Foggy, With a Chance of Disappointment

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Despite good financial news from the Maine campaign for our equality, the storm clouds are gathering, in the form of "Fog."

This video from Focus on the Family (courtesy of GoodAsYou) lays out the red carpet for Maine ads using President Obama's personal belief that marriage is between a man and a woman against us.

As I said earlier, if Obama wants to help us in this single state -- Maine -- he doesn't need to ask Congress for a thing; though permission from Rahm Emanuel is probably at least as hard to come by.

But it is not entirely a matter of Obama helping us. He is on the record in a way that can and will hurt us. If he says nothing about Maine, then his comments to Rick Warren can accurately and honestly be used, as they were in California, to help convince moderate voters to repeal equal marriage rights. This is not a national issue, and he is not the President of Maine. But his lack of clarification is his consent to the anti-equality campaign to use these existing remarks as is.

The President knows this. He is the only person who can do anything about it. His silence here would be his most eloquent refutation of his expressed good intentions. That is so clear, even Focus on the Family can see it.

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Street vs. Suite

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Sunday's National Equality March (NEM) brought out tens of thousands (according to The Washington Post), including lots of dogs and children, with the simple purpose of demanding equality. It remains to be seen whether the rally, the AIDS vigil, and the flash protest against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) will be followed by productive action.

The march mixed the serious and the festive, with banners saying "Equal Justice Under Law" and "Teabaggers for Gay Rights." Placards ranged from "End the Harm from Religion-Based Bigotry and Prejudice" to "If Liza Can Marry Two Gay Men, Why Can't I Marry One?"

The messages at the rally at the U.S. Capitol were a hodgepodge. On one hand, there were strong speeches by Lt. Dan Choi and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond. On the other hand, Lady Gaga said, "This is the single most important moment of my career. And you know I love Judy Garland." (The Judy mythology refuses to die.) David Mixner spoke conspiratorially about "politicians in a back room." Urvashi Vaid described the four steps that are necessary to bring down the Patriarchy.

The NEM organizers refused to invite openly gay members of Congress to address the rally. At a news conference on Oct. 9, NEM co-director Robin McGehee said that politicians would only be welcome if they "would make a commitment over the next year to work towards legislation that would bring full federal equality." So Reps. Baldwin, Frank, and Polis are not committed to working for LGBT equality? One wonders how the organizers expect to influence Congress while overtly disdaining Barney Frank, one of its most powerful members.

The march's "no excuses" rhetoric contrasted with the cheers for President Obama at Saturday's Human Rights Campaign dinner. The President gave a fine speech, but broke no new ground-no increased pressure on Congress, no explicit statement opposing the ballot initiatives in Maine and Washington State, no stop-loss order ending discharges of gay and lesbian service members. It is easy to defend the President by noting that Congress must pass bills before he can sign them; but we need more bully in the bully pulpit. To be fair, though, for millions who watched the speech on CNN and C-SPAN, it was the first time they saw the President make such a strong statement for LGBT equality.

HRC President Joe Solmonese did his cause no good by saying last week in a letter to members, "[O]n January 19, 2017, I will...look back on many...victories that President Barack Obama made possible." While HRC probably has a detailed strategy for advancing our lengthy legislative agenda, the tone-deaf 2017 reference reinforces perceptions that HRC prioritizes Democratic Party interests over LGBT advocacy.

NEM leader Cleve Jones did no better when he denounced incrementalism as a failure mere days after the introduction in the D.C. Council of a marriage equality bill that enjoys overwhelming support and strong prospects resulting from a smart and thorough incremental strategy.

Early Sunday morning, the HRC building in D.C. was defaced with pink and black paint. Credit was claimed by Queers Against Assimilation, who told the LezGetReal blog, "HRC is run by a few wealthy elites who are in bed with corporate sponsors who proliferate militarism, heteronormativity, and capitalist exploitation." Blogger Michael Petrelis wrote approvingly of "this act of urban redecorating," which only bolstered a White House adviser who told NBC that the NEM protesters were leftist-fringe bloggers who "need to take off the pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely-divided country is complicated and difficult."

