Plasma Pool

Find below, via Towleroad, a video of liberal gay activist Michelangelo Signorile and Log Cabin Republican spokesman Charles Moran echoing and reechoing one another in a discussion of President Obama’s sorry and disingenuous record on gay rights in an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon.

We can’t fail to note how the cable news media’s default approach to covering politics—pitting nominal extremes against one another and letting them fight it out in a sham discussion—has failed here. The structural opposition between LCR and liberal gay activists relied upon by cable news to fill their interview spots for gay issues has been tempered in most places and eliminated in some. The gays, at least on Obama’s sluggishness, have finally got it together. Sorry, CNN. The political context in which marriage for all individuals is a liberal luxury rather than a claimed right is dead. The president’s pernicious inaction presumes and so promotes the opposite view. It says that we can wait. We cannot.

State the particulars however you’d like: something changed in the collective mind of the American electorate, so far as that means anything, with the passage of California’s Proposition 8. No one’s quite sure precisely what changed yet, or what it will come to mean. What we do know is that much of the rest of the country—seeing so many otherwise unobjectionable homosexuals told by their fellow Californians (often on TV) that their love is not worth as much—greeted the passage of the odious measure with a mostly-surprising outpouring of support, not just for gays, but for for gay marriage as such. This surprising shift in public support was followed by the institutional legalization of gay marriage in, among other places, the Midwestern state of Iowa. People began to speak of domino effects, presuming that the president, once president, would be as active an advocate as he had promised. A bad bet if you took it.

These post-Prop.-8 shifts created a public and legal-institutional foundation—a boon that candidate Obama had no reason to expect—from which today’s Obama should have been even better able to work as an active advocate. If Obama and his strategic cadre operate as though these shifts mean nothing, they be far more likely to mean precisely nothing, and it will be largely Obama’s fault. In this area of domestic policy—as in healthcare—the president seems to have forgotten that those fancy fountain pens with which he signs oversized pieces of paper decreeing this or that are more than just historical kitsch. They also have a potent corollary in a president’s power to lead by example. Whether people follow is decided by how good Obama is at leading.

Obama’s task is not solely to support gays and lesbians. Had he promised solely that, perhaps it would be. But he promised active advocacy. He chose the word advocate; he chose that commitment. Advocates, as Moran says, must actually do something; and they must not by any means work against their supposed allies, as the administration most certainly did in filing a brief in defense of DOMA with the excuse that existing law must be defended. Other presidents, and not just the last one, have chosen to let beseiged federal laws they thought injust languish and die. Without a compelling reason beyond abstract legalistic principle for defending DOMA, this explanation is an excuse, and a poorly clad one at that. No such compelling reason has been offered.

Which isn’t to say that we don’t know the reason for all this pussyfooting, leaked as it has been repeatedly (and easily guessable at that): ensuring Obama a second term, and more generally ensuring Democrats persistent control of power. This would, of course, be preferable to control by the economically ignorant and only vaguely morally tolerable right-wing conservatives who now hold their own national party by the throat. But that people may stop following you is not an excuse to stop leading. The Obama we elected said he knew that. Yet Democrats, led by Obama both nominally and by example, are deprioritizing the civil rights of a minority for political advantage. That may have been acceptable two years ago, but it no longer is, thanks partially to Obama’s erstwhile boldness.

Persistent presidential lallygagging on gay rights is a powerful if unintentional nod to those who want to see these recent shifts as signifying nothing. That Obama as politician was formed in the old, more hater-friendly political context means and dictates nothing about his current position. Now that he’s president he not only gets to prescribe; it is his duty to prescribe. His not doing so represents the administration’s fundamental lack of confidence in the American people’s capacity to be convinced of a good argument on its own merits, and a lack of courage on Obama’s part to make the argument. If he believes the argument will fail, he must work to make it better, now, today. Shelving it because it’s too tough to handle at the moment is not an option. People are not to be shelved.

We have a president, and irony of ironies a black one, who has been convinced that manning up on the defining civil rights issue of our age will get him evicted from the White House. Whether or not this prediction is a good one is irrelevant. Manning up is what Barack Obama was elected for. This is the job, however shabbily done by others, so he can shit or get off the pot. The longer he sits there perched without moving his bowels, the stronger the miasmic stench of his equivocating rhetoric, and the stronger his signal to Americans that with respect to gay rights, nothing has changed. History is made. Obama is leaving it to be found.