Some things never change. One of the unshakable axioms of the Catholic church is that bishops who toe the line get promoted. This morning, the Vatican presented American Catholics with exhibit A when it announced that New York archbishop and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops president Timothy Dolan will be elevated to the rank of cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI next month.

Considering that the New York archdiocese is widely regarded as the spiritual heart of the Catholic church in America and that eight out of New York’s ten archbishops have been named cardinals, it was only a matter of time before Dolan got the red hat. Still, given the great deal of respect Dolan’s peers have for the archbishop, the visibility of his current office, and the fact that his charm and media savvy have made him the de facto face of the American Catholic church, many people were surprised that it took Rome this long to move on his promotion.

I find it particularly telling that Benedict only created Dolan a cardinal after he made the fight against marriage equality a top priority of both his episcopate and the USCCB. In New York, Dolan spearheaded the opposition to the state’s marriage equality law. While the bill was being debated, Archbishop Dolan frantically worked to torpedo it, saying that allowing loving and committed same-sex couples the freedom to marry would turn the State of New York into a communist dictatorship. He called marriage equality “perilous,” “detrimental for the common good,” and a “violation of what we consider natural law that’s embedded in every man and woman.” He railed against same-sex marriage in a series of blog posts, characterizing it as “Orwellian social engineering.” In the same post, he compared marriage equality to polygamy, and went further in an interview on 60 Minutes in March, saying “I love my mom. I don’t have the right to marry her.”

Dolan’s anti-gay rhetoric didn’t stop after the law passed. He whined that he had been tricked by the politicians who cast their votes for fairness and lied that Catholic churches in his diocese were being threatened with lawsuits intended to force them to perform same-sex weddings, despite the fact that the law explicitly prohibited such suits. And he doubled down on his rhetoric about the “threat” to marriage posed by loving same-sex couples, comparing their marriages to “polygamy, adultery, and forced marriages.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken a similarly aggressive tack under Dolan’s leadership, forming a so-called subcommittee “for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage” dedicated to opposing equal marriage rights. This group is so extreme that its Policy Advisor for Marriage and Family, Daniel Avila, was forced to resign late last year after publishing an inflammatory column in which he stated that homosexuality is caused by Satan.

Apparently, engaging in consistent spiritual abuse of LGBT people so endeared him to Catholic leaders in Rome that they gave him a promotion. The worst part? All cardinals under the age of 80 are eligible to vote in a papal conclave (election). Benedict XVI is in failing health, and Dolan’s young age (at 61, he’s a veritable spring chicken among his fellow cardinals, whose average age in 2010 was 78) ensures that he’ll be able to help vote another anti-gay pope into office after the current one dies, and is likely to be able to repeat the feat at least once more. And the cycle of institutional homophobia in the Catholic church continues.

in 2006, Oren Adar and Mickey Ray Smith legally adopted a Louisiana child while they were living in NY; they wanted both their names to appear on the birth certificate. Their simple request that Louisiana acknowledge reality was ruled against by a federal appeals court, and now the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case.

In their appeal, spearheaded by the gay rights advocacy group Lambda Legal, the couple said it was important both practically and symbolically they both be listed as the legal parents.

“Obtaining an amended birth certificate that accurately identifies both parents of an adopted child is vitally important for multiple purposes, including determining the parents’ and child’s right to make medical decisions for other family members at the necessary moments; determining custody, care, and support of the child in the event of a separation or divorce between the parents,” the legal brief said.

Lawyers for the men also said it is vitally necessary for Social Security and tax purposes, inheritance, insurance, school registration, and obtaining a passport.

Adar and Smith tried to have the birth certificate changed in Louisiana. All states have laws creating a right to accurate, amended official birth and identity documents that would be recognized in other states and by the federal government.

Darlene Smith, Louisiana’s registrar of vital records and statistics, refused their request. She took the position that the term “adoptive parents” in the applicable section of state law applies only to married parents, because in Louisiana, only married couples may jointly adopt a child.

