Gays can serve in the military, get married in most states (and probably all states, after this summer), and appear in campaign announcement videos. So are we all done here? No more queer liberation necessary?
Well, no, not really. What America needs now is its second gay president. Sorry, Mr. Buchanan.
The marriage equality movement has rocketed along at an unbelievable pace. After Loving v. Virginia in 1967, it took nearly thirty years before a majority of Americans approved of interracial marriage. In contrast, public opinion on marriage equality has flipped in just one decade. (Check out the condom-shaped chart at the 1:15 mark here.)
With marriage nearly won, AIDS becoming more manageable, and a trans man about to grace the cover of Men's Health, it's tempting to feel like we've made enough progress and won't need anything more from the next president.
But that's not quite the case. There's actually a ton of work still undone, and we'll need a gay-friendly president to finish it.
Most of the work at the federal level falls into four categories: family, discrimination, international issues, and youth.
In the family category, there's the Every Child Deserves a Family Act. Currently, adoption programs are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race or religion, but not sexual orientation. That means that an agency can say to a couple, "nope, sorry, no kid for you, faggos." This bill would give Health and Human Services the ability to withhold federal funding from anti-gay adoption programs, and to provide tools to help programs comply with nondiscrimination policies.
The next president will also have to defend LGBT access to Family and Medical Leave. Right now, same-sex couples can be forced to choose between taking care of a sick spouse and keeping their job, while straight couples are allowed to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave. This was supposed to be fixed last month, but then Texas sued the federal government and the fix was put on indefinite hold. Because the future survival of the state of Texas depends on preserving the freedom to fire a lesbian when her wife gets cancer.
Internationally, we need a president who will sign the Global Respect Act, which would prevent human rights abusers from entering the country. (There's a waiver for anyone attending the United Nations, so don't worry, you're good, Ali Khamenei.) Crucially, it would also require an annual report to Congress, which would help keep international human rights abuses top-of-mind for those Congressidiots who think LGBTs are too politically powerful.
On the discrimination front, gays and lesbians can still be kicked off of juries on the basis of sexual orientation. I'm a little reluctant to support this reform, as it was nice to have a potential get-out-of-jury card... but, ugh, I guess if this is the price of equality I can suck it up.
But we can probably all agree that the next president urgently needs to sign the REPEAL Act. Currently, 32 states criminalize HIV. It sounds insane, but in most states, you can be arrested under ridiculous laws with no basis in science—for example, it's against the law for HIV+ people to spit in Texas, a state where spitting is basically the official pastime.
Maybe the largest need for reform involves youth, and not just because of their lousy manners. Various pending bills would prohibit schools from discriminating against LGBT students, would expand grants for anti-harassment programs, and would require a biennial report on national efforts to curb school harassment. And the Runaway and Homeless Youth Inclusion Act would prohibit discrimination in programs for at-risk youth and gather data on LGBT youth homelessness, which would address an enormous ongoing crisis that, infuriatingly, few people are willing to talk about right now. (Forty percent of homeless youth identify as LGBT!)
And of course, aside from all these to-dos, the next president will need to protect all the gains made under President Obama. We're not talking about small potatoes here. We're talking about big potatoes. Huge ones. Blue-ribbon, country-fair prize-winning potatoes. Potatoes that will save people's lives.
For example, until recently, same-sex couples could be excluded from emergency evacuations by the State Department, or separated from each other at emergency shelters. International LGBT refugees didn't have a resource center in the United States until 2011, despite facing death or imprisonment or torture in various countries. And the United States didn't have a national HIV/AIDS strategy until 2010, a fact so unbelievable it looks like it must be a typo, but it's not. Twenty freaking ten!
And then there are various other milestones to defend: ending the ban on letting people with HIV enter the country (2009), counting LGBTs in the census (2010), ending a Social Security Administration practice of outing trans people at work (2011), including LGBTs in prison sex abuse protections (2012), opening parts of Medicare to queer couples (2013), and taking a stand against "pray away the gay" torture (2015).
That's just a tiny sampling of the dozens and dozens of changes we got under Obama. Do you suppose we'd have seen anything close to that under President John McCain, or heaven help us, President Sarah Palin?
And what do you suppose we'd be in for under President Rand Paul? Or President Marco Rubio, who called gay parents "a social experiment"?