Temperatures plummeted the night after the march, a reminder that sunny rallies cannot spare us the long winter of struggle to turn slogans into legislative victories. Support from cultural figures like Lady Gaga and the cast of Hair, while valuable in its own right, does not automatically translate into political success. Bills reach the floor of Congress one at a time. Passing them requires persistent engagement by people who know the process, the players, and the details of the issues. As in entertainment and sports, victory requires both passion and preparation.

The culture clash between the Joneses and the Solmoneses reflects a longstanding tension between liberationists and assimilationists, between "the streets and the suites." Some mutual respect is in order if we want to defeat the anti-gay right instead of one another.

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Meanwhile, on the West Coast. . .

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While tens of thousands of people were marching in DC for gay equality, a few of us were in Los Angeles piecing together the events on this coast that made all this possible.

The occasion was the book release party for Tom Coleman's memoirs, The Domino Effect. Tom is one of the key figures in gay history who fought tirelessly in L.A., first to eliminate our state sodomy law, then to chip away at the other vague laws which the police used to harass us, and most significantly to find a way for the culture and the law to include same-sex couples within the definition of family. That effort put California in the nation's forefront in having our elected leaders reshape the law before the courts needed to. If you want to know how important California is in gay rights, ask yourself why the State of New York, which has had an organized gay community for about as long as California, continues -- to this day -- not to have even so much as domestic partnership for the state's same-sex couples. My answer: They lacked a Tom Coleman.

As Tom was briefly recounting his career, I could not help but notice how many of the key figures in the room he was thanking were heterosexuals whose role in our movement is both essential and unrecognized: State Senator David Roberti; Attorney General John Van de Kamp; L.A. City Attorney Burt Pines (absent due to a hospitalization, but definitely in everyone's mind); L.A. City Councilman Mike Woo; Wallace Albertson; Dr. Nora Baladerian; Judge Arthur Gilbert. Whether you know their names and contributions or not, these are what fierce advocates of gay equality look like.

But they had to be coaxed into action by gay advocates with farsightedness, political wisdom and sheer common sense: Jay Kohorn and Chris McCauley, and, of course, Tom, were at the head of that list. This small band of people came together and used the freedom and tools our political system offers to turn a world that had no place at all for same-sex couples into one where our chief complaint is that the compromise they devised and then implemented -- domestic partnership -- is viewed by some people as good enough, at least for us. It was a fine compromise for the world that existed in the 1980s and 90s; but it is a step toward equality that arose from political necessity; it is not equality itself.

If what you know about the history of gay rights in California is Harry Hay and Del Martin and Harvey Milk, there are entire chapters left to understand. Tom's book will not be the last word on these people's place in our history. But it is a good start.

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Unfierce Advocate (2)

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This debate on CNN shows how the HRC event provides cover for the President's silence about Maine and Washington. Hilary Rosen -- who I tend to agree with, mostly -- is exclusively focused on one thing: the federal government. The President cannot do anything because it takes a long time to get a bill through Congress. We have to give him time because Congress is slow.

No one with any sense could disagree with that, but its blinkered focus is dangerous. There are two critical state elections about our relationships, and the President's ambivalence about our relationships will be a factor in both of them. He doesn't need to ask Congress to do a thing. His very clear remarks last night reinforced the fact that he supports qualifed equality for our relationships (Washington) but not marriage (Maine). Like his statements as a candidate, this reaffirmation of his position (which the event attendees cheered) can and will be used against us, either explicitly in Maine, or implicitly in Washington, where his failure to say anything against repealing their domestic partnership law will not go unnoticed.

We are right on the verge of winning the support, not only of courts and legislatures, but of voters directly. The President is the leader who could tip the balance. Last night he stepped away from the field. And we let him.

