Subscribe to Breaking NewsVanasco: Obama caving on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?
This is what I was worried about.
According to the Washington Times, Obama’s team is saying that even ASKING for a repeal of the ban on open gays in the military may not happen until 2010. First, he wants to build consensus.
Fair enough.
But it seems to me that consensus is already built – or at least as much as it’s going to be. Earlier this week, 104 retired generals and admirals called for DADT’s repeal.
A former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke out against DADT in 2007. So did a former Secretary of Defense. 143 members of the House have co-sponsored a bill to overturn the policy; a bill approved by the House Committee on Armed Services.
We know the US military needs more soldiers to fight the two wars we are engaged in – last year alone, 627 servicemembers were dismissed under the DADT. The military needs servicemembers and gays want to serve.
You know what else? DADT is expensive. In February 2006, a University of California Blue Ribbon Commission concluded that so far, it has cost the government (meaning, us, the taxpayers) $363 million.
Don’t Ask is a failed policy. The only people who don’t think so are homophobes.
I understand what Obama is trying to do here. He’s trying to avoid a Clintonesque debacle like the one that gave us DADT in the first place.
But of everything we’re fighting for, DADT seems like it’s the least controversial and would make the most sense. If this isn’t even being looked at until 2010, then when is he going to start making good on his campaign promise of federal civil unions? When (if) he’s re-elected?
I’ve got a better idea. Why doesn’t Obama name a gay person – like Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer, say – as Secretary of Defense? That would signal real change – and give gays and lesbians real hope.
Morgan said: “The guy isn’t even in office yet and we are already second-guessing and judging him.”
I suggest that most of the second-guessing seen in so many comments on this site is not spontaneous and genuine. It started here weeks before Obama was elected and was initiated mainly by one individual, a Republican, posting under several different names. It’s a political strategy designed to spread doubt, confusion and division within the gay community.
In politics, it’s always useful to ask, “Who benefits?”
Clearly we were only important enough during the election. Now we get shelved. I don’t know why people expected Obama to be any different. I’m voting for a candidate that actually supports gays 100% next time. No more Dems.
Yes, Morgan you ARE banging up against “your fellow gays”, you are telling us to put our issues aside so Obama and Democrats can put their agenda and re-election needs ahead of our human rights and needs. And yes, gay and lesbian Americans have FINALLY and thankfully grown impatient. We’ve been preached to by the likes of you, telling us to be patient, to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism while we watch the entire western world zoom past us at the speed of light. As Americans we are impatient, we invented the Atom Bomb first to beat the Nazis, we invented the Internet, we invented planes yet you and scumbags like you are telling gay Americans to continue to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism and for what? So Democrats can get re-elected easier. HELL NO, and FUCK YOU. You may have sold your own soul to the Democratic Party for peanuts, but to hell with you if you expect even more gays and lesbians to sell out like you have, so cheap.
“Obama is not a knight in shining armor” NO SHIT SHERLOCK yet it was people like you, Morgan who sold us on the notion that Obama represented Change and that he would keep his promises. Instead Gay and Lesbian Americans were sold the political equivalent of snake oil.
“Reality is starting to creep in, isn’t it folks?” Yes it very much is, the REALITY is that Obama is NOT an ally to the gay and lesbian community, no matter what self appointed gay “leadership” like you have sold him to be.
“Don’t we all know that noone gets to be President of the USA without promising us the sun, moon and stars so to speak?” Exactly, No one gets elected without promising us the sun, moon and stars. That is the truest statement. But what’s even more sickening to gay Americans on the street, is that gay “leadership” such as you didn’t even wait for Obama to promise us marriage equality, y’all sold out yourselves and your community for the mere promise of Civil Unions, you didn’t even hold out for a better deal. And then, after Obama made his OPPOSITION to marriage equality perfectly clear, y’all went around the country convincing gay and lesbian voters that Obama secretly supported marriage equality but that he just needed to get elected. NOW that he’s elected now we have to wait for Dems to have a SUPER majority or for Obama’s re-election. Give me a fucking break. Either everything we are fighting for happens NOW or never, countless millions don’t have the time or the patience to wait until they’re dead before the change we were promised comes to pass. So people like you need to shut the fuck up and step aside.
