March 1, 2008

Open Letter from Barack Obama to the LGBT community

Point by point, let’s look at Barack Obama’s statement, released February 28, 2008:

I’m running for President to build an America that lives up to our founding promise of equality for all — a promise that extends to our gay brothers and sisters. It’s wrong to have millions of Americans living as second-class citizens in this nation. And I ask for your support in this election so that together we can bring about real change for all LGBT Americans.

So, Barry, where was this appeal before Camp Obama realized how badly they’ve been screwing over the LGBT community? Why didn’t you make this statement before the South Carolina primary, instead of handing an “ex-gay” bigot a microphone so he could tap into the raging homophobia of throngs of religious bigots at the expense of the LGBT community you’re suddenly sucking up to now? Why wait until just before the Ohio and Texas primaries to cozy up to the queers — because you just realized Ohio and Texas are full of queers who don’t go in for that “love the sinner, hate the sin” sermonizing you do so well?

Equality is a moral imperative.

Then why don’t you support marriage equality, Barry?

That’s why throughout my career, I have fought to eliminate discrimination against LGBT Americans. In Illinois, I co-sponsored a fully inclusive bill that prohibited discrimination on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity, extending protection to the workplace, housing, and places of public accommodation. In the U.S. Senate, I have co-sponsored bills that would equalize tax treatment for same-sex couples and provide benefits to domestic partners of federal employees. And as president, I will place the weight of my administration behind the enactment of the Matthew Shepard Act to outlaw hate crimes and a fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act to outlaw workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

If these issues are so important to you, then why wait until you’re president to “place your weight” behind them? Why haven’t you introduced any domestic-partnership bills as a U.S. Senator? You’re allowed to do that, you know.

As your President, I will use the bully pulpit to urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws.

Not good enough, Barry. You can “urge states” all you like, but when you leave equality to the states, you get separate but equal — just like the validity of your parents‘ marriage was “left to the states” when you were born.

That’s not good enough. You can’t claim your intention to push through “equal treatment” of LGBT Americans on a federal level, while leaving “family and adoption laws” to the states.

Only federally-recognized marriage equality will do.

I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment.

Every married same-sex couple in New Jersey would disagree with you.

But I also believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples — whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage.

Again, with the “states’ rights” argument. You’re just wrong, Barry. You’re misinformed, deluded, and just plain wrong.

Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) — a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate.

You can promise “the complete repeal” of DOMA — in fact, you can promise anything you want — before you’re president. Bill Clinton did; he promised to allow gay and lesbian Americans to serve openly in the military, and look what happened to him: He was blindsided by Congress, and forced to compromise with DADT.

So, you can promise us anything you want, Barry — or you can be realistic about DOMA, like Hillary Clinton has been: She’s promising to overturn the part of DOMA she believes she can overturn — she’s not making a promise that is absolutely impossible to keep.

Now, you could say that your eagerness to compromise on marriage equality via the baby step of civil unions is based on political expediency, but I won’t believe it for a second. Your aversion to full marriage equality is based on your religious beliefs, and nothing else — which we’ll address further in just a moment.

While some say we should repeal only part of the law, I believe we should get rid of that statute altogether.

So do I, but I have no confidence whatsoever in your ability to get rid of it altogether. If you can, great — I’ll praise you for it — but I’m not holding my breath.

And let’s not forget that you can’t do it alone, Barry. It’s going to be up to Congress to overturn DOMA; you’re just the guy who’ll get to sign the bill, if it ever gets to your desk.

Finally, don’t think for a minute that I believe you’re going to go to work on repealing DOMA right away; LGBT equality has never been a priority for you in the past; especially with the mess left to you by the Bush administration, LGBT equality is going to be further down on your to-do list than you’d like to admit.

Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does.

Then why aren’t you pushing for federally-recognized civil marriage — not civil “unions,” but civil marriage — right now?

I have also called for us to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and I have worked to improve the Uniting American Families Act so we can afford same-sex couples the same rights and obligations as married couples in our immigration system.

Oh? Since when did this issue hit your radar? Last I heard, your position on the UAFA was identical to Senator Clinton’s: You have both been withholding your support for the UAFA, citing concerns about immigration fraud.

Well, here’s my question to you, Barry: If immigration reform is such a big issue to you, why not propose a moratorium on all immigration-by-marriage until you’ve got it sorted out? By holding up passage of the UAFA, you are denying only same-sex couples immigration rights. Either open immigration to everyone, now, or deny immigration to everyone, now, until you figure out how to deal with fraud.

