TMQH: Jimmy Carter and Gay Rights

The recently departed Jimmy Carter is considered the first pro-gay US president, and, while reflecting on his legacy, we dig into whether that accolade is accurate. 

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On March 19th, 1976, presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter appeared on NBC’s The Tomorrow Show and stated, “I favor the end of harassment or abuse or discrimination against homosexuals.’ He was the first presidential candidate to vocally support gay rights on national TV. As we honor the recently departed Jimmy Carter, I’d like to take the chance to reflect on his legacy as the first pro-gay American President. 

In 1974, James Earl Carter Jr., better known as Jimmy Carter, announced his run for president. Having previously served as a state Senator and Governor of Georgia, Carter had political experience but no name recognition, raising concerns about his prospects early on in the race. There was also a perceived vagueness to his views, a feature which would normally cause issues for a political candidate but seemed to work in Carter’s favor. His varied platform and concerns were interpreted by folks from across the political spectrum as being aligned with their policy preferences. An unnamed Democratic party insider said of Carter in the 1970s that, “To liberals, he was a liberal; to moderates, he was a moderate; and to conservatives, he was a conservative.” 

Part of Carter’s appeal to many Americans was his devout religiosity. Identifying as a born-again Christian and a Southern Baptist, his openness about his faith won him many supporters amongst the Evangelical voter base. This was despite his simultaneous support for policies unpopular amongst conservative Christians, such as desegregation, abortion rights, and gay rights. At the same time as Carter was saying to Southern Baptist and evangelist voters that he believed that homosexuality was a sin, he was also speaking to gay rights advocates about how he wanted to end discrimination against gay people. To some, this felt like Carter was speaking out of both sides of his mouth - but by and large, queer people were thrilled to have a presidential candidate openly support them. As gay activist Louie Crew Clay said during Carter's campaign, “We all knew that Carter didn't really approve of homosexuality, but at least he recognized that we had equal rights like everyone else. For us, this was the most important thing. In those days, anti-gay rhetoric and feelings were so widespread, that a public figure who recognized us as equal members of society was an ally by definition.”

As for how Carter himself reconciled the conflict between his own personal views on homosexuality and his commitment to opposing discrimination against gay people, his explanation was simple: he was a vehement advocate for the separation of church and state. He believed that his own beliefs should not shape policy towards groups that were considered sinful by the Bible. However, even with his firm belief in the separation of church and state, he acknowledged that his Christianity, being so core to who he was as a human being, could not help but influence at least some of his actions as president. 

Despite this, Carter proved from the start of his candidacy that he was committed to giving queer people a seat at the table. As a presidential candidate, Carter set a number of firsts in the realm of gay rights, being the first presidential candidate from a major party to meet with gay activists, have a gay interest group endorse him, express his support for ending discrimination against gay people on national TV, run campaign ads in a gay magazine, namely the advocate, and have an advisory committee in his campaign on gay rights issues. He was, unquestionably, the first presidential candidate from the two major parties to include gay people in his campaign in a positive way. 

Some queer activists worried that Carter was simply courting the queer vote, and would abandon them upon entering office. Carter quickly dispelled this concern, filling a number of seats within the administration with gay advocates, many of  multiple of whom were involved in his campaign for his presidency. In February of 1977, Carter staffers Margeret “Midge” Costanza and Marilyn Haft set up a meeting with the LGBTQ+ activist organization the National Gay Task Force devoted to discussing discriminatory policies against gay people in federal agencies. This meeting was followed by another meeting with a coalition of gay activists in March. It's hard to state how unprecedented these meetings were. This was the first time that gay activists had been invited to the White House, period. This invitation followed more than a decade of requests from organizations like the National Gay Task Force to meet with the White House. The activist coalition, which drew people from across the US and from multiple gay activist networks, presented a compelling list of pro-gay policies to the White House Staff. This created a buzz in the queer community about the symbolic value of the meeting  to the gay rights movement. The meeting was not without significant backlash afterwards. There was, of course, the expected backlash from conservative news outlets and religious organizations, but it also created fissures in the gay community over who had been invited to the meeting and who had been excluded. Over the following years, this divide would largely be bandaged over by the Carter Administration's open door policy to gay activists, which allowed many of the members of the community with such grievances to meet with Carter's staff. Carter himself never personally met with the delegations of gay rights activists for any of their official talks in the White House, but he did meet individually with activists for unofficial talks on several occasions. This open door wasn’t just limited to the National Gay Task Force, either, but was also extended to organizations like the National Coalition of Black Gays, the Metropolitan Community Church, and the Gay Activist Alliance. This lent significant visibility and legitimacy to these activist groups.

Carter's actions weren't just symbolic, however. During his tenure as president, the queer community won significant rights and saw the rollback of multiple discriminatory Federal policies. 

