Asterisk

Note: I’m a terrible judge of my own stuff, but something I wrote on a message board as a reaction to another “Obama has a lot on his plate so just be patient” argument got a pretty good reaction, so I’m bringing to the blog. I’ve modified it for clarity and sourcing, and to clean up some mixed metaphors.

The most frustrating part of the fight for LGBT rights is that many people, both inside and outside the community, view it as a grab bag of issues. It isn’t. It’s One Issue with many moving parts, and it really doesn’t matter to me where we succeed first. The work will continue until the One Issue is completed, because in truth the One Issue is more than the sum of its parts.

There’s a reason LGBT people suffer depression and anxiety so much more often than straight people do. There’s a reason we’re twice as likely to suffer PTSD. There’s a reason our youth are three to seven times (depending on environment) more likely to die by suicide.

It’s no coincidence that our statistical 5-10% of the nation’s youth make up 20-40% of all homeless youth, that LGBT homeless youth are 56% more likely to abuse alcohol than straight homeless youth and 76% more likely to have been sexually assaulted.

Solving the One Issue has the side effect of bringing people back from the edge. That’s the real reason the fight is so important. It’s not about me getting married (I won’t) or joining the Marines (it is to laugh). It isn’t about me not getting a job because I’m a fag or being politely turned down for a loan or being turned away from a restaurant or being told my blood is tainted.

It’s about people knowing that they exist, that their lives are real and important, that their government won’t assault them, and that it actually considers them in the same way it considers their parents and siblings and friends. That One Issue is the keystone to all the others.

The U.S. government is, right now, today, harming us with its codified discrimination because people in the majority approve of it. I want that harm to cease, quite selfishly, because I’m one of those people being harmed and I know a lot of other people who are being harmed. And though it irks me to no end, I suppose I shouldn’t think too poorly of people, even those who think they’re our allies, for not wanting it to change badly enough because of their own selfishness.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m going to shut up and bow my head until that far off, imaginary, never-to-come day when people in the majority have everything they want and decide it’s okay to finally make the government stop harming people.

No sir.

By the time I post this (I’m so lazy) most people will have heard about last week’s Prop 8 ruling. It’s a stunning ruling in both its language and its conclusion.

The ruling contains 80 findings of fact and a conclusion of law which finds that Prop 8 violates both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

Like most people on both sides of the issue, I expected Judge Vaughn Walker to rule in our favor. There was, after all, a veritable mountain of evidence from the plaintiffs and a striking lack of credible evidence from the defendants. He surprised me, though, by ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional because of due process and equal protection. I expected one or the other, but never both. (Truth be told, I audibly gasped when I saw that.)

Rachel Maddow spent three segments on Thursday night discussing Judge Walker’s decision, and one the following night marveling at the decided lack of reaction from the Religious Right. I’ve embedded all four below.

David Boies, one of the attorneys leading the case against Prop 8, spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Fransisco Thursday night. In this clip he discusses the history of state-sanctioned, codified anti-gay discrimination and the outlook of this case.

Then there were the Sunday talk shows. David Boies faced off against Family Research Council‘s Tony Perkins on Face the Nation. (You may recall last year when Mr. Perkins wanted the US to side with GWB’s “Axis of Evil” against gays.) Boies took Tony to the woodshed on this one by doing what most TV pundits are trained not to do: He called Tony a liar and then proved it.

Meanwhile, former Solicitor General Ted Olson, the other lead attorney on the case, had a must-see interview on FOX with Chris Wallace. Olson bluntly challenged Chris on his rhetoric and righted the discussion to the true issue at hand.

(Side note: Kudos to MSNBC on their video embedding. CBS and FOX are leagues behind them with the absolute worst embedding capabilities I’ve seen.)

Finally, Jon Stewart talked about the media reaction to Judge Walker’s ruling on the best newscast around, The Daily Show.

