Aug 08, 2008  |  By: PETER ROSENSTEIN  | COMMENTS     

SUPPORT BARACK Obama and urge everyone to do the same. But recently I was accused of not drinking the Kool-Aid yet, which is true, because Obama remains something of an enigma.

I am a gay activist. I have been involved in politics since the age of 12 and ran for office as a young man. My loss was disappointing but in retrospect was the best thing that could have happened to me.
It kept me from a life as a politician and one of constantly making concessions to my real beliefs to get elected. And to all who say that doesn’t have to happen, you are sticking your heads in the sand.
I was recently asked to join the GLBT National Policy Committee for Obama.

I realized they were asking everyone on the Clinton campaign to join. They wanted my name more than my views. That’s fine and it’s politics. I agreed to lend my name if that helps in any way to see Barack Obama take the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009. The alternative is unacceptable to any GLBT person.

But I will do what I have always done with the candidates I support and hold their feet to the fire on the issues I care about. I am a policy wonk and don’t hesitate to tell candidates when I think they are wrong or going down a losing path. Sometimes I am wrong and sometimes I am right, but never am I silent.

I RECENTLY READ about the take-home exams, unearthed by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, that professor Barack Obama gave his students when he taught at the University of Chicago Law School. There were many questions on reproductive and gay rights and how one can interpret parts of the Constitution to guarantee those rights. What this shows me is that Obama has thought about these issues, or at least wanted others to think about them, for many years.

But I agree with the conclusion of Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post who said, “I am not sure where Professor Barack Obama, or President Barack Obama for that matter, comes down” on the answers to the questions he poses.

These included questions such as, “Can a state university’s law review expand its affirmative action program to include special treatment for gay students as well as racial minorities? Does a man have any right to stop his ex-wife from using their frozen embryos to try to get pregnant? In the state of Nirvana, where a gay couple Richard and Michael want a child, would Nirvana’s laws prohibiting gays from paying surrogate mothers or adopting children violate the constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process?”

AS IN SO many other areas, Obama is great at asking the questions. But we still don’t know how he answers many of them. I don’t feel totally secure that he will answer them in the way I, as a gay man, want them answered.

There is a similar lack of clarity regarding the influence of his religious beliefs.

I know Obama is not Muslim, a claim that is patently false. I also know he is a patriotic American. But as a Christian, where does he come down on GLBT rights in the long run? I know his answers now, but then he talks about continuing President Bush’s faith-based initiatives, while issuing another statement to assure us that he is still going to support ENDA. If he makes faith-based institutions hire gays and follow other federal laws, the result will be that most faith-based programs that now don’t take federal funds will still refuse to do so. So what is the purpose of this initiative?

Will Obama stand up to the Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army, which discriminate against gays? Will he ensure that when religious schools take students with federal money from voucher programs, as in the federally funded D.C. program, that they teach appropriate health and sex education and not abstinence-only programs?

Will Obama include the term “gender identity” in the Democratic platform? Will he call for budget and legislative autonomy for the District of Columbia, which will allow us to pass a marriage equality bill not beholden to review by Congress? Will he end all federal funding for abstinence-only education?

I will continue to ask these questions, among others, while I campaign for and work to elect Barack Obama president.