Not that marriage in New York was an option open to this couple when they adopted their son. But the adoption did go through. Ms. Smith appears to have been pretending that these gentlemen were married for purposes of adoption, but not for purposes of record-keeping.

Why, Darlene, why such time and effort to screw people over, including innocent children? These men are both the parents–your employer, the state of Louisiana, would seem to have acknowledged as much by allowing the adoption. Why couldn’t you have made a note of the fact in the public record and let everybody get on with their lives?

Andy posted these videos earlier, from New York state town clerks who are derelict in the duties of their jobs. They are victims, you see, because Maggie Gallagher says so. So, as part of Maggie’s new “Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance,” ** three religious bigots made videos whining about the fact that the state won’t give them a pass to do their jobs poorly, on account of their religious beliefs. Watch with the sound up, or watch with the sound down and put on some sad violin music.

Here is Rose, who is a sympathetic victim because all she really wants to do is take care of her cuddly farm animals anyway. Why are all the gays being mean by wanting equality?

Here is Laura Fotusky. Maggie has provided some scary music in order to convince the reader that Laura’s worries about her life being in danger are valid. Also, because it is October, and spooky music is in right now. Laura claims that her religious freedoms have been violated by marriage equality in New York, proving that she is completely unclear on what her religious freedoms actually are.

Finally, here is Ruth. Her video is also full of spooky music! They miss her at work, but she won’t go back because she just can’t imagine performing the duties of a secular government job anymore, now that there might be a gay couple here and there.

Truly, tales of woe and lamentations.

*Maggie’s new thing is apparently to give wingnut organizations really similar names to gay organizations, because that isn’t pathetic or anything.

NOM is always mad about activist judges and activist legislatures and activist houseplants and whatever else.  Now let them start grunting about activist voters, as a new poll out of New York shows that NOM’s desire to rewrite discrimination into that state’s laws has a fairly fat chance of actually happening:

- 55 percent of registered voters support the legalization of same-sex marriage.
- 63 percent of registered voters oppose overturning the new marriage equality law.
- 44 percent of registered voters (a plurality) say they are more likely to vote for a state senator who voted to pass the same-sex marriage law.
- 70 percent of New Yorkers would attend a same-sex wedding if invited, including 34 percent of those who oppose the law.

Maggie ‘n’ Brian: get jobs.

Meanwhile, wingnut dominionist pastor David Barton has an idea’r about how to “punish” the New York GOP senators who voted for marriage equality:

“No disrespect to our Native American friends, but this is where you hang a bloody scalp over the gallery rail. You hang these four Republican scalps over the Senate rail and every other Republican senator looks up and sees those scalps and says, ‘my gosh, I’ll be hanging up there beside them if I don’t stay with this pro-family stuff.’ And that’s exactly what has to happen.”

Uh yeah, David, great idea, considering the fact that those other Republicans will be looking up at that rail and seeing those scalps (NO OFFENSE OUR NATIVE AMERICAN FRIENDS!) and face a real hard choice: cater to the whims of the rapidly dwindling minority of New Yorkers who are unreconstructed bigots, or be normal. Tough decision.

[h/t Think Progress & Towleroad]

On The View today, the hosts took time to discuss the people protesting gay weddings in New York, and the resident Republican, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, called the protesters out as tasteless:

And then they discussed the perils of taking the Bible too literally.

Sherri Shepherd: the sheep were asking for it. I wonder if that defense has ever been used in an Alabama court of law.

[h/t HuffPost]

The Moonie Times reports that a couple of wingnut groups have decided to double down on the desperate, filing suit against New York’s new marriage equality law:

The day after New York became the sixth U.S. state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, two traditional-values groups filed a lawsuit to overturn the law, saying that politicians used a “corrupt legislative process” to enact it.

New York State Open Meetings laws were violated, said New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms and Torah Jews for Decency in their lawsuit. There were also irregularities in the Senate voting procedures, and “unprecedented Senate lockouts” in which lobbyists and the public were denied access to lawmakers.

