On to 2012

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To nobody's surprise, the main group trying to repeal Prop 8 this year in California has announced that it failed to gather the almost 700,000 signatures of registered voters needed to get the issue on this fall's ballot.

While that's disappointing for those who worked hard to get the signatures, and for those who believed it might be possible to win this year, it's good news for the movement. It was never a good idea to try for a repeal in this electoral and economic climate. Without the support of the main gay-rights groups, and without the support of major donors, the 2010 effort has mercifully expired.

Now the focus will turn to a possible repeal in 2012. There are at least two big unknown factors at work.

First, would a repeal in 2012 be successful? A recent poll showing that a bare majority of Californians now support gay marriage is as unpersuasive on this score as were the early polls telling us we would win the Prop 8 battle by fifteen percentage points.

Second, would a 2012 repeal effort be affected by the ongoing litigation over Prop 8 launched by David Boies and Ted Olson? It's now in a San Francisco trial court awaiting closing arguments and a decision. But the inevitable appeals will take at least a couple of years, and probably more.

In the fall of 2011, when money for a signature drive would have to be raised, and in the spring of 2012, when signatures would have to be gathered, it's likely the Prop 8 litigation will still be alive. In the summer and fall of 2012, when more money would have to be raised and volunteers would be needed to execute a campaign, it's quite possible the litigation will be at or nearing the Supreme Court.

The danger is that the very existence of the litigation will sap energy from a repeal effort. Some donors and volunteers will figure that the matter will be resolved by the Court, so why bother working for a repeal? The Supreme Court will do that for us.

The phenomenon of litigation draining energy from political work has precedent. Many abortion-rights activists believe, for example, that Roe v. Wade actually stunted the political movement for abortion rights. The same was true of the many legislative challenges to Connecticut's anti-contraceptives law in the decades before the Supreme Court struck it down. Several ongoing lawsuits over a period of thirty years made the drudgery of legislative work seem even less attractive, and unnecessary.

But at least in the case of abortion and contraception, the movements behind those efforts got what they wanted from the Supreme Court. In 2012, we may be in the unenviable position of getting nothing from the Supreme Court but a depressed and dependant political base.

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Teach Your Parents Well

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Sometimes we don't notice our victories until long after a battle has been won. Over the last couple of years, gay marriage has secured territory most people didn't even realize was contested, and its loss will be far more devastating to gay marriage opponents than their victories in all the court cases and all the elections in the world.

I'm talking about sweetness.

Our opponents demonize us -- sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly, but viciously and relentlessly. Their chief weapon is sex - ours, not theirs -- overlaid with a self-righteous piety that is funny when Dana Carvey does it, and wrongheaded no matter whose pursed lips it leaks out of. But while everyone from the Pope on down has been focused on the inherent disorders and immorality of homosexual sex, another front in the gay rights battle opened up: Gay teenagers in love.

This year saw a slate of prom stories across the south in Mississippi, Georgia and North Carolina, and while the outcomes varied, the facts were the same: lesbian and gay students wanted to take a date to the prom, a date consistent with their sexual orientation.

It's pretty unlikely any of these kids will show up in recruiting materials circulated by the National Organization for Marriage. Take a look at the pictures of these kids, and try to figure out how you'd attack them - or why you'd want to. If you want the ugly side of this debate, you have to go to the adults opposing them, ganging up against Constance McMillen and calling her selfish for daring to think she should be able to go to the prom and dance with her date just like her friends.

It is victory enough that teenagers in the South are now claiming their proms. But they're also claiming time on network television. Here are two gay teens kissing on "As The World Turns." And here is a sequence of scenes where Justin comes out on "Ugly Betty," after a four-year story arc.

Neither show is a cultural landmark. But in a way, that's the point. This kind of thing is well within the worldview of people now, barely worth commenting on.

"Ugly Betty," in particular, gave us a couple of things that are inevitable precursors to gay marriage. First, young Justin has a very openly gay mentor, Mark. The irresponsibility and selfishness of Mark's life melts away as he gently and understandingly leads Justin through the conflicts and torments of adolescence in a way that his straight family - though completely, even overly, sympathetic - can't. (And I don't pretend to any neutrality here - I'm a fan of the show; but even if I were less biased, I think the point holds). Helping Justin makes Mark a better man. Where has that story been hiding all these years? The last American generation of gay and lesbian kids who couldn't imagine having an older relative/friend/teacher who could understand them has passed into history.

