Can I Take Your Order?

Silly me. As my deadline expired last week, I read that several GLBT leaders were over at the White House in a late-afternoon meeting with administration aides. And, since our community has been pressuring the Obama crowd for a gay rights executive order, I assumed that the decision had been made in our favor. I mean, why get everyone over to the west wing just to dash their hopes? What’s the point in that?

Um, I don’t know, but indeed that’s what the administration did last week. They decided not to add sexual orientation and gender identity to an existing executive order that mandates nondiscrimination policies for federal contractors. If that sounds like a mouthful, let me assure you that a stroke of the President’s pen could have provided protection against job bias for tens of millions vulnerable GLBT workers. 

But my main question was: Why have a meeting to announce the bad news, and in so doing, piss off gay activists and cause a stir? Why not hedge? Why not make a secret deal to sign the order after reelection (just before we settle our business with Vladimir Putin)? It seemed clumsy.

My pragmatic side has some sympathy for Obama’s dilemma. Romney has so little fodder for his campaign that he would have fed on this type of executive order for the duration. Not that Mittens would have openly advocated discrimination against gays. Instead he would have used it as an example of Obama using the public purse to “force companies to undermine their religious freedom.” 

Nonetheless, in the empty echo chamber of today’s political media, where offhand comments reverberate for days, this charge could have thundered back and forth for months. 

On Thursday, Jay Carney explained that Obama remains committed to ending job bias, but wants to do so by passing the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a perennial non-starter in any Congress, let alone one where Democrats lack 60 votes in the Senate. That’s like refusing to make breakfast in a Manhattan apartment until you can set up a chicken coop and produce your own eggs. (Please note that I did not go off on my usual tangent about how much I hate the Employment Nondiscrimination Act.)

Obama has done more for us that anyone seems to recognize by placing the Justice Department on the side of equality in virtually all federal gay rights lawsuits. He’s done so without really drawing fire from the right, and his 2011 decision could have historic repercussions well beyond the impact of an executive order. 

That said, he must be reelected for the policy to work on our behalf as a dozen or so federal cases make their way up the courts over the next few years. For that reason, I’ll give up the order without too much fuss if the decision helps win him another term.

Maybe just a little fuss. 
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There’s Something About Montana

Speaking of lawsuits, there’s an interesting state case, argued last week before the Montana Supreme Court, that I have never fully understood. Perhaps I would have a better grip on the underlying strategy had I actually read the briefs and the lower court opinion, but then again, there is only so much time in this short life for the unpaid perusal of legal paperwork. 

Six gay couples are arguing that Montana’s anti-marriage constitutional amendment should not preclude legislating a domestic partner scheme that offers at least some marital benefits to gay unions. Further, they say, failure to do so is unconstitutional.

I agree, but it sounds as if the case as argued is too vague for victory. Usually, we find a few couples who are being denied this or that benefit and then state our claim. We don’t just sue for an unspecified partner status. But here’s the other anomaly:

In California (and now in Nevada), we argue that you cannot offer all the benefits of marriage without extending the status of marriage itself. The “m-word,” we correctly insist, is an integral benefit of marriage and can’t be excised out of the “m-package” under the guise of civil unions.

Elsewhere, we make the claim that the antigay constitutional amendments that exist in over 30 states should not be interpreted to forbid workplace benefits or other arrangements that recognize gay couples. Giving someone medical insurance for their partner for example, is not the same as “recognizing a same-sex marriage.” Hence the denial of such benefits should be analyzed as a violation of equal protection rather than a threat to the marriage amendment.

The Montana case seems to fall into an uncharted gap between these two lines of argument. It almost makes me want to read the filings in order to produce a coherent report on the case. But, the key word is “almost.” Sorry Montana. 
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Does Pizza Turn You Gay?

Were you aware that pizza boxes cannot be recycled? I was sort of aware of that, but I put my boxes in the bin anyway, because they may be greasy, but they’re still cardboard. What the hell. We’re nice enough to bother to recycle, and they still want us to perform additional triage. 

Turns out the grease will damage the recycling apparatus and could even taint your entire bin. I learned this by clicking an intriguing link with a title that said something like: “The Mystery of the Pizza Box.” I routinely fall for these tantalizing sidebars, wasting what adds up to vast chunks of time in pursuit of what turn out to be tedious little anecdotes, useless advice and old news. I suppose the pizza box item was useful, but still. It hardly lived up to its enigmatic teaser, now did it?

Perhaps I should make my section headlines more tempting. I just wrote the one for this particular section as a test. Don’t lie to me. You were dying to read on, weren’t you? The problem is that now, like me, you feel cheated. 