“The guy isn’t even in office yet” NO SHIT, he isn’t even in office yet and the damage done by his administration has already begun. Obama voters in California were told by HIM via robocalls that he believed that “marriage is between one man and one woman”. Obama has been elected, by an electoral landslide and he could NOT have achieved it without gay and lesbian support, so we’re owed LOTS of political pay back and we are coming to collect. The Washington post, that you mention is a reputable paper, so when they publish rumors, they’re usually facts. Obama has been packing his cabinet with Clintonistas who sold us out back in 1992 and 1996, yet Obama didn’t run on a campaign of Clintonism but Change. Obama seems less and less likely the progressive/liberal messiah he was sold to us as. And the Post is right to keep us informed of his shenanigans, after all, elected officials are supposed to be beholden to the interests of those that put them in office. Or did you skip that civics class Morgan?!?!
“Too much playing on gay issues too early in the game is quite frankly suicidal for a brand new president” Why does this matter? Why should a gay person who is fighting in Iraq or some gay person who is losing his home after losing his job to discrimination give a shit about Obama’s political career and re-election? Why!?!?!? Why!?!?! Why the hell should gay people keep waiting for more and more decades to pass, only to see nations like South Africa, Spain and Nepal enact marriage equality?!?!? Why?!?!?
“With 58 seats in our favor, we need two more seate to be won by Democrats.” What makes you believe that all 58 Democrats in the Senate are for us?!?! Senator Byrd opposes gay rights, and quite a few Republicans such as Collins support us. Why do gay and lesbian people need to be married to the Democrats and their agenda?!?! Morgan you are more of a Democrat than a gay person, hell you are more of a Democrat than a human being, and that is NOT a compliment. Gays and lesbians have enemies in both parties and allies in both parties, it would be politically suicidal for gays to sell our souls to one political party, like you have. Partisan politics is the abyss of common sense, and gays and lesbians need to put our issues BEFORE and ABOVE partisan bullshit, lest we become as idiotic as Morgan.
You mention how everything would be possible if we only had 60 Democrats in the Senate, as if all 60 of them would be pro-gay. You also seem to discount that regardless of the number of Democrats in the Senate, we have enough people as is right now to push for a HOST of legislation and to enact it by mid 2009, if only people like you would stay out of the way, because you, Morgan, are worse than many gay enemies.
You mention the re-uniting families act, if we pushed for MARRIAGE EQUALITY on state and federal level we wouldn’t need to pass piece meal legislation to allow bi-national couples(like my own) to stay in the US. You also mentioned ENDA, DADT and repeal of DOMA, well, we need to legislate ENDA asap, which is more than possible. President Obama should sign an executive order once in office repealing DADT. And as far as DOMA, if Congress and the President are too slow to get rid of it, we should fight it in the courts, because DOMA violates the full, faith and credit clause. We don’t need Congress or Obama to win against DOMA, we were fighting and winning marriage rights in Massachusetts with a damned Mormon in office and with hostile homophobic bigots coming out of the woodwork to descend on Massachusetts. Gays and lesbians need Obama to act NOW, but he needs us far far more than we need him. We can do this alone, but the last damned thing we need, is scumbags like you Morgan telling us to keep waiting, keep taking the tranquilizing drug of gradualism until we’re all dead.
“This country is on the edge of progay change region by region with big areas of the land still very resistant.” DUH, and there is nothing that changes public opinion than change. We cannot wait until 80% of Americans support marriage equality before we work to enact it. On as we progress do we change people’s minds, and change does NOT have to take 50 or 100 years as you and scumbags like you keep telling us. There is NO reason that American gays should watch Nepal or South Africa zoom past us, while people like you keep telling us to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. It’s gays like you Morgan, which make the fight for equality harder. It’s easier to fight bold faced bigotry from the other side, then traitors and gradualists within your own ranks.
