Obama's Gay-Free Inaugural

Obama’s Gay-Free Inaugural

For all the victories embodied by his presidency, gay marriage hopes dim under Barack Obama

The presidency of Barack Obama begins, steeped in the legends of Lincoln and King and turning a page on America’s tragic racial history. But while African-Americans rejoiced, gays and lesbians seeking the right to wed may have felt left behind by a president opposed to gay marriage, one who seemed to be going out of his way to make sure his inaugural was so not gay.

Most are at a loss to explain Obama’s choice of Rev. Rick “Homosexuality is a Sin” Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation — a preacher who thinks gay is a matter of choice and who rallied his parishioners to support Prop 8, placing a constitutional ban on gay marriage in California.

In his inaugural prayer, Warren spoke of compassion, mercy and forgiveness “when we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the earth with the respect they deserve.” It’s an ironic request by a man who condemns gays and lesbians in God’s name, compares homosexuality to incest and insists that civil unions are not a civil right.

Unlike Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama chose not to distance himself from Warren as criticism grew. Warren pulled “gays not accepted” lingo from his mega-church web site last month in apparent appeasement, but will his gay-baiting ultimately be emboldened by presidential endorsement? And what was with the Obama handlers who deleted a television appearance by a noted gay bishop at Sunday’s pre-inaugural celebration?

We Are One (except for
that guy in the collar)
HBO, with exclusive rights to the “We Are One” bash on Washington’s Mall, snipped the opening invocation by Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and outspoken gay rights leader. Viewers were spared Robinson’s prayer for “freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.”

HBO pointed to Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee, whose apology was lost in a sea of inaugural giddiness: “We had always intended and planned for Rt. Rev. Robinson’s invocation to be included in the televised portion of yesterday’s program. We regret the error.”

Obama’s gay marriage flip-flop
We’d not be celebrating Barack Obama’s phenomenal ascension at all had white supremacists kept another marriage ban on life support. The U.S. Supreme Court pulled the plug on laws banning interracial marriage in 1967, paving the way for Obama to become the first child of mixed marriage to assume the presidency and the first president to have endorsed, then opposed, marriage equality for same-sex partners.

That was then…
In 1996, Illinois State Senate candidate Obama told Chicago’s Windy City Times, “the state should not interfere with same-gender couples who choose to marry and share fully and equally in the rights, responsibilities and commitment of civil marriage.”

This is now…
Obama’s current take on gay marriage strikes critics as the sort of compromise that led to whites-only restrooms and racially-themed drinking fountains in pre-civil rights Dixie: separate, but far from equal. Obama says same-sex couples should enjoy all legal rights given to heterosexuals who marry — everything but being able to marry. It’s the tactic designed to coddle heterosexuals who believe their marriages will be somehow degraded should gays be allowed to wed — appeasing the prickly rather than extending the full spectrum of civil rights to all Americans.

Appeasement in biblical proportions?
The 44th president has made no secret of his desire for Democrats to embrace fundamentalists disenchanted by the Bush administration.

“They found [evangelicals] annoying and insufferable,” David Kuo, deputy director of Bush’s faith-based initiatives program tells Vanity Fair this month, describing how the Bush team wooed, then shunned, the bible-thumping crowd. “These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated,” he says.

Obama went out of his way to accommodate fundamentalists during his campaign. While he couldn’t risk support of women with a as tough a stance on choice, Obama’s anti-gay marriage stance was a great way to make new friends despite changing attitudes by younger evangelicals.

A survey by Faith in Public Life shows that “among young evangelicals, a majority favor either same-sex marriage (24%) or civil unions (28%), compared to a majority (61%) of older evangelicals who favor no legal recognition of gay couples’ relationships.” Obama, however, chose to comfort the stodgy while making soft, cooing sounds to disenfranchised gays.

Obama is against amending the constitution to ban it — an easy position on a highly unlikely scenario. He has spoken against anti-gay discrimination and has said that he chides African-American congregations for their homophobia.

“I’m a Christian,” said Obama on the campaign trail, “and I praise Jesus every Sunday, but in the African-American community and in church I hear people saying things that I don’t think are very Christian toward people who are gay and lesbian. When we blame gay people for our problems like we blame immigrants or Muslims, all we’re doing is dividing each other.”

Still, how far can Obama stray from the majority of African-Americans (new numbers say 57-59%) to vote for California’s Prop 8, from the Mormon establishment that backed it with gusto, or from the hard-core base of the religious right?

Echoes of the King Legacy
So a president offering scant hope for gays with marriage on their minds takes his oath on a bible used by Abraham Lincoln who shared a bed with buddy Joshua Speed for years — a presidency born in the centennial shadow of Dr. Martin Luther King whose march on Washington and bus boycott in Montgomery were pulled together by Bayard Rustin, longtime King associate and an openly gay black man.

Rustin pleaded for years with King to include gay equality in his crusade for racial equality, eventually backing his demands with the threat of resignation. King, fearing a gay alliance might weaken his hand in an ongoing power struggle with conservative leaders of the National Baptist Convention, declined.

Will Obama do the same? Time tells.

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