Month: October 2009

A reader writes:

I admire your rage. I wish I had more of it or any at all. I know you are angry and that DADT and gay rights are life and death to you, literally. However, I am concerned about the incendiary bent your recent comments have taken. I understand why Obama's speech on Friday night angers you.  However, he did something in that speech that I

thought was pretty remarkable.

In it, he referred to a young man, scared and alone knowing he was gay for as long as he could remember.  For our president to unequivocally acknowledge that a gay person would know he was gay for as long as he could remember leaves no room for the ridiculous notion that being gay is a choice or a "lifestyle." I choked up because if I had heard my president on a Friday night on a major news channel say that when I was ten years old my adolescence and college life might have been entirely different. 

I am not saying cool down, don't, but remember we have someone here who has a shot at doing the right thing. To take him to task so brutally when he has promised to do more than any other president seems unfair.  You are more enraged at the guy who might/will do something than Bush who did nothing. Nothing. You know these things are not as easy a swipe of a pen.  Make him do it but don't take him down in the process.

Another writes:

The absolute DUMBEST thing in the whole entire world that Obama could do right now, at this very moment as President is to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or involve himself in the same sex marriage statewide issues or other gay rights issues that you wish him to tackle, in the present, highly volatile, nasty political climate, while this Aftghan war is escalating, (41 killed in Pakistan just this morning), jobs are being lost in record numbers, and with Healthcare Reform, something that Obama has made crystal clear is a mandate for his first term as President, is still on the table being negotiated. And President Obama is NOT dumb!

That is just the reality of the situation, Andrew, pure and simple. I think that you are much too emotionally involved in this issue Andrew, and as with all of us, when our emotions are in control, we become irrational. I say this out of tremendous respect and admiration for you.

My record of rage against Bush's FMA is easily found. I don't know many Republicans who'd say I was easier on Bush on these matters. I don't give a damn who the president is; and a civil rights movement shouldn't rest its foundation on any single party or politician. In this, of course, I am wearing my "activist" hat. But when a situation is about this kind of injustice, as on torture, I see no distinction between being a writer and an activist. There are times when you just have to stand up and say what's right. It is not my job to enable the continued persecution of my gay brothers and sisters. I never have and never will.

I have, of course, no intention of "taking this president down", even if I had any such power. I do have every intention of doing what I can to keep him to his word and letting the Democratic party poobahs know that we actually mean it when we say this is a civil right, and we will not tolerate the persecution of servicemembers in the line of fire any more. We went through this sixteen years ago and we did not support Obama and work round the clock to elect him only to repeat the charade.

End the ban now.

They get it; they will never lose it; and it’s time that Washington understood it:

As the Democrats treat us with the usual contempt, a reader writes:

Here's a local NY perspective: The campaign for gay marriage in the state is funded primarily by wealthy donors with GOP ties. The former majority leader of the Senate, Joe Bruno, is Republican and has urged lawmakers to legalize same-sex marriage. Certainly, more Democrats than Republicans are supportive in the State Senate, but it's the Democrats, who received more than $1M from the gay rights community, who are stonewalling on the bill because they fear it will cause lose them to lose their majority. At least in New York, it's not so black and white.

For years I've said that the gay rights movement should rid itself of victimology and one-party reliance. The major obstacle has been the GOP itself.

The ideals of small government, individual freedom, fiscal sanity and prudent foreign policy are appealing to many gays – a third of whom voted for McCain last time around. But Rove and Bush used us as a wedge to build a fundamentalist coalition, a coalition that has inevitably now become a rump. 

How long before Ted Olson's view manages to make its way back to the center of the GOP? The news of the HRC sell-out reveals just how important that now is for the future of civil rights. And if the GOP had any idea how to get back to the center, they'd do in America what the Tories have in Britain and outflank interest group politics by embracing civil rights for all individuals, regardless of any identity, as non-negotiable. That's an inclusive conservatism I and many others can

Dan Blatt, an old friend and gay conservative, notices something:

I have to say that while I do delight in mocking gay leftists for their sometimes seemingly slavish support of Democrats, I have been most impressed with the integrity of many left-wing gay bloggers. They haven’t marched in lockstep with an Administration, even one they helped elect. And it’s not just in dealing with a Democratic Administration. While most gay organizations have been silent on the persecution of our fellows living under oppressive Islamic regimes, many gay bloggers on the left have covered their plight, with one blogger even organizing rallies on behalf of gay victims of Islamofascism.

These bloggers are hardly a fringe of the gay community, indeed, they may well be representative of it.

Nearly every gay Democrat I talk to has expressed the same frustration as do these left-of-center bloggers. They may agree with a number of thing the President has done these past nine months, but they’re appalled at how he has failed to act on the promises he made to the gay community. So, we should be grateful for the blogosphere–it may well be more representative of our community that the heads of the various gay organizations with their fancy offices and titles and more ready access to the mainstream media.

And we have yet to see what Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will air on the subject. They get it.

Obama, it seems to me, has made a very dumb mistake: he thinks the Human Rights Campaign is the gay community. Well, he's in for a big surprise.

In which Fallows reveals that Nobels cannot be given posthumously and that the Dish can get things as wrong as the Washington Post, which is somewhat distressing. Still, we did recommend Mousavi and Karroubi for the prize as well, both of whom would have been eligible.

