| by Victoria A Brownworth

President Obama Delivers Final SOTU

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Will the next president preserve LGBT Rights?

Will the next president preserve LGBT Rights?

When you cover politics, a layer of cynicism falls over you. It’s a given that politicians promise everything and deliver something quite different. We’re seeing it now in the 2016 race for president.

Donald Trump promises to keep out all illegal immigrants–something that’s never been achieved in American history. Bernie Sanders rolled out an $18 trillion–yes, trillion–single payer health care proposal.

Trump says Mexico will pay for and build a wall between our border and theirs. Sanders says the corporations he asserts are America’s criminal class in every stump speech will pay for the new health care system.

These are easy promises to debunk and discredit. They’re implausible and unfeasible.

But when every Republican candidate promises to shut down Planned Parenthood where many women get medical care, overturn same-sex marriage rights and refuse a path to citizenship for families who have lived in the U.S. for years, those stark promises seem well within reach with a Republican-led Congress. When Hillary Clinton says she will hold the gun manufacturers accountable, that seems imminently doable–if she’s actually president.

I don’t need a wall between Mexico and America. I would love to have the single-payer health care system that Clinton proposed as First Lady and argued for in the 2008 primary and which Sanders is touting now, but I’ve watched the debate over Obamacare and holding onto that is going to be struggle enough.

Holding on was a theme of the SOTU Tuesday night. President Obama opened with a series of goals he would like to achieve in his final year: “…helping students learn to write computer code to personalizing medical treatments for patients. Fixing a broken immigration system.

Protecting our kids from gun violence. Equal pay for equal work. Paid leave. Raising the minimum wage. All these things still matter to hardworking families. They’re still the right thing to do. And I won’t let up until they get done.”

Then Obama made the case for what happens next: “I want to focus on the next five years, the next 10 years, and beyond. I want to focus on our future.”

President Obama promised many things in 2008. In 2012 he promised to do things he didn’t do in his first term. His final State of the Union address was, in many respects, a coda on his presidency. It was definitely a different kind of speech than most SOTU speeches I have reported on, including Obama’s own. It was by turns defiant and poignant.

On social media and in some political blogs the past few months of Obama’s presidency have been referred to as IDGAF Obama. After years of seemingly endless and mostly rebuffed attempts at bipartisanship, at some point midway through his second term, Obama decided enough was enough and there were things he would do and things he would not and one thing he would no longer do was to capitulate to the obstructionist Republican Congress.

The final SOTU of Obama’s presidency was in part a dressing down and taking to task of his opposition. Rather than the whiny anger about how America needs to be made great again that the Right has made their signature stance in the presidential race, Obama took a different tack: America is already great, Obama declared, subtly calling into question why anyone would say otherwise.

One of the things making America great is our diversity as a nation and the laws Obama has augured to secure the lives of our diverse–the most diverse in the world–citizenry.

Among them, women, immigrants, LGBT Americans.

As the room was filling for the SOTU, a few things caused a stir. First Lady Michelle Obama was striking in a gorgeous marigold dress designed by out gay American fashion designer, Narciso Rodriguez. According to CNN, the $2,095 dress available at Nordstrom’s was sold out before the SOTU was over.

Throughout her tenure as First Lady, Mrs. Obama, whose elegance has been compared with that of previous fashion icon First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s, has consistently made her own subtle political statements with her choice of designers, many of whom have been people of color or gay or both.

Less fashionable was Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who was arrested and jailed for refusing to sign marriage licenses for lesbian and gay couples after the landmark marriage equality decision last June. Dressed very much off-the-rack in what one pundit described as

“like someone grabbed a bunch of scraps from the floor in a sweater factory and made sweater sausage,”

Davis’s presence at the SOTU caused a different kind of stir than the First Lady as her mere presence was viewed as a slap in the face to Obama, who has taken credit for marriage equality since he “evolved” from first term to second.

Davis was not seated near the First Lady. But Jim Obergefell, a plaintiff in the landmark marriage equality ruling was next to her, wearing, he said, the same tie he wore when the Supreme Court handed down their decision on June 26, 2015.

Also seated by FLOTUS was Ryan Reyes. He sat next to the empty chair symbolizing the lost victims of gun violence in America. Reyes’ partner, Daniel Kaufman, was credited with saving the lives of four people in the San Bernardino terrorist attack before being killed himself. Since Kaufman’s murder, Reyes has also spoken publicly against anti-Muslim attacks and rhetoric.

I found Obama’s speech compelling and surprisingly moving. I take speeches by politicians–even ones I have voted for and supported–with more than a few grains of cynicism. But as Obama laid out his concerns about our nation and the world, as he chastised himself for not being more of a uniter like “FDR and Lincoln,” as he looked to the future, the reality of the ending of this presidency loomed larger and larger and with it concerns for who will next occupy the White House.

