Bonus! Here’s a quick clip of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs confirming that Monday’s White House reception for LGBT leaders is just for show and no actual action is being considered with regard to gay rights legislation:

A commenter asked whether I thought Obama’s inaction on gay rights was a political calculation or if it gay rights just aren’t on his radar at all.  I think what’s  frustrating for the gay community is that it’s become increasingly difficult to tell if the president’s recent overtures – the recent extension of a few benefits to federal employees, inviting some gay leaders to the White House to celebrate the Stonewall anniversary – are signals that the administration will be taking a slow, incremental approach to extending rights to gays, or if it’s just damage control when people like Howard Dean and campaign advisers on LGBT issues are pulling out of LGBT-focused fundraisers for the Democratic Party.

One of the more surprising things for the gay community has been the change of tone from the administration.  Dial back to January, before the inauguration, and we were hearing the administration saying things like “…you don’t hear a politician giving a one-word answer much, but it’s yes.” when asked if the administration was planning to repeal DADT.  Dial forward to May, and the same person is giving a waffley, politicky, (realistic) answer – conversations are being had between the administration and the Pentagon, we favor a legislative solution, other rhetoric.

If you read that HuffPo article from January I just linked to two sentences ago, you’ll see how outdated it is six months later.  We were really led to believe and allowed ourselves to believe that gay rights would be a priority from Obama and that we weren’t going to repeat the Clinton administration, which started off being a vocal supporter of gay rights but ended up signing both DOMA and DADT.  So while a lot of the gay anger towards Obama might be explained by gays coming back to planet Earth after having unrealistic expectations, I don’t see anything wrong with keeping pressure up and keeping expectations high to avoid repeats of disappointment.

I agree with Gibbs when he says that Congress needs to get rid of DADT and that congressional action will create a longer-lasting solution, and I’m pretty sure Dan Savage does too, but in the meantime, Obama has fired approximately 264 people for being gay.  I take that as a personal affront, but I also realize that gay people are a political liability.  What a sad sentence to have to write.  I’m really looking forward to what Obama has to say on Monday when he speaks at the Stonewall celebration.

I’m one of those mad gays, and I must admit I’m a little confused too, so I think writing out a quick nonexhaustive representative recap of everything Obama and gay that has happened in the past year or so would help me get a handle on it and put it all in perspective.

Campaign season – Obama has nine campaign promises related to gay rights, declares himself as a “fierce advocate” for gays and lesbians (PS great word choice re: fierce)

1. Pass hate crime legislation to include gay, transgendered people
2. Pass a workplace antidiscrimination bill – ENDA
3. Fully repeal DOMA, which keeps the federal government from recognizing gay relationships or states from recognizing other states’ same-sex union contracts
4. Create federally recognized civil unions, an everything-but-marriage alternative to marriage
5. Won’t sign a constitutional gay marriage ban
6. Repeal DADT – allow gays to serve openly in the armed forces
7. Protect and extend adoption rights for gay couples
8. AIDS – he’s against it, supports curing it.
9. Pass the Uniting American Families Act, listed here, which would allow binational same-sex couples to be treated as real life couples in immigration law, such as gaining citizenships or being approved for visas.

January, Inauguration – Invites Rick Warren, someone who compares being gay to incest and pedophilia, to give the invocation.

February – Nothing.

March – Nothing. Be patient! Recession!

April – Nothing yet! You are not important as other things!

May – Nothing yet! Quiet your grumbling! Dijon mustard, more recession!

June – Obama addresses gay rights for the first time, sort of, with an eye roll.

The Department of Justice releases a legal brief comparing gay marriage to incest and saying that a discriminatory law is okay as long as it saves the government money.

Obama, smelling the shitstorm, quickly signs yesterday’s ineffectual executive memorandum to mollify the angry queers to save a DNC fundraiser (which the White House admits). The memorandum, to review, gives gay partners some benefits, which they sometimes already had, and not healthcare or pension benefits, to some federal employees, but not if you’re in the military, in which case you get fired, and it expires when his term is up. What do gays get to do now? Use sick days to take care of spouses and children and get included in calculations for family size when determining overseas housing allocation.

More detail and background here.

***

One of my favorite consequences of being gay is that you are automatically thrust into an advanced civics class.  Upon coming out, I became immensely fascinated with all of the complicated ways that discrimination can be written into law.  You really get an appreciation for checks and balances and the deliberate mechanisms that make all government changes proceed at a snail’s pace, necessitating extensive and exhaustive debate on every issue before it becomes law when your personal love life, relationships, and your family are the subjects of the debate. I think a significant portion of gay activists’ frustration and anger stems from the appreciation of the system we have – we know that our best strategy to gain our legal rights is to convince people that we are real, live humans.  It’s much more satisfying to have our rights acknowledged through a popular vote or legislative process than through judicial decree.

