By Eric Tucker, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A gay rights group sued the Justice Department on Wednesday for failing to produce hundreds of pages of documents related to a 1953 order signed by President Dwight Eisenhower that empowered federal agencies to investigate and fire employees thought to be gay.

The suit in U.S. District Court accuses the government of conducting an inadequate search for the material and of groundlessly withholding some records on the basis of national security.

Executive Order 10450 allowed broad categories of federal workers, including those with criminal records, drug addiction and "sexual perversion," to be singled out for scrutiny and termination as threats to national security. Suspicions of homosexuality led to between 7,000 and 10,000 workers losing their jobs in the 1950s alone, according to one estimate cited in a 2014 report from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

"We want to know, and history needs to know, how this thing was administered and how it was enforced, and what was the dynamic inside the Justice Department and the FBI driving" it, said Charles Francis, president of the Mattachine Society. The gay rights research and education organization has sought to obtain the records since 2013.

"This is an issue of public importance — how your government treats people who work for it, how your government has historically targeted people based on their LGBT status and destroyed their lives," said Paul Thompson, a partner at McDermott Will and Emery LLP, the law firm that filed the Freedom of Information Act suit. "People are paying attention to this right now."

Justice Department spokeswoman Nicole Navas declined to comment.

Eisenhower's order came at a time of widespread anti-gay discrimination authorized at the highest levels of government, including a 1950 Senate subcommittee report that concluded that gays were unsuitable as federal employees.

Under a "sex deviate program" put in place by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, agents were directed to "completely and fully" investigate anything about a prospective employee's sexual orientation developed during background checks. A May 1950 FBI bulletin to local police agencies told officers to make a notation on arrest fingerprint cards if anyone they arrested on suspicion of being a "sex deviate" worked for the federal government. The FBI collected copies of the fingerprint cards.

"In other words, by the time of Eisenhower's election in November 1952, Hoover already was amassing a cache of information to use against homosexual employees of the federal government," the lawsuit states. "And he was using state and local police as his deputies to gather it."

The executive order went a step further by effectively approving of the investigation and firing of federal workers believed to be gay.

The government now makes it explicitly illegal to discriminate against federal employees on the basis of sexual orientation. President Barack Obama in 2014 signed an executive order to prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against gay workers, though he lamented that being gay can still be a fireable offense "in too many states and too many workplaces."

While the government's position has changed dramatically since the 1950s, debate about the scope of LGBT rights persists in state legislatures and courthouses. Francis said the documents sought in the suit would help reveal early and overt anti-gay bias that lingers in some corners.

"The evidentiary history is critical to see the roots of the animus," he said.

Documents culled from the National Archives, libraries and other sources have shed light on the order, as have several hundred pages already disclosed by the Justice Department. But Francis' group believes hundreds of additional pages that have been withheld could help flesh out the portrait.

"We put the puzzle together but we're still missing an ocean of material," he said.

The organization requested documents in January 2013, including all correspondence involving Warren Burger, a senior Justice Department official tasked with helping enforce the order who later become chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The FBI has invoked multiple exemptions to the public records law, including a provision that protects against the disclosure of classified information for national security reasons— an assertion Thompson said he "particularly troubling" because national security was the rationale of the order in the first place.

"What the lawsuit is for us is the final step in us saying, 'No, we really are serious'," Thompson said. "We are serious, and we're not going to stop until we feel like we have exhausted all possible avenues to obtain these records."

To Learn More:

            Executive Order 10450 (National Archives)

            Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government (U.S. Senate) (pdf)

Obama to Sign Executive Order Barring Anti-Gay Discrimination by Federal Contractors (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Federal Employee Health Benefits: Dogs, Yes; Gay Partners, No (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

U.S. Government Formally Apologizes for 1957 Firing of Gay Astronomer (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)