Sep 11 2009
The issues with Harvey Milk Day
There are special days of recognition for teachers, conservationist John Muir, adoptive parents, and the California Poppy. Now Sen. Leno wants to add a special day of recognition for Harvey Milk - the first openly gay mayor in San Francisco. The bill passed, and is headed to the Governor’s desk - or would be if not for the Governor’s promise to veto everything until water, prisons and other major issues are solved. Why does there have to be a day for Harvey Milk? Sen. Leno says that students need good homosexual role models.
Civil rights leaders tend to get honored for their contributions and because their personal lives were upstanding. If you are honoring a homosexual politician for being homosexual, don’t you want to double chekc his personal life - since that is what you are honoring him for? It turns out that Harvey Milk lied about his military service, and had a boyfriend as young as 16. This all comes from a book, “The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk,” by Randy Shilts, a journalist who chronicled the gay-rights movement through the 1980s before dying of AIDS. If you are going to honor someone, don’t you want to make sure they are worth honoring? Do you want someone like this to be the role model? Haven’t there been plenty of homosexual politicians to honor? Why pick him, because he was the first?
We honor Martin Luther King Jr. because of what he did, not because he was the first person to ever stand up for civil rights. We honor him for what he accomplished, and what he stood for. We honor him because he was a good person, who was doing his best to bring others to the same conclusion he had come to - that we are all equal and deserve political equality. We don’t honor him because of his bedroom activities and personal decisions.
But when you choose to honor someone for a prsonal characteristic - like being homosexual - you open up their whole life to being examined. This is what some gay rights activists object to - they claim the remarks about Milk lying and having a 16 year old boyfriend are simply red herrings. But they are not. They are important. If a person is to be honored for homosexuality, then they need to have everything about their homosexuality in order and in line with the law. And adult with a 16 year old is not in line with the law, no matter what gender each person is.
Harvey Milk was important for some people. Susan B. Anthony is important to women, so is Amelia Earhart. These are women who who have been honored for their accomplishments as women - and when you are honoring a woman for being a woman, you have to make sure there is nothing else obviously wrong in their personal lives. Neither of these women has a special day of recognition in California, but they are great role models to women. Why Harvey Milk? What is so special about the gay movement that they feel they need special days and special honors for their leaders?
This post is going to be controversial, I know. But please think about your comments before posting them. I am not arguing that Harvey Milk isn’t important to some people. I am saying that days of recognition are special things, and Harvey Milk isn’t special enough. Just because someone is a role model to some in a small, but vocal, minority, does not mean they deserve special honors - especially not when there were things about his life that signal he had some moral problems - his lying.
