC) when McVeigh "anonymously" identified himself as "gay" on an America OnLine profile and the Navy subsequently used deception to coax an AOL employee to identify the profile as McVeigh's. In the meantime, AOL had actually closed his account on the theory that his request for friends to forward his email calling for help amounted to a "chain letter," a violation of its "terms of service." A federal judge ordered a permanent injunction on his discharge; and it seems that the judge might well hold the notorious "guidelines" clause (predicated on the assumption that administrative, as opposed to criminal, proceedings afford very little procedural due process protection) unconstitutional even if the overall DADTDP policy itself is constitutional. The Navy had even tried to use McVeigh's never-married history as evidence of his homosexual "conduct." (The Navy threatened to appeal but has reportedly offered to let McVeigh retire. McVeigh has been assigned as a base librarian and been taken off his special duty pay.)
Certainly, AOL's mishandling of this case will bring new attention to the privacy rights of consumers and the protections that businesses which trade with them owe them. We should be wary of moving too quickly, because businesses need information about consumers to be efficient and because significant issues could arise in screening people who have access to information about consumers.
BOY SCOUTS:
A New Jersey appeals court ruled March 2 that the Boy Scouts cannot exclude James Dale from his volunteer position as assistant scoutmaster solely because the Boy Scouts found out from a newspaper article that Dale is gay. The court ruled that the Boy Scouts are a "public accommodation" that must comply with the state law prohibiting discrimination against gays. And are the Boy Scouts a really "private" and voluntary membership organization? This is a bit if a conundrum. Consider that the BSA was chartered by Congress in 1916 and that various public schools and police and fire departments allow the Boy Scouts to use public facilities and actively promote them. (States often "charter" private corporations and universities and these organizations are not publicly subsidized unless they become non-profit and get tax breaks · so state involvement makes it difficult to determine what is really "private.") Boy Scout experience is looked upon favorably by the military. All of this may put government in the position of not simply suborning anti-gay discrimination (as does the military and DOMA laws) but also of indirectly supporting the establishment of religion (since the Scouts require loyalty to God), in direct contradiction to the First Amendment. However, if the Boy Scouts cut all public ties, the situation would be different. People should be free to form voluntary assemblies and membership associations to promulgate ideas, even bad ideas (such as a patriarchal notion of masculinity). When government can mediate association to those who dispense "correct" ideas, there is great danger to all expression and exploration of new ideas. The greatest defense to obnoxious ideas is freedom! Of course, this gets complicated. Religious and non-profit "private" organizations enjoy not only tax breaks but preferred treatment in some intellectual property law situations, so it's still possible for "private" associations to gain undue influence. Indeed, some people think proper speech about moral issues and even about minorities should be decided by "representative democracy." Yes, and that attitude gave us sedition laws, like during World War I when you dared not criticize the draft.
FREE SPEECH
What now? Oprah Winfrey takes her show to Amraillo, Texas, to answer a subpoena and frivolous lawsuit that she libeled the Texas cattle industry (and made beef prices fall) by speculating that we might have an epidemic of "Mad Cow" spongiform encephalopathy in this country, one that would multiply geometrically like another AIDS. Some states have tried to pass "positive laws" (cattle defamation laws) protecting their industries from the common law "opinion rule" that regards the statement of negative opinions as free speech. Often we look at law the other way; we need law to tell us we can do certain things to protect us from frivolous lawsuits. On Feb. 27, a jury of our peers agreed with Oprah that she was within her First Amendment rights.
REFORM PARTY:
Not only the Libertarian party is advancing advances in individual liberty. At a local Reform Party caucus in Minneapolis on March 4, one resolution that would end Selective Service registration was passed, as was another one which would specify that all unenumerated rights in the Ninth Amendment are individual rights (there goes Hardwick). The Minnesota Reform Party has articulated many good ideas on its proposed platform, such as a law forbidding unions from applying monies derived from payroll deductions to political contributions without workers' consent. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on March 9 in which it discussed (with support) a proposal in the House ("Paycheck Protection") to forbid unions and employers to make (without consent) payroll deductions for political contributions. There is a similar proposal (unions only), Proposition 226, up for referendum in California. For libertarians (like right-to-work laws, term limits and tort reform proposals) this cuts both ways. It might interfere with "freedom to contract" but it certainly, in practice, would reduce the "loyalty" hold special interests have over workers. But then again, in a free market a little loyalty is a good thing.
