Obama Agenda: Gays

One of the interesting findings from last week’s Commentarama Poll was that few people understand Obama’s agenda. So let’s see if we can’t flesh that out (assuming there is an agenda). Fortuitously, Saturday night, Obama reaffirmed his agenda vis-à-vis gays.

Prior to the election, Obama backed gay rights in speeches and legislation 18 times, though as a candidate he refused to back gay marriage. This weekend he became only the second President to speak at the annual dinner of the Human Rights Campaign (a gay group). In his speech, Obama repeated the following promises:

• To work with the Congress to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which keeps states from recognizing gay marriages in other states. Right now 29 states have changed their constitutions to ban gay marriage. Six states recognize gay marriage and six more provide some level of spousal rights to gay couples. Though Obama has refused to outright support gay marriage, repealing the DOMA would be the same thing.

• To expand hate-crime laws to include sexual orientation through passage of the Matthew Sheppard Act, which has now been attached to the Department of Defense budget.

• To “reinvigorate enforcement” of hate crimes by the Department of Justice’s Criminal Section.

• To overturn the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that allows the military to expel openly gay soldiers.

• To prohibit work place discrimination based on sexual orientation or “gender identity or expression” (e.g. transgender and cross-dressing), by passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

• To appoint openly gay individuals, like David Heubner, who was appointed as the first openly gay ambassador to New Zealand.

In June of this year, Obama also extended some benefits to gay partners of federal employees, though he did not extend full benefits. The benefits extended will:

• Open up long-term care insurance.

• Allow federal employees to use their sick leave to care for a gay partner or the partner’s children.

• Allow gay partners of foreign-service employees to use medical facilities at overseas posts and get evacuations if necessary.

• Include same-sex partners and their children when calculating family size for overseas housing allocations.

• Extend current anti-discrimination rules in the federal workforce to cover transgender employees.

However, Obama did not extend the most sought after benefits -- health insurance and retirement benefits.

Despite these promises and actions, gay groups remain upset at Obama because he continues to refuse to endorse gay marriage. They are also upset that he did not extend full benefits to gay partners of federal workers. And they are upset that he refuses to set specific timelines for the promises above.

None of this should be surprising. As noted in my article outlining the make up of the Democratic Party, gays are one of the up and coming power tribes within the party, though they don’t control the leadership. Thus, it is in Obama's interest to promise them what they want, but to deliver sparingly, lest they get what they want and stop supporting the other identity tribes. And that is exactly what Obama has done here -- he's handed out a taste only. If he had wanted to, he could have done much more and could have set a time table for the rest. . . but that's not how tribal reciprocity works.