John Aravosis’s distortions spread in a perfectly predictable D.C. conventional wisdom sort of way.
That’s why most of the folks in D.C. have no problem spreading them. But, the latest example strains even D.C. levels of credulity. So, we start with Anderson Cooper’s Obama interview.
In it, Obama says nothing new. Period.
Obama says that he wants Congress to act to change the law and reiterates comments from others that he is looking for “the possibility, though, that we change how the law is being enforced, even as we are pursuing a shift in Congressional policy.” He discusses making the policy work well for “the outstanding gay and lesbian soldiers that are both currently enlisted or would like to enlist.” He says he’s like to see this accomplished “sooner rather than later.”
Nothing in there is new, other than the President — rather than solely Secretary of Defense Gates — says that he is looking for an interim solution until Congress acts. Those are the facts.
Then, Sam Stein at The Huffington Post goes to John for comment, under the premise that the Obama language is “bound to cause some concern.” He then quotes Aravosis as a “prominent writer and gay activist” — which, I think, at least implies a fact-based assessment — and asks for his view on what Obama has said. Shockingly, Aravosis states that “President Obama no longer wants to repeal ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ he only plans to change’ the law” — despite the reality that nothing suggests that is the case. Aravosis concludes for Stein’s story: “It’s increasingly clear that this White House has a severe case of the cooties when it comes to the civil rights of gay and lesbian Americans.”
Stein, unfortunately, fell prey to Aravosis’s goal — advancing AmericaBlogReality, regardless of the facts that underlie (or, more often, don’t) that reality. Stein posted his article at 6:31 p.m.
Then, in less than two hours, at 8:07 p.m., Aravosis has the gall to use Stein’s interview with . . . um, Aravosis . . . to advance . . . of course, Aravosis’s view. He writes:
The most disturbing part of the interview is when Obama starts talking about “changing” DADT. (Sam Stein at Huffington Post appeared to have the same interpretation of the Obama interview as I did, with regards to the change to the word “change.”)
Yes, the link is to the piece quoting him as the only on-the-record source stating such a view.
And then, predictably, the reality spreads. This evening, Kelvin Lynch at the Cincinnati Examiner sourced Stein’s reporting of Aravosis’s comments to justify the headline:
“Forget a repeal, Obama now just wants DADT to work better for US soldiers.”
And that is how AmericaBlogReality spreads.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Chris Geidner is the award-winning senior political & legal reporter at BuzzFeed and has written for Metro Weekly, The Atlantic Online, The American Prospect, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications, as well as at his blog, Law Dork. He has appeared regularly on television commenting on current affairs, including MSNBC, PBS, HLN & Current. Prior to moving to D.C. in 2009, he served as an attorney on the senior staff at the Ohio Attorney General's Office and had earlier worked for a leading Columbus law firm. An extended biography can be found
I saw this yesterday and feared it would spread in this way. How can anyone take Aravosis seriously?
Cool new site, btw.
it’s frightening to see foolishness like this
I am so puzzled… I thought an interim solution to the loss of LGBT soldiers, while we wait for Congress to pass the Military Readiness Act, was exactly what Aravosis had been complaining that Obama *wasn’t* getting done.
Also, I don’t understand why “repeal” is considered so much better than “change.” For one thing, wouldn’t the repeal of DADT leave in place the prior legal regime in which the military *did* ask and could fire people on the basis of their sexuality? It seems to me that what we need is a law that prohibits discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and applies that prohibition to the military, not merely a repeal of DADT.
In your own “perfectly predictable” way you again try to drown in Barack Berry Kool Aid anyone who disagrees with you about its namesake. That’s your right, but declaring opinion “facts” is why lawyers remain among the most hated of professions.
Michael, if you think Chris is drinking KoolAid, why don’t you offer him an antidote in the form of a rebuttal, instead of ad hominems? I see so many commenters on this blog who say that Chris must be working for the Administration, or must be in love with Obama, or must be a self-hating gay … but very few who actually take his arguments apart. Like the rest of them, you prefer personal attacks.