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Unfierce Advocate

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There is no shortage of excellent commentary on President Obama's speech to HRC. Andrew Sullivan, Jim Burroway and Jeremy Hooper are all great. I only have a few thoughts to add.

(1) For those who want action from Obama, it's good to remember a speech by the President of the United States is action. We talk a lot about "war," but that is just a metaphor for what we are doing: changing a cultural prejudice that has existed for centuries. Signing bills is only one kind of action in that kind of struggle, and that's an end, not a means. Finding heterosexual leaders to join us has been the hardest part of our effort. This was a speech inconceivable from any prior President. It will be helpful in moving toward equality, and may stand as a landmark.

(2) This speech incorporated exactly the incoherence we are fighting in the culture. Obama did promise to sign bills that would punish anti-gay prejudice -- hate crimes and employment discrimination. But whatever political value those laws will have is undermined -- powerfully -- by the federal government's own explicit discrimination against gays in DOMA and DADT. Until those laws are changed, the government Obama presides over remains the country's dominant source of anti-gay discrimination. Those who oppose us will certainly have those two pillars of discrimination to support their own feelings about our inferiority.

(3) The President's failure to mention either Maine or Washington is unforgivable, and Obama has compromised, if not forfeited, any claim to be a fierce advocate of our equality in leaving them out. His ambiguous language about equality for our relationships will be used in Maine, as it was in California, to reinforce his opposition to same-sex marriage -- which is a fact. That fact will be used against us, and Obama is the only person that can prevent that, if he chooses. But the election in Washington state is one where even his lack of conviction about our equality would have been no bar to supporting us. The Washington referendum is not about marriage, it is only about domestic partnership rights. That is exactly the qualified equality he said he supports for us. There was not a person in that room last night who did not know about these two elections, and their cheers for the President's waffling on this central issue were inexplicable. Washington's legislature finally moved same-sex couples in that state to the nominal equality the President believes we are entitled to, and some in that state want to take it away, leaving same-sex couples in Washington with scraps (though not "nothing" as I incorrectly asserted in an earlier post). How could the President possibly be silent about that and be celebrated?

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Evan forgot about Washington — Obama shouldn’t

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I couldn't agree more with Evan Wolfson's advice to Barack Obama about what he needs to say at his speech to the Human Rights Campaign this weekend.

Well, maybe a little. Evan thinks that Obama needs to make the moral case against exclusion of gay couples from the law. He follows David Mixner's lead, saying that Obama needs to explicitly oppose Maine's attempt to override the legislature's decision to support same-sex marriage.

Amen to that.

But he also follows the mainstream media's obsessive focus only on the east coast of this country, and completely leaves out what's happening in Washington.

In fact, opposition to Washington's Referendum 71 fits more comfortably into Obama's current position on gay equality. R-71 grants same-sex couples only domestic partnership benefits, not marriage - which is exactly what Obama is already on the record supporting. Given that, his silence on Washington's election is already inexplicable, and should be remedied. After all, if R-71 passes, gay couples in Washington will have no legal recognition of their relationships - no rights - at all. That makes Washington a good starting point for Obama's remarks.

But I agree with Evan that Obama needs to go beyond that bare support for qualified equality, and support the real thing. That is what is at stake in Maine. Washington's Equality Lite is a political compromise that is better than no equality at all. But in Maine, they have true equality on the ballot. Mixner is exactly right that Obama's hedged rhetoric was used against us -- against Obama -- in California, and will be used the same way in Maine. Only he can prevent that from happening.

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The High Cost of Queer

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It is expensive to be gay.

How expensive?

We didn't know. We did know that committed gay couples had fewer rights than committed straight ones. We knew this meant we paid more for health insurance, that we couldn't share our partner's social security benefits, that we had to pay estate taxes that straight couples didn't.

But the wonderful people at the New York Times ran the numbers. They wanted to figure out how much more gay couples had to pay over their lifetimes because of fewer rights.

