Last night at the Human Rights Campaign dinner President Barack Obama delivered his first big speech on lgbt issues since becoming President.   There was much anticipation for the speech, as some in the gay community feel that the President has not moved fast enough on the issues affecting our community.

What is “an LGBT Issue”?

But what impressed me about the speech was not that he failed to set a date or timetable for the repeal of  “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” or that he offered no new legislative strategy to pass ENDA, but rather the “queer-ness” of his remarks.   After a pretty funny joke where he thanked HRC for inviting him to be the opening act for Lady Gaga, he acknoweldged that many in the audience held the view that “progress had not come fast enough” on lgbt issues.  He challenged the assembled homo audience to think expansively about what it means for something to be an “lgbt issue”:

I think it’s important to remember that there is not a single issue that my administration deals with on a daily basis that does not touch on the lives of the lgbt community.  We all have a stake in reviving this ecomony.  We all have a stake in putting people back to work.   We all have a stake in improving our schools and in acheiving quality, affordable healthcare.   We all have a stake in meeting the difficult challenges we face in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These and other remarks signaled the President’s strong anti-identitarian and non-institutional approach to civil rights, an approach not shared by the likes of HRC and many other lgbt rights groups.   Rejecting the notion that “our issues” are exhausted by those that have “our names” on them, such as “gay marriage,”  “gays in the military,” or a “gay-rights bill,” Obama suggested that the community take on a much more ambitious agenda.  Take the marriage equality campaign, for instance.  Many lgbt people seek the legal recognition of their relationships in order to gain their partner’s health benefits.  But there are many, many lesbian and gay people who can’t or won’t marry someone with good benefits, and a right to marry a same sex partner won’t help them.  Health care reform that secures a right to decent health care, regardless of one’s marital status or one’s ability to hook up with someone with good benefits, surely should be on “our agenda,” as Obama put it to us in his HRC speech.

In a sense the President was subtly acknowledging that there are large parts of the lgbt community that would never attend one of these dinners, and that don’t see HRC as “their” organization.  I’m going to guess that very few of the people attending the dinner – all of whom paid at least $250 to attend (and many paid much more) – had been laid off in the last six months and/or were among the upwards of 47 million Americans without health insurance.   Indeed, the President was one of the very few people of color in the room who wasn’t serving the food and clearing the tables.   If you check out HRC’s website, it’s health tab says nothing about the pending health care reform legislation in Congress or whether HRC has taken a position on the legislation.  It’s clearly not part of “their agenda.”

In his HRC speech, President Obama also challenged his audience to think expansively about what it means to be gay or lesbian:

For, while some may wish to define you solely for your sexual orientation or gender identity alone, you know and I know that none of us wants to be defined by just one part of what makes us whole.

This was perhaps the queerest moment of the speech.  Rather than invoking the now-common, creepily nationalistic moniker “gay-American” that Jim McGreevy tragically wrapped himself in when he came out in 2004, Obama’s speech urged his audience to focus more on interests than on identity.

Rather than reading Obama’s remarks as somehow falling short when it comes to ticking off the gay agenda, maybe we should listen more closely.  Could it be that his support of civil unions instead of marriage rights for same sex couples, and his prioritization of health care and jobs over the immediate repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” mark how he’s actually out in front of “us”?   More progressive than “we” are?

Take a moment and read Lisa Duggan’s piece in the Nation from last summer, What’s Right with Utah, in which she describes the successful and radically progressive political campaign going on in Salt Lake City undertaken by the lgbt community after they lost the chance to gain marriage rights when the state constitution was amended barring such unions.  They regrouped, found straight partners with whom to work in coalition, and have taken on much broader reforms than what they could have accomplished with “mere” marriage rights for lesbian and gay couples.  Brilliantly, they found local Mormons who opposed gay marriage, but who said they weren’t homophobic and took them at their word.  They found that of this group 62 percent supported employment nondiscrimination laws, 56 percent supported fair housing laws and 73 percent supported granting adult designees of state employees health insurance coverage. They also found that 56 percent backed legal protections like inheritance rights and job protection for LGBT people.  When they could no longer ask for marriage they found unlikely partners with whom they could ask for much more than what marriage would have provided.

This is the subtle premise of Obama’s speech last night:  think critically and progresively about what it means for something to be part of “the gay agenda.”   His remarks cautioned a kind of self-ghettoization that is always at risk when one’s politics are premised on and invested in a claim to identity that demands that political and legal victories be framed in terms of a ratification of that identity.  So too, there is a lesson in these remarks for the groups that speak on behalf of that identity, such as HRC.

The good news is that there are organizations that see the connection between, for instance, the health care public option and the interests of lgbt and queer people.  Queers for Economic Justice is perhaps the best but not the only example.  See their work on health care here.

