Injustice Based on Sexual Orientation
One of the biggest questions threading through American political
culture is how to deal with a range of putative inequalities. A
closely related question is precisely which inequalities are worthy of
public concern. Activists of many political, cultural, and social
movements on both the Right and Left are fighting against some
perceived injustice or another, with many fighting more specifically
against certain perceived unjust inequalities—be they the treatment of
poor inner-city blacks or rural white evangelicals (cf. Smith 1998).
At the same time, across the political spectrum, there are many
inequalities regarded as simply irrelevant to political life—for
instance, the correlation, among males, between height and economic or
political success. Without perceptions of injustice, there can
ordinarily be no impetus for activ- ism against inequality, and any
social structure upon which it rests may be reproduced with little
struggle by the beneficiaries of that arrangement. Therefore, our
focus in this article is on those relationships that, while gener-
ally agreed to be “unequal,” arouse controversy over whether they are
justifi- ably unequal and therefore nonproblematic, or injustices
requiring correc- tive action.

The Office of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Student Support Services at
Indiana University (IU)

Data

The data for this study were originally part of a larger study on the
social construction of minority and ethnic groups (Berbrier 1996). In
the 1990s, while Berbrier was a graduate student in Bloomington,
Indiana, he collected documents relating to a local controversy over
efforts to establish an out- reach and support office there for
lesbian and gay students. These initial data included many newspaper
articles—from Bloomington Herald-Times (a mainstream daily),
Bloomington Voice (an alternative weekly), and Indiana Daily Student
(the journalism school’s student-run daily)—and 200 letters e- mailed
to the president of IU, solicited from around the country by local
activists. The office continues to operate, and in 2004 we acquired a
variety of additional documents that had been reproduced on its Web
page. These include the 1993 Final Report of the Indiana University
Educational Task Force on Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Concerns, many
newspaper articles from both the initial period and beyond, and a
series of annual reports for the office dating back to 1993.7 Our
presentation here begins with a summary of the story “The Opening of
the Office,” in order to familiarize readers with the plot and main
characters. We then move into an analysis of the framing contest.

The Opening of the Office

The stage had long been set by June 1994, when the trustees of IU
voted to establish an office on campus that would support and counsel
gay, lesbian, and bisexual students. In 1990, the school’s Code of
Student Ethics had been revised to include proscriptions against
discrimination based on sexual ori- entation. Also included there was
a detailed list of students’ individual rights concerning harassment
on the basis of sexual orientation and one regarding the specific acts
regarded as harassment. Notably, the amendment to the Code of Ethics
addressed issues of harassment and discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation as matters of “individual rights.”

In September, responding to the IU Board of Aeons and the Student Sen-
ate’s recommendations for the establishment of a university-funded
center for gay, lesbian, and bisexual students, the Office of the Dean
of Students established a task force to identify and address “the
needs and concerns of the student population as well as to identify
and create resources” for the IU community (Carty 1993, 2). The group,
called the IU Educational Task Force on Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual
Concerns, was composed of 40 members from the faculty, staff, and
students.

Two and a half years later, in March 1993, the task force reported on
its (several) subcommittees’ inquiries and findings. One subcommittee
was charged with identifying “challenges as they relate[d] to the
recently adopted [revision to the] Code of Ethics” (Carty 1993, 4)—a
document that, again, recognized discrimination and harassment of
lesbians and gays as matters of individual rights. Under the heading
“Assessment of Needs,” the subcommit- tee cited specific policies that
distinguished heterosexual from homosexual couples—for example, a
campus housing policy that limited family housing to legally married
couples and the denial of access to a university chapel for the
purpose of same-sex “blessing unions” (p. 5). Throughout its report,
the task force deployed language clearly portraying these and other
inequalities as unjust violations of rights. For example, regarding
the family housing pol- icy, it wrote, “The family housing situation
is one of equity. The current fam- ily housing policy discriminates
against and excludes individuals who are not traditionally married.
The proposed family housing policy gives equity to all domestic
partners without discriminating against any committed relation- ship”
(Carty 1993, 6). In June 1994, in response to the many
recommenda-tions in this report, the Board of Trustees voted to
establish the Office of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Support Services.

While the task force and its efforts had gone essentially unnoticed by
the local community, upon the trustees’ announcement, an assertive
campaign of opposition began. This countermobilization was led by two
student organi- zations and one state legislator. The organizations
were the campus branch of Young Americans for Freedom and the IU
College Republicans, whose rep- resentatives were repeatedly quoted in
local newspapers and engaged in ardent exchanges with office
supporters via letters to editors. The legislator was Representative
Woody Burton, a Republican from the district of Green- wood.8 Burton
became the most polarizing figure in the debate when he threatened to
introduce legislation to withhold $500,000 in state funding from the
university, retaliating for the $50,000 in taxpayer money that had
been earmarked by the university for the office.

Eventually, a compromise was reached. On October 19, 1994, IU’s then-
president Myles Brand announced that the funding for the office would
come from a private donor, not taxpayer money. In addition, Brand
announced that unlike the offices for established minority groups,
this office would not be independent. Rather, the University’s Office
of Student Ethics would be renamed as the Office of Student Ethics and
Anti-Harassment Programs, and would subsume the Office of Gay,
Lesbian, and Bisexual Student Support Services within its structure.
In return, Representative Burton agreed to with- draw his threat to
cut state funding (Rowland 1994). Despite an impassioned outcry on the
part of the supporters of the office who indicated that these changes
would undermine the intended function of the office, the university
held firm. The Office of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Student Support
Ser- vices was officially opened on November 24, 1994.

The Victim Contest

Given that the task force had framed the question as one of individual
(rather than group) rights, it is interesting that one of the initial
issues in this victim contest was the “minority status” of lesbians
and gays, from which were derived other themes for establishing the
in/justice of the unequal treat- ment. These included (a) the
relevance of behavior versus orientation, (b) the nature and degree of
the discrimination and harassment, (c) the in/justice of
discriminating against homosexuals, and (d) the meaning and relevance
of “diversity.” Since these themes are closely woven together in
myriad combi- nations, we too weave through them in the following
analysis; thus, the head- ings indicate emphases, but the sections are
not thematically exclusive.

Opening Salvos: Behavior versus Orientation

As indicated above, the announcement of the planned office generated
sustained opposition. An article in Bloomington Voice announced that
the opponents “see no clear need for the services . . . and object to
the use of the term ‘minority’ in reference to Gays and Lesbians”
(King 1994). The article continued by focusing on the disagreement
between proponents and oppo- nents of the office over the specific
issue of designating “minorities.” Jim Holden, president of the IU
Republicans, said, “I know a lot of minorities who object to the idea
that there is no difference to being a minority and being homosexual.
I would personally be offended if that comparison was drawn. I don’t
think there’s a similarity between someone’s behavior and the color of
their skin. It’s a behavior that you willfully choose to participate
in” (King 1994). In Holden’s view, then, a group’s “minority” status
is established by “the color of their skin.” Being homosexual, on the
other hand, is established by “someone’s behavior.” Carlos Lam,
president of the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom,
expanded upon Holden’s argument by directly attacking the collective
character, denying the group a victim status. “The difference is that
the sexual behavior of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals is wrong. . . .
The way to correct the wrongs of being gay is by practicing absti-
nence. With a Hispanic or a white you can see the difference, but the
actual gay sex act is the mark that you’re gay” (King 1994). For Lam,
it is relevant not only that homosexuality is determined by behavior
but also that it is “wrong” behavior; the “wrongs of being gay” need
to be corrected. Sally Green, president of the IU gay and lesbian
organization OUT, responded, “It’s not a behavioral choice, it’s
orientation. The reason they’re saying that is because it’s easy to
pick out an African American or a Latino student, but with gays and
lesbians it’s a little more difficult, so that makes it harder to
appreciate how we actually are a minority” (King 1994). Green
distinguishes between “behavioral choice” and “orientation.” In her
argument, Green asserts that African Americans and Latinos are both
minorities, and that they are visible (“they are easy to pick out”),
possibly by virtue of skin color or facial features. She concedes that
gays and lesbians are less easy to identify but argues that it does
not preclude their minority status. Although one can- not see a
person’s orientation, Green contends that it is no more a behavioral
choice than skin color and thus no less a criterion for minority
status. That it may be more difficult to discern does nothing to
remove gays and lesbians from their status as victims.