“New York law requires that the government be open and transparent to keep political officials responsible,” said Mathew D. Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, which is representing the groups.

“The back-room tactics were rampant in the passages of this law,” he said. “The law should be set aside and the process should begin again to allow the people a voice in the process.”

It’s never simply that they lost fair and square, and it doesn’t matter which branch of government inches LGBT people closer to full equality; there was always a “corrupt process” or a “rogue legislature” or “activisssssss judges.” They simply can’t sleep at night without feeling like they’ve hurt gay people that day.

Says more about their demons than it says about us, I think.

Pathetic.

This is a really, really fun thing:

Some couples may be married in a chapel made of three-dimensional plywood letters arranged in a circle. Others could find themselves in one composed of interlocking pipes connected with plastic zip ties. Certainly, the couples who marry inside such structures intend to form unions far more permanent than the sites where they will exchange vows.

On July 30, the first Saturday that same-sex marriage will be legal in New York State, two dozen couples will be wed inside two pop-up chapels that will appear for about 10 hours at the Merchants’ Gate entrance to Central Park, near Columbus Circle.

The designs for the two chapels will be selected from entries to a contest that began last week and ends July 21. The winning design will be announced the next day, giving architects only eight days to bring their concepts to fruition.

I’m a big fan of art intersecting with love. They are so similar, the two.  Read the whole piece and there’s more info on the Pop Up Chapel project here.

[h/t Alex Blagg]

Those who follow the gay rights movement, especially as it pertains to Religious Right opposition, know all too well that anti-gay wingnuts will go completely Sarah Bernhardt at any perceived slight to the cultural supremacy they still believe they hold. Therefore, when a nondiscrimination law passes and suddenly a wedding photographer who happens to be a wingnut decides she doesn’t want to follow the law, the wingnut is held up as some sort of champion for tradishnul values/a trampled victim. Aside from the fact that it’s a completely disingenuous strategy, it’s sort of gross, as gay teens still attempt and complete suicide at far-too-alarming rates and even now, with a majority of Americans supporting marriage equality, anti-gay hate crimes are still on the rise.  Meanwhile the incidences of Christian Fundamentalists being bullied, beaten,  maimed or killed for being Christian Fundamentalists in this country are still pretty much zero.  So the Religious Right touts these stories, bitching and moaning to the very moon about how we on the side of fairness and equality are the real haters and they’re the real victims.

A New York town clerk has decided to quit her job, rather than sign marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples:

Laura Fotusky submitted a letter of resignation to the town board in Barker, a small town north of Binghamton, on Monday, saying her religious beliefs prevented her from marrying gay couples.

Okay, fine. If she doesn’t like it, get a new job. Here’s part of her letter:

There was no protection provided in the legislation for Town Clerks who are unable to sign these marriage licenses due to personal religious convictions, even though our US Constitution supports freedom of religion.”

“I believe that there is a higher law than the law of the land. It is the law of God in the Bible. In Acts 5:29, it states, ‘We ought to obey God rather than men.’”

“The Bible clearly teaches that God created marriage between male and female as a divine gift that preserves families and cultures. Since I love and follow Him, I cannot put my signature on something that is against God. Deuteronomy 10:12 says, ‘…What does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good.’”

“I would be compromising my moral conscience if I participated in the licensing procedure.

Unfortunately, Laura’s interpretation of the Bible isn’t a legal document in the state of New York. Also, freedom of religion doesn’t include the right to do inferior work in one’s state career due to one’s religious beliefs. I always say this, but it bears repeating again: discriminating against minorities in secular careers actually isn’t part of the free practice of anyone’s religion! Despite what the Religious Right says, we actually don’t care whether or not their churches are willing to perform same-sex marriage. Why? Because those churches are where they actually DO practice their religion. That is actually part of their Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion, and as such, should be protected.  But this is civil marriage we’re talking about.  Duh…

Oh, but watch. The usual suspects will add this one to their litany of sob stories about how it’s just so gosh darn hard to be a Fundamentalist Christian in the United States.

