You need help. No, seriously…you are in desperate need of an intervention. Ever since November 2nd, you have become addicted to all things Barack Obama. You’re so hooked you’ve even given his wife a fashion award just for dressing better than Barbara and Laura Bush (not a hard task by any stretch of the imagination), thinking that Michelle’s approval will bring you closer to his heart and once that’s done, he’ll give you what you’ve been needing: passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA); the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA); and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT).
That’s right, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community, I’m talking to you. After eight years of experiencing an actively hostile administration under George Bush—and eight years of a heartbreakingly disappointing administration under Bill Clinton before that—it’s easy to understand why members of the country’s most acronym-tastic minority are feenin’ for a bit of that Obama hope and change. Cheered by his public declarations that he would dismantle laws allowing open discrimination against the LGBT community, you assumed that your dignity and value would be recognized by his administration not when it was politically advantageous but with a sense of urgency.
Of course, that was assuming a lot. It was assuming that Democrats would pass ENDA and send it to Obama within the first 100 days of his presidency. It was assuming that his Justice Department wouldn’t write a legal brief supporting DOMA that equated its legality with that of laws prohibiting incest. It was assuming that his Pentagon wouldn’t dismiss 264 soldiers from the military simply because someone asked and/or someone told. What’s more, some of you were in complete denial, thinking he was secretly in favor of man-on-man marriage (he told you he wasn’t, didn’t you listen?) but just couldn’t publically say so until after the election.
Like I said, you need help.
Obama’s greatest strength as a politician is his ability to see and speak to the larger picture. Take health care: what was once an argument that the nation has a moral obligation to provide health coverage to the 50 million Americans without insurance has under Obama been framed as creating a universal system that would lower costs and improve quality of care for all Americans. Now a cause that was a priority for 16 percent of the country has become a legislative necessity for 100 percent of the populace.
Advancing gay rights can easily be construed by political opponents as acting in the interest of a relatively small group. Conventional estimates number the LGBT community at 10 percent of the population and with that low of a number Obama simply does not see LGBT rights as beneficial to the larger whole. He may agree with the arguments around equality, justice and any other mamby-pamby civil liberties diatribe you want to use, but if we’re being honest the LGBT community has not made an effective argument that its civil rights contributes to the betterment of America writ large. The closest the LGBT rights movement has come to doing so is around DADT, stating that this policy leads to on average the dismissal of over 800 soldiers a year and that this has hurt national security. Of course it’s not hard to counter that by pointing out that those 800 soldiers only account for .03 percent of a military numbered at three million and that is an acceptable price to pay for maintaining troop morale.
The LGBT community must therefore make the Obama administration see how LGBT rights are tied to a larger agenda. In 1941, prominent black labor rights leaders first proposed a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in war time factories. Fearing what this could do to the production of equipment for WWII, President Roosevelt issued an executive order barring discrimination in the national defense industry.
Black folks learned then that there were times when they would have to make political leaders see that their rights were inextricably tied to the welfare of the nation as a whole. Recently, a couple of prominent gay donors employed the same tactical style (albeit on a much smaller scale) by refusing to attend a Democratic Party fundraiser. Within days, Obama had rounded up every gay he could find hanging out in Dupont Circle for an Oval Office ceremony where he extended some small-scale benefits to the same-sex partners of Federal employees. He did so because he knows he cannot accomplish his priorities without a large Democratic majority in Congress and in order to maintain that majority past the 2010 midterm elections, especially given the difficulty of raising money during a recession, Democratic congressional candidates will need every pink penny the gays can give.
The connection between LGBT dollars and the President’s national priorities has been made clear by Obama’s own actions. It’s now up to the LGBT community to seize this momentum and put a freeze on donations to the Democrats and show them that until real progress is made, it’s the Democratic Party that is going to need the help. Seriously.
Jamaal Young is a former political operative with the Democratic National Committee and has served as a policy consultant to a number of organizations on civil rights, education, and community service.
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