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Don’t Quote Me: Playing Politics

“I really respect the advocacy that the community is waging on behalf of marriage … I am impressed by the intensity and persistence of that advocacy, but this has not been a long-term struggle yet.”

– Senator Hillary Clinton, responding to the LGBT community’s frustration with her belief that same-sex marriage should be a states’ rights issue, at The Visible Vote 08, the HRC/Logo-sponsored presidential forum on Aug. 9, 2007

Did you feel the love? Or did you, like me, feel more placated, stroked, as if being limply hugged by a group of so-called friends who showed up at your party only because they know you always bring booze to theirs?

Last Thursday night, six of the eight Democratic candidates for president – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson and Mike Gravel – walked into a studio in Los Angeles and participated in a groundbreaking forum hosted by Logo (AfterEllen.com’s parent company) and the Human Rights Campaign. Joe Biden and Chris Dodd did not attend due to scheduling conflicts. Chris who?

The candidates who were either not busy enough to be somewhere else, or who honestly looked forward to talking directly to the LGBT community about our issues, were each given a little over 15 minutes each to answer questions posed by the forum’s moderator, Bloomberg News columnist Margaret Carlson and a panel that consisted of Jonathan Capehart, an editorial writer from the Washington Post; Joe Solmonese, president of HRC; and Melissa Etheridge, “an incredibly privileged rock star.” She said it; I didn’t.

The evening was, as Logo promised it would be, different. The combined gay muscle of HRC and Logo, plus the respected panel members and the familiar queer faces in the studio audience – Neil Patrick Harris and Jane Lynch, to name two – all fed a vibe that was missing in the earlier debates.

Same-sex marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell were all discussed, not as footnotes, but at length as primary issues. Unlike previous presidential forums, nearly everyone in the studio audience had one and the same agenda, and that was to choose the man or woman who would best represent the LGBT community in the White House and fight for our rights once there.

As a result, the discussions looked more like job interviews. I hate job interviews. And judging from the behavior and speech of the candidates, most of them weren’t crazy about the four-on-one questioning process either.

Often awkward, but throughout a lesson in kissing-up, the candidates did what I have to assume was their best to show their respect for LGBT voters and attempt to secure a few more of our votes. But their best was either not good enough – or, as in the case of Kucinich’s over-the-top outpouring of endless love, too much.

Although for the most part the candidates answered the questions without deviating too far off course, one, Bill Richardson, was asleep at the wheel. After being asked by Melissa Etheridge if he thought being gay was a choice or the result of biology, a question that, as far as I’m concerned, begs an answer that too closely resembles an excuse, Richardson said, “It’s a choice.” Then, after given the opportunity to rethink his answer, he said, “I’m not a scientist.”

You’re not a president either. Sorry.

For the record, Richardson, who favors civil unions with full marriage benefits over same-sex marriage, has since apologized for misspeaking. “I screwed up. I didn’t understand the question,” he said to Sirius OutQ Radio the day after the forum. “I had flown all night from New Hampshire – that shouldn’t be an excuse – but I made a mistake … It’s not a choice, it’s not a lifestyle, and I didn’t understand the question.”

I understand. I’m tired, too, Bill – tired of fractional consideration.

But speaking of Melissa Etheridge, what the heck was she doing there? I like Melissa; I’m a big fan. But I have no idea why her seat was not given to a lesbian journalist.

Of the four questioners, she was the least prepared and struggled most to articulate her comments. After attempting to discuss equality with a then-befuddled Richards, whom I now assume hasn’t gotten much sleep since Stonewall, she reached so far to engage him that she asked about the bark beetle infestation in his state. “It’s still a problem,” he said.

Bark beetles, inequality — we all have our problems, don’t we?

But to Melissa’s credit, she was the only person on the panel to remind Hillary Clinton of something I’ve wanted to remind her of for years. When recalling how the first Clinton administration pumped the LGBT community full of high hopes 14 years ago and then slowly deflated us, Melissa told the senator, “We were thrown under the bus.”

Yep, at least one Clinton finally got to hear what Melissa has been singing for years: “To love me, you have to climb some fences.” But the fences are apparently too high to scale, even for the woman who might become the first female president of the United States.

By virtue of her gender alone, Senator Clinton should be more sensitive to civil-rights issues than her white male opponents, but if she is, she didn’t show it in Los Angeles. She’s against gay marriage, and her opposition to it is, as she put it, “a personal position.” She’s in favor of civil unions with full benefits, but she also believes the marriage issue should be a state issue, not a federal one.

When reminded by Joe Solmonese that that same position was a “red herring” during the civil-rights era, and is now viewed as yet another attempt at diversion, Clinton responded with, “This has not been a long-term struggle yet.”

Ouch. Fightin’ words!

In the senator’s mind, we haven’t yet sweated enough. And that leads me to ask these questions: Since when is equality something to be measured? What does the senator suggest we measure our inequality against — the difficulty of those now equal who had the misfortune of being in a similarly suck-full position previously?

