THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release June 1, 2009
LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER PRIDE MONTH, 2009

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BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION

Forty years ago, patrons and supporters of the Stonewall Inn in New York City resisted police harassment that had become all too common for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Out of this resistance, the LGBT rights movement in America was born. During LGBT Pride Month, we commemorate the events of June 1969 and commit to achieving equal justice under law for LGBT Americans.

LGBT Americans have made, and continue to make, great and lasting contributions that continue to strengthen the fabric of American society. There are many well-respected LGBT leaders in all professional fields, including the arts and business communities. LGBT Americans also mobilized the Nation to respond to the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic and have played a vital role in broadening this country’s response to the HIV pandemic.

Due in no small part to the determination and dedication of the LGBT rights movement, more LGBT Americans are living their lives openly today than ever before. I am proud to be the first President to appoint openly LGBT candidates to Senate-confirmed positions in the first 100 days of an Administration. These individuals embody the best qualities we seek in public servants, and across my Administration — in both the White House and the Federal agencies — openly LGBT employees are doing their jobs with distinction and professionalism.

The LGBT rights movement has achieved great progress, but there is more work to be done. LGBT youth should feel safe to learn without the fear of harassment, and LGBT families and seniors should be allowed to live their lives with dignity and respect.

My Administration has partnered with the LGBT community to advance a wide range of initiatives. At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world. Here at home, I continue to support measures to bring the full spectrum of equal rights to LGBT Americans. These measures include enhancing hate crimes laws, supporting civil unions and Federal rights for LGBT couples, outlawing discrimination in the workplace, ensuring adoption rights, and ending the existing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in a way that strengthens our Armed Forces and our national security. We must also commit ourselves to fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic by both reducing the number of HIV infections and providing care and support services to people living with HIV/AIDS across the United States.

These issues affect not only the LGBT community, but also our entire Nation. As long as the promise of equality for all remains unfulfilled, all Americans are affected. If we can work together to advance the principles upon which our Nation was founded, every American will benefit. During LGBT Pride Month, I call upon the LGBT community, the Congress, and the American people to work together to promote equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-third.

BARACK OBAMA

From: White House Presidential Proclamation

Barack Obama’s administration has declared June an LGBT Pride Month. The powerful President of The United States has declared that he openly hires LGBT people to positions of power. Okay. And the company I work for hired me, I mean. *shrug*. Not exactly the same thing, but yknow. Not the most my-socks-hit-the-other-end-of-the-room kinda wow either.

Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate the LGBT pride month. I’d just like to see so much more.

While Obama’s official stand is to that he does not support gay marriage (he favours civil unions), it does look like sexuality rights is making headway in America. I hope he’ll soon come out in support of gay marriage.

I mean, how’d he like it if I declared that non-Caucasians, or non-Christians should not be allowed to marry? All marriage licenses for African American couples revoked, NOW. Let them have civil unions too. Well. I don’t want to get started on America. After all….*looks wryly at my own country, where politicians get away with calling each other pondan as slurs*.

It is no secret that we in LAGAI – Queer Insurrection, like many other grassroots queer activists, are not big advocates of gay marriage. As with queers in the military, we think the overall political institution is wrong, and therefore we should not be struggling to have an equal place in it. Through legal marriage, the state coerces people into nuclear families, statistically the most dangerous place in the country, through a system of rewards and punishments. People’s rights in society, whether to health care or immigration should not be affected by the type of relationship they are or are not in. We wish the energy that goes into gay marriage could instead go into the other issues that affect us all, like making queer youth safe in schools and on the streets, providing economic support for queers and all people, and building a society where people’s needs are met, and we are free to live and love as we choose.

However, we opposed proposition 8. Proposition 8 wasn’t about the de-establishment of marriage, it was plain and simple about homophobia, or the maintenance of heterosexual privilege, however you want to call it. It was about religion controlling access to benefits of what is supposed to be a secular state. So we were appalled to see the No on 8 ads put on by the “Human Rights Campaign” (HRC) and other mainstream gay groups, that at best missed the point and were ineffective, and at worst were racist. No On 8 never showed the diversity of gay people who wanted to be married and they never talked about the impact of denying these rights on how queers perceive themselves and their place in society.

The last ads were, instead, appropriative of the history of people of color in the u.s. They equated the history of slavery and the fight for civil rights for African Americans, the internment of Japanese residents and citizens, and the struggle for justice for Latino workers with the struggle for legal recognition of gay marriage. White Europeans exterminated millions of Native Americans, and killed at least two million Africans who were abducted and thrown in the holds of ships to be sold as slaves. Slavery was legally maintained for over 200 years. White supremacy was maintained through terrorism (including lynching), as well as law. Legally enforced segregation persisted until the 1960′s. Although nominally able to vote after the Civil War, African Americans were effectively disenfranchised everywhere in the u.s., and legally disenfrancised in much of the south. The Civil Rights movement was about overturning this systematic legal oppression of African Americans, and thousands of people were injured and hundreds of people lost their lives in that struggle.

It is absurd to casually equate this experience with the experience of not getting state recognition for a marriage.

Racism is Not Over

Starting in the 1960′s pollsters have been asking white and Black americans about their views on racism in America. For example, in December 2006, a CNN poll found that 49 percent of Black respondents said that racism is a serious problem, and an additional 35 percent said it was “somewhat serious.” Compare that to 18 percent of whites who thought it was a serious problem, (while 48 percent at least thought it was “somewhat serious”). This only a year after the federal government abandoned tens of thousands of Black people in Louisiana and Mississippi to die in flood waters, or to beg for help by the side of the road or in a filthy and and overcrowded sports arena.

