Kerry Eleveld at the Advocate has obtained a White House email to gay organizations participating in today's high-level DADT summit at the White House. The summit was hastily called as part of the White House's larger "charm offensive" to woo the left pre next week's elections.Charming. Read More......
In the email, the White House liaison to the gay community, Brian Bond, outright threatened our key national organizations that if any of them dare mention the DADT court cases - the ones the Obama administration keeps defending and appealing, even though they don't have to - the White House will immediately end the meeting.
There's increased chatter, as the spies would say, from the Obama administration and from administration apologists about the notion that the President simply has to appeal our DADT & DOMA victories in court lest a future Republican president refuse to appeal legal challenges to Obama's health care reform bill or the Hate Crimes bill.
The President's near fanatical desire for "bipartisanship at all costs" is by now legendary. He seriously seems to believe that by giving something to the GOP for nothing, the Republicans will at some future date return the favor. And, not surprising to anyone born before yesterday, they never do. But he keeps trying. He keeps scaling back his promises, keeps caving on key legislative provisions at the drop of a hat, keeps putting conservative Ds and Rs in charge of his major policy priorities, from health care reform to the budget deficit, and keeps ceding more and more power to his Secretary of Defense on DADT, as though Robert Gates were the boss of Barack Obama - all in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, one of these opponents will be nice to him since he was nice to them.Read More......
But it hasn't worked out very well because life doesn't work that way, at least not in Washington, DC. The Republicans are never "nice" to Democrats because Democrats ceded ground first. To a Republican, you didn't give them a peace offering, you conveyed weakness. How many campaign promises does he have to self-sabotage before the President understands that the goody-two-shoes school of political diplomacy simply doesn't work in this town?
The notion that President Sarah Palin is going to look to Barack Obama for guidance on what to do on health care reform is laughable. And the notion that any Republican is going to give a damn about Obama's positions on gay rights when deciding whether to once again bash the gays is preposterous.
Sept. 1: Fall semester begins at Rutgers. Dharun Ravi and Tyler Clementi are roommates in Davidson dormitory on Busch Campus.Not that it should matter, but Tyler was apparently a good kid, and an accomplished violinist:
Sept. 19: Twitter feed from Ravi: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with another dude. Yay.”
Sept. 21: Twitter feed from Ravi: “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”
Sept. 22, around 8 p.m.: Friends say Clementi sends a Facebook update: "Going to jump off the GW Bridge. Sorry."
Later that hour, Clementi commits suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge.
Clementi was a member of the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra 2010-2011 season as a violinist. At the annual Ridgewood High School ceremony in June 2010, the senior won the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra Scholarship, the Orchestra Parents Association Award, and the National School Orchestra Award. He has been recognized by the Friends of Music that supports music in the Ridgewood public schools for his community activities.This is what it means to be gay in America in 2010. I think a lot of people who aren't gay, and even many who are, like to think that we're all rich and live in big welcoming cities where being gay is about as big a handicap as being left-handed. We say we want our civil rights, but I think a lot of people think we've got things pretty good, and behind closed doors, they probably call us whiners too.
Diane Wade, a violinist with the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra, sat next to Clementi and said he was one of the most gifted student players she had encountered in many years playing with the orchestra.
“He was so incredibly talented – I could not believe how good he was for such a young boy,” Wade said. “Such a nice kid all the way around…As a parent, he was the way you want your kids to be – polite, courteous, serious about the work he was doing and a hard worker.”
Many activists involved in the issue say a large part of the blame goes to the Human Rights Campaign, the most well-funded and politically connected gay rights group in the country. They say it did not act quickly enough, did not spend enough money on the issue and failed to pressure Democratic leaders to take action before the elections.Joe has a lot more about this on AMERICAblog Gay. Read More......
"If you're solely riding on being a voice at the table and remaining at the table, eventually you're going to have to show us results," said Servicemembers Legal Defense Network spokesman Trevor Thomas, a former employee of the Human Rights Campaign. "I don't know how you're going to do that when we lose the House to the Republican leadership."
For its part, the leadership of the Human Rights Campaign maintains that it worked hard to repeal Don’t Ask Don't Tell and believes the policy could still be overturned by Congress in the coming months.
President Obama promised us during the campaign that he would repeal DADT and DOMA, and pass ENDA. He's done nothing to advance the latter two, and on the former, he blew it off for over a year, finally came up with a crappy last-minute compromise, and then hardly lifted a finger to get it to passed. And it didn't.
At this point, anyone who tells you that they're going to pass the DADT compromise during the lame duck session (i.e., after the November election but before the new Congress gets seated in January), is either naive or simply lying to you. This Congress and this President wouldn't even hold a vote on the health care reform bill - the President's #1 campaign promise - after we lost Senator Kennedy's seat and before Scott Brown was seated. Do you honestly believe that Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress care more about passing gay rights legislation than they did about health care reform?Read More......
All three of Barack Obama's most important promises to the LGBT community - DADT, DOMA, ENDA - are now dead in the water, in large part due the White House's own malfeasance and neglect. And you're expected to wipe the tears, open your wallets, and once again go to polls and vote for the same people who weren't competent enough - who didn't care enough - to keep their promises to you the first time around.
That'll show them who's boss.
With the imminent demise of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" compromise that did not, in any case, repeal DADT (even though the NYT and other lazy journalists like to claim it did), and the imminent demise of the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives, President Obama is about to have accomplished a record zero of his top promises to the gay community. A record that, if we lose the House, will likely remain at zero for the next six years, if the President is so lucky as to win re-election.
It's becoming increasingly clear that Barack Obama is not an agent of change. He's not out to fundamentally transform our government or our country, and he's never going to be anyone's fierce advocate. If gay voters want to hand their money and their ballots over to someone who won't keep his major promises, who won't significantly advance the cause of their civil rights, who will outright work against those promises as we attempt to advance our civil rights in courts of law, but who at least won't be as big a bigot as John McCain, then they are certainly welcome to support him with all their hearts and wallets. I for one am not feeling an overwhelming desire to donate another $1,000 to, or raise another $43,000 for, a candidate who promises me the moon and then seems almost embarrassed of me the morning after the election.Read More......
Perhaps it is naive. But I expect politicians to at least try to keep their major promises. I never said they have to succeed. But they have to at least TRY. Our fierce advocate seems fiercely indifferent. And I fear that an increasing number of Democratic voters now share his indifference.
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