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Thursday, May 28, 2009

Dear Mr. President

This is the text of an excellent open letter sent yesterday to the President by the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center upon his arrival in the city. I found the text over at Americablog:
Dear President Obama:

Welcome to California, Mr. President. I welcome you with a heavy heart because of the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Prop. 8, relegating same-sex couples to second class status and denying us that most noble promise of America, “liberty and justice for all.”

You are arriving in Los Angeles on the heels of emotional demonstrations throughout California and our nation and your silence at such a time speaks volumes. LGBT people and our allies have the ‘audacity to hope” for a country that treats us fairly and equally and for a President with the will to stand up for those ideals. From you we expect nothing less.

We know the country faces many serious challenges and we have strived to be patient. We’ve waited for the slightest sign you would live up to your promise to be a “fierce advocate” for our equal rights while watching gay and lesbian members of the armed forces, who have never been more needed, get discharged from the military. And so far you have done nothing. No stop loss order. No call to cease such foolish and discriminatory actions that make our nation less safe.

You pledged to repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, Mr. President. You promised to support a “complete repeal” of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act and pledged to advocate for legislation that would give same-sex couples the 1,100+ federal rights and benefits we are denied, including the same rights to social security benefits. You said “Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples.”

What of those promises, Mr. President?

Your commitment to repeal DOMA has been removed from the White House website. Your promise to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was removed and then replaced with a watered-down version. And in the aftermath of yesterday’s California Supreme Court ruling, you have remained silent while your press secretary summarily dismisses questions about the issue.

We not only need to hear from our President, we need his action. And we need it now.

We need your words, Mr. President. But we also need your deeds. We expect you to fulfill the promises you made to us. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” Do not delay, Mr. President. The time for action is now.

Sincerely,

Lorri L. Jean
Chief Executive Officer
L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your commitment to repeal DOMA has been removed from the White House website. Your promise to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was removed and then replaced with a watered-down version. And in the aftermath of yesterday’s California Supreme Court ruling, you have remained silent while your press secretary summarily dismisses questions about the issue.Obama the most progressive president the US ever had, ladies and gentleman!

Dale Carrico said...

I have said Obama is the most progressive president in my memory, the first President in my lifetime about whom I feel a real abiding pride and enthusiasm, and I have said that Obama might manage in the long term to helm the most practically progressive Administration since FDR. I still think all of that is completely and even obviously true. I'm still proud and happy that Obama my President, something I've never felt before in my life. That assessment and feeling is easily reconciled with my awareness that there is plenty to disagree with and push him on, including matters involving campaign promises and policy toward queer folks like me. Is all that too complicated for you to follow, Captain Sarcastic?

jimf said...

> Your promise to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was removed and then
> replaced with a watered-down version.

FWIW:

(from http://hunterforjustice.typepad.com/hunter_of_justice/military/ )

May 07, 2009

Justice Dept does the obvious thing in second DADT case

Yesterday, the Justice Department filed its opposition to certiorari
( http://hunterforjustice.typepad.com/files/pietrangelo-opp-cert.pdf )
in the DADT case involving one of the plaintiffs in Cook v Gates,
528 F.3d 42 (1st Cir. 2008), who had asked the Supreme Court to
review the Court of Appeals decision upholding the military's policy.
The other 11 plaintiffs asked that the Court not grant review, even
though they had lost. (See below for why)

There is virtually no chance that the Court will take the case, since
the precedent for rejecting facial challenges to this policy is unanimous.
Nonetheless, the Department, through the office of the solicitor general,
had to respond to the petition.

The most interesting thing about the opp cert brief is that it is the
first document related to an lgbt rights issue filed with the Supreme Court
by the Obama Justice Department, and so it provides the first glimpse
of how the new team will approach gay issues. The answer seems to be -
with political savvy.

The brief can perhaps be best described as minimalist. It was clearly
crafted to do the least possible damage to future efforts to eliminate
DADT either in the courts or in Congress. Although it does state that
"[t]he decision of the court of appeals is correct," it successfully
ducks the issue of which standard of review the Court should apply in
testing laws that discriminate based on sexual orientation, by arguing
that military cases are unique.

The plaintiff had asked the Court to take the case to address what the
standard of review should be post-Lawrence v. Texas. The Department argued
that "[a]pplying the strong deference traditionally afforded to the
Legislative and Executive Branches in the area of military affairs, the
court of appeals properly upheld the statute. ...The court's decision
upholding [DADT] rested not on its choice of a formal standard of review,
but on its strong deference to Congress's judgments on matters relating
to the armed forces."

The other plaintiffs in this case asked the Court to deny review so that
a better case in a different circuit (Witt v. United States) would not
be cut off from further factual development, a strategy that Justice has
enabled by declining to seek Supreme Court review of the 9th Circuit
decision that the government lost in Witt. Details here.
( http://hunterforjustice.typepad.com/hunter_of_justice/2009/05/
justice-dept-does-the-right-thing-in-witt-case.html )