So yeah. It was an important week. We have a long way to go, and it’ll extend at least into 2011, but this will go down as a historic decision for the cause of civil rights.

Almost nine months ago, John Aravosis and Joe Sudbay of AMERICAblog initiated their “Don’t Ask Don’t Give” campaign, asking LGBT people to stop funding Democratic party campaigns until they actually make a concerted effort to keep their promises. I finally found a chance to join the cause last week when I received a fundraising email signed by Brad Woodhouse, Communications Director of the DNC. Below is my response to his donation request.

Mr. Woodhouse,

In response to your request for a small donation, I must unfortunately reiterate what so many others have said in the last few months. The Democratic party will not see one penny from my pocket until and unless substantial gains are made in the field of LGBT rights.

In 2008, the LGBT community helped give you the White House, the House of Representatives, and a super-majority in the Senate. What we’ve discovered is that there is little difference between a Democratic-led government and the Republican-led government of five years ago. Instead of taking a clear and decisive pro-civil rights stance, you thanked us by running the other way and choosing ***anything*** but LGBT civil rights.

• You punted repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, with a compromise that doesn’t actually repeal anything, has yet to be voted on in the Senate or signed by the President, and reportedly is being considered for veto by President Obama.
• You’ve put off the Employment Non-Discrimination Act until it’s logistically unlikely this year, with Speaker Pelosi characterizing the bill as “controversial” rather than rallying Democrats around this clear issue of civil rights.
• Repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act isn’t even being considered, no matter how many times President Obama says he’s “urged” Congress to do so.
• Ending the discriminatory anti-gay blood donation ban has been discussed and rejected with no real push from the DNC to follow the science and penalize risky sex rather than responsible gay men in monogamous relationships for thirty years.
• Bids to institute state-wide marriage equality have failed in part because of the lack of leadership and funding from the DNC, most notably in Maine last year.
• Even a bill to offer safety to all school children has failed to find congressional footing because members of Congress get squeamish at the bill’s specific mention of LGBT kids who are many times more likely to be bullied, depressed, isolated, and suicidal than their straight peers.

So no. You will not get my money, you will not get my time, you will not get my voice, and you will not get my vote until you show me that you consider my rights as important as yours.

Candidates who have shown leadership for these completely reasonable LGBT demands retain my support and vote, but until I see substantial leadership and not excuses from the national party, my response remains the same:

NOT. ONE. CENT.

Cordially,

Matthew D. Algren

For far too long, Democrats have viewed LGBT people as nothing more than a committed source of funding and a reliable voting bloc. It’s time to teach them that we’re more than that.

Take the pledge.

Here’s why.

First, a screencap taken early this morning. Then we’ll get into the WTF of it.

Brittney Hansen: We need this injustice to stop but the only way to do so is to put ALL gay people on an island with a weekly drop of food and supplies and let them all die off. We dont have to deal with them and they dont have to deal with us.

On Monday, Good As You’s Jeremy Hooper published a killer post concurring with me that Louis Marinelli III can reasonably be identified as an agent of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). To use Marinelli’s term, he is a “NOM Strategist,” and his rhetoric is wildly off-message for NOM.

Now that someone with a higher profile than mine has called Marinelli and NOM out on the connection, Marinelli’s been trying to hide what he’s been saying for the last few months since NOM aligned themselves with him. A few hours after the post went up, most of the group’s youtube videos, including the ones I embedded here in early May, joined the group’s twitter account on the scrap heap.

