... a passionate advocate for gay civil rights, and a brilliant and accomplished lawyer who's been in the trenches of the fight. He's also very funny and an incisive analyst, as his initial post below demonstrates.
At last he's been released from the deadening clutches of the establishment!
Anybody remember the "Tax Equity For Health Plan Beneficiaries Act"? I didn't think so. It's the federal bill that would end the unfair taxation of health insurance benefits for domestic partners.
Right now, if your employer provides health insurance for your domestic partner or same-sex spouse, the insurance is taxed as income. Economist Lee Badgett estimates that this discrimination costs an average of $1069 per year and takes a collective $178 million dollars per year out of the pockets of gay and lesbian families. The Tax Equity Act would fix all of that.
The Tax Equity Act is co-sponsored by a Republican, has the backing of a huge swath of corporate America, and would provide real, concrete financial relief for same-sex couples. So when we list all of the things Obama and the Democrats in Congress aren't doing for us, why do we keep forgetting about this bill?
A hate crime bill may be psychologically satisfying, but it isn't going to do a thing to reduce hate crimes. ENDA is just going to give us another blistering fight over the political feasibility of transgender inclusion. The Democrats are so terrified of looking anti-military that they probably won't repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell until the ghost of Douglas MacArthur appears before a joint session of Congress and reveals that he was actually gay himself. So why don't we focus on something that can actually pass and would do a tremendous amount of good?
I know "tax relief" and "backed by corporate America" are dirty, dirty phrases to many on the left, but this bill really shouldn't be allowed to die on the vine.
Chris Geidner has a good, measured piece at Salon, gently making the point that the gay community does not need to be at war with the President over the Smelt brief. I agree, and urge people to read his essay.
While he does not defend the brief, though, I think he misses the key point. That's even clearer in his blog post criticizing the rhetoric John Aravosis has been wielding. It's not that he's wrong; Aravosis does exaggerate the role that the pedophilia and incest cases play in the brief, and does overstate DOJ's official statement about its role in defending federal laws. But these are disagreements about hot, political oratory, and distract from what I continue to think is the central problem with the brief - its premises.
As I've argued, the constitutional sections of this brief could not have been written but for its central, unarticulated thesis -- that all people are fundamentally heterosexual. It is only from that starting point that anyone could argue DOMA does not discriminate against lesbians and gay men. If all people really could meaningfully marry someone of the opposite sex, then DOMA's prohibition on any federal legal recognition for same-sex relationships really doesn't discriminate against anyone. It is the very model of the "neutrality" the brief continually invokes -- because the world it posits has no homosexual people in it to discriminate against.
That premise is as untenable as it is incoherent. Of course DOMA discriminates against lesbians and gay men. It was intended to discriminate against lesbians and gay men. This calumny deserves the fury that has taken hold in the gay community, and is at the very heart of the acrimony I think most of us now feel.
Everything else is beside the point. This vintage misconception (I'm really trying to restrain myself now), was publicly adopted by the administration, and we deserve nothing less than a substantive and explicit apology for it. From what I've heard and read so far, the administration has never so much as acknowledged that the brief might be reinforcing a notion that is not true - the very one that provides the foundation for the harmful notions about homosexuality gays are spending their lives trying to replace.
Like Geidner, I honestly do not think the President believes this lie. But it now has his name on it. We need to focus solely and relentlessly on getting the White House to see what it has actually told the American people.
To my skepticism below, though, I need to add a note of thanks to the administration. Someone had the good sense to invite Frank Kameny to the White House for yesterday's ceremony, and give him the President's signing pen. This explicit and public step toward equality is what Frank has been fighting administrations for since he was fired from his job as an astronmer in 1957 because he was gay.
Frank is one of the superstars of gay history, and the White House got it exactly right in making sure he was there. When they finally finish the job, they should invite him back.
(Thanks to Jon Rauch for pointing this out)
Barack Obama is adding a coda to Mario Cuomo's observation that people campaign in poetry but govern in prose: based on his press conference yesterday, when it comes to gay rights, even prose is failing him. On our issues, he is governing in grunts.
There is no better illustration of how badly the toxic residue of anti-gay prejudice distorts ordinary politics than Obama's flailing on the simple and fundamental issue of the inequality that federal law demands for those who are homosexual. And that is a point that cannot be overemphasized: DOMA and DADT are federal laws that explicitly require the government to discriminate based on a person's sexual orientation. Discrimination is the considered policy of the U.S. government when it comes to lesbians and gay men.
