Get Over It

I am not exactly sure what America’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community expected to get out of this past year. But whatever it was, they didn’t get it.

I know this because a great number of my peers in this community are being terrifically loud about how upset, disrespected and betrayed they feel by the man who actively courted us from the beginning of his campaign nearly three years ago, President Barack Obama.

It’s important to note Obama didn’t conduct an especially effective courtship for most of that time.

To the extent that anyone can infer from evidence that is mostly anecdotal, the LGBT community supported his rival would-be nominee, Hillary Clinton, in numbers that were probably overwhelming, right up until the moment Clinton conceded at the Denver convention.

Once the nomination was official, though, our demographic dutifully moved its support, more or less monolithically, behind the man who promised to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” but held on to public opposition to gay marriage (and, for what little it is worth now, Clinton maintained the same position).

There were good signs early on. Obama spoke to us; he acknowledged us; he recognized our existence and our general right to exist.

(Of course, he also recognized our increasing skill for organization and growing economic power. He would have been foolish not to.)

He did better than threaten to merely “tolerate” us, as Sarah Palin did in her debate with Joe Biden; he promised that our fight would be his fight.

We believed him. We had to – what alternative did the opposition represent?

So we were as elated as anyone on Inauguration Day last year. I traveled to Washington, D.C. for the event and wrote about it in this space.

But I am a lifelong student of politics, and thus I am a realist, and I am skilled at the tempering of expectations.

I said the following, not in reference to prospects for LGBT citizens under Obama, but merely in reference to his coming presidency in general:

“Everyone accepts that over the course of the new administration, no one is going to get precisely his or her way. The nature of all things in government is compromise.

I am fine with that … I just want competence. Though we may each find ourselves disappointed in the direction of this policy or that, I believe we will at least find competence rather than indolence.”

That’s not asking much.

But the expectations of my LGBT peers were apparently much more demanding.

A year later, they haven’t gotten precisely their way, and many of them are furious.

To this, I have two responses.

Find out what they are at: The Daily Athenaeum!