So they set up an imaginary lesbian couple with kids and an imaginary straight couple with kids. They gave them the same imaginary income of $140,000 per couple. And they looked for best-possible-case scenarios (both women were able to get health insurance on their own, for example) and worst possible cases (property was in only one of their names, which left the survivor with a whopping inheritance tax).

The reporters went through around 900 simulated tax returns, analyzing the data.

What did they find?

That, yes - it is expensive to be gay. Very expensive.

Try $41,196 more expensive than a married straight couple for a married lesbian couple with kids.

That's the best case.

The worst case is that this mythical lesbian couple will pay $467,562 more than a straight couple over their lifetimes - all because of a lack of rights.

$467,562.

Whoa.

That is a lot of money.

And that is great.

I mean - the cost itself isn't great. That's a preventable tragedy for thousands of families. But it is great that the cost of our rights is now in cold, hard dollar signs, because it is economic arguments that are most likely to move legislators (and perhaps judges).

Before, we knew the number of federal rights gay couples were denied: 1,138. But that number doesn't compute for most people. We don't understand what it means.

But almost half a million dollars? That we get in our gut.

That's a pair of college educations. That's the difference between living on the edge and being able to sleep at night. That's a house.

And the Times didn't even look at the other piece of this - that lesbian couples often make less than straight couples, especially because we're often found in helper jobs like social work, teaching and nursing.

They didn't consider that it's still legal in most states to fire someone for being gay or lesbian. They didn't look at the fact that some jobs with good benefits - say, serving in the military - are closed to us, which means that we also have fewer opportunities than members of straight couples.

Nevertheless, I am grateful to the Times for this analysis. It's the kind of work we need to do on our own behalf, because it's this kind of work that makes change.

We spend a lot of time in our movement trying to convince wingnuts on the right that Christianity doesn't have to be anti-gay, that we are just like anyone else, that we don't have some kind of subversive agenda.

These arguments don't work. Not on wingnuts. In fact, NOTHING will work on wingnuts, because they are crazy. They aren't open to argument or reason - they have their opinion and they're sticking to it.

But most Americans aren't wingnuts. Most Americans believe in fairness and justice. And it is those Americans who will look at those numbers and think - This is not OK.

We have rightness on our side. But now we also have the numbers. And sometimes, numbers speak louder than words.

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Grabbing the Education Nettle

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The latest "Yes on 1" ad, just released by supporters of the Maine initiative revoking same-sex marriage, strikes me as so misleading, and so tangential to marriage per se, as to amount to little more than a naked pitch that gays will recruit your kids-the anti-gay "blood libel."

In a Sept. 18 memo, Maine public officials and law professors responded effectively to the substance of such ads (which, of course, really have not much substance to respond to): Marriage is not taught in the Maine curriculum and won't be soon; Maine has good religious-liberty protections in existing law; the cases misleadingly cited by SSM opponents have nothing to do with marriage per se (they're anti-discrimination cases). It's a fine letter. Everyone should read it.

But here's the political problem we face in Maine and California and, we can be confident, elsewhere. We are asking for full legal equality and, where education is concerned, we still have not figured out how to defend it. As the new ad makes pretty brazenly clear, what our opponents are really saying in their ads is: "Gay marriage will make it legally and morally harder for schools to condemn or ignore same-sex marriage, to teach that straight families are superior to gay ones, and to ignore and stigmatize homosexuality generally."

There's no denying that measures advancing gay equality in law, culture, and society will, other things being equal, advance gay equality in schools. If we cannot figure out how to defend that core proposition to voters, we're going to lose.

So what's my bright idea? I'm working on it. But I suspect the answer will be in the nature of a positive, forthright, non-defensive message about the value of teaching kids that discrimination is wrong and that everyone deserves a family. "Liar liar pants on fire" looks to voters like an evasion.

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Coming Out of the NFL Locker

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It's not like there's a shortage of gay-related things to write about this week, but I don't think nearly enough people know about Brendon Ayanbadejo and Scott Fujita.