Justin also has a supportive family. This is now fully within the imagination of gay teens, even those whose family is not. When Derrick Martin was kicked out of the house by his parents in Georgia after media attention over wanting to take his boyfriend to the prom, he got outside support that had no equivalent when many of us were his age. The idea that his parents might be the ones acting wrongly is available to him, and kids like him. That does not ease the emotional pain or harm his parents are inflicting on their son, but it is a safety net we have been able to provide to cushion his fall. More kids will have supportive families as time goes on, but even those who don't will be able to know that they are right to be honest with themselves, even if their families cannot handle the truth. These are kids who might even be able to be patient with their parents, and be able to repair the relationship over time.

And that brings me to the sweetness that pervades all this. When Justin finally comes out on "Ugly Betty," it is not by making any announcement, or saying anything at all. He simply holds his hand out to his boyfriend as an invitation to dance - to dance with everyone else at his family at his mother's wedding.

There was no clear and unambiguous image like that for those who grew up in earlier decades, and I can't imagine how valuable it will be in the years to come. It will, of course (along with many other positive images), be a foundation for kids who are coming to identify as homosexual. But more important, it will be there for all the heterosexual kids, with no fear in it, and no evil, nothing to worry about and nothing to oppose.

The lack of that sweetness is what has most afflicted the public perception of homosexuality throughout history. It comes from the failure to view homosexuals as people who love one another. Imagine what it must be like to envision a group of people who don't have love in their lives, just sex.

If I were Maggie Gallagher or Brian Brown or Martin Ssempa or Pope Benedict, I can't think of anything that would scare me more than the gentle joy of two high school girls holding hands, swaying to the music at their prom, or two boys dancing and laughing with the family at a wedding. After a centuries long fight, we've got those images fixed now, real ones and fictional, and they won't ever be going away.

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Don’t Hold Your Breath

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In a recent newsletter to supporters (which I can't find online), Brian Brown, the executive director of the anti-gay-marriage National Organization for Marriage, writes:

Stopping the legal deformation of marriage is one key step, as is protecting the ordinary civil rights of voters, including religious people and communities. But the end game for us in this fight for marriage is something quite different: transmitting a marriage culture to the next generation. That means creating an America in which each year more children are born to and protected by their mother and father united in a loving, decent, average good-enough marriage.

Hey, I know! How about a state-by-state campaign to revoke no-fault divorce? That would be a good way to transmit a marriage culture and have more children protected by mothers and fathers in an "average good-enough marriage."

What? You don't think NOM will campaign against no-fault divorce?

Don't be so cynical. They just haven't gotten around to it yet.

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The Power of Ellen

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American Idol is a show everyone watches - young, old, from Red States and Blue. It is a throwback, almost, to the days of television when families would gather around a television set and watch enriching programming together.

And one of its big draws these days is a lesbian.

The New York Times pointed out last weekend that Ellen DeGeneres "finds a way to remind audiences of her sexual status on almost every episode of 'American Idol.'"

It continues: "More than in any other of her ventures, Ms. DeGeneres's performace on America's favorite television show suggests how hard she works to seem effortlessly funny and how determined she is to be openly but unthreateningly gay."

She brings it up gently, making jokes and bright-eyed allusions, mentioning her wife Portia, talking about her suits and short, tousled hair.

And America loves it.

Ellen is America's sweetheart of the moment, funny, down to earth, a pretty, sparkly woman whom everyone can relate to. And the extraordinary thing is that her gayness doesn't get in the way of that or hide it - instead, she makes being gay seem to be the absolutely normal thing that it is.

And an icon of Gay Normal is important. All too often - still - anti-gay conservatives point to people on the edges of our community as being representative of all gays and lesbians. They take images from Pride Parades and television and gay circuit parties and try to paint us as social outliers who are strange and frightening (or inappropriate and silly) and thus a danger to mainstream marriage, work and family.

Those who lie on our edges - Adam Lambert, say, or Johnny Weir, or any of the Dykes on Bikes - are important to us and are part of our community. They help us define our LGBT culture as one that celebrates fiercely individual personalities who nonetheless come together for common causes and celebrations. We need them and we love them and we celebrate their outrageousness.

But we need our Ellen DeGenereses and Dan Chois (and now Ricky Martins and someday Anderson Coopers), too. We need public figures who seem like the best friend that you wish lived next door, people who are safely sexy, people you can trust to watch your dog, people who you'd welcome to meet your kids and your folks and your elderly Aunt Martha.