The article also indicated that IU trustee Cindy Stone claimed that
the opponents’ arguments “cut to the very core of diversity issues,”
calling the distinction between gays and other minorities
“ridiculous.” “You ask some-one who is being harassed, whether they
feel like they’re in a minority because their skin is different, their
gender is different, their orientation is different, they feel like
they’re in a minority because they’re in a potential position to be
victims of hate crimes. . . . Hate crimes occur because someone is
different in some way. This university is built on inclusiveness, not
exclud- ing people because of one or more characteristics that are
different” (King 1994). In Stone’s construction, minority status is
conferred upon those who are “different,” on the basis of the
nonbehavioral and equivalent characteris- tics of skin color, gender,
and orientation and on the basis of the fear of fall- ing victim to
hate crimes.10 This early fight about minority status, behavior, and
orientation seemed to set the stage for much of the rest of the
debate, which would continue for several months.

Victims versus Villains

Images of homosexuality informed claimants’ alternative constructions
of people as either victims or villains, following Loseke’s (2003a)
outline. A former president of IU’s Young Americans for Freedom named
Shun Ravago is quoted claiming that there was no need for an office
for gay, lesbian, and bisexual support because homosexuality is a
“preference rather than some- thing someone is born with” and,
moreover, that “IU is saying that being a homosexual is like being
black or Asian, but it’s not the same at all. It is an immoral
lifestyle. The center is going to be a place in which homosexuality is
condoned. . . . The gays, lesbians, and bisexuals at IU are a minority
group of the population, like pedophiles or masturbators” (Hahn 1994).
Here, Ravago presumes two types of minorities—immoral versus moral. He
denies that gays embody the victim potential of oppressed cultural
minorities (blacks and Asians); rather, they comprise a numerical
minority of villainous sexual deviants. Once again, the question comes
down not to inequality but to the question of why people (audiences,
“society”) should care. If good people are harmed and they are not at
fault, our cultural feeling rules call for sympa- thy: people should
care (Loseke 2003a). But invoking cultural villains, such as
pedophiles, elicits feelings of antipathy and vengeance. Ravago thus
denies victim status to gays through an attack on their collective
character. “Minorities,” in this construction, may be treated
unequally, but that is how things ought to be for immoral minorities.

Responding to these sorts of allegations, IU student columnist Matt
Oliver asserted that gays do, indeed, constitute an unjustly oppressed
group: “homosexuals are clearly a minority group, whether the state
wants to offi- cially recognize them or not. Gay bashing is a
nationwide pastime. Homo- sexuals have been kept out of the Army, out
of schools, and out of the main-stream of our society. The gay
population has been forced to hide in its own bars, in its own cities,
and have its own Olympics. It is by the will of the majority that this
has occurred” (Oliver 1994). In Oliver’s construction, gays are
objectively a minority (i.e., whether “officially recognized or not”).
Like others, Oliver does not use the word “inequality,” choosing
instead to drama- tize poor treatment (“bashing,” “kept out of the
mainstream,” “forced to hide,” and segregated) in which the broader
culture becomes the victimizer responsible for the harm; that is,
discrimination is the “will of the majority,” and harassment is a
“nationwide pastime.”

