Pope Francis’s Disgraceful Sex Abuse Excuses

In general I do not often agree with Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen who I view as too right wing on any number of topics and issues.  Yet, in a new column, he sums up my views of Pope Francis' sharp failure to firmly address the need for a thorough house cleaning of the ranks of the Vatican and Church hierarchy without which the Catholic Church will remain a moral embarrassment and will lack any shred of moral authority to lecture others on anything. The column lays out why the continued evasive excuses, cover ups and refusals to hold individuals accountable must end.  Don't hold your breath for this to happen.  Only a massive exodus of parishioners and huge drops in financial supprt will force need to change to happen.  Until, then, expect more of the same failure to act in any meaningful way.  Here are column highlights:

Pope Francis’s closing address to the Vatican Summit on Child Protection was a disgraceful display of excuses and evasions. He began with extended meditation on how a “great number of” abuse cases are “committed within families.” He urged the assembled bishops to focus on “other forms of abuse” experienced by “child soldiers,” “starving children,” “child victims of war” and “refugee children.” He laid out an agenda that, bizarrely, focused on matters have nothing to do with clerical abuse (such as combating “sexual tourism”). And, most shamefully of all, he lashed out at those demanding that bishops who covered up abuse and silenced victims be held to account, declaring that the church must “rise above” those who “exploit, for various interests, the very tragedy experienced by the little ones.”

While Francis did declare that “no abuse should ever be covered up (as was often the case in the past),” he still refuses to tell us which bishops and cardinals did the covering up. It’s true that, just days before the summit, he removed disgraced former archbishop Theodore McCarrick from the priesthood. But Francis still refuses to explain: What took so long? Who knew about McCarrick’s alleged serial predations and did nothing? When did Francis know? And why did he not punish McCarrick until his crimes — which were repeatedly reported to the Vatican — were publicly exposed by the media?

Francis’s decision to focus the summit exclusively on “the protection of minors” was a cynical ploy to avoid addressing questions of accountability, or the rampant sexual abuse of vulnerable adults by their religious superiors. The accusations against McCarrick were not limited to his horrific abuse of children. He allegedly forced countless young priests and seminarians, whose careers he could make or break, to have sex with him. Last week, The Post reported on the Rev. Lauro Sedlmayer, who says he was sexually abused as a young priest by McCarrick during the 1990s. The priest says he told three bishops and that nothing was done.

It is not enough for Pope Francis to remove McCarrick from the priesthood. The patronage network that enabled him must be rooted out as well.

There are documents in the Vatican archives that would definitively show who knew what, and when they knew it. But Francis has refused to release them, much less hold McCarrick’s many enablers to account.

[T]he pope has squelched efforts to expose and punish those responsible for covering up abuses by McCarrick and others. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2015, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley — whom Francis put in charge of handling the abuse crisis — recommended the creation of a special tribunal to try bishops who ignore or cover up abuse. The pope rejected his proposal. Last year, O’Malley met with Francis in Rome where, the Journal reports, the pope “made it clear he would not authorize a full-fledged investigation into the McCarrick affair.”

Until Francis addresses the corruption of the episcopacy, he has zero credibility to lead a fight against sex tourism. No one wants to hear lectures on morality from bishops who refuse to rid their ranks of those who enable sex predators. They seem to be more concerned with preserving their worldly privilege and power than restoring the church’s moral integrity. How many souls have been lost, how many have left the sacraments, because of their scandalous inaction? We will never know in this world. But they will certainly learn the answer in the next.

Francis called the summit an “opportunity for purification.” It was a missed opportunity. Purification requires two things: confession and penance. Until the bishops repent of their sins, and accept the temporal consequences of their actions, there will be no forgiveness from the laity.

Don't Criticize France When Bush and Cheney Ignored 9-11 Warnings

The death toll in Paris is not even final, yet many on the far right in America's chattering class and GOP politicians are already insanely laying blame on Barack Obama, french gun control laws, and any number of irrelevant things - liberals, college students, the list is nothing short of crazy.   Yet through all of this is a total failure to admit that the more serious failure to stop Islamic terrorism occurred on the watch of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who remain darlings of the far right.  Making all of this far worse is new information that makes it painfully clear that Bush and Cheney were warned and did nothing. A piece in Salon looks at the shocking failure of Bush/Cheney and they failure to hold them accountable (and let's not forget the war crimes they committed).  Here are column highlights:

Documentarian Chris Whipple has some new bombshell revelations about how the Bush administration ignored the advance warnings of 9/11 in story for Politico, “‘The Attacks Will Be Spectacular,’” a spin-off of his documentary, “The Spymasters,” set to air this month on Showtime, in which he interviews all 12 living former CIA directors.

