The Root Cause: Discrimination

Gay rights activists say that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation along with violence or "gay bashing" has reached gigantic proportions against the gay and lesbian community.

A lobbying pamphlet distributed by the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights quotes a March, 1987 Wall Street Journal survey which said 66 percent of U.S. chief executives would hesitate to promote a gay person to management-committee level.

The same pamphlet cites a 1987 National Institute of Justice report entitled, "The Response of the Criminal Justice System to Biased Crime." as saying. "Homosexuals are probably the most frequent victims of hate-motivated violence."

A 1984 survey by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force of 2000 respondents found that 40 percent of gay and lesbian people had been threatened with violence and 90 percent had experienced some kind of victimization because of their sexual orientation. The task force's 1987 report found that the number of cases of violence and intimidation against gay people rose 300 percent since 1985.

Since crime reports are published in newspapers, many victims are afraid to do anything about gay bashing because they know there are no civil rights statutes to protect them against job or housing discrimination, says David M. Osborne, aide to State Sen. Michael J. Barrett '70 (D-Cambridge).

Osborne says that a 1985 report by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination found that the Commission received 170 complaints of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the first half of that year alone.

Kevin M. Cathcart, a Boston attorney and ex-director of the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders says. "We receive phone calls regularly from people who are exposed to some kind of discrimination at work."

"Unless they live in the city of Boston or Cambridge, both of which have local ordinances, there is no protection against discrimination," Cathcart adds. "If the bill passes and becomes law, then MCAD will have jurisdiction," he says.