Today, President Barack Obama made history when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which included the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Here are two pictures from the signing. The President is due to give remarks specific to the hate crimes prevention measure at 6 p.m. Watch it live here. [UPDATE: Read my article at The Atlantic Politics Channel on today's events here.]
The President announcing his signing of the National Defense Authorization Act -- which contains the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act -- in the East Room of the White House.
President Obama signs the National Defense Authorization Act -- including the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act -- into law.
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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
great news
Sigh, meanwhile John Aravosis continues with his campaign to convince people that Obama hates the LGBT community. Dan Savage is parroting back Aravosis’s ridiculous legal analysis again:
“In violation of US law, the Obama administration has decided to stay the deportation of heterosexual foreign-born nationals married to Americans who have since deceased, reportedly in order to curry favor with the Latino community. But when a gay foreign-born national, married legally in Massachusetts to an American, who has been raped in his home country, seeks to stay in the US the Obama administration deports him.”
Of course, the law that Obama was “violating” was already set to be repealed at the time he stayed the deportation, and the repeal is ready for his signature. (http://www.silive.com/northshore/index.ssf/2009/10/obama_expected_to_sign_bill_ba.html)
If Congress gets a bill in the pipeline that would have same-sex marriages recognized by the federal government in 6 months, I suspect that Obama would be staying those deportations as well.
The whole reason the old law was seen as particularly cruel is that the people being deported were already being considered for immigration visas that, had the paperwork been processed before the spouse’s death, would have entitled them to stay in the country. So far as I know, Americans cannot get immigration visas for their same-sex spouses because the executive branch, due to DOMA, cannot recognize those marriages in the first place. There’s no paperwork in the pipeline at the time of the spouse’s death.
Gah. If I were Georgetown Law, I’d be considering rescinding Aravosis’s JD.