Ellen works hard for us. As the Times says, her private life is "served up as an affirmation of gay marriage set in a Harlequin romance frame." And she brings her life "with her on America's most conventional reality show."

She makes gay marriage and gay rights seem easy to take - and not just easy, but almost as if they are a fait accompli. Ellen had a beautiful wedding and the many pictures and videos of a beloved Gay Normal icon getting hitched surely made marriage equality easier for middle America to imagine.

They can picture being at a wedding of a gay couple now. Which means that they are slowly being won over to our side.

America loves Ellen. Her daytime talk show may collect the gigantic Oprah Winfrey audience once Oprah moves on at some point next year. (The Times says she is the best bet to inherit "Oprah's mantle as talk show queen.") Her gentle jokes and self-deprecating bits have made her the most amusing judge to watch on American Idol.

Ellen has hosted the Emmys and Oscars, won 12 Emmys herself, and convinced then-candidate Barack Obama to dance on her talk show.

She is happy and successful and famous and - normal.

She is what middle America wants to be.

The contest for best singer might still be going on over at Fox, but America has already crowned it's next American Idol - and it's Ellen DeGeneres.

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A Lesbian Albatross? So What?

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They don't drive Subarus, wear comfortable shoes, or listen to folk music. But are the female pair-bonding albatross discussed in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine lesbians?

Despite its provocative title, the essay "Can Animals Be Gay?" is one of the more thoughtful and nuanced treatments to have appeared in a while. It achieves this largely by ignoring the title-question and instead focusing on what scientific research into animal behavior does-and more to the point, doesn't-tell us about humans.

These are the facts: Lindsay C. Young, a biologist studying a Laysan albatross colony in Kaena Point, Hawaii, discovered in the course of her doctoral research that a third of the nesting pairs there were actually female-female. Albatross typically pair off monogamously, copulate, and then collaboratively incubate the resulting single egg each year. Scientists who have observed nesting pairs generally assume-falsely, it turns out-that they are all male-female. (Albatross are difficult to sex by sight.) So Young and two colleagues published a paper explaining their surprising findings. From the Times essay:

"It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young's colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years - as far back as the biologists' data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody's nose for what you might call 'straight' couples."

Like most scientists, Young and her colleagues were careful merely to share their observations, rather than to draw moral or political conclusions. But that didn't stop folks from both sides of the gay-rights debate from drawing foolish inferences and alternately either praising or attacking her research.

Gay-rights opponents derided the work as agenda-driven propaganda. Gay-rights advocates, by contrast, saw it as new evidence for the "naturalness" of homosexuality and even as providing a justification for marriage equality.

The simple truth that both sides overlook is this: Research about animals tells us what other animals' behavior is; it does not tell us what human behavior morally ought to be.

Notice the two key distinctions here. First, although humans are animals, they are not the same as other animals. That doesn't mean that studying other animals can't help us learn more about humans, often by suggesting hypotheses worth testing in humans. But species behave differently, and what's true of albatross, or bonobos, or fruit flies frequently isn't true of humans.

Second, there's the distinction between the descriptive and the normative; between what is and what ought to be. The fact that animals (including human animals) do something does not entail that we morally SHOULD do it.

Which means that all of the empirical research in the world, as interesting and important and valuable as it is, won't settle any moral disputes for us-at least not by itself.

I say "at least not by itself" because there are indirect ways in which this research may be relevant. Young's findings, for example, provide a nice illustration of heterosexist bias among previous scientists, and there are more general moral lessons to be gleaned when we uncover bias.

Moreover, such research can undermine the premises of bad arguments used by the other side. ("Animals don't even do that, therefore it's obviously wrong.") However, it's worth noting that the arguments would be bad even if they were not based on false premises, since they still involve invalid inferences. ("Animals don't cook their food either. What follows?")

There's also the undeniable fact that, whatever their logical flaws, these arguments have emotional resonance. As the Times essay notes:

"What animals do - what's perceived to be 'natural' - seems to carry a strange moral potency: it's out there, irrefutably, as either a validation or a denunciation of our own behavior, depending on how you happen to feel about homosexuality and about nature."

But that's just the point: the conclusion depends on "how you happen to feel." The feelings are doing the work, not the logic.

When bad arguments are used in the service of good aims, what should we do?