For his part, President Obama was succinct: America needs a Democrat in the White House. America needs to succeed his presidency with another Democratic one. Repeatedly he called out the Republicans for their obstructionism. He noted their refusal to acknowledge climate change–one of his signature concerns.

He enumerated issue after issue on which Americans know the Republicans have held us back from the future Obama and many in the LGBT community envision.

Obama never mentioned Donald Trump’s name, but he said, “We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion.This isn’t a matter of political correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal–it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.

His Holiness, Pope Francis, told this body from the very spot I stand tonight that ‘to imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.’ When politicians insult Muslims, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. And it betrays who we are as a country.”

Also betraying who we are as a country is not having equality for all Americans.

For all the moving moments in the SOTU–and there were many–there was much left unsaid that LGBT people needed to hear in this last year of Obama’s presidency.

The president only proffered one new initiative, albeit a huge one–curing cancer. Putting Vice President Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer last May, in charge of the initiative, Obama said, “Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer.

Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources that they’ve had in over a decade. So tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the families that we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”

As a cancer survivor who has written extensively about the epidemic of lesbians and cancer and published an award-winning book on the subject, “Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic,” I applaud this initiative. Chicana lesbian activist Jeanne Cordova, who I wrote about in the Jan/Feb issue of Curve, died Jan. 10 after a long battle with the disease. So did Honey Lee Cottrell in September. And so have many, many other lesbians, both famous and simply our beloved sisters.

As the president discussed equal pay and family leave, I couldn’t help but wait to hear something about the 22 years lesbians, who statistically are the most discriminated against in employment in our community, have been waiting for the passage of ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) which has come before Congress every year since 1994 and has yet to be passed. And which the president could put in place via executive order.

I wanted to hear something about our lesbian and gay families which are still being torn apart by Draconian adoption laws, as happened to a Utah lesbian couple, April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce in November, when their infant daughter was removed from their care because the judge thought children needed to be raised in heterosexual homes.

And while Obama repeatedly slammed the GOP, notably Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, for their immigration stances, the administration is currently literally knocking down doors and rounding up immigrant families for deportation, among them lesbian and gay families who have fled here because their countries of origin are so dangerous.

I loved the shout out to Grace Hopper, Katherine Robinson and Sally Ride–three genius inventors and women in STEM who should be household names. Robinson, 97, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year. Ride, died of cancer in 2012 at 61 and was the first American woman–and lesbian–in space.

I also loved the references to marrying those we love and coming out to our parents that were interpolated in the SOTU. But when I saw Obama hugging the “Notorious RBG”–Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court’s most liberal justice, 2016 got very real, very fast.

Four justices are on the brink of retirement, including the two most liberal, Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, both appointed by President Bill Clinton. President Obama appointed two more women to the bench, the first Latina, Sandra Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The next president will be appointing at least two and possibly four new justices for their lifetime appointments.

This is what the president wanted us to know from his speech: that science deniers inhabit at least half the seats in Congress already, but Obama himself just returned from a trip to the Denali glacier in Alaska, where the impact of climate change is visible every day.

He wanted us to know that when he leaves, his signature legislation–the Affordable Care Act, the Lily Ledbetter Act, the climate change accord in Paris last month, marriage equality, every executive order he’s signed, all of it is up for grabs come January 2017.

And for us, for all women, for lesbians and other GBT people, our very lives are on the line.

For her part, Democratic frontrunner and former Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said

and

MSNBC reporter Alex Seitz-Wald explained what Bernie Sanders was thinking

and

The Republican rebuttal came from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the nation’s youngest governor, the daughter of Indian immigrants. Haley surprised her own party by calling out the “shouting” of Trump and Cruz. She said, “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation.”

She allegorized the Charleston shooting by Dylann Roof as a moment of a community coming together to heal, regardless of differences. She took credit for taking down the Confederate Flag from the state capital (legally she did, but black activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole with rappelling gear and took it down and was arrested for it).

Trump and other GOP were enraged by Haley, who is viewed as a likely vice presidential contender this year. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter went on a rant over Haley.

In response to Trump’s Twitter tirade, Haley simply said, “You shouldn’t take these things personally.”

The Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary will be held next month. These are America’s whitest states–95% and 97% white, respectively. They are among the top ten least populous states. They vote GOP over Democrat the majority of the time. Will they represent America and President Obama’s initiatives over the past seven years?

We won’t know until the coldest days of February. But as you ponder the SOTU and the past seven years–what you loved and what you didn’t–look at the GOP lineup and what they have to say about women, about gays, about guns, about our planet.

That legacy Obama spoke of in his final SOTU is as much ours as it is his.

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