From Columbia Law School Professor Patricia Williams, via The Nation

Millions of people are expected to descend on the nation’s capital for the inauguration of Barack Obama. It is unprecedented: churches, temples, mosques and tribal councils have hired buses to attend. Schools are closing for the day. Universities are setting up JumboTrons to watch the festivities. Global media will join the dancing in the streets.

A friend recently asked me if I thought all these constituencies were celebrating the same things. Did I think this coronation-scaled civic bliss was mostly about Obama’s being our first African-American president? Or was it because his win convinces us that some “post-race” American Dream has been ultimately affirmed? That he’s going to improve the economy? Repair global relations?

The question made me reflect for a moment. Yes, the symbolism of his race is significant, although it certainly cannot be equated with the end of racism. And surely we’re uplifted by Obama’s being so genuinely likable and smart. No doubt the euphoria is also unusually great because his campaign drew constituents into political engagement–the phone banks, the door-to-door canvassing, the social networks, mass e-mails and text messages. As a result, people feel personal, even possessive, satisfaction about his victory.

But at least as important as all that, I think, is a kind of Wizard of Oz-ish fizzy relief about George W. Bush’s exit–as in Ding Dong, the Wicked Warlock is melting into a nice little past-tense puddle. There’s a giddily celebratory sweeping out of the indubitably, absolutely, completely, very worst president in our history. So many bad things have happened in the past eight years that it’s hard to keep them all in one’s head at one time. Another friend says he hung a list in the hallway of his apartment building, tabulating all the really awful things he blames Bush for. Other neighbors added to it. At first, he said, he was going to use it to host an inauguration party at which people would knock back a shot for each phenomenally inept executive flub. But then, he says, “I realized we’d all be drunk for a year.”

In any event, it’s a great list; the sheer length of it reminds one how dizzyingly mismanaged the executive office has been. Here are a few of the highlights, to get you in the mood of groveling gratitude for the new course we are about to embark upon:

Pax Americana and the aspiration to consolidate a global American empire. The Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. Hurricane Katrina and “heckuva job, Brownie.” The explicit rejection of the Geneva Conventions. John Yoo’s and Alberto Gonzales’s redefinition of torture. Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank subsidizing his girlfriend. Ahmad Chalabi. The FCC allowing greater consolidation of media. The outing of Valerie Plame. The manipulations asserting that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The addled handling of Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Opposition to stem cell research. The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, and the burning of Baghdad’s National Library. Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks that rioting in Iraq was the sign of a liberated people and that Iraq was no more violent than some American cities. Stacking the Civil Rights Commission with conservatives, like Abigail Thernstrom, who want to overturn sections of the Voting Rights Act. The shooting death of Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari and injury of journalist Giuliana Sgrena at the hands of American soldiers. The appointment of ultraconservatives John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Cheney filling his friend with birdshot. The USA Patriot Act. Doing away with habeas corpus. The National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of citizens’ phone calls and e-mails. The notion of an unchecked, unaccountable “unitary executive.” The failure to keep official numbers of dead Iraqi civilians. The forbidding of photographs, or even visibility, of American military dead. The multilayered, high-level lying about how football hero Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan. Halliburton taking kickbacks from Kuwaiti oil suppliers. Paul Bremer dispensing billions of dollars for contracts in Iraq, which disappeared, never to be accounted for or recovered. Blackwater mercenaries accused of murdering Iraqi civilians. “Military tribunals” established outside the military justice system, with no due process or right to an attorney or to cross-examination or even to know the charges. The silly disparagement of the national anthem sung in Spanish. Bush talking directly to God. Abu Ghraib. Profiling Arab, Muslim and Latino immigrants. Guantánamo. Extraordinary rendition. Lousy veterans’ benefits. Lousy veterans’ hospitals. The failure to provide soldiers with reinforced armored vehicles (”You go to war with the army you have,” explained Rumsfeld). The refusal to recognize post-traumatic stress disorder as a legitimate condition. Monica Goodling’s political litmus tests in hiring for nonpolitical posts in the Justice Department. Expelling Helen Thomas from the White House press room and putting in fake reporter “Jeff Gannon” to throw adoring softball questions. John Ashcroft’s draping of bare-breasted sculptures in the Justice Department. His subpoenas of more than 2,500 records of abortions performed at public hospitals. Gonzales firing US Attorneys around the country for political reasons. Oh, and did I forget the economy?

This is only a short list–it doesn’t even touch on the things we were spared but that might have happened: Bush’s (failed) nomination of Bernard Kerik to head Homeland Security; the privatization of Social Security; the elevation of Alberto Gonzales and Robert Bork to the Supreme Court; a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

“Honestly,” says my friend, “who needs booze? Just reading the list, you could get drunk and have a killer hangover.” I do suppose we’ll all sober up after inauguration day. But I’m going to sneak a look at the list every now and then, just to make sure I don’t take anything for granted. However challenging the future we face, an Obama administration represents real change.