Whipple’s most stunning revelations revolve around a July 10 meeting that’s been mentioned by others in books before—Bob Woodward, George Tenet, Condi Rice—but always in a manner that drastically underplays the urgency of CIA’s warnings, and how much they had to go on, according to Whipple’s new information:

By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.”

Finally, things boiled over:

That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.”

Tenet called Rice for an immediate meeting with her and her team—Bush was out of town:

“Rich [Blee] started by saying, ‘There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.’” [Condi said:] ‘What do you think we need to do?’ Black responded by slamming his fist on the table, and saying, ‘We need to go on a wartime footing now!’”

But nothing happened. “To me it remains incomprehensible still,” Black told Whipple. “I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.”

It was not just a failure to respond to warnings, however. There was a broader refusal to even consider thinking proactively. Along these lines, Whipple writes more broadly about Tenet and Black’s plan to “end the al Qaeda threat” with a combined military/CIA campaign “getting into the Afghan sanctuary, launching a paramilitary operation, creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.” They pitched the plan in spring of 2001, according to Whipple, “‘And the word back,’ says Tenet, ‘was “we’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking.”’ (Translation: they did not want a paper trail to show that they’d been warned.)”

Black chalks this up to the Bush team being stuck in the past, thinking of terrorists as “Euro-lefties,” but there was a deeper story, with more to the state of denial than Whipple discusses, since the Bush team was also actively fending off dealing with the recommendations of bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission (officially the “U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century”). It had warned that “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”

Not only did Hart-Rudman see terrorist attacks as a possibility, it highlighted five key areas for reform, the first of which was “ensuring the security of the American homeland.” It regarded a 9/11-style attack as so likely that defending against it should be a top priority in rethinking our entire approach to national security.

" . . . EIGHT Benghazi investigations yet Bush WH sat on its hands while bin Laden got ready to kill 3K Americans,” Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert tweeted. “if this story were abt Benghazi, GOP would introduce Obama impeachment proceedings today,” he followed up. Boehlert’s point is obviously valid, but even more troubling is how the lack of accountability has made things so much worse, actually crippling our ability to win the war on terror.

The failure to hold anyone accountable for 9/11 is inextricably intertwined with the broader failure to go back and rethink fundamental questions on all aspects of national security—something that was obviously needed at the time, and that remains imperative still.

Brian Williams Suspended For 6 Months - Shouldn't We Suspenf Congressional Republicans Likewise?

Huffington Post is now reporting that NBC anchor Brian Williams has been suspended without pay for six (6) months for embellishing events from his past experiences as a reporter, most recently about events in 2003 while reporting from Iraq.   The statement released by NBC reads in part as follows:

By his actions, Brian has jeopardized the trust millions of Americans place in NBC News. His actions are inexcusable and this suspension is severe and appropriate. Brian’s life’s work is delivering the news. I know Brian loves his country, NBC News and his colleagues. He deserves a second chance and we are rooting for him. Brian has shared his deep remorse with me and he is committed to winning back everyone’s trust.”

My question is this: if Williams jeopardized the trust of millions of Americans, should not the same standard apply to Congressional Republicans who have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States?  Through deliberate lies, policies that make a mockery of the Constitution and rights of many Americans, six month suspension without pay for Congressional Republicans seems, if anything, too light.   Seriously, pause and think about the batshitery of Ted Cruz as but one example.  Shouldn't members of Congress be held to a higher standard than news anchors?

The Great Police Violence Cover-Up

Politico isn't always the most liberal of news outlets.  It's not Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, but it isn't Salon or the Huffington Post either.  Thus, it is informative that its magazine arm has an article bearing the same title as this blog post.  America has a serious problem with lawless police officers.  That statement is not intended as a denigration of all police officers.  But like it or not, there are far too many officers who have no business wearing a badge or carrying a gun.  Especially when it comes to their views of minorities, particularly blacks.  White, conservative Christians too often revere the police yet have no idea what its like to have the police view you as a menace or unworthy of decent treatment simply because of your skin color or your sexual orientation.  It's bad enough to be gay around some police officers much less to be black or brown skinned.  Here are article highlights:

I have a 20-year-old son, and I have a 12-year-old son, and I’m so afraid for them. … This is about a war machine. It is us against the [expletive] machine!” 

