It’s time for straight Americans to pay.
Heterosexuals owe their gay compatriots not just an apology for historical grievances, but financial compensation, too. Or at least, that’s the assertion of professor Omar G. Encarnación in a New York Times op-ed that circulated over the weekend, titled “The Case for Gay Reparation.”
The notion of race-based “reparations” was revived recently as several Democratic presidential candidates have flirted with the idea and endorsed its further study. Yet in this piece, Encarnación argues that gays are also entitled to restitution, calling reparations “a struggle worth pursuing” and “a useful tool for restoring dignity for those victimized by discriminatory policies and for allowing countries to close long and painful chapters of homosexual repression.”
This is absurd. Proposals for race-based reparations are highly impractical and morally questionable, but at least there is a serious historical basis that can justify restitution, and a clear intergenerational impact that stems from historical discrimination. This simply isn’t the case when it comes to the gay community, a fact that Encarnación conveniently ignores.
To start, Encarnación endorses “moral rehabilitation…which entails a formal apology by the state and the expunging of criminal records of those convicted of a homosexual offense.” He cites the New York Police Department’s recent apology for the 1969 police raid on Stonewall Inn, an incident that’s credited in part with sparking the 1970s gay rights movement. Yet even if it makes sense to pardon and expunge the records of those convicted of sodomy and similar offenses in times past, there’s something empty and even fundamentally immoral about these kinds of formal apologies.
They are offered in most instances by people who did not commit the deed in question and weren’t even involved. Sometimes, they weren’t even born yet. For instance, the leadership of today’s NYPD bears no moral responsibility for decisions they played no part in 50 years ago. Additionally, modern gay Americans (like myself) who are the recipients of these apologies were, in most cases, not involved in or affected by these deeds.
This is just as true for many of the other examples Encarnación cites, such as Britain’s 2009 apology to the gay community for the chemical castration of Alan Turing 60 years earlier. Frankly, no one owes me an apology for something they were not involved in and did not do to me.
Encarnación shies away from endorsing the idea of all gay people receiving financial restitution, but he doesn’t come out against it, either. Instead, he starts by praising Germany’s 2016 effort to financially compensate victims of anti-gay atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust. While government compensation for those murdered and interned is reasonable enough, it still essentially punishes modern German taxpayers for the sins of their ancestors. That’s hard to justify morally, and any form of financial gay reparations that goes further would be a disaster.
After all, gay people don’t have an intergenerational legacy in the same way a racial group does. When African Americans were enslaved and brutalized, this created wealth disparities that then perpetuated themselves over the decades and were passed down across generations. And to this day, many or most of them would be able (especially with the help of DNA matching technology) to trace their ancestry back to the person who was wronged, thus proving their family was defrauded of the free labor of their ancestor.
This simply isn’t the case for gays, lesbians, or others whose sexuality was repressed. We have no evidence of homosexuality being passed between generations en masse like racial or ethnic characteristics. This means that today’s gays are largely not financially affected in a lingering way by past atrocities. That makes broad financial reparations impossible to justify. Moreover, the nongay descendants of people once repressed for the crime of homosexuality might end up receiving reparations from modern gay people whose ancestors oppressed them. Is this what we’re aiming for?
All in all, this Times op-ed represents just another escalation in the social justice movement’s Oppression Olympics. The author claims that gay Americans are still under attack, referencing the Trump administration’s supposed “hostility.” Yet the only examples he cites are the deletion of web pages from federal websites, and President Trump’s decision to not allow embassies to fly the rainbow flag.
If you want to spin a narrative of modern-day oppression, you’re going to have to do better than that. And until progressives do so, the “Case for Gay Reparations” will remain incredibly weak.
