In response to the controversial brief defending DOMA last week, HRC’s Joe Solmonese has issued the following statement which finally addresses the case of incest cited in the brief. Snippets of the statement below, full PDF available here.

Dear Mr. President:

I have had the privilege of meeting you on several occasions, when visiting the White House in my capacity as president of the Human Rights Campaign, a civil rights organization representing millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people across this country.  You have welcomed me to the White House to express my community’s views on health care, employment discrimination, hate violence, the need for diversity on the bench, and other pressing issues.  Last week, when your administration filed a brief defending the constitutionality of the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act,”[1] I realized that although I and other LGBT leaders have introduced ourselves to you as policy makers, we clearly have not been heard, and seen, as what we also are: human beings whose lives, loves, and families are equal to yours.  I know this because this brief would not have seen the light of day if someone in your administration who truly recognized our humanity and equality had weighed in with you.

…

Next, the brief indicates that denying gay people our equal rights saves money:

It is therefore permitted to maintain the unique privileges [the government] has afforded to [different-sex marriages] without immediately extending the same privileges, and scarce government resources, to new forms of marriage that States have only recently begun to recognize.

The government goes on to say that DOMA reasonably protects other taxpayers from having to subsidize families like ours.  The following excerpt explains:

DOMA maintains federal policies that have long sought to promote the traditional and uniformly-recognized form of marriage, recognizes the right of each State to expand the traditional definition if it so chooses, but declines to obligate federal taxpayers in other States to subsidize a form of marriage that their own states do not recognize.

These arguments completely disregard the fact that LGBT citizens pay taxes ourselves.  We contribute into Social Security equally and receive the same statement in the mail every year.  But for us, several of the benefits listed in the statement are irrelevant—our spouses and children will never benefit from them.  The parent who asserts that her payments into Social Security should ensure her child’s financial future should she die is not seeking a subsidy.  The gay White House employee who works as hard as the person in the next office is not seeking a “subsidy” for his partner’s federal health benefits.  He is earning the same compensation without receiving it.  And the person who cannot even afford to insure her family because the federal government would treat her partner’s benefits as taxable income—she is not seeking a subsidy.

…

I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones:

And the courts have widely held that certain marriages, performed elsewhere need not be given effect, because they conflicted with the public policy of the forum.  See e.g., Catalano v. Catalano, 170 A.2d 726, 728-29 (Conn. 1961) (marriage of uncle to niece, though valid in Italy under its laws, was not valid in Connecticut because it contravened public policy of th[at] state.” [3]

As an American, a civil rights advocate, and a human being, I hold this administration to a higher standard than this brief.  In the course of your campaign, I became convinced—and I still want to believe—that you do, too.  I have seen your administration aspire and achieve.  Protecting women from employment discrimination.  Insuring millions of children.  Enabling stem cell research to go forward.  These are powerful achievements.  And they serve as evidence to me that this brief should not be good enough for you.  The question is, Mr. President—do you believe that it’s good enough forus?

This is so far the strongest statement issued by an LGBT group in response to the DOMA defense. Hopefully it will garner a more detailed response from the administration.

At the 77th annual U.S. Conference of Mayors, mayors have passed a resolution titled “Equality and Civil Rights for Gay and Lesbian Americans,” defining support for gay marriage, ENDA and hate crimes legislation and opposing DADT. From the press release issued by Freedom to Marry:

“By passing this resolution, America’s mayors spoke for the families they know and serve in communities across the country, and said that excluding those families from the freedom to marry must stop,” said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry and author of Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality and Gay People’s Right to Marry. “The mayors have their fingers on the pulse of the country, and their voices today said loud and clear that ending discrimination in marriage is the way to go.”

In reference to the freedom to marry, the resolution stated, “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that The U.S. Conference of Mayors supports marriage equality for same-sex couples, and the recognition and extension of full equal rights to such unions, including family and medical leave, tax equity, and insurance and retirement benefits, and opposes the enshrinement of discrimination in the federal or state constitutions.”

“The nation’s mayors are proud to take the lead in recognizing the importance of protecting all our citizens equally. It is now time for state legislatures and our federal government to enact the same protections for all our nation’s citizens,” said U.S. Conference of Mayors President Greg Nickels, Mayor of Seattle.

