Obama Ties LBJ's Civil Rights Legacy to LGBT Americans

In a speech at the Civil Rights Summit at Johnson's presidential library in Austin this week marking the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act, Barack Obama tied the civil rights legislation spearheaded by Lyndon B. Johnson with today's struggle for full LGBT equality.  While the Christofascists - and their trained circus dog minions within the ranks of black pastors - disingenuously whine that the civil rights movement of the 1960's is not synonymous with push for legal equality and non-discrimination protections for LGBT citizens, it is telling that the ancestors of today's hate merchants similarly used the Bible to justify racism and anti-black discrimination.  MetroWeekly looks at Obama's comments (which sadly would be more meaningful and believable if Obama would sign an executive order ENDA).  Here are highlights:

President Barack Obama embraced Lyndon B. Johnson's civil rights legacy Thursday in a speech that credited the former president with helping to open the doors to equality for countless Americans, including those who are LGBT. 

"Because of the Civil Rights movement, because of the laws President Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for everybody -- not all at once, but they swung open," Obama said. "Not just blacks and whites, but also women and Latinos; and Asians and Native Americans; and gay Americans and Americans with a disability. They swung open for you, and they swung open for me. And that’s why I'm standing here today -- because of those efforts, because of that legacy."

Obama's speech at the Civil Rights Summit at Johnson's presidential library in Austin marking the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act was not the first time the nation's first African-American president has tied the Civil Rights movement to the LGBT-rights movement.

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall," Obama said during his second inaugural address, repeating a phrase he used during a Barnard College commencement speech in May 2012.

When Obama marked the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington last August, he said that those who came to Washington in 1963 pushed the nation forward. "Because they marched, America became more free and more fair -- not just for African Americans, but for women and Latinos, Asians and Native Americans; for Catholics, Jews, and Muslims; for gays, for Americans with a disability," Obama said. "America changed for you and for me."

Where Obama has come up short — in refusing to sign an executive order protecting LGBT federal contractors from workplace discrimination — he has faced heightened criticism, in large part because of how out of character it is from his broader civil rights record. That proposed executive order, which Obama once supported as a candidate for president in 2008, is based on Executive Order 11246, which has been expanded by a number of presidents to prohibit federal contractors from discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

In light of the setting for Obama's speech today, it is worth noting that executive order was first signed by President Johnson.
 
Obama's LGBT-rights legacy is certainly not lost on the president. And arguably nor is the work left to be done.

I am not ungrateful for the pro-gay things that Obama has done, but it would indeed be nice if he followed through on something he pledged to do 8six years ago.

The LBJ Renaissance

I will confess to the fact that I am of an age where I remember JFK's assassination and Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing in as Kennedy's succession and then his 1964 re-election.  I also remember his disastrous decision to escalate the fool's errand in Vietnam following the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This fatal decision ultimately led to Johnson's decision not to seek re-election in 1968.  Johnson was not without his faults, but sadly his contributions to the advancement of civil rights is now often obscured by the Vietnam War disaster.  But for Johnson, the civil rights effort begun under John F. Kennedy might have died.   As The Daily Beast reports, a new appreciation of Johnson's civil right role - at least out of GOP/white supremacist circles - is re-emerging.  It is telling that the GOP claims that Democrats "buy votes" from blacks through handouts.  The reality is that many blacks still remember which political party forced through the Voting Rights Act - and Act that Republicans seek to gut and render useless.  Here are some excerpts:

History often casts its glow fickly. Sometimes we get a sense of how one will be reflected in its light contemporaneously. Sometimes it takes a little longer to sort things out.

In 1865, when an assassin’s bullet felled Abraham Lincoln, his loss was felt immediately and his place in the presidential pantheon all but assured. Though he had elicited withering criticism during the course of his four-year presidency, the sixteenth president had lived to see the Civil War to its bloody end, keeping the Union whole while putting a constitutional end to the odious institution of slavery. “It is small consolation that he died at a moment in the war when he could best be spared,” wrote Harper’s Weekly just after his death, “for no nation is ready for the loss of such a friend.”


It has taken history far longer to catch up to the legacy of our 36^th president, Lyndon Johnson.  
A hundred years after Lincoln’s passing, Johnson stood before Congress and delivered one of the great, unheralded speeches of its age, a plea before Congress to put the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Though slavery had long been abolished at Lincoln’s hand, racism, virulent and intractable, continued to plague much of America. A year earlier, Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first meaningful civil rights bill since Reconstruction, striking down Jim Crow laws that allowed for racial segregation throughout the South.

“[I]t is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice,” Johnson said as he looked over his former Congressional colleagues in the House chamber, many of them unyielding segregationists, as his mouth tightened and his eyes narrowed determinedly. “And we shall overcome.”

Through what became known legendarily as “the Johnson Treatment”—wielding political capital, horse-trading, threatening, cajoling, flattering, whatever it took—Johnson got his Voting Rights Act. He considered the law his greatest legislative accomplishment. That’s saying something given that he also saw through Medicare, Medicaid, the Immigration Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Higher Education Act, the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act, the Public Broadcasting Act, the Arts & Humanities Act and a spate of other landmark laws. 

It took Lyndon Johnson to finish what Abraham Lincoln had started.

Yet despite his titanic role in America’s quest for civil rights, the greatest domestic movement of the Twentieth Century, LBJ has been largely underappreciated—even ignored—until recently. While Lincoln won his war, vanquishing the Confederate Army, Johnson could never quite overcome the Communist insurgency in Vietnam. It was Ho Chi Minh who prevailed, not LBJ.

Now, forty-five later, Lyndon Johnson seems to finally be getting his due; history’s light is beginning to penetrate the shroud of Vietnam that has darkened his legacy. “I absolutely think the time has come,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin of reevaluating Johnson’s legacy in a front page New York Times story on Sunday. “When he left the office, the trial and tribulations of the war were so emotional that it was hard to see everything else he had done beyond Vietnam.”

[I]n early April, the LBJ Presidential Library will host a Civil Rights Summit to mark the act’s fiftieth anniversary that will draw a host of luminaries including many aging heroes of Civil Rights movement and as many as four U.S. presidents. Moreover, LBJ is regularly upheld in the media as a president who got laws passed through Congress at a time when Washington sausage-making has all but ground to a halt.

Though Johnson died over four decades ago, succumbing to heart failure at his beloved LBJ Ranch in 1973 at the age of 64, we are only now starting to get the true measure of the man.

Lady Bird Johnson Dead at 94

I know I am dating myself, but I always thought Lady Bird Johnson was a class act. I did not like here husband's Vietnam policies for obvious reasons and only missed having to enlist in the military by virtue of a high lottery number (269). Some of my friends were not so lucky - one drew a 2, but fortunately survived. Two other friends (brothers in fact) from my summers in the Adirondacks did not and committed suicide after returning from Vietnam. They just never got over the horror and mental torment they experienced. Here's portions of the Washington Post story on the other LBJ:

Lady Bird Johnson, 94, a first lady whose quiet ambition and determination allowed her to play an influential role in her husband's remarkable political career and to carve out an identity of her own as an advocate for beautifying the national landscape, died yesterday at her home in Austin.

Mrs. Johnson, who also was a successful businesswoman and philanthropist, had been in failing health for several years. She suffered a stroke in 1993 and was legally blind because of macular degeneration. She spent six days last month in an Austin hospital, where she was treated for a low-grade fever. "She just slipped away," family spokeswoman Elizabeth Christian said.

The full story is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/11/AR2007071102146.html?hpid=topnews