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Friday, October 15, 2010

Barack Obama Doesn't Care About Gay People

Rick Warren at your inaugural? Gay marriages are yucky? No executive order stopping the discharge of exemplary servicepeople who happen to be gay, even though you say you think it's wrong? Endless shilly-shallying in negotiations and processes with people on the record as antigay bigots? Directing your Department of Justice to appeal ruling after ruling that sides with queer folks, then claiming you have no choice, and then not appealing rulings that don't involve the gay? "Fierce advocate"? Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.

I obviously don't think Obama is an antigay bigot. I expect him to do the right thing if it doesn't require him to do much of anything. But, yes, I honestly think Barack Obama doesn't care particularly about gay people. If he did, he would not choose to do so little to help us while also choosing so often in countless ways large and small to denigrate our service and our labor and our relationships and even our desire to share in the hope for change of his inauguration day, nor would he expect so much credit and patience from us despite all this. It's as simple as that.



2 comments:

jimf said...

One of the unique aspects of the "gay problem" as a political issue
in the U.S. is the tension between two facts:

1) For better or worse, being gay is a condition that in
fact affects a relative tiny proportion of the population --
a couple percent, most likely. A small minority, in
any case. As political priorities go, it's not
anywhere near the most urgent one.

2) In another sense, the "gay agenda" is one of **the**
big hot-button issues in U.S. politics. It's been adopted
as a symbolic issue by social conservatives and by the
religious right.

As a result, Obama et al. are put in an unappealing bind.
To right a relatively minor wrong, they need to spend
an inordinate amount of political capital.

I have a friend, older than me, who is also gay, and who
loves to take the rhetorical position of devil's advocate
and cold-blooded realist. Whenever I mention, for
example, Don't Ask Don't Tell, he loves to harrumph that
the whole question is close to being a non-issue, given
the other problems facing the country and the world.
Ditto for such questions as the burning issue of whether
being gay is "innate" or "a choice". "Who cares?"
he'll say.

In one sense, he's right. In another sense (and I get
as wrapped up in it as most other homosexuals) it **is**
a big deal. If DADT is repealed, either by Congress or
(as is looking more likely) by the courts, it will be
a big slap in the face to the religious right -cum- Tea Party
in this country. What's next, the Boy Scouts? And there
may, in fact, be (whether or not gay servicemembers are
currently a source of demoralization in the workplace)
a disruptive reaction in the military to the repeal of
DADT. It's been pointed out elsewhere that the voluntary
military is disproportionately drawn from red states,
from the relatively uneducated, and from religious conservatives.
There have even been claims of deliberate and mandatory religious
indoctrination in the military, in violation of the doctrine
of separation of church and state. To have a big dose of
"secularization" thrown in their faces will likely not
sit well with some military personnel. Not that I'm arguing
it shouldn't happen -- far from it! -- but it's no use
pretending that it might not be fraught.

Dale Carrico said...

I think my perspective differs from yours in several interesting ways, although we re-converge both in preferred outcomes and sense of present outrages, where it counts.

First, even if I accepted that only 2% of the population was lgbtq-oriented/identified (I think the percentage is higher, even before we put pressure on the differences and dynamisms that actually stratify and mingle in the category itself as we must), the proportion of the population affected would be considerably higher still inasmuch as friends, family members, neighbors, colleagues who know queer folks also take personally and seriously the injustices and mistreatment of folks who are part of their lives. That's leaving aside the possibility that even a person who knows or doesn't know they know any gay person at all might indeed rail at the injustice of mistreatment of her fellow citizens.

Second, I certainly don't think the issue of mistreatment of a presumably negligible minority has become important because the more important lunatic theocratic right has made it so and hence we all must fight their evil in the arena actually at hand (if I am right to interpret your position that way). No, the fact is that growing majorities (especially the younger people are) don't agree with the religious right on this, and hence there simply is no reason for our laws not to reflect what is both right and popular. Given the comparative youthfulness of military personnel this is all the more relevant -- from what I hear one of the problems of DADT is that its presumption of problematical queerness is so far afield from the everyday assumptions of new recruits that they don't even know what to make of the policy. Given the actually existing religious diversity exhibited in working units of servicepeople it is likewise clear that religious indoctrination according to some particular religious sect would yield conspicuous practical disciplinary problems well before we philosophers and ethicians had time to parse all the pernicious legal and ethical dilemmas involved as well.

The problem with the religious right is that they do not live in the real world -- the intensity of their hysteria at the moment is a symptom of their own recognition of that fact, not only to be feared for the harm it can do but welcomed as a signal that the secular social democracy announced by the New Deal may be realized in our lifetimes after a long ugly battle with neoliberal-neoconservative reactionaries.