Report of the Commission
On Sexual Orientation
And the Law

Appendix F-1 C. SELECTED QUOTATIONS

    "The deletion of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 marked a dramatic reversal of the judgment that homosexuality is a behavioral disorder. In the practice of medicine, especially psychiatry, it is important to distinguish between that which is abnormal and that which is not.

    "The literature on children of lesbian mothers indicates no adverse effects of a homosexual orientation, as evidenced by psychiatric symptoms, peer relationships, and overall functioning of the offspring. The frequency of a homosexual orientation has not been greater in such children than in children of heterosexual mothers. The data on children of gay fathers is more scant. No evidence has emerged, however, to indicate an adverse effect of sexual orientation on the quality of fathering. Enough information has accumulated to warrant the recommendation that sexual orientation should not in itself be the basis for psychiatric and legal decisions about parenting or planned parenting."

    "Patients who seek a change in their sexual orientation are diverse with respect to sexual attitudes, values, and psychopathological features. Some are motivated by homophobia, and the wish to change subsides as this is addressed. Others reject their homosexual orientation for other reasons, often religious. Sometimes the incompatibility between sexual desires and personal values cannot be resolved by therapeutic interventions."

    "There are no data from scientific studies to justify the unequal treatment of homosexual people or their exclusion from any group."

    "One of the justifications presented for strong anti-gay legislation in these states was the assertion that gays and lesbians are at particularly greater risk to sexually molest children. "Colorado for Family Values," a group lobbying to limit gay rights, asserted that people living a homosexual lifestyle were responsible for 50% of all child molestations...

    ...In addition to noting the relationship to the child, we evaluated the information provided about the alleged perpetrators to determine if they were involved or had been involved in heterosexual relationships. Heterosexual relationships were documented for 237 (88%) of the alleged adult offenders. In 32 cases no "sexual identity" could be inferred from the pattern of relationships documented in the chart. In most of these cases, the person who brought the child to the clinic was not personally acquainted with the alleged offender and had no knowledge of his or her habits or lifestyle.

    "Community-based studies of adults indicate the typical perpetrator is likely to be a trusted person in the child's immediate network of family or friends, and rarely is childhood sexual abuse committed by strangers"

    "...a child's risk of being molested by his or her relative's heterosexual partner is over 100 times greater than by someone who might be identifiable as being homosexual, lesbian or bisexual."

    "...no evidence is available from this data that children are at greater risk to be molested by identifiable homosexuals than by other adults. There is no support for the claim to the effect by groups advocating legislation limiting rights of homosexuals.

    "If religious strictures are used to justify oppression by people who regularly disregard precepts of equal gravity from the same moral code, or if prohibitions which restrain a disliked minority are upheld in their most literal sense as absolutely inviolable while comparable precepts affecting the majority are relaxed or reinterpreted, one must suspect something other than religious belief as the motivating cause of the oppression."

    "There is a sense in which gay people were the first to introduce romantic love into the Christian system of thought, and following this, marriage as a result of romantic love rather than biological necessity. There is a great irony in the fact that in the 20th century gay people should therefore be made to feel that there is no place for them in that tradition..."

    "One might view these unions as 'imitative of' heterosexual marriage, but it would be more cautious to see them as modes of 'participating in' the majority culture."

    Karl Ulrichs, a German and probably the first gay political activist to ever live wrote in 1869 of the church's refusal to sanction gay marriage:

    "That they have omitted doing this...is a sin of hitherto unsuspected significance for the Church, a sin whose burden falls upon the Church itself. It criticizes the [gay person] with: 'You fulfill your...Sexual orientation sinfully.' However, based upon that omission, he parries the entire criticism with: 'You, however, carry the guilt of not making it possible for me to do so without sin'."

    Ulrichs again:

    "But to call the blind cry of the masses: 'Punish the [homosexual's] 'awareness of the law' is nothing but a euphemism. Two hundred forty years ago they called out: 'Burn the sorcerer!' and at one time in Rome: 'Christians to the lions!' Would you call those the 'awareness of the law'? In London they once established a committee for the delivery of wood to the funeral piles 'to burn heretic'... Legislators should not subordinate themselves to such an awareness of the law... We have ministers of justice, not ministers of people's passions."

    In his book, A More Perfect Union: Why Straight America Must Stand Up for Gay Rights, Richard Mohr recounts the following true, not atypical story:

    "On their walk back from their neighborhood bar to the Victorian [house] which, over the years, they have lovingly restored, Warren and Mark stop along San Francisco's Polk Street to pick up milk for breakfast...Just for kicks, some wealthy teens from the valley drive into town to 'bust some fags.' Warren dips into a convenience store, while Mark has a smoke outside. As Mark turns to acknowledge Warren's return, he is hit across the back of the head with a baseball bat. Mark's blood and vomit splash across Warren's face. At San Francisco General, Mark is dead on arrival. Subsequently in 1987, a California appellate court holds that under no circumstance can a relationship between two homosexuals--however emotionally significant, stable, and exclusive--be legally considered a 'close relationship,' and so Warren is barred from bringing any suit against the bashers for negligently causing emotional distress, let alone for wrongful death."

    "They are married to each other in their own eyes, in God's eyes, in the eyes of their church and community--in every eye but the law's."

    "...in approaching the courts, gays need to acknowledge that there are some cases and moral causes that are advanced for the sake of such important values that they are causes and cases worth losing."

    "I suggest that, for the foreseeable future, dignity rather than happiness or practicality ought to be the ideal and polestar of gay politics."

    The legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin explained how ideas that many ideas once seen as radical will come to be seen as obviously true:

    "They appeared in law school classrooms and law review articles, then as lawyers' arguments in particular cases at law, then as judicial arguments in dissenting opinions explaining why the majority opinion, reflecting the orthodoxy of the time, was unsatisfactory, then as the opinions of the majority in a growing number of cases, and then as propositions no longer mentioned because they went without saying."

    Legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart:

    "No doubt it is true that if deviations from conventional sexual morality are tolerated by the law and come to be known, the conventional sexual morality might change in a permissive direction. But even if the conventional morality did so change, the society in question would not have been destroyed or 'subverted.' We should compare such a development not to the violent overthrow of government but to a peaceful Constitutional change in its form, consistent not only with the preservation of a society but with its advance."

    Gay legal theorist William Eskridge:

    "We are gender rebels because that role has been thrust upon us by oppressive dividing practices, including legal discriminations like the exclusion from marriage. If those dividing practices were to collapse, we might tend to meld back into society's mainstream, which does not inevitably strike me as baleful."

    In response to some gay activists who worry that marriage will somehow create a classes of "good" vs. "bad" gay men and lesbians:

    "I am under whelmed by this argument."

    In response to the charge that gay men have much more to gain from marriage than do lesbians, the gay legal philosopher William Eskridge responds: "Lesbians are often the plaintiffs in same-sex marriage lawsuits, and the overwhelming majority of same- sex couples who have actually obtained marriage licenses in the United States have been women, including women passing as men and lesbians of color."

    And finally:

    "Once those repressed by dividing practices such as this one recognize that their isolation is unnecessary as well as hurtful, they resist it. And once they resist, there is hell to pay until the system relents, which it ought to do promptly."

   "THE "GAY ELITE" is a myth. A new University of Maryland study to be released today, found gay workers earn less than others in the same jobs. Gay men earn 11% to 27% less than heterosexual men of similar age, occupation, marital status and residence. Lesbians earn 5% to 14% less.

Appendix F-2A Reports and Studies Table of Contents