Obama on gay rights: Just what HAS he done?

I've been involved with a number of discussions online about which of the Democratic candidates is best on the question of gay rights. That discussion has come back into prominence this week when a prominent conservative minister, one of Bush the Younger's "spiritual advisers" and a supporter of "reparative therapy" for gay and lesbian people announced he was endorsing Obama and inquired about making appearances on the candidate's behalf. Caveat: The announcement in question came from the minister in question and not from the Obama campaign. Calls made yesterday to the Obama campaign disavowed any knowledge of the minister's announcement or of any plans to have him campaign on Obama's behalf.

The general consensus of opinion among Obama supporters is that Obama is clearly the best of the Democratic candidates. They will enthusiastically proclaim, usually without any documentation, that Obama has "done the most" for gay rights of all the Democratic candidates. They point with pride to his sponsorship of the Illinois law banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity, and his fine words about what he wants to do if elected president.

The trouble is, those words aren't backed up by much in the way of concrete action--and what action there has been from Obama can at best be described as ambivalent. There is a curious disinterest, among Obama's supporters (whether gay or not) to discuss what I've come to think of as the "McClurkin Incident." When I bring it up, however, I am usually told that I'm just dredging up old news from the past in an attempt to smear the best candidate in the field.

After another lengthy discursus on the question at Big Orange yesterday, I decided to do a little digging. What I found, I think, gives credence to my initial position--to wit, that Obama's record on gay rights is little better (or worse) than either Clinton's or Edwards's. Follow me below the fold for the details.

Let's start with the "old news," the McClurkin incident. Gospel singer Donnie McClurkin was invited by the Obama campaign to headline one of three October 2007 gospel concerts arranged by the campaign in South Carolina, part of their outreach to black evangelical voters. Given McClurkin's status as an allegedly "cured" homosexual who has called sexual orientation a matter of personal choice and said that he wanted to go to war with the "curse" of homosexuality, this decision did not go over very well with many in the gay community. (See, e.g., here and here.)

This was pointed out to Obama, but he refused to back down or to ask McClurkin not to appear on his behalf. Instead, he invited an openly gay black minister (who subsequently turned out not to be black) to offer an opening prayer at the event. Although Obama expressed strong disagreement with McClurkin's views on homosexuality, he didn't turn down the money raised at the McClurkin event. And while he offered an explanation of how McClurkin came to be asked to appear on his behalf, Obama has yet to offer any kind of an actual apology for the slap in the fact to his LGBT supporters that McClurkin's appearance represented.

Now let's look at Obama's record in the Illinois legislature. Obama was elected in 1996 and took office in 1997 as a member of the 90th General Assembly. Insofar as I can tell from the archaic printouts available at the General Assembly's archival section, Obama neither introduced nor co-sponsored any legislation pertinent to gay rights during either of his first two terms in office (1997-2000, 90th and 91st General Assemblies). In the 92nd General Assembly (2001-2002), he signed on to a House bill (HB101) in April 2001. That bill died in committee and expired when the legislature adjourned sine die on January 7, 2003.

On January 21, 2005, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich signed into law Senate Bill 3186 which, according to the bill's synopsis on the General Assembly's page:

Amends the Illinois Human Rights Act. Provides that nothing in the Act shall be construed as requiring any employer, employment agency, or labor organization to give preferential treatment or special rights or implement affirmative action policies or programs based on sexual orientation. Provides that discrimination against a person because of his or her sexual orientation constitutes unlawful discrimination under the Act.

Also according to the General Assembly's bill summary page for SB3186, Barack Obama did not introduce, sponsor, or co-sponsor this bill, despite having been a co-sponsor on two previous draft bills (SB101 and SB2597) in the very same session of the GA that appear to be virtually identical to the one that actually passed. SB101 was introduced by State Sen. Carol Ronen on January 29, 2003 and died in the Rules Committee that summer. The bill expired when the Senate adjourned at the end of the session on January 11, 2005. SB2597 was introduced, also by Sen. Ronen, on February 4, 2004, and referred that same day to the Rules Committee, where it likewise died. That bill also expired on January 11, 2005. SB3186 was introduced in the Senate on February 6, 2004, two days after the bill that Obama eventually signed onto as a co-sponsor. Obama did not resign from the General Assembly until November 2004 when he won election to the U.S. Senate. For the whole of his final term in the General Assembly, the Democrats were in control of both houses of the legislature, after trouncing the Republicans in the 2002 elections (largely due to the disgrace of indicted and now convicted former Republican Governor George Ryan on influence peddling and campaign finance charges).