Similarly, another student, Raman Nagarajan, asserted that this
culture keeps gays closeted. As a result, “it prevents homosexuals
from enjoying the same things heterosexuals can. A heterosexual couple
can take a walk on a crowded boardwalk at sunset and not have to worry
about getting hit with a baseball bat. Homosexual couples can’t. This
persecution keeps them from the ‘pursuit of happiness’ that is a
cherished American value” (Nagarajan 1994). Again, without explicitly
using the words, Nagarajan claims that homosexuals face both
“inequality” and “injustice” because they cannot do and enjoy the same
things as heterosexuals. Furthermore, the “pursuit of hap- piness”
evokes constitutional guarantees for the “cherished” inalienable
rights of each individual. By claiming that homosexuals are prevented
from enjoying this basic right, Nagarajan is claiming that homosexuals
suffer an unjust inequality—that it is, indeed, “persecution.”

Finally, like so many others, Nagarajan seems to believe that the
constitu- tional frame was not enough and that (at least at that time
and place) civil rights framing was particularly appropriate: “if more
people realize that homosexuality, like race, is not a characteristic
that one can control, then they would see the fundamental similarity
between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement”
(Nagarajan 1994). Again, invoking similarities between homosexuality
and race, and between the civil rights movement and the lesbian/gay
rights movement, is used to allege that the inequalities homo- sexuals
face are as unjust as those faced by blacks. Or put another way, if
you believe that blacks have faced unjust inequality meriting redress,
you must also believe this for lesbians and gays.

The Importance of the Minority Designation

Since the case of the Office of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Student
Ser- vices at Indiana University is not particularly about whether
gays and lesbi- ans constitute a minority group (like African
Americans), that such discourse was generated might indicate something
about of the potency of “minority” status and the stakes involved in
establishing or recognizing a group that way.In the early 1990s, this
very “minority” status of gays was being debated politically. The
terms of that debate—orientation and minority status versus chosen
(and presumably immoral) behavior—were familiar to those who followed
gay rights issues in those years, especially the controversy over gays
in the military (which we discuss further below).In the
minority-status discourse, the opponents were not arguing about the
inequality, but whether it was unjust in the same way as
discrimination against blacks and Latinos, whose generally accepted
status as “minorities” implied that discrimination against them was
both undeserved and illegiti- mate—that is, emblems of their
victimhood (Berbrier 2002). In the context of the debate then,
conceding minority status means conceding that there are inequalities
that ought to be addressed.

The opponents went further, implying not only that the discrimination
claims were exaggerated but that they were only to be expected, and
even jus- tified, by the deviance of the behaviors. The alleged
victimizers were pre- sented in the discourse as provoked by the
increased visibility of homosexu- ality. For example, IU College
Republicans’ president Jim Holden explained why he saw “no clear need
for the services” in this way: “if anything, the cen- ter will cause
so much tension that it will increase harassment—not that I believe
there’s an incredible problem with it already” (King 1994). Similarly,
Representative Burton—in what some might interpret to be blame-the-
victim style—would later attribute any harassment to the activists
them- selves when he “conceded . . . that there is discrimination,”
and even that it was wrong, but that lesbians and gays could avoid it
by “becoming unknown and invisible” (Hodges 1994). Burton was also
quoted as saying that “when people are going to do things that aren’t
mainstream American, they’re going to be discriminated against more”
(Wimmer 1994). The remedy to injustice was to closet the targets,
since their actions (or the actions of their representa- tives) were
responsible for the harassment and attacks. Here Burton parsimo-
niously illustrates three items from Benford and Hunt’s (2003) list of
counterframing strategies: first, counterattributions—Burton deflected
the responsibility to the gay and lesbian activists, thus denying
lesbians and gays the status of victim, as “minorities.” Second,
counterprognoses—Burton’s solution is to erase the victims. And third,
Burton’s attacks on their collective character—the bottom line is that
these folks are “not doing the ‘mainstream American’ things.”12 Thus,
once again, the opponents are not arguing about inequality per se, but
about whether it can be justified; minority groups can be victims of
others, but deviants are only victims of their own behavioral choices.

Equality from Diversity

Throughout, the data also yield frequent references to “diversity.” As
Ellen Berrey (2005) has indicated, a “diversity trope” has developed
in our popular discourse that can be (and has been) used in multiple
ways, including being co-opted by neoliberals when seen as profitable.
For some progres- sives, the term is invoked with regularity, used as
if it were a universally legit- imate symbol mandating equality. That
is, since it is assumed that just about everyone supports diversity,
all groups within that diversity who are mani- festly subjugated must
receive better treatment.

Those supporting the IU office engaged in similar rhetoric. During the
height of the victim contest, the university’s vice president, Kenneth
Gros- Louis, wrote a letter to alumni defending the university’s
decision:

A university always has been a place where people of diverse
backgrounds gather . . . What’s changed recently is a dramatic
increase in . . . violence against people who are perceived as
different. Over time, that has included women, African-Americans,
Latinos, Jews, foreign students, and increasingly, homosexuals. . . .
College campuses across the country are seeing an increase in
harassment and other negative acts based on race, religion, and sexual
orien- tation. We are no exception.

Gros-Louis’s style here, as well as several other passages presented
here (and many more not shown), are examples of what Berbrier (2002)
called “indexical association,” wherein a stigmatized group is
discursively associ- ated with culturally accepted groups by pointing
to putative similarities, thereby equating them. In that article,
there was an emphasis on direct com- parisons across groups. In
contrast, many of the associations here were made less by direct
analogy and more indirectly by metaphor. That is, by putting the words
side by side, and connecting them, it is implied that “sexual orien-
tation” is akin to “race” and “religion” as a source of unacceptable
forms of harassment; “homosexuals” themselves are akin to women,
blacks, Latinos, Jews, and foreign students—people who are “different”
or have “diverse backgrounds.”

In September 1994, IU staff member Duncan Mitchel concluded that Jim
Holden and Woody Burton were “unable or unwilling to grasp so simple
and basic a concept as equality” (Mitchel 1994). This was the last
part of a long letter, and the final word in the letter was Mitchel’s
first use of the word “equality.” His conclusion regarding “equality”
was built upon two founda- tions: claims about diversity and indexical
associations. Specifically, Mitchel had opened his letter stating that
this indicated that Holden had “absolutely no idea what the word
‘diversity’ is supposed to mean. . . . [He] can only con-ceive of a
world where one sex, race, religion or sexual orientation reigns
supreme and all others are suppressed, or at least relegated to the
back of the bus” (Mitchel 1994). Once again, “diversity” is used here
with a metaphori- cal indexical association; that is, the phrase “the
back of the bus” links dis- crimination against gays with both the
oppression of African Americans and one of the civil rights movement’s
most sympathetic icons, Rosa Parks. Later, Mitchel is still more
explicit in turning the diagnosis of the problem from promoting a
deviant immoral lifestyle to the justice of opposing dis- crimination.
The office was not promoting anything, but merely “taking gay
students, faculty, and staff members under its protection. If the law
punishes someone for desecrating a synagogue, it is not ‘promoting
Judaism.’ When the Armed Forces conduct anti-racist training, they are
not ‘promoting Negritude’ ” (Mitchel 1994). It is only at this point
in his letter that Mitchel finally introduces the issue of “equality.”

Mitchel indicated that he had been motivated to write his letter
because of a claim, attributed to Holden, that the office would
promote “a certain life- style above others.” Such inversion of
putative victims and victimizers is common in anti-gay
counterrhetoric: society is presented as the victim of the gay agenda.
As Young Americans for Freedom’s Carlos Lam put it, “the gay lifestyle
has caused demoralization in America” (Lam 1994). But it was also this
point upon which the university bent. Instead of being independent
(like recognized minority groups’ offices) the office was to be
subsumed under the Office of Student Ethics and Anti-Harassment
Programs. According to Vice President Gros-Louis, this was because it
was intended “to provide a safe educational environment and not to
advocate a lifestyle or political agenda” (Gros-Louis 1994). In
reaction, two local gay activists, Gary Pool and Daniel Soto,
solicited letters from around the country via e-mail; they asked that
these letters of support for the office be addressed to President
Brand, who subsequently received over 200 such letters. Many of them
criticized the uni- versity president for “capitulating.”14 A
contribution from Jeffrey Bass noted that “the original proposal by
the Board of Aeons called for a center similar to the Black Culture
Center and the Latinos Center” (Bass 1994). Eric Hinsch-Little (1994)
wrote and asked President Brand, “If a group calling themselves say,
The African-American Student Union formed on the IU campus, would you
force them to change their name?”15 And Martin Meeker, a graduate
student in history at the University of Southern California, wrote to
the IU president, “Although ignorant and hateful people would like to
deny us our identity and community, gay, lesbian, and bisexual people
do form an ethnicity, as diverse as any other but also as cohesive. In
face of intense dis- crimination (as a historian I am quite aware of
the position of gays in the1950’s) we have formed our own culture,
institutions, and even traditions”.To sum up to this point, the
literal terms of this debate—“behavior,” “ori- entation,” “victim,”
“villains,” “minority,” “deviant,” “diversity,” and “cul- ture”—were
not deployed in order to establish or deny inequality or even degrees
of inequality. Rather, the claimants were directing their audiences to
consider the meaning of relationships of power, prestige, and rights.
Those relationships appear to have been understood by all parties to
be unequal, with the focus on whether those inequalities reflected
problematic situations in need of rectification, or not.

Thus far, our analysis has not strayed from Bloomington, Indiana. But
while all discourse (like all politics) is inherently local, any
discourse that is only local, and thus only locally meaningful, is
sociologically uninterest- ing.16 Hence, we now inquire into how these
events may have been related to things beyond the local setting.

Locally Appropriating from a National Issue: Status versus Behavior Revisited

The debate over status versus behavior that played out on the national
level in 1993 was very familiar to people following the gay rights
movement, so much so, we believe, that it seems implausible to suggest
that it did not influence the events one year later in Bloomington. We
easily found several instances of how that debate played out there.
For example, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Colin
Powell, wrote, “Skin-color is a benign, non-behavioral characteristic.
Sexual orientation is perhaps the most pro- found of human behavioral
characteristics. Comparison of the two is a con- venient but invalid
argument” (Trainor and Chase 1993). At around the same time, in an
article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Charles Bussey, a
black veteran of World War II, was quoted as having said, “I resent
people who try to compare our situation with gays. There’s no
similarity. Blacks couldn’t hide their blackness. Gays are able to
hide their sexual preference. The issues are nowhere near the same”
(Reza 1993). Similarly, John Watkins wrote a letter to the Seattle
Times in which he described how he had served in the army while it was
being integrated and how, contrary to the rhetoric of those advocating
integration of gays into the military, opposition to integra- tion was
the (numerical) minority opinion and most soldiers, including the top
brass, supported the idea as “a matter of simple justice.” He went on:
“they backed integration and worked hard to make it work. And it did
work. We should remember this when we discuss the homosexual problem.
Black- ness is a matter of appearance, not behavior. Homosexuality is
a matter of behavior, not appearance. Do we want to endorse the
behavior?” (Watkins 1993). These claims are remarkably consistent with
those made by Jim Holden in the local case described above. Both
Holden and these claimants from the national controversy held that
homosexuality is distinguished by choice and “preference.”
“Appearance” is therefore held up as the essence of what makes for a
minority group: it is an involuntary and ascribed “status.”

Also as with the local Bloomington case, the gays-in-the-military dis-
course produced claims in which the status-behavior distinction was
explain-ed via comparisons with blacks, as in the following letter to
the editor: “you can tell when someone is African-American or Asian
because it is self- evident. But you know someone is gay only because
they express it with words or actions. Regardless of whether its
origins are genetic or social, homo- sexuality manifests itself by
behavior—and only by behavior” (Carlson 1993). In this case, the
comments echo those of State Representative Burton (see note 12) who
argued that you can know a visible “minority”—including Jews but not
closeted homosexuals—when you see one.

We use these examples of the national case of gays in the military to
direct attention to the fundamentally collective nature of the
representations made in the Indiana victim contest. That is, the
national controversy generated a public discourse that became
accessible for appropriation into other dis- putes. Since it is
unlikely that the claimants in the Indiana case had all just then
become interested in or concerned about homosexuals in 1994, we
believe it is reasonable to assume that most (on both sides) had
keenly fol- lowed the “gays in the military” controversy the year
before. The terms of that debate about the in/justice of
discrimination is thus circumscribed by the prior and larger debate,
which provides people in local settings with discur- sive resources
with which to debate the meaning of inequalities.

Appropriating from and Indexically Associating with Blacks and the
Civil Rights Movement

In both national and local gay rights victim contests, indexically
associat- ing with and invoking “civil rights” themes were common.
Again, examples abound. Massachusetts Congressman Gary Studds (who is
openly gay) argued that “the American people are just beginning to
wrestle with this issue [of gay rights]. Rosa Parks wasn’t asking to
sit in the middle of the bus” (Puga 1993).17 In a separate piece, the
San Francisco Chronicle reported how Representative John Lewis of
Georgia (a civil rights movement icon who was one of the leaders of
the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965) said that the
claims of opponents of gay rights were “like the words we heard in
1965” (Sandalow 1993). These comparisons to the civil rights movement
made in the national discourse are remarkably similar to those drawn
by IU staff member Duncan Mitchel and student Raman Nagarajan above.
Both local- and national-level rhetors were drawing upon a broader
cultural dis- course that is a legacy of the African American struggle
for civil rights—the “civil rights master frame” (Snow and Benford
1992). It seems, therefore, not only that the Indiana case was
influenced by discourse produced in the gays-in-the-military
controversy but that in both contexts people were influ-enced by the
still broader discourse about minority rights that had developed over
several decades.

The national case also resulted in a discourse comparing President
Clinton’s initiative to allow gays into the military to President
Truman’s racial integration of the military. Indeed, from the outset,
gay rights advo- cates and supporters of Clinton’s initiative made
this comparison “the cor- nerstone of their campaign” (Goldman 1993).
Truman’s initiative was regu- larly invoked when comparing the
discrimination of gays in the 1990s with that of blacks under Jim
Crow. By indexically associating gays and blacks, and by mirroring the
discourse of the opposition to racial integration—a practice that by
1993 was widely regarded as ridiculous, if not a national
embarrassment—these claimants seek to dramatize the injustice of
exclud- ing gays as something that over the decades would be recalled
as similarly absurd. Moreover, it is important to note that it was
precisely because racial integration was perceived as having been both
traumatically difficult and notably successful that it was all the
more appropriate. As expressed by Kahne Parsons, “Truman’s decision
recognized that cultural norms were insufficient grounds for
discrimination. He did not exempt the military from standards of
fairness and tolerance; instead, he placed the military in the
position of racial pioneer, with the result that today the U.S. armed
forces exemplify the highest standards of racial tolerance and
equality. . . . Let us not kid ourselves that the stakes are not
equally high for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters: Gays and
lesbians are the target of physical and psycho- logical violence every
bit as cruel as that directed against racial minorities”.

Reading 12:

Respond to questions:

1- the authors discuss how the injustice frame is built on claims
about minor-ity status. Discuss the various ways that activists at
Indiana University made the case that gay, lesbian, and bisexual
student constitute a minority group.

3- discuss the counter-efforts of activists that sought to deny gays,
lesbians, and bisexual the protections typically given to groups
victimized by injustice.

5- Discuss the reasons why, prior to the civil right movement, many
non-blacks did not view the unequal treatment of blacks as an
injustice. What kinds of claims were made about why this inequality
was justified?

after reading the assigned article.
Your responses should be clear, thorough and well thought out. Proof
read your answers and cite sources as needed.