You tell us to work on what’s possible, and keep SLOWLY chipping away. I say we shoot for what you and people like you deem impossible and keep going no matter what the setbacks. From 2004 to 2008 public opinion shifted radically on gay and lesbian rights. And as we’ve learned, or at least some of us have learned, history doesn’t wait for people to be ready before change happens. So why the hell should we start NOW?!?! Why should we wait until even our enemies support marriage equality and gay rights, before we push for them!!?! Why should gay and lesbian Americans keep taking the back seat to other concerns?!?! Why should we tolerate people like Morgan in our own ranks, telling us that our issues and our concerns are secondary to someone’s or some party’s re-election chances.
1rst off lets be clear…DADT “creates no substantive nor procedural rights”. So get the idea out of your heads that there ever were any rules to the military’s longstanding game of vengeful homosexual witch-hunting at the sole discretion of military Commanders. The bottom line is at the drop of a hat without a scintilla of evidence anyone can be painted as gay and drummed out of the service without any legal recourse because they choose administrative “kangaroo” procedures that have ZERO due process at all bypassing even their own Code Of Military Justice which is in itself an oxymoron!
2nd The media always paints DADT as some service member admitting to being gay ignoring the facts that most if not all DADT discharges are retaliatory actions based on rumor, innuendo, suspicion and not by SGT Smith saying “I am Gay”
3rd The military chooses again on a whim when not to feret out gays when they have a manpower shortage or the member is needed by the Command…but once that shortage or need ends as a Thank You for for their honorable service they are ‘branded’ and treated to a less than honorable discharge vis a vis once again a “kangaroo” administrative separation.
4th Make no mistake it was Sam Nunn and his vitrol homophobe ‘buddies’ in Congress and Yup…even Colin Powell (the former Joint Chief Of Staff) who since has changed his tune…that squashed Clinton from lifting the ban in the first place and craftily codified it in 10USC654 to prevent any Presidential Order from being able to lift the ban.
Overturning the military’s ban and getting the military and the government to stay out of the private consensual bedroom is no simple task but once achieved it will be the cornerstone to opening up equality on all of the “waterfronts”
One only has to look at our neighbors military’s who were forced to drop their bans and see that had a positive effect in gaining equality
No one should be surprised. Obama does not believe in equality for gay people. OBAMA HAS MADE THAT VERY CLEAR. Obama doesn’t believe gay relationships deserve marriage equality, and he has been backtracking away from his vow to end DADT as soon as he had won the primary against Hillary. Obama’s promises are just RHETORIC. Obama is no friend to the LGBT community. Just ask Obama’s friend Donnie McClurkin!
OK, seriously? I fully expected this. And no I don’t see this as a step back. Accourding to my estimates, we won’t see DADT reversed until 2010 (probably after the mid-term elections) then DOMA won’t be repealed until 2013 (assuming a successful reelection bid) Federal civil unions won’t come around until probably 2016, (assuming democrats successfully hold the White House, which would be the first time that’s happened since Truman defeated Dewey. And then about 2021 by the time full marriage comes around.
We’re dealing with politics here people. We aren’t arguing the point with Obama, we’re arguing against the GOP. And it’s not like the Democrats are a monolithic party either. If the DNC had it’s way, we’d have at least civil unions already.
So yeah, this is gonna take a while, don’t kid yourselves. But demographics are changing and as the the WWII generation, dies off, and the baby boomers dwindle in numbers, we’ve got Gen X and Echo boomers who are at least gay neutral and gay friendly respectfully.
And who knows, maybe with Gen X and the Echo boomers becoming mobilized by Obama, these changes may come sooner.
He’s just another evangelist bigot, with a nice shiny progressive liberal wrapper.
Obama will NOT make the same mistake Clinton made in rushing into this. He wants to make certain that he cannot later be accused of having the interests of we gays and lesbians as his #1 priority (ahead of EVERYONES interests in matters of the economy, health care, etc.) Look what happened to Bill in the midterm elections when the fallout hit.
Obama is our FRIEND. But we have to be a little patient and wait for a year or so. In the meantime, sign up – don’t tell – and be patient.
