IGF CultureWatch

There’s no shortage of commentary and analysis about the repeal of DADT, so I’ll just add a brief thought.

A number of people showed amazing, active leadership to get this done.  Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Murphy in the House, Dan Choi and all the folks at Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen; even Lady Gaga deserves a tip of the hat.

But I want to say a word for a different kind of leadership, the kind that takes place out of the limelight.  Barack Obama, in particular, gave us several measured and tailored statements of support, none of them exhibiting the kind of inspiring rhetoric that will live on in the history of political oratory.  He has taken no end of criticism for failing to live up to his self-description as our “fierce advocate.”

But as the Rolling Stones observed, you may not always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.  What we should have learned from Bill Clinton’s spectacular failure on this issue is that a large component of vitriolic unfairness is built into it, and can and will be exploited easily enough.  When Clinton promised he would resolve the problem of gays in the military with the stroke of a pen, he gave Sam Nunn an engraved invitation to visit those infamous submarine bunks, and paved the way for Republicans to invoke the most fearsome set of showers since World War II.

This is the kind of political problem that can best be solved more indirectly.   There was no doubt about the public support for repeal, and while there was concern about how the troops would view it, that turned out to be based on the same wishful thinking by the right as everything else in the area of gay equality.  But even in the face of genuine popular support, the equally genuine, gut-level ugliness of the minority also has to be negotiated.

That is Obama’s real triumph, and he proved to be quite right about how you approach the problem.  Rather than offer up the moral leadership of the presidency as a target, and risk yet another failure, he allowed the focus of the animosity to diffuse, letting the political poison seep out in less toxic doses.

That’s not the kind of celebrity leadership that makes a president a short-term hero to a constituency group, and leaves nothing but moral victories in its wake – if a president is lucky enough to get even one of those.  It’s a brand of political leadership that is antithetical to our desire for immediate gratification, but is better for our long-term health.  Andrew Sullivan has called this Obama’s Long Game, and that gets it exactly right.

Harry Reid was complicit in this strategy to get us what we needed, not merely what we wanted.  Reid doesn’t have the oratorical gifts Obama has, but he doesn’t need them.  There are times when I wish Reid could give a speech with the conviction that Newt Gingrich had.  But Reid’s low blood-pressure style is what allows him to get the results that Gingrich could only promise in his failed House leadership.

There are a lot of different styles of politics, and despite what the media and the spokespeople would like us to believe, there is an enormous amount of politics that takes place quietly, thoughtfully and without fanfare, until the fanfare is actually warranted.  That is how the embarrassment of DADT was ultimately removed from the law.

May its slander rest in peace.

From the Washington Post: “A Senate vote Saturday cleared the way for final passage of a bill to end the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy…. Fifty-seven members of the Senate Democratic caucus and six Republicans—Sens. Scott Brown (Mass.), Susan Collins (Maine), Mark Kirk (Ill.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and George Voinovich (Ohio) —voted yes” on the procedural vote (that is, the vote to have a vote).

In the final 65-to-31 vote taken Saturday afternoon, two additional GOP senators supported repeal: Richard Burr (N.C.) and John Ensign (Nev.).

If the military report had been requested earlier and finished before the final month of the 111th Congress, and if the Democratic leadership had made it a priority, the repeal could have happened sooner. GOP senators Collins, Snowe and Brown, in particular, didn’t just become socially moderate.

But with the incoming GOP-controlled House, the path is blocked in terms of further legislative advances. It will be up to the courts to modify the Defense of Marriage Act’s ban on federal recognition of state-authorized same-sex unions. And the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which during the two years of a Democrat-controlled Congress never made it out of committee, is dead. (In 2007, during the 110th Congress, the House had passed a version of ENDA covering sexual orientation but not gender identity.)

More. The change won’t take effect right away. After being signed into law, the president and his top military advisers must certify that lifting the ban won’t hurt troops’ fighting ability. After that occurs, there’s a 60-day waiting period.

Furthermore. It’s worth noting that the Dream Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for children brought into this country at a young age by their parents, was set up to fail, just as “don’t ask” repeal was set up to fail until this week. The Senate Democratic leadership allowed no committee hearings on the controversial measure, and then in the final weeks of the congress brought it to the floor with truncated debate and no process for voting on amendments. It failed to achieve cloture, letting Democrats continue to paint the GOP as the “enemies” of Hispanics.

So, after two years of inaction and shenanigans over “don’t ask” repeal, tying it to a complicated Defense Authorization measure and allowing no debate or amendments, why did Harry Reid at long last move forward a separate measure that, surprise, garnered eight Republican votes? I think many (not all) activists and many (not all) left-progressive bloggers finally demanded an end to the gaming and threatened to blame Democrats as well as Republicans for failure (see, for example, Richard Grenell at the Huffington Post, as previously referenced). The threat to withhold dollars and support pushed the Democrats to give in and allow “don’t ask” repeal to be legitimately presented and passed. Unfortunately, Hispanic activists let the party have its way in order to keep the Hispanic vote tied to the Democratic party through 2012.

