One year ago, President Barack Obama delivered an address full of hope and promise at the Human Rights Campaign’s 2009 Annual Dinner, saying, “I’m here with a simple message: I’m here with you in that fight. For even as we face extraordinary challenges as a nation, we cannot — and we will not — put aside issues of basic equality.”
“Now, I’ve said this before, I’ll repeat it again — it’s not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans petitioning for equal rights half a century ago. But I will say this: We have made progress and we will make more.”
One year later, just two and a half weeks ago, the president sent his senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to speak at HRC’s annual dinner.
This year, after a tenacious spring and disappointing summer, the Obama White House has, some would say, almost gone out of its way to antagonize voters from one of its steadfastly loyal constituencies, the gay community. News over the past few months that the administration’s Department of Justice would appeal federal court rulings that declared the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA,) and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT,) unconstitutional, along with the White House’s almost utter silence on the federal court ruling that found California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional, have been met with sheer dismay, disappointment, and growing anger by the LGBT community and its supporters.
Before last week, when little more than lip service was paid — and by only the Department of Education — to news of a rash of anti-gay bullying-related teen suicides that gripped the nation, the gay community rose into anger — and action.
The growing perception throughout America that churches are partly to blame for gay teen suicides, along with many Americans finally equating the anti-gay statements and actions of some religious and so-called “pro-family” organizations with bullying and suicides, has led members of the gay community, a large percentage of whom have remained staunch Hillary Clinton supporters, to see the Secretary of State’s quick response and recent record on LGBT issues within her own domain, as a standard this White House has not met.
Even President’s Obama’s “It Gets Better” video to gay and questioning bullied and harassed teens felt to some as an important, albeit late, gesture, especially given that his Secretary of State had released her own video message days earlier. And when the Department of Justice filed for and received an emergency stay, effectively placing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” back into law on the same day as the first-ever and astonishingly, widely-observed “Spirit Day,” a day designed to honor LGBTQ teen suicide victims, many in the gay community took that as yet another example of a callous and tone-deaf administration.
(Of course, the fact that Secretary of State Clinton wore purple on Spirit Day to a Situation Room meeting in the White House, and the president did not, only helped to cement this perception in the minds of many.)
But could an Associated Press (AP) article, “Gay Voters Angry At Democrats Could Sway Election,” published Sunday afternoon, that spread rapidly throughout major media outlets, be responsible for the Obama White House finally waking up to a problem?
Late Monday night, word was leaked of a high-level legislative-strategy meeting Tuesday for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” That meeting included several LGBT organizations, including HRC and the Log Cabin Republicans. Tuesday, the news was all over the Internet, along with varying degrees of support, skepticism, more skepticism, and analysis, depending on the source.
There has been a hush from all participants at Tuesday’s White House meeting, but rumor has it, as Metro Weekly’s Chris Geidner reports, that “the president stopped by the meeting ‘to directly convey to the participants his personal commitment on this issue.’”
“A person outside the White House familiar with the meeting agenda told Metro Weekly that there were three main points the White House was looking to impress upon attendees: (1) President Obama was pushing for lame-duck Senate action, (2) there would would more meetings up to the vote and (3) executive options are not being looked at right now.”
It is easy to feel a degree of ambivalence with this message, given earlier reports Tuesday, one via the Washington Blade, that “White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday he’s unaware of any outreach the president has done in the Senate to advance “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell†repeal,” and another via Igor Volsky at Think Progress, again placing Gibbs at the center of attention when he “refused to say whether President Obama would be willing to use his stop-loss authority to end discharges under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should Congress fail to repeal the policy.”
But also Tuesday came another AP article, some might wonder if by way of an apology, titled, “Record number of openly gay officials serving in Obama administration.” (Wildly right-wing news outlet One News Now saw fit to re-write the piece as, “Obama most ‘gay’-friendly president in history.”) (Skepticism is truly in the eye of the beholder.)
Yet another pro-gay announcement came from the Administration Tuesday, although sources say it has been in the works for some time. The Department of Education announced a campaign to prevent anti-gay harassment and bullying. The Washington Post reported, “The Obama administration is launching a campaign to prevent anti-gay bullying and other harassment at school, advising educators that federal law protects students from many forms of discrimination.”
“The advisory from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, to be made public Tuesday, does not break new legal ground, officials said. But the officials described it as the federal government’s most comprehensive guidance to date on how civil rights law applies to the sort of campus situations that in some cases have led persecuted students to commit suicide. President Obama is expected to help promote the initiative.”
So, unlike other times when the Obama administration finally woke up to extreme unrest within the LGBTQ community, and miraculously found its way to regift some rights and provide a few tokens of appreciation, like extending some benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees a year ago June, this time there is little new in the offing, but at least the message has been sent that gays matter. At least, a little. At least, for now.
Despite the confusing messages this administration continues to send, a few things are clear. The administration is trying, but needs to learn to explain its workings and processes, and work with groups, like the LGBT community, like labor, that support it more than many others. And equally clear: it’s time, despite all our frustration, to explain our frustration to this administration, not by not voting, and not by voting Republican, but by voting for Democrats who will be in position to speak our truth to power, and to vote for the change we need.