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Loading ...Obama posts campaign pledges on LGBT rights
11.19.2008 9:41am EST
(Washington) President-elect Barack Obama has laid out his commitment to LGBT civil rights in an eight-point plan posted on his transition Web site.
It calls for passage of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act; a gender-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act; repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act; opposition to any attempt to reintroduce an amendment to the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, support for inclusive adoption rights; and an expanded war on HIV/AIDS.The program is identical to Obama’s positions during the campaign and LGBT rights groups said it shows that the president-elect is committed to keeping his word.
The Matthew Shepard Hate Crime Act would add sexual orientation to the list of categories covered under federal hate crime law. It passed the House in 2007 and the White House threatened to veto it. In an effort to get around a veto, the Senate version was tied to the 2008 defense authorization bill. It passed but then went to conference, where it was stripped out.
Obama was a co-sponsor of the bill. On his transition Web site, Obama notes that in 2004, crimes against LGBT Americans constituted the third-highest category of hate crime reported, making up more than 15 percent. As a state senator in Illinois, Obama helped pass tough legislation that made hate crimes – and cthe onspiracy to commit them - against the law.
Obama, in his eight-point plan, also supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and says it must include gender identity.
ENDA passed the US House in 2007 without protections for the transgendered, but was not taken up by the Senate.
The legislation would make it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in hiring, firing, promoting or paying an employee.
ENDA as originally introduced by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) included transpeople, but Frank removed those protections in committee, saying it would be impossible to pass the bill if it included gender identity.
More than a dozen LGBT groups immediately distanced themselves from the legislation. Frank has since said he would fight to ensure an inclusive ENDA is passed.
Obama’s support for an inclusive ENDA virtually assures it will include gender identity when it is reintroduced in the next session of Congress.
“While an increasing number of employers have extended benefits to their employees’ domestic partners, discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace occurs with no federal legal remedy,” Obama says on the transition site.
Legislation to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the ban on gays serving openly in the military, was taken up in committee this year for the first time, but did not make it to a vote.
DADT was enacted in 1993. Since then more than 12,000 servicemembers have been dismissed when it was learned they are gay. According to statistics from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which advocates for gays in the military, an average of two service members each day are dismissed under the law .
“The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve. Discrimination should be prohibited,” the Obama transition site says.
“Obama will work with military leaders to repeal the current policy and ensure it helps accomplish our national defense goals.”
The Web site also touts Obama’s commitment to same-sex families, but he remains reluctant to support gay marriage.
“Barack Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples.” the transition site says.
“Obama also believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions. These rights and benefits include the right to assist a loved one in times of emergency, the right to equal health insurance and other employment benefits, and property rights,” the Web site says.
He also supports adoption rights for all couples “regardless of their sexual orientation.”
Obama’s plan also offers a comprehensive plan for combating HIV/AIDS.
“In the first year of his presidency, Barack Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities,” the Web site says.
Part of that plan would see a diminished role for the Bush administration’s dependence on abstinence education, as well as distributing contraceptives in prisons and lifting the federal ban on needle exchanges.
cm said “Yes, our all-hailed President elect has kept his pledge to keep us 2nd class citizens. To not allow our partners or husbands or wives to immigrate to this country, to not allow us to have the same right to marry as heterosexual rapists, murderers, and serial killers do. To not ensure that our rights are recognized in every state, and not just in some. His pledge to make sure that our relationship are separate… BUT equal.
All hail the great president elect.”
Thank you, WAYNE. I am tired of all the focus on the single issue of a word. Those eight points are incredibly important to us. If you are going to get hung up on civil unions alone to continue bashing Obama, you really are WAYNE. That is more of a force for negativism and self-loathing than anything any elected official can or can’t do. WAYNE swore Obama would do absolutely nothing for LGBT rights. Well, here is the proof of intent. Suddenly, crickets chirruping, no WAYNE, but here is cm singing the same song and dance. It is up to Congress to get those things done, so that Obama can actually sign them. Remember that.
“I personally believe AIDS can be cured already, but it’s far too profitable to merely treat the symptoms and let the third world die off (along with the gays and blacks.)”
Actually, this is partly true. There IS a cure of sorts for AIDS, but it’s much too expensive and dangerous to be applied to anyone (it has about a 1/3 chance of killing you), especially people in the third world, since the cure makes you more susceptible to third world diseases. So you wouldn’t have AIDS anymore, but you’d probably die of malaria and such pretty fast.
Ophi said “Do I think he will be able to accomplish legal equality? I don’t know.”
I think he won’t be able to accomplish squat, let me explain. Legislation doesn’t come from the President, it comes from the Legislature (Congress), the Senate and House. He is saying he will sign the bills into law should they come across his desk (as opposed to Bush who would veto), and maybe will push Congress to act on the “bigger deal” ones (HIV, Mathew Shepard, the ones that most of the country (c)would support).