The resolution which was submitted by Mayor Christopher Cabaldon of West Sacramento, CA, Mayor David N. Cicilline of Providence, RI, and Mayor Sam Adams of Portland, OR, reads as follows:

EQUALITY AND CIVIL RIGHTS FOR GAY AND LESBIAN AMERICANS

1. WHEREAS, The U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution in 1984 calling for the legal protection of gay and lesbian rights at all levels of government, and within two years dozens of cities had adopted anti-discrimination policies or executive orders; and

2. WHEREAS, The U.S. Conference of Mayors has long supported granting the protection of federal hate crimes laws to all citizens, including lesbian and gay communities, and adopted its first resolution calling for increased vigilance in preventing hate crimes in 1991, citing statistics compiled by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; and

3. WHEREAS, subsequent hates crimes resolutions were adopted by the Conference in 1992 and 1994, designed to strengthen protections for all communities; and

4. WHEREAS, the Conference of Mayors, in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has awarded nearly $12.6 million in HIV/AIDS prevention grants, and the Conference took the lead in issues affecting gay/bisexual men of color, conducting a national HIV prevention needs assessment as well as 48 local HIV prevention project; and

5. WHEREAS, hundreds of mayors have been at the forefront of the battle for marriage equality, from the historic leadership of Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco in early 2004 granting marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, to a paradigm-shifting news conference by Mayor Jerry Sanders of San Diego in 2008, to Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington DC in 2009 signing legislation to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states; and

6. WHEREAS, then-Conference President Wellington Webb of Denver spoke on behalf of the nation’s mayors at the Millennium March for Gay and Lesbian Rights in 2000 calling for federal action on hate crimes, employment discrimination protection, repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell, and marriage equality; and

7. WHEREAS, current Conference President Manuel A. Diaz of Miami co-chaired the statewide campaign against marriage discrimination in 2008, and incoming President Greg Nickels of Seattle issued an executive order recognizing same-sex marriages; and

8. WHEREAS, The U.S. Conference of Mayors has a long record of leadership in advancing civil rights and equality for all, answering President Kennedy’s call for national mayoral action in support of the civil rights movement at the Honolulu annual meeting in 1963,

9. NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that The U.S. Conference of Mayors endorses the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, the Uniting American Families Act, and the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act; and

10. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that The U.S. Conference of Mayors supports marriage equality for same-sex couples, and the recognition and extension of full equal rights to such unions, including family and medical leave, tax equity, and insurance and retirement benefits, and opposes the enshrinement of discrimination in the federal or state constitutions.

Outstanding. Our nation’s leaders could definitely learn a thing or two from the folks at the local level.

Minister Leroy Swailes of Oxon Hill, Maryland put on quite a show at the Washington DC gay marriage hearings last week as he put forth his arguments against same-sex marriage, citing bestiality, pedophilia and the anti-Christ in a nearly 4 minute rant. While some may find his words disturbing, it also borders on the ridiculous and absurd. Watch the freakshow below…

Just one thing I want to know… who the hell applauded Swailes at the end of his remarks? Those are the ones I’m really worried about.

LGBT groups have issued a joint statement today condemning the Obama administration’s challenge to DOMA. Press release below:

We are very surprised and deeply disappointed in the manner in which the Obama administration has defended the so-called Defense of Marriage Act against Smelt v. United States, a lawsuit brought in federal court in California by a married same-sex couple asking the federal government to treat them equally with respect to federal protections and benefits. The administration is using many of the same flawed legal arguments that the Bush administration used. These arguments rightly have been rejected by several state supreme courts as legally unsound and obviously discriminatory.

We disagree with many of the administration’s arguments, for example that DOMA is a valid exercise of Congress’s power, is consistent with Equal Protection or Due Process principles, and does not impinge upon rights that are recognized as fundamental. We are also extremely disturbed by a new and nonsensical argument the administration has advanced suggesting that the federal government needs to be “neutral” with regard to its treatment of married same-sex couples in order to ensure that federal tax money collected from across the country not be used to assist same-sex couples duly married by their home states.

There is nothing “neutral” about the federal government’s discriminatory denial of fair treatment to married same-sex couples: DOMA wrongly bars the federal government from providing any of the over one thousand federal protections to the many thousands of couples who marry in six states. This notion of “neutrality” ignores the fact that while married same-sex couples pay their full share of income and social security taxes, they are prevented by DOMA from receiving the corresponding same benefits that married heterosexual taxpayers receive. It is the married same-sex couples, not heterosexuals in other parts of the country, who are financially and personally damaged in significant ways by DOMA. For the Obama administration to suggest otherwise simply departs from both mathematical and legal reality.

When President Obama was courting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender voters, he said that he believed that DOMA should be repealed. We ask him to live up to his emphatic campaign promises, to stop making false and damaging legal arguments, and immediately to introduce a bill to repeal DOMA and ensure that every married couple in America has the same access to federal protections.

Signed:
American Civil Liberties Union
Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders
Human Rights Campaign
Lambda Legal
National Center for Lesbian Rights
National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce

If anything the statement doesn’t go nearly far enough. It doesn’t even address the cases citing incest and underage marriage that were used  to defend DOMA. As Pam Spaulding put it so well on Pam’s House Blend:

Friends, is this is the watershed mark, the line in the sand, the utter moral betrayal of this administration in black and white? Does this mean that we are not only expendable to this Administration, but  that it has decided we can also be vilified as a constituency at will and not receive any blowback? That’s balls. A brief with language like this could have been written by Liberty Counsel it’s so homophobic; that it’s written in legalese doesn’t blunt the arguments being made here. It will be used to cause lasting damage to future civil rights gains.