Michael has a fetish for the military. He relentlessly attacks anyone who doesn’t think DADT is issue #1 for our community. I struggle with this issue because I am anti-war and, to a lesser extent, anti-military (not individual members, but the larger structure). So, while I empathize with folks who want to serve openly, and believe they should be able to, I just can’t get exorcised about allowing queer people to take part in the US’s ending wars.
I tend to put DADT higher in terms of priority because I believe that if America isn’t willing to let gays fight/die for their country, then America certainly won’t be willing to broadly accept SSM.
I agree. It seems that they accuse Chris os working for the administration, but can’t fully break apart his arguments in a sensical manner.
Some of these commentators don’t like the fact that Chris isn’t agreeing with Aravosis. He isn’t trying to fight fire with fire or by creating a fire. Chris is standing his ground and that’s brave.
Does Avarosis or anyone else fully grasp that Obama, as someone who has taught Constitutional Law is doing what he can to follow the rule of law and not overstep Executive Authority? We decry Bush/Cheney overstepping executive authority and ignoring the Legislative branch and yet when it comes to our piece of the pie…well by all means please ignore the Legislative branch and refuse to follow the rule of law.
I don’t think Obama is 100% principled or fully pragmatic, but he’s clearly not going to halt the discharges or magically repeal DADT.
I think its fucking unfair to Lt. Choi and others.
But the reality of the situation is, Obama is basically responsible for the DEATH of every soldier under his command. Does anything think he’s going to lose more sleep over the injustice of discharging soldiers for being gay until DADT is repealed by Congress?
Had he halted the discharge process, there would be even less pressure for Congress to act for actual change in the Law.
Ultimately, Obama needs people like Avarosis but what he doesn’t need are for people to actually be taken in by what people like him say.
*Does anyone…
I really need to proof my comments better
The problem with folks like Aravosis is that they want to use the same instruments (stop-loss, unitary executive orders) that they decried during the Bush regime to advance their own agenda. As Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will not unmake the master’s house.”
Spot on! Its a problem I have with the Left, the idea is “hey the Right does X to move their agenda so we should too!” Its a basic element of human nature, but I think we cede the moral high ground and ultimately thats what lasts longer.
As someone who considers myself ‘of the Left’ (actually, I’d place myself as center-left, but I am using the New Deal/Great Society as the center as it was pre-Reagan), I entirely agree with MG and Manos in comdemning these sorts of tactics. I’ve watched commentators use the IOKIYAAR as a sneer, but it is equally untrue that IOKIHIAR — It’s OK if he’s a Republican. Or if the tactics we condemned suddenly turn out to be useful to achieve our ends, we are no more justified than those who had different ends.
But there’s something more going on here, I think. And I’m going to try and put it into another post.
No, I’m not, because I keep almost being able to make sense of Aravosis, then the system crashes. Is he trying to be the Mr. Outside to Obama’s Mr. Inside? No. Is he sincere but deluded? That almost works, but not quite. Is he simply trying to be the rooster whose crow makes the sun rise? That seems closer, but…
Does anyone whose followed him longer have any clue either? But does Obama ‘need’ an Aravosis, as someone suggested earlier? Do his actions help us? Those last two are easier to answer. (Someone who was pushing hard, but not ‘kneecapping’ the person he’s trying to work with — that Obama needs and would help us.)
Prup,I think you’ve hit it with the Mr. Outside angle. I think some people spend their whole lives defining themselves by what they are against than what they are for. Its one of the reasons why I describe myself as a liberal but not “left” as left and right tend to relate to positions insted of mindset(…That’s just my own take on those terms and in no way judgement of anyone who self identifies as such….)
But without getting into armchair psychoanalysis of Aravosis, I do think in some ways a “radical” voice is needed on both sides of most issues in order to propel change.
I don’t think white America would have embraced Martin Luther King, jr. as much as they did, had there not been a Malcom X for them to look at and say…Oh shit we better go with the least radical element.And white America also had to see not just passive racism, but they had to actually see violent racism and oppression before they could really support change.
So too do I think that when “straight” America sees radicals on either side of LGBT issues, they then tend to support the middle road.
