I'd like to speak up in favor of the White House statement on the two anti-gay referenda. It is easy to be cynical about the statement, and there is certainly no shortage of evidence to support cynicism. But it will help.
Here is the statement:
â¨"The President has long opposed divisive and discriminatory efforts to deny rights and benefits to same-sex couples, and as he said at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, he believes 'strongly in stopping laws designed to take rights away.' Also at the dinner, he said he supports, 'ensuring that committed gay couples have the same rights and responsibilities afforded to any married couple in this country.'"
Andrew may be right that the President is not putting his weight behind us in either Maine or Washington, but the politics of this issue is not so straightforward. This one's a bank shot.
Obama is not going to support gay marriage yet. End of sentence. There is no rational or moral reason for his position, and he knows enough not to even try to offer one. It's an assertion without a foundation, and one that more than half of all Americans continue to believe.
But we have two very close elections to worry about now. One is in Maine with California's Frank Schubert at the helm again trying to terrify voters about gay marriage. Schubert is as savvy and dangerous a political flack as exists, and he'll use anything to win - including Obama's on the record statement to Rick Warren expressing his personal belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Obama is not going to take back his statement to Warren. But when the White House says, in an official statement, that Obama believes "strongly" in stopping laws "designed to take rights away" (as Maine's referendum is), our side is no longer defenseless when and if Schubert tries to use the President's words against us.
It is not perfect, and it is not what we need most. But it is more than the nothing Obama gave us in California.
And it is a little more than that in Washington State. A contemporaneous statement of his support for our equal rights will go a long way to help us approve Referendum 71. While the opposition is doing everything it can to make that election, too, about same-sex marriage, it is not. Washington's legislature has been working incrementally to make domestic partnership there more equal to marriage, and passed a law that does exactly what the President said - and now says again - that he supports. Again, it is not perfect, and it is not what we need most. But it is not nothing, and our side will be able to use the President's words, dated this month.
I fully understand and share the frustration of people who want more from the President. The nation has changed since Bill Clinton was in the White House. But we can't forget the fundamental lesson from the 1990s: When it comes to gay rights, it's not the principle that is most potent, it's the backlash. Clinton did not want to sign either DADT or DOMA (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). In both of those cases, he was dealing with incendiary reactions to pro-gay statements. And both were compromises to proposals that would have been worse: a complete ban on gays in the military and a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage.
The nation has moved a lot on DADT and civil unions. But it hasn't moved enough yet on marriage, where 53% of Americans still haven't come around. They will. I, too, would like to see Obama lead the nation into its best instincts on this issue rather than follow its worst.
But if we can win in both Maine and Washington, I think we will have turned a corner. Obama's statement does help us some in both states, and we should use it for all it's worth.