The Dish

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.

If you believe it is wrong to fire people from their jobs solely because they are gay, as you said Saturday night, stop doing it.

Apologies for the few posts today. After enduring the HRC event last night on CSPAN, I needed to cheer myself up and remember why I'm so glad to be gay. So we went to Bob Mould's and Rich Morel's Blowoff dance party and danced the night away with all the bears. By the time we came to this morning, we had to rush to get to the Equality March. We just got back. The Dish can sometimes wait.

It my have been, in Barney Frank's opinion, "useless," but for me and Aaron and my friends, it was a beautiful  and empowering time. So many young people, so many old and dear friends, so many faces I haven't seen in so long, so many straight people, and kids and families and trannies and a good, good happy vibe. Then the message that was louder and clearer than any march I've been to since 1987. Just equality. Not tolerance. Not protection. Nothing special. Just equality as human beings and citizens – in all things large and small.

More to the point, this was not a plea for it; it was a statement of it. We are equal. We always have been. The prison of inferiority is in our own psyches as well as in others' fears. But I sense now, for the first time, a critical mass of self-respect among my LGBT brothers and sisters. It was there before; but now it's everywhere, especially the young, who seem to have found the courage of their own desires and the knowledge of their own love.

I don't know how many people showed up and don't care. There were some off-moments, of course, but also some fine, fine messages, from Dan Choi and Cynthia Nixon especially. After watching last night's self-satisfied worship of access to power, it was so great to be among people who are not interested in getting invites to the White House or appointments to federal jobs or yet another photo for their mantelpiece next to Obama. I was among people who simply want to be treated with the respect that they're entitled to.

So I repeat to myself what I often forget. Know hope. Love life. And always remember: gay is good. 

(Photo: me, Aaron, Eddy and one of the first gay rights pickets ever made for a Washington protest. It was made in 1965, four years before Stonewall, and the Mattachine heroes held it up in front of the White House on October 23 forty four years ago. Charles Francis brought it, and allowed me to hold it for a while. I am so proud to have been part of this movement, and so honored to touch one its sacred artefacts.)

A new study by Pew finds that nearly a quarter of the world's population is Muslim. Juan Cole reacts:

If current demographic trends continue, moreover, the world could level off at about 9 billion persons in 2050, and nearly 1/3 of those could well be Muslim. The really big Muslim populations are not in the Middle East, which is largely arid and wouldn't support such populations. It is in relatively well-watered places such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia in Asia where the bulk of Muslims live. Pakistan now has about 170 million people but is likely to rival the current US population of 300 million in the next few decades. (When I first went to Pakistan in 1981 I think its population was, like, 70 million).