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.

A friend of mine wrote to C.W. Bill Young regarding a pending federal hate crimes bill (H.R.  1913 AKA The Mathew Shephard Act) that would expand the 1969 federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by the victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. I’ve posted the Congressman’s response in its entirety after the jump. I found it offensive both intellectually and morally.

Congressman Young explains that he will not support the Mathew Shepard Act because under such  a law “criminals who kill a homosexual, transvestite or transsexual could be punished more harshly than criminals who kill a police officer, a member of the military or any other person.” “I fundamentally believe, ” he continues, ”that we should instead value all life equally.”

While the Congressman purports to be making an Equal Protection argument, his juxtaposition of “homosexual, transvestite or transsexual” with “police officer, a member of the military or any other person” belies the real logic at work here. This is an appeal to homphobia, plain and simple. Dressing it up in a tenuous Constitutional argument doesn’t make it any more acceptable.

I received word early this morning from the Human Rights Campaign that the House is scheduled to vote on the Mathew Shepard Act today (April 29, 2009). If you’d like to contact Congressman Young and give him a few valid reasons to support or not support it, you can reach him at (202) 225-5961.