What Clinton is missing is that a person is either equal to another or is not. In the same way a woman can’t be “sort of pregnant,” an American can’t be “kind of equal.” When we compare the fight for same-sex marriage to that of interracial marriage, we do so in an effort to shine a light on the obvious and prevent ourselves from being similarly victimized at length, not to flex our victimization.

What’s true — and what Clinton should have said — is that she’s in reach of the presidency, and her “personal position” is that getting there is far more important than helping us achieve a right she enjoys (the right to marry) by doing absolutely nothing.

And she’s not the only one who feels that way.

The absent Joe Biden and Chris Dodd believe civil unions are the way to go, and John Edwards, who assured us that he wouldn’t impose his religious beliefs on the American people if elected, doesn’t support gay marriage either. Funny, but I doubt any of them would feel that way if someone told them they couldn’t get married.

Obama, too, gushed in expressing his undying commitment to our full equality, but in the next breath refused to support same-sex marriage. He claims that the word “marriage” is the problem. “Semantics may be important to some,” he said. Well, it’s clearly important to you, Senator. But that doesn’t make much sense to me.

I’m one of those annoying lesbian voters who believes that a candidate born in 1961 to a Kenyan father and a white, American mother, and who has spoken and written about struggling to reconcile the image he has of himself with the image others have of him, should not only recognize the discrimination faced by the LGBT community, but act without hesitation or excuses to correct the injustices he admits are similar to what he and others faced in the past.

A little over three years ago, Barack Obama stood at a podium at the Democratic National Convention and spoke the following words in his keynote address:

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over 200 years ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
I, like many of you perhaps, thought that a leader emerged that night. His words moved me, and his energy inspired me. But I wonder now how a man so acutely aware of the correlation between dignity and equality fails to be inspired by the gay-rights movement.

Instead of racing each other to do the right thing, the two Democratic front-runners, Clinton and Obama, are lagging behind the also-rans when it comes to being noble. And neither one appeared to be troubled by that at the forum.

In fact, they appeared very much at ease. They know that if Kucinich or Gravel, the only two candidates who support same-sex marriage, had the slightest chance of winning the nomination, they’d have to work a lot harder to get the gay vote, because as the Los Angeles Times reported last Sunday, gays and lesbians take voting very, very seriously:

A recent study by San Francisco-based Community Marketing Inc. found an eye-popping 92.5% of gay men report they voted in the 2004 presidential race, and almost 84% said they cast ballots in the 2006 midterm election. Among lesbians, the results were almost as impressive; nearly 91% in 2004 and 78% in 2006. By comparison, the Washington-based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate puts the turnout for all Americans eligible to vote at about 61% in 2004 and roughly 40% in 2006.
But as it stands now, Kucinich and Gravel are about as threatening to Clinton and Obama as two kittens in Michael Vick’s kennel.

Kucinich is a good guy, that’s for sure. I like him; I like the way he thinks. A lot. But he’s not going to be our next president.

Gravel is quite a different story. He’s not only un-Presidential but often appears nutty and out of touch, especially with the gay community. He might mean well, but even with Gavin Newsom as a tour guide, I doubt he’d be able to find the Castro. His repeated references to the LGBT community as “the gays” on Thursday night were crude and just plain weird. Gravel might be on our side, but I, for one, am not comforted by that fact.

The Logo/HRC forum did little but confirm that we are, whether we like it or not, stuck with Clinton or Obama. We know that, and, more importantly, they know it. They offer us an inch when we want (and are entitled to) a mile, because they can offer it and still get elected.

If civil unions proved to be the slightest impediment to the presidency, they wouldn’t even proffer that little. And the reason is simple: Not only are our problems not theirs, but also they see the solutions to our problems as potentially greater problems for them.

However, what Clinton and Obama see as problems today — a series of backlashes from on-the-fence-voters should they support same-sex marriage — only reveal how shortsighted they are.

It’s inevitable that history will not look kindly on any dragging of feet or outright refusal to correct the injustice to our community. In the future — the very near future, I think — a majority of Americans will look on the gay-rights struggle as they now reflect on the civil-rights era, the struggle of suffragettes, etc. In due time, those who opposed full equality will be seen as ignoramuses, and those who were forward-thinking, who supported it from the beginning, will be praised as brave leaders.

For Obama to acknowledge that there are, indeed, similarities between the gay-rights movement and the civil-rights movement, but not do everything in his power to ameliorate the problem, and for Clinton to fervently claim to recognize the pain and urgency in the voices of our community, but then tell us we must be patient, are not only acts of ingloriousness today, but will likely be viewed as dishonorable exponentially as Americans continue to evolve.

Today’s presidential candidates — including and especially the Republicans who refused an invitation to appear in a similar platform on Logo in the future — should waste no time in rethinking their positions on LGBT issues if they care at all how they will be regarded in the years come.

And you can bet all your Susan B. Anthony commemorative coins and Martin Luther King, Jr. Days off that they care. If there is one thing they all have in common, it’s that each one wants to leave behind a legacy that ensures that future generations will think as highly of them as they think of themselves.

Watch video clips of the Presidential Forum at VisibleVote08.com.

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