As the Obama administration goes to court in support of "don't ask, don't tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act, Michelangelo Signorile wonders if it's gay leaders who are to blame.
The disappointment many of us felt with President Obama over the Rick Warren debacle last January boiled over into full-fledged rage in June, when the president's own Justice Department, using the kind of language that would make Warren proud, tried to block a legal challenge to the antigay Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.
But in our rage, it's important to remember that the president's progress -- or lack thereof -- on gay issues is as much a reflection of the private advice and public stands of those gay advocates who have access to the White House as it is a product of the intentions and actions of the administration.
The Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest gay political group, gave the administration cover early on -- largely remaining silent, or even defending the White House, while grassroots activists and pro-gay media figures and bloggers protested the silence out of Washington. In May, HRC's Joe Solmonese came out of a meeting with administration officials saying that the president had a "plan" for moving forward on gay rights legislation. No one else has been informed of this plan, and it's unclear if action on DOMA was part of it.
But it appears that the Justice Department's DOMA brief in June -- along with a charge a week earlier on the website The Daily Beast that HRC was cutting deals with the White House and accepting its inaction on "don't ask, don't tell" (an allegation HRC calls a lie) -- seems to have nudged the Human Rights Campaign to be more vocal. In response to the DOMA brief, Solmonese sent a strongly worded letter to the president that actually reminded Obama that we are "human beings" as it criticized the brief's arguments.
But the big question remains: How far will HRC go in keeping the pressure on the president, and did the cover the group provided early on give the administration the sense that the gay movement would just lie down and get trampled?
In its brief, intended to block a legal challenge to California's Proposition 8 and DOMA filed last December by California couple Arthur Smelt and Christopher Hammer, the Justice Department stated that, "Section 3 of DOMA does not distinguish among persons of different sexual orientations, but rather it limits federal benefits to those who have entered into the traditional form of marriage."
In other words, the administration is arguing that gay people, like anybody else, can get married if they want-as long as it's to someone of the opposite sex! Thus, gay people are not discriminated against.
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Signorile's radio show airs weekdays on Sirius OutQ and XM89. This article is representative of the author's views and not those of Advocate.com.