One line from Amanda Marcotte’s piece this morning on the New York marriage win, and its concomitant right wing hysteria, grabbed me:

There are 44 more states to go, and the usual suspects in the South will be the biggest struggle, but the size and influence of New York will help usher this process along. Once straight people start to realize nothing is really going to be that different from them, they’ll stop caring. Many people are quietly adjusting towards a less bigoted point of view about gay people.

A recent poll out of Iowa showed that fully 61.3% of Iowans support marriage equality. That’s a couple of percentage points above public support in New York, which was around 58% right before the law passed.  Wait, that doesn’t make sense, does it?  I think it does.

One of the most important things for us to grasp, as marriage laws are expanded to include gays and lesbians around the country, is that absolutely nothing that the Religious Right promises — none of their scare tactics, none of their sky is falling Chicken Little Chickensh*t hysteria — ever comes to pass.  Ever.

Now, in the small minds of the wingnuts who fervently hate gay people, who spend an inordinate amount of their lives obsessing over what their religious masters tell them about gay people, that sky is falling and will always fall.  Before Iowa, all of the equal marriage laws were in New England, a “cultural elitist” place that, for the common wingnut, is sort of an exotic destination that may or may not actually exist, much like Europe.  So they can sort of compartmentalize what they’ve heard is happening — gays are forcing children to dress up as drag queens in preschool while taking fisting classes from GLSEN! or whatever — and imprint it upon themselves because they have, truly, very little experience with these places.  An obvious parallel came out during the fight over healthcare, where wingnuts went absolutely insane at the suggestion that nations in Western Europe had better health outcomes, for less money, than we do.  It’s, of course, completely true, but those facts had little bearing on wingnuts, most of whom couldn’t pick out the nations of Western Europe on a map.  To them, “France” is not a real place, but a target for their childish resentments.

But now Iowa has had marriage equality for a little while, and over 60% of the people in that heartland state couldn’t care less.  I would suggest that, as Amanda said, sane, reasonable people who were once on the fence or even opposed to marriage equality  have now had an opportunity to see that absolutely nothing — nothing! — has happened.  All the screaming and caterwauling from the Religious Right is just that — the hysterical moaning of liars who are losing their cultural influence.  Meanwhile, nice and normal gay and lesbian couples are getting married and raising families and regular Iowans are going, “Well hell, I guess the world didn’t end after all.”

I predict that this will happen in every state.  Oh sure, there will be a backlash when the Supreme Court finally and ultimately, in the tradition of Loving v. Virginia, declares that anti-gay marriage laws and amendments are unconstitutional and states like Georgia and South Carolina are forced to grow up real fast.  I mean, for a lot of Georgia wingnuts, Atlanta is exotic.  And that’s where a large percentage of that state’s gays and lesbians live.  But even in those places, public acceptance of LGBT equality will grow exponentially when we actually have equality in those places.

Because people hear the hysterical warnings from the Religious Right, and it works for a bit, for as long as the bigots can keep the harsh light of reality away from their followers.  But once that light starts to shine in, once those warnings are exposed as the insane lies that they are…

And that’s how you get a larger percentage of the population supporting marriage equality in Iowa than in New York.  To be sure, New York will zoom by Iowa once marriage equality has been the law of the land for a little bit.  In a way, we should thank our opponents for being such craven, hysterical, and most importantly, dishonest bigots.  They’re helping us more than they will ever understand.

This morning, like many of our readers, I watched Obama’s press conference, where he said this about marriage equality, New York, and the general state of the fight for equality [via Queerty]:

This administration under my direction, has consistently said, we cannot discriminate as a country against people on the basis of sexual orientation…

What I’ve seen happen over the last several years and what happened in New York last week – I think was a good thing because what you saw was the people of New York having a debate, talking through these issues. It was contentious, it was emotional – but ultimately they made a decision to recognize civil marriages. And I think that’s exactly how things should work. And so I think it is important for us to work through these issues – because each community is going to be different and each state is going to be different – to work through them. In the meantime, we filed briefs before the Supreme Court that say any discrimination against gays, lesbians, transgenders is subject to heightened scrutiny and we don’t think DOMA is unconstitutional (sic – they do think DOMA is unconstitutional). So the combination of what states are doing, what the courts are doing, the actions we’re taking administratively, all are how the process should work…

I think what you’re seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays, lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers and that they’ve got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out.

