Where’s OUR change, Mr. President?

Tue, 12 May 2009 18:05:11 -0400

Barack Obama was, as is now oft repeated, swept into office on the promise of change, real and tangible. One aspect of this change on which he has, as yet, failed to deliver is his bipartite promise to America’s queers: to topple those two malevolent monuments of the Clinton administration, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and DOMA.

Now, perhaps it’s just my youthful naïveté, but it seems to me that with the Whitehouse, both houses of Congress, and the support of most Americans (upwards of seventy percent of Americans are in support of, and upwards of sixty percent of those in the military are either in support of or ambivalent towards, allowing gays in the military; and while I couldn’t find DOMA-specific data, about half of Americans support same-sex marriage, which would say to me that support for repeal of DOMA would be higher, though as to how much I cannot speculate), now would be the time to deliver on these promises, especially as we continue to hurt for troops in the Middle East and as more and more states legalize gay marriage—marriages that, due to DOMA’s unconstitutional infringement upon the Full Faith and Credit clause, other states do not have to recognize and on which neither they nor the federal government has to confer the benefits of heterosex marriages (in obvious contravention of the equal protection clause, as those states that have legalized same-sex marriages make no distinction between them and opposite-sex marriages). [Sorry about that unreasonably long sentence]

If the president wants to grant gay couples equal rights and protections as married heterosex couples (and personally I don’t care what he wants to call such a union as long as it truly is legally equivalent to a marriage—though it does seem silly for him to quibble about the name, not to mention unconstitutional, since the Supreme Court has declared marriage—that’s marriage, mind you not civil unions—to be a “basic civil right”), the logical first step would be to repeal DOMA, which prohibits the federal government from conferring some benefits of marriage on same-sex partners and permits the states not to do so.

I could spend an equal amount of time discussing the benefits of overturning “Don’t ask, don’t tell”; I could cite historical precedent in Greek society of soldiers being paired with lovers to motivate them to fight better, I could give facts and figures and percents, but I won’t. All right-minded people, including military top brass, now recognize the ridiculousness of not allowing queers to serve, so to run through a complete argument would be a waste of time. I will simply quote Barry Goldwater: “You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight.”

But to the point: President Obama has made a big to-do about bipartisanship, which is hunky-dory A-OK with me except for the fact that the Republicans have stood pretty uniformly and stubbornly opposed to all of his overtures. So I say, screw ‘em. If they don’t want to play ball, that’s fine—the Democrats can play without them. Obama can and should use his mandate (if you can really call seven percent a “mandate”) to force through a repeal of DOMA and “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

So while I don’t expect Obama to champion gay rights—for his own reasons, whether because he thinks it’s “icky” or because he doesn’t want to alienate his base, he has consistently come out in opposition to same-sex marriage—he should at least fulfill the promises he made to the gay community during his campaign with regards to gays in the military and DOMA. He could at least try to get a bill to overturn DOMA introduced, for chrissake.

Obama has his mandate, and he has the support of the majority of America—an outstanding majority, in fact—to make good on his pledge to the queer community. And to those cynics who may ask me why I would expect a politician actually to follow through on his campaign promises, I have this to say to you: Obama was supposed to be about change—change in the economy, change in social laws, and change in politics. Let’s see it.

_{photo by frankgumola: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankgumola/}

Ben Silver's Open Salon Blog

Where’s OUR change, Mr. President?