Opinion | When Reagan Said Gay

However, an enterprising homosexual activist main the No on 6 marketing campaign, David Mixner, sensed a possibility. He knew that Mr. Reagan, along with his Hollywood background, was extra acquainted with homosexual folks than the common American and that the previous actor was an advocate for restricted authorities and particular person rights. He arrange a gathering with one among Mr. Reagan’s senior aides, himself a closeted homosexual man, to make the case towards Proposition 6.

Mr. Mixner persuaded the aide to rearrange an viewers along with his boss. To steer him to oppose Proposition 6, Mr. Mixner used Mr. Reagan’s personal language: “Anarchy,” he advised the previous governor, who had used that phrase to explain campus unrest at Berkeley, could be unleashed in school rooms statewide as college students lodged spurious prices of homosexuality towards their academics. Disciplinary proceedings would in flip spark courtroom challenges, and the ability of state authorities over college boards would improve — a improvement that ought to lift alarms with any advocate of native management, as Mr. Reagan was. Lastly, countless witch hunts towards academics would swell administrative budgets and authorized prices, bugbears of each small-government conservative.

Mr. Reagan, Mr. Mixner advised me 4 a long time later, “nearly grinned” as he heard the case, “like he was in search of an excuse to not help these folks.”

A number of days later, Mr. Mixner’s gambit paid off. “I don’t approve of educating a so-called homosexual life-style in our colleges,” Mr. Reagan introduced. However Proposition 6, “has the potential of infringing on primary rights of privateness and maybe even constitutional rights.” He made a extra substantive case in his syndicated column printed every week earlier than the election, refuting the declare that gays had a larger propensity to be little one molesters and the canard that they joined the educating occupation to recruit impressionable children.

On Election Day, voters rejected Proposition 6, 58 % to 42 %, an almost actual reversal of what the polls indicated simply two months earlier. “That one single endorsement — Ronald Reagan’s — turned the polls round,” Mr. Briggs groused after the election. The Rev. Jerry Falwell, then rising as a pacesetter of an more and more highly effective voting bloc, evangelical Christians, declared that Mr. Reagan had taken “the political somewhat than the ethical route” and would “must face the music from Christian voters two years from now.”