President-elect Barack Obama has thrown the LGBT community a lifeline in our time of need and no one seems to be grasping for it.
After 31 same-sex marriage election defeats in 32 elections, with 45 of 50 states banning same-sex marriage, with 17 states banning civil unions and domestic partnerships, our president-elect, still, wants to grant us federal marriage equality. Yes, all 1,138 federal rights of marriage, including joint income tax returns, shared Social Security benefits, and immigration rights.
Obama's official presidential transition Web site proclaims he "believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions" (http://www.change.gov/agenda/civil_rights_agenda/).
This means that anyone in the nine states and Washington, D.C. that have same-sex marriage, civil unions, or domestic partnership could have full federal marital rights. If Congress words the legislation correctly, this may also mean that if you live in one of the other 41 states you could travel to Massachusetts and get married or to Vermont to get a civil union or to California, Washington, or Oregon and sign up as registered domestic partners and have all the federal marital rights even if your home state does not grant you state marital rights.
However, there are two catches.
The first is that the federal government will not call these marital rights "marriage." Indeed, it appears the federal government will not call them anything. Rather, they will simply be recognizing whatever the state calls them, marriage, civil union, or domestic partnership.
The second catch is that we need to work our butts off to help our president-elect fulfill his promise.
Any president can only sign what Congress passes. We need to start lobbying our current and newly elected members of Congress to support the president-elect's pledge for federal marriage equality. This has been made more difficult with the passage of Proposition 8 and anti-marriage propositions in Arizona and Florida. But our community has faced long odds before and prevailed. Prior to the marriage lawsuits, which brought a tsunami of reactionary electoral defeats outlawing same-sex marriage, we had a strategy that was working. Working through legislative bodies, and not the courts, we successfully passed hundreds of domestic partnerships and civil unions policies, none of which have ever been directly reversed. Civil unions and domestic partnerships have only been reversed when they were included in anti-same-sex marriage laws. Indeed, the promoters of Prop 8 admitted that they did not try to overturn California's domestic partnership because they knew they would lose.
Now President-elect Obama has invited the LGBT community to work for federal marriage equality in our nation's most important legislative body, the Congress of the United States. He wants us to help him fulfill his pledge to us. But Obama cannot do this without our help.
Equality California has said it wants to repeal Prop 8 on the 2010 ballot. This is all well and good. But is this the best use of our time, money, and energy at this juncture in our history? Is this the best time to focus on anything else when our new president has a mandate for change now?
President-elect Obama has thrown the LGBT community a lifeline in our hour of need. I hope we have the good sense to grab for it.
Leland Traiman chaired Berkeley's 1983 Domestic Partner Task Force, which wrote the world's first domestic partnership policy enacted into law. He founded Rainbow Flag Health Services & Sperm Bank (http://www.GaySpermBank.com) and successfully defended the rights of gay sperm donors against the Food and Drug Administration. He lives in Alameda with his husband of 18 years and their two children, ages 9 and 3.