So many issues are convulsing the LGBT world right now — notably same-sex marriage — that the grandmother of all issues has been nudged out of the spotlight. I’m referring to free speech.
Half a century ago, we were denied any freedom to discuss LGBT issues in the media, or even to discuss them among ourselves in publications sent through the mail. In 1954, the U.S. Post Office confiscated an issue of One, the first gay-rights magazine, alleging that any discussion of gayness was obscene in itself. In 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of One, giving a boost to the new gay-rights movement.
Today that battle for free speech goes on in a new arena of communication, the Internet. The very first day of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the Child Online Protection Act was unconstitutional. For 10 years, the ACLU’s lawsuit to challenge this law had been grinding along like a glacier. COPA would have made it a federal crime to sell anything on the Web to minors that could be deemed “harmful” to them.
My publishing company, Wildcat Press, and I were among the LGBT entities — including Philadelphia Gay News — involved in the fight against COPA. As an author, I view censorship as a personal kick in the teeth by government, so I’ve been involved in anti-censorship litigation since 1996, when I signed on with the ACLU for a similar censorship fight against the Communications Decency Act, which was also struck down.
COPA was supposedly aimed only at hard-core porn on the Web, but was so broadly written that it could actually have been used to criminalize non-porn LGBT content, whether sexual health information or gay-themed books. For me, it was personal: My publishing company could have been prosecuted for selling my novel “The Front Runner” to a 17-year-old on our Web site.
But the battle is far from over. Our enemies have already shifted their efforts to battlefields where they have more local leverage — for instance, school districts. There, it’s shocking to see the narrowing of student free speech, which is viewed as “disruptive” by many school boards.
A recent case in Louisiana shows how badly things have deteriorated. After Election Day, some schools punished students for talking about Obama’s election at school, even for wearing T-shirts with his image. The ACLU of Louisiana had to send a letter to Louisiana school districts reminding them that they were breaking the law.
If Obama is a forbidden subject at school, we can imagine how verboten is discussion of LGBT issues. Indeed, a number of states outlawed any discussion of sex or sexual orientation in classrooms.
Even heterosexual students who support us can wind up being silenced. Last year a Florida student named Heather Gillman won a First Amendment lawsuit against her school, which had punished her for wearing a rainbow-flag symbol to school to show solidarity with gay and lesbian friends.
Many Americans today don’t seem concerned about the gradual erosions of free speech under the U.S. Patriot Act. Compared to job loss, inadequate healthcare and the burden of personal debt, free speech seems like an antiquated and academic issue to some. The same goes for many LGBT people, who seem to take it for granted that those rights first granted in 1956 will be ours forever. Many gay media did scanty reporting on the COPA win, filling up their columns with Prop. 8 rehashes and speculations on what Obama might do for us.
We’ll have to hope that Obama is more censorship-savvy than Clinton was. Yet when the chips are down, it’s not up to the president to protect our First Amendment rights for us. Only we can do that, by fighting for them. Indeed, we can debate and discuss all our other issues only when we have that most fundamental right of all.
Patricia Nell Warren is a bestselling novelist and blogs at the Huffington Post, the Bilerico Project and www.Outsports.com. Visit her at www.patricianellwarren.com.