Ideally, we’d just act on legal and moral principle, but humans don’t really function that way, we need to feel empathy, fear, guilt, hunger or some other instinct in order to act.
“And white America also had to see not just passive racism, but they had to actually see violent racism and oppression before they could really support change.”
I agree with this, but I don’t see how Malcolm X was helpful in illustrating that to America. MLK quite deliberately waded into the places where he knew he would be imprisoned, have dogs and firehoses set on him, and otherwise make a dramatic image for the cameras. I wrote a paper once about the influence of TV on the civil rights movement, and it was precisely this difference between violent racism and passive racism that made TV useful in the early years but less so later on.
E.g. MLK could get great imagery of what it looked like to be thrown off a bus or out of a restaurant, or to have children getting eggs thrown at them while they just tried to go to school, or to be beaten for trying to exercise the right to vote. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, MLK had a much more difficult time rallying public support. When he tried to campaign against housing discrimination, it was very hard because there was no dramatic action for the cameras. Redlining doesn’t happen in public; it’s done on paper behind closed doors.
Similarly, I think Matthew Shepherd’s death gave some impetus to the gay rights movement because the images were so grisly. Straight people felt badly that gays were actually getting murdered for being gay. (This is also why there’s such a strong effort by opponents of gay rights to declare that Shepherd’s murder was merely a simply robbery, nothing more.) It is more difficult to show visually the effects of losing a job, getting kicked out of the military, not being able to marry the person you love.
My example of Malcolm X or the Black Panthers or any other “militant” organization which tends to be polarizing or “scary” tends to then make the demands or requests of someone like MLK seem tame and reasonable by comparison.
It was not just the idea of helping people that prompted much of the action of the New Deal, it was the fear that if concessions were not made, a revolution of sorts might break out as had in Italy, China and Germany.
Again, I don’t advocate such fear tactics, but its just natural part of human psychology that sometimes requests for change are more palatable when compared to other requests/demands that seem more radical.That’s all I was trying to say in regards to even the shrillest voice having a purpose in moving discussions along. Its this competition of ideas, even bad ones, that keeps the political process alive.
Sorry, but I have to absolutely disagree with the comparison to
Malcolm X — or the more apposite one to the Black Panthers and Eldridge Cleaver. Aravosis is not offering an ‘alternative’ way of getting our goals, and certainly not the violent one of the Panthers. Nor is he, while talking to his own group, attempting to influence the outside group. Straights uninvolved with gay rights don’t, I’d guess, have the faintest idea who Aravosis is, or what he has said. (And I admit I haven’t read him much, but if he damns bisexuals such as myself as ‘part-time gays,’ I can’t see him reaching out to the many supportive straight bloggers such as Steve Benen or Ed Brayton.)
To contiue, Aravosis isn’t ’scary’ to straights — because he represents, as I said before the line-skipping problem started, no alternative. He’s hardly in a position to threaten to lead a ‘real pro-gay’ political campaign against Obama — and were he to try, all he could do is to gladden the hearts of homophobes seeing us fighting among ourselves.
In fact, I challenge anyone here to imagine the mindset of someone who would be convinced to support ssm, or even repeal of DADT based on Aravosis’ writings and actions, where, without them they would oppose either.
No, he’s not “Mr. Ourside,” but with his constant repetition of “Obama wouldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t revealed the comparison to incest and pedophilia” he very well might be the rooster who knows his crowing brings the sunrise — and damn well wants credit for it.
Prup,
Yes, I think “rooster whose crowing brings the sunrise” is the correct diagnosis here.
Incidentally, is anyone keeping an eye on the negative responses to the Administration’s plan to revoke the HIV travel ban? It would be good to have someone send in a response close to the August 17 deadline that addresses the statements of those who think either the travel ban or the testing at entry should be retained. Just re-sending the same form letter, which looks like what some organizations are having people do, isn’t very useful.
Would have left this alone, but couldn’t resist quoting a beautiful comment — referring to Republicans on a different topic, but applicable to Aravoisian dittoheads as well:
“all these losers have is the Audacity of Nope.”