Obama’s Willing Executioners

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Barack Obama was elected with euphoria on the part of his supporters on Nov. 4, 2008. So starry-eyed was one of my friends he told me, “I think Barack Obama may prove to be one of the greatest presidents in American history.”  Then Prop 8 passed. And the news media reported that 7 out of 10 African Americans voted for Prop 8, as did a majority of Hispanic voters. But later a petition began to circulate in academic circles blaming the Mormons, who make up only 2% of California’s voting population, for this “catastrophy,” as LGBTQ people and supporters characterized it. They have called for the withdrawal of tax exempt status for the Mormon Church, but not the Catholic Church or black churches.

And yet no one was blaming Barack Obama, whose supporters clearly carried in Prop 8 in California. Why should they? Barack Obama loves gay people, doesn’t he?

It’s just those friends he keeps, and those he finances. Obama is friends with the Rev. James Meeks, leader of the Illinois Family Institute, someone the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a major foe of gay people and a “hater.” Meeks is also connected with Americans for Truth, an Illinois group. Obama is also friends with one Father Doug Kmiec, a Catholic priest whom Obama chose to lead his own Family, Faith and Values Tour that began in the last week of September, 2008. The tour was billed as “Voting All Our Values,” but its anti-gay message apparently did not register with too many of Obama’s LGBTQ supporters. It did register with a few feminists, who decried it, but it went out directly to those voters Obama wanted to reach: anti-gay voters.

The gay magazine The Advocate ran an article about the tour, but in the frenzy of Obama fever and Hope (TM) and Change (TM), its impact was a fizzle. The Advocate took the line that “Kmiec’s views run counter to those of Obama,” a mantra that has continued to distance Obama from the anti-gay activists with whom he closely associates.

Obama has said he wants to repeal the DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act), and Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she’d back him in that. So it would seem that Obama thus opposes his friend Meeks’ association with Americans for Truth. But many Democrats who were vigorously behind Obama, such as Senator Harry Reid, voted for DOMA, and it’s repeal seems unlikely, given Obama’s lack of courage on gay issues. If it were only a lack of courage, though, we could perhaps forgive it. Bill Clinton suffered from the same willies, as it were, to push too hard for gay rights. Yet Obama puts himself consistently in the company of people who hate gays who say they liken gays to murderers. This is extreme language. Obama says he doesn’t agree but appears with the people at public campaign events anyway.

Moreover, any repeal of DOMA is likely to lead exactly to where Obama wants to go: to the states. Many who don’t favor gay marriage believe DOMA is a kind of prophylactic, as it were, and if that is removed, it will generate more Prop 8-type ballot initiatives and state action.

Why should LGBTQ people believe that Obama is choosing these people to act as his spiritual advisors and lead his all-inclusive Values campaign if he does not embrace these values himself? Indeed, his own promotion of his tour claimed he was focusing on universal values. As a gay person, I don’t find it a panacea that Obama says (often smugly and with condescension) that he is for civil union, wants to leave it to the states (wasn’t that said about slavery?), and feels secure in his own sacred marriage.

Constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage also passed last week in Arizona and Florida, and Arkansas voters approved a measure banning unmarried couples from serving as adoptive or foster parents. These states either went for Obama or gained in Democratic votes in the days before the election.

For me, marriage is an issue I have not, as a gay person, been willing to embrace. I thought of it as a patriarchal institution that was essentially heterosexual and one that had a history of the oppression of women that I saw no need for gay people to embrace. I thought of civil union as sufficient, and possible a wonderful alternative, if it were equal in all regards. But I have come to see it differently in the light of the onslaught against gay marriage, because this is the issue the homophobes have siezed upon, along with pedophile priests and teachers, that will bring the LGBTQ people down. This is the beginning of our “Nuremburg Laws.”

We will begin to see, under Barack Obama’s presidency, a gradual set of laws that resembles the 1935 Nuremburg laws used to deprive Jews of civil rights, but this time, the laws will be directed against LGBTQ. It will take more time, because we have a federal system that does relegate much to the states, so it may happen last in a state like Connecticut, which showed its unwillingness to oppress gay rights, and first in a state like California, which has referenda allowing homophobic lobbies greater access to constitutional changes. But make no mistake, Obama will support these without being so bold as Hitler to say that he does. He will simply claim there is nothing he can do about it.

In Daniel J. Goldhagen’s provocative book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, he posits that anti-semitism ran so deep in German culture that when a charismatic leader came along who could invoke that hatred as a legitimate feeling, the Christian German people were more than willing to see their Jewish neighbors exterminated.

Obama is a charismatic leader who has shown us a narcissistic personality unrivaled in American politics. He has trotted out a seal, a symbol, a flag, and now another seal called The Office of the President Elect. (There is no such office.) He has shown his love of grandiosity with the spectacle in Denver at the Democratic National Convention that was reminiscent of the Nuremburg rallies, although it was more Britney Spears than Leni Riefenstahl. For all the totalitarian tendencies, which Obama’s supporters don’t seem to mind, come policies that will relegate gay people to the lowest status imaginable.

Obama does hold the views of the company he keeps. And that company is all too willing to suppress gay rights. I don’t think Obama is going to exterminate gay people. But I think we will see a series of Nuremburg-like laws that begin to erode the move towards equal rights for which gay people have fought so hard. We need to be vigilant. And we need to take the blinders off when it comes to Obama.

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Filed under Culture, Obamanation, Politics, Religion, Sex

Tags: anti-semitism, Arizona, Arkansas, ballot initiatives, Barack Obama, California, Catholics, DOMA, Family Faith and Values Tour, Father Kmiec, Florida, gay marriage, gay people, Hitler's Willing Executioners, James Meeks, LGBTQ, Mormons, Nuremburg Laws, Obama, Prop 8, Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC