San Diego LGBT Weekly publisher Stampp Corbin makes a convincing editorial case, “North Carolina and Georgia,” for the economics of inclusion and non-discrimination with GOP Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal’s veto of an anti-gay bill that might have triggered an unofficial economic boycott in the Peach State of Georgia. Mr. Corbin’s greater argument Deal’s veto signals the end of economic oppression of the LGBT community in our nation is, sadly, not the case.
As I have previously written for LGBT Weekly, I spent formative years in the Deep South, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia, and my late father served with the Alabama National Guard at the tense integration of the University of Alabama in June 1963 and the incredibly dangerous third Selma to Montgomery march in late March 1965. I have a non-speaking role as a reporter in the 2015 film Selma.
The Slave Era spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I Have Seen,” brings tears to my eyes still from the violence, killings and economic and social oppression I saw as a youth and continue to see as an adult. In
July 1994, late North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, in a hateful Senate maneuver, tried to have me fired for “promoting the gay agenda” as a diplomat in the Foreign Service and filled The Congressional
Record, July 1994, with hateful words captured for eternity should anyone care to read them. As a result of this employment discrimination, I hope for a speaking role in a Jesse Helms biopic.
Gov. Deal did not cite economic pressures from corporations mentioned by Corbin as the reason for his veto of the “religious freedom” bill that would have given legal protections to Georgia clergy and businesses who opposed same-sex marriage. Deal said he would not allow discrimination against the LGBT community to protect religious belief.
The Deal veto set off a predictable reaction by the bill’s supporters who pledged to bring up similar legislation in the future. This is bad news for LGBT families in Georgia, and elsewhere in Dixie, from the standpoint of their religious freedom, freedom to marry and freedom to work. Discrimination against the LGBT community is not gone in Georgia as a result of Deal’s politically courageous veto. Rather, it will likely become more resistant and determined to, as some of my Southern friends like to say regarding the Confederate States of America, “Rise again.”
The CSA, like the Ku Klux Klan, will not likely “rise again” in a physical form but in a form invisible perhaps via Internet but also in the many subtle, bureaucratic and legislative ways LGBT discrimination can become institutionalized forever like forms of racial discrimination African Americans and other minorities are still fighting despite federal legislative protections.
During the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s, my family lived south of Atlanta on the Georgia-Alabama border and William Hartsfield was the Mayor of Atlanta. While racial violence and vicious police with equally vicious dogs plagued the streets of Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Selma and others, Hartsfield responded to the message of his constituent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and declared Atlanta as “A City too Busy to Hate.”
Atlanta was, by no means, a racial paradise in the Deep South of the 1960s; it was though, by my observation, a city that worked to do better than cities in Alabama, Mississippi and others. As a result, today Atlanta is an economic powerhouse in the Deep South and a popular attraction for Alabamians who on weekends and holidays wear their football T-shirts and caps on Atlanta streets as same-sex couples walk past holding hands or wearing T-shirts or other items with LGBT messages. This is based on my recent observations while on travel to Atlanta.
Deal’s veto may also have been based on his own casual walk on Atlanta’s busy streets and his actual real life observation that Southerners of varied outward signs of sexuality can walk the streets together, laugh in bars and theaters together, and worship together.
It is such walks among people that one, even a politician, can observe people being people in the absence of fundraisers whose mission is to drive people apart.
I do not believe Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is a bigot as Corbin implies in his column. I genuinely believe Georgians and others in Dixie fear change, especially social change. Certainly, threat of an economic boycott in states seeking “religious freedom” from federal laws may put greater fears in already “fearful,” if not hateful minds. It could have other consequences as well as fear could lead to greater resistance to change and possible violence.
Longtime Washington diplomat Jim Patterson writes from California and Washington JEPDiplomat@gmail.com James Patterson, (415) 516-3493, Diplomat, Writer, Speaker, Educator