Or, as Immigration Equality noted: “The fraud protections in the UAFA are exactly the same as they are for married (opposite-sex) couples. I perhaps haven’t pushed this point hard enough in previous exchanges, but the fraud protections in the UAFA are not the problem. The problem is that politicians do not understand LGBT relationships and do not consider them bona fide. Whether it is because a marriage certificate cannot be issued, or some deeper discomfort with LGBT marriages we do not know, but to deny LGBT couples a marriage certificate and then say that because there is no marriage certificate you must be subjected to more intense scrutiny is discriminatory, and wrong. Let’s not forget that Obama does not support gay marriage while at the same time claims civil unions extend exactly the same rights as does a marriage certificate.

“The fraud protections in the UAFA are no more loose or no more strict [than] current fraud provisions for opposite-sex couples. It is unfortunate that Sen. Obama, the child of a binational couple whose marriage was once as frowned upon as LGBT relationships does not see this double standard for what it is. We are continuing to work with the Obama camp to bring them onto the UAFA but we will not let them off the hook so easily.”

The next president must also address the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

And this issue is specific to an “open letter to the LGBT community” why, exactly?

Did you mention HIV/AIDS because you’re so accustomed to associating HIV/AIDS with gay men — and “the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth” and other “sinners” — the way you did in your 2006 World AIDS Day Speech at your “friend” Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church?

“Like no other illness, AIDS tests our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes — to empathize with the plight of our fellow man. While most would agree that the AIDS orphan or the transfusion victim or the wronged wife contracted the disease through no fault of their own, it has too often been easy for some to point to the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth or the gay man and say ‘This is your fault. You have sinned.’

“I don’t think that’s a satisfactory response. My faith reminds me that we all are sinners.”

Are you so compelled to distance yourself from the AIDS epidemic by asserting your heterosexuality that you must, again, compartmentalize HIV/AIDS as a “gay issue”?

When it comes to prevention, we do not have to choose between values and science. While abstinence education should be part of any strategy, we also need to use common sense. We should have age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception.

Can’t find a thing wrong here. But then, there’s a first time for everything.

We should pass the JUSTICE Act to combat infection within our prison population. And we should lift the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. In addition, local governments can protect public health by distributing contraceptives.

Fine, but: Why are you bringing the issue of HIV/AIDS and prison inmates and intravenous drug users into an “open letter to the LGBT community”? Are you lumping felons and heroin addicts in with “the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth or the gay man,” too?

We also need a president who’s willing to confront the stigma — too often tied to homophobia — that continues to surround HIV/AIDS. I confronted this stigma directly in a speech to evangelicals at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, and will continue to speak out as president. That is where I stand on the major issues of the day.

I’m glad you brought up your visit to Warren’s church. You pissed off a lot of left-wingers — and Warren pissed off a lot of right-wingers — by “consorting with the enemy.”

Oh, I know it by heart: These are the people you want to “reach out” to — this is your attempt to make “post-partisan unity” a reality. But you shouldn’t be consorting with them, Barry; these are the people who want no middle ground. Surely, you’re not stupid enough to think they are going to compromise with us — the “us” being the Americans “they” have built successful careers of demonizing, and at best want to run out out of the nation on a rail: the gays, the pro-choicers, the atheists, the evolutionary scientists and teachers, the Muslims… anyone who isn’t a heterosexual, anti-choice Christian opposed to full marriage equality.

They are not going to compromise their core values, Barack — and those of us whose rights hang in the balance (where our rights exist at all) will be damned if we compromise our core values for theirs.

The Christofascists are not going to budge an inch. You may get their votes, but you’re a damned fool if you actually believe you’re going to bring them around to any mode of rational thinking.

As my friend David G (whose nail-it-to-the-wall observations I’ll be quoting again soon) remarked regarding your “gay ad”: Like Donnie McClurkin and Kirbyjon Caldwell and Hezekiah Walker and all the rest of the religionists you call your “friends,” they are in fact “fundamentalist activists, anti-choice, anti-science… They are the same as Robertson or Dobson. Not ‘good folk who haven’t accepted gays,’ but dogmatic, rigid fundies. …

“Those of you who think these members of the Religious Right are only ‘a tad homophobic’ are living in denial. They are the clinic blockers, the school boards who sue over evolution. And you are voting them to power in our party.”

Which begs the question: Is that really your intention, Barack, to bring these bigots around? You pay a lot of lip service to maintaining the separation of church and state — even a few atheists positively swooned over your remark that “we are not a Christian nation; we are a nation of Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists. We are also a nation of non-believers and non-church going folk who may not have ‘Sunday-best’ hanging in their closets but who most assuredly carry the best of intentions within their hearts.”

Yet you continue to infuse your rhetoric with religious buzz phrases — yes, I’ll say it: “code words” — that seem contrived as a “dog whistle” for the religionists, but are more than familiar to those of us against whom your Bible has been used as a bludgeon. I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt, Barry; it’s tempting to think your own religiosity is so deeply ingrained, you don’t even know you’re doing it (which, to be honest, isn’t much comfort either). But I am convinced you are doing it deliberately.

