"gay agenda"

[Arnold Zwicky]

Dear Tom Elias,

        Thanks for your informative column in the Palo Alto Daily News
of Friday 4 July, on moves towards gay rights in the state of
California.  The column was written from the point of view of
proponents of gay rights, though you took no editorial stance and did
mention the solid opposition by California Republicans.  But I'd like
to object to the headline - "Gay agenda advances in Legislature" -
which conveys quite a different point of view by its use of the
expression "gay agenda".

        I assume you had nothing to do with the headline, since your
article didn't use this expression at all; instead, you talked about
"complete legal equality in California" as a "goal" of gay people.
You used the language of "gay rights" and goals, but "gay agenda" in
the headline is the language of opponents of gay rights, people (for
instance, fundamentalist Christians) who prefer not to use the word
"rights" at all in connection with gay people (since that would
concede that there were such things) but instead attribute to them an
"agenda" that threatens the larger society.

        It's only homosexuals who are routinely referred to as having
an "agenda".  If I talked about the women's agenda, the business
agenda, the Black agenda, the Southern agenda, the Jewish agenda, the
fundamentalist agenda, the urban agenda, and the like, you'd have some
idea what sort of thing I was referring to in each case, but you'd
probably feel uncomfortable with the suggestion that there's an
ominous monolith of activism at work.

        Gay people themselves don't use the expression, except in a
mocking way.  (There is a gayagenda.com website, and it has some
political reporting and opinion on it, but it's mostly a style
magazine, heavy on television, film, music, travel, and the like.  The
site name deliberately highjacks the enemies' words.)  That should
tell you something.

        For a contrast to PADN's headlining of your column, look at a
similar article in today's New York Times (Sunday 6 July, p. 8); it's
the lead article in the National Report section, and covers much the
same territory as your piece, but for the nation as a whole rather
than just California.  The headline is "Adversaries on Gay Rights Vow
State-by-State Fight".  No gay agenda there.

        And for a notable recent reference to the gay agenda (in the
guise "homosexual agenda"), listen to Antonin Scalia's scathing
dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he accuses the Supreme Court of
having "taken sides in the culture war" and having "largely signed on
to the so-called homosexual agenda".  (I suspect that Justice Scalia
was reluctant to use the word "gay" at all.) It's a metaphorical war
out there, and the gay agenda serves as the marching orders for one
side.  Not the message you wanted to convey, I think.

Arnold M. Zwicky
722 Ramona St., Palo Alto

(I am a Visiting Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, since 1985, and
a Distinguished University Professor (Emeritus) of Linguistics at Ohio
State.  Also an openly gay man for over thirty years, and partnered
with another man for 26 years, until his death just a few weeks before
the Lawrence v. Texas decision.)