150 Obama-appointed gays and not counting

By logointern1
I had a “so what” moment last week.
A news release came into my Mail application, one of maybe 100 releases to arrive October 26th. The headline heralded, “Obama appoints record number of gay officials.”

President Barack Obama has appointed more openly gay officials than any other president in U.S. history.
The number, at half-way through Obama’s term, is estimated at 150 appointments, from “agency heads and commission members to policy officials and senior staffers.” The prior record number of appointments was made by Bill Clinton over his eight years in office and estimated at 140. Note the use of “estimate,” which to me means that we don’t really know the number, making about 150 a record that needs an asterisk.
The Senate had to confirm two dozen of Obama’s openly gay appointees, including John Berry as director of the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the nation’s 1.9 million federal workers.
“Eh, so what,” I thought.
I remembered back to the furor over Clinton’s nomination of Roberta Achtenberg as assistant secretary for Housing and Urban Development and also the controversy surrounding the nomination of James Hormel as the nation’s first openly gay ambassador.
Achtenberg was the first openly lesbian or gay public official whose appointment was confirmed by the Senate. The late U.S. Senator Jesse Helms attacked her as a militant, an extremist, a “damned lesbian” and waged a two-day filibuster against a vote on her confirmation.

Clinton nominated Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg in 1997, but he was not placed into the job until 1999, when the president made a recess appointment. Senate Republicans, lead by then Majority Leader Trent Lott, who famously in the Hormel dispute compared homosexuality to alcoholism and kleptomania, had stalled the nomination for two years.
Those were not “so what” appointments or times. But to the appointment of a “record” number of openly gay staffers in the Obama administration, I thought, “so what.”
When Clinton was making gay appointments, visibility, representation topped a list of the LGBT community’s goals. After Ronald Reagan, after George H.W. Bush, with the rise of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America crowd, we wanted to be seen and heard in the White House. We wanted, to go back to the oft-uttered phrase during that era, a “place at the table.” Out was uncommon then. Out, hopefully, is increasingly ordinary now.
So counting openly gay appointees, that seems so 1990s, so Spandex and “Saved by the Bell,” so “so what.”
In the days after the first stories circulated on Obama’s new record, I read a series of columns, most of them published in the mainstream press, suggesting that LGBT citizens who had demonstrated their discontent over the administration’s legal defense of “don’t ask, don’t tell” should change their tone, soften their stance. Hey, their arguments went, the president isn’t hiring gays in the Armed Forces, but he’s hiring them in the White House, so there you have it.
So what.
Clinton set the standard for appointing gays in his administration and Obama, as the next Democratic president, should raise the record.
Clinton also, however unintentionally at the start, delivered enactment of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy banning gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.
And it’s on this issue that Obama really should seek to best Clinton. So I’m looking for the press release in my Mail app that announces Obama, as the commander in chief, recruited 150 gays and lesbians into the Marines, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force. That would not get a “so what” reaction.

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