GLIL BUSINESS MEETING HELD IN FEBRUARY
A majority of the corporate board of directors of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty met at the home of Joe Beard on Thursday, February 12, 1998, and made the following decisions:
(1) GLIL's new president, succeeding Odell Huff, is Rick Sincere, who will also serve as interim treasurer.
(2) Succeeding Rick Sincere as Secretary is Dave Edmondson.
(3) A new set of by-laws was formally adopted, which includes a clause stating that GLIL is an organization "with members" and that membership dues will be $25 per year (or $15 for students and seniors).
(4) Aside from its monthly happy hour, GLIL will sponsor a number of events in coming months. The first event, to be held in the latter half of April in a location to be determined, will be a debate on the question of whether the Boy Scouts should be allowed to exclude gays and lesbians or atheists and agnostics from membership or staff and volunteer positions. The second event, tentatively scheduled for late September, will be a debate on medicinal marijuana. It was also agreed to sponsor a booth at the D.C. g/l/b/t pride festival in June and perhaps also to do the same at Philadelphia's festival. There was also discussion about having a GLIL presence at the Log Cabin Republicans' convention to be held in Dallas in August.
(5) The newsletter will continue to be edited by Bill Boushka, now in Minneapolis. We agreed to provide him with copy and a mailing list so that a new issue can be published in early March. There was some confusion as to who possesses the most up-to-date version of the mailing list; anyone who can shed some light on this question, please contact us.
(6) A motion was made and passed to the effect that the President will appoint a committee to explore the possibility of GLIL distributing newspaper columns (written by various people) to the gay press. These columns would address issues of concern to the gay and lesbian community from a libertarian perspective. Authors could be GLIL members or not; authors could be gay or non-gay.
--Rick Sincere
According to a wire service story appearing in the Chicago Tribune, "In a statement issued a few hours before Wednesday's broadcast of the situation comedy, DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] Administrator Thomas Constantine said CBS and the show's creators were 'doing a great disservice' by trivializing drug abuse' and pandering to the libertarian supporters of an "open society" and to the myths of legalization.'"
After years of being ignored, I'm glad that someone is finally pandering to me (and other libertarians). We are the people who are more inclined to agree with the assessment of Ethan Nadelmann, director of The Lindesmith Center, a drug policy think tank based in New York.
Nadelmann called the episode a "cultural breakthrough," adding that "Candice Bergen and the producers of this episode brought a uniquely balanced perspective to the complex and controversial issue of medical marijuana for the first time ever on national, prime time television." Nadelmann, whose center recently published the book Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts: A Review of the Scientific Evidence, explained that "Murphy Brown and her associates made it clear that marijuana should be, and can be dealt with honestly and responsibly, without sending the wrong message to our youth. For this, they should be congratulated."
This Murphy Brown episode had a particular poignancy to me, since I am currently going through chemotherapy -- though for a far less severe illness than Murphy's breast cancer. This explains my absence from the pages of The Metro Herald for the past two months, as I have had to cut back on many of my activities during my chemotherapy treatment cycle. (The prognosis is for the treatments to be finished in January with the prospect of a full cure -- so my theatre and music reviews will return soon.)
As it happens, the drugs that my doctor prescribed for nausea work just fine. This is not true for everyone, however, and I would not hesitate to use medicinal marijuana if it were necessary. I am a firm believer in the relegalization of marijuana, not only because it is medically valuable, but because it would reduce the human and monetary costs of the failed "War on Drugs."
Marijuana is one of the oldest medicinal herbs known to man. Around the world, people have used marijuana as medicine for at least five thousand years, with earliest records dating from the rule of Chinese Emperor Shen Nung in about 2737 B.C. In the United States, cannabis tinctures were widely used throughout the 19th century and until 1937 for ailments such as teething pain, arthritis, epilepsy, and insomnia. In recent years, doctors have recommended marijuana for those who need to relieve the intense nausea from cancer and AIDS drugs so they can eat, to stave off blindness from glaucoma, and to reduce the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis.
The acceptance of the use of marijuana as medicine has been gaining steady momentum across the country. Last year [in 1996] two states passed voter initiatives -- Proposition 215 in California and Proposition 200 in Arizona -- making it legal to prescribe marijuana to patients for medical purposes. Earlier this year [1997], the Virginia General Assembly turned back a spirited effort by conservative legislators to repeal a 1979 law that tentatively allows "medical necessity" as a legal defense against criminal charges of marijuana possession. Spearheaded by AIDS activists and with the support of several members of the D.C. Council, a medicinal marijuana initiative petition is being circulated in Washington for a ballot measure to be presented to voters next year.
