January 10, 1999

David Kelley
Executive Director
Institute For Objectivist Studies
82 Washington Street, Suite 207
Poughkeepsie, New York 12601

Dear Dr. Kelley,

A Robyn Blumner newspaper column, "Beyond Left and Right", was included as an insert arriving with your November 30 IOS fundraiser letter. I view that inclusion as a regrettable mistake.

Ms. Blumner began her November 8 column on a positive note, presenting the Objectivist vision that "the fundamental thing in life is for 'individuals to pursue their own happiness and that people should be constrained by government only when they intrude on the rights of others.'"

To demonstrate the similarity between political controls of the left and the right, both of which Objectivism rejects, Blumner concretized these approaches with a topical treatment of political issues about homosexuality in America.

On one side, we were offered Pat Robertson and his Moral Monopoly political action groups. This movement views gay and lesbian Americans as antichrist abominations who should legally be persecuted and deprived of fundamental constitutional rights.

On the other, Blumner referenced unidentified "liberal gay advocacy groups" who want the government to give them "special status" in the areas of hate crimes and partnership benefits.

Blumner wraps this up with the Objectivist view that the law should remain neutral to all groups. She concludes that Objectivism would say that gays and lesbians should be "given" the right to marriage and adoption, "but the law should not be used to arm-twist those who despise homosexuality into embracing it."

Despise? Blumner never identifies which groups she claims are trying to coerce others into "embracing" homosexuality. For those not in the know, Blumner also leaves it to the imagination to figure out just which groups despise homosexuality.

Of course, a person should be legally free to "despise" others, for any reason whatsoever. However devoid of factuality, however irrational, people are limited only to the injunction that they don't act in such a way as to deprive others of their rights -- as does the Christian Coalition, for example.

If Robyn Blumner had instead examined the KKK's "race issue", concluding that affirmative action is wrong but that those who "despise blacks" wouldn't be arm-twisted into "embracing" them, Dr. Kelley, I think we’d agree that you'd not have permitted insertion of that material into your mailer.

While Blumner makes it clear she is not an admirer of Robertson "and his ilk", all Blumner’s references to homosexuals are in terms of anonymous, stereotyped negatives. As a foil to this, we are referred to Robertson’s even more negative views.

Ms. Blumner's selectively negative characterizations presume that the reader would not care about gay, lesbian or transgender issues, and that there would not be any readers who are members of the gay community.

To castigate a group for politically incorrect responses to life-threatening violence, while pointedly ignoring the physical threat against which that group has petitioned protection, smacks of profound moral cowardice.

As you know, American citizens who are gay or lesbian are as culturally and politically diverse as the community at large, and currently are victims of several monstrous social and legal injustices.

Most of us just want full equality before the law, the same as everybody else, and to be left free to get on with the wonderful business of living. Like their heterosexual counterparts, few gays have reasoned out from scratch how a society might properly achieve "full equality before the law".

There are brownshirts and government bullies who would actually like to kill us, or, at a minimum, to legislate away our few recognized civil liberties. Lou Sheldon's promise to his followers was that "under a Kingdom of God, homosexuals would be executed."

In America today, gays still cannot marry or form legal permanent partnerships, and citizens like Matthew Shepard are murdered solely on account of sexual orientation.

Are those actions not an intrusion on the rights of others? Should the government not constrain legal and physical force against gays, and which "rights" groups are acting only when necessary to obstruct any change in the status quo? Blumner has nothing to say about that, but writes patronizingly of those who seek laws that punish "crimes against gays more severely than crimes against heterosexuals".

It would have been truthful to state that gay and lesbian Americans are just as confused and worried about violence and legislated injustice as any other Americans, but that gays and lesbians happen to be a prime target group, whereas most other Americans are not.

That’s why it should be alarming to see legal recognition of any kind of domestic partnership laws, or "hate crime" laws, dismissed as just so much left-wing, gay-agenda agitation for "special rights".

This, by any other name, is the unmistakably familiar, agenda-serving rhetoric of the so-called Christian Right.

Homosexuality in America, as with sexuality in general, is still a difficult topic to present to a broad-spectrum audience. Blumner would have been better advised to pick a topic about which she was more fluent.

Ann Landers can write matter-of-fact columns on the topic, and Parade magazine can do it. There must be a credible reason why a writer of Robyn Blumner's skill couldn’t do it, but we will probably never find out what it is.

Ironically, the American Civil Liberties Union, which is still regarded by most as beyond the pale of ultra-left wing politics, is winning victories in court on behalf of individual victims of government and civil breaches of civil liberties. Most of these cases are being won on the basis of sound fundamental constitutional law.

What I see coming from IOS under your stewardship is a renewed emphasis on fundamentals: one cannot "armchair" the facts of reality. There is no substitute for apprehending reality, all of it, on one's own.

You seem to have done an outstanding job of healing old rifts, and refocusing analytical thought back into the context of the real world and real issues. It is a shame to see that focus clouded by shabby treatment of critical issues that personally affect friends, family or the lives of your readers.

Homosexuality is an excellent example of how political ideas translate into the workaday world, because so many people are so very uncomfortable with its discussion.

Awareness of the talent and diversity outside one's own immediate group is a valuable part of life, as you have shown. Positive exercise of this awareness is an inherent responsibility in managing any group, particularly if that task force aspires to change the way we think about our ourselves, our nation, and the world we live in.

You have shown how important it is to take advantage of a diversity of opinion and interests in the Objectivist and libertarian communities. By the same token, it should also be important to eschew the kind of unthinking "politics of dismissal" (of all other groups and interests) which often characterizes so much else in ideological circles.

I hope you and your eminently capable staff will select the content of IOS publicity releases as carefully as you would for the IOS’s Navigator journal.

Dr. Kelly, I admire your work at IOS. Students of any age, who follow through on the discoveries offered into the efficacy of the human mind, are about to begin or to advance an exciting, rewarding and wonderful lifelong adventure.

It's to my self-interest to support such work. Sexual orientation of the student, or of members of other communities, should have nothing to do with a quest for personal and political freedom.

If this issue needs to be re-examined in the libertarian community, then by all means open it up for re-examination. In the long run, we are all minorities.

I do not believe Blumner's inappropriate characterizations reflect a collective damnation on your part of all gay and lesbian Americans. I hope I would be able to count on you to correct me if I am wrong.

In conclusion, I would like to share an anecdote from the NBI Lecture Series days at Marine's Memorial Club, San Francisco.

I attended The Objectivist Psychology lecture series in 1968. NBI thinking on homosexuality was presented under "Psychosexual Disturbances", It was explained to all of us that gays and lesbians suffer from a chosen but curable neurosis that upsets Mother Nature's dominant-male, submissive-female apple-cart.

Let's face it, in those days, very few people knew better.

Ayn Rand was guest lecturer near the end of that same series, as I recall. At the conclusion of her session, she permitted questions from the audience. In short order, she disposed of several stock-in-trade questions about ethics, the gold standard, and current events.

Next, she recognized a young man, a guest, distinguishable from the rest of us only in that he came to this lecture attired in a neatly pressed suit. The suit was of that style of safe, well-worn conservative cut which students invariably chose when they could afford only one suit, for very important occasions.

"Miss Rand", he asked courteously, "what is your opinion of homosexuality?"

You could have heard a pin drop.

"If you had read Atlas Shrugged", she barked, "you would not waste valuable class time with questions of THAT sort!"

And, with that, Ayn Rand went on to take the next question from the audience. My question to you is, how much have we learned, over the course of the 30 following years, from our mistakes?

Cordially,

/s/ Alex Forbes