Lawyers for President Obama are quietly drafting first-of-their kind guidelines barring workplace discrimination against transgender federal employees, officials said Tuesday.This is a good thing, and an important step for the transgender community. But don't think for a minute that the President would have held that Oval Office signing ceremony if the community hadn't risen up in anger over the anti-gay DOMA brief.
The guidelines will be in an updated federal handbook for managers and supervisors to be distributed and posted online in the next couple of months, and they could also be included in other materials for managers. They will list transgender people — those who identify their gender differently from the information on their birth certificates — as among several groups protected by antidiscrimination laws.
An important point. Obviously the Obama administration is worried about the uproar from the community. And obviously, they are doing things like adding gender identity to the federal non-discrimination regulations, letting married gay couples change their names on their passports, providing some benefits (not health care) to some partners of some federal employees because they're trying to play some catch up. And good. They need to catch up. But one thing is missing. An explanation as to what happened two weeks ago when Barack Obama's Department of Justice compared gay marriage to incest and pedophilia?
Not a word from the White House about that little chestnut. And there's the rub. It's great that the White House suddenly feels the need to act on a number of issues that help the gay community, only after we collectively beat the crap out of them. And they seem intent on finding every non-top-of-the-agenda item they can to "fix" in order to boost their pro-gay bona fides. Today, for example, we learn of the government's apology to Frank Kameny for having fired him 40 years ago for being gay. This is good thing. But again, it is not an explanation for how our president's DOJ could compare us to incest and pedophilia, and for why our president refuses to issue a stop-loss order preventing real governmental discrimination taking place today in 2009, not in 1957. It's almost as if the Obama administration hopes that if it can piece together a big enough list of small items, they can make us go away on our biggest issues, Obama's biggest promises, to repeal DOMA and DADT.
Let's remind the White House once again why we are all here:
Will this president apologize for comparing our community to incest and pedophilia?
Will he explain why the brief gratuitously argued for the dismantlement of the legal underpinning of our civil rights (suggesting that Loving v. Virginia had nothing to do with gay marriage equality)?
Will he explain why our civil rights do not matter his making an exemption - which he is in his rights to do - to the standard, but not exclsuvei, practice of a president defending existing law? Why won't he oppose DOMA in court?
And then there's DADT. Barack Obama is destroying the lives of two patriotic US service members a day. He could issue a stop-loss order, ceasing the discharges, today. He refuses to. Why? Because he claims that repealing DADT is better. Yes it is. But since President Obama is doing nothing, planning nothing, to repeal DADT, then why not stop the discharges now, and then get to the repeal later? Silence. The reason Obama won't repeal DADT now is that this would require him to take the lead. And what we're learning about our president is that when seemingly controversial issues arise, he suddenly becomes the Follower of the Free World, rather than its leader.
Main & gay blog