With George Bush and Dick Cheney finally out of power, our country is returning to its ideals so quickly and in so many ways that it’s dizzying.
Recognizing the rule of law? Check. Following the Constitution? Check. Keeping politics out of law enforcement? Check. Recognizing our right to know what our own government is doing? Check.
What about LGBT equality? George Bush worked to enshrine discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans into the United States Constitution, supported laws that put gay and lesbian couples in prison for the crime of having sex in their own home, and fought to continue to allow workplace discrimination against LGBT Americans.
And President Obama? The White House website spells out President Obama’s agenda for LGBT equality, and it’s pretty terrific. He:
- Opposes a constitutional amendment to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying
- Supports expanded hate-crime legislation
- Supports a transgender-inclusive ENDA
- Supports civil unions (He’s still not with us all the way on full marriage equality, but we’ll keep pushing him on this one)
- Supports eliminating the heinous Defense of Marriage Act
- Supports legislation to ensure that same-sex couples have the same federal rights and benefits that opposite-sex married couples have
But it’s not just the substance of the agenda that’s important: Where it’s placed on the website tells us a lot.
Rather than cravenly avoiding LGBT rights altogether or putting them in a category like “social issues” or “cultural issues,” as a number of others do, the White House places them exactly where they belong: as part of our nation’s civil rights agenda. The Obama Administration is framing LGBT issues in a way that helps progressives set the terms of the conversation.
The Radical Right dishonestly paints their anti-equality positions as pro-family, pro-values, and pro-religion, a dangerously deceptive framing that the mainstream media tends to blindly accept. Thus, the Right has long set the terms of the national conversation.
No more. Using the bully pulpit of the White House, President Obama can make it clear that LGBT equality is nothing less than a civil rights issue.
And that framing allows us to more effectively pin the Radical Right down by asking the threshold question: What specific legal rights that you have should be denied to people who are gay, lesbian, or transgender?