Our time will come – soon – and with a minimum of perceived desperation or failure to secure the foundations of support among those who will be overseeing the process.
I know that I am banging up against my fellow gays who are riven with the typical American impatient “gots to have it all right now” whether getting it all right now is practical for a brand new president whose modus operandi and name a lot of us are simply not familiar with until the media kindly did its homework for us out there in reader-land and filled us in with snippets of Obamabilia and Onama this and that.
Obama is not a knight in shining armor able to rescue us for the debts of Bush and GOP hell as much as our fantasies crave such things, just like a crack addict madly craves his crack or a cigarette addict becomes a wreck without a nicotine fix.
Reality is starting to creep in, isn’t it folks?
Don’t we all know that noone gets to be President of the USA without promising us the sun, moon and stars so to speak? And not without endlessly campaigning for a year or more prior to election, which is something my friends in Canada find very strange.
They tell me that candidate up there campaign for a much, much shorter period of time before Canadian elections. They can’t see going through the election thing ad nauseum the way we Americans do. We should know already in a nutshell what each candidates ideas are and just go from there, because the real world has other ideas than the “feel good” stuff the guy or gal is tickling our itchy ears with. why pointlessly belabor it all month in and month out. My Canadian friends are right about that. But back to us Americans and our president-elect.
The guy isn’t even in office yet and we are already second-guessing and judging him. I see in The Washington Post that rumors are leaking out from the Obama camp. We don’t need to hear that stuff. We need actual deeds not words. We need to see him in actual action in the White House since we have now legally elected him to that office and by law he will be our actual president on January 20, 09. He is merely President-elect for now which unfortunately already sets a tone in itself as he must finish his selections for his cahinet and team now and hit the office in “running/ take off” mode on day one.
I have said it before and I am going to say it again and if displeases my readers, sorry.
Too much playing on gay issues too early in the game is quite frankly suicidal for a brand new president using up too much of his political leverage and his (in this case his)political capital too soon. Unless he has a 60% filibuster-proof seating of his fellow Democrats in this new Congress which we don’t just yet. Progay Mark Begich (Democrat mayor of Anchorage, Alaska, read on Queers United that he was part of the gay pride parade and its speech making welcome Anchorage Gay Pride)Begich and Steven’s own criminal conduct help unseat another antigay Republican.
With 58 seats in our favor, we need two more seate to be won by Democrats.
These are some of practical realities which depends on which party gets which number of seats.
Practical realities have a way of trumping gay dreams and ideals. Like this Don’t Ask.
Maybe with a filibuster proof number of Democrat seats getting rid of DADT and a host of other hot-button gay issues might be a piece of cake and the DADT is now one of the least hot of the issues, nowhere as inflammatory as gay marriage for example.
DADT is much more doable as some many well-known retired military top brass have come out public against that policy, and I sense we are headed toward a repeal of that much sooner than say DOMA. With 60 seats and popular opinion increasingly in favor axing DADT may be quite easy to do by now.
I would work on killing DADT first and come back for DOMA later after first say passing other business like ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) and then passing Uniting Families? right name? to protect binational Ameican-foreign gay couples from being split apart at the border with each person in a relationship being processed seperately as NOT FAMILY AND/OR NOT RELATED and/or from being deported as if “legal strangers to each other” with the foreign half of this same-sex couple arrangement not eligible for legal marriage or other arrangements of a recognized family arrangement. (Unlike Canada where an American man married to a Canadian man would be allowed to stay in Canada if I have that right).
We in the USA don’t have federally recognized gay marriage, but Nadler etc in our Congress was working finding a way for gay binational couples to remain here in the USA and not be split up.
So maybe those sort of things are quite possible and very easy if we have all 60 seats occupied by sympathetic Democrats.
Get those things done and come back later for DOMA. With the Federal DOMA gone, it will be even easier and faster I’d think to
wipe individual “blue” coastal states like Delaware with a growing gay population clean of their own state-level DOMAS.
