Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter speaks to the congregation at Maranatha Baptist Church before teaching Sunday school in his hometown of Plains, Georgia on April 28, 2019. Carter, 94, has taught Sunday school at the church on a regular basis since leaving the White House in 1981, drawing hundreds of visitors who arrive hours before the 10:00 am lesson in order to get a seat and have a photograph taken with the former President and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
Former President Jimmy Carter died today at the age of 100.
Carter was an ex-president for so long that you’d have to be in your sixties to have voted to elect him to the White House. By the time of his passing, he achieved a platonic ideal of what a former commander-in-chief should be: a thoughtful advocate for human rights who was willing to pick up a hammer to build houses for the poor.
When it comes to gay issues, Carter is probably best known for saying at the age of 93 that Jesus would have been perfectly fine with marriage equality (Carter came out in favor of marriage equality in 2012). His comments attracted some attention, particularly from anti-LGBTQ+ evangelical leader Franklin Graham, who said Jesus would kill gay people, not marry them.
At one time, however, Carter represented a diversity of thought in the evangelical movement. Hard as it is to consider now, there was a time in the 1970s when someone like Carter could be considered an evangelical in good standing, even though in many ways he was liberal on social issues.
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Carter was relegated to the category of elder statesman for so long that what he thought didn’t stir up much controversy anymore, but what he stood for while in office certainly mattered. Even his most ardent admirers would be hard-pressed to place him in the top echelon of presidents, but when it comes to gay rights, Carter deserves a fair amount of credit. He was really the first president to take positive and concrete steps toward acknowledging the importance of gay rights.
During his administration, the Foreign Service lifted its ban on gay and lesbian personnel, a huge step in removing the lingering stain from the McCarthy-era witch hunts. In addition, the Internal Revenue Service lifted its requirement that any LGBTQ+ nonprofit state that homosexuality was “a diseased pathology.”
At the height of the Anita Bryant fear-mongering, his administration was also the first to invite gay activists to the White House. The move was controversial and ultimately contributed to Midge Constanza, the closeted lesbian official who issued the invitation, deciding to step down. But Carter didn’t quash the meeting, either, which would have been the politically easy thing to do.
Like many other politicians, Carter went back and forth on gay issues. He was on record supporting gay rights as early as 1976, but he caved when it came to supporting a plank in the Democratic party platform. During his re-election campaign, he refused to commit to issuing an executive order prohibiting employment discrimination. The political reasons for his waffling were easy to understand, given that the Democrats were still stinging from George McGovern’s defeat in 1972, which pundits widely attributed to the party’s leftward drift.
Still, for at least two reasons, Carter’s willingness to support the cause was important. For one, the times were very different, and the modern LGBTQ+ movement was just beginning to emerge. The support of the president offered legitimacy that was much needed to spur the movement’s advance.
The other reason is that Carter was always candid about the importance of faith in his life. He proved that supporting gay rights didn’t fly in the face of all religious beliefs. Since Carter’s defeat in 1980, evangelicals have cast their lot with the Republican party (and somehow, Donald Trump) and evangelical leaders have made gay-bashing their bread and butter. But it wasn’t always so.
Carter may not have been anyone’s idea of the perfect president, but it’s not hard to imagine that the country’s early response to the AIDS epidemic would have been very different if Carter had been re-elected. (It could hardly have been worse.)
It’s worth remembering the groundwork that Carter laid as president for the gains we’ve seen in the past few decades – the ones that subsequent Republican presidents have kept trying to roll back. Carter was too timid at times, but he moved the argument for gay rights forward, and forty years later, he was still doing so.
For that, he deserves our respect.
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