What was Marinelli trying to hide? I’ll let Jeremy tell you:

So once we had that confirmation that Mr. Marinelli is, in fact, in NOM’s inner circle, we started considering all of the eye-opening things that he had seen Marinelli tweet over the past few months. And frankly, we were shocked. Because in addition to the “gays have shorter life spans” one, there was a retweet that declared all gays to be single. There was the time that Mr. Marinelli said that Peter LaBarbera and his fringe “Americans For Truth” group merely “tell the truth about homosexuality.” There was the determination that marriage equality is “a mockery and a hijacking of the civil rights movement.” There were times when he flat-out called us an abomination, citing Leviticus. There was this one: “Deviance” describes actions or behaviours that violate cultural norms – homosexuality is far from a cultural norm. Therefore, it is deviant.” And this: “Homosexuality and gay marriage are wrong and harmful to society.” And this: “#iaintafraidtosay that there shouldn’t be any recognition of homosexual relationships because that is saying that homosexuality is OK.” There was this one, accompanied by a smile: “What they do is blantantly [sic] immoral. :)” There were times when Mr. Marinelli compared our unions to that which might exist between a sterile brother and sister. And other times when our very character was assaulted: “#nevertrust activists of the homosexual agenda – they are deceitful people who care only about themselves and not what’s best for society.” And so on and so on.

After Marinelli tried to erase evidence of that paragraph and more, he took to his group’s facebook page and made this request (link to the thread and a screencap from about 2:00 AM EST):

Protect Marriage: One Man, One Woman: No hate speech, no derogatory comments against homosexuals. Show your support for one man, one woman marriage. That’s what this page is about. If you’ve got something negative to say, bite your tongue. Just play nice, please.

A good suggestion, even if Marinelli was just trying to save face because people were connecting him with NOM. But as I showed you at the top of the post, it’s nigh impossible to rein people in after you’ve spent so much time and effort teaching them how to, you know, go nuts with hate speech and derogatory comments.

By the way, Marinelli’s been actively involved on the NOM facebook page since this message was posted, and that usually includes deleting posts that he considers off-message. And yet we have Brittney Hansen showing the world what she’s learned from NOM Strategist Louis Marinelli III.

Brittney Hansen: We need this injustice to stop but the only way to do so is to put ALL gay people on an island with a weekly drop of food and supplies and let them all die off. We dont have to deal with them and they dont have to deal with us.

Last September, I wrote about Lisa Pond, a woman who was forced to die alone because the hospital she was taken to after collapsing on vacation wouldn’t let her 18-year partner or their children into the room, even though they had all the legal documents providing her partner the rights that straight married people take for granted.

Lisa Marie Pond
1967 - 2007

So it’s a relief to be able to say that starting now, under the direction of President Barack Obama, any hospital that receives federal funding (including Medicare and Medicaid) is required to allow people to designate visitors regardless of legal relationship. Here’s the money quote from the president’s memorandum:

It should be made clear that designated visitors, including individuals designated by legally valid advance directives (such as durable powers of attorney and health care proxies), should enjoy visitation privileges that are no more restrictive than those that immediate family members enjoy. You should also provide that participating hospitals may not deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Here is the remainder of the presidential memorandum:

Janice Langbehn, Lisa’s partner, has been fighting for patient rights since Lisa’s death. Janice was on Anderson Cooper 360 Thursday night to give her reaction to the president’s action today, and said that President Obama actually called her this afternoon (from Air Force I, no less) before releasing the memorandum. Here’s the segment of the show:

We owe Janice Langbehn such a debt of gratitude. Her tireless efforts on behalf of LGBT families was unquestionably instrumental to President Obama’s action Thursday.

This is a huge step forward in the pursuit of simple human decency. But at the risk of finding the dark cloud inside this silver lining, two points:

1. This is a presidential memorandum, not an executive order. As we learned with last year’s memorandum on LGBT federal employee benefits (which haven’t yet materialized, by the way), the legal foundation for these new regulations disappears as soon as President Obama leaves office. A new memorandum by the next president will be necessary to ensure that these regulations stay in place.
2. President Obama has made a habit of going after the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to LGBT rights. This is an easy sell that everyone can relate to, but the harder paradigm-shifting battles like repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act continue to languish, with the president actually arguing against civil rights in some cases.

But put that in your pocket for the moment. Thank you Mr. President for showing the compassion and reason, as well as the leadership, to keep families together at such difficult times in their lives.