Naturally, there is still resistance to this effort to bring compassion into state and national drug laws. Some people are still confused about the issue, unsure what to think; others have never heard any "argument" but government propaganda about the drug war. An article in the New York Times Magazine observed that "California's experiment with medical marijuana could well turn out to be a turning point in the drug war, if for no other reason than it is rapidly transforming what has long been a simplistic monologue about drugs -- Just Say No -- into a complex conversation between the people and their government. So far, the most compelling voices in that conversation belong to the patients, the doctors, the growers and the cops who together are struggling to carve out a place for legal marijuana in the face of fierce opposition from Washington."
Reflecting the fact that the medical use of marijuana is quietly but definitively gaining support among Americans, the most remarkable aspect of the Murphy Brown episode was the fact that stodgy Jim Dial -- Murphy's conservative co-worker -- was the most insistent that liberal Murphy overcome her reluctance to try marijuana as a means to reduce her debilitating nausea.
Indeed, as dramatized on Murphy Brown, the medicinal marijuana issue is one that crosses party and ideological lines. Although libertarians have long been in the forefront of arguing for relegalization, both conservatives and liberals recognize marijuana's therapeutic value, and the large margin of victory for the initiatives in California and Arizona last year suggest that the average voter understands the arguments. "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man," concluded the DEA's own Administrative Law Judge, Francis Young.
Others who agree that relegalization is necessary -- or at least worth discussing -- include Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, and former Secretary of State George Shultz.
Murphy Brown has played a valuable role by bringing the debate about medicinal marijuana into the living rooms of millions of Americans. The debate is bound to continue, and eventually the forces of compassion will win out over the forces of fear.
Rick Sincere is entertainment editor and a political commentator for The Metro Herald. He is also president of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty.
There is a Hawaii bill that would allow a relatively small number of state legislators to require the legislature to take a vote on whether to affirm or override a court decision that a particular law is unconstitutional. If the vote overrides the decision, then the bill says that the law will continue to bind everyone, except that the actual parties to the case on which the court ruled will be bound by the court's decision.
It's true that legislatures can often effectively override court decisions. They can do so when the court decisions have construed statutes in certain ways of which the legislatures disapprove; the legislatures can then make it clearer what is meant by those statutes. They can also override court decisions that depend on the absence of statutory law on a given subject, or on common law, or on rules of court falling within the constitutional competence of the legislatures to alter (this depends on how the constitution in question reads or is interpreted to read).
However, under prevailing views of the separation of powers, legislatures cannot override court decisions construing a constitution, except by initiating a constitutional amendment. This lesson was recently taught Congress in City of Boerne v. Flores, No. 95-2074 (U.S. June 25, 1997), where the Supreme Court declared that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was unconstitutional because it represented an attempt by Congress to say what the First Amendment means rather than simply to enforce it through Congress's Fourteenth Amendment enforcement power. It's the Supreme Court's job to say what the First Amendment means.
Interesting that the Hawaii bill's language denounces the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, in which the Supreme Court announced its exclusive right to say what the Constitution means. Talk about reactionary legislation! In any event, the Supreme Court expressly reaffirmed Marbury v. Madison and the separation of powers (as if that were really necessary to do) in City of Boerne.
Legislatures can override court decisions pertaining to statutory interpretation. However, that isn't what theHawaii bill seeks to do. It seeks to institute legislative overrides of courts' constitutional interpretations.
Bill Kelley, Chicago
WHAT'S THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PERSONAL GROWTH AND POLITICS?
"Get a life," people tell me. I pontificate because I don't have an intimate partner of my own, and especially kids to raise. If I did, I wouldn't expect to find a perfect world. I'd be pragmatic.
Personal growth is "getting a life." It's about being more important to other people. That means, knowing what's unique about me, that only I can give to others. That means knowing what's mine.
If you have a loyal family and circle of friends or some kind of protective community, who cares about the Outside, as long as it doesn't implode completely? Focus on the things you can see, that make a visible difference to other people.
What's wrong with this insular view? Within any relatively closed group of people, little power struggles will develop. People will compete for "power" - that is, status and recognition, a sense of control over others. That's just human nature, no matter how good the people. And that's politics. It happens among chimps and dolphins, too.
