Look Who’s Marching With the Thought Police : Gay activism: The demand for ideological purity among allies, inside or out, will weaken the fight against real villains.

As if the lesbian and gay community didn’t have enough problems to tackle, it is now beset by a crisis of its own making: the tendency to see a world polarized into those who are for us and those who are agin’ us. Two recent events show how dangerously diversionary this black hat/white hat outlook can be.

First, the case of the Rev. Eugene Lumpkin, a member of the city Human Rights Commission in San Francisco:

Lumpkin, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, was prodded on a local TV talk show into admitting that he believed the Bible to be literally true, and that the Bible said gay men should be stoned to death, and . . . well, the audience could reach its own conclusion. Lumpkin did not say anything new, or even anything untrue. The Bible says exactly what he said it says. You could look it up.

Everyone then began doing the steps to a dance that will someday look as dated as the Hustle: Gay leaders denounced Lumpkin as encouraging violence against gays. Lumpkin refused to apologize for or renounce his beliefs. Mayor Frank Jordan removed him from the commission. Step left and repeat with the next partner.

The twist is that while Lumpkin was on the commission, he had voted in accordance with a broad definition of gay rights. Despite his personal beliefs, he had acted in his official capacity just the way we expect people to act in a society that values public tolerance. He was able to put aside his private religious beliefs to further what he thought was the public good.

It is Lumpkin’s actions as a public official that should have counted. And on that score he was not an enemy of the gay community. In removing Lumpkin, that community and the mayor upped the ante of public accountability in the most totalitarian way. In San Francisco, now, words speak louder than actions.

It is painful to see lesbians and gay men, who have taken great pains to support diversity of all kinds, demanding the strictest conformity imaginable from public officials--conformity in thought, word and deed. Most reasonable people would find the Bible’s prescription for homosexuality extreme, and Rev. Lumpkin himself seemed squeamish at having to ‘fess up to the logical conclusion of his beliefs. But that was what he believed. What should he have said? Are we going to let “don’t ask, don’t tell” leak into the civilian sector?

While this tempest was brewing in San Francisco, the commissioners of suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County were deciding that homosexuality was incompatible with community standards. The commissioners decided that, since some publicly funded art might treat homosexuality in a favorable light, they would revoke all public funding of all art. Said Commissioner Gordon Wysong: “We are not going to spend our money to implement the gay agenda.”

Cobb County’s commissioners join concerned citizens in Maine, Oregon, Idaho and other states who are mustering their forces to eradicate the “gay agenda,” a phantasm straight out of Stephen King that no living being has ever seen. That illusory agenda is believed to be lurking under front porches and in basements throughout the nation, snatching away our youth and mutilating their morals.

It is people like Wysong that the gay community should be worried about. Their beliefs, like Rev. Lumpkin’s, are troublesome. But their beliefs are nothing compared to their actions. There is no way to surgically remove a belief, no way to compel a thought. If there were, society might have succeeded in its longstanding attempt to enforce heterosexual attraction in people who are not heterosexual. At its best, the gay community demonstrates that there is something private and personal that is individual to each of us, something society cannot and should not try to command.

The fight with people like Wysong, then, is not over what they think or believe, but over how they act, specifically in their capacity as public servants. There is no shortage of solid and convincing arguments to show that Wysong and his fellow commissioners are harming, not helping, their community by taking the first steps to cleanse it of homosexuality.

It is hard to persuade people who do not wish to understand. But persuasion has been known to work. San Francisco was not always a place where lesbians and gay men were openly accepted and sometimes embraced by the political Establishment. Long after Frank Jordan is gone, that city will remain a tribute to the power of personal and public honesty.

The acceptance that has blossomed in San Francisco and begun to take root elsewhere is, however, now being squandered when people like Pastor Lumpkin are cast aside for not being ideologically pure enough. Having tasted political power, some lesbian and gay leaders are falling into the same kinds of corrupt notions that have seduced leaders from time immemorial. Ironically, some of these gay leaders are beginning to sound like their counterparts in the Vatican, blithely believing in a unified vision of a right-thinking world in which dissent is a thing of the past.

In the Rev. Lumpkin, the gay community had an imperfect ally. The same is true of Bill Clinton and Barney Frank and Larry Kramer and Randy Shilts and any number of other women and men who are doing the best they can but have not measured up to a constantly adjusting ideal. And while energy is spent on punishing the imperfect, the harder battles, the real battles, remain, like the one in Cobb County. There is nothing wrong with imperfect allies, given that this is an imperfect world. To the lesbians and gay men in Cobb County, even a flawed friend would be welcome these days.