Barack Obama pays for his excessive caution

IT TAKES a special genius in politics to be assailed by both sides of an argument and receive no credit at all for standing in the middle. That is the position into which Barack Obama appears needlessly to have manoeuvred himself on gay rights. Social conservatives complain that he has done too little to “defend marriage” (by which they mean preventing gays from marrying), and that his plan to allow gays to serve openly in the military will spook America’s warriors. Gay activists complain that he has so far been too timid on both fronts. And, as luck would have it, Virginia Phillips, a federal judge in California, made a ruling this week that has tossed the question of gay rights back into the public eye at the most uncomfortable possible moment for the White House: three weeks before November’s mid-term elections.

The legal side of this story is simple. Under the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, gays in the armed forces are prohibited from disclosing their sexual orientation. If they do, or if they are found out, they are discharged. Since 1993 over 13,000 have been thrown out when their homosexuality became known. A group of gay activists, the Log Cabin Republicans, complained that this infringed their constitutional rights and took the Department of Defence to court. Last month Judge Phillips found for the plaintiffs, ruling that the policy violated their free-speech and due-process rights. On October 12th she followed up by ordering an immediate stop to all investigations now under way and a halt to all planned discharges. In effect, unless a higher court takes a different view, the Clinton-era compromise that has governed the service of gays in the military for a decade and a half is dead. …

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