In a modern democracy ("people rule"), politics has evolved from macro conflicts between dynasties and nation states to a somewhat more personal battle in which people define boundaries among themselves, which meander as they compete for their personal consideration within the common good. Even though a lot of politics revolves around distant special economic interests, it is the cultural battles over values where the correspondence appears between national issues and the dynamics within an insular group. Both in reconciling interests of competing groups and in circumscribing particular individual behaviors and incentives, the underlying question is always, "what is fair?"
For when I speak of politics, I'm not stopping with voting or offering money or support to political candidates and parties or pressure groups that speak collectively. I'm talking about all forms of personal expression - writing, novels, acting, music - and daily personal choices - that project personal values.
The fulcrum of the cultural war is the libertarian idea of "self-ownership." At its best, self-ownership emphasizes self-actualization, not libertine self-indulgence and gratification. Still, both "liberals" and "conservatives" balk at allowing the individual too much choice about his or her own direction.
The left points out that even this "psychological capitalism" depends upon exploitation and ignores the accumulated injustices suffered by oppressed classes in past generations: these must be righted by the "people" before individual liberty really makes sense. The right points out that excessive individualism undermines the nuclear family, especially important in socializing the underprivileged and morally vulnerable. "Family values" - so essential to raising children and to providing a personal safety net for adults, contradicts somewhat optimum psychological health when viewed at an individual level, because individual psychological attachments often work out better (even within traditional marriages) when both partners maintain a certain amount of psychological self-sufficiency - even to the point of creating their own separate "peak experiences." Both political "sides" point out that survival of ordered liberty may be jeopardized if individuals are unable to sacrifice (even "ultimately") for the common good in meeting external threats. Both point out that some personal choices - especially in such matters as pornography and drug use - have influences on others beyond immediate consequences to individuals. Both sides seem appropriately concerned with how much a person's community can afford of that person's discretionary choices. Any individual with a real self-concept must care about this, about knowing "what is mine to have?"
It's possible to propose, on paper, a utopia in which most of these personal "values" are crafted through "democracy" - the state - into a stable "moral order." The state redistributes unearned wealth away from those who don't "deserve" it to those in need (sometimes under the influence of "minority status"). The state also heavily supports the nuclear, two-parent (straight) family and forces those who don't participate to subsidize those who do. Personal choices and particularly relationships depend on the approbation and recognition of the surrounding community and ultimately the state.
There is a "moral" principle to which this appeals. That is, that before self-actualization (contrasted with gratification) happens, one must meet the real needs of others, preferably in a totally committed adult partnership, sanctioned by the community and capable of raising children or at least supporting dependents. One seeks and implements truth and right according to the resources available first through family and immediate family, even when this limits one's vision. We call this "family first."
So conventional gay activists come along and say, fine - let's keep this principle of "prior obligation" but expand it to include same-sex couples and parenting. (We could add, let's keep the idea of an obligation to serve the community and allow open gays to serve in the military.) This makes many people very uncomfortable. It reminds them they can fail in their own sexuality, so they invent "moral" rationalizations to deny gays the right to serve higher callings than themselves. A man goes through some kind of metamorphosis as he gives up the narcissism and upward affiliation that would keep him from being a good provider, husband and father, they say. Of course, they ignore the fact that a real life-long same-sex partnership makes psychological demands they cannot even imagine. The problem is, winning this kind of argument as long as the state remains involved and the "people" get to resolve it collectively limits gays practically to immutability as their only viable political argument - responsibility for personal conduct becomes "relative" to "nature." There's some evidence for biological immutability, but that about Free Will - the choice and accountability for behaviors, that makes us human? To say one the one hand that gays are morally unfit for parenthood or military service and on the other that gays are an oppressed minority that must be protected in all discretionary areas of society (where they can spend their surplus on themselves) is just plain intellectually dishonest (if politically expedient). But without "minority status" and the privileges that would inevitably accompany that, representative government is left with the option of deciding how much personal freedom for homosexuals society can "afford."
It's much better to sit back and accept this individual space-v.-other-people duality. We can accept the tensions between masculinity and femininity, between objectivity and subjectivity - between liking plain just-people and liking art, ideas and intellectual plasma (like Beethoven themes and their tension-evolving developments) that seem to take upon a subspace consciousness of their own. Thinking through the cultural wars for the political arena brings us back to the idea we need to work these out ourselves, and not let them be voted upon by the "people." But it also gives us a chance to teach the message of personal growth and empowerment to others. Most of all, it requires every one of us to look at our own exercise of personal responsibility. The Editor (Bill Boushka).
