NOW He Throws Us a Bone

This just in from the Washington Post:

As John Berry forecast in his Advocate interview at Gay Pride in D.C. on Sunday, Obama is going to sign an order tomorrow extending healthcare and other benefits to partners of federal employees.

That's great news for all those who are eligible, and I'm happy for them.

But that doesn't make everything all right now between Obama and the LGBT community. There's millions of us who won't be affected in any way by his signature tomorrow.

We deserve ALL the rights and benefits that anybody else does, in or out of Washington, D.C. We are Americans, we are citizens, we are human beings too.

Nothing less than the equal protection of the laws everywhere in the land will satisfy us; because that's simply our due as the equals of everybody else in this country.

Mr. Obama does not yet see it that way, folks. He is doing this for political reasons to take the heat off. Understand: He is a straight man who still does not get it.

It's high time he did, though.

Also noted: this persuasive article, "Obama needs a bit of Truman's courage," by Dick Polman in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Update: It's not even a bone he's throwing us, it's just a little piece of gristle, John Aravosis opines:

As you may have heard, President Obama tomorrow will be signing a presidential directive, not an executive order, providing "some" benefits to gay and lesbian employees. Well, the details, murky that they are, are coming. And they aren't great.

First off, Chuck Todd on MSNBC that because this is only a "memorandum," as he called it, it will expire when Obama leaves office. Lovely. Second, health benefits for federal employees won't be covered. Why? Because of DOMA, so says the Advocate.

Just which benefits will gay federal employees be getting? The White House is refusing to say. But it's unlikely it's anything involving money, like Social Security, or, as we now know, health care. Which is ironic, since health care is Obama's number one issue (but not for us). Also ironic, which I wrote about earlier, is that health care reform likely won't cover us either, since they'd have to include us as "families" and "dependents" - and let's face it, they just compared us to incest and pedophilia, does anyone think this administration or this congress is going to define us as "family" in their health care package? (It's also not clearly that DOMA would let health care reform provide us any benefits anyway.) In any case, Obama's inaction on DOMA, and outright defense of DOMA, is now undercutting his other efforts, meager that they are, to help us. It's all tied together.

Furthermore, John says about tomorrow's memo signing in the Oval Office:

It's also awfully convenient that the event is being held at 5:45pm, just a tad too late for the evening news to pick it up. Gosh, how did that happen?

Unfortunately, federal benefits for gay federal employees is not even one of the eight campaign promises Obama made to our community (there are only seven now on the White House Web site - the DOMA promise went down the memory hole about two months ago). . . .

Today, after having been compared to incest and pedophiles by our own Democratic president, it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what this president needs to do to win back our trust. Not to mention, we have to beat the bejeesus out of you for five days to even get your attention, and this is all we get?

What is he going to do on DOMA, DADT and ENDA? Is the President going to apologize for comparing us to incest and pedophilia last week? Is he going to support us in the next DOMA lawsuit, whose brief is due on the 29th, or he is yet again going to support a bigoted law that he has called "abhorrent," even though he is fully in his power as president to oppose an existing law IF HE CARES ENOUGH TO DO SO.

When you figure that one out, get back to us. Until then, spare us the cute photo opps that give the president an opportunity to stand around a bunch of gay people and show how loved he is by the gays. when everyone is really pissed off at him. This isn't North Korea.

Update 2: The NYT quotes Administration sources who confirm that tomorrow's Presidential doggie treat is indeed a political ploy for damage control:

Mr. Obama will be weighing in for the first time on one of the most delicate social and political issues of the day: whether the government must provide benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. While he will announce a list of benefits, officials said, they are not expected to include broad health insurance coverage, which could require legislation to achieve. . . .

But administration officials said the timing of the announcement was intended to help contain the growing furor among gay rights groups. Several gay donors withdrew their sponsorship of a Democratic National Committee fund-raising event next week, where Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to speak.

And remember I told you the other day there is no fucking plan? Pam Spaulding says:

The more I think about how this stuff seems slapped together, the more I believe that there was no "plan" for our issues and legislation. But that can't be true, can it? John mulls the same thing.

Honestly, really I don't want to believe that It was all about placating and delay and deny -- and then laying the blame the lack of votes on the Hill for inaction. Harry Reid finally caught on to this asshattery. The question, then, is how could this well-oiled political machine that we saw during the campaign, turn into a crew that is so ham-handed on our issues that they thought tossing out an inflammatory DOMA brief wasn't going to be like dropping an A-bomb on the community?

Given some unnamed source in the administration actually admitted to the NYT that this partner benefit announcement was crafted to stop the benefit from tanking, the WH is clearly off balance and off message. It's amateur hour at our expense.