Obama the marriage-equality hypocrite

Many gay and lesbian Americans feel double-crossed by President Barack Obama – and rightly so. After all, it was Obama’s clear stance against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that led many to side with him over Democratic primary rival Hillary Clinton.

Let’s travel back to the summer of 2007, a time when no one was expecting the battle royale to come between Clinton and Obama. In fact, Clinton was all but assumed to be the next president.

Logo, the gay cable network, held a gay-focused presidential primary debate along with the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest gay civil rights organization. Inevitably, the issue of marriage for same-sex couples came up.

While both Obama and Clinton agreed on separate-but-equal civil unions over full marriage equality, they differed on DOMA. That legislation, infamously signed into the law under dark of night by then-President Bill Clinton, does two critical things:

1.   It says the federal government does not have to recognize a legally wed same-sex couple, even if they are legally wed in their home state.

2.   It says that other states don’t have to recognize a couple legally wed in their home state. (This is clearly unconstitutional because of the U.S. Constitution’s full faith and credit clause, which means – among other things – that if a straight couple elopes to Vegas, when they go home to Idaho, their Nevada marriage must be recognized.)

At the Logo debate, Clinton – ever the pragmatist – said that as president, she would advocate repealing part of DOMA, but not the portion dealing with full faith and credit. She explained that it would not be politically feasible to repeal DOMA fully over the next presidential term.

Obama, however, went all in. He not only called for the full repeal of DOMA, but also noted that this has been his position since he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006.

After that exchange, many LGBT Americans took a second look at the race – and while many still sided with Clinton, more and more jumped to Obama.

DOMA, therefore, was a decisive issue for a large number of gays and lesbians looking at the presidential race.

It’s no wonder so many are angry with Obama right now.

Not only is he dragging his heels on high-priority LGBT issues such as repealing DOMA and the military’s anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy (which he promised to overturn), but his administration’s recent defense of DOMA is nothing but despicable.

In a brief submitted in the case of Smelt v. U.S. challenging the constitutionality of DOMA and California’s anti-gay Proposition 8, the Obama administration argues that DOMA is a “cautious policy of federal neutrality.” What!?!?! During the campaign, Obama called DOMA “abhorrent.”

As pointed out by the New York Times in a June 16 editorial, this “neutrality” argument is “an odd assertion since the law clearly discriminates against gay couples. Under the act, same-sex married couples who pay their taxes are ineligible for the sort of federal benefits – such as Social Security survivors’ payments and joint tax returns – that heterosexual married couples receive.”

Then there’s the brief’s comparison of same-sex marriage to incest and pedophilia. As the Times put it, “The brief insists it is reasonable for states to favor heterosexual marriages because they are the ‘traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.’ In arguing that other states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages under the Constitution’s ‘full faith and credit’ clause, the Justice Department cites decades-old cases ruling that states do not have to recognize marriages between cousins or an uncle and a niece.”

And to top it all off, the brief argues that DOMA does not discriminate against gays; it merely limits federal benefits to those in opposite-sex marriages. So the Obama administration is saying that a gay man isn’t being discriminated by DOMA because he could go off and marry a woman to get the benefits!

This is twisted and shows ignorance and the kind of wedge-issue politics that Obama spoke out so strongly against during the campaign.

Then after all this odious offense, Obama has the nerve to throw crumbs in the form of partner benefits for federal employees only.

This is hypocrisy and anti-gay demagoguery worthy of George W. Bush. Is this really the change we can believe in that a majority of Americans voted for?

California high court got it wrong on marriage

Most know by now that the California Supreme Court this week upheld the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. And many are angry because the decision halts the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

But if you want to be really angry, understand how six of the court’s seven justices were able to find a rationale to uphold the now-infamous Proposition 8 – and understand the anti-gay bias behind that decision.

One of the arguments made by the lawyers seeking to overturn Proposition 8 as unconstitutional was that the ban took away the right of same-sex couples to due process and equal protection under the law. But the majority opinion, written by Justice Ronald George, ruled that Proposition 8 does “not entirely repeal” or “abrogate” the aspect of a same-sex couple’s state constitutional due process – that is, the right to “choose one’s life partner and enter with that person into a committed, officially recognized, and protected family relationship that enjoys all of the constitutionally based incidents of marriage.”

Instead, the court ruled, “the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights” by reserving the official designation of the term “marriage” for the union of opposite-sex couples.

That is to say, since California has strong domestic partnership laws, same-sex couples can do whatever they want regardless of whether or not the state confers the word “marriage” upon them. In essence, according to the ruling, denying the word “marriage” does not diminish the right to equal protection under the law.

This is nothing but a legal tango to rationalize that separate-but-equal is not only equal, but also constitutional.

Haven’t we been through this before? Separate but equal is NOT equal. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized this.

Thankfully, at least one of the justices on the court understands this.

The lone dissenter, Justice Carlos Moreno, wrote in his opinion that denying “the designation of marriage to same-sex couples cannot fairly be described as a ‘narrow’ or ‘limited’ exception to the requirement of equal protection. … Even a narrow and limited exception to the promise of full equality strikes at the core of, and thus fundamentally alters, the guarantee of equal treatment. … Promising equal treatment to some is fundamentally different from promising equal treatment for all. Promising treatment that is almost equal is fundamentally different from ensuring truly equal treatment. Granting a disfavored minority only some of the rights enjoyed by the majority is fundamentally different from recognizing, as a constitutional imperative, that they must be granted all of those rights.”

Despite the survival of Proposition 8, all is not lost.

The good thing is that this is far from the last word on the issue. The other good thing is that all seven justices ruled that their decision was not retroactive, so the 18,000 or so same-sex couples who married in California before Proposition 8 passed last November are still legally married.

The downside to that, of course, is that it creates an even crazier patchwork of laws. It used to be just that same-sex couples were only legally married based upon what state they were in. Now, same-sex couples in California are only legally married based upon the date on their marriage certificates.

This is untenable – and it’s just one of the reasons why eventually marriage equality will be the law of the land from sea to shining sea.