—Rapper Killer Mike

Perhaps the saddest thing is: We don’t really know what the truth is. We don’t really know if Killer Mike—his voice breaking on stage this week after the Ferguson grand jury decision—is correct in his perception that America’s police departments are less protectors of the peace than monstrous “war machines” leveled against the nation’s poor and minorities.

[N]o one knows for sure how serious the problem is—now, or then—because there simply are no reliable national data on police violence in the United States. The data are lacking because police departments keep almost all those numbers to themselves, in defiance of a 20-year-old federal law—the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—requiring the Justice Department to compile an annual report on “the use of excessive force” by police.

The story of the various failed national efforts to compile and release such data—or to obtain any reliable numbers on violence by police officers at all—is just another dimension of an issue that Monday’s grand-jury decision threw into relief: a sense that police departments across the country are simply not held accountable enough.

And because a substantial portion of these alleged police abuses of law and justice appear to be directed against blacks and other minorities in certain communities—not the white-dominated power structure in their own communities—it rarely becomes a notable issue, at least until a Michael Brown-type killing provokes enough violence and outrage in the streets for the TV cameras to pay attention.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program collects data from the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country to compile statistics about crime and law enforcement, and yet here too police departments are not required to submit data on what they consider to be justifiable homicides by officers.

But given the average number of dubious shootings in any given year—most recently the killing of a 12-year-old boy wielding a BB gun in Cleveland—many criminologists say it’s clear that there is a serious problem, especially in minority neighborhoods, that has not been quantified. “If there’s smoke, there must be fire there,” says Sam Walker, an expert on police accountability at the University of Nebraska.

Despite the consistently high percentage of African-Americans in prisons, the issue is not necessarily racial. “It’s not a black or white issue. It’s a blue issue,” Frank Serpico, the former New York City detective whose efforts to expose corruption were made famous in a 1973 movie starring Al Pacino, said in a telephone interview. “The fact is that police have never been accountable,” said Serpico, who in the decades since his retirement from the NYPD has become an advocate for police whistleblowers and greater restraint on the use of force. . . . . what erupted in Ferguson is not just about Ferguson. This thing has been a long time coming.”

According to another widely cited criminologist, Lorie Fridell of the University of South Florida, “It’s not just about when force is used. There is a lot of variation in this country about how police treat low-income, high-minority neighborhoods. There are places where police treat them very, very differently than they do white communities.” She adds that “police have gotten better over the years, but also expectations might have gotten higher.”

[A]ccording to John Firman, director of development of the IAPC, after a year “the Justice Department shut it down, and for good reason: The number of [police departments] reporting back to us was under 600” out of about 18,000 in the country. The law had no means of forcing cooperation, Firman added, and as for whether the government is simply ignoring the mandate of the law, “that was between the Congress and the DOJ.”

Other criminologists have found that even when they participate, law enforcement agencies often misrepresent data in survey responses. “On nonsensitive subjects we usually get a high response in our surveys,” says Edward McGuire, a criminologist at American University. “But then on questions about the use of violence we get a very low response rate. That’s because they had been advised by their attorneys not to answer those questions.”

[T]he real answer to restoring accountability may lie in technology, especially sensors and body-worn cameras for police officers. Despite some current resistance, most officers like that solution too, she says, because most of them probably have nothing to hide. “The police profession is unlike any other in that officers usually operate outside the direct review or purview of supervisors in most cases. So this is a way to document not only what the police are doing—but what the subjects are doing as well.”

. . . “body-worn cameras increase transparency and citizen views of police legitimacy,” and it quoted William A. Farrar, chief of police in Rialto, California, as saying: “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better. And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”

 We need to do a far better job of policing the police.

