IGF CultureWatch

"We are one people." It is easy to say, but we have struggled over it for 232 years. The charismatic speaker, who once wrestled with his biracial identity and found his footing as a community organizer in south Chicago, brings a conviction that gives people goose bumps. It is a vision that clashes with the hard truth voiced by Bruce Springsteen: "No secret my friend / You can get killed just for living in / Your American skin." Barack Obama knows it is hard, and includes LGBT Americans in his call to action.

Sen. John Kerry points out that Martin Luther King was 34 when he said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" Thomas Jefferson was 33 when he drafted that creed. If Obama wins, he will be 47 at his inauguration-a year older than Bill Clinton, four years older than Jack Kennedy, five years older than Teddy Roosevelt. His toughness is evident in his remarkable coolness in the face of smears by the Clintons.

To be sure, Obama has fought back against those attacks. Former President Clinton, who switches between charming elder statesman and eager practitioner of win-at-any-cost politics, blamed the divisiveness on Obama and the media, and used civil rights veterans John Lewis and Andrew Young as trump cards instead of addressing charges that he was behaving like the late GOP operative Lee Atwater. Those who fault Obama for fighting back must have admired Kerry's month of silence after the "swift boat" attacks in 2004.

Obama notes that the Clintons' attacks began only after he started rising in the polls. One of his central messages is, "Change doesn't come from the top down, but from the bottom up." By contrast, Hillary Clinton implicitly compared herself to Lyndon Johnson, emphasizing his key role in passing civil rights legislation. What was patronizing about that comment was the implication that change chiefly depends on Washington politicians.

Obama raised a stronger vision of leadership on Jan. 20 at King's own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, with a speech of rare grace and power. At one point, after saying "none of our hands are entirely clean," he admonished his audience: "We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity." This was not pandering.

Obama challenges gay people as well by refusing to respond to opponents of gay equality with boycotts. As he wrote in response to the controversy over a campaign appearance by antigay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, "We will not secure full equality for all LGBT Americans until we learn how to address that deep disagreement and move beyond it." He understands that our cause requires many painful discussions, not demands for silence from those whose views offend us. He shows the way by talking to churches and ministers about homophobia.

As Obama told The Advocate in October, "on issues from 'don't ask, don't tell' to DOMA to the gay marriage amendment to the human rights ordinance in Illinois that is the equivalent of what we've been attempting to do at the federal level and that I was a chief cosponsor of and then passed-there has not been a stronger and more consistent advocate on LGBT issues than I have been." Like Clinton and John Edwards, he opposes same-sex civil marriage, but he supports giving same-sex couples the 1,138 federal rights and responsibilities accorded married couples. Needless to say, this is less than I want; but it would be a giant step toward the goal. The next few years will not bring final victory, but are an opportunity to push the debate crucially forward.

If you are not careful, life can beat the hope out of you. Some activists I know, old enough to remember the Sixties, support Hillary. They have pictures of King and Bobby Kennedy on their walls, yet now back someone more reminiscent of Richard Nixon. Instead of supporting a leader who can inspire a broad spectrum of Americans, they support someone whose idea of the presidency is managing the bureaucracy, and whose idea of bipartisanship is cosponsoring a measure against flag burning.

Some claim that Obama lacks detailed policy proposals. They should visit BarackObama.com, including barackobama.com/pdf/lgbt.pdf. Others hesitate to support him because they worry about what might happen to him. But if we are governed by our fears, we are defeating ourselves.

The times call for a leader who offers more than a continuation of the scorched-earth politics of the past two decades-someone who will do more than triangulate and outmaneuver partisans on the other side. Once again a gifted man from Illinois has come forth who understands that a nation divided against itself cannot stand, who exhorts us to summon the best in ourselves to continue the work of building our nation. I will not lower my sights because the work is hard. That is why I support Barack Obama for President.

A year ago at this time there were high hopes among gay activists for the new Democratic Congress. They were going to pass legislation expanding gay rights and eliminating discrimination that had long been blocked by the Republicans in power since 1995. Even if Bush vetoed new gay-rights legislation, the Democrats would at least put him on the defensive about it and build momentum for the day when the Democrats took the White House. All of this would be payback for the huge amount of time, energy, and money that gay Americans - their third most loyal voting constituency after blacks and Jews - had given the Democrats.

That was then.

At the midpoint of this Congress, it's not looking very good. Not one piece of pro-gay legislation has even reached the president's desk.

Let's look in more detail at just how far short the Democrats have fallen. In a column one year ago, I proposed a 100-point scorecard based on four key issues and suggested how to evaluate the total:

75-100 points: Never vote for another Republican.
50-74 points: Democrats are worth our first-born children.
30-49 points: Democrats are willing to fight for gay equality, at some political risk.
10-29 points: Democrats will do the minimum necessary to mollify gays.
0-9 points: Democrats know they can take gays for granted.

Now here are the four issues and how things are looking so far:

(1) Federal recognition of gay relationships (worth up to 50 points): Congress has done nothing to eliminate or modify the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It has also done nothing to give spousal benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees. Not only has no vote been taken on proposals to do these things, there have not even been hearings on them. While the Democratic presidential candidates have talked about such things, we learned painfully from the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton that talk is very cheap.

Points for the Democrats: 0.