Still more. From Slate:

While undoubtedly a step forward, repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t suddenly establish a legal principle that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and also doesn’t allow transgendered individuals to serve in the military. [emphasis in original]

In retrospect, it’s surprising that LGBT activists didn’t sabotage DADT repeal by demanding transgender inclusion.

With a vote now schedule for Saturday, and GOP Senators Brown, Collins, Snowe and Murkowski on board, I’m betting this will, finally, happen. But this is troubling, from The Politico:

Publicly, President Barack Obama has reaffirmed his support for repealing the policy this year. But the White House is quietly pushing far more aggressively for the new START treaty, signaling it may be open to punting the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal until after the new year if it can get enough GOP votes on the treaty for ratification, according to several senators and Democratic aides.

And this:

Whether the Democrats’ approach will work is an open question. While gay rights groups do blame the GOP, which has promised to block all legislation until the government is funded and Bush-era tax cuts are extended, they have been urging Senate Democratic leadership to make the measure a higher priority and not wait until the end-of-the-session logjam to move it forward.

“We’re running out of time to get a lot of things done around here,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a proponent of the repeal. “I hope we can get a lot of things done, including that one.”

And this:

“I have a lot of people in Nebraska who are supportive of repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ but they don’t hold against you what you can’t do,” said Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat up for reelection in 2012.

And this:

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, contends the GOP just wants an opportunity to debate and offer amendments to important bills like the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the DREAM Act and the repeal bill. . . .

“They may be just trying to show their base that, yeah, they really tried hard,” he added, “and the mean ol’ Republicans stopped them from getting it done.”

(Reminder: we welcome comments from all perspectives, but those with personal insults or obscenities will be deleted. That’s the policy.)

Let me put it this way.  After today’s 250-175 vote in the House to repeal DADT (the second time the House has passed repeal this session), and Olympia Snowe’s newly announced support for repeal in the Senate, it would be a failure of epic proportions if the bill does not get approval from the Senate and make its belated but no less welcome appearance on Obama’s desk.

We are dealing with politics here, and anything is possible.  But right now, the naysayers are the ones who have the most to worry about.

From Richard Grenell at the Huffington Post, “Gay Leaders Need a Tea Party Style Shakeup—111th Congress a Total Failure“:

The entrenched gay leaders in Washington, DC, have spent the last two years blaming Republicans for the fact that they themselves have struck out on Capitol Hill and will end the 111th Congress with nothing to show for their multimillion-dollar fundraising efforts. If this were a public company, the Board or the shareholders would have run these leaders out of town a long time ago.

Despite campaigning for decades to put Democrats in control of all of Washington, their dream ticket of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama failed to deliver what the gay leaders themselves promised the movement. . . . [Gay leaders in Washington] have turned their comfortable and high-paying perches into a safe haven free from the consequences of job performance evaluations.

Read the whole thing.

More. Democratic party control of the White House and both chambers of Congress (with substantial majorities) was a once-in-a-generation occurrence. We will not see it again for a long, long time. But a permanent campaign to restore it will keep HRC’s fundraising coffers full for the next decade.

An important but unacknowledged figure in gay rights just passed from the scene.  In 1976, Adele Starr founded the LA chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.  Five years later, she became PFLAG’s first national president.  Karen Ocamb has a nice overview of Adele’s public life, summed up in this wonderful quote:  “We did it out of love and anger and a sense of injustice, and because we had to tell the world the truth about our children.”

Lesbians and gay men weren’t the only ones who needed to learn to come out of the closet; so did our parents and families, who were often even more embarrassed about homosexuality than we were.  But honesty and unconditional parental love were part of Adele’s nature, and she had an unparalleled ability to talk to other parents who felt their worlds had been turned upside-down.

It is ultimately arithmetic that secures her place in our history books.  We are not just a minority, we are an extremely small minority, no matter how you slice and dice the numbers.  It took us generations to begin to assert our own self-respect, but that is not nearly enough to change the history of misunderstanding that nearly all cultures have built up around homosexuality.  We also needed the support of our families and friends.

That was the bulk of the task we faced back in the post-Stonewall 70s, and Adele Starr stepped up to the plate, not only for her son, Phillip, but for all of us.  At LA’s gay rights parades of the time, PFLAG was always greeted with the biggest and most heartfelt cheers.  Their presence with us was simply joyous.  The gay rights history books will not be complete without a full accounting of PFLAG.

I know how inspiring Adele was to me in LA as we were working on the early ordinance on domestic partnership in the mid-80s, but I am sure there were people like here in cities across the nation.  Parents like her were as much the pioneers in their world as we were in ours, and maybe a little bit more so.  We had our own mountains of prejudice to fight against, but try to imagine what it must take for a parent to reject their own child.  That was what PFLAG was fighting.

