gratitude week 11

Some one who inspires you.

Listening to a podcast the other day I was introduced to the story of a freedom of speech pioneer.
Found this on the web that tells a little bit about Frank Kameny. Someone who was told to be a difficult person to be a friend with. But glad to know a little bit of his story.

Jonathan Rauch writes about free speech. American freedom of speech and the fact that it is not always what people think it is. He thinks that every voice should be allowed to be heard. Even bigoted, stupid and hateful voices. And he tells about some of the difficulties in talking about freedom of speech.

What happened was this. In 1957, the U.S. Army Map Service fired an astronomer named Franklin Kameny after learning he was gay. Kameny, unlike so many others, did not go quietly. He demanded reinstatement from the U.S. Civil Service Commission and the Congress. When he got nowhere, he filed a Supreme Court brief. "In World War II," he told the Court, "petitioner did not hesitate to fight the Germans, with bullets, in order to help preserve his rights and freedoms and liberties, and those of others. In 1960, it is ironically necessary that he fight the Americans, with words, in order to preserve, against a tyrannical government, some of those same rights, freedoms and liberties, for himself and others."

In 1965, Kameny led dignified gay-rights demonstrations, the first of their kind, in front of the White House and Philadelphia's Independence Hall. (Signs said: "Denial of equality of opportunity is immoral." "We demand that our government confer with us." "Private consenting sexual conduct by adults is NOT the government's concern.")

In ones and twos at first, then in streams and eventually cascades, gays talked. They argued. They explained. They showed. They confronted. If the pervasiveness of bigotry was supposed to silence them, as hate-speech allegedly does, Frank Kameny missed the memo. "If society and I differ on something," he said in 1972, "I'm willing to give the matter a second look. If we still differ, then I am right and society is wrong; and society can go its way so long as it does not get in my way. But, if it does, there's going to be a fight. And I'm not going to be the one who backs down."

Kameny and others confronted the psychiatric profession about its irrational pathologizing of homosexuality, bombarded the U.S. Civil Service Commission with demands that it end the ban on gay government employment, and confronted Christians with their hardly Christ-like conduct. "If your god condemns people like me for the crime of loving," Kameny would say, "then your god is a false and bigoted god." In the 1980s and early 1990s, a few visionaries-Andrew Sullivan, Evan Wolfson-argued that gay couples should be allowed to marry, a cause seemingly so hopeless that even many gay people hesitated to endorse it.

Frank Kameny lost every appeal to get his job back; the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. In 1963, he launched a campaign to repeal the District of Columbia's sodomy law and lost (that effort would take three decades). He ran for Congress in 1971 and lost. But at every stage he fired moral imaginations. He and others saw Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant not as threats to hide from but as opportunities to be seized: opportunities to rally gays, educate straights, and draw sharp moral comparisons. "Is that what you think this country is all about? Really?"

To appeal to a country's conscience, you need an antagonist. Suppression of anti-gay speech and thought, had it been conceivable at the time, would have slowed the country's moral development, not speeded it. It would have given the illusion that the job was finished when, in fact, the job was only beginning. It would have condescended to a people fighting for respect.

I am not naive about the bravery it took for Kameny and others of his generation to step forward. They were hammered. They suffered severely. Kameny lived long enough to be honored by President Obama and, in 2009, to receive an official government apology from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which by then was headed by an openly gay man. But most of us are not Kamenys.

Apparently, years and years later, he got a formal apology for his firing
(and he asked for his back pay)

A remarkable story.
It makes me want to be a better person.