President Obama’s Administration has not delivered for the The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community

President Obama’s Administration has not delivered for the The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community
By Carlos T Mock, MD
March 26, 2009

Two months ant seven days and Mr. Obama has delivered on just about every front except gay rights:

Attorney General Signals Shift In Marijuana Policy-March 18, 2009
Tucked into the big spending bill just signed by President Obama is a welcome provision designed to make affordable birth control available to millions of women across the country-March 13, 2009
Obama Reversed Limits on Stem Cells Research-March 9, 2009
Obama Restoring Endangered Species Act Provision-March 3, 2009
President Barack Obama last week expressed his commitment to launching a new effort to find "a cure for cancer in our time-March 2, 2009
Obama’s Backing Raises Hopes for Climate Pact-February 28, 2009
Obama's energy future policy of renewable forms of energy is on his budget
Obama grasps healthcare reform on his budget
Obama signs equal-pay bill named for woman who says she was denied equal pay for decades-January 29, 2009
Barack Obama has made a good, confident start. He quickly signed orders closing Guantánamo Bay-January 24, 2009

We have seen token measures toward the GLBT community such as:

Officials: Obama administration to reverse Bush stance on gay rights at UN on March 17, 2009
Obama picks openly gay man to head Office of National AIDS Policy on February 26, 2009
Federal immigration bill introduced. Saying that now there's a president in the White House who is not a "guaranteed veto" for the legislation, U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler reintroduced a bill Feb. 12
With Nancy Sutley joining Team Obama as chairwoman of the Council on Environmental Quality, she becomes the first prominent, openly gay or lesbian to join the Cabinet.

Yet, there are the never ending issues that treat gays as second class citizens in which we have seen no action:

Let’s star with Current U.S. LGBT employment discrimination law: Employment discrimination refers to discriminatory employment practices such as bias in hiring, promotion, job assignment, termination, and compensation, and various types of harassment. In the United States there is "very little statutory, common law, and case law establishing employment discrimination based upon sexual orientation as a legal wrong." Some exceptions and alternative legal strategies are available. President Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13087 (1998) prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation in the competitive service of the federal civilian workforce, and federal non-civil service employees may have recourse under the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution. Private sector workers may have a Title VII action under a quid pro quo sexual harassment theory, a "hostile work environment" theory, a sexual stereotyping theory, or others. Twenty states, the District of Columbia, and over 140 cities and counties have enacted such bans. The states banning sexual orientation discrimination in private sector employment are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin (the first state to do so, in 1982). Five states have laws prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination in public workplaces only: Delaware, Indiana, Michigan, Montana, and Pennsylvania. On November 22, 2007, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm issued an order guarding the rights of transgender men and women. She prohibited discrimination of state workers based on gender identity or expression. Many of these laws also ban discrimination in other contexts, such as housing or public accommodation. A proposed bill to ban anti-gay employment discrimination nationwide, known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), has been introduced in the U.S. Congress, but its prospects of passage were not believed to be good when there was a Republican-controlled Congress. However, the Democratic victory at the 2008 general elections may present a new opportunity for the bill to pass. Thirteen states had reformed their state civil rights code (or experienced court decisions) to include sexual orientation and gender identity, while another seven had amended their civil rights code to only include sexual orientation. Aside from state law, about a hundred cities in thirty three states had enacted some type of civil rights legislation that includes sexual orientation.

Then there is housing discrimination: this refers to discrimination against potential or current tenants by landlords. In the United States, there is no federal law against such discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, but at least thirteen states and many major cities have enacted laws prohibiting it.

Gays in the military—The terrible failure of President Clinton's “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy allowed The Pentagon, which allows gays to serve as long as they do not reveal their sexual orientation to dismissed 787 gay men and lesbians last year. All we need is a simple executive order like President Truman made after WWII and gays would be integrated in the armed forces.

Our families:

Census: Do we count?  Never mind Massachusetts. Never mind Connecticut. Never mind Vermont, or any state with civil unions. Gay marriage, or any other form of recognized partnerships for GLBTs, is still not being accounted for by the federal government when they count households.

