We Lack a National Political Voice for LGBT Rights

Frank Rich has another Sunday column this week taking President Obama and the Democrats in Washington to task for stalling LGBT rights legislation, from hate crimes laws to repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."  Why are DC Democrats so cowardly when it comes to LGBT issues?  Well, according to Rich, it's in part because we have no national figure or politician within the party making the moral case for full equal rights for LGBT Americans.

And I couldn't agree more.  I mentioned earlier this week that when it comes to finding a political voice speaking out for equality, I don't turn to the Democratic Party.  I turn to Meghan McCain, who is saying things that cautious Democrats won't touch with a ten-foot pole (as she did with her letter to NY Republicans this week, which was one of the best political pieces I've ever read on why politicians of either stripe should support marriage equality).

Here's Rich's take:

The Democrats do have the votes to advance the gay civil rights legislation Obama has promised to sign. And they have a serious responsibility to do so. Let’s not forget that “don’t ask” and DOMA both happened on Bill Clinton’s watch and with his approval. Indeed, in the 2008 campaign, Obama’s promise to repeal DOMA outright was a position meant to outflank Hillary Clinton, who favored only a partial revision.

So what’s stopping the Democrats from rectifying that legacy now? As Wolfson said to me last week, they lack “a towering national figure to make the moral case” for full gay civil rights. There’s no one of that stature in Congress now that Ted Kennedy has been sidelined by illness, and the president shows no signs so far of following the example of L.B.J., who championed black civil rights even though he knew it would cost his own party the South. When Obama invoked same-sex marriage in an innocuous joke at the White House correspondents’ dinner two weeks ago — he and his political partner, David Axelrod, went to Iowa to “make it official” — it seemed all the odder that he hasn’t engaged the issue substantively.

Evan Wolfson, a lawyer with Freedom to Marry, was even harder on Obama.  He told Rich, "This is a civil rights moment.  And Obama has not yet risen to it."

One might argue that no one from the national Democratic Party has risen to it.  And that's certainly not the Republicans fault.  That's the cowardness and cautiousness that defined Democrats in the 1990s rearing its ugly head again in this decade.