Obama appears to have just thrown LGBT America under the bus

It's beginning to look like it Obama just threw us under the bus -- and broke a campaign promise while doing so. In a 54-page brief defending (DEFENDING!!!) the Defense of Marriage Act, Obama's Justice Department compares marriage equality to incest and trots out every other familiar homophobic attack on LGBT people.

You can read the brief here.

Kudos to Americablog for getting the brief and breaking the details of the story. John Aravosis write:

I cannot state strongly enough how damaging this brief is to us. Obama didn't just argue a technicality about the case, he argued that DOMA is reasonable. That DOMA is constitutional. That DOMA wasn't motivated by any anti-gay animus. He argued why our Supreme Court victories in Roemer and Lawrence shouldn't be interpreted to give us rights in any other area (which hurts us in countless other cases and battles). He argued that DOMA doesn't discriminate against us because it also discriminates about straight unmarried couples (ignoring the fact that they can get married and we can't).

Pam Spaulding writes, and the emphasis is hers:

Friends, is this is the watershed mark, the line in the sand, the utter moral betrayal of this administration in black and white? Does this mean that we are not only expendable to this Administration, but that it has decided we can also be vilified as a constituency at will and not receive any blowback? That's balls. A brief with language like this could have been written by Liberty Counsel it's so homophobic; that it's written in legalese doesn't blunt the arguments being made here. It will be used to cause lasting damage to future civil rights gains.

I'm just now going through the brief in detail, but it is certainly looking like Pam is right.

LGBT groups and the ACLU express outrage.

See Americablog for breaking news.

Queers, Blacks & more Proposition 8 postmortems

I found New York Times columnist Charles Blows' piece on Proposition 8 to be both interesting and unsettling. But I couldn't figure out why it worried me so much until Pam Spaulding came to the rescue. Among her many criticisms:

I think Blow makes another serious mistake with the first suggestion -- we cannot throw up our hands and cede a "religious beliefs" or bible-based excuse to those who don't support marriage equality. The Right and black religious conservatives don't own religion. There are black leaders of faith who do support equality, and they need to be front and center and supported by the LGBT community to do outreach.

However, she also praises Blow, making a point that I heartily endorse.

Blow's piece is full of flaws, but the premise that we haven't engaged or challenged wrong-headed beliefs of a community on terms it can relate to is correct.

Pam's entire post is worth reading. Thanks to Pam for quoting my most recent column, but I'm also sending her even greater thanks for writing about her own clearly written perspective on the issue and for highlighting Jim Toevs' words of wisdom.

Birds of a Feather: Fred Phelps supports Bush's surgeon general nominee

By Diane Silver

Hate Monger Fred Phelps has come out in support of James Holsinger. That's hardly a surprise, and it certainly cements Holsinger's credentials as the worst-choice-ever to become the nation's chief doctor. Democrats and fair-minded Republicans simply have to take a stand against making Holsinger the surgeon general.