We all have our rhetorical tics and tricks. For example, mine include the excessive use of clauses such as ''however,'' ''actually'' and ''for example.'' I also tend to spend the first couple paragraphs of any column making jokes and references that are only tangentially related to the subject I'm writing about.
However, that's no guarantee the jokes will be funny.
President Obama speaks at LGBT Pride reception
(Photo by Todd Franson/Metro Weekly)
I was reminded of this last week when President Obama spoke at the White House's annual LGBT Pride reception. The president's verbal tics are as well known as old Saturday Night Live catchphrases — every time he says ''Let me be clear,'' someone might as well call out, ''More cowbell!''
But Obama's particular rhetorical trick with the LGBT community is his repeated urging for us not to be patient, followed by declaring that he won't do the thing we've been impatiently asking him to do — in this case, to sign an executive order requiring federal contractors to have nondiscrimination policies that include LGBT employees. This is not a big ask for our community. The president clearly has the authority. He has explicitly said that executive action is an important and necessary part of advancing LGBT and other civil rights issues. He promised to do so when he was running for his first term.
Yet here were are in 2013 and he simply refuses to do it.
The official White House line is that he wants to pursue a legislative strategy, which is why Obama mentioned the legislative repeal of ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'' back at the end of 2010. Of course, that molasses-paced legislative process resulted in a lame-duck nail-biter that barely squeaked through before Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) got enough votes to recklessly abuse the filibuster.
The idea that we should be putting our sole hope in a legislative strategy for a transgender-inclusive ENDA – in a Senate that threatened to scuttle immigration reform that even Republicans admit is crucial to their long-term survival as a political party over the inclusion of gay couples – is simply ludicrous. And that's even before we get to the Republican mad dog caucus in the House.
There is a two-pronged approach to take here: an executive order that reinforces and grows protections for thousands of LGBT employees across the nation, while helping to build increased support for ENDA by demonstrating the positive effect (or lack of negative effect) in the many, many congressional districts that represent federal contractors.
Yet the president insists on pursuing a one-pronged approach, even as that one-prong is the least likely to succeed given the Republican recalcitrance and control on the Hill. It really makes no sense. If there is a logical reason for Obama to not sign an executive order that he previously promised to sign and that fits within his own stated approach to civil rights, someone at the White House needs to explain it. Brushing off inquiries by referring to the ''hypothetical executive order,'' as spokesmen have done, doesn't cut it. Jay Carney rotely repeating that the president believes in pursuing a legislative strategy on ENDA has become insulting.
And President Obama standing before a roomful of LGBT people, telling them not to be patient and then citing DADT repeal as a model for ENDA is, frankly, a finger in the eye.
For a president who has undeniably done so much for LGBT equality, these rhetorical tics and tricks are maddening, and the political strategy on ENDA indecipherable. He needs to explain why he's chosen only one option when he can pursue two. Or he needs to bite the bullet and sign the executive order.
Actually, I'm getting awfully damn impatient.
Sean Bugg is the co-publisher of Metro Weekly. He can be reached at sbugg@MetroWeekly.com. Follow him on Twitter @seanbugg.
...moreWhen some of us say the LGBT movement has reached a turning point, others object. We are not finished, they say, confusing "turning point" for "end point." Of course we are not done. But to the extent equality is the goal, we are nearer the finish line than the start.
Equality, however, is not everyone's goal. As the saying goes, some folks don't want a seat at the table, they want to turn the table over. These are not the violent anarchists of a century ago. Today's self-styled revolutionaries take the milder approach of crapping up city parks during ''occupy'' movement actions, protesting corporate sponsors of gay events, and picketing the Democratic National Convention. They engage in street theater while scorning the moral compromise of electoral work.
Marriage equality and open military service were never priorities for the anti-assimilationists. Former National Gay and Lesbian Task Force leader Urvashi Vaid, in her 2012 book Irresistible Revolution, writes, "The LGBT movement has been coopted by the very institutions it once sought to transform." This elides the fact that most activists never shared her revolutionary stance.
Vaid claims the mainstream gay-rights movement neglects issues like women's reproductive freedom, racial justice, and transgender equality. As a mainstream activist who has advocated on those issues, I smell a straw man. For instance, my 2009 column titled "Pro Gay, Pro Choice" provoked one reader to call me a murderer who ought to be dead. (The FBI paid the guy a visit.) Doesn't that sort of thing earn a son of the patriarchy a teensy bit of feminist cred? We all have our feet of clay, but it is irritating to have self-righteous scolds forever telling us we "have to start" discussions of injustices over which we have wrestled for years.
Vaid objects to single-issue alliances with conservatives whose other positions she opposes, claiming such alliances treat women, people of color and trans folk as dispensable. This ignores our real diversity of viewpoints in favor of an illusory progressive monolith. Homeless gay youth would not have been helped by rejecting the hedge-fund managers who raised funds for the four GOP state senators who provided the winning margin for marriage equality in New York.