To be fair, we share part of the blame for the President's dilemma. Some of our leaders led him to believe that gestures toward equality would do. But since Obama was elected, four states have recognized full marriage equality, three of them by legislative action. On the other side of the ledger, the government has discharged one of its most articulate and talented Arabic translators, Lt. Dan Choi, because he has been honest about being gay -- at the same time that 69% of Americans say they do not support the policy under which he was fired. That is, in large part why the weak tea the President offered yesterday looked so much like weak tea.
What he did is satisfying enough, if you're among the 2% of American workers who are federal employees, and also among the 3% or so of them who are homosexual, and also among the unknown percent of them who have a committed partner. I'm not a mathematician, but I believe the overlap of these three circles in a Venn Diagram would be quite small. I know I'm immediately disqualified because I'm in the 98% of workers who isn't a federal employee.
But the scattershot benefits that are now available to that infinitesimal percentage of Americans exclude the one that makes the biggest daily difference in people's lives: health insurance. This is not just the dominant benefit in most people's employment, it comprises, by itself, between 6.9% and 8.1% of total compensation.
But the President's compelled performance was matched by those in our community who had to grit their teeth and act as if they were grateful. Rea Carey, Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force did everything but blink out S.O.S. with her eyelids in supporting the memo.
And, let's be honest, none of this would have happened (at least not now) but for the DNC fundraiser that continues to fall apart because the President's DOJ filed its "squalid" brief (in Dale Carpenter's perfect description) in the Smelt case - the very non-pink elephant in the room the President declined to mention.
Despite all this, it is depressing to have to acknowledge the Democrats remain better on gay issues than Republicans. But when even the Democrats are still acting with the skittishness of 1994, it's hard to distinguish the two.
At the very least, I wouldn't want to give the DNC the $1000 entrance fee to their fundraiser. At best, I think that all we've gotten from them is about $57 worth of equality.
From Ryan Sager, Being Barack Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry. It's excellent. Here's an excerpt:
And, you know what, they (we) will pretty much take it. Just like with Bill Clinton...
If we generally like someone - and the vast majority of gay people like Obama and voted for him - we're far more likely to accept an apology from them. ...
[By the same token, if you didn't like President Bush, you were certainly never going to forgive him for supporting the Federal Marriage Amendment (even though Bush only fake-supported it to appease his base and then made sure it never moved forward in Congress - arguably making him better on gay rights than Clinton).]
Another factor at work is the "false consensus bias." It's a shame the things Obama has had to do out of political necessity, you tell yourself, but I know deep down he cares about gay rights ...
Of course, this is bull. Experiments have shown that we're all terrible intuitive psychologists and extremely prone to projecting our views onto others (that is, in the absence of evidence, we assume people think what we do).
Obama, in fact, has really been the master of false consensus bias.
Read the whole thing.
As if to prove the above: The AP reports, Obama fends off criticism from gay supporters
Trying to quell that anger, Obama was set on Wednesday to sign small changes in benefits available to same-sex couples....Partners, however, would not have access to primary health insurance or to pensions....
...the administration defended the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to reject another state's legalized gay marriages and blocks federal Washington from recognizing those state-based unions. Overturning it is a top legislative target for gay activists. But Justice Department lawyers used incest as a reason to support the law.
[White House press secretary Robert] Gibbs argued that the administration had no choice but to defend existing laws and said Obama still believes it should be repealed. But he also would give no specific timeframe for doing that, or for overturning the military's "don't ask don't tell" policy in effect since 1993....
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., defended Obama against criticism that he has been slow to deliver on his campaign promises.
Furthermore. From Dale Carpenter, The Least He Could Do.
The gay community's reaction to the Obama administration's insulting and slanderous brief in the Smelt case has had some effect. A DNC fundraiser set for next week is falling apart, and the President will announce he wants to give the same federal benefits to homosexual federal employees as he gives to heterosexuals (well, some of the same federal benefits; health care seems to be off the table - the single "benefit" that comprises the lion's share of all employee benefits).
We have every right to be furious at the President, but it's important that we be furious for the right reasons.
I don't think it is fair to criticize the administration for filing the brief. The well-intentioned but hapless plaintiffs in this case have gotten themselves (and the rest of us) in over their heads. They are certain to lose their case, and it's better if they lose early on procedural grounds rather than in a published opinion that rules against us on the constitutional issues. The administration is doing nothing wrong in filing a brief to clear away this irritation.