Adele Starr isn’t with us any more, but her work isn’t anywhere near done.  There are still parents who find their own sons and daughters repugnant because of the child’s sexual orientation.  Adele and PFLAG showed by example that love can dominate that unnatural and destructive set of feelings.  We shouldn’t, for a second, forget how important that is to us.

Just to follow up on David Link’s excellent comments: barring last-ditch efforts by Sen. Joe Lieberman and a few others to secure a separate repeal vote, the question will be whether President Obama will appeal a future Ninth Circuit ruling that very well could uphold the district court’s decision that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unconstitutional. The administration, of course, appealed the district court ruling in favor of the Log Cabin Republicans well-argued suit. Stay tuned.

Yesterday’s defeat of a vote on the Defense Authorization bill – which included repeal of DADT among hundreds of thousands of other items – is instructive to those who criticize lesbians and gay men for going to the courts to overturn laws passed in the normal democratic process.

DADT, in its molasses-like demise, is subject to anything but a normal democratic process.  To be fair, the entire lame duck session resembles ordinary democracy only in the sense that it is conducted by people who have been duly elected.  But any semblance of process, due or otherwise, is lacking.  Where else but in the United States Senate would the entire country take it for granted that a 57-40 vote in a 100-member body would be a defeat?

But the central point is more particular than mere complaints about the vagaries of Senate procedure.  As Robert Caro discussed in comprehensive historical detail in Master of the Senate, the filibuster and cloture rules have been around to be abused since the very early days of the Senate, and some leaders, like Lyndon Johnson, were able to keep the bills running on time.  Just because the rules are more abused now than at any time in history doesn’t make them any more unfair to anyone, including lesbians and gay men.

No, the singular problem for DADT, as for any law that alienates a specific minority, is how the accumulation of bad feelings about the minority garble and twist the discussion.  Just this week, yet another respectable poll of the American people showed a solid 2/3 who not only support repeal of DADT, but would, themselves, vote for it if asked.  Since 2005, the percentage of support has been at 60% or more.

But when Senator Harry Reid called for the premature, losing vote yesterday, his frustration was palpable.  A senior Senate aide described the problem.  While Reid and Senator Susan Collins had finally agreed to four days of debate, and an amendment process satisfactory to Collins, she was not the only relevant senator:

“It would have been much more than four days,” the aide says. “Her suggestions were flat out unworkable given how the Senate really operates. You can talk about four days until the cows come home. That has very little meaning for Coburn and DeMint and others who have become very skilled at grinding this place to a halt.”

The minority Republicans in the Senate were and are so obsessed with the problem of open homosexuals in the military, that they are not only willing to block a vote on funding for the nation’s entire military, they have done their part to hold it up until this late date even though the prejudice they believe they are protecting is on life support, not only among the voters, but even in the military, itself.

But Republicans are only part of the larger problem.  I cannot speak to Reid’s actual concern about how the Senate’s proceedings would be gummed up, but it’s not really Harry Reid’s rights that are at stake here.  The inconveniences of a leader and his institution are problems of an entirely different species from the problems faced by a woman who is afraid to tell her friends in the military who they should contact if she is killed in fighting.

Would it really have been so bad for the Senate to call the GOP’s bluff on this?  The prospect of Senate Republicans pontificating on gays in the military for four days or more is a soul-chilling prospect, but maybe that’s what the nation needs.  They have no new substantive arguments to make — they never really had any to begin with.  Their rearguard action on this lost cause might just need its Waterloo, to  finish it off once and for all.

Neither Reid nor Obama nor Collins nor anyone else in the Senate has any personal stake in this fight.  Their speeches are speeches, not the real life conflicts that lesbians and gay men have to confront every hour and every day.  It is the heterosexual Senate’s luxury to be able to put off equality until a more convenient time.

We suffer that luxury.  But it is not our only choice.  The courts exist in general, and the equal protection clause exists in particular, precisely because majorities don’t have a personal interest in a minority’s disabilities under the law.  Some members of the majority may have the principles of a Joe Lieberman or a Patrick Murphy, but they can also cater to the distortions of prejudice, even when that status quo is dying.  Majorities can even sometimes sacrifice their own interests (such as a defense authorization bill) because of their perverted views.

Perhaps Reid knows what he is doing.  I still think this can get done.  But yesterday’s political convolutions are a compelling argument for courts to have the final say on some issues.

A coalition of religious conservative groups blocked the city of El Paso, Texas, from extending benefits to city employees’ same-sex partners through a successful ballot measure. The aim of the initiative: to promote “traditional family values” by limiting benefits to “city employees and their legal spouse and dependent children.” But as the Wall Street Journal reports, after being approved by 55% of the voters, it became clear that the measure also eliminated retiree health benefits for former city workers (and even for elected officials, who aren’t technically city employees).

“We don’t want to get into a holy war with the church,” said Ron Martin, president of the local police union. “I just wish they would have left us alone.” Just one of the unintended consequences of discrimination by ballot box.

Tis the season, courtesy of Fox’s “Glee“: