Sins of Commission

Mary Francis Berry has sparred with presidents over civil rights issues over the years, and now she is calling on President Obama to make gay civil rights a priority.

She's not a gay activist. At 71, her response to a question of "Are you gay?" is a simple, "I don't know."

But she does know gay history - better, probably, than most gay leaders. She knows that, before President Carter's White House staff met with gay leaders in the 1970s, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission did. She recalls that, in the 1980s, members of ACT UP attended a commission meeting wearing rubber clown masks. She knows what Congress has done to disadvantage gays, and she knows what it has failed to do to protect gays. She knows about Matthew Shepard in Wyoming and the Sucuzha?ay brothers in New York.

And she says it's time the commission put sexual orientation discrimination front and center.

This is a key proposal in her just released book, And Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America. In that book -- and in a widely discussed Jan. 15 op-ed in the New York Times -- Berry urges the Obama administration to dismantle the current commission, create a new one, and make gay civil rights the new commission's "first order of business." Berry will read from the book at Roxbury Community College on Feb. 19.

In various accounts of her 24 years on the commission, Berry comes across as a feisty, take-no-prisoners advocate for disadvantaged minorities. Certainly, she feared no one. She criticized President Reagan for his failure to advance civil rights and he removed her from the commission; Berry sued him and won her seat back. She openly criticized President Bush for his failures in the civil rights arena, including gay civil rights, and had the commission publish a detailed report on its website in 2004. Bush replaced her as chair of the commission, so Berry quit, and echoes of that conflict still linger today. Just last month, for instance, an e-mail from 2004 surfaced in which a Justice Department official - and obvious Bush loyalist - quipped that he liked his coffee "Mary Frances Berry style-black and bitter." Berry, who is African American, laughed it off wryly, saying, "I'm black but not bitter" and quipped that the former official's lengthy apology was "even funnier."

Today, she is a professor of history and law at the University of Pennsylvania, but she still offers blunt assessments about presidents. For instance, she thinks Obama's selection of evangelist Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation was a mistake.

"I think he should not have asked him," said Berry in an interview this week. "There are many ministers who try to bridge the gaps and divides." Obama, she says, "was sending a signal to the public that he's willing to accept people who have views like [Warren's]."

Among other things, Warren has said he opposes equal marriage rights for same-sex couples and has said he would "absolutely" equate gay marriage with pedophilia, incest, and polygamy.

Berry says the Obama White House's new Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships council, announced this month, "is a violation of church and state."

"I'm also against it," said Berry, "because many, many studies show faith-based social programs do, in fact, try to proselytize."

She agrees with Obama that "there has to be consensus" for changing the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of excluding gay people, but said bluntly that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) "should have passed by now."

In lectures and in interviews, many of which can be seen on youtube.com, Berry comes across as intensely serious and focused on the struggle for equality and concern for all disadvantaged minorities. She's a walking-talking history book of civil rights movements in the United States - all of them - blacks, women, people with disabilities, gays, and others.

But she doesn't just recall the past; she's trying to shape the future.

Berry says that when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission was first formed, under President Eisenhower in 1957, its mandate was focused solely on race.

"When the modern women's movement got underway aggressively," she said, "that was when Congress and the commission said we need to look into sex discrimination. And Congress added sex to the commission's jurisdiction."
Over time, as other civil rights causes gained momentum, supporters lobbied Congress to expand the commission's focus and, over the years, Congress voted to add other missions - color, religion, age, disability, and national origin.

When she talks about creating a new commission, she says she means one that is independent of presidential favor and free from its current captivity by right-wing conservatives. And she wants its focus to be on discrimination based on sexual orientation - not because the gay civil rights movement is like the black civil rights movement or any other movement, but because LGBT people face discrimination and the country needs to deal with that.

"There is no need to analogize the battle for the rights of gay and lesbian people to the struggle of African Americans to overcome slavery, Jim Crow and continued discrimination," said Berry in her New York Times op-ed. "But as Coretta Scott King said to me as she tried to imagine what position the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would take on 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell': 'What's the yardstick by which we should decide that gay rights are less important than other human rights we care about?'"

Berry will read from her new book Thursday, February 19, 7 p.m., on the second floor of the Student Center at Roxbury Community College.