In other words, in four terms in the Illinois Senate, Obama co-sponsored (but did not introduce) three bills that would have added sexual orientation as a protected category under the Illinois Human Rights Act. None of those bills passed, all of them dying in committee and then expiring when the session adjourned. From what I can tell online, Obama's involvement with the bills seems to have been minimal. He does not appear to have argued for their passage, urged their consideration, or done anything other than to put his name onto someone else's bill. Moreover, the language of the bill he supported, like the one that eventually passed without his involvement or support, while it did extend protection on the grounds of sexual orientation, also made it quite clear that there was to be no "preferential treatment" or "special rights" for homosexuals under the bill. That's what I'd call a left-handed compliment--or a backhand to the chops. What the bill gave with one hand, it took away with the other--and appealed to decidedly right-wing framing and language to do it. If I were Senator Obama, I don't think I'd be holding up this bill as anything to be particularly proud of. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to list it among my accomplishments.

In 2006, Barack Obama got a score of 89 from the Human Rights Campaign in its 2006 congressional scorecard (PDF link). That was the same score received by both Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman. John Edwards got a 66 from HRC in its 2004 scorecard (PDF link), largely because he didn't vote on the "Marriage Protection Amendment" that came up that year. An 89 is not a bad score by any means. But there were 11 other senators in 2006 who received perfect scores of 100--including Lincoln Chafee, at that time a Republican. I'll be the first to admit that such legislative scorecards are not perfect indicators. But they do at least offer a consistent metric by which to judge different people on the same set of issues. And by that admittedly less-than-perfect metric, there's considerable room for improvement where all three of our Democratic front-runners are concerned on the question of gay rights.

And that, I think, is where all the heat and passion come from. Every Democrat is sick to death at the crap the Bush administration has pulled during its first seven years in office, and we're all dreading what they may yet do during the current and final year of their term. We're anxious, eager, and passionate to kick the bums out and replace them with good people who will do the right thing because it's the right thing. I'll be the first to admit that Barack Obama is a gifted orator. He makes fine speeches, and usually says all the right things. But I can't help noticing that, when it comes to gay rights, he almost never seems to make those speeches anywhere that might hurt him politically. And he doesn't seem particularly eager to back up those pretty words with concrete actions. When he talks about gay rights at all, it's on the LOGO channel (barely reaching 10% of households with cable television, if I remember correctly, and almost exclusively watched by gay and lesbian viewers, since it's the "gay channel") or in the pages of one of the magazines that cater to the gay community. To find the LGBT issues page on Obama's campaign website, you have to know to click on the "People" tab at the top. On Edwards's website, it's right there on the "Issues" tab, though you do have to scroll down a bit. Clinton doesn't seem to have an LGBT page at all--or if she does, it's not linked to from the front page of her campaign site.

Regrettably, none of the three front-runners in the Democratic race is all that good on gay rights from where I stand: they're all more or less squarely at the same spot in the middle of the road. All of them get more or less the same ratings from the national gay-rights organizations and all of them are campaigning on more or less the same positions. I can't see that any one of them has any significant advantage over the other. Obama's rhetoric is perhaps more promising, but that is coupled with a distinct lack of any real or noticeable effort to put that pretty rhetoric into concrete action. Sure, Obama stood up in the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Sunday and made a fine speech from Martin Luther King's home pulpit:

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

But those words ring more than a little hollow when compared to his own actions in the McClurkin affair. Obama seemed perfectly willing to profit from exactly those divisions across races and regions when he thought it would win him some more votes in South Carolina--and to hell with the gay and lesbian Democrats (and independents, and Republicans) that he dismissed when it was expedient to do so. I'm afraid that the Democratic field, when it comes to gay rights, is still pretty much where it was 14 years ago when Bill Clinton was running for the White House--and that none of the front-runners really has much of an edge over any of the others.

Comments

[James]

DOMA
Don't Ask Don't Tell
Both served up to us by the Clinton Administration. Both have had a more detrimental effect on LGBT Americans than anyone who Obama has ever stood beside or taken a picture with. Get real folks -- Since Clinton is taking credit for everything that happened during her husband's administration, maybe she can answer for these two horrendous policies as well.

[Michael]

Sorry, James, but I don't buy Hillary's argument that she gets to take credit for what Bill did--and by the same token, I don't agree that she has to get saddled with his mistakes, either. Senator Clinton has, unlike Obama, hired LGBT people to work on her campaign--and has always had gay people on her staff, all the way back to her Arkansas days. If Obama is so great on gay rights, why isn't he putting his money where his mouth is?

And while Obama may never have stood next to him or been photographed with him in person, I have to say that I think Donnie McClurkin and his buddies in the ex-gay racket have done far more harm to far more gay and lesbian Americans--particularly young gay and lesbian Americans--than just about anybody else. There is no credibility in the ex-gay movement: they are based on lies and fears, no more. Every reputable psychiatric and medical organization has denounced them, and no self-respecting politician has any business being associated in any way with that movement. Obama still wouldn't drop him from the lineup--and that action speaks far louder than any of his pretty words ever will.

[ja]

I would say that Senator Clinton has done much more for treating gays as equal than any of the other main Democratic candidates, just by basic inclusion. They don't seem like tokens or paraded.

Obama kind of scares me the way he sends different advertisements to different groups, with many of his stated values mutually exclusive. Everybody does it, but he's so good at saying three different things he takes it to a whole different level. I have no clue who the man really is or what he'll do at this point.