http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/07/06/090706taco_talk_hertzbergStonewall Plus Forty
by Hendrik Hertzberg July 6, 2009
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At the time of the Stonewall uprising, Barack Obama was a seven-year-old grade-schooler in Jakarta, Indonesia. This week, as President of the United States, he will welcome an assemblage of prominent gay citizens, along with their partners and, in some cases, their spouses, to the East Room of the White House for a commemoration of the movement the uprising sparked. From the perspective of forty years ago, that is remarkable enough. But just as remarkable is the fact that many of these same citizens believe that this still new President has done too little to advance their cause. They have a point.
As a candidate, Barack Obama presented himself as a strong proponent of “full equality” for “LGBT people”—the current term of art, awkward but inclusive, for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people. He promised unequivocally to end the Pentagon’s misbegotten “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, under which some thirteen thousand soldiers and sailors have been cashiered for nothing more than acknowledging their sexual orientation, and to fight for the repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriages and allows states to ignore such marriages if contracted elsewhere. Although most organized gay support had gone to Hillary Clinton during the primary season, Obama took the overwhelming majority of gays’ votes in November.
The President has said all the right things. But there have been signs, before the election and after, that where gays are concerned his fine-tuned ear for the emotional resonance of his actions has an alloy of tin. Choosing the conservative evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the Inaugural invocation could be defended as a mutual gesture of civic comity. More disturbing, if less widely publicized, was the Obama campaign’s use of an anti-gay gospel singer who claimed to have been “delivered” from homosexuality to entertain rallies aimed at Southern blacks. And, in the five months of the Obama Presidency, the hyperactivity that has marked the Administration’s approach to the economic crisis, the health-care mess, and the Middle East has been missing on the issue of what, during the campaign, the candidate stirringly called “real equality for all Americans, gay and straight alike.”
DOMA and D.A.D.T.—the Defense of Marriage Act and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—remain as fully in force as they were on Election Day. But what has provoked some of the President’s gay supporters to speak of “betrayal” and prompted others to boycott a gay Democratic fund-raising dinner last week was a June 11th legal brief from the Justice Department defending the constitutionality of DOMA and, some charged, likening same-sex marriage to incest. With rare exceptions, and this is not one of them, Justice Department lawyers must defend existing statutes in court, even those the Administration wants to repeal. Anyway, the brief does not really suggest any moral equivalence between gay marriage and incest, a word it does not mention. (It notes, as part of a technical argument, that marriages between first cousins are legally valid in some states and invalid in others.) But nothing required Justice to build a bridge over this particular River Kwai. The brief praises DOMA as “a cautiously limited response to society’s still evolving understanding of the institution of marriage” that reflects “a cautious policy of federal neutrality towards a new form of marriage.” Unlimited, incautious, and hostile is more like it.
“I don’t blame you for your impatience,” Vice-President Biden said at the boycotted (but still lucrative) fund-raiser, adding, “I hope you don’t doubt the President’s commitment.” A fair test of that commitment would be a quick end to the dithering over D.A.D.T. A permanent solution will require an act of Congress, and the Administration is understandably reluctant to seek one at a moment when Congress’s plate is already piled to the ceiling. But the President doesn’t have to wait. The Palm Center, a public-policy institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has made a persuasive case that he can order an immediate halt to involuntary discharges of gay servicemen and servicewomen under the same “stop-loss” law that his predecessor used, less admirably, to force soldiers to extend their enlistments.
Last Wednesday, the Center for American Progress, a think tank that has provided many Obama appointees, proposed a plan whereby a stop-loss executive order would be followed by a Presidential panel on implementing repeal and, ultimately, by repeal itself. On Thursday, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, seemed to dismiss the idea (“The Administration believes that this requires a durable legislative solution”), but he also seemed to leave the door ever so slightly ajar (“There could be differences on strategy”). The President should kick that door open, and if he doesn’t his gay supporters and their allies should do a little kicking of their own. The community organizer on Pennsylvania Avenue will get the message. ♦
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