Читать книгу Freedom to Differ - Diane Helene Miller - Страница 11

In the winter of 1993, shortly after his inauguration, President Bill Clinton nominated longtime supporter Roberta Achtenberg for the position of assistant director of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Achtenberg, an openly lesbian lawyer and lesbian rights advocate, had served on the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco from 1991 to 1993. Her selection to a position in the president’s cabinet required the approval of the Senate, making her the first openly gay or lesbian nominee ever to face the Senate confirmation process. Because she made no secret of her sexual orientation, Achtenberg and her supporters anticipated some resistance to her candidacy from conservative senators. However, the battle began sooner and more brutally than expected, with Senator Jesse Helms’s statement to the Washington Post that the Senate should refuse to confirm “a damn lesbian.” Many of Helms’s colleagues condemned his outright bigotry, yet the issue of Achtenberg’s sexual orientation became a key point of attack for her mostly Republican opponents.

Colonel Margarethe (Grethe) Cammermeyer had been a highly respected nurse in the United States National Guard for twenty-seven years when she began preparing to apply for the War College to enable her to compete for the position of chief nurse of the National Guard in 1989. During the routine questioning required for top secret security clearance, Cammermeyer revealed that she was a lesbian. As a result of the military board hearing that followed, and despite a flawless record of service, in 1992 she was not only refused the promotion but was also separated from the National Guard, stripped of her rank, and denied a number of the benefits of her long tenure. Cammermeyer subsequently filed a civil discrimination suit against the military and was reinstated by a district court judge in 1994.¹ Nevertheless, the battle left its scars. Cammermeyer was denied her lifelong dream of attaining the rank of general, serving as chief nurse of the National Guard, and retiring with full military honors. Instead, she spent the culminating years of her distinguished career embroiled in legal battles against the institution to which she had dedicated her life, fighting against the people and the country she had defended and loved.