The brief did not need to go any further than the procedural issues, and would almost certainly have prevailed on that ground. It was a mistake to have gone further. But when it did wade into the constitutional issues, it adopted arguments - as the administration's - that cannot be entertained by any reasonable person. The argument (and I quote) that "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," is a non sequitur. As Joe Solomonese so tartly put it, this is to say that "DOMA does not discriminate against gay people, but rather only provides federal benefits to heterosexuals." Spend some time with that analysis, because Solomonese nails it. The argument assumes it is possible to provide benefits only to heterosexuals in a way that does not discriminate against homosexuals. Would it also be possible to provide benefits only to men and not discriminate against women? Or to provide benefits to whites in a way that does not discriminate against people of color?
There is only one way to reconcile these incompatible ideas; adopt the right's still dominant theory that all people are really heterosexual, and could marry someone of the opposite sex if they weren't so insistent on being perverse. Everyone could get "traditionally" married, and should, so it is right to design public policy to benefit only that form of marriage. Gay people do not exist in this worldview.
This is good enough for the right, but it is not good enough for this administration - and I don't think the President believes it. But when you look at the miniscule gesture of federal benefits, you can see the real problem he faces. The reason he cannot grant health care benefits to federal employees is because DOMA is still on the books. DOMA is the single law that most fully incorporates that outdated notion of a world that has no homosexuals in it.
The President has promised - repeatedly - that he will work to repeal DOMA. But that's all he's done: promise. Similarly, he has promised to repeal DADT. All the federal benefits and hate crimes laws and even ENDAs in the world cannot balance out the harm these two laws, which actively incorporate discrimination against lesbians and gay men in federal law, do.
DADT must go, entirely. And about 70% of Americans agree. That is how perverse discrimination can be - on this single issue, the most talented politician of our era is afraid of 30% of his constituents.
The numbers are very different for DOMA, and the President is right to be cautious. But there is no need to repeal all of DOMA in order to minimize its damage. It makes political sense to keep section 2 of DOMA in place, which allows individual states to wall themselves off from progress, while repealing section 3, the part that prohibits the federal government from recognizing any equal treatment for same-sex couples.
I can think of no president in my lifetime - no politician, in fact - who is more capable of understanding what the gay community experiences, and who could, if he chose, articulate for the American people a course of action. It is his abject failure on that front so far that has made the DOJ brief such a catastrophe. I hope his speech tonight helps to clarify that we can expect something more than just gestures from him in the next few years.
The New York Times on Tuesday called Obama out for his about-face support of the Defense of Marriage Act:
The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction on gay rights.
Later that same day, the Washington Post reported on its website (and then in Wednesday's paper) that the administration would extend federal benefits to unmarried partners of federal workers. Will that appease LGBT Democratic liberals, who have shown themselves extremely easy to appease in the name of party unity? Stay tuned.
More. The Wall Street Journal clarifies, "The president doesn't have the power to grant gay and lesbian partners of federal workers health care and many other benefits." That's because "The government is prevented from granting many federal benefits under the Defense of Marriage Act." But, the Journal adds, "he could take other steps, such as offering family services like language training and evacuation assistance for State Department workers." Woo-hoo!
But fear not. For Pride week, Obama is signing a directive banning discrimination against LGBT federal workers (Clinton signed an executive order covering gay workers and Bush left it in place; Obama's directive includes the transgendered). Change we can believe in!
So, Adam Lambert comes out in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, and you're thinking, "What's next? Rolling Stone announces 'Water is wet'"?
I get where you're coming from. But there are deeper lessons to be gleaned.
First, notice how Lambert comes out-in a music magazine, with his sexuality occupying a relatively minor portion of the article. And he does so with the candid yet indirect phrasing "I don't think it should be a surprise for anyone to hear that I'm gay." The gayness is almost taken for granted-embedded in a sentence about public reaction, rather than placed front and center.
That approach reflects a larger trend in how society-and in particular, younger generations-view gayness: as a simple matter-of-fact, not something to be belabored. The contrast with Clay Aiken's "Yes, I'm Gay" People Magazine cover is subtle but important.
And yet, second, there's an ambivalence in the article that captures the national tone on the issue. Lambert says, "It shouldn't matter. Except it does. It's really confusing."