In the same speech that wooed a few atheists, you also said:

My religious upbringing taught me that homosexuality was sinful and that gay unions should not be allowed. But my political belief is that all people are created equal and thus should be treated as such, homosexual couples being given the same civil rights as their heterosexual counterparts.

I’m not so sure about that, Barack. In fact, I’m dead certain your political belief is informed, and formed, solely by your religious belief. Remember what you said in Iowa (and have repeated in one form or another ever since you started stumping in churches)?

“Doing the Lord’s work is a thread that runs through our politics since the very beginning. And it puts the lie to the notion that separation of church and state in America means somehow that faith should have no role in public life.”

And:

“My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work.”

I can think of another president who was convinced that he was doing “the Lord’s work” by merging religion with politics: George W. Bush.

That is not a comforting thought.

And, as David Domke and Kevin Coe observed: Since the Saddleback sermon, “Obama’s religious politics have only grown. He often begins speeches — including his address in February 2007 in which he announced his intention to seek the presidency — by giving ‘all praise and honor to God,’ and regularly cites the biblical story of Joshua.”

To those of us not swayed by biblical ecstasy, that’s pretty chilling stuff.

But having the right positions on the issues is only half the battle. The other half is to win broad support for those positions. And winning broad support will require stepping outside our comfort zone. If we want to repeal DOMA, repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and implement fully inclusive laws outlawing hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, we need to bring the message of LGBT equality to skeptical audiences as well as friendly ones — and that’s what I’ve done throughout my career. I brought this message of inclusiveness to all of America in my keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention.

I’ll give you credit for your 2004 DNC speech, Barry. I was stunned with delight to see this kid with the funny ears even mention “gay friends in the red states.”

What’s sad is how inspired I felt at the time — and how small a bone you threw to me, and how I jumped at it, with nearly feverish hope.

What’s sad is how much my opinion of you has changed in less than four years.

I talked about the need to fight homophobia when I announced my candidacy for President, and I have been talking about LGBT equality to a number of groups during this campaign — from local LGBT activists to rural farmers to parishioners at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King once preached.

Don’t bring Dr. King into this, Barry. Not when your campaign and your supporters virtually slit Hillary Clinton’s throat for making a historically accurate remark about what it took to get the Civil Rights Act passed. You don’t have a monopoly on Dr. King’s message or legacy — and, frankly, Dr. King was far more evolved on the issue of true equality than you are.

And as far as your appearance at Ebenezer Baptist Church, do you remember what you told BeliefNet after that?

“The prayer that I tell myself every night is a fairly simple one: I ask in the name of Jesus Christ that my sins are forgiven, that my family is protected and that I am an instrument of God’s will.”

I don’t want “an instrument of God’s will” in the White House, Barry. I want an employee who doesn’t drag his religious beliefs to the office every morning.

Just as important, I have been listening to what all Americans have to say. I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans.

Barry, until you commit to marriage equality, you are not committing to full equal rights for all LGBT Americans. Period.

But neither will I close my ears to the voices of those who still need to be convinced. That is the work we must do to move forward together. It is difficult. It is challenging. And it is necessary.

Why? Your stubborn refusal to “close your ears” to homophobes is impossible to defend in light of your swift and unyielding condemnation of racists.

Or have you forgotten the names Don Imus and John Tanner?

Finally, what rankles me, Barry, is that you presume to speak for the LGBT community, when you don’t “get” the LGBT community. Your intentions may be (may be) good, but you lack an innate understanding of us, what we’re about, what motivates us, and — yes — why we can’t pretend the McClurkin issue was an isolated incident and just let it go.

You are not our “voice,” Barack. You may think you’re listening to us — and this letter of yours, and your “gay ad” show you’re at least vaguely aware that many of us queers are none too pleased with you — but you’re not hearing us. You don’t have the authority to speak for us, as a genuine ally.

Which is yet another reason I say you need some more “seasoning” before you’ll be anywhere near ready to lead us all, as a nation.

Americans are yearning for leadership that can empower us to reach for what we know is possible. I believe that we can achieve the goal of full equality for the millions of LGBT people in this country.

Again, “full equality” means marriage equality. Not some “set of basic rights,” as if we were children, or animals, who must prove we can be trusted indoors without piddling on the rug before you give us a set of grown-up rights.

“Full equality” means exactly equal with what you aready have, Barry. And as long as you have what we don’t, you have privileges, while we have merely second-class citizenship.

“Separate but equal” is not equal.

To do that, we need leadership that can appeal to the best parts of the human spirit. Join with me, and I will provide that leadership. Together, we will achieve real equality for all Americans, gay and straight alike.

I don’t think so, Barry. I don’t believe in you, because you don’t understand what you’re promising us — and yet simultaneously denying us.

You’re not ready, Barry. You’re nowhere near ready.

And you don’t understand who we are.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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