Real property is a separate area of law because "real property," by definition, is finite in availability and supposedly permanent in form. "Intellectual property" is in fact the opposite - amorphous and subjective. But all property law addresses the question: what does property owner X deserve to have for what she has invested?
Government's involvement in real property policy has some interesting side effects. Government has long supported the mortgage interest deduction, and it has subsidized low down-payment loans through FHA and (for former military servicemembers) VA. The generous purpose of these politically popular programs is to make stable homeowners (and family providers) out of people with modest incomes and means.
Consider the consequences of these policies. We can debate whether, as a matter of morals, someone who owes a mortgage really "owns" his property. But people are encouraged to owe more money on houses than their income-earning ability and job skills really justify. How so? For one thing, when jobs are lost and homeowners default, FHA and VA rarely go after former homeowners for deficiencies (conventional lenders are much more likely to do so, even with subject-to assumption sales). This creates the impression that there is little personal risk in home ownership. Therefore, people who don't own ("renters") become seen as second-class citizens. No wonder, some people live up to their reputations and do not take care of property they rent. Another effect derives from the mathematical fact that most mortgages require enough (itemizable) interest to beat the standard deduction. Therefore, when people go into debt, they find it "easier" to make charitable or religious contributions or to grow hobbies into businesses.
During the 1950's (the Levittown era), people did save for down payments and bought homes to live in to raise families. Over time, houses got to be seen as hedges against inflation and as tax shelters for non-family people, and forms of pseudo-ownership (condos and even co-ops) became well established by the 1970's, often with easy financing.
One major consequence of the impulse to home ownership has been to perpetuate a de facto segregation. In the 1950's, before government programs had become a major influence, many suburban developments, even in the north, refused to sell to blacks. As inflation and government policies became more important, people in many cities developed the idea that they could shelter their families from racial and cultural mixing (and forced bussing) by moving to increasingly distant suburbs, often with their own well-off school districts. Large employers have sometimes followed suit, moving major operations centers to affluent suburbs, in some cases "to get away from the blacks." In the 1970's and 1980's this was likely to affect gays and lesbians, who often saw there jobs move away from them even before the major waves of mergers and downsizings. Urban, gentrified and expensive housing has usually been hospitable to gays and lesbians (and empty nesters), although as late as around 1980 we would hear stories (even in New York) of co-op boards that would refuse to approve sales to two cohabiting men. The Editor.
Boaz, David. Libertarianism, A Primer and The Libertarian Reader. (The Free Press, 1997). Easy to find at most bookstores.
Boushka, Bill. Do Ask, Do Tell: A Gay Conservative Lashes Back. (High Productivity, 1997). Order at Barnes and Noble/B Daltons/Lambda Rising or from the author at Jboushka@aol.com (http://www.hppub.com). Bill presented some of his own personal account of libertarian ideas (as covered in the Aug. 1996 Quill) in a talk to students at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. on Feb. 25 1998.
Cassler, Robert. Second in the Realm (play) (Performance, 1996). Order from the author at Rcassler@pressroom.com.
Just drop us a line including your membership dues and your name, street address, city, state, ZIP, (PO Box is OK), phone, and email or www address. The dues are $10 basic, $50 sustaining.
Mail to GLIL, PO Box 65743 Washington, D.C. 20035-5743
Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty is an organization of classical liberals, market liberals, limited-government libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and objectivists. GLIL publishes The Quill to promote the philosophy of individual liberty, both generally and as it affects gay men, lesbians, bisexual and trans-gendered persons. In addition to publishing the newsletter, GLIL sponsors a happy hour on the first Tuesday of every month at Windows, 1635 17st St. NW, Washington D.C. 20036 on the Second Floor. We are looking into starting similar gatherings in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
POSTSCRIPTS: As we go to press, watch the Istook Constitutional Amendment, which could be voted on in the House of Representatives soon. According to some commentators, this measure would make it easy to use public money to promote religion, especially in schools, and put religious (or non-believing) "minorities" in the position of virtual pillory.
Note also: according to the Supreme Court Beck decision (1988), union members can request refunds of dues spent on political campaigns, although they may lose voting rights and may face ostracism in practice.
© Copyright 1998 by Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty. All rights reserved.