Overall, he (we) need Congress to get on this. We need to call, write, email our reps and senators to tell them we want them to bring this up. If they want our vote, they need to represent us.
Make no mistake, I support Obama, but his support for us mean NOTHING without Congress passing the bills.
cm said: “Yes, our all-hailed President elect has kept his pledge to keep us 2nd class citizens.”
Yeah, voting for McCain/Palin and the religious right would have been so much better for us.
I think federal civil unions would be a great idea. It’s still too soon to have same-sex marriage nation wide. People just aren’t ready for yet. Yes, we’re ready for it, but too many people are still ignorant. Civil rights don’t just happen over night, we have to do these kind of things in small steps and if you disagree with me I beg you to please read a good history book.
Well, this is certainly good rhetoric as platforms go, and it will be interesting to see what develops. I do think we need to be careful here for two reasons.
First, as we learned from the Clinton era, stirring the cultural pot without dedicated resolve and political capital can lead backwards as well as forwards. The Clinton era gave us DOMA and DADT, and he was supposedly a GLBT ally. If I recall, Clinton actually even signed DOMA–when he didn’t even have to.
Second, there is a deep hypocrisy in the Obama position, which makes me distrust him here. For he is either obscruing his real feelings about gay marriage for political expediency, which I find hypocritical, or he truly believes gays are separate an unequal and not deserving of actual marriage, which is at heart a problematic formation riddled with a racist homophobia.
We can parse the difference all we want between politics and religion, but any which way it is parsed, there is something of a foundational hyporcrisy here, and I fear such will weaken the will for resolution to GLBT issues.
Also, how do you parse the religion here and not implicitly uphold the history of Christianity being used to uphold slavery and the colonial project, and how do you avoid upholding variously oppressive religious ideals, like the Mormon position on blacks or even the foundational misogyny at the heart of Christianity. If we must have a slice of religion, I think we must also own the rest of the religious cake.
Time will tell.
First of all let’s start with this unnecessarily redundant and useless institution known as a civil union. Marriage is and has always been a civil contract, therefore there is NO reason under the sun to establish an entirely separate and unequal institution to serve as a gay version of marriage. The only reason people support civil unions for gays and marriage for heteros is animus towards gays and lesbians, no matter how mild. On the issue of the civil-ness of marriage as it is, in Rome, long before Judaism or Christianity came into the western world marriage was called status civilitus or civil status. Civil Unions, invented in Vermont in 1999 as a second class gay “marriage”, in every state they’ve been used, have been a complete failure. So not only do I oppose civil unions, I oppose civil unions far more than nothing at all. If we accept civil unions, we’re making the civil rights equivalent of accepting 100,000 dollars out of court when we’re owed 100 million. Civil unions are a sick and evil joke, which gay people should reject as nothing less than soft-bigotry.
NOW, Onto the rest of Obama’s promises to us. On the first day he’s in office, he should sign multiple executive orders, one to repeal DOMA, which violates the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution so that same-sex couples MARRIED in Massachusetts and Connecticut can move from state to state without divorcing when they cross the state line. He also needs to sign an executive order banning all anti-gay discrimination in ALL 50 states, until congress passes a comprehensive SONDA(Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act). He also needs to sign an executive order instructing the federal government to recognize ALL marriages contracted both abroad and within the country as equal, in all regards from taxes, to immigration to social security. Not only should he, by executive order, lift the ban on gays serving in the military, he should immediately instruct the military to pay out spousal benefits to gay and lesbian partners of service personnel killed or wounded since the start of our War on Terror.
Obama wants to throw us crumbs and there are fools within our community and self appointed “leaders” who sell themselves and us out short. Obama has a lot of political capital, most of which is on credit. And since gay voters overwhelmingly supported him, much of that capital is owed back to us as a community and we should do all we can to collect on it.
I for one didn’t vote for Obama, I refused to vote for anyone who didn’t support marriage equality 100%. I took alot of b*llsh*t from people and former friends because I refused to support Obama. I was told that he supports marriage equality, but just can’t get elected if he says he does. I was lambasted by supposedly non-homophobic people who called me selfish for wanting to be treated equally under the law, through marriage equality. As far as I am concerned, Obama’s opposition to marriage equality was quite clear to everyone who had a brain and ears to listen, but too many people only wanted to hear what they wanted to hear. Obama is not an ally to the gay community, he is an enemy. His voice and statements in opposition to marriage equality were used by robo-callers to stir up black homophobia in California. He has only made small baby steps and people are acting like he’s walking on the moon or mars.
Gay Americans need to stop selling themselves and their community short. We need to harness anger and impatience and we need to press for the “Change” that Obama and his zealot followers promised us, or yet again we’ll be having Deja vu William Jefferson Clinton.
Can’t compare B. Clinton with Obama, as Obama just may pull thru on LGBT rights,
that is why many of us did not support H.Clinton for the fear of idle promises.