Accountability Penn State Style Versus the Vatican

I haven't said much about the exploding sex abuse scandal at Penn State. The failure to act and insist that wrong doers be held accountable is disgusting and one has to shake their head that supposedly decent people basically just looked the other way after supposedly covering their asses by reporting to superiors. Superiors who did nothing. The parallels with the behavior within the ranks of the the Catholic clergy (although on a fraction of the scale compared to the tens of thousands molested by priests) in some ways are remarkable. The ultimate consequences, however, are shockingly different. At Penn State people are being fired and the president of the university has resigned. With the Catholic Church, no one in the hierarchy has been punished and cretins are even pushing for sainthood for John Paul II who had an active role in cover ups. It shows that the secular world has a far higher standard for morality and accountability than the supposed princes of the Catholic Church. Here are highlights from a New York Times piece that looks at the far different consequences and standard of accountability at Penn State:

Joe Paterno, who has the most victories of any coach in major college football history, was fired by Penn State on Wednesday night in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal involving a prominent former assistant coach and the university’s failure to act to halt further harm.

Graham B. Spanier, one of the longest-serving and highest-paid university presidents in the nation, who has helped raise the academic profile of Penn State during his tenure, was also removed by the Board of Trustees. When the announcement was made at a news conference that the 84-year-old Paterno would not coach another game, a gasp went up from the crowd of several hundred reporters, students and camera people who were present.

“We thought that because of the difficulties that engulfed our university, and they are grave, that it is necessary to make a change in the leadership to set a course for a new direction,” said John Surma Jr., the vice chairman of the board.

The university’s most senior officials were clearly seeking to halt the humiliating damage caused by the arrest last Saturday of the former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky. . . . . Sandusky has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys over a 15-year span, and two top university officials — Tim Curley, the athletic director, and Gary Schultz, the senior vice president for finance and business — have been charged with perjury and failing to report to authorities what they knew of the allegations. Neither Paterno nor Spanier was charged in the case, though questions have been raised about if they did as much as they could to stop Sandusky.

A grand jury said that Spanier, the university’s president since 1995, was made aware of a report of an incident involving Sandusky. Upon learning about a suspected 2002 assault by Sandusky of a young boy in the football building’s showers, Paterno redirected the graduate assistant who witnessed the incident to the athletic director, rather than notifying the police. Paterno said the graduate assistant who reported the assault, Mike McQueary, said only that something disturbing had happened that was perhaps sexual in nature. McQueary testified that he saw Sandusky having anal sex with the boy.

Contrast this with what was done with Cardinal Law of Boston. Rather than face punishment, Law was transferred to Rome - in part to get him out of the reach of civil authorities - and given a plum position where he lives literally in a palace. The moral bankruptcy of the Church hierarchy is truly complete. And yet as we saw when in Rome recently, the sheeple still flock to grovel to Benedict XVI who likewise was up to his ears in the cover up of the molestation of children and youths. It's a sad commentary on rank and file Catholics.

The Catholic Hierarchy’s Pointless Campaign Against LGBT Rights

The hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy knows few limits when it comes to denigrating LGBT individuals. Out of one side of its mouth the hierarchy disingenuously states that it is Church policy that gay individuals be treated with dignity. Out of the other side of its mouth and through its checkbook, the hierarchy does everything possible to help fan the flames of anti-gay hatred and to inflict emotional harm on LGBT individuals and to keep them third or fourth class citizens. Indeed, the members of the Church hierarchy - not to mention their Protestant Christianist allies - make the Pharisees of the Gospels look like kind, upstanding folks. Especially given their foul hands in the context of the Church's virtually worldwide sex abuse scandal. A piece at Religion Dispatches looks at the pointless anti-gay jihad of the nasty old men in dresses among the hierarchy. Here are some highlights:

In early July, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles opposed a modest piece of legislation that requires schools in that state to include lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people, and other previously excluded groups, in their social studies curricula.

The archbishop argued that he was merely supporting parents’ rights to make decisions regarding their children’s education. But Catholics who pay attention to our bishops’ energetic campaign to thwart any legislation that legitimizes (or in this instance, even recognizes) same-gender attraction are familiar with this ruse.

Our hierarchy has a habit of invoking noble sounding principles but applying them only when they can be used against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington did something similar last year when he announced that the legalization of same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia had forced him to stop offering health insurance to the spouses of new employees of Catholic Charities.

To take this argument seriously, one has to overlook the fact that Catholic Charities already offered benefits to the spouses of employees who had not been married in the Catholic Church, or who had been remarried without benefit of an annulment. These are also clear violations of the Church’s teaching on marriage. But Wuerl’s harsh and unloving stance is typical of a hierarchy that behaves as though there is sin, and then there is gay sin—and gay sin is much worse.

