Not on the agenda

[solarbird]

filkertom posted a link to the Obama transition site "change.gov," and asked about his reader's five biggest priorities.

I of course listed torture and rule of law, renewable energy/energy independence, and transparency in the banking system, noting my opinion that these have to happen or there isn't a country anymore. These need to be first priorities.

I'd have thrown in an issue that affects me more personally and directly, just to have it on the table, but as I note in comments, Mr. Obama is opposed to equality under the law, and so is the Democratic Party, and I rather expect various campaign positions about making separate-but-unequal less unequal - repeal of DOMA, in particular - to be conveniently forgotten. But out of curiosity, I went searching through the agenda and position pages, skimming through hundreds of position and agenda statements across dozens of pages, and when I didn't see anything relevant to gayfolk, I started using the search engine. And guess what I found?

We found 0 results for “DOMA”
We found 0 results for “"civil unions"” (searching without quotes yielded hits, but not relevant ones)
We found 0 results for “"defense of marriage act"” (same notation)

In fact, I eventually got desperate, and:

We found 0 results for “gay”
We found 0 results for "lesbian"

So there you are. And yes, quotes work as you'd expect, I tested on a string I specifically found in an article; "19 million women" brought the article right up.

Just to be sure, I had Google do the search for me too:

Your search - site:change.gov lesbian - did not match any documents.
Your search - site:change.gov gay - did not match any documents.

That didn't take long, now did it?

eta: In my searching - which I did not include comprehensively above, I did try many combinations other than that - I managed to forget "sexual orientation." There is a direct hit on that, in reference to employment discrimination, and that's not a code phrase. (This is as opposed to the reference to the Matthew Shepard act, which, in its previous form, did specifically include GBLT people, which is why it was opposed by the fundamentalist movement; they were okay with it with the queers excluded. "Matthew Shepard" would be a hit, if you know the right code language.)

So that takes a bit of the edge off. I had formerly added, "This could be a new game! We could call it, 'Let's troll through the agenda looking for coded references to citizens too ickycontroversial to mention by name!'" We're still not mentioned by name, but we're not entirely off the agenda.

Comments

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Did you try "civil rights"?

This is the reason I didn't vote for either major party in the presidential campaign. Both are actually bragging (though more quietly these days) about how they're going to infringe on my civil rights.

I really expected the independents to do better this election, and am sad they didn't.

[solarbird]

Oh, there's a whole section on civil rights. Lots of plans. Some of them seem pretty good. None involve queers, tho'.

eta: Oh wait, there's a line entry on hate crimes, which mentions the Matthew Shepard act, which in its previous form included hate crimes against GBLT people and was opposed by fundamentalist groups on that basis. So that's a hit.

[avram]

I'm think the site's been put up pretty hastily. Looking at the page on the economy, I see pretty obvious duplicate paragraphs.

More hitless searches:
guantanamo site:change.gov
torture site:change.gov
constitution site:change.gov only turned up a reference to the inauguration, quoting the inaugural oath.

[solarbird]

Well, that's bad. Of course, none of that is particularly high on the Democratic Party agenda either, with the possible exception of gitmo.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

So we gotta get loud, get rowdy. I'll hit'em up when I go to lunch.

[kodi]

There is one policy-related hit for "sexual orientation," promising to "...prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression," right above the Hate Crimes area. Not that I disagree with your overall point.

[kodi]

"...prohibit [employment] discrimination...", I meant to write.

[solarbird]

Damn! I can't believe I didn't search for that. (I searched for other variations - until I got to Google when I was just kind of desperate - but didn't list them all.)

That's my bad and requires a real eta.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i'd post it anyway. and ask all your friends to do the same.

[corivax.livejournal.com]

http://change.gov/agenda/civil_rights_agenda/

Explicit support for repealing DOMA.

[solarbird]

I'd heard they'd revised the "Agenda" section extensively late last week but hadn't been back to search. Perhaps some of the prodding did some good. (Copy-and-pasting my "defense of marriage act" search from above now yields this hit, as well.)