Mule, Meet Board

A little pressure gets a little attention. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The administration has directed the Census Bureau to determine changes needed in tabulation software to allow for same-sex marriage data to be released early in 2011 with other detailed demographic information from the decennial count. The bureau historically hasn't released same-sex marriage data.

Actually, that's an understatement; the census bureau has deliberately suppressed some data about same-sex couples, under Bush administration policy. They were all set to do it again, but maybe now we'll get the data counted correctly.

Americablog, regarding two more DOMA-related cases, not connected with the one last week that sparked all the outrage:

Top gay lawyers [from GLAD and Lambda Legal] simply wanted to talk with the Obama administration's representatives at the Department of Justice and the Office of Personnel Management (which is not only run by an openly gay man, but has an openly gay general counsel). The gay lawyers wanted to know the details of the administration's reasoning that DOMA precluded health care benefits, among other benefits, to the partners of gay employees. The Obama administration refused.

However, today it's a different story:

Two very top White House officials, Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina and Political Director Patrick Gaspard, are holding a "wonderful" conference call on Monday with the LGBT caucus of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I've seen the email, which reads in part: "The call will include important updates on the Administration's LGBT agenda and how we move forward."

This does go to show -- and I've heard it from many people on other issues -- if you want the attention of the Obama White House, you have to play hard ball. For the LGBT community, among other things, that means shutting down the Gay ATM.

No doubt, we'll hear how great it was that White House people talked to the gays. That might have been a big deal in 1979, not 2009.

And even Justice is doing a little turnaround now:

The Obama Justice Department has reached out to major gay rights organizations and scheduled a private meeting for next week with the groups, in an apparent effort to smooth over tensions in the wake of the controversy over the administration’s defense in court of the Defense of Marriage Act. . . .

At the meeting — which hasn’t been announced and is expected to include leading gay rights groups like GLAD and Lambda Legal — both sides are expected to hash out how to proceed with pending DOMA cases.

All of this still doesn't add up to much. But it's a start.

There's an old joke most Southerners know about the farmer who hitched up his mule to a wagon, but the mule just sat down and wouldn't move. So the farmer gets off the wagon, goes up to the mule, and hits him over the head, blam, with a two-by-four. Then the mule got up and trotted right along as he was supposed to.

A friend who was passing by asked the farmer why he hit the mule like that. The old farmer replied that the mule was usually cooperative; "but fust, you have to get his attention."