This included the Civil Service Reform Act, which extended anti-discrimination protections to federal employees in all sectors except for the military and national security. When pressed on the matter, Carter expressed his concern that gay employees of the military or national security offices could be blackmailed over their identities by foreign interests, a line of reasoning used during the Lavender Scare. However, the military and national security represented only 5% of the federal work force at the time, meaning in practical terms that 95% of federal employees were protected against discrimination based on their sexual orientation.

His administration also fought hard to mitigate the anti-gay exclusion statutes within the Immigration and Nationality Act, statutes which were unique to the United States. Members of his staff knew full well that any attempts to amend the Act would be shut down by Congress, and so they devised a workaround - a federal policy which amounted to a “Don't Ask, Don't Tell" approach to gay immigrants and refugees to the US. No direct questions would be asked of immigrants' sexual orientation, but if the immigrants volunteered the information that they were queer, it would still constitute reasoning enough to block them from entering the country. Before the workaround was accomplished, Senator Alan Cranston proposed a bill to amend the Act, removing the sexual orientation clause. This bill was supported by President Carter himself, the first time that a president had ever offered support for gay rights legislation. 

In 1977, queer members of Carter's staff arranged meetings between activists and the chief commissioner of the IRS to reform the IRS's policy of rejecting tax exemption status for queer organizations and nonprofits. The new chief commissioner, appointed by Carter, would later that year announce that all gay rights groups would be eligible for tax exempt status. This ruling also meant that gay organizations were eligible to receive federal funding for their programs and their staff, including funding from the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Activist organizations of course benefited, but one of the areas that saw the greatest benefit from the increase of funding was gay health clinics. Sadly, this funding would be cut in nearly all cases as soon as Reagan took office in 1981, just months before the start of the AIDS crisis. It is, of course, impossible to say for certain how different things would have been if Carter had been reelected in 1980 instead of Reagan, but it feels easy to say, with almost near certainty, that the reaction to the AIDS crisis would have been swifter, more comprehensive, and more compassionate.

That being said, not every policy that Carter enacted during his tenure was positive. During his presidency, Carter's administration reinforced the ban on gays serving in the military. His rationale was similar to that of not extending employment protections to federal employees involved in the military and national security. This further entrenchment of the ban was softened by The Carter administration rectifying the "less than dishonorable" discharge of service members due to homosexuality, a discharge which brought with it removal of veteran benefits. Under Carter, many who were discharged for their homosexuality saw their benefits reinstated. Carter also wasn't always proactive in opposing anti-gay legislation, initially refusing to make a timely public comment on the Prop 6 bill, also known as the Briggs Initiative, which outlawed gay persons serving as teachers in California. Days before the election, Carter capitulated and asked voters to vote against Prop 6 in California. When pressed over whether he would let his daughter, Amy Carter, be taught by a gay teacher, he stated, “I know that there are homosexuals who treat children and the children don’t suffer. But this is a subject I don’t particularly want to involve myself in. I’ve got enough problems without taking on another.”

Towards the end of his presidency, Carter found himself locked in the culture war debate, pressed on both sides by gay activists and religious fundamentalists, both of who saw him as their ticket to power over policy decisions. Carter's repeated support for gay rights, as well as abortion rights and civil rights for racial minorities and women, drew the ire of the evangelical voter base which had backed him so enthusiastically when he ran in ‘76. The inclusion of the gay rights plank in his re-election campaign in 1980 was the final nail in the coffin for his support from conservative religious forces, which defected en masse to Ronald Reagan in that year’s election. While not the only thing that cost him re-election, it certainly played no small part. 

While examining Carter's legacy, it's important to acknowledge that a significant amount of Carter's impact was not through Carter himself pushing legislation or changing policies, but by appointing queer people to his staff and empowering them to make changes throughout the federal government that amounted to significant progress for gay civil rights. Many of the gains achieved during the Carter presidency resulted from Carter putting the right people in the right places, and he deserves recognition for his willingness to uplift marginalized people. His willingness to speak positively towards gay rights isn't just positive in a symbolic way, as well. What was once a fringe issue which presidential advisors considered to be political suicide to address before his presidency became a topic of national concern. As Louie Crew Clay said to Harris Dousemetzis, the fact that Carter at the time considered queer people to be inherently sinful was secondary to his clear commitment to ending discrimination towards them. And Carter only became more vocal in his support for queer people after his presidency. Was there more that Carter could have done? Of course. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that Carter was, undeniably, the first president to advocate for queer people.

Thank you for joining us for the ninth episode of This Month in Queer History. Take care, and join us next month for our eleventh episode about “zaps,” a political protest technique used by gay activists to embarrass anti-gay public figures.