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For immediate release
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Garden State Equality statement
From chair Steven Goldstein:
Garden State Equality devoted considerable time and resources to Barack Obama’s campaign for President last year in New Jersey. As an organization, we endorsed then-Senator Obama before the end of the 2008 Democratic primaries, when many of us who had been supporting various Democratic Presidential candidates came together in the interests of unity to help defeat George W. Bush.
We have supported President Obama with passion. But when a leader or political party takes the LGBT community for granted, our highest loyalty must be to the community itself. We will criticize where criticism is due.
President Obama now deserves our criticism. His first five months in office have been a tyranny of timidity when it comes to advancing civil rights of the LGBT community.
Today, his much anticipated action extending benefits to domestic partners of federal employees specifically excludes health benefits. To be clear, federal law would not prevent him from granting health benefits. The President’s action today is not even an executive order, which he has the option to issue, but rather a lesser memorandum whose legal effect is more temporary.
Earlier this month, the Obama Administration filed a brief defending the anti-LGBT Defense of Marriage Act in court. That is in direct conflict with the President’s repeated promises as a candidate and as President to oppose DOMA.
Adding insult to injury, in the Obama Administration’s brief advocating the continuation of DOMA, the Administration's lawyers have repeated all of the Bush Administration’s most heinous prejudices against the LGBT community.
Let’s be clear: It is not true that President Obama’s Department of Justice is legally compelled to defend lawsuits against the federal government. And never in a way that constitutes a grotesque slander against the LGBT community.
The President's sad early record doesn’t stop there. The Obama Administration has offered excuse after excuse in refusing to take action on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The President has the power to issue an executive order to immediately halt discharges based on the corrupt military policy – a policy which three-fourths of all Americans oppose.
Immigration reform that would unite binational same-sex couples in the interests of fairness and compassion doesn’t even seem to be on the president’s radar screen. And why hasn’t the President, who knows how to use the power of the bully pulpit, been more forceful in advocating for the passage of a transgender-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act?
Garden State Equality rejects the arguments of those who say, give the President more time. Or that this President has done more for the LGBT community already than his predecessors.
First, a popular new President’s popularity will never be higher than now. President Obama will never have more political capital than now.
Secondly, we’re tired of comparisons to previous presidents. 2009 is not 1992. Times have changed radically. As poll after poll and state law after law indicate, the nation is moving ahead on LGBT civil rights far faster than is President Obama.
In the fight for civil rights, good things don’t come to those who wait. Good things come to those who demand equality today.
Civil rights progress doesn’t result from those who say, cut our leaders some slack. Civil rights progress results from those who say, half-baked caution won’t cut the mustard.
In the bold spirit in which Garden State Equality has worked to get 210 LGBT civil rights laws enacted in New Jersey in the past five years, and has helped to bring New Jersey to the cusp of marriage equality, we reject pastel progress.
We demand more vibrant advocacy, right here and now, from the President who had the audacity to call himself our fiercest advocate.
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