Monday, June 22, 2009

Criticism of Obama’s anti-gay policies is growing louder

Posted by Justin Jeffre

Gay rights pioneer Cleve Jones calls for March for Equality on Washington. He says Obama seems to be continuing this really hurtful policy of doling out increments of rights, fractions of equality and that gays want full equality now. And former Army Secretary Clifford Alexander (the first African American to hold that position) calls on Obama and Congress to repeal DADT. Democracy Now! interviewed both of them here.

Gay rights advocates first became alarmed when the then President-elect invited an anti-gay bigot to give the invocation at his inauguration. But the disappointment didn’t stop there. According to this report, President Obama signed a memorandum last Wednesday to extend some, but not all, benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. Comprehensive healthcare, for example, is not included. Like Democratic President Bill Clinton before him he’s good at giving lip service and bad at actually delivering equality to this nation.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Today I’m proud to issue a presidential memorandum that paves the way for long-overdue progress in our nation’s pursuit of equality. Many of our government’s hard-working and dedicated and patriotic public servants have long been denied basic rights that their colleagues enjoy for one simple reason: the people that they love are of the same sex.

Currently, for example, LGBT federal employees can’t always use sick leave to care for their domestic partners or their partners’ children. Their partners aren’t covered under long-term care insurance. Partners of American Foreign Service officers abroad aren’t treated the same way when it comes to the use of medical facilities or visitation rights in case of an emergency. And these are just some of the wrongs that we intend to right today. […]

It’s a day that marks a historic step towards the changes we seek, but I think we all have to acknowledge this is only one step. Among the steps we have not yet taken is to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. I believe it’s discriminatory, I think it interferes with states’ rights, and we will work with Congress to overturn it.

Some may argue that this is a step in the right direction, but it is a mixed bag at best. This came one week after his administration filed a controversial legal brief supporting DOMA, an action which greatly disappointed activists fighting for marriage equality. For instance Joe Solmonese, the president of the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, said, quote, “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

Cleve Jones was a friend of the gay rights leader Harvey Milk. He’s the founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and the co-founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. He’s planning a national march for equality on Washington this October.

Jones said, “There is no fraction of equality. You are an equal people, or you are not.” Jones said they are no longer satisfied with just “crumbs”.

And,

“We want full equality, which I define as being equal protection under the law in all matters governed by civil law in all fifty states. It’s the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. That’s what we want.”

For all the support that Obama and the Democrats got from the GLTB community the continuation of discriminatory policies really does seem, well, crumby. The President has also been criticized for failing to push for an end to the military’s discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy though he, like Bill Clinton, campaigned on the issue.  In a brief, the Obama administration had said the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion.”

According to former Army Secretary Clifford Alexander (who also served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as a presidential adviser on civil rights), that is simply not true.

Alexander said,

The policy is an absurdity and borderline on being an obscenity. What it does is cause people to ask of themselves that they lie to themselves, that they pretend to be something that they are not. There is no empirical evidence that would indicate that it affects military cohesion. There is a lot of evidence to say that the biases of the past have been layered onto the United States Army.

It has several negative ramifications. One is the fact that the people who are presently serving, and that’s thousands and thousands who are gays and lesbians, they have to lie every day. It’s like asking a Jewish person to act like he or she is a Muslim, or asking a Catholic to act like he or she is Buddhist, taking their fundamental values and exchanging it for silence. A second issue is, of course, that people who would want to serve in this nation’s armed services, because of their specific orientation sexually, they will not do so because they don’t want to engage in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Nathaniel Frank is the author of Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America.

According to Frank,

The military’s own studies have again and again since the 1950s assessed this question and found that there’s no link, and they often try to bury the studies. In fact, I spoke to members of the Military Working Group, senior retired officers who were tasked with creating the blueprint that became “don’t ask, don’t tell” for the research in my book, and they told me, several of them, this policy was not based on any empirical evidence. It was not based on research. It was subjective, and it was based on our own fears and prejudices.

And,

There are at least twenty-four, and counting, foreign militaries that include all of our major allies, including combat-tested militaries such as Britain, Israel, Australia, Canada. Even some of the smaller militaries that conservatives are fond of dismissing have actually led the way in battles in Afghanistan, in particular, in which US service members have served under them and served shoulder to shoulder in countries that allow gay service. And in the book I document actual cases where they work under known gays. This gives the lie to the idea that working amidst known gays would undermine military cohesion.

According to Frank, before “don’t ask, don’t tell” became law it was just a Pentagon policy and regulation. Because it is a law that was passed by Congress, Congress will need to repeal it. Clinton’s compromise makes repealing the law more challenging now.

But Frank said President Obama can act unilaterally to use his powers of stop-loss through a statute, 12305 from 1983, in which Congress itself gives the President the power to stop separations in the military for a variety of reasons. “And so, he has said that he wants to stop the firings, and he actually has the power to stop the firings. And so, it’s really been very unclear to many of us why he’s unwilling to take that step”, he said.

He added,

It would be an executive order halting all separations while we are under a national emergency, which the statute defines as being—having the National Guard mobilized, as it currently is. And then he could go to Congress some months down the line and say, “Look, we’ve had openly gay service officially”—incidentally, we already have openly gay service; thousands of people are serving openly, notwithstanding the policy. But he could turn to this situation officially and say, “We have openly gay service because of this executive order. The sky hasn’t fallen. Now, Congress, let’s move to get this off the books permanently.” So it would be a one-two punch. And that is an option that Obama has. And he’s been asked about it, the White House has been asked about it, and they haven’t given a good reason why, given what he said about wanting to stop the firings, he’s continuing to let the firings go, when he has the power to do otherwise.

It is time for President Obama to honor his campaign promise and stand for equal protection under the law instead of continuing his discriminatory policies. The Democrats have control of the White House, the House and the Senate. What they no longer have is anymore excuses. We don’t need any more lip service in this country; what we need is equality for everyone now!

 

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Wolfie says:
23 Jun 2009  at  08:48 am | #

Thank you Justin.

And belive me when I say that many in the LGBT Community are up in arms and the bloggers are doing the best they can to exert pressure.

Now for soem REALLY GOOD NEWS

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