Showing posts with label intolerance LGBT. Show all posts

Aug 18, 2009

Obama Calls for Repeal of Defense of Marriage Act

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The Obama administration distanced itself Monday from legal arguments it had made earlier this summer, taking pains to remove and renounce language that had outraged advocates in the gay community in a case that centers on the constitutionality of a same-sex marriage law.

In a filing by the Justice Department, administration lawyers made it clear for the first time in court that the president thinks the 13-year-old Defense of Marriage Act, which denies benefits to domestic partners of federal employees and allows states to reject same-sex marriages performed in other states, discriminates against gays and should be repealed.

A lawsuit challenging the law, which is proceeding in a district court in California, became a touchstone this summer after leaders of the Human Rights Campaign and other prominent advocacy groups for gay men and lesbians complained to the White House about its slow pace in dealing with marriage, adoption, insurance and other hot-button issues important to the gay community.

Under decades of bipartisan tradition, the Justice Department is obliged to defend statutes passed by Congress, regardless of the political imperatives of the president. But gay activists registered their pique after government lawyers filed a brief in June that included language that appeared to equate same-sex marriage with incest and pedophilia. In another passage, the lawyers wrote that heterosexual marriage is "the traditional and universally recognized form."

Neither argument appears in a follow-up brief the Justice Department filed Monday. Senior trial counsel W. Scott Simpson embraced findings by researchers and prominent medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association, in saying "that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as likely to be well-adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents."

And, in an unusual turn, Obama issued a statement Monday affirming that he would continue to seek repeal of the law, which has been upheld by federal judges in Florida and Washington state. The president said that he would "examine and implement measures that will help extend rights and benefits to (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) couples under existing law."

Government lawyers continued to assert that the law passes constitutional muster, but they pointed to narrow grounds in seeking dismissal of the California case, Smelt v. United States. "The Justice Department cannot pick and choose which federal laws it will defend based on any one Administration's policy preferences," department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said.

Prominent gay rights advocates expressed satisfaction with the Justice Department's action Monday, as they turned up the heat on the White House to work with allies in Congress to overturn the 1996 law. Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, called on the president anew to take a "leadership role" in repealing the Defense of Marriage Act.

"It is not enough to disavow this discriminatory law, and then wait for Congress or the courts to act," Solmonese said. "While they contend that it is the DOJ's duty to defend an act of Congress, we contend that it is the Administration's duty to defend every citizen from discrimination."

Robert Raben, a Justice Department official in the 1990s who owns a Washington lobbying firm, said that the administration had "obviously heard deep concern" from advocates who expressed indignation at the initial court filing.

"Between the Department of Justice and the White House, they did the best they could possibly do," Raben said in an interview. "It's their job to defend statutes, even lousy ones. The issue now becomes, let's get down to repealing DOMA."

The Obama administration, managing a busy and complicated legislative agenda, has not begun working with Congress to repeal the act, congressional and White House sources said. Dissatisfaction in the gay and lesbian community peaked in June, when some donors canceled plans to attend a Democratic National Committee fundraiser.

That month, Obama signed a memorandum that gives same-sex partners of federal employees access to long-term-care insurance benefits and allows civil servants to use sick leave to care for ailing domestic partners and children.

At a Washington conference in June, White House Staff Secretary Lisa Brown and vice presidential chief of staff Ronald Klain acknowledged dissatisfaction among the president's gay supporters.

"There's no question . . . that there were some cites in there that should not have been" in the earlier filing, Brown said at the American Constitution Society's annual conference, noting that this was her personal opinion. "The administration is trying hard; it's moving slowly," Brown said at the time.

Staff writer Scott Wilson contributed to this report.

“They Want Us Exterminated” — Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq

“They Want Us Exterminated” — Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq
Source: Human Rights Watch

This 67-page report documents a wide-reaching campaign of extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, and torture of gay men that began in early 2009. The killings began in the vast Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, a stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, and spread to many cities across Iraq. Mahdi Army spokesmen have promoted fears about the “third sex” and the “feminization” of Iraq men, and suggested that militia action was the remedy. Some people told Human Rights Watch that Iraqi security forces have colluded and joined in the killing.

Jun 30, 2009

Obama's Stonewall

Comment

By Richard Kim

In 1996, when Barack Obama was running for the Illinois Senate, he was asked in a survey by Outlines, a gay community newspaper in Chicago, if he supported same-sex marriage. Unlike most candidates, who merely indicated yes or no, Obama took the unusual step of typing in his response, to which he affixed his signature. Back then not a single state permitted same-sex marriage, and sodomy was a crime. Nonetheless, Obama took a position on the progressive edge of the Democratic Party, and he did so with unmistakable clarity: "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."