Suppose Young's study makes a parent less inclined to kick a gay child out of the house, because the parent (illogically) reads the study as proof that human homosexuality is "natural." This sort of thing happens all the time, and I'm hardly inclined to call up the parent and point out his or her logical lapse.

There are, however, long-range consequences to such laxity. The same logical sloppiness that motivates this particular parent to do the right thing helps others to rationalize discrimination. Repeat after me: what other animals do is one thing; what humans morally ought to do is another. Only when we distinguish those questions can we make a sound case for equality.

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An Opportunity Ignored

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In California's GOP primary for the U.S. Senate, former congressman Tom Campbell, a supporter of gay marriage, is under attack, and his previous front-runner staus reduced to a statistical tie with gay-marriage opponent and failed CEO Carly Fiorina, reports the DC Examiner.

The demented National Organization for Marriage is spending $300,000 on television ads that falsely liken Campbell to ultra liberal tax-and-spender Barbara Boxer, best known for castigating a military officer who dared show her the respect of calling her "ma'am."

According to the Examiner, Campbell's "opposition to Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative that enshrined a ban on gay marriage in the California Constitution, has made him a target of the social conservatives who dominate the ranks reform the GOP."

If the LGBT political movement was at all savvy, its leaders would recognize that supporting a major, viable candidate like Tom Campbell is the only way to reform the GOP, and that eventually having two parties in support of gay legal equality is better than having one (which, by dint of being the only player with gay support, can easily take the money and run - and do little to nothing else).

But the LGBT movement is run by Democratic operatives who, IMHO, prefer having an anti-gay GOP - it gives them a big, easy, fundraiser target. And so we cling to the one party strategy.

More. No surprise; the Human Rights Campaign is going to go all out to support Boxer over a Republican who favors marriage equality and could begin to shift the national direction of the GOP.

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Gay for President!

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According to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, 50 percent of Americans would support having an openly gay president.

Bad news: That seems unlikely.

Thanks to the last Presidential election, we've all heard of the Bradley effect: voters tell pollsters that they'd vote for the black guy/woman/gay person, but then in the polls they vote for the same white male they always have.

They want to give the answer that's more socially acceptable.

This poll isn't asking the harder question - whether the person being polled would vote for a gay President. It's just asking if they would support a gay person once they magically made it into office (hear that, Charlie Crist? You can stay closeted, come out later when you've won the office, and people will support you. Maybe).

Yet 50 percent of the people polled said yes, they would. A gay President is A-OK with them.

Good news: If this indicates that the Bradley effect may now apply to us, it is a welcome sea change.

The President question is only one question, of course, in a silly (if scientific) poll that also asked whether someone would rather visit Bourbon Street, Graceland or Nashville.

And admittedly, the question also primed the person being polled to feel positively toward us. It said:

"The military's 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy-prohibiting openly gay soldiers from serving in uniform-may soon be changed. Would YOU SUPPORT OR OPPOSE having an openly gay person serve in any of the following roles?"

As we know, an overwhelming majority of Americans now support gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. So they probably were feeling kindly toward us patriotic gay people before the full question was asked.

And then the poll gets stranger. After asking about whether Americans would support a gay President (50 percent support), it lists Supreme Court Justice (55 percent), Secretary of State (56 percent), Commissioner of Baseball (61 percent!) and Super Bowl quarterback (62 percent!!!!)

Honestly, the only thing that seems less likely to be than Americans currently supporting a gay President is Americans supporting a gay Super Bowl quarterback.

Still, the point holds: Americans are becoming more sensitive to the idea that it is not OK to discriminate against gay people.

So what the question was really asking was: Do you feel like it's OK to be homophobic in public, to a stranger?

And the answer to that, it seems, is starting to be "No."

Finally.

This is just one step in a long series of steps toward equality, but it is an important one. Americans who are afraid of being labeled homophobic by a stranger in public (even by someone as innocuous as an anonymous over-the-phone pollster) are less likely to actually discriminate against gay people. They're less likely to call us names; less likely to allow their kids to bully us in school; less likely to fire us when they find out we have a same-sex partner; less likely to legislate against us.

This is very different from 25 or 30 or 40 years ago, when it seemed like the "natural" thing to do was to find gays and lesbians unnatural. And it is very, very different from the days when straight Americans could not even imagine gay people openly holding any kind of public office, let alone the most highly respected one.

It is steadily becoming more true that being anti-gay is not OK.

