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But at the same time that gay activists have become more sophisticated and accommodating, their opponents on the Christian right have become more militant and more powerful within the Republican Party. Gary Bauer, head of the Family Research Council, and his mentor James Dobson, the Christian broadcaster who heads Focus on the Family, with its 2.3 million-name mailing list, have made opposition to gay rights a defining issue. Republicans trying to bridge the gap complain that while the rhetoric of the Christian right makes compromise difficult, so does some of the language of gay activism. "They got to get off the stuff about Christians having this conspiracy to incite hate crimes," insists a Republican lawmaker. "When you have people so far apart, it makes it more difficult."
In the end and in the beginning, the struggle over gay rights is only partly political in the legislative sense. Much of the real action is in everyday life--from household arrangements to mass media to the simple yet crucial changes wrought by acquaintance and friendship. This debate has been carried on in the culture at large for years, around the ears of gays who, because they lived within it, came out and came out earlier, in a process that may not have been easy but that eventually seemed to them right and essential. If Washington reacts slowly and crudely, turning family dramas and internal dialogues into attack ads and legislative-floor fights, it only proves what conservatism has always argued--that government, even representative government, is a crude representative of ordinary lives. While the world tries to make sense out of Matthew Shepard's death, maybe his most important political act was his life. He was gay, and for a while he lived that way.
--Reported by Harriet Barovick and John Cloud/New York and Michael Duffy/Washington