Last week when John McCain and Barack Obama were at Columbia to discuss “national service” in a non-partisan way, both candidates criticized the University for failing to reinstate ROTC activities on campus, asserting, as Senator Obama put it, that the University’s policy denies “young people….at Columbia….an option in participating in military service.”

The Naval ROTC program at Columbia ended in 1969 after students successfully objected to the connection between the University and the “military industrial complex” during the height of the Vietnam War.  Part of what sparked the campus riots in 1968 was the discovery of documents in the International Law Library detailing Columbia’s heretofore secret institutional affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think-tank affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense.

Since then Columbia students have had the option of participating in ROTC by joining ROTC programs at neighboring colleges and universities while attending Columbia as full-time students (e.g., Fordham and Manhattan). A handful of Columbia students exercise this option every year.

In 2005 the faculty, students and administrators representing their constituencies in Columbia University’s Senate voted against reinstatement of ROTC at Columbia, on grounds that the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on sexual orientation violates the University’s long established ban against a presence on campus of any organization that discriminates against individuals on the basis of race, religion, national origin, political preference or sexual preference. To give ROTC a place at Columbia would violate this policy.

I sincerely hope that Obama’s remarks about ROTC at Columbia did not signal support for “don’t ask, don’t tell” or a diminished commitment to the idea of non-discrimination in the military when it comes to gay men and lesbians.  I don’t think they do, but it would be worth it to contact the Obama campaign to reinforce the importance of repealing the don’t ask, don’t tell regulation, and the federal law (known as the Solomon Amendment) that punishes any university that refuses to allow recruiters for the armed forces from recruiting on campus.

Many members of the Columbia Law faculty signed the following letter last fall in response to the presence of military recruiters from the JAG Corps coming to the law school.  We will be circulating a similar letter this fall when the JAG Corps recruiters come again to do on-campus interviews.

We, the undersigned members of the faculty of Columbia Law School, strongly oppose the federal law known as the Solomon Amendment.  Through punitive financial coercion, this law requires the Law School to allow the United States armed services to recruit on our campus through the Law School’s Career Services office.  This recruitment directly violates the Law School’s longstanding non-discrimination policy, which forbids employers from recruiting on our campus if they discriminate based on, inter alia, sexual orientation.  Under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, which bars openly lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals from military service, military employers discriminate explicitly based on sexual orientation.

In March 2006, in Fair v. Rumsfeld , the United States Supreme Court upheld the Solomon Amendment against a challenge based on the First Amendment rights to speech and association. The Court held that law schools could be required to permit military recruiters access to campus, notwithstanding the schools’ non-discrimination policies. However, Chief Justice Roberts, speaking for a unanimous Court, also made clear that “[s]tudents and faculty are free to associate to voice their disapproval of the military’s message.”

Accordingly, we reaffirm our commitment to an educational environment at the Law School that is free from discrimination based on sexual orientation, as well as discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, and handicap or disability.  The faculty recognizes with regret the particular harm to which our lesbian, gay and bisexual students will be subject as a result of the military recruiters’ presence on campus in violation of our non-discrimination policy.

JOSÉ ALVAREZ
MARK BARENBERG
GEORGE A. BERMANN
VIVIAN BERGER
BARBARA ARONSTEIN BLACK
VINCENT BLASI
SARAH CLEVELAND
JOHN COFFEE
SHERRY COLB
LORI DAMROSCH
MICHAEL C. DORF
MICHAEL DOYLE
ARIELA DUBLER
HAROLD EDGAR
RANDALL EDWARDS
ELIZABETH F. EMENS
JEFFREY FAGAN
ROBERT A. FERGUSON
MERRITT B. FOX
KATHERINE FRANKE
RICHARD N. GARDNER
PHILIP GENTY
SUZANNE GOLDBERG
HARVEY GOLDSCHMID
JACK GREENBERG
MICHAEL HELLER
CONRAD A. JOHNSON
OLATI JOHNSON
WILLIAM K. JONES
AVERY W. KATZ
JOHN LEUBSDORF
BENJAMIN LIEBMAN
CAROL B. LIEBMAN
LANCE LIEBMAN
EDWARD LLOYD
LOUIS LOWENSTEIN
GILLIAN METZGER
CURTIS MILHAUPT
EBEN MOGLEN
KATHARINA PISTOR
ANDRZEJ RAPACZYNSKI
ALEX RASKOLNIKOV
JOSEPH RAZ
PETER ROSENBLUM
CAROL SANGER
BARBARA A. SCHATZ
ELIZABETH SCOTT
ROBERT E. SCOTT
WILLIAM SIMON
MICHAEL I. SOVERN
JANE SPINAK
JANE STAPLETON
PETER L. STRAUSS
SUSAN STURM
KENDALL THOMAS
MATTHEW WAXMAN
PATRICIA WILLIAMS
JOHN WITT
TIM WU
MARY ZULACK