I confess I am tired, as a civil service pensioner, of being lectured on the class struggle by a wealthy leftist. In any case, reforming Wall Street does not require spurning Wells Fargo as a Pride parade sponsor, any more than supporting diverse families requires mocking same-sex couples as imitating 1950s sitcom families. While privileged intellectuals harangue their inevitably imperfect allies, change is happening. The black high school students I advise on their senior theses are comfortable enough applying the civil rights model to gay families that they use old cartoons of segregated drinking fountains to illustrate the anti-gay discrimination they oppose.
What do we do after the overturn of the Defense of Marriage Act renders our old siege mentality implausible? We build on our gains, keep fighting for trans equality, and work in coalitions to defend American diversity. Upholding respect for that diversity does not require talking revolution, denouncing capitalism, or demanding every conceivable reform at once.
Some of us seem afraid of winning. Devaluing anything short of instant utopia (whose definition we don't agree on) ignores the incremental gains by which real progress happens. Most LGBT people do not want a revolution. We want equality, in our daily lives as well as the law books. And we are winning it faster than most of us thought possible.
What we can do, as we grow accustomed to what professional outsiders deride as "mere equality," is to live our lives while reaching a helping hand to others. That is plenty gay enough.
Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist. He can be reached at rrosendall@starpower.net.
...moreI am originally from Usulután, El Salvador, where I founded Mi Nueva Familia, a working group for fellow transgender women living with HIV. Almost four years ago, I arrived in the U.S. and got involved as a health educator with community-based organizations and started attending the Latino GLBT History Project's (LHP) annual DC Latino Pride celebration.
From Day One, I felt welcomed. My ideas were appreciated and being used to plan LHP's annual events and presentations. For the first time in a long time, I was being heard.
Alexa Rodriguez
That's what LHP is all about. We strive to include the full diversity of DC's Latino LGBT community in all of our programming, leadership and events. Celebrating our culture and identity creates welcoming spaces.
Our Pride planning included bilingual planning meetings to ensure that events like our panel discussion on immigration included simultaneous translation. We worked carefully to select venues and with club owners to ensure a smooth and welcoming process for everyone regarding IDs. We also made sure to include recent immigrants, Latinos who have been in the U.S. for years, DREAMers, youth, professionals, community organizers, and any member of the community who was interested in volunteering for our cause.
Since Jose Gutierrez founded DC Latino Pride in 2007, it has grown into to a celebration of over 900 LGBT Latinos and allies through three signature events. We partner with 35 of D.C.'s best local and national organizations and 30 host committee members. Our events showcase the history, celebration, identity, diversity, health and faith of our community via the Human Rights Campaign, Town Danceboutique and the Metropolitan Community Church. We also place a special focus on visibility for our cause. With reached more than 350,000 Latinos with a week of LGBT tolerance messages on ''El Zol'' 107.9 FM, the region's leading Spanish language radio station.
And the best part of all this? DC Latino Pride is 100 percent volunteer-run. Our group of 45 volunteers included the first transgender co-chair, Gladys Gonzalez from La Clinica del Pueblo's Empodérate program; and co-chairs Wil Gutierrez, a fellow Salvadoran from Maryland, and Jose L. Plaza, a graduate fellow with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. And our outreach team was led by José Ramirez of Identity, May Sifuentes of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Nancy Cañas, mother and lesbian Latina burlesque performer.
Our Pride celebration also helps LHP raise funds we use to invest in year-round community education programs. During my reign as Miss Latino GLBT History Project 2012-2013, I have been able to learn from the educational and leadership-development opportunities LHP has to offer. Earlier this year, LHP sponsored a group of four D.C.-based advocates to attend the first LGBT Latino Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Creating Change conference in Atlanta. We also sponsored lodging for four members of the national Trans-Latina Coalition – something very personal to me and my story.
I have had the opportunity to talk about transgender identity on El Zol's prime morning show and on Univision, and to invite D.C.-area Latinos to our Pride celebration. Now I am working on hosting two educational forums for 2013, which I suggested to the LHP board.
I want you to know: Las puertas están abiertas. The doors are open.
We invite community members to join our LHP familia and our mission to preserve the history of, celebrate and empower LGBT Latinas and Latinos.
Alexa Rodriguez is a board member of the Latino GLBT History Project and of the national Trans-Latina Coalition. She works as a health educator with Identity Inc. in Maryland. She can be reached at arodriguez@latinoglbthistory.org.
...moreClothing company Nasty Pig will auction off exclusive, one-of-a-kind T-shirts designed by celebrities in its Shred of Hope campaign, with all proceeds benefiting the Ali Forney Center in New York City.
The movement, which suffered the latest blow on Wednesday as Exodus International's board voted to shut down, is the subject of a new installment of Our America With Lisa Ling.
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