No, they are not the new It Gay Couple. Far from it. They are linebackers. In the NFL. Ayanbadejo plays for the Baltimore Ravens (he's on injured reserve right now) and Fujita is with the New Orleans Saints, both teams at the top of their divisions.

And both of them have gone public supporting gay equality; Ayanbadejo explicitly in favor of same-sex marriage and Fujita throwing his support behind the National Equality March this weekend.

Fujita became active after last year's proposal in Arkansas to ban gay adoption. As an adopted child, himself, Fujita felt he could not remain silent. When complimented for his courage, he said:

I don't think it's that courageous. I think I have an opinion, that I wish was shared by everybody, but I honestly believe that it's shared by more [football players] than we know because a lot of people just won't speak out about it. I'm hoping that what [Baltimore Ravens linebacker] Brendon [Ayanbadejo] did, and things like what I'm doing, speaking out a little bit, hopefully more people will step up and acknowledge the fact that hey, its ok to talk about this. Just because I'm in favor of gay rights doesn't mean that I'm gay or doesn't mean I'm some kind of "sissy" or something. That's the language that you hear in locker rooms. I know these guys well. I know for the most part, guys are a lot more tolerant than they get credit for but they're not comfortable yet speaking out about it. It's going to come in time. By in large, it's an opinion that's shared by more people than are realized. I just wish it was shared by everybody.

This is a theme I'm seeing a lot more lately: closeted support for gay equality from people who are afraid to say publicly what they believe privately. That is the closet Fujita and Ayanbadejo came out of, and they're not alone. It is extremely problematic for many straight men to even talk about gay equality, for the reasons Fujita states. But then, it was hard for us to talk about it for many centuries, as well. It's easy for us to assume that pro locker rooms are hotbeds of homophobia, and it's good for us to hear that maybe sometimes we should be more generous in our assumptions, and encourage more public support like this. We need it. And I deeply appreciate it.

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Heat Shield

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Whether adding robust (as opposed to paper-thin) religious-liberty exemptions to Maine's gay-marriage law would have kept that law off the ballot is dubious, at best. But there maybe something to suggestion-made here (PDF) by Prof. Douglas Laycock, a gay-marriage supporter-that adding those exemptions now might take some steam out of the anti-gay-marriage initiative. Since reasonable and robust religious exemptions make sense anyway, this should be tried.

Another group of legal scholars weighs in for them here (PDF).

A persuasive rebuttal: K.C. Johnson, a Brooklyn College historian, Maine native and voter, and co-author of a book on the Duke lacrosse fiasco, offers this reply to my post (excerpted, with his permission, from a longer email):

I just read the Wilson group's letter to Gov. Baldacci, and write to express my dismay at its timing-and your suggestion that Baldacci and the legislative Dems should consider adopting it at this stage of the campaign.

I suspect [that] the Yes on 1 effort will use the Wilson letter to revive their theme that the state will see a flood of lawsuits if Question 1 is rejected. That the Wilson group's letter acknowledged that their original missive had been misinterpreted in Yes on 1 advertisements but still felt compelled to send another letter, at the height of the campaign, strikes me as disturbing.

I also found absurd the Wilson group's claim that if only the state legislature had adopted their suggestions in the spring, the resulting campaign would have been more "civil." Since Yes on 1 seems entirely responsive to NOM and the state Catholic Church--both of which would have opposed gay marriage anyway-it's hard to imagine the provision's adoption making any difference in the tone of the campaign. Indeed, the provision is irrelevant to the education argument that's been at the heart of the Yes on 1 campaign.

I support religious exceptions-although not the Wilson group's assertion that these exceptions could, in some circumstances, apply to government employees-for political reasons. But given the way this particular campaign has turned out, I don't think there's much evidence that things would have been any different if the law profs' recommendations had been adopted, and the timing of this current batch of letters strikes me as highly unfortunate.

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