Obama On Gay Rights And The Need To Fight Back

Tuesday’s New York Times editorial titled a Bad Call on Gay Rights, points out the by now obvious: the Barack Obama elected on a platform of audacity, change, and hope, has not bothered to offer little of those to homosexual Americans. Worse, his Administration seems both able and willing to defend those who oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage, evidence emphatically with last week’s wrongheaded arguments to support the Defense of Marriage Act.

Using language deliberately demeaning and dismissive, the Justice Department, writing a brief meant to opposed a case filed in federal court, in Santa Ana, California by a couple who are challenging the profoundly poor politics of DOMA, argued that is reasonable for states to favor heterosexual marriages because they and only they are “the traditionally and universally recognized form of marriage.” The Justice Department, inspired by rationale rather tenuous at best, continued that states do not have to recognize gay marriage under the Constitution because states do not recognize marriage between cousins or between an uncle and niece. Inflammatory and insensitive, the comments made in the filing do, unfortunately put to a lie Obama’s promise to be “our fierce advocate” and that, mimicking the oratory of the civil rights movement a change was going to come. Neither seems to have been true, and like Clinton who came into office with promises and promises meant to strengthen and support the LGBT community, but was instead puny political pandering, hollow at the core, Obama has held out the idea of hope, but it is a hope that discriminates, unsparingly.

We – you and I and every gay you know have been thrown not to the back of the bus, but under the bus. Fight back, get angry, refuse to accept anything less than the equality you and I and every gay you know is entitled to. Come out, to family, to friends, to anyone and everyone, and make clear in a distinct and loud voice that we are no longer willing to live an ambiguous life, one pruned and truncated, where who we are and who we love and who loves us right back – all of us and it is a diverse lot – are no longer prepared to be muted, softened around the edges, hidden, made less different only because we might make some uncomfortable. That – other’s awkwardness with gay men and women – that is not our concern, not a problem we need ever address.

Be hopeful and in turn offer hope and say with finality so loud it is deafening that we are done with injustices and the dance of submission which follows, and we will accept no longer inequality in any of its forms.