Many have taken this as a full-throated endorsement of states’ rights, going so far as to compare it to anti-miscegenation voices in the days before Loving v. Virginia. I think this is misguided, for a lot of reasons, and I have a theory as to why the Obama administration is playing the political game they are playing on marriage equality.

Now, disclaimer:  like all self-respecting gays, I surely do wish he would just come out and support marriage equality.  It would be nice for the President to add his voice to the growing chorus of support for full, simple equality.  However, the fact that he hasn’t really isn’t bothering me all that much.  I think there’s a bit of a long-view, meta game going on here [which is fully in line with Obama's actions on lots and lots of issues], and I’m not necessarily endorsing said game, but rather simply explaining what I think is going on.

Disclaimer two:  I’m not even entertaining the notion that Obama secretly hates gay people or anything like that, as I see it as a psychological problem on the part of the one who holds the opinion, rather than a rational, informed opinion based on anything.  Obama’s statements on marriage equality don’t deviate one bit from the historical statements of other Democrats in lesser positions who have straddled the line on marriage equality until finally coming out in support.

So, to offer my analysis of what I actually think is going on, I’m going to springboard off Andrew Sullivan’s piece on the subject from this morning.  While I rarely agree with Andrew on anything, god love him, I think he’s on the right track here:

[The Obama administration] withdrew legal support for DOMA. Again, a critical factor, along with moves in the states, to get the Supreme Court at some point to acknowledge that equal protection means equal protection; and that the logic of banning marriage for two percent of the population evaporates upon close rational inspection. Again, this was in the presidential bound of authority. And Obama did the right thing in the end.

Some now want this president to be Andrew Cuomo, a heroically gifted advocate of marriage equality who used all his skills to make it the law in his state. But the truth is that a governor is integral to this issue in a way a president can never be. Civil marriage has always been a state matter in the US. That tradition goes all the way back; it was how the country managed to have a patchwork of varying laws on miscegenation for a century before Loving vs Virginia. The attack on this legal regime was made by Republicans who violated every conservative principle in the book when they passed DOMA, and seized federal control over the subject by refusing for the first time ever not to recognize possible legal civil marriages in a state like Hawaii or Massachusetts. Defending this tradition is not, as some would have it, a kind of de facto nod to racial segregation; it is a defense of the norm in US history. And by defending that norm, the Obama administration has a much stronger and more coherent case in knocking down DOMA than if it had echoed Clinton in declaring that the feds could dictate a national marriage strategy.

More to the point, until very recently, if we had had to resolve this issue at a federal level, marriage equality would have failed.

That basically captures the gist of what Sully is saying, and as I said, I think he’s right.  There are several layers to consider here, when looking at the national battle for full marriage equality.  Firstly, of course, are the various DOMA challenges working their way through the courts.  The reason DOMA is flatly unconstitutional is precisely because it upends the states’ abilities to make their own marriage laws, as they always have, and have them recognized by the federal government.  But the flipside of that coin is that in all other instances of marriage law, the various states recognize each others’ contracts.  So, your Alabama marriage might be technically illegal in Massachusetts, but if you get married in Alabama and move north, the state of Massachusetts will recognize your marriage.  However, if you are a gay couple from Massachusetts and find yourself faced with a move to Alabama, you have no such luck.  The Constitutional principle being violated here is Full Faith and Credit, and the part of DOMA that violates it is Section 2.

