For all those who keep insisting that Obama has too much on his plate right now to focus on repealing the DOMA and DADT, I would like to pose a simple question... when will it be the right time for him to work on these issues? Next year when he will still be dealing with the economic crisis, North Korea and worrying about keeping a Democratic majority during the midterm elections? The following year, when he needs to start thinking about his reelection campaign? Maybe four years from now (if he's reelected), when he'll still have big foreign policy problems to deal with and wants to build his "legacy"?

The reality of politics is that for a new president, the window of opportunity to do things of great consequence is usually pretty small. You need to scramble when you've got the public's good will to push though things that they won't necessarily go for. You have to be willing to spend political capital and sometimes you need to drag the country kicking and screaming into doing the right thing. LBJ knew that. He certainly had plenty on his plate in 1964 when he signed the Civil Rights Act. Kennedy had been assassinated not too long before. We were just getting over the Cuban Missile Crisis and our involvement in South East Asia was deepening. There certainly was no national concensus on passing the act - indeed there was very violent opposition on large sections of the country. Members of his own party begged him not to push the issue so strongly and voted against the act because they were afraid of the political fallout, and the Democratic Party did pay a very heavy price in Southern states. But LBJ still signed the act because it was the right thing to do.

Frankly, I don't see that kind of courage in Obama over any issue. He doesn't seem capable of taking any kind of real stand and in all honesty, I really don't think he cares about gay and lesbian issues. The only rational I have for this is that either he is a wimp who would rather be popular and loved than be a real president and make necessary but not necessarily popular decisions, or (on this issues, at least) that he does harbor the anti-gay prejudice that you see exhibited in most black congregations and that he had lied about his hopes for repealing these two repulsive laws. The brief filed by his administration in defense of DADT was appalling because it was the voice of his administration on the issue. His administration compared gay marriage to incest, and if that doesn't tell you where he stands than nothing else will.

I'm not saying it's going to be an easy thing. When Clinton tried to force the military to rescind its ban on gay service members (and tried to do so with a much smaller Democrat majority than Obama enjoys), he had his ass handed to him by his own party and had to accept DADT as a half-measure. But Obama is in a situation that is very different than what Clinton had to deal with. His majority is nearly filibuster proof and the Republican Party is in complete disarray. If he can't force through these kind of big issues now, then he's never going to.

We keep seeing these half-measures all over the place. He wants to reform healthcare (which is a huge mess), but he wants to make everyone including the for-profit insurance companies happy so they'll be on board (an impossible task). He wants to close down Guantanamo Bay, but is too afraid of the political backlash to actually do it. He talks big, but acts small. He promises to get rid of DADT, and what we get is a memo granting some (not all) federal employees a few benefits (not the big ones like healthcare or survivorship) for their same-sex partners. It’s nothing that is going to benefit the millions of gay Americans who have for fight for every right they can muster. Rather, it’s throwing us a few crumbs, hoping that we’ll shut up and get back on the train.

Bill Maher said it best - Bush may have been a major league asshole, but he was able to get shit done. It was the wrong stuff that he got done, but let's call it like it is. He didn't care about being popular or loved - he focused on doing the things he felt needed to be done accomplished. I wish that Obama had a bit more of that backbone to stare his own party in the eye and tell them that the time has come for them defy the expectations of them being a bunch of self-serving children, pull up their grown up panties and start getting the job done.

To those who keep warning the GLBT community that they won't do any better under the Republicans (like we don't already know that), let me answer that as painful as it is to be shafted by the party that stands against everything you are, it's infinitely worse to be shafted by someone who was supposed to stand up for you.