The Ten Worst LGBT Moments of George W. Bush's Presidency

Well, this is it, the last weekend of President George W. Bush. As the “End of the Omnipotence” draws nigh, we’re taking a look back at the past eight years, and covering some of the worst moments in LGBT rights that happened under the watchful cowboy hat of #43. Was this President the most anti-gay leader we’ve had? I'd love your thoughts.

10. La la la la, I can’t hear you, Matthew Shepard Act. Fact: Under the Bush administration, hate crimes committed against LGBT citizens have risen dramatically throughout the U.S. Fact: With bipartisan support, the 110^th Congress passed the Matthew Shepard Act, which would add sexual orientation to the list of protected classes under federal hate crimes laws. Fact: President Bush threatened to veto the legislation, to the point where the Act languished in the gallows of the Beltway. Bush’s promised veto of this bill is a shameful legacy, especially given the FBI’s October 2008 report that said hate crimes against LGBT citizens had increased six percent nationwide over the previous year. More frightening? That number is a lowball figure. Not all police precincts report hate crimes to the FBI, so we’re only seeing number reflected from a very small percentage of police jurisdictions across the U.S. Shameful. Bush had a chance to send a message about anti-violence. Instead he sat on his hands.

9. Legitimizing anti-gay talk radio. This week alone we’ve heard Michael Savage say that workplace diversity training would force straight people to engage in sodomy, and radio host Gunny Bob Newman say that allowing openly gay men to serve in the military would spread HIV like hotcakes. During the past eight years, talk radio has become a bastion of anti-gay rhetoric and homophobia, all legitimized by the Bush administration. When Rush Limbaugh says that the Democratic party “bends over” for gays and blacks, he gets rewarded by having Vice President Dick Cheney on his show. Sean Hannity gives airspace to radical activists who threaten violence toward LGBT leaders, and he’s rewarded with sit-downs with White House staff. Sure, radical right-wing radio will continue even after Bush heads to Dallas. But it’s legitimization by the White House should end.

8. And the award goes to… Six months before the 2004 election, President Bush traveled to Italy as a PR stunt to lure the Catholic vote to award then Pope John Paul II a Medal of Freedom. Now, when it comes to blasting LGBT folks, current Pope Benedict XVI makes JP II look like an angel. But Pope John Paul II certainly gave his fair share of anti-LGBT commentary. He called gay marriage one of the gravest challenges facing mankind, and under his reign, the Vatican launched in July 2003 a global campaign to defeat same-sex marriage. We get that the Pope is an important world leader. But bestowing a Medal of Freedom to a man who sought to deny freedoms to LGBT people around the world strikes us as tasteless. Perhaps had the Pope spent more time speaking out against war, famine, global poverty, torture and other actual grave challenges to humanity instead of honing in on LGBT rights…

7. When marriage equality advocates are like crooked politicians. Bush’s 2006 State of the Union speech compared unethical politicians to same-sex marriage supporters. Classy, right? Bush also alluded to gay marriage being an affront to the health and well-being of the family. Still, by most measures, this 2006 speech was nothing like his 2005 State of the Union speech, where he threatened to dismantle social security AND launch a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between one man and one woman. Is there anyone else thankful that Bush doesn’t get to deliver any more State of the Union speeches?

6. The abstinence-only curriculum heard ‘round the world. The Bush administration made stigmatization of homosexuality no accident in its abstinence-only policies. Federal abstinence-only programs under the Bush administration require students to learn that heterosexual marriage is the expected standard and that anything outside of heterosexual marriage is harmful. Further, according to Legal Momentum, many abstinence-only programs funded by the Bush administration conflate being gay with being diseased. Others completely twist biological facts for their own agenda. Case in point, the Abstinence Clearinghouse, a federally funded program that tells children, “the male and female body are not anatomically suited to accommodate sexual relations with members of the same sex.” Lies, lies, and more lies.

5. The pimping out of Mary Cheney. When Sen. John Kerry mentioned the fact that Vice President Dick Cheney had a gay daughter during the third and final Presidential debate of 2004, you would have thought he committed treason the way the Bush/Cheney camps reacted. Lynne Cheney famously called Kerry “not a good man,” and accused him of a “cheap and tawdry political trick.” But the reality of the situation is that the VP’s daughter, Mary Cheney, was an out lesbian for years. Kerry might as well have said, “The sky is blue.” Worse, Dick Cheney used his daughter’s sexuality in a campaign stump speech months earlier, and during his Vice Presidential Debate with Sen. John Edwards, he actually thanked Edwards for being so kind to his lesbian daughter. All the Bush campaign succeeded in doing by feigning disgust at Sen. Kerry was tarnishing the word lesbian. Worse, they threw Mary Cheney under the bus by acting as if they were ashamed of their daughter.

4. We prefer the way Sudan does it. If you had to choose sides between a country that allows LGBT persons to live private lives and commit to a partner of the same-sex, or a country that murders homosexuals, has killed hundreds of thousands of its own people, and whose own President has an arrest warrant out on him for committing war crimes, which would you choose? The U.S. chose the latter, by siding with Sudan (as well as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, and Yemen) in denying support to a United Nations statement calling for an end to the criminalization of homosexuality around the globe. The Bush administration always had a rocky relationship with the UN (John Bolton, anyone?), but this final kick in the teeth shows just how devalued the United Nations was under #43.

3. The error of Lawrence v. Texas. We’re not saying that the Bush administration’s penchant for hiring graduates from Regent University was a bad thing (though as a law school, it’s in the lowest-tier of nationwide rankings, tied for 136^th place). What we are saying here, however, is that when a graduate from Pat Robertson’s college says that the U.S. Supreme Court case they most disagreed with was Lawrence v. Texas – the case that threw out sodomy laws across the U.S. – they probably shouldn’t be given high profile positions with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. (To us, that’s sort of tantamount to rewarding someone who disagrees with Brown v. Board to be the head of a civil rights commission.) But that’s what happened under the Bush administration, as Regent University graduates (known for their opposition to abortion and LGBT rights) flooded all levels of the federal government for the past eight years. Again, we don’t mean to slander an entire student body. But this certainly does seem like another example where the Bush administration places adherence to a particular religion above adherence to a particular law. Oh, and remember Monica Goodling? She was a Regent University graduate, too.

2. What do 6,000 discharged servicemembers look like? Not only did the Bush administration take our country into two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), they also stood and watched as more than 6,000 U.S. servicemembers were discharged under the archaic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy over the past eight years. To add insult to, well, insult, several of the individuals discharged were highly qualified Arabic translators, one of the most valuable positions currently within the U.S. military. To put it bluntly, this policy hurt our national security. Thankfully, the days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” seem to be nearing an end. But it won’t be because of contributions made by the Bush administration.

1. Marriage amendments galore. Karl Rove’s playbook may be the most damning legacy from the Bush administration when it comes to LGBT rights. The White House’s tacit (or not so tacit) support of gay marriage amendments throughout the country helped solidify Bush’s re-election in 2004, bringing social conservatives out of the woodwork. Nearly a dozen states passed marriage amendments in 2004, including Ohio, the state that tipped the Electoral College to Bush. More states followed suit in 2006 and 2008, with Florida’s Amendment 2, Arizona’s Proposition 102, and California’s Proposition 8 leading the way. Ballot initiatives are nothing new when it comes to limiting or repealing LGBT rights, dating back to at least Anita Bryant. But to have a White House actively working to support them is something new, and the Bush administration took full advantage of its bully pulpit.