Being unwilling to be seen as homophobic in public is a long way from helping us gain full equality, of course.

And it is unlikely to translate into actual votes.

But it is an important step.

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Unnatural

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I'm not staying up nights waiting for the Pope to apologize for his role in covering up - and I'd say offering tacit acceptance of - child rape by Catholic priests. As alcoholics and their loved ones know all too well, you can't offer a sincere apology for something you don't or can't admit is a problem in the first place.

Any apology from the Pope would be putting the cart before the horse. This isn't a tragedy just of human frailty or even of bureaucratic self-preservation and corruption. The original sin here is doctrinal.

The problem isn't celibacy - or only celibacy - it's the Church's cramped and careless view of nature, and specifically sexual nature. The Church trumpets the notion that God has ordained sex only for procreation, and that God's nature is itself being violated by every sexual act with any other intention; and even a correct intention isn't enough if the act isn't within a properly consecrated heterosexual marriage. This is nature writ very small.

In contrast, the demand that priests be lifelong celibates is a decree to those who are merely human to defy nature itself. What was originally crafted as a supreme sacrifice to God has turned into (if it has not always been) the institutional torture of human beings that plays out in these all too predictable everyday tragedies. Yes, some priests don't molest children. Perhaps the Vatican is correct that the vast majority of priests are entirely innocent of the charge.

But if anyone believes any majority of priests is actually celibate, they certainly aren't very vocal about it. A reasoned definition of nature must include human nature. Even without being philosophers, most Catholics have a more coherent view of human nature than their Church does, as they mock the Vatican's mad directive about birth control.

Priests and homosexuals are the only small groups that the Vatican still feels it can impose its disordered view of nature upon. The priests can speak for themselves, as can the remaining homosexuals who continue on as Catholics.

But the Vatican insists on burdening the rest of the world with its error about human nature in its stepped up campaign against gay marriage -- and gay rights more generally -- worldwide. What it cannot enforce upon its own clergy it wishes civil government to order for homosexual citizens - and digs deep into its pockets for the funds. This miserable crusade is the best the Vatican can do to distract from its barely existent threads of credibility on sexual matters.

None of the Church's problems will or can be solved until it is able to acknowledge that it is wrong about sex. Catholics know that, and so do most other religions, even those that agree with the Catholic misunderstanding of the side-issue of homosexuality. Until the Vatican offers up its own confession of error, it will suffer the practical penance of attrition, both among its sexually conflicted priests and its incredulous adherents who will be wise to accept the Pope's between-the-lines advice to take greater care of their children when in the custody of Catholic clergy.

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Prom Liberation

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Recent reports about students in Mississippi and Georgia seeking to bring same-sex dates to prom stirred memories of my own prom experience.

The year was 1987. I was "straight" then-or so I convinced myself. I knew I had "gay feelings" (as I put it), I knew I had no straight feelings, and I knew that people with gay feelings but no straight feelings are gay. And yet, by not letting these various ideas "touch," I avoided drawing the obvious conclusion. (This, from someone who would later teach elementary logic.)

I had never been on a date with a woman before, or even kissed one. Sure, there was that time in fifth grade when I played spin-the-bottle, but as soon as I figured out what the game was, I ran from the room.

By the time I reached junior high and high school and noticed my "gay feelings," it was easy to find excuses:

"I go to an all-boys Catholic school; I don't know any girls," I told myself and anyone in earshot. "Besides, I'm planning on becoming a priest" (which was true, starting around sophomore year). Pressure's off!

Except that it wasn't. Because my "normal" friends, even the ones who planned on priesthood, sought and found girls. I wasn't feeling what I was "supposed" to feel, and it frightened me.

Patty Anne was someone with whom I served on the parish council. She went to an all-girls Catholic school. I called to invite her to my prom, she accepted, and minutes later she called back to invite me to hers. They were on consecutive nights, so I got a deal on the tux rental.

My prom went smoothly, and at the end of the evening, I gave her a prim kiss on the cheek.

Her prom was a little more involved. One of her friends with whom we were sharing the limo hosted a small pre-event party. Upon arriving, I had two very gay thoughts in rapid succession:

(1) [Upon seeing Patty:] That dress is hideous compared to last night's.

(2) [Upon seeing her friends' dates, all of whom were from a local military academy and looked stunningly handsome in their dress whites:] Uhhhhhh….HELLO!

