Many in the LGBT community are growing increasingly frustrated with Barack Obama's inaction on LGBT issues, and what is being seen as his administrations anti-gay decisions and actions.
The Gay Liberation Network will be protesting President Obama on Monday June 15th at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago. Protesters are mad that Obama continues to enforce the Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy barring gays from serving openly in the military. They are also outraged that the administration defended the Defense of Marriage Act in courts using some ridiculous claims and marriage equality opposition tactics. Some are also still mad about his giving a platform to anti-gay people like Rick Warren and Donnie McClurkin.
The GLN demands that President Obama:
Repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and come out for marriage equality
Repeal Don't Ask / Don't Tell
Legalize readily accessible needle exchanges to reduce HIV / AIDS transmission
End faith-based initiative funding which allows for religious groups to discriminate against LGBT people
PROTEST President Obama's visit to Chicago 10:30 AM – 12 noon Monday, June 15 Hyatt Regency Hotel 151 E. Wacker Drive (one block east of Michigan Avenue) (Map)
Michigan lawmaker, Rep. Pam Byrnes announced a joint resolution Saturday to change the current state law defining marriage between one man and one woman, thus overturning the 2004 constitutional amendment passed by voters that banned same-sex marriage.
The resolution faces many challenges, such as gaining two-thirds approval of the Michigan Legislature before it would be put to voters in the 2010 election. (A route that Prop 8 should've gone through here in California, but the CA Supreme Court apparently disagrees.)
Byrnes felt prompted to launch the initiative after seeing the results of a recent poll that showed Michigan voters have become more favorable to the idea of same sex unions since 2004.
The poll showed considerable support for some gay-friendly policies, but less than a majority (46.5%) in favor of gay marriage. The ballot proposal endorsing traditional marriage was approved 58%-42%
The proposal would be opposed at every step by many of the same groups that successfully supported the 2004 campaign, such as the Catholic Church.
Another opponent, Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan, said he doubts even a simple majority of the Democrat-led House would overturn the 2004 statewide vote.
"But it does make for high drama, as political theater goes, to announce such radical legislation during a homosexual 'rights' rally, even though it'll never see the light of day thereafter," Glenn said.
Byrnes said same-sex couples deserve the same rights as opposite-sex couples in state law.
"No doubt, it will be a fight," Byrnes said. "But we're seeing some attitudes change."
I'll be the first to admit that I'm awful at math, let alone applying statistical analysis to any sort of collected data.
Luckily for me, Andrew Gelman of Columbia University has done the work for me when applying data collected over a period of fifteen years on marriage equality and LGBT rights.
In his article, "Gay Marriage: a tipping point?" he clearly reports on Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips use of "multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate attitudes toward gay rights in the states...using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights."
Don't ask me. But here's the cool part. Graphs! Since I'm the visual type (and I'm assuming many of you are, too), these are much easier to read.
Gelman reports, "In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s."
Why is this surprising? Because Gelman expected to see a "uniform swing" or "the lowest values increasing the most and the highest values declining, relative to the average. But that's not what's happening at all."
So why is this happening? Gelman says it's the "tipping point." As LGBT rights become more accepted and more people come out of the closet in a particular state, then "straight people realize how many of their friends and relatives are gay, they're more likely to be supportive of gay rights."
On the other end of the spectrum, if rights are restricted in a particular state, the LGBT population stays in the closet, "and thus the knowing-and-accepting process will go slower."
Unfortunately, it's a chicken or the egg paradox. LGBT don't want to come out of the closet where they're not accepted, but then if they don't, winning their rights takes longer, thus feeding the discrimination. So what comes first? Rights or acceptance?
Though this information is fascinating in its presentation, this conundrum is nothing new to the LGBT population. Harvey Milk's message during the Briggs Initiative touched on it.
I ask my gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country ... We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets ... We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I'm going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives.
What this study does do is remind us that being ourselves is the key to winning our rights and actively changing hearts and minds. But it's also a good reminder for us to support our fellow LGBT to find the courage to take that necessary step out of the closet to make that difference.
"Forty-five members of the California Legislature, led by Senator Mark Leno and the LGBT Legislative Caucus, have called on the Obama Administration to prevent the persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Iraq. The lawmakers sent a letter to the Administration late last week encouraging the United States to take immediate action to stop the violence against LGBT Iraqis.
"Disturbing reports of the torture, beating and killing of LGBT Iraqis have surfaced in recent months as part of an effort led by police officers to “clean up” Iraq by getting both beggars and gays and lesbians off the streets. This year alone, 63 people, most of them men and boys suspected of being gay, have been tortured or killed as a result of religious decrees against LGBT people in Iraq."