You all know this.  Barack Obama, a constitutional lawyer, also knows this!  So when Obama says, “I think it is important for us to work through these issues – because each community is going to be different and each state is going to be different,” I don’t see it as an endorsement of a completely federalist approach to marriage.  For one thing, the words directly following those sort of negate the notion that he’s looking at it from a purely states’ rights point of view.  Now, we already know that Obama and his Justice Department have judged Section 3 — the part preventing the federal government from recognizing a state’s same-sex marriages — to be unconstitutional.  But for those of us who have become accustomed to the knowing smirk of Barack Obama, my feeling is that he is well aware that Section 2 is also unconstitutional, and that he knows exactly what is going to happen as these DOMA cases move higher and higher through the court system.  Moreover, most of the most significant challenges so far have focused on Section 3.   Yes, I know there’s a weird thing going on with the Department of Justice suddenly appealing the bankruptcy case that found Section 3 to be unconstitutional, but I’m suspecting a strange parsing of words in their original decision to stop defending the law is at play, and I’m still studying that one.  Confusing, yes, and also bizarre, but I’m still not losing it.  Let’s say I’m raising my eyebrows.  More on the role of the courts in a minute.

The other major case making its little way through the court system right now is the Prop. 8 case, which has the potential to make waves far beyond the bigoted anti-gay marriage amendment passed by California voters.  Anti-gay marriage amendments fall purely into the category of discrimination, by the states, for the states, differentiating them from DOMA, which deals with states’ relationships with each other and with the federal government.  The judge in the Prop. 8 trial found California’s constitutional amendment — which is more or less the same as anti-gay marriage constitutional amendments in quite a few other states — to be a violation of both the Due Process and the Equal Protection clauses of the United States Constitution.  The anti-gay side in that trial made a damn fool of itself, and continues to do so.  At this rate, we have no reason to believe they will not continue to do so.  The difference here is that, depending on how far up the case goes, and how narrowly or widely the Supreme Court rules, it could have a huge, possibly nullifying, effect on the anti-gay constitutional amendments of the other states.  Now let’s revisit what Obama said directly after his comments on states’ rights:

In the meantime, we filed briefs before the Supreme Court that say any discrimination against gays, lesbians, transgenders is subject to heightened scrutiny and we don’t think DOMA is unconstitutional (sic – they do think DOMA is unconstitutional). So the combination of what states are doing, what the courts are doing, the actions we’re taking administratively, all are how the process should work…

Obama is right there on the record saying that discrimination against LGBT people is subject to heightened scrutiny, AND they think DOMA is unconstitutional.  [Note that he did not specify which section of DOMA he was talking about.]  The administration’s statements on heightened scrutiny apply both to the fights against anti-gay marriage amendments on the state level and federal laws like DOMA.  This can be shortened simply, as Daniel Villareal said in his headline earlier today, to encapsulate Obama’s feelings on constitutional amendments banning marriage equality:   “Of Course I Don’t Support Prop 8, You Dummies.”

Obama alluded in his statement to the idea that this process is working itself out on several fronts — state legislatures, court cases, the actions of his own administration that actually fall under his own set of responsibilities.  President Obama simply cannot wave his magic wand and declare full equality for LGBT Americans.  And I agree that it’s great that states like New York have used their legislative branch to move us forward.  However, those who think that the civil rights of minorities should be solely left up to the whims of either voters or their elected representatives are idiots, as there comes a time in civil rights battles where the Supreme Court has to come in and gently explain to Mississippi that it’s time to stop playing with its own poop in the corner and join the other well-behaved children at the lunch table.  [Can you imagine if we had waited around for Mississippi to deal with anti-miscegenation laws on a legislative level?  My god.]