He's right on all three counts.
"It shouldn't matter." American Idol is a singing competition, and Lambert wanted to-and should-be judged on his vocal performance. His decision to wait until after Idol to answer the gay question, he claims, stemmed from his desire that his sexuality not overshadow his singing. (It may also have stemmed from a desire for votes, and I couldn't blame him for that. It's not as if he lied about being gay or took great pains to hide it.)
"Except it does [matter]." As Lambert himself put it in the interview, "There's the old industry idea that you should just make sexuality a non-issue, just say your private life's your private life, and not talk about it. But that's bullshit, because private lives don't exist anymore for celebrities: they just don't."
The music industry doesn't just sell songs; it sells images. For better or worse, personal backstory is part of that (especially on Idol).
What's more, gay celebrities give hope to closeted gay kids, who need to know that they're not alone and who sometimes don't have gay role models in their everyday lives. That's not to say that Adam Lambert is any more representative of gay life than any other gay person. It's just to say that his representation, such as it is, will reach more people.
"It's really confusing." Yes indeed. We live in a nation where, for some people, much of the time, gayness is a non-issue, and for others, virtually constantly, it's huge. American Idol is one of those "common denominator" phenomena (say that three times fast!) where these different groups interact with each other. Often they can do so while avoiding the issue of sexuality. But not always.
And the tension here is not just between groups; it's also internal. When Lambert says, "I'm proud of my sexuality. I embrace it. It's just another part of me," he unwittingly raises a question-one that opponents often hurl at us: "Why be 'proud' of something that's 'just another part' of you?" Why take pride in a trait that you didn't choose and is supposed to be no big deal?
Answer: because it is a big deal. It does matter. Maybe in an ideal world it wouldn't, but we are still far from that world.
Ironically, it's a big deal precisely because our opponents insist on making it a big deal. Thanks to them, Adam Lambert (like every gay person) has to negotiate the issue of revealing his sexuality in a way that straight people never do. I think he's handled it admirably.
Lambert told Rolling Stone that "I'm trying to be a singer, not a civil rights leader." Fair enough. But it's also fair to note that civil-rights change doesn't only come from civil-rights leaders. It also comes from countless small acts of revelation by ordinary and not-so-ordinary people, including Adam Lambert.
Noel Coward's "Design for Living" - now in revival by the Shakespeare Theatre Company - shocked audiences when it premiered on Broadway in 1933. It's not hard to see why.
The play, about a polyandrous relationship between two men and a woman, makes no apologies for its liberationist view of sex and relationships and could hardly be more direct in its sympathetic presentation of gay attachment. "Design for Living" was considered so risque that Coward had to wait until 1939 before staging a production in London for fear of offending British censors.
Seen today, the play shocks, but for an altogether different reason: Its message is so outdated that it's bewildering why any theater would put it on except for its curatorial interest as a period artifact.
The story begins in a dilapidated Paris garret shared by Otto, a painter, and his lover Gilda, a sprightly, if aimless young interior designer who proudly expresses her view that marriage, at least for her, is "repellent." She wishes she could believe "in God, the Daily Mailand Mother India" but instead leads a life of carefree bohemianism and free love. Gilda, you see, isn't just in love with Otto. She's also in love with Leo, a wandering playwright who has just returned to Paris. This isn't a typical love triangle, however, in that Leo also is in love with Otto, and Otto is in love with them both. Together, they are waging a "private offensive against the moral code," in the words of a 1933 Time magazine cover story about Coward. The upholder of this code is Ernest Friedman, a stately and punctilious art dealer who faults Gilda for leading a "dreadfully untidy" life. (His first name isn't incidental.)
The trio's fragile harmony is upset by the unexpected and early return of Leo, who shares "an unpremeditated roll in the hay" with Gilda. Otto becomes distraught and furious when he discovers this infidelity, and the betrayers express what appears to be sincere guilt about "cheating" on him. Otto storms off, while Gilda follows Leo to London, where he soon becomes a very successful playwright and the toast of the town. (The play is loosely autobiographical; Coward had a similar, though nonsexual, relationship with the husband-and-wife acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and the three performed together in the play's Broadway debut).
What makes "Design for Living" even more defiant of prewar social mores of its time is that the characters do not view their domestic arrangements as anything of which to be ashamed; to the contrary, it is society's expectations that they deem immoral. "I shouldn't feel cozy married!" Gilda tells Leo when he half-seriously proposes that they elope, if only to make gliding along the London society circuit less awkward. "It would upset my moral principles." Leo, for his part, confesses that there's "no use making any of us toe the line for long" when confronted with the prospect of matrimony.