Read the rest of the press release on Sen. Mark Leno's site.
Hopefully with more and more U.S. governmental officials speaking out against these human rights violations, Obama and his administration will be moved to act. Just recently, the State Department issued a statement against it, but I found it to be rather passive and nowhere near meeting the responsibilities that we, as the occupying country of Iraq, should be fulfilling.
Despite the fact that he opposes the suit's preliminary injunction against Prop 8, which would immediately reinstate marriage rights to same-sex couples, Brown agrees with the federal case that the initiative violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause.
“Taking from same-sex couples the right to civil marriage that they had previously possessed under California’s Constitution cannot be squared with guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the Attorney General’s filing states.
“Today's filing by Attorney General Jerry Brown underscores that Proposition 8 is a clear violation of the United States Constitution because it denies all people equal rights,” said Chad Griffin, Board President of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the organization that hired Olson and Boies to challenge Prop 8. “We are confident that our state's chief legal officer's strong opinion will help this case move quickly through the courts so that every Californian will soon be treated equally under the law.”
I just finished a very cordial conference call with Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and discussed what has now become the hot topic of their complimentary wi-fi service blocking some LGBT news blogs, such as Towleroad and Pam's House Blend.
In a statement to Unite the Fight, Coffee Bean said:
First and foremost I want to thank you for bringing the issue of the two blocked LGBT websites to our attention. Let me be 100% clear from the onset. It is not, and has never been, the policy of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to willingly block or prevent access to LGBT Internet sites.
After you brought this to our attention yesterday we took immediate steps to resolve the issue and investigate exactly what happened. We found the OpenDNS Web content filtering system had miscategorized these two web sites as having sexual content, and thus prevented customers from accessing those sites. With the help of OpenDNS, we were able to override the filter immediately when it was brought to our attention.
No web content filter is perfect, but we are able to change misclassifications when they are brought to our attention. To be clear, the words “gay” or “lesbian” are not flagged in the OpenDNS Filter. We believe that censorship of any site that offers news and opinions is wrong and goes against everything we stand for as a company and a member of the communities in which we operate.
To those who came to Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf's defense - you were spot on. And I want to thank the coffee and tea chain for their fast action on correcting the situation.
I personally want to state that my frustration wasn't with Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, but with OpenDNS' flagging method, the content filter provider for Coffee Bean's wi-fi. As I've stated already, these faulty but many times purposeful flagging methods usually lead to "technical discrimination," which we LGBT face at work, libraries and other public places offering internet services. And in the case of OpenDNS, it took just a view homophobic viewers to flag these LGBT sites and effectively block them for all.
When OpenDNS responded to my first email claiming it was Coffee Bean who was responsible, it immediately stirred a lot of people up against Coffee Bean, but inaccurately. I then wrote Coffee Bean. They responded immediately to me.
In the interim, the Founder of OpenDNS' clarified his company's original statement, stating that all of this was a "technical mistake" on their end.
In this case, it was a mistake. But in other cases, it isn't. Under Towleroad's story on this issue, many commentators have mentioned all the other places where they found the site to have been blocked. Other's have mentioned the same for Pam's House Blend, a site purely news and editorial.
What this boils down to is our continued need to change hearts and minds about the LGBT population. What needs to change is the automatic correlation between who we are and what is deemed offensive, hence the need for many to block any site that deals with our issues and, unfortunately, our labels.
And it was this frustration that I experienced which launched all of this in the first place. Hopefully, the good that will come out of this isn't just a stronger relationship between Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and the LGBT population. What can come out of it is a message, first to us, that if we speak up, things can change. But secondly, a message to the public that we simply will not, cannot take, not only "technical discrimination," but all discrimination.
UPDATE: The White House sent this statement to numerous media sites in response to the uproar:
"As it generally does with existing statutes, the Justice Department is defending the law on the books in court. The President has said he wants to see a legislative repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act because it prevents LGBT couples from being granted equal rights and benefits. However, until Congress passes legislation repealing the law, the administration will continue to defend the statute when it is challenged in the justice system."
This is the same argument used to keep Don't Ask Don't Tell in place, even though Obama has the power to use stop-loss in the interim of its repeal. Also, the statement ignores the fact that other Presidents have disputed federal law in order to change it, instead of defend it.
A federal case arguing against DOMA was recently challenged by the Department of Justice, the voice of Obama's Administration when defending current law, using discriminatory language and diminishting the only two cases won for LGBT civil rights in the US Supreme Court.