Since then, as Obama traced his dazzling arc to the presidency, his stance on gay rights has become murkier, wordier, less courageous, more Clintonian. During his 2004 US Senate bid, he stated that he supports domestic partnerships and civil unions instead of same-sex marriage. When speaking to gay audiences, he explained his new position as "primarily just...a strategic issue." But on bigger stages he cited his Christian faith as grounds for his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman, a view he reiterated during the 2008 presidential election even while he also asserted, inconsistently, that religion should not dictate a state's approach to gay rights.

As president, Obama has made similar equivocations on gay rights. As a senator and as a candidate, he won the vocal support of the vast majority of gays and lesbians by calling for the repeal of both the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the miserable failure that is "don't ask, don't tell," and by supporting full federal partnership rights (but not same-sex marriage) and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would make it illegal to fire someone because of his or her sexual orientation. But he has so far spent no political capital to turn these promises into reality. Quite to the contrary, Obama's slide hit what one hopes will be a nadir on June 12 when his administration filed a brief defending the legality of DOMA by comparing same-sex marriage to incest and pedophilia.

It is impossible to accept that a president who owes so much to movements for civil rights and social justice, never mind the Obama of 1996, believes in such right-wing bigotry; the only plausible explanation can be one of political calculation. The memory of Bill Clinton's early failure to integrate the military, as well as the aftermath of the 2004 election, when same-sex marriage was blamed for John Kerry's loss, looms large in the minds of top Democratic strategists. Guided by veterans of the Clinton-era culture wars like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the prevailing wisdom in the White House seems to be that a forward push on gay rights can only endanger what the Democratic Party hopes will be a lasting majority and would squander precious political capital better used on issues like healthcare and economic reform.

Such logic, however, is quickly becoming obsolete. Six states have legalized gay marriage. Democrats like Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine have renounced support for civil unions and embraced same-sex marriage, with Corzine having done so as a centerpiece of his re-election bid. Gen. John Shalikashvili, Clinton's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a cadre of military leaders have publicly called for an end to "don't ask, don't tell." Huge majorities of Americans, 89 percent in a 2008 Gallup poll, support workplace rights for gays and lesbians. Steve Schmidt, John McCain's campaign manager, and former Vice President Cheney have announced their support for same-sex marriage; and Utah's Republican governor, Jon Huntsman, came out in favor of civil unions, a switch that has not eroded his popularity in Mormon country one bit. At this rate, Obama is in danger of being outpaced on gay rights not just by the American people but by the nonsuicidal wing of the Republican Party.

There is still time for a course correction. In the wake of an uproar from gay activists and progressives, Obama signed a memo extending limited benefits to partners of gay federal employees (but not healthcare or inheritance rights); reiterated his intent to repeal DOMA; and voiced support for legislation that would, in the interim, give healthcare to same-sex partners of federal workers. But words are no longer enough. Now is the time for Obama to act with the full authority of his office and his character to pass a gay rights agenda that, in the end, will be seen as neither particularly radical nor particularly partisan but as a simple matter of fairness under the law.

A promising first step would be to fast-track passage of ENDA. A previous version passed the House by a vote of 235 to 184 in 2007, with thirty-five Republicans in favor, before dying under the threat of a Bush veto. Congressman Barney Frank introduced a stronger version that includes protections for transgender people on June 24, just before the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, which ignited the modern gay rights movement.

In those forty years, and especially in the past decade, the arc of the moral universe, as Obama is fond of saying on other matters, has bent toward justice. So much so that the question is no longer, Can the Obama administration afford to support gay rights with full-throated passion--but rather, Can it afford not to?

Jun 28, 2009

Political Memo - Political Shifts on Gay Rights Lag Behind Culture

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON — For 15 minutes in the Oval Office the other day, one of President Obama’s top campaign lieutenants, Steve Hildebrand, told the president about the “hurt, anxiety and anger” that he and other gay supporters felt over the slow pace of the White House’s engagement with gay issues.

But on Monday, 250 gay leaders are to join Mr. Obama in the East Room to commemorate publicly the 40th anniversary of the birth of the modern gay rights movement: a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. By contrast, the first time gay leaders were invited to the White House, in March 1977, they met a midlevel aide on a Saturday when the press and President Jimmy Carter were nowhere in sight.

The conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay issues reflect a broader paradox: even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents.

It is reflected in the surge of gay men and lesbians on television and in public office, and in polls measuring a steady rise in support for gay rights measures. Despite approval in California of a ballot measure banning same-sex marriage, it has been authorized in six states.

Yet if the culture is moving on, national politics is not, or at least not as rapidly. Mr. Obama has yet to fulfill a campaign promise to repeal the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The prospects that Congress will ever send him a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters: Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, sent a letter to clerics in his state arguing that it would be destructive to “faith, families and freedom.”

“America is changing more quickly than the government,” said Linda Ketner, a gay Democrat from South Carolina who came within four percentage points of winning a Congressional seat in November. “They are lagging behind the crowd. But if I remember my poli sci from college, isn’t that the way it always works?”

Some elected Democrats in Washington remain wary because they remember how conservatives used same-sex marriage and gay service in the military against them as political issues. The Obama White House in particular is reluctant to embrace gay rights issues now, officials there say, because they do not want to provide social conservatives a rallying cry while the president is trying to assemble legislative coalitions on health care and other initiatives.

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a group that opposes gay rights initiatives, said Mr. Obama’s reluctance to push more assertively for gay rights reflected public opinion.

“He’s given them a few minor concessions; they’re asking for more, such as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ being repealed,” Mr. Perkins said. “The administration is not willing to go there, and I think there’s a reason for that, and that is because I think the American public isn’t there.”

Conservative Democrats have at best been unenthusiastic about efforts to push gay rights measures in Congress; 30 Democrats voted against a bill prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation that passed the House in 2007. (It died in the Senate.) And a half-dozen Democrats declined requests to discuss this issue, reflecting what aides called the complicated politics surrounding it.

Still, there are signs that the issue is not as pressing or toxic as it once was. “I don’t think it’s the political deal-breaker it once was,” said Dave Saunders, a southern Virginia Democratic consultant who has advised Democrats running for office in conservative rural areas. “Most people out here really don’t care because everybody has gay friends.”

Interviews with gay leaders suggest a consensus that there has been nothing short of a cultural transformation in the space of just a few years, even if it is reflected more in the evolving culture of the country than in the body of its laws.

“The diminution of the homophobia has been as important a phenomena as anything we’ve seen in the last 15 years,” said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who is gay.

Democrats now control the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time since 1994, increasing the chances of legislative action. Mr. Frank said that over the next two years, he expected Congress to overturn the ban on gay service in the military, pass legislation prohibiting discrimination against hiring gay workers, and extend the hate-crime bill to crimes involving gay couples.

There is also an emerging generational divide on gay issues — younger Americans tend to have more liberal positions — that has fueled what pollsters said was a measurable liberalization in views on gay rights over the past decade.

A New York Times/CBS News poll last spring found that 57 percent of people under 40 said they supported same-sex marriage, compared with 31 percent of respondents over 40. Andy Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, said the generational shift was reflected in his polling, in which the number of Americans opposing gay people serving openly in the military had dropped to 32 percent now from 45 percent in 1994.

David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser, said, “You look at polling and attitudes among younger people on these issues are startlingly different than older people.”

“As generational change happens,” Mr. Axelrod added, “that’s going to be more and more true.”

In the view of many gay leaders, the shifts in public attitude are a validation of the central political goal set by the dozens of gay liberation groups that sprouted up in cities and on college campuses in the months after the Stonewall uprising: to have gay men and lesbians who had been living in secret go public as a way of dealing with societal fear and prejudice.

But there is considerable evidence that this is still an issue that stirs political concerns. Gay leaders have increasingly complained about what they call Mr. Obama’s slow pace in fulfilling promises he made during his campaign. Some boycotted a Democratic Party fund-raiser recently to show their distress.

“I have been really surprised how paralyzed they seem around this,” said Richard Socarides, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay issues.

Mr. Hildebrand did not respond to calls and e-mail messages asking about his encounter with Mr. Obama, which he described in a private e-mail forum for gay political leaders. (The meeting was confirmed by senior White House officials.)

Still, David Mixner, a longtime gay leader, said he was struck by how things had changed.

“Listen,” Mr. Mixner said, “in 1992, what we were begging Bill Clinton about — literally — about whether he was going to say the word ‘gay’ in his convention speech. Even say it. We had to threaten a walkout to get it in.”

Jun 17, 2009