This brings us to why I think President Obama is deliberately being cagy on the subject of full marriage equality, at this point in time.  Again, we all may not like it, but I do believe there is a method to the madness here.  Going into the 2012 elections, the Obama administration is, unfortunately, more vulnerable than I think it should be, due to the economy, and due to the goldfish memories of many American voters, who do not remember where the shitty economy came from, but who simultaneously think that Obama should have been able to snap his fingers and fix it.  And though the economy is improving, there are still a hell of a lot of Americans who are first and foremost concerned about the fact that they don’t have jobs.  If that situation hasn’t improved much by the time next year’s election rolls around, he could be more vulnerable than we might have expected, especially if the GOP manages to nominate someone who at least doesn’t appear to directly communicate with their Evangelical Mothership on a regular basis.  And believe me, the administration is conducting their own internal polling to figure out where they stand, especially in swing states like North Carolina, Ohio and Florida.  These states all went for Obama last time, and they also each have a decent share of unhinged anti-gay bigots.  Now, those bigots weren’t going to vote for Obama in the first place, but if they end up sort of not all that excited about their nominee [Romney, for instance], they might not be too excited about voting.  Oh, but hell, if Obama is actually running around before the election, as Daniel Villareal said in the piece linked above, “guns blazing with a red, white, and blue hard-on for the queers,” I can imagine a scenario where that could tip one or more of those states into the red column.  As it is, he’s letting the process play out and staying a bit above the fray, seemingly to me, to avoid handing the GOP that easy wedge issue going into the election.  Now surely, he could come out for full marriage equality next week and prove me wrongity-wrong-wrong, but my gut just sort of says that’s where things are right now.

Back to the courts for a minute.  Let’s say he wins in 2012 and then comes out fully supporting marriage equality.  Lots of cases involving DOMA and Prop 8 and god knows what else that hasn’t even been filed yet, are going to find their way to the Supreme Court in the next few years.  As the court stands right now, I believe, we have a delicate 5-4 balance tipping in our direction, emphasis on the delicate.  Over the next few years, there will be a couple of Supreme Court retirements, most likely.  Unless we luck out, I don’t think they’re coming from the conservative wing.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg has pancreatic cancer, so she will be leaving the Court at some point in the near future, most likely.  The other one who may possibly retire before too long would be Stephen Breyer.  That’s about it.  Barack Obama has a 100% record when it comes to appointing Supreme Court justices who seem to safely be on our side on these issues.  If reelected in 2012, he’ll make either one or two more appointments, which will simply preserve the delicate 5-4 balance.  If there’s a surprise conservative retirement, well, that looks good for us as our cases start making their way to the high court.

Let’s say he loses.  Let’s say Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann [doesn't make a damn bit of difference because the wingnut judge-making machine is in full flower, regardless of which GOP stooge sits in the Oval Office] is President, and just one of those judges retires.  Setting aside the fact that the ladies of this nation can kiss Roe goodbye under that scenario,  it also creates a fairly shitty situation for any cases involving DOMA, Prop 8, equal rights of any kind for LGBT Americans, and a host of other issues which, I always feel I have to remind single-issue gay voters, actually do exist.  And that court is where so much of our equality will be ultimately decided.

I feel that Obama would like to be the one making those appointments, for myriad reasons.  I am eminently more comfortable having Obama make those appointments.  So the “process” goes as it goes for right now, and my gut feeling — I have always sensed that support for marriage equality would be a second term issue anyway — is that, as long as he is reelected, we’ll be in a pretty good situation, all across the movement, through the various court cases working their way through, to achieve full equality.  If a wingnut takes the keys the Oval Office, all our work over the last several years could go directly down the tubes, and fast.

So that is my theory as to what game the Obama administration is playing.  As I said before, surely I would love it for President Obama to hold a press conference where he announces that his “evolution” on marriage equality is complete, that he supports it wholeheartedly.  That would be wonderful.  But at the same time, everything I’ve written up to this point explains why I’m just not that worked up over the fact that he hasn’t said it yet.  I sense that the Obama administration is playing the long game here, and I, as a young-ish politically involved gay American, am too.  I’m far more concerned about the make-up of the Supreme Court in the year 2013 than I am about hearing those three special words from Barack Obama right now.  They’d be nice to hear, but if I have to wait a little longer in order to make sure the gay community doesn’t get screwed sideways due to a stupid misstep, well, I’ll wait a minute longer.  As I said before, it’s not like the President can wave his magic wand and give me full equality and a pony anyway.

Strategery!  It’s part of politics.  It’s not always fun, but it is what it is in the system that we have.