Gays Deserve Reparation Checks

“The time has arrived to place economic reparations for gay and lesbian Americans on the political agenda,” Jacob Appel writes in the Detroit Free Press. Equality under the law is inevitable, if still a few years out; meantime, homosexuals must be compensated for their trouble. “While the financial losses” suffered “as a result of state-sanctioned discrimination may prove challenging to quantify, they are real.”

“A second purpose of reparations is to express moral opprobrium,” Appel writes. A check can’t cure all the wounds of being a second-class citizen, but “the admission of collective culpability behind such payments might offer a first step toward reconciliation.” Will straight people try to game the system? No, Appel writes. We’re still far from the day when a hetero cheater “possesses enough confidence in his own sexuality to impersonate a homosexual.”