America Blog does an amazing job of breaking down Obama's court brief defending DOMA.
Obama didn't just argue a technicality about the case, he argued that DOMA is reasonable. That DOMA is constitutional. That DOMA wasn't motivated by any anti-gay animus. ---- He actually argued that the courts shouldn't consider Loving v. Virginia, the miscegenation case in which the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to ban interracial marriages, when looking at gay civil rights cases. He told the court, in essence, that blacks deserve more civil rights than gays, that our civil rights are not on the same level.
And before Obama claims he didn't have a choice, he had a choice. Bush, Reagan and Clinton all filed briefs in court opposing current federal law as being unconstitutional . . . Obama could have done the same. But instead he chose to defend DOMA, denigrate our civil rights, go back on his promises, and contradict his own statements that DOMA was "abhorrent." Folks, Obama's lawyers are even trying to diminish the impact of Roemer and Lawrence, our only two big Supreme Court victories. Obama is quite literally destroying our civil rights gains with this brief. He's taking us down for his own benefit.
Check out the rest of their post as they break down Obama's brief, bit by bit, a brief that contains:
Obama invoking incest and adults marrying children
Child rape cases make DOMA constitutional
It saves the federal government money
DOMA doesn't discriminate against gays - all they have to do to get the benefits is get married... to someone of the opposite sex.
"DOMA Is Consistent with Equal Protection and Due Process Principles."
don't confuse the gays with the blacks, and other "real" marriages
This is in fact very disheartening. People may say that the president is only doing his job of protecting the law, but as already stated - Clinton, Bush and Reagan all had filed briefs opposing federal law. Obama could've done the same, but he didn't. Is this this an action of a man who said he believed that DOMA was "abhorrent"?
There has been many mixed reactions to Obama's job so far as President, especially within the LGBT population. Some have called for patience since he's only been in office for less than six months and is busy tackling numerous crises. Others have demanded action on his campaign promises, or in the very least, a sign of support, something that has been lacking.
I have attended demonstrations, calling on Obama to act immediately on Don't Ask Don't Tell, since our nation needs as many of our men and women in the armed forces right now. For me, it wasn't a protest against the president, just a call to action.
But now I don't know how I feel. This brief states clearly that his administration intends to defend DOMA, instead of filing a presidential challenge, an action that has precedent.
Even Jenny Pizer, director of Lamda Legal's marriage project has stated, "We are surprised and profoundly disappointed that the administration has chosen to defend DOMA - using many of the same arguments the Bush Administration used - plus some new arguments that make no sense and are discriminatory."
I'm not one to think the worst of people, but instead I try to understand where they're coming from and why they do what they do. But I don't understand this. This is NOT the actions of a "fierce advocate," no matter how you interpret it.
And isn't this the month that Obama declared to be officially LGBT Pride Month as a hallmark to us and his commitment to our civil rights? What a way to celebrate.
I feel like a fool for believing the promises that he made.
Right now I'm in shock. The anger will come later.
HRC:"The Administration apparently determined that it had a duty to defend DOMA in the courts. The President has just as strong a duty to put his principles into action, and end discrimination against LGBT people and our families,” said HRC President Joe Solmonese. “We call on the President to send legislation repealing DOMA to Congress,” he added.
Task Force:"DOMA is and has always been an immoral attack on same-sex couples, our families and our fundamental humanity. This law has only served to discriminate against Americans and belittle our nation's heralded values embracing freedom, fairness and justice. The Task Force Action Fund demands President Obama and Congress immediately repeal this hateful law, which has left a moral scar on our nation and its worthy pursuit of equal justice for all.
"Unfortunately, the malicious and outrageous arguments and language used in the Department of Justice's marriage brief is only serving to inflame and malign the humanity of same-sex couples and our families. This is unacceptable.
"This ugly chapter in our nation's history must come to an end now with the repeal of DOMA."
Pam Spaulding from Pam's House Blend states the potential impact of this brief: "A brief with language like this could have been written by Liberty Counsel it's so homophobic; that it's written in legalese doesn't blunt the arguments being made here. It will be used to cause lasting damage to future civil rights gains."
Am I wrong for feeling like a fool? Have we all been fooled? What do you think? What do we do now? What actions do we take?
ACTION: Demand that President Obama stop defending DOMA and fulfill his campaign promises by getting it repealed! You can contact the White House by filling out their contact form, or call them and let them know what you think. Phone Numbers Comments: 202-456-1111
Posts
Many in the LGBT community are growing increasingly frustrated with Barack Obama's inaction on LGBT issues, and what is being seen as his administrations anti-gay decisions and actions.