So now we see how they really feel. John Harwood reports:

And for a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me today those bloggers need to take off their pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.

So the president who was elected in part by the blogosphere is now at war with the blogosphere? Not smart, guys. We know "governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult." We also know that a civil rights movement waits for no-one. Do you recall a candidate who used the term "the fierce urgency of now"? To dismiss the younger generation's civil rights movement with the classic swipe of the coopted MSM is so culturally and politically off-base it shows how far the Obama machine has come from its moorings.

And again, what is "left" about civil rights? They are neither right nor left; they are civil rights. What is "left" about serving your country? It isn't right or left, it's patriotism and courage. What is "left" about civil marriage? It's neither right nor left, it's about love and commitment and responsibility for one another. Do only leftists get married? Please. We are not on the left or the right; we are bang in the middle of your families and your country and we refuse to be treated as second class human beings any more.

This lame attempt to dismiss a genuine and impassioned argument for equality from a new generation is par for the Emanuel course. But it remains the old politics that Obama ran against not for. What the White House would be better off doing is congratulating these young marchers and protestors for taking Obama seriously and at his word and holding him accountable. That's called democracy in action.

Or when he said "we are the ones we've been waiting for," did he actually mean just him?

The Dish took it easy with the pace of posts this weekend. Andrew delivered a harsh rebuke to HRC president Joe Solmonese and another to Obama (with live-blogging of his HRC speech here). He also targeted the administration over its handling of the Fouad al-Rabiah torture case and revealed his pick for the Peace Prize.

On a lighter note, Andrew blogged about his uplifting experience at the march today.

— C.B.

A friend writes:

After watching Obama’s speech last night, and your reaction, I have to say “I told you so…”

Remember during the campaign, when I was still in the Hillary camp and you were in your “1980’s television evangelist” phase for Obama, I said to you something like “How can he do all of these things he is promising AND end the culture of partisanship in Washington. Being bipartisan necessarily means compromise. Which of his platform promises will you be willing to compromise?”

I know we’re right. And we can end this hideous military policy in a way that will only be made furiously partisan by the far right. So let them. So many still seem to think it’s forever 1993. It isn’t. And our job as gay people and straight people who favor decent treatment for gay servicemembers is not to provide excuses for inaction, or to echo Clinton’s “false hope” warning but to demand our equality in a voice that cannot be dismissed as “liberal lefty” and can only be seen as patriotic.

They called King a communist. Do you think that made him more patient? Do you think that made him less adamant about the fierce urgency of now? The only way past this is through it. And when you show you have lost the nerve, as HRC has, you have lost half the battle. Well, some of us want to fight that battle and win it, not provide excuses for those who won’t fight at all.

The message from HRC last night was: we’ll get back to you in 2017, and can we have cocktails at the White House again soon? The message from the march today was: we are human beings, whose dignity and equality waits for no one. I stand with the marchers. And I will never apologize for or regret supporting a candidate who said he’d keep his promises on civil rights. I just intend to be in his face every day until he does.

More dead fly art here.

The president is currently repeating his belief that torture is always wrong and yet his own administration has just continued the prosecution of a Gitmo detainee we have long known was innocent. Obama has indeed ended torture going forward and deserves mad props for that; but he has so balked at holding America accountable for the past that he has come close at times to being complicit in the war crimes of his predecessor. The case of Fouad al-Rabiah is one such instance. It's such an appalling story, such a betrayal of the American idea, that it still beggars belief. I've written about this on the Dish before but my column today tries to sum it up in one digestible piece:

We know that an American interrogator, operating under the authority of the US government, said the following words to a detainee:

“There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”

That’s from page 41 of the court memorandum and order, releasing al-Rabiah. Al-Rabiah was captured in Pakistan in December 2001. He had an unlikely history for a top Al-Qaeda commander and strategist. He had spent 20 years at a desk job for Kuwait Airways. As the journalist Andy Worthington has painstakingly reported — and the court reiterated — he was also a humanitarian volunteer for Muslim refugees. Yet informants had described him as an Al-Qaeda supporter and confidant of Osama Bin Laden, and before he knew what was happening to him, he was whisked away to Guantanamo.

The informants’ accounts were riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. In her ruling, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly noted that “the only consistency with respect to [these] allegations is that they repeatedly change over time”. The one incriminating statement was given by another inmate after he had been subjected to sleep deprivation and coercion. So the only option left to prove that al-Rabiah had not been captured by mistake was his own confession.

The interrogators’ notes, forced into the open by the court, gave the game away. In the judge’s words, although “al-Rabiah’s interrogators ultimately extracted confessions from him”, they “never believed his confessions, based on the comments they included in their interrogation reports”. In fact, “the evidence in the record during this period consists mainly of an assessment made by an intelligence analyst that alRabiah should not have been detained”.

That CIA analyst, moreover, had told the justice department this was his judgment. Rather than withdraw the prosecution, however, the decision was made to get al-Rabiah to confess. He didn’t and wouldn’t. So he was subject to sleep deprivation and other unspecified “interrogation techniques” that led him to suffer “from serious depression, losing weight in a substantial way, and very stressed because of the constant moves, deprived of sleep and worried about the consequences for his children”.

Continued here.