Catholics faithful to the scriptural admonition to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with their God, have become increasingly alienated by bishops who seem obsessed with pushing a narrow anti-gay agenda to the exclusion even of simple charity. Our bishops were in the small minority of religious leaders who failed to speak out when a wave of anti-gay bullying, some of which led to suicides, swept the country last year.

In their zeal to deny any form of legitimacy to same-sex relationships, the bishops have neglected more urgent pastoral duties. Catholic schools and parishes are closing by the dozen in dioceses across the country, yet somehow the hierarchy and its allies in the Knights of Columbus have found millions of dollars to spend in one state after another opposing marriage equality, or its weaker cousin, the civil union.

If you are the Catholic parent of LGBT daughter or son, you know firsthand that it is your child’s sexual identity, and not a belief in the Immaculate Conception, that puts them at risk for beatings and taunting. Archbishop Dolan and his colleagues should stop pretending that they face anything like the intolerance that our children do.

The one fortunate aspect of the bishop’s campaign against LGBT people is that it has been singularly ineffective. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute makes clear that almost three-quarters of Catholics support either marriage equality or civil unions, and that we back legal protections for LGBT people in the workplace (73 percent), in the military (63 percent), and in adoptions (60 percent) by significant margins.

Last week, the Vatican announced that it had appointed Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver as the new archbishop of Philadelphia. . . . We would only note that in his previous post, he supported a parish priest who expelled a girl from a Catholic school because her parents were lesbians. The archbishop argued that parents must be able to cooperate with Catholic schools in the education of their children, and that those who do not embrace Church doctrine cannot do so.

This was not an argument he employed against Protestants, or non-Christians, or children whose parents had remarried after a divorce. It was employed exclusively against lesbian parents. Because in the theological universe that our bishops are constructing to support their personal biases, there is sin, and then there is gay sin, and gay sin is so much worse.

Meanwhile, here are highlights from a story in the Malta Independent that tell the true story of the bishops' utter moral bankruptcy:

Basing himself exclusively on publicly available sources – newspaper and magazine articles, court documents, books – Mr Podles documents only a fraction of what really went on. He concludes: “The bishops made excuses, but the excuses did not excuse. Bishops claimed they were only following the advice of psychologists, but they put abusive priests in parishes even when the psychologists warned against it. Why hadn’t bishops ever gotten angry at abusers? Why were abusers treated so gently, when men who left the priesthood to marry were treated so harshly? Why had the bishops lied to parents? Why hadn’t they disciplined their clergy, when they seemed so eager to micromanage everything else in America, from what married couples did in bed to what the government did about immigration?”

Then he analyses the findings. Since 1950, tens of thousands of boys and girls have been molested by priests in the United States. The victims were chosen because they were vulnerable and the vulnerability was often the misplaced faith they or their parents had in the trustworthiness of the Catholic Church. The victims suffered the immediate horror and degradation of sexual abuse; they and their families endured decades of pain, which sometimes ended only in death by suicide for the victims and unending grief for the families.

Podles discusses the possible number of victims and abusers and comes to the ‘conservative’ estimate of up to 200,000 victims in the United States alone, and a rough estimate of up to 100,000 abusive priests worldwide since 1950 and anywhere up to two million victims.

And the victims had a variety of innocent weaknesses which the abusers exploited: the sexual ignorance of the very young, the emotional turbulence of adolescence; sickness or injury, family problems such as divorce or death or poverty; the absence of a father, or, most dangerous of all, piety.

Many times, the abuse suffered was horrendous. Abusive priests often added the pleasures of sacrilege to the pleasures of abuse. Being, as they invariably put it, ‘close to God’, enabled them to ensure the victims’ silence. Predators seek out vulnerable children and prey on them.

Fundamentally, bishops and priests tolerated abuse and bear the greatest responsibility after the abusers themselves. Bishops were weak in dealing with abuse, a weakness that had its source in their non-confrontational personalities, personalities which made them attractive to the Vatican as candidates for bishop. Abusers exploited bishops’ desires to avoid confrontation and bad publicity. Priests almost always turned a blind eye to abuse going on in their parishes, because they knew the bishops did not want to know about it and they would be marked as troublemakers for reporting it.

