Barack Obama proclaims June as LGBT Pride Month
June 3, 2009 at 5:30 am by Lorna Bracewell
By Lorna Bracewell
PoHo contributor
In a presidential proclamation issued on Monday, President Barack Obama officially recognized the month of June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.
LGBT Americans have made, and continue to make, great and lasting contributions that continue to strengthen the fabric of American society. During LGBT Pride Month, I call upon the LGBT community, the Congress, and the American people to work together to promote equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The president’s call for equality and his acknowledgment of the many contributions LGBT people have made to America’s culture, society and politics despite being culturally, socially and politically marginalized are truly moving. However, I can’t help feeling slightly ambivalent about the whole thing. Here’s why:
Unlike many in the big gay blogosphere, the root of my ambivalence is not the excruciatingly slow pace at which the president has pursued formal equality for LGBT people. Rather, it’s the order in which things seem to be happening. It seems wrong to me that LGBT people have been given a month before we’ve been given civil rights.
That’s not the way things happened for African Americans. They officially got their duly deserved month in 1986 when Congress passed Public Law 99-244. This law required the president to issue a proclamation recognizing Black History Month, which had been privately observed since 1915. Then President Ronald Reagan obliged with a document that reads quite similarly to Obama’s LGBT Pride Month proclamation.
All of this happened some 116 years after the passages of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the amendments to the federal Constitution that abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection of the laws, and enfranchised all males regardless of race, and 22 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a federal law that went a long way toward making the abstract legal rights guaranteed by those amendments substantively meaningful for African Americans.
In short, African Americans got their rights first and their month second. It is almost Orwellian that the many achievements of the LGBT civil rights movement are being extolled while LGBT people are still being denied the most basic civil right of marriage and are still prevented from serving openly in the military. Let’s hope history-turned-on-its-head doesn’t repeat itself and force us to wait 116 years for formal equality.
