Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America

Why should Americans who are not gay care about gay rights?
In Created Equal, Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff argue that the movement for gay equality is central to the continuing defense of individual liberty in America. Beginning with an examination of the determined assault on gay issues by the religious right, the authors show how this sectarian movement to legislate private religious morality into law undermines the purpose of American constitutional government: the protection of the individual's right to determine how best to live his or her life.
The book starts from the premise that gay and lesbians are, first and foremost, American citizens, and then looks to what rights belong to every individual American citizen, arguing from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Addressing their argument to the great majority of their fellow Americans, Dawidoff and Nava emphasize that what is at stake is not the fate of the gay community, but the future of constitutional principle and the rights of free individuals in American society.

This succinct, cogent manifesto emphasizes that gay men and women are not seeking new or special privileges, but the ordinary rights of individual liberty and equal protection that Americans enjoy under the Constitution. The authors call for an end to discriminatory practices, anti-gay laws, vicious stereotyping, and the near-invisibility of lesbians and gay men. Resisting the fundamentalist religious right's attack on gays, they argue, constitutes a defense of real religious liberty which is predicated on tolerance and personal freedom in a pluralistic society. Moreover, they insist, the struggle for gay rights is important to everyone: "What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be." Nava, a lawyer and writer of mystery novels, and Dawidoff, a history professor at the Claremont Graduate School in Southern California, have produced an eloquent, closely argued benchmark document.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This slender volume is a cogently argued call for all Americans to support the struggle of gay and lesbian Americans for equal rights under the law. The pairing of lawyer/novelist Nava (The Hidden Law, 1992, etc.), and Dawidoff, a historian (Claremont Graduate School), is a fortuitous one. The book opens with a brief glimpse of two weeks of demonstrations that took place in 1991 in Los Angeles in protest of California Governor Pete Wilson's veto of a gay-rights bill. The authors then state a series of basic premises that undergird the book's thesis that gay rights are in the best interest of all Americans. They proceed to delineate an America in which there is a rising tide of violence against gays and lesbians and in which the basic civil rights of gays and lesbians are often unprotected in the courts. Systematically, they lay out the causes of legalized homophobia and the manner in which the religious Right, playing on public fear of homosexuality, has spearheaded an attack on basic constitutional guarantees of privacy and equal protection under the law. Although their argument is ultimately not based on either of two current theories of the formation of sexual orientation--choice and genetic determinism--Nava and Dawidoff are emphatically on the side of the latter. Finally, they state their own agenda: legalized same-sex marriage, the right to serve in the armed forces, the right to privacy, and an end to discrimination in housing and employment. A thoughtful and passionate essay whose message is clear: ``Everyone's freedom suffers when individual liberty is denied to a class of citizens.'' -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nava and Dawidoff have written the clearest, most focused civic argument for gay rights. They do not indulge personal anecdotes, they do not essay moral arguments, they do not cite psychologists and social scientists on the normalcy of homosexuals, they do not attempt to change minds that believe homosexuality is a sin. Most saliently, they do not anathematize antigays. Rather, they point out and patiently, repeatedly restate that homosexual Americans are citizens and entitled thereby to the rights and protections citizens enjoy under the Constitution and the rest of U.S. law. Those rights and protections include access to jobs, housing, public accommodations, and public service, such as in the military--access that must not be impeded on account merely of being homosexual. Of course, much of the book has to be spent answering the standard criticisms of gays and homosexuality--the big lies involved in blanket phrases like "the gay lifestyle," the view of some religious sects and factions that homosexuality is a sin, etc. This Nava and Dawidoff do as well as anyone has, and they excel at the end of the book at arguing for gay marriage, for which, they acknowledge, many gays do not yet see any need. This is the gay book that nongays should read. Ray Olson

Lawyer and author Nava and historian Dawidoff have here succeeded in writing the most comprehensive, readable, and persuasive primer on gay rights to date. According to the authors, the issue is fundamentally a question of privacy rights implicitly granted with precedent to all by the Consitution but denied to homosexuals by the illogically decided 1986 Supreme Court ruling, Bowers v. Hardwick. The authors have revitalized that most organic of political documents, the U.S. Constitution, by arguing that basic human and civil rights are being denied to gays and lesbians based on arguments not constitutionally applicable, namely, the sectarian beliefs of one particular segment of society. Among the topics discussed are gay rights within the context of the Constitution, gay rights and proscriptive biblical interpretation, double standards in the strategies of anti-gay rights advocates, and much more. Similar in tone and outlook to Richard Mohr's A More Perfect Union (LJ 3/1/94), Nava and Dawidoff's book is more encompassing in scope and more thoroughly researched. An intellectually brisk and persuasive book that is highly recommended for all collections.
Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.