This all made for very interesting stuff in the 1930s and could accurately be said to characterize a certain gay sensibility of the era. Decades before a concept like same-sex marriage was in the consciousness of gays, it was understandable that gay artists would mock the sort of conventional social arrangements that were closed off to them (unless, of course, they sublimated their nature). Indeed, those rare gays who sought to "couple" were mocked for "playing at" traditional heterosexual life, not just by straights but by their fellow "inverts."
Much of the "Design" protagonists' dialogue can be read as inchoate yet by now dated arguments for tolerance of homosexuality; Otto defends the threesome as immoral "only when measured up against other people's standards" and speaks of seeking "our own solutions for our own peculiar moral problems." In a line that the latter-day gay rights movement could borrow without alteration from Coward's script, Otto admonishes Gilda for worrying about societal disapproval by stating that their lives are "none of their business, we aren't doing any harm to anybody else."
The three lead characters were curiosities in the 1930s, so rare was the openly bisexual or gay person, never mind the proudly polyamorous. Today, however, they just come across as self-obsessed, vain and cruel.
"Design for Living" premiered in an era when traditional ideas about sex and the role of women in society were being challenged, and the play's notoriety almost surely had something to do with the audience's vicarious envy of the characters' ability to break free of oppressive conventions. In the ensuing 70-plus years, however, America has witnessed the wages of free love, and we've decided they're not pretty. The play's controversy is obsolete; there really is no serious constituency these days arguing for the virtue of non-monogamous relationships. And as much as gays have been cultural iconoclasts, it's difficult to imagine a leading gay playwright of Coward's artistic stature today endorsing the sort of message presented in "Design for Living."
Indeed, I don't think I'm speaking out of turn in my presumption that "Design for Living" would stick in the craw of most gays today. Its unsubtle conflation of polyandry and homosexuality as "lifestyles" equally deserving of social approval is the very sort of "slippery slope" argument proffered by religious conservatives to which gay marriage proponents so strenuously object.
The play is not as antiquated as art deco, swing dancing and other artifacts of the 1930s. It even might have served as a socially relevant statement in the 1960s, during the American cultural revolution, and as late as the 1970s or early 1980s, the age of gay liberation, when activists argued that frequent (and anonymous) sex with multiple partners was more than just a civil right; it was a fundamental part of being gay. AIDS made hash of that viewpoint, as did the general ideological maturation of a community that, while still fighting for equal rights, has earned a societal tolerance that neither Coward nor any gay person of his time ever could have imagined.
I suspect that today's more enlightened understanding of homosexuality as something wholly natural to the human experience and unthreatening to society had something to do with the audience's confused response to the play's fundamental moral darkness. This reaction was most apparent during the final scene, when Gilda must decide between her two young lovers and Ernest, whom she has married and with whom she has decamped to New York. In a sputtering and pathetic spectacle, Ernest condemns the play's putative heroes and their uninhibited ways, yelling that he "could never understand this disgusting three-sided erotic hotchpotch." Red in the face, he farcically trips on a stack of recently acquired paintings as he stomps furiously out of the room.
Until this point in the production, it isn't entirely clear which side in this fundamental dispute Coward will endorse. But by the end of the play, his ambition is obvious: a rejection of monogamy as a societal ideal in favor of whatever floats one's individual boat. As Ernest storms off the stage spewing invective like machine-gun fire, Leo, Otto and Gilda lie erotically curled over one another on the couch in a fit of hysterics, and we're meant to laugh with them in this victory of independence and bohemianism over bourgeois constrictions. But the audience at the performance I attended viewed this triumph with bewildered silence, and I have no reason to believe its reaction was in any way unique.
In times like these, with commentators of all political stripes bemoaning the divorce rate and speaking of out-of-wedlock birth rates with alarm, and when gays are fighting for the right to marry and join the nation's armed forces, as opposed to pursuing lives of sexual abandon, it is the studiously old-fashioned Ernest with whom we naturally sympathize, not the egotistical and emotionally frivolous Bright Young Things, no matter how glamorous and sophisticated they may seem. Here, an inverted adaptation of Marx's observation about the repetition of history makes sense: What's intended as farce winds up as tragedy.