All of the above underscores why I left Catholicism. Had I remained in the Church, I would have felt dirty and tainted as an accessory to crimes against children and youths. How others can shut their eyes and deny their own complicity by remaining in the Church still baffles me.

Why LGBT Americans Need to Continue to be Vigilant and Maintain Pressure on the White House

Now that Barack Obama has formally announced his re-election bid, there will be those within the the White House administration, the DNC and other circles who will be advocating for LGBT citizens to be quiet, cease the demands for equality and simply do the bidding of those who "know better." We tend to see the phenomenon every election cycle, but given Obama's overall refusal to be a leader on any issue and repeated attempts to have Congressional Democrats perform the leadership role he abdicates I suspect we will be getting a double dose in the lead up to the 2012 elections. I for one don't buy the "we know better" story line and I remain convinced that the 2009 debacle in Virginia's statewide races was a direct result of the failure of Democrats up to that point to deliver any of the "change" that had been promised. Yes, the GOP will undoubtedly engage in extreme gay bashing, but the voter pool that eats up such bigotry is literally dying off. It will be important to demand that Democrats demonstrate that they have a backbone - not always their strongest suit. Kerry Eleveld has a piece at Equality Matters that looks at some of the upcoming dynamics and why LGBT voters need to be vigilant so that our issues are not thrown under the bus by our faux fierce advocate in the White House. Here are some highlights:
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President Barack Obama has just announced his 2012 bid for re-election and the inevitable push for LGBT support - donor, voter, and activist - has begun. To be sure, many LGBT Americans would much rather see Barack Obama still gracing the Oval Office come January of 2013 than a Republican. And so, many of us are faced with a familiar dilemma: should we sublimate our intrinsic desire to continue advocating for full equality to the urgency of reelecting a man who has presided over some of the greatest advances in the history of the LGBT movement? My answer: No.
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This is not an either-or proposition in my opinion, nor should we feel compelled to surrender our basic humanity to the whims of the election cycle. That type of thinking is a relic of days past when politicians held firmly to the notion that addressing LGBT concerns would undoubtedly be a drag on their electability. What we have witnessed over the past couple years is just the opposite. The repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" scored huge points with President Obama's target voters -- independent, moderate, and progressive alike - and his declaration that the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional reestablished his ability to show bold leadership. Here's our new reality: The right thing to do is also the popular thing to do.
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But there is much more work to be done and it would be an absolute mistake for LGBT advocates to sit back and relax after the momentum generated by the DADT win and the push toward DOMA's dissolution. The country is at a tipping point as evidenced by multiple polls indicating voters are evenly divided if not leaning toward support for same-sex marriage - a decent barometer for our overall acceptance since marriage equality has also been one of our most contentious issues.
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Rather than assembling a patchwork of progress agency by agency, President Obama should issue executive orders or amend existing ones that set a government-wide precedent for equality in the following ways:
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1) Directing the federal government to include LGBT Americans in all federal level data collection efforts.
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2) Mandating that all federal contractors must have policies providing nondiscrimination protections for their employees on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
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3) Prohibiting federal funds from being used to discriminate against LGBT Americans.
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4) Prohibiting discrimination against military service members on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
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5) Adding gender identity protections to President Clinton's executive order 13087, which protected civilian federal workers from bias based on their sexual orientation.
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[P]rohibiting the government from using federal funds to discriminate against LGBT tax payers might seem unnecessary at first blush, but the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships -- created during the Bush administration and continued by President Obama -- has funding tentacles that stretch across America, sometimes touching rabidly homophobic organizations through grants that often go undetected.
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While some reporting has already uncovered discriminatory abuses of federal funding, this is an area still ripe for inquiry. But for starters, Andy Kopsa of the Washington Independent documented the Iowa Family Policy Center, which publicly opposes same-sex marriage in the Hawkeye state, receiving more than $3 million in federal funding for its Marriage Matters program from 2004 through 2009 - a portion of which will continue to be dispersed through 2011.
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With an executive order, President Obama could put a definitive end to this questionable conflation of church and state by following through on his campaign promise to end discriminatory practices in federal funding, especially where faith-based organizations are concerned.
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We did not achieve "don't ask, don't tell" repeal by being satisfied with White House Easter Egg roll invitations and passing mentions in a handful of speeches. Now is the time for the president to employ his considerable executive powers to effect a government-wide culture change that will trickle down to every corner of America. Let's not squander this opportunity to squeeze as much goodness out of this administration as possible, which in turn will help President Obama secure four more years in office.