I laugh about this now, but at the time, (2) was terrifying. Not-noticing girls was one thing, but noticing guys was quite another. And these guys, all dressed up and nicely groomed to impress their girlfriends, were hard for me not to notice.

These were the sorts of things spinning through my head on the post-prom limo ride to a club in Manhattan. Patty and I had the backwards-facing seats on either side of a small television; the remaining couples shared a large bench-seat facing forward.

Suddenly, the other couples started making out.

"Thank god for this little television separating us," I thought.

But the television couldn't protect me. Before I knew it, Patty was sitting on my lap.

We made out. It felt wrong-and that frightened me further.

When the limo dropped me home later that morning, I needed to "process," so I hopped into my car and drove over to my best friend Michael's house.

It was 6 a.m., and I stood in his backyard in my disheveled tux, throwing clothespins at his window to rouse him without waking his parents. (When his mother finally entered the kitchen, she glanced at me and asked, "Oh John-would you like an English muffin?" as if there were nothing unusual about daybreak guests in black tie.)

I think that conversation with Michael was the first time I told anyone other than a priest or a psychologist that I had "gay feelings"-all the while continuing to insist that I was basically straight. Baby steps.

A year later, when I moved from "gay feelings" to just plain "gay," Michael was among the first people I came out to. It would take another year beyond that before he mustered the courage to come out to me.

Which brings us back to Constance McMillen in Mississippi and Derrick Martin in Georgia, two brave young souls.

Constance's prom has been canceled. A private prom is being held instead, and many of her classmates claim to hate her for "ruining" their regular prom.

Derrick, by contrast, will be allowed to attend prom with his boyfriend. The bad news is that his parents have kicked him out of the house over the incident.

How many more children must suffer because of these perverted values? How many more must live in silence and in fear, forced to choose between pretense and rejection, all while being denied the simple joys their peers take for granted?

For that matter, how many more adults must suffer?

That last question became especially poignant after I received comments from Michael on a draft of this column.

You see, Patty Anne, Constance, and Derrick are all their real names. "Michael" is not. He asked me to change it because, as he put it, "I am still pretty covert in my professional life."

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The Day Gay Rights Died

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Mark the date March 21, 2010, on your calendar. That's the day the great Obama health-care reform finally passed Congress. It's also the day that any realistic hope of passing significant gay-rights measures at the federal level died until at least 2013.

President Obama showed what a determined Democratic president and large congressional majority could do in the face of unified political opposition, powerful interests standing in the way, and the mobilization of the most energized and angry portion of the American public. When a president cares about something - really cares about it - he uses the bully pulpit in tandem with the political muscle and control of legislative procedure that a congressional majority gives him and he gets it done. That's what presidential leadership looks like.

But the fact is, the Democrats have now spent whatever political capital they had remaining for the passage of unpopular liberal-identified causes. They have called in all their chits. They have pulled out all the stops. Use whatever hackneyed phrase you like, but it all comes to this: They are done.

All of the liberal constituencies that make up the Democratic Party - environmentalists, gun-control enthusiasts, abortion-rights advocates, financial-reform supporters, and yes, gay-rights activists - will now be told that the urgent necessity is to focus on the fall election and that, for now at least, their pet causes must be subordinated to that larger goal. So sorry.

It's not as if gay-rights measures were headed anywhere fast before yesterday. Nobody is talking about repealing any part of the Defense of Marriage Act these days. Remember the president running on that?

Repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has been put off for at least a year and the White House is in no mood to have it brought up before then. Fat chance getting it done after November.

Even the most innocuous and politically popular measure that even pre-election Obama skeptics like me thought would happen, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, has been delayed time after time. It's not clear it can pass the House with "gender identity" included, which gay groups are once again insisting upon. It's even more doubtful that supporters can round up 60 votes in the Senate for it, with or without protection for transgendered people.

After the November election, all of this legislation now on life support - to the extent it has any life left at all - will have the feeding tubes pulled out and the respirator turned off. The urgent necessity then, we will be told, is re-electing the president.

Then, in 2013, if he is re-elected, and if he has sufficiently large majorities in Congress, we get to start the cycle again.

UPDATE: A reader emphasizes a reasonable point: it's not as if the Democrats were making gay-rights measures a priority before health-reform passed, so what difference has passage made? The difference, I think, is that without this signature accomplishment the president and Congress would feel somewhat greater pressure to do something for various constituencies. Now they can say: "We've accomplished the liberal dream of the past century. Leave us alone until after the next election."

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