Stonewall Lecturer Kevin Cathcart spoke to an enthusiastic audience of about 70 students and faculty on the recent successes and continuing challenges faced by the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights movement.
Cathcart has been the executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund since 1992. The organization is dedicated to achieving full civil rights for the GLBT community through litigation and public education.
Over the course of the largely serious speech, Cathcart peppered his remarks with witty jabs at the federal government's inefficiency and reluctance to further GLBT civil rights.
In the past decade, Lambda has launched lawsuits against the Boy Scouts of America and the United States military, and has challenged state anti-sodomy laws and advocated extension of benefits to partners in same-sex relationships.
Lambda aims to affect the largest possible number of people by choosing cases that can be used to set legal precedents, Cathcart said, predicting that the GLBT movement's next defining issue will be the question of same-sex marriage.
In the past, polling data has shown widespread support for gay civil rights, but, due partly to lack of voter turnout, this has not always translated into the election of officials who are sympathetic to the cause.
"This is probably going to be a very ugly, very divisive and very difficult campaign for us to win," Cathcart said, referring to Lambda's ongoing drive to include a same-sex marriage referendum on the 2004 Massachusetts ballot.
Achieving legally recognized same-sex marriage is important because the federal government uses marriage as the criterion for determining who is eligible to receive federal benefits and services, Cathcart said.
Among the most important of these benefits are worker's compensation and social security. Lambda is currently involved in an effort to win benefits for the partners of 21 people who lost their lives on Sept. 11.
Although Lambda succeeded in procuring aid from the Red Cross, the overall battle to win federal benefits has been less fruitful.
"The federal government remains completely committed to preventing same-sex marriage and same-sex partners from having the rights of marriage and the benefits that go along with those rights," Cathcart said.
Currently, only Vermont, California and Hawaii legally recognize same-sex partnerships. The Vermont Civil Union Law went into effect in 1999.
Cathcart said that the movement has achieved the most progress in the area of rights for gay youth. He praised "the incredible bravery and leadership of young people around the country" and cited the expansion of gay-straight alliances in high schools nationwide.
He criticized the spread of abstinence-based sex education programs, which advocate postponing marriage and which now exist in 29 percent of schools across the country.
Such programs "deny GLBT youth a sexuality and basically make them invisible by telling them that they cannot have sex until marriage, which for them means never," Cathcart said.
Cathcart stressed the challenges of expanding the narrow support base of the movement and combating growing complacency and inertia now that certain basic civil rights have been achieved.
"We've done a great job at winning the battle for the heart and minds of the reachable middle," Cathcart said, "but it's a very conservative movement in the sense that equality for LGBT people is not the same thing as social justice."
The movement, and Lambda in particular, is supported primarily by contributions from white, middle-class gay and lesbian donors.
Cathcart denied, however, that there is a single "gay agenda.""Lambda is committed to having a very broad docket," he said. "It's goal is achieving everyday equality for GLBT people that would encompass all aspects of their lives."
The speech, officially titled "Queer Today, Queer Tomorrow: The State of Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights," took place yesterday afternoon in 13 Carpenter Hall.