Get EQUAL - Fight Back and Hold People Accountablequal:

As regular readers know, I am beyond over the worthless rhetoric and total lack of meaningful action that seems to be all that most of the national Democratic Party establishment gives back to LGBT citizens who have consistently provided money and votes based on promises of legislative action. As the LGBT liaison to the local Democratic committee, I let loose on Tuesday night and basically laid out the reasoning of the "Don't Ask, Don't Give" campaign to turn off the gAy TM and indicated that the representatives of the three congressional candidates needed to provide me with information on what each had actually done in terms f votes, etc., to justify LGBT support. In short, I said don't use the same tired GOP boogieman argument because I and most of my LGBT friends are beyond over it. In keeping with this mindset, GetEQUAL has launched a campaign to hold leaders in the Democratic Party accountable for the non-delivery of promised action after going on nearly two years of Democrat control of Congress and the White House. You can go here to name the Congressional leader you believe needs to be held most responsible for the total failure to keep promises. Here are some highlights:
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Our so-called "friends" in Congress who are stumping for re-election, speaking at our Pride events and addressing our organizational galas have promised passage of ENDA month after month, and year after year. Why are we allowing our "friends" to collect awards and accolades while breaking their promises?
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It may not be nice and it certainly won't get us invited to any fancy Washington cocktail parties, but we aren't going down without a fight! To us, the silence is deafening and we want you to help us do something about it.
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Who do you think we should hold accountable? http://getequal.org/accountable.php
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Should it be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has promised us since May that a vote will happen by the second week of June?
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Should it be Rep. Barney Frank, who said "we will get this [ENDA] done fairly quickly," but then called GetEQUAL's pressuring tactics "immature" and "tacky"?
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Should it be Rep. George Miller, who heads the House Education and Labor Committee and has said via a spokesperson "he intends to get to it [ENDA] very shortly?"
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Should it be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said that he will "fight hard for the votes to get it passed," but who has failed thus far to pressure the last few Senators for their votes?
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We're launching direct actions immediately and want to give you the opportunity to decide who is at the top of your list.

The Other Plot to Wreck America

Yesterday I gave a three hour seminar to a group of real estate investors, one of whom owns a commercial contracting company. The common lament? The near impossibility to get financing. This investor said that his work orders were 1/3 of what they were in the previous year, which was not a good year to start with. Meanwhile, headlines shout out how banks are giving out BILLIONS in bonuses after being bailed out with taxpayer funds. Instead of lending, these leaches are giving bonuses to themselves. It's disgusting - indeed, it's obscene - and it's killing the recovery of the real estate market, the collapse of which is what took down the economy in the first place. There is a serious need for drastic reform of the banking regulations and I strongly support Ariana Huffington's call to move deposits from greedy banks that are "too big to fail" and move them to community banks which are about the only source for business and commercial loans for small business. Here's a link to more on here "Pledge to Move Your Money Now." I guess I was ahead of the curve because I moved my accounts from Wachovia and Bank of America several years ago to a much more user friendly regional bank (owned by a Canadian bank) that seems to actually value my business. Frank Rich has a column that looks at what banking greed and reckless behavior has wrought. Here are some highlights:

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Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.
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The White House’s chief economic hand, Lawrence Summers, has repeatedly announced that “everybody agrees that the recession is over” — which is technically true from an economist’s perspective and certainly true on Wall Street, where bailed-out banks are reporting record profits and bonuses. The contrary voices of Americans who have lost pay, jobs, homes and savings are either patronized or drowned out entirely by a political system where the banking lobby rules in both parties and the revolving door between finance and government never stops spinning.
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Angelides gets it. But he has a tough act to follow: Ferdinand Pecora, the legendary prosecutor who served as chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated the 1929 crash as F.D.R. took office. Pecora was a master of detail and drama. He riveted America even without the aid of television. His investigation led to indictments, jail sentences and, ultimately, key New Deal reforms — the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the formation of banks too big to fail.
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Why was our money used to make these high-flying gamblers whole while ordinary Americans received no such beneficence? Nothing less than complete transparency will connect the dots. Among the big-name witnesses that the Angelides commission has called for next week is Goldman’s Blankfein. Geithner, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke should be next.
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If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.