The midterm elections were a disaster for LGBTs and their allies on a national level. The Republicans gained at least 60 seats in the House of Representatives, putting an end to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's four-year tenure and setting the stage for one of the most conservative Republican majorities �" even outdoing the one that passed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" back in 1993.
Before the 112th Congress is sworn in January, a lame-duck session of the current 111th Congress starts next week. Gay rights advocates are pinning their hopes on the Senate passing an amendment to repeal DADT during this session, and we certainly want that to happen. Whether it will, however, is entirely uncertain now. There have been conflicting comments coming from the White House, the Pentagon, and lawmakers. On top of that, when the Senate last tried to pass the amendment in September, the Republicans succeeded in rejecting a motion to break their filibuster.
A majority of Americans are not in favor of DADT, which prohibits gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. Some top military leaders have spoken in support of its repeal, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet others, such as Marine Commandant General James Amos, are consumed with the idea of men showering together and sharing sleeping quarters as they argue for retaining DADT. "There is nothing more intimate than young men and young women �" and when you talk of infantry, we're talking our young men �" laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers," he said, according to the Associated Press. "I don't know what the effect of that will be on cohesion. I mean, that's what we're looking at. It's unit cohesion, it's combat effectiveness."
This old red herring is the primary impediment to stopping repeal of DADT, and as long as top brass continue with this retrograde argument, we'll have an uphill battle with only about eight weeks until Congress ends.
But the lame-duck session is the last real opportunity for getting rid of DADT. When the new Congress convenes, you can be sure that bills supporting LGBT equality will go nowhere in the House. Gay Congressman Barney Frank, who survived a close re-election bid himself last week, minced no words when he told the Washington Blade Monday that LGBT legislation would have a "zero chance" of passing in the Republican-controlled House.
"Next year there's no chance of anything happening," he said of pro-LGBT legislation. "There's zero chance."
That means no Employment Non-Discrimination Act, no comprehensive immigration reform that includes same-sex binational couples, and no repeal of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act.
In April 2009 we wrote that action on the LGBT bills was imperative in 2009, because in 2010 all the members of the House would be up for re-election, along with a third of the Senate, and prospects for passage during an election year were greatly reduced. In the end we got one piece of legislation passed, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. There was no vote on ENDA, despite promises from Pelosi herself.
While we have suspected for more than a year that repealing DOMA was unrealistic, Congress' inability to pass ENDA is shameful. And it's an example of the types of laws that were sacrificed so Obama could get his health care reform through. While there's no denying that the health care law is a major accomplishment, it came at a heavy price, exacting a toll on many Democratic lawmakers. Conservative Tea Party activists stormed town halls last summer, putting Democrats on the defensive over health care. The administration failed to communicate clearly to voters and dragged the process out for a year �" at the expense of legislation like ENDA. While exit polls from last week showed that the health care law itself wasn't really a factor in people's voting, the atmosphere created by those caustic town halls only intensified the frenzy, further polarizing the electorate.
The main stumbling blocks in passing ENDA are the issues of which bathroom transgender people will use and the false assumption that transgender women will accost other women, two absolutely ridiculous obsessions that the far right has seized on, and that our national LGBT leaders have wanted to ignore rather than confront. Let's hope they have learned some lessons. ENDA, as we have written several times, should have been framed as an economic issue from the start �" preventing discrimination on the job for LGBTs. But that argument failed to gain traction and for all the Democrats' talk about "jobs, jobs, jobs," they did not deliver, another reason the party went down in flames last week.
What's next? We know that the national LGBT organizations need to reassess and retool. And the grassroots groups need to stop badgering Democrats who are supportive of LGBT rights. All the infighting in the community this past year didn't help advance equality one bit. There may be an adrenaline rush associated with chaining yourself to the White House fence or protesting outside Pelosi's office, but at the end of the day such actions don't help get the legislation passed. These groups will have two years until the next national elections to figure out a more effective strategy.