Much has been made of the Obama administration's decision to defy a California judge's order that they enroll a lesbian federal employee's partner as her health-insurance beneficiary. While Alex Blaze called the struggle "a power battle between the judiciary and the executive" in a post about the issue, openly gay Director of the Office of Personnel Management John Berry says it's not so simple. Yesterday at the Victory Fund's Gay and Lesbian Leadership Institute, a participant asked Berry why his office had specifically instructed Blue Cross/Blue Shield not to comply with the judge's order.
The administration has 30 days to comply with the request, but Rep. Tammy Baldwin's Domestic Partnership Benefits & Obligations Act is quickly working its way through Congress. If they can get it passed in the House and sent to the Senate, I'm sure they could use that to leverage quick passage in the Senate and satisfy the judge that they're complying -- not just in a single case but for all federal employees.
(Crossposted from my home blog, Bilerico Project. Come visit me there to see why both the Washington Post and the Advocate named us one of the top 10 LGBT political blogs in the nation.)
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Don't expect any tendency to do the right thing from this administration. It's not in them.
Just a cop-out, imho.
President Obama has done a good job of adhering to the law and to due process in issues such as these. Though we would love it if he just took a big black crayon and "X"-ed out everything that we found discriminatory, his careful, methodical procedures ultimately will do more for civil rights of gay and lesbian people that seeming single-handed policy handed down from "on high".
These won't be fast, radical, hard, dramatic changes -- but realistically, no real change ever has been -- especially not the changes that are drastically against the "status quo".
Look at history.
Even the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked within the system, in addition to peaceful protests. It took time.
We may want a firebrand -- but real "change" does NOT happen that way -- especially when the "change" is as unfortunately threatening an issue as human rights (ALL human rights) tend to be. Have a little patience, and let these processes work.
Just as his AGs have had to defend laws in court he's actively working to overturn/ammend, he, unlike the previous administration, understands that the President is required to uphold and obey the rule of law, even if it is inconvenient for him to do so.
This issue is about whether the executive branch can ignore the judiciary and do whatever it pleases. Exactly what was supposedly wrong with the past eight years.
Berry is an apologist and Obama as a constitutional law scholar should know better. At this point, animus or indifference are their only excuses.
In states where there were no anti-miscegenation laws. persons of a single or mixed race were regularly married. States like Alabama and Virginia (and also Arizona and California at one point) used Jim Crow laws to prevent integration in a variety of things, marriage among them.
However, not all states had legal barriers to interracial marriage. Couples could wed, but should they move to a state with such laws in place, that marriage would not be recognized.
Since Obama's parents were wed in Hawaii, where interracial and mixed race marriages were common, the issue was more or less moot even with Loving. Despite the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia many southern states kept anti-miscegenation laws on the books. Alabama was the last to repeal its interracial marriage ban in 2000.
It's pathetic we didn't learn from that.
"Rep. Tammy Baldwin's Domestic Partnership Benefits & Obligations Act is quickly working its way through Congress. If they can get it passed in the House and sent to the Senate, I'm sure they could use that to leverage quick passage in the Senate and satisfy the judge that they're complying -- not just in a single case but for all federal employees.
Worth repeating:
Not just in a single case but for all federal employees.