Disgusted

How’s that for a headline? Look, we really didn’t want to write this post, for a number of reasons. First, because we just wrote about our disappointment with Obama two weeks ago, and second, because it’s such a big downer. So we’re not going to dance around the issue, we’re going to come right out with it: we’re disgusted.

The Obama Justice Department said some pretty repugnant things about gay people in a legal brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act last week. Yes, OBAMA, not Bush, and it’s the same DOMA that Obama promised to overturn when he ran for President, the one that Newt Gingrich guided through the Republican-controlled Congress during an election year, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996, when same-sex marriage wasn’t legal anywhere in the US. DOMA is the law that prevents the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages the states perform. Because of DOMA, we can't file a joint tax return or seek citizenship for an immigrant partner, among numerous other rights.

Fast-forward nearly 13 years; it’s an electoral off-year, and both houses of Congress are firmly in Democratic hands. Same-sex marriage is no longer some mysterious unknown; 5 states sanction them, and numerous other municipalities legally recognize some form of same-sex relationship. We have a president who ran on a promise to overturn DOMA, and what do we get? A motion to dismiss a case challenging the law, in which relationships like ours are equated with marriage between “an uncle and a niece” or “under-aged marriage.” Hmmm, incest and pedophilia? Where have we heard that before? We’d expect this from a Republican, or a Democrat if we dialed our time machine back to the mid-90s or before. But this? This, in 2009? From a Democrat who ran as a “fierce advocate” for gays and lesbians?

We can’t go on because we’re too ticked off to process this rationally, so we’re going to let our gal pal Rachel Maddow hash it out with our daddy-crush Howard Dean. It’s long, but take the time to watch it. Dean nails the point that, although he doubts Obama knew the specifics of the brief, "you cannot talk about gay Americans the way gay Americans were talked about in this brief." Which makes us wonder...who wrote the brief? Where did all this homophobic language come from? We'd expect this from Alberto Gonzalez or John Ashcroft, but who in Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department wrote this, and why was it allowed to go forward?