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Time
for Obama to defend gay rights
- Frank Rich
- June 29,
2009
Obama's advocacy of civil rights is
sorely lacking in one area.
LIKE all students
caught up in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, I was riveted
by the violent confrontations between the police and protesters in Selma, 1965,
and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked
Greenwich Village after police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the
wee hours of June 28, 1969.
Then again,
I didn't know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire
Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends
and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era's political tumult, we
somehow missed the Stonewall story.
The issue
of gay civil rights wasn't on our radar. Not least because gay people, fearful
of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As David
Carter writes in Stonewall, at
the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but
Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws
protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual
character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or
suicide.
The younger
gay men — and the few women — who acted up at the Stonewall on those early
summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their contemporaries in the
front-page political movements of the time. They often lived on the streets,
having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by their families before they
finished high school. They migrated to the Village because they'd heard it was
one American neighbourhood where it was safe to be who they
were.
After the
gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced
haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and a new wave of gay activism to fully
awaken many to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still
embryonic awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made
them even more vulnerable during a rampaging
plague.
Today
President Barack Obama will commemorate Stonewall with a reception for gay
leaders. Some have been fiercely critical of what they see as his failure, thus
far, to redeem his promise to be a "fierce advocate" for their still unfulfilled
cause. The rancour increased this month when the Department of Justice supported
the Defence of Marriage Act, the most ignominious civil rights betrayal under
the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
The most
charitable take on Obama's delay in honouring his campaign commitment to
dismantle the bill had it that he was following a deliberate strategy, given his
habit of pursuing his goals through long-term plans. After all, he's only five
months into his term and must juggle two wars, the cratered economy, health care
and Iran. Some have speculated that the President is fearful of crossing
preachers who are adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Others say that the
President is tone-deaf on the issue because his inner White House circle lacks
any known gay people.
But the
most prevalent theory is that Obama, surrounded by Clinton White House alumni
with painful memories, doesn't want to risk gay issues upending his presidency,
as they did his predecessor's in 1993. After having promised to lift the ban on
gays in the military, Clinton beat a hasty retreat into the Don't Ask, Don't
Tell policy once Congress and the Pentagon
rebelled.
But 2009 is
not then. Clinton failed less because of the policy's substance than his
fumbling of the politics. Even in 1992 a majority of the country (57 per cent)
supported an end to the military ban on gays. But Clinton blundered into the
issue with no strategy at all and little or no advance consultation with the
Joint Chiefs and Congress. That's never been Obama's
way.
Besides,
the cultural climate is far different today.
Now,
roughly 75 per cent of Americans support an end to Don't Ask Don't Tell, and gay
civil rights history is moving faster in the country, including on the
once-theoretical front of same-sex marriage, than it is in
Washington.
But full
gay citizenship is far from complete. "There's a perception in Washington that
you can throw little bits of partial equality to gay people and that gay people
will be satisfied with that," says Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter who won
an Oscar for Milk, last year's
movie about Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay civil rights politician of the
1970s. Such "crumbs", Black adds, cannot substitute for "full and equal rights
in all matters of civil law in all 50 states".
No
president possesses that magic wand, but Obama's inaction on gay civil rights is
striking. So is his utterly uncharacteristic inarticulateness. The Justice
Department brief defending the Defence of Marriage Act has spoken louder for
this president than any of his own words. Jennifer Chrisler of the Family
Equality Council, an advocacy organisation for gay families based in
Massachusetts, noted that he had given major speeches on race and abortion and
to the Muslim world. "People are waiting for that passionate speech from him on
equal rights," she says, "and the time is now."
Action
would be even better. The media reports that "gay supporters" are disappointed
with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren't just another political
special-interest group. They are citizens who are actively discriminated against
by federal laws. If the President is to properly honour the memory of Stonewall,
he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous
kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood
up to make history happen in the least likely of
places.
Frank Rich is a columnist with The New York
Times.