We know that Little Miss Liberty University burrowed lots of wingnuts in career DoJ positions. But they still have to take orders, and the order should come down that bigotry is out and the Constitution is in.

I was as ardent an Obama supporter as any, during the campaign. But, after learning he has no immediate intention of preventing gays to be booted under DADT (he could, at the very least, issue a stop-loss order, while the matter gets debated). I wash my hands of him.

There is only one thing that would get me behind Obama again, and that would be concrete action on GLBT issues of consequence. His words mean nothing. They are hollow.

I won’t hold my breath.

By the way…kidcharles analysis is exactly right, imho. I think this was Rahm Emanuel’s strategy all along. Throw the gays under the bus to prove how centrist Obama is…figuring who would we turn to?

They act like the rest of the progressive alliance won’t be offended, as well. Unfortunately for the Obama team, there have been too many instances of right-wing pandering for this strategy to fly.

If I were a betting man, I would say that this beginning groundswell may eventually conjure the memories of another groundbreaking moment in glbt civil rights, the Stonewall Riots of 1969. While this may not be as big or significant as that event, I think it would be wrong to undere-stimate the current level of rage bubbling below the surface in the glbt community. It started with Prop 8 and has been fueled by Obama’s broken promises.

A new wave of activism has arisen that hasn’t been seen in this community for a long, long time.

Cocktail parties for access, and conducting business as usual, just won’t cut it anymore.

In plain English that amounts to pretty much the same thing.

There’s plenty of other things in the brief to arouse disgust. For example, saying that it’s a rational position of the federal government to ration scarce resources by not giving survivors benefits to children of gay parents. Then consider their argument that Loving vs Virginia had no bearing what so ever on gay marriage because gay men could marry any women they chose. What particularly roused my ire was the glib statement that DOMA did not arise out of an animus against gay people. What planet do they think we are living on.

Heck, fax it to him: 202-456-2461

…Doing so sets you up for instances such as the DOJ brief on a lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, where they compared marriage equality to incest, among other things.

Except that’s not what the brief did. That’s what John Aravosis says it did, to the great irritation of ethical lawyers like Chris Geidner:

There have been many times in the past two weeks when I have linked to and re-tweeted items with which I agree and want to advance on AmericaBlog, but so long as John continues to repeat misstatements in his attempt to create a false impression of what is being done right and wrong by the Obama Administration, I will continue to point out that he is doing so.

Today already, more than 30,000 people have visited his site. That’s a lot of influence. When John continues to repeat falsehoods, he is influencing the debate, yes, but not in any way that will actually help advance the cause of seeking equality for LGBT people.

[…]

That John repeats the contention, without suggesting that anyone — let alone several preeminent legal scholars, from Arthur Leonard to Nan Hunter to Laurence Tribe, who write extensively in support of LGBT equality — disagrees with his contention that Obama is “in his rights” to “oppose DOMA in court,” shows that John’s purpose is not to inform but to persuade and incite, facts be damned.

That John continues to write about “pedophilia” at all despite the fact that 16-year-old whose marriage was invalidated in the case cited in the brief — Wilkins v. Zelichowski, 140 A.2d 65, 67-68 (N.J. 1958) — would today have reached the age of consent, if not the age at which a marriage would be found to be valid, in 32 states shows that John’s desire to advance the “pedophilia” story is without any merit.  Moreover, as pointed out by PG in comments to the earlier post, this case was cited by none other than Lambda Legal in one of its own briefs — for the same purpose it was cited in the Smelt brief.