Immigration - Gay couples should be allowed to stay together in the United States.   
Adoption: The vast majority of states no longer deny custody or visitation to a person based on sexual orientation. State agencies and courts now apply a "best interest of the child" standard to decide these cases. Under this approach, a person's sexual orientation cannot be the basis for ending or limiting parent-child relationships unless it is demonstrated that it causes harm to a child. Using this standard, more than 22 states to date have allowed lesbians and gay men to adopt children either through state-run or private adoption agencies. Even though All of the research to date has reached the same unequivocal conclusion about gay parenting: the children of lesbian and gay parents grow up as successfully as the children of heterosexual parents. In fact, not a single study has found the children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged because of their parents' sexual orientation. Other key findings include:

There is no evidence to suggest that lesbians and gay men are unfit to be parents.
Home environments with lesbian and gay parents are as likely to successfully support a child's development as those with heterosexual parents.

Good parenting is not influenced by sexual orientation. Rather, it is influenced most profoundly by a parent's ability to create a loving and nurturing home -- an ability that does not depend on whether a parent is gay or straight.

There is no evidence to suggest that the children of lesbian and gay parents are less intelligent, suffer from more problems, are less popular, or have lower self-esteem than children of heterosexual parents.

The children of lesbian and gay parents grow up as happy, healthy and well-adjusted as the children of heterosexual parents.

And finally Marriage: In 2003, the U. S. Supreme court Lawrence v. Texas Sodomy declared unconstitutional sodomy laws. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, explicitly reversed Bowers v. Hardwick. (On June 30, 1986, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick, that homosexual citizens had no constitutional right to privacy.) What is significant about this decision is that under the common law, the existence of rights of sexual partners are recognized through the marriage contract. That is, in common law there is no stand-alone right to engage in sexual activity, be they male or female, adult or minor. But, it is a basic legal principle under the common and statutory laws that everything that is not forbidden by the common and statutory law is allowed. As sexual acts usually take place in private, few cases involving engagement in sodomy and fornication come before the courts, and no precedent was established under the common law forbidding fornication; with sodomy, the common law is mixed. This was most notable in Judge Scalia dissension: with this decision, Scalia concluded, the Court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda." While Scalia said that he has "nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means," Scalia argued that the Court has an obligation to decide cases neutrally. In Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, a later case decided by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, held that the Massachusetts Constitution requires that marriage be available to homosexual as well as heterosexual couples. Now that The Lawrence decision has made our relationships “officially” legal—our rights need protection like those of any other U. S. citizen—therefore the 14th Amendment to the constitution applies fully to homosexuals: this amendment provides a broad definition of citizenship, overruling Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) which had excluded slaves and their descendants from possessing Constitutional rights. The amendment requires states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons within their jurisdictions and was used in the mid-20th century to dismantle racial segregation in the United States, as in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Its Due Process Clause has been the basis of much important and controversial case law regarding privacy rights, abortion (Roe v. Wade), and other issues. This is the only legal compromise for same sex “civil “marriages—we are legal citizens of the U. S. of A. and pay taxes and FICA like every other citizen in the country. Until we are allowed the “civil right” to wed, we will be second class citizens—we will be deprived of more than 1,138 federal rights that accompany civil marriage, and some additional 300-600 per individual state. That means your run-of-the-mill-marriage-license-carrying heterosexual couple has access to over 1,400 rights, benefits, and protections that gay and lesbian citizens are unable to obtain! This is a clear violation of the 14th amendment to the U. S. Constitution that provides equal protection under the law to all persons regardless of sexual preference or gender orientation! Civil unions are not enough! In Loving v. Virginia, (1967) where The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. The court ruled that Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Court's decision, Chief Justice Warren wrote: “Marriage is one of 'the basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival . . . To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.”


Dr. Mock has published four books with Floricanto Press, Berklety, CA. His articles have appeared on publications like The Chicago Tribune and several gay and lesbian newspapers. He was inducted in The Chicago GLBT Hall of Fame in 2007. He can be reached at: www.carlostmock.com