“I’d go for practical and secure.”
That’s why they do it, to lure your in. Why sacrifice your principles like that? Don’t sell yourself and other gay people out just because it’s easier to do!
What’s needed is a national public health study about the results for POTENTIAL sex partners practicing the strategy, and how widespread is being practiced the strategy of “Let’s get tested TOGETHER BEFORE we have sex, for A VARIETY of STDs.”
Sexual health checkups reduce ambiguity/risks and can be like anything else POTENTIAL sex partners might do together.
Society is constantly EVOLVING; calling for a REVOLUTION, however much you think could be “accomplished overnight”, is not the way to go. Time to grow up and accept that gays live in the world with other people of equal value, some of whom disagree with us. REASON is our tool, and it should guide our collective actions, Mr. Moore.
Our society is sadly imperfect, and we must recognize that we must all grow together. I agree that we should never rest our voices until we are treated equally, but neither should we waste another minute ranting and crying.
When I read cynicism in these reader comments, combined with disconnection from the process (”I’ll just stand back, and wait and see if he delivers!”), combined with narrow mindedness (”if he’s not with us on marriage support, he’s not with us”), combined with lack of sound political strategy (implementing federal civil unions is such a strategically BAD idea right now…it would generate the much feared culture-war atmosphere…too many states aren’t ready), I grow concerned for our community.
Let’s get behind both this man and our allies in Congress. They had the votes for ENDA a few years ago, but couldn’t get around a Republican filibuster and a presidential veto. Let’s get these baseline rights in place. And let’s give both our congressional leaders and the president latitude to do this work in a time frame that does NOT create a culture-war backlash like the one we experienced when Clinton tried to integrate the armed forces across sexual orientation. In other words, if it would be more effective to set up some bogus committee internal to the armed forces to “look into” DADT (pretending that it hadn’t been done before several times), if it would help that military culture to feel as if the idea of repeal was coming from them and was under their control, and if taking a few years to get that committee report and positioning it to the American people would help ease the transition, then, please, cut the poor guy some slack!
The real test is to compare what got done at the end of four years with what is in this document. It’s wayyy too early to judge the guy on anything other than, as another poster put it, “intent.”
And just one more note on marriage: leave the federal fight alone for a few years, and strategically focus on some states. With the right efforts, it is possible to get a string of states on board with gay marriage between now and 2012 or so, and the string could run along the eastern seaboard from Maryland up through Maine. (VT, NH, and NJ are closing in on it, but still need our work and support.) Establishing a string of states that implement gay marriage would do more for the cause than ramming through a civil unions law on the federal level. What we really need are a number of states showing how normal gay marriage is and how “the earth didn’t implode.” Right now, unfortunately, they are able to paint marriage as a “weird MA thing, and we all know how crazy those MA liberals are.” But they can’t say that about NH, NJ, or Maine.
It would be using the states rights versus federal rights methodology in the way that our founders intended it: the states are the laboratories, and things become federalized only after a consensus builds. It’s really a good system. It prevents states that ARE ready for a change to experiment with it, without forcing the states that aren’t ready to do something against their will.
Can we take a moment to compare who’s been in office for the last eight years and who’s taking office now?
I’m not saying sit on our laurels, we certainly haven’t “won” or anything like that, but perhaps we can conduct our fight for equal rights a little bit more joyously now that we have a friend in office?
Maybe I’m a cynic. I shouldn’t be. My husband and I were married in Massachusetts this past September. We adopted our son together in New York a few years ago. Complete joint equal parents under the (state) law. So why do I find Mr. Obama’s eight points to be, I don’t know, somewhat of a pipe dream or a set of hollow promises? Yes, I voted against McCain. But did I vote FOR Obama? Or just for the less fearful choice. I want to believe he can accomplish these things, but as others pointed out, he can’t really make these changes happen without legislative support. Even now here in NY, there are democrats, newly elected, who threaten to side with republicans against us. The word marriage is important. To “them” as well as “us.” Coupled with the word “civil” it is very enticing. After all, many countries require a civil marriage. Religious marriages are optional. But civil “unions” will never be created to grant 100% equal legal status to marriage. Because then they’d have to be open to any two adults (like they are in France). And that would never pass because it would be perceived to weaken the institution of marriage in so many people’s minds (including the legislators who have to pass the laws). I want to believe that change will come. But eight points on a website, while appealing, don’t guarantee anything. We do need to keep the pressure on. And yes, civil rights take time. But that’s no excuse to accept a few crumbs and morsels and go away happy. Civil rights are won through united strategies and networking and protests and demanding them. (and Timmy, people are ready to accept same sex marriage. The tens of thousands of couples who made that leap across the country didn’t do it alone – hell, the higher profiled ones made it into TV, newspapers, even the cover of People magazine. So, the concepts and the realities have made it into the mainstream, and the world didn’t end).
“REASON is our tool,..”
Reason only works with reasonable people though.