It is beyond the ability of this statement to address all of the forms and examples of racism against people of color in this country. We just want to say that racism is not over. It is still the very root and core of u.s. society, as is the heterosexual nuclear family.

Perhaps one of the most offensive manifestations of racism in the Prop 8 aftermath is the statement, seen on signs, and now as the front page of the Advocate, “Gay is the New Black.” It is amazing how much wrong can be put into five words. It seems to imply that either Black people are gone, or possibly that Black people are no longer oppressed, because otherwise how could anyone be the “new” Black? It clearly negates the existence, and certainly the oppression of Black gay people. As we said above, it appropriates African American history.

Let’s get it clear, it wasn’t Black people who created Prop 8, it wasn’t Black people who funded Prop 8, and it wasn’t Black people who made Prop 8 win. The vast majority of people who voted for Prop 8 were white. Black people make up only 6 to 10 percent of the California electorate. The CNN exit poll on which the media built the idea that African Americans were responsible for Prop 8 winning was based on 154 Black voters.

The media, including the left media, is titillated by the “conflict” between Black people and gays just as they have been by the “conflict” between Jewish and Black people for decades. Democracy Now has had more gay content since Prop 8 than perhaps in its entire history. We hear on KPFA and Public Radio that white gay people have never done anything to support struggles against racism, and we know that isn’t true. We hear that no queer people of color support gay marriage, and we know that isn’t true either. The impression is given that the people of color who voted for Prop 8 weren’t doing it because they were homophobic, but because they were angry at the racism of the No on 8 ads or because they are generally anti-marriage, and we think that’s not true either. Because there are better ways of handling this contradiction than by participating in a vote that brings out the homophobia in all communities, and particularly places queer people of color at risk.

The mainstream gay organizations, particularly the HRC, waged this campaign as they have waged all others, completely divorced from the community they claim to represent, hiring ad agencies and conducting focus groups, putting out single message bullet points (“It’s unfair. It’s wrong”). We have heard that ads were made and not used with diverse gay couples explaining why they wanted to be married. Probably some of those ads would have been more persuasive, but we will never know.

We still oppose Prop 8, and we are glad that the mainstream civil rights organizations, Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Equal Justice Society, California NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. filed a petition on November 14 seeking to overturn Prop 8 on the basis that permitting a majority vote to eliminate rights for any group of people threatens the rights of every minority. “We would be making a grave mistake to view Proposition 8 as just affecting the LGBT community,” said Eva Paterson, president of the Equal Justice Society. “If the Supreme Court allows Proposition 8 to take effect, it would represent a threat to the rights of people of color and all minorities.”

Unfortunately, queer liberationists, and other progressive queers have a very low profile in both the straight and left media. On most issues, on any day, KPFA would rather put on the HRC than LAGAI or Gay Shame. Even though the HRC supports sweatshops, and sold out trannies on ENDA. But it is not fair to impute the history of the HRC to the many queers — queers of color and white queers — who fought in the civil rights movement, and continue to fight racism in our communities and elsewhere.

The campaign against 8 will move forward into the courts, and we can only hope the courts overturn it, because frankly we were sick of the gay marriage issue 10 years ago. But no matter how the court case goes, it is important that queer communities address the racism that has boiled to the surface in the Prop 8 aftermath.

We will never achieve equality as LGBT people until we join all the struggles for justice and liberation and against racism and class oppression. We need to honor and name the unique histories of queer people of color, not write them out of history, and out of the present for that matter.

Well, in this case, imagine if you could have gay marriages in Malaysia. Joyous celebrations aside, some poor sod will be stuck fixing the flawed system we have in place for dealing with such things in registration forms.

Check out one person’s complicated process of making forms gay marriage-friendly:

To be blunt, the systems aren’t set up to handle it. The paper forms have a space for the husband’s name and a space for the wife’s name. Married people carefully enter their details in block capitals and post the forms off to depressed paper-pushers who then type that information into software front-ends whose forms are laid out and named in precisely the same fashion. And then they hit “submit” and the information is filed away electronically in databases which simply keel over or belch integrity errors when presented with something so profound as a man and another man who love each other enough to want to file joint tax returns.

From: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective.

This is the part that really got my attention, right at the end (and, I generally love the geekiness of it all):

Come to think about it, all three of the gender in your head and the sex of your body and the clothes you wear are independent from one another! Why don’t we just add another column for telling whether someone’s a transvestite or not…

[ Insert obligatory flippant remark about certain advisory council out there ]

Nothing like a person who works with binaries to tell you they don’t work.

I look forward to the day some programmer’s work be made difficult because he has to make registration forms in Malaysia egalitarian — and that includes recognising all forms of gender and sexuality. Or at least, leaving it out of the form?

(image by Steve Knight / sxc.hu)

Voice Comment: (206) 338-ONG-9

:: download file :: listen on iPhone ::

Duration: 26:18 | 24.5 MB | Stereo |

Along with over 300 people, I attended the Kansas City’s own Fight the H8 rally. I chatted with many people and asking them why was it important that they are out there in the cold to be in this rally.

This will be one of the top issues of my life to fight for the right that was taken away from me simply because I’m gay. Yes, this is personal. You won’t stop hearing from me.

Listen to the audio podcast by clicking “play” on the audio player above.

This video is mainly on Professor Lessig’s opinion on Prop 8. But his arguments on separating religion from state laws as well as definitions of love and marriage is applicable to all of us struggling with social and religious bias. Please watch and spread!

Lawrence Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic and political activist. He is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons, a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center and a former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[1] He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications. Excerpt from Wikipedia.

I had the opportunity to meet Professor Lessig on several occasions. Though always soft-spoken and polite, his speeches whether on legal copyright or political issues are very rousing.