From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stampp-corbin/obama-enda_b_3263726.html
Stampp Corbin05/14/2013
There are leaders within the LGBT community who are extremely frustrated that President Obama has not issued an executive order eliminating discrimination in employment for our community. Those leaders are extremely shortsighted and do not fully understand the strategy of the Obama administration.
First, an executive order can be overturned immediately by the next president who disagrees with the order. President Obama is smarter than that. What Obama wants is the Congress of the United States to recognize that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people deserve the same treatment as everyone else in America.
The LGBT community wants equality in the workplace. Yesterday. Unfortunately, in the current political environment, if President Obama issued an executive order to ensure employment non-discrimination for LGBT people, what is likely to happen is retaliation from the republican House of Representatives and potentially a republican Senate, or worse an executive order by a Republican president in 2016 that codifies LGBT employment discrimination.
Executive orders are temporary fixes. President Obama is about permanent solutions; solutions that cannot be easily overturned by the stroke of a pen. That is what the LGBT community should be working toward. In this case, haste indeed does make waste.
President Obama is thoughtful and methodical, we all know that. The same LGBT voices, who cry out for an executive order ending LGBT discrimination in employment, are many who said that Obama would not repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, or pass hospital visitation rights. Those voices were wrong then and they are wrong now.
President Obama understands that it is prudent to wait for the Supreme Court decisions concerning same sex marriage in California and the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). It is crystal clear that the court will rule that marriage is a state’s rights issue. Thereby, Californians should be able to enter into same sex marriages by July based upon the lower court ruling.
Continue reading at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stampp-corbin/obama-enda_b_3263726.html