Every once in a while, though, it really becomes overwhelming and too much to handle.  Shit is seriously convoluted when you need to go to a lawyer to figure out how much you’re getting fucked.  “Partners will be considered in calculations for housing allotments”. Give me a fucking break. I don’t want to be a special case for HR, I don’t want to be fine print. I am not an issue.  I am not an issue. I am not up for debate.  You really go crazy when every day you hear things like “the gay rights debate” or “the delicate and divisive issue of gay rights”.

It’s tiresome to debate people on a false premise. Gay rights are often presented as a moral issue.  It’s not. For it to be a moral issue, it would have to be a choice.  It’s not a choice.  Let’s not get confused here, love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin people. Gay rights are not a moral issue, other than the immorality of denying/obstructing/failing to advance (when able) civil rights.  Gay sex and gay relationships are as moral and immoral as straight sex and straight relationships.  Gay cheating should be as immoral as straight cheating, and gay PDA is as gross as straight PDA. If you want to crusade against sleeping around, knock yourself out, but do it fairly and do your moral grandstanding against everyone.

Here’s honesty: I’m young, healthy, unemployed, a pacifist, single and a UBT. Not one of those nine big gay rights issues or bills affect me in any way, yet I am deeply and personally involved in the outcome of all of them. DADT, DOMA, ENDA, hate crime legislation, etc. are all just a layered, codified way to express the following phenomena while in civil society and in public discourse:

6 in 10 Americans think gay marriage should be illegal.

Half of Americans think that homosexual relations are immoral.

Americans rank homosexuality in between euthanasia and abortion in terms of morality.

4 in 10 Americans believe that homosexual relations should be illegal.

4 in 10 Americans think that being gay is unacceptable.

4 in 10 Americans think that gay people should not be allowed to be elementary school teachers.

4 in 10 Americans think that homosexuality is a result of environmental factors.

4 in 10 Americans don’t even know a gay person.

I don’t have the data to look at, but I bet dollars to donuts that those four people are the same four people all the way down the list.  R-squared is at least 0.9.

Please excuse me while I fagaliciously and indignantly wave my finger up and down, pop my hip, purse my lips and say “YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW ME”  in a serious manner.

This is where the outrage comes in – the people that we are debating about gay issues think being gay is a choice, therefore a moral question, and then that it’s immoral, yet they don’t even know any gay people. It’s absurd that it’s a public debate, and it’s more absurd that politicians need to pander to these people.

It comes down to this: We understand that people that don’t know us don’t like us.  However, self-respecting gay people should have no need to persuade, compromise, or debate on civil rights.  We should have full rights and recognition from our government. Failure to extend full rights, despite promises to do so at some point in the future, is the same as saying we can’t have rights.  Both end in no rights.  So when Mr. Fierce gives us a laundry list of expectations, but then insults us, ignores us, ignores us some more, insults us, and then signs a patronizing, nonconsequential symbolic act to salvage a fundraiser, fuck him.  Get back to principled, effective leadership like he’s shown in the past and then we’ll talk about throwing you fundraisers.

The Guvna, his lovely wife, two quaid friends of mine (right), and me

The pro photographers were going nuts here. Mayor and Governor! Zowee!

These guys (the Hat Sisters) pretty much had me laughing.

This was pretty much the average crowd density along the whole route.

Aaaand I just remembered that I’m single. 

Me: “Smile for Twitter!” Them: those precious expressions.

Seriously. Out of 150 groups, 18 were politicians or political groups and 20 were churches. A ton were schools. Full list of participants here.

Like maybe 5.  What kind of pride parade has more churches than underpants!?

The Boston Globe estimated that 500,000 people were in attendance.

PS If you came to this site because I said you were cute and handed you this website address, click here.

As some commenters have noted, Obama is an astute politician, and few will be surprised when he finally does take action.  I would really be happy, though, if he stopped acting like a homophobe, because he’s probably not.  And not the “repent or burn in hell thank you for the handout, man in the subway” kind of homophobe, but the kind that refers to his lesbian daughter’s girlfriend as “my daughter’s friend”.  The kind that would just prefer we don’t exist.

Yo quaids, check out this enjoyable ad I encountered today in Harvard Square.   A company owned by two gay dudes (I can only assume) with an ad with a good gay joke.  And the ad agency included the word “fudge” in this gay ad, which is for a food product might I remind you I think you get my point. How shameless and ballsy. One can only hope that the slippery slope argument is in fact valid and marriage will one day be defined as between one fatass and one dessert commonly associated with sadness.

I think gays and lesbians have a friend in the White House because I’ve consistently committed myself to civil unions, making sure that they have the ability to visit each other in hospitals, that they are able to access benefits, that they have a whole host of legal rights that they currently do not have. I don’t think that it makes sense for the federal government to get into the business of determining what marriage is; that isn’t traditionally the federal government’s role.

