solarbird | Not on the agenda

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 ~~icky~~controversial to mention by name!'" We're still not mentioned by name, but we're not entirely off the agenda.