(2) Gays in the military (worth up to 30 points): Congress has done nothing to eliminate or modify the ban on gays in the military, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Clinton in 1993. There have been no hearings on the subject, either, despite a stream of military leaders coming out against the policy and a wartime decline in anti-gay discharges. Again, the Democratic presidential candidates all oppose DADT on paper, but this counts for nothing until something is actually done.

Points for the Democrats: 0.

(3) ENDA (worth up to 15 points): The Employment Non-Discrimination Act passed the House, with 35 Republicans providing the necessary margin for passage. That first-ever triumph for a gay-rights bill was thanks largely to the leadership of Barney Frank, who fended off efforts by left-wing gay groups to kill the bill because it did not include explicit protection for transgendered people. Senator Ted Kennedy has promised to introduce the bill in the Senate, but so far no action has been taken or scheduled. It's unclear whether the bill will even get a vote in the Senate this year.

Points for the Democrats: 5.

(4) Hate crimes legislation (worth up to 5 points): This is the least important of the four issues. There's no evidence hate crimes laws actually deter hate crimes, but a federal law would have some symbolic value. Yet even that seems unlikely to come out of this Congress. Both the House and the Senate have passed hate-crimes legislation, but have waffled on how to send the bill to President Bush for his signature or veto. An effort to send the bill to Bush as part of a larger defense spending authorization foundered when anti-war liberal Democrats opposed the spending.

Points for the Democrats: 3.

By my scorecard, the Democrats have earned just 8 out of a possible 100 points at mid-term, which means that so far at least they're taking gay support entirely for granted. While they still have a few months to go, it seems unlikely they'll accomplish much in an election year when they have to worry about reelection and are likely to let gay rights take a seat even further back on the bus.

The Democrats' anemic performance so far does not necessarily mean you should vote for Republicans this November. If you support the Democrats' views on taxes, the Iraq war, national healthcare, and other issues, you're likely to back them even if they get nothing more done on gay rights.

But the Democrats' failure to produce does liberate voters who intensely support gay rights but disagree with the Democrats on other important issues. Many of these voters, subordinating their strong feelings about non-gay issues, have supported Democrats in the past because they believed the Democrats would actually accomplish something positive for gay rights.

Now these voters will find it harder to support a Democrat they would otherwise oppose just because the candidate says she supports civil unions, employment protection, ending the military ban, and the like. For them, voting Republican is not a strategy to punish the Democrats for their faithlessness on gay issues. It's a vote of principle.

Soothing words are nice, and the Democrats excel at such kindnesses. But results matter much more. On this, so far at least, they're failing.

What a non-issue civil unions are turning out to be.

I fully expected that the GOP candidates would leverage New Hampshire's newly enacted civil union law to remind voters that only they will protect the traditional family. I'm sure there were comments made at rallies and in restaurants that I didn't hear and that reporters chose to ignore. But short of Mike Huckabee's statement in the ABC/WMUR/Facebook debate that he and Obama likely held different positions on same-sex marriage, fulminations against lesbian and gay couples simply failed to materialize.

In point of fact, the positions of Huckabee and Obama are much closer than one may realize - no viable candidate for the White House supports same-sex marriage - but consider what the silence in New Hampshire portends. Just a little more than a week before the Jan. 8 primaries, the local papers were abuzz with news of the law taking effect. The steps of the capitol became the Dixville Notch for gay couples as three dozen of them said their "I do's" before family, friends and the media (and at least one cranky protester from Maine) at midnight on New Year's Day. Projections from those in the know suggest that over 3,500 couples will take advantage of the new law in the first year alone. That ain't chump change.

Meanwhile, the local GOP opposition isn't even trying to overturn the law. At present, it hopes to repeal the provision that says New Hampshire will recognize out-of-state civil unions. News flash: Not gonna happen. Gay Vermonters who work in the Granite State are tired of being legal strangers every time we head east across the Connecticut River, and our allies in New Hampshire will rally for us. Besides, four states now have civil unions: Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey and New Hampshire. Only one has same-sex marriage (Massachusetts.). The trend line says that more and more states will enact civil union laws, and just as in New Hampshire, more and more people will have no objection when that day comes.

Now fast-forward to the spring of 2009. Imagine the next president proclaiming that the federal benefits that attend civil marriage (well over 1,100) would be extended by executive order to all federal employees whose relationships have been registered in one of the 50 states. And imagine that president calling upon Congress to pass legislation to extend those benefits to all couples so registered.

I'm deliberately avoiding the M-word here because for years now I've argued that we as a nation need to divorce the legal benefits of marriage from the religious connotations of the word. I've argued that civil unions need to be available to all. And the collective shrug seen in New Hampshire suggests that a move in that direction is possible, both on a statewide and on a federal level.

After all, most of us intuitively grasp the distinction between a license filed away in a musty vault somewhere and the moment enacted before witnesses where two people wed their lives to each other. The latter, not the former, constitutes marriage. The rest is paperwork.

I do not discount the symbolic important the M-word has for many in our world today, which is why I'm happy to report that people routinely refer to my partner and I (neither one of us likes the word "husband") as married. The state cannot withhold the word or the ceremonial rites of marriage.

The legal rights of marriage, in contrast, are held exclusively by the state. Let's keep prying those rights free from the word itself. One of the fastest ways we can do that is to elect a president who can help make this distinction clearer, who respects all couples for their intrinsic worth and sees their genuine need for the protection of their relationships that only the law can afford. And when the GOP nominee starts squawking about civil unions on the state and federal level, say: You had your chance to speak up in New Hampshire. It's time for you now and forever to hold your peace.