Hey, Obama.  Not to be a harpy nitpicker, but the only person who’s actually done anything yet regarding those rights we do not currently have is that lady you used to out-gaylove back when a couple million people were interviewing you for your job.

He literally hasn’t said one word out loud until now, unless you count this really awkward no-homoesque joke from the correspondents’ dinner. And these three uncomfortable dodges from his press secretary that strongly indicate that there is no discussion of these things, say, at staff meetings.

It’s not like the opportunity hasn’t presented itself.  Indeed, there is an extensive list of LGBT rights advances from the past six months – Iowa, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire have legalized marriage since he was sworn in, Washington and Nevada have passed all-but-marriage bills, and D.C. voted to recognize gay marriages performed in other states. And of course, Congress, i.e. the federal government, has the ability to overrule the D.C. city council’s decision.

Just to review, there are a whole slew of things that could have happened by now to show that his answer to Brian Willams isn’t just politicking to placate a huge donor base: end the HIV travel ban, ask Congress to repeal DOMA, repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell instead of sending people you fired, Mr. Commander-in-Chief, letters saying that you are sorry for firing them (sort of), or pass ENDA so non-military people can’t get fired for being gay, invite Adam Lambert to the White House.

Alternatively, you could say that you wanted to do any of these things into a microphone at any point after you were inaugurated, just like you did all the time in the debates and on the campaign trail.  And yes, there is a difference between saying “gay people should have legal rights” and “I am asking Congress to give gay people their rights by repealing DOMA as soon as possible.”

Cynisism aside, I can totally sympathize now with how much my mom hates having to nag.  It really sucks, but it always (eventually, at least) resulted in my picking up my socks or passing legislation or whatever when I lived at home.

Don’t worry, there’s some Santana Champ in the back of the fridge I saved for you.

I know! It is so crisp!

For my straight dude readers – I triple dog dare you to say the following to another straight dude today:

Dude, New Hampshire finally passed gay marriage. Sweet, yeah?

If you don’t, you hate gay people.

I’m being serious.  Tell me who you told.

Coming out used to be an exhausting process. You had to come out again and again and again to all your friends at different times. Nowadays, even with social networking, gays still have to come out, but one of the key differences between our pre-profile selves and our new online presentations is that now (finally!) the burden is also on our friends to discover and digest our identities. For the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, Facebook et al have finally leveled the identity field, and it’s kinda nice.

This article makes several things clear.  The first clear thing is that the author of this article clearly got the idea for the article from my blog. Second, it is clear that this article was written for a middle-aged audience, what with the adjective “new” being employed to describe facebook. Third, as a result of reading this article and also my best friend getting engaged (Hey Em! Congrats again!), it is clear that the etiquette of coming out and getting engaged are eerily similar – the order of people that you tell basically tells them how you rank them numerically as friends, if you find out via facebook you don’t really matter, and it allows for a lot more social laziness.  Cuz seriously, in both situations, after the first three times, it gets boring telling the same story over and over.  “Yeah, he did get down on one knee; yes, it is indeed a 1.8 karat diamond” = “Yeah, I’ve always been into dudes; yes, that is why I like Shakira so much.”

Example: “THE WORLD IS FLAT BECAUSE IT’S IN THE BIBLE”

Anyway, I’m just using that as a little introduction to this gem that a tipster sent in.  It’s the National Organization for Marriage’s newest ad for straight-only marriage in all its pedophile-implicatory, child-exploit-y, fear-monger-y shitasticness. [Update: NOM has pulled this ad, probably to keep them from charges of child abuse? Luckily, other users have reposted it.]

I’ll waste no words on the content.  I’ll just let Louis CK take care of it.  (COULD ‘CK’ STAND FOR CAT, KEYBOARD!?)

The ad came out about a week ago, but I’m putting it up because of the haps up in New Hampshire earlier today.  The governor said that he would sign a gay marriage bill that had already passed both houses of the legislature if they added extra special language that makes it super clear that churches and religious things can still keep discriminating against gay couples if they feel like it, First Commandment be damned.  It created a little snag when it went back to the House.  The House didn’t pass the revised version of the bill because some gay marriage supporters believed the language to be too broad. The new language says that anyone affiliated with a religious organization — Churches, adoption agencies, The can deny goods, services, and benefits to gay-married people.  It’s an understandable hang-up, since the language is pretty darned broad for something added to calm fears that churches would be legally obligated to marry people they don’t want to without the language, just like the Catholic church is legally obligated to perform weddings for divorced people and Mormon churches are also legally obligated to marry atheist straight couples.

That was sarcastic; don’t want Poe’s Law to trip anyone up.