I won’t do it again.
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Pizza Has No Impact on Sexual Orientation

Just thought I’d clear up the business about the pizza before I continue. Moving on, in the course of my extensive research on interesting things that have little or no connection to GLBT news, I was reading about a Third Circuit case on whether or not a Pennsylvania middle school can ban a bracelet that reads: “I (heart) boobies.” 
 
The case is a kissing cousin of our many school T-shirt dramas, where students are stripped of their gay-friendly garb or told to cover up their homophobic Bible verses. It highlights the constitutional clash between a kid’s right to free speech on campus and the school’s obligation to sustain an educational environment free of unrest, incitement to crime and/or lewdness.

The bracelet is part of a campaign against breast cancer, but for the school it’s a trigger for sex-crazed little boys to disrupt the class and bother the girls. These cases are not always clear-cut, but for my part I come down on the side of the bracelet-wearer. Schools can prohibit, let’s say, Confederate bandanas that could cause a riot. But they can’t confiscate any and all potentially controversial items of clothing. 

At any rate, it will be instructive to see how the Third Circuit rules on this matter. We have yet to get a clear High Court decision on the scope of school authority when it comes to gay or antigay clothing, and this case would surely shed light on the subject if it reached the justices. 

A few years back, the High Court dismissed a gay T-Shirt case as moot, because the student in question had graduated, but that was basically ducking the issue. And last year, a Seventh Circuit panel ruled that a shirt reading “Be Happy, Not Gay,” could not be censored, but that was the end of that particular long-running case.

Earlier this month, Lambda sued an Ohio high school, where a student was ordered to turn his “Jesus Was Not A Homophobe” shirt inside out. The student complied at first, but after a little legal research pressed the administration to no avail. Lambda sent them a few letters, and made a federal case out of it a couple of weeks ago. Good luck, Lambda.
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Tobacco Road To Ruin

What else is new, you wonder. Well, not that much actually. We are all gearing up for the North Carolina anti-gay marriage vote on May 8. Both Barack Obama and Lung Cancer State Governor Bev Purdue have urged a no vote, but the polls are not encouraging. 

That said, most voters don’t seem to understand that the NorCar proposition not only bans recognition of same-sex marriage, it also bans domestic partnership benefits for both gay and straight couples, and will even roll back local partner recognition in cities or by public employers around the state. Oddly, it is even opposed by Prop 8 proponent David Blankenhorn, a man who testified in favor of Prop 8 in court, but who nonetheless claims to support a lesser status for gay couples (a nuanced position indeed). 

In theory, a majority of Tar Lung voters believe gay couples should have some kind of recognition. But that kind of majority never seems to coalesce once the antigay crowds sink their soundbites into the flesh of the electorate. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I was cheered to see that the antigay people in Washington have only collected 4,583 signatures to repeal marriage equality after three weeks of petitioning. They have until June 6 to turn in 120,000 valid names, which means they have to get themselves into gear if they’re going to have a shot at killing our communal hopes and dreams next fall. 

Gay activists are preparing for a marriage fight, although some believe more effort should be focused on a “decline to sign” type effort in order to prevent the repeal from qualifying for the ballot to begin with. According to the Seattle Times, the most recent antigay ballot measure (a losing effort to repeal domestic partnership) barely made it through the petition phase, ergo we should be able to nip this measure in the bud if we put our minds to it. 

To make matters more complicated, the anti-marriage crowd is collecting names for a different ballot measure that operates under different rules. In addition to the repeal, they are also aiming to define marriage as a union of one man and one woman, and for this they need 241,153 names by July 6. 

I gather that you have to vote “yes” on one of these things and “no” on the other, a complication that will surely baffle voters on both sides of the issue if both these nefarious proposals make it to the polls.

I suppose I could look up the latest news on our fight to save Maryland’s marriage law, our effort to restore marriage equality in Maine, and our battle against an anti-marriage amendment in Minnesota. But the above discussion of North Carolina and Washington has proved exhausting. I must rest.
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Don’t Say Tennessee

A quick word count indicates that I don’t have room to relate the many bad things that are going on in the Tennessee legislature this week. Be thankful, dear readers.

It also suggests that I have room for two or three final paragraphs which I will use to berate the insurance company that runs those Goody Two Shoes commercials where ordinary people go out of their way to help others. 

Do you think opening the door for a blind woman is some kind of unusual gesture? Neither do I. But the scene that really annoys me is the one where a guy stands aside at the grocery line to let a mother with a child in a cart through the check out line ahead of him. The man does not have a cart. He has two or maybe three items tucked in the crook of his arm.

Look, there’s no reason on Earth for the man to give up his place in line.  What? Are women entitled to check out before men regardless of the volume of their respective purchases? This isn’t chivalry. It’s insanity. It’s mindless copywriting, and it bugs me.
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Ann’s column is available every week at sfbaytimes.com. You can reach her at arostow@aol.com.