Civil unions state New Jersey and the other 4 New England states have a potential for gay marriage laws of their own. New York State may be the next after all of New England to get legal gay marriage of its own. NY already recognizes out-of-state gay marriages. But the killing the federal DOMA would speed up the process throughout the country and soon states will being realizing that that faith and credit clause means thet they have to honor marriages legal in other states.
This country is on the edge of progay change region by region with big areas of the land still very resistant.
But start with what’s possible and keep chipping away. For now work on restoring gay marriage to California. I think that it is inevitable that gay marriage will one day be permanent and not reversible in that state.
It was quite a close fight in Massachusetts. But gay marriage continues to be a fact in that state as also in Connecticut where voters refused an every 20-year chance to get a rewrite of their state constitution.
Tell your congresspeople again and again about the changes you want. Speak up, object do not be silent. Because your opponents are not silent.
When less than ideal Obama finally senses where the national tide is turning, then he will have realize that is the way it is. Hetero priviledge is still strong here but its once 100% grip on our land is gradually lessening tiny bit by tiny bit. Stay tuned and speak up for what you want.
Art Carroll Said: November 21st, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Sheeesh …. cut the guy some slack …. he won’t be Prez until January 20th ….. with the entire U.S. economy circling the bowl, ‘our’ issues are the least of his concerns.
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Thank you!
How retarded is this entire topic?!?!
There are going to be millions of people out of work. Hundreds of thousands are going to lose their homes.
Let’s get some perspective here folks.
So gay guys won’t be able to have their arms legs and faces blown off for Madison Avenue.
Boo f*cking hoo.
Let’s get public works jobs going and tackle the changes to Reaganomics which have nearly destroyed us all in the last 20 years. Then of course, there’s getting off of oil.
Priorities, people!
Kwitcherbitchin.
You are so 100% right. When will we see change? I feel at this current time he just told us what we wanted to hear. Making an excuse to say we need to wait until 2010. What kind of copout is that. But I guess it is to be expected as with most politicians. They tell you what you want to hear and never follow thru on their words. Sad day when you put your hops on the shoulders of a person that you would think would know what it is like to be treated unfair and know where we are coming from when all we are asking for is the same human right as everyone else. Please my tax money is good enough to fund the war but not good enough to allow me to fight in it. I can be if we would have a draft the DADT would magically disappear as would the many different “heterosexuals” That use the excuse to get out of serving their country that is unfair and bias to us. But yet they feel so strong as to deny us our rights as citizens that want to help the country.
Sheeesh …. cut the guy some slack …. he won’t be Prez until January 20th ….. with the entire U.S. economy circling the bowl, ‘our’ issues are the least of his concerns.
I don’t trust any politician. I voted for the guy, hoping that he has the cajones to back his rhetoric, knowing full well that he has stated clearly, that he does not favor Gay ‘marriage’ …. he was the best choice / hope that we had. Let’s see how he does ….
my guess would be that he would take more chances on controversial policy changes in a second term.
If McPalin had won, we wouldn’t be debating these issues … we’d be packing to move out of the country, asap, like the smart Jews did in Germany in the early 1930’s.
Canada keeps looking better all the time.
This geographic loony-bin, and all the Christo-crazies we have running amok, is going to become more perilous for ‘us’ if the economy tanks …. desperate people do desperate things, and there will be no shortage of nutcase preachers blaming ‘us’ for the fall of the Empire.
Obama backtracking on a promise! No!
We didn’t really see this one coming now did we?? If he’s already backtracking on DADT then one can only imagine what he’s going to do about the repeal of DOMA. Can we say dumpster. Like the slogan went, Si se puede, yes he can.
Obama is not even President yet! Our Country is unraveling at its foundations. It is up to us to put pressure on our Representatives so they put some pressure on Obama. If Obama does not repsond to this political pressure we should not support him if he runs again. But, give him a chance to get into office and try to see the entire field he is managing…then apply surgical pressure.
Since the story was from an interview with Aubrey Sarvis of the Service Members Legal Defense Network, I think that it’s proabaly a pretty good source.
Service Members Legal Defense Network a Right Wing Operation?