Remember a few months back when it was announced that gay couples, even married ones, were going to be listed as “unmarried partners” in the 2010 Census? Well you can put away the harangue you had all prepared for the census taker. Hitched gay couples will have their relationships counted.

The Commerce Department reversed a policy with a legal opinion that  argued the Defense of Marriage Act does not mean the Census cannot release raw data on gay pairs. Aside from the fairness of it all, this is a boon for research purposes. While talking about LGBT life is rather easy (heck, they even let me do it), it would be nice if there was just a base of raw data especially when it comes to marriage. Sure many folk have done yeoman work when it comes to gay crunching numbers, but the more information we have the better it is for the cause.

Aside from the stats, this move is typical of the  Obama not enough people paid attention to during the campaign.  It is undramatic, lacks sex appeal, and makes people yawn. But that is how the president operates. If he makes any moves on the gay rights agenda (and the jury is still out on that), anything he does will be below the fold. Small, yet significant moves, that reverberate beyond the news cycle. He’s not going to tackle the topic head on. We can debate if that’s the best strategy, and if it is any different from people who came before him; however,  he is who he is.

1. Slogging through The Brothers Karamazov. Hopefully will be done in three more weeks. Right now all I can say is Grushenka was not worth the effort.

2. Still no one in custody for the murder of three at a Tel Aviv gay and lesbian center. There might have been a personal, not political, motive.

3. Glad the media stopped talking about the “beer summit.” Wish the story was handled  better, but when the (perceived) topic is race there are only so many narratives we like to hear.

4. If you call a  black person a “jungle monkey”  you are not allowed to announce how utterly free of racist animus your soul is.

5. Any summer  movie suggestions?

6. The suspect in the murder of sailor  August Provost, III killed himself. Not sure there will ever be a satisfactory answer to why Provost was murdered.

7. Blueberries are expensive this summer.

8. The leader of the “birther movement” is nutty and needs a cosmetic adviser. And birther crazies? Please leave no comments. Just go fix your tin foil hats.

9. What will I do now that the Olberman and O’Reilly feud is kaput? These two knot heads having a beef is why I don’t miss TV.

10. I’ve said this before, but it needs repeating . Spent the weekend watching season one of  The Wire. Anyone who didn’t nominate the show for an Emmy is a moron.

When I read the White House announcement about the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom I laughed out loud. Wasn’t too boisterous because the day job is getting funkier by the minute (if my boss is reading this I only mean that as a compliment). Only President Barack Obama would think to honor both Jack Kemp and Harvey Milk.

Milk’s importance doesn’t have to be justified here (at least I hope so). While I have nothing against Gus Van Sant’s biopic, it wouldn’t hurt folk to check out Randy Shilt’s The Mayor of Castro Street for a more nuanced vision of the man and his history. However, when Milk’s family goes to the White House on August 12, they will  bump into Jack Kemp’s kin. The former HUD Secretary will also be given the same award. Kemp and Milk. I’m willing to bet  both would appreciate the irony  of their honors because they looked at each other from across the political divide. Milk, knocking the door open for gay political participation; Kemp, doing his best to slam that very door.

For partisans honoring both men cheapens what they stood for. That’s fair and worthy of conversation, but the past shows people of good will can be found all over the political map. Yes history judges us, but that rearview look doesn’t mean we can’t honor those who were political opposites.  Our battlefields have made this point already.

America’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom is awarded to individuals who make an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

From the White House press release:

“This year’s awardees were chosen for their work as agents of change.  Among their many accomplishments in fields ranging from sports and art to science and medicine to politics and public policy, these men and women have changed the world for the better.  They have blazed trails and broken down barriers.  They have discovered new theories, launched new initiatives, and opened minds to new possibilities.

President Obama said, “These outstanding men and women represent an incredible diversity of backgrounds.  Their tremendous accomplishments span fields from science to sports, from fine arts to foreign affairs.  Yet they share one overarching trait: Each has been an agent of change.  Each saw an imperfect world and set about improving it, often overcoming great obstacles along the way.   

“Their relentless devotion to breaking down barriers and lifting up their fellow citizens sets a standard to which we all should strive.  It is my great honor to award them the Medal of Freedom.”

President Obama will present the awards at a ceremony on Wed., Aug. 12.”

Other awardees include Nancy Goodman Brinker, the founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world’s leading breast cancer awareness organization; Stephen Hawking, the internationally-recognized theoretical physicist; Sen. Edward Kennedy; Desmund Tutu; Chita Rivera; Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland; and Sidney Poitier.

Billie Jean King

Billie Jean King was an acclaimed professional tennis player in the 1960s and 1970s, and has helped champion gender equality issues not only in sports, but in all areas of public life.  King beat Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, then the most viewed tennis match in history.  King became one of the first openly lesbian major sports figures in America when she came out in 1981.  Following her professional tennis career, King became the first woman commissioner in professional sports when she co-founded and led the World Team Tennis (WTT) League.  The U.S. Tennis Association named the National Tennis Center, where the US Open is played, the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2006. 

Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk became the first openly gay elected official from a major city in the United States when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Milk encouraged lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) citizens to live their lives openly and believed coming out was the only way they could change society and achieve social equality. Milk, alongside San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, was shot and killed in 1978 by Dan White, a former city supervisor.  Milk is revered nationally and globally as a pioneer of the LGBT civil rights movement for his exceptional leadership and dedication to equal rights.

Spend anytime reading the comment sections on gay political sites and there is lots of vitriol for President Barack Obama. From DOMA to DADT, there is a palpable sense the Obama administration has turned its back to the  LGBT community. That is a fair reading few would dispute, even those who continue to support the White House. However, the Palm Center released a paper arguing DADT is still around because of conscious choices by gay activists.

Called “Self-Inflicted Wounds”, the report argues when chatter for Obama to sign a executive directive to get rid of DADT was at its peak,  “a network of gay and gay-friendly activists, journalists and politicos worked to derail the possibility of a suspension of the ban.” Aaron Belkin, the paper’s author, makes the case that instead of focusing on a two tier attack, pushing  the president and congress, the “gay and gay-friendly activists journalists and politicos” focused their attention solely on the legislative side of the DADT debate.

No names are listed but if you remember reporter Jason Bellini, in a Daily Beast video, hinted the Human Rights Campaign might have informed the White House the military ban should be worked on last, after the hate crimes bill (HRC head Joe Solmonese vigorously denied  the implications of Bellini’s reporting).

Belkin’s paper will get a lot of press, as it should. Hopefully it will also engender a conversation about the nature of leadership. Maybe it’s time for us to recognize that a diverse group such as the “gay community” is cannot put all of its eggs in a leadership basket. Some who we think speak for the community are essentially on the hunt for access to power. There is nothing wrong with that, but if you are looking for change you might need to look beyond groups like HRC.

Health care reform. Two wars (you all better be reading the articles of Michael Yon), an economy that gives everyone the shakes. Given all this the media kept its eye on one word used by President Barack Obama in his most recent press conference.

On Wednesday night, the president was asked about Henry L. Gates’ run in with the Cambridge police. He admitted his bias upfront, described the incident, and noted Cambridge officers “acted stupidly.” The press jumped on that word and to hear some tell it Obama has something against the police.

Getting stupid on Obama’s use of the word stupid is part of the whole “give the police the benefit of the doubt” ethos. No one denies police work is a difficult job, filled with hazards of the highest order. However, police do make mistakes and often times act without thought. Don’t believe? Ask Chad Gibson what he thinks about the perfectibility of the police. If you don’t trust him what about Ryan Moats? He plays professional football and was pulled over by an officer. His crime? Rolling through a red light. Why? his mother-in-law was dying.

Okay, Moats asked for the officer’s abuse. He wasn’t being respectful enough to the cop,  who at one point in the conversation says “I can screw you over.” Want another example? How about the Oakland policeman  who killed a man on a train platform. Some of you will argue the guy didn’t follow the officer’s orders like a good citizen should. Well Oscar Grant was lying face down on the ground, but  Officer  (now ex) Johannes Mehserle pumped bullets in him anyway. Can’t wait to see how that is justified!

For the record and it irks me this has to be said,  but I know how some play here at 365: there is no suggestion from me the man who arrested Gates, Sergeant James M. Crowley, is a racist. From all accounts he is good at his job and a decent enough fellow. Yet, even after reading  his report a few times (that has been contradicted by Gates), I’m still confused why he felt the need to arrest the professor  in his house (and yes Virgina: the porch is part of the house).

It’s  hypocritical of  me to dog out the media about “Gate-gate” as I blather on about it also, so I’m done. However, this has to be said. While the Cambridge kabuki is entertaining, it  keeps us away from our serious law and order troubles. I’m willing to bet Crowley, Gates, and Obama would all agree on that.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints President Thomas S. Monson presented Obama with details of his family’s genealogy during their first face-to-face meeting. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat who is Mormon, helped arrange the meeting and joined it.

“I’m grateful for the genealogical records that they brought with them and am looking forward to reading through the materials with my daughters,” Obama said in a statement after the meeting. “It’s something our family will treasure for years to come.”

Mormon leaders traditionally meet with new presidents and share with them records from the Salt Lake City-based church’s extensive genealogical records.

“President Obama’s heritage is rich with examples of leadership, sacrifice and service,” Monson said in a statement. “We were very pleased to research his family history and are honored to present it to him today.”

The five leather-bound books detail Obama’s family history for several generations. Parts of that history were already known, such as his ties to former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney. The two are eighth cousins.

Obama is a descendent of Mareen Duvall. The French Huguenot’s son married the granddaughter of a Richard Cheney, who arrived in Maryland in the late 1650s from England.

In his speech, President Obama noted that though, “there probably has never been less discrimination in America than there is today,” he added that “the pain of discrimination is still felt in America.”

The president addressed several groups who are discriminated against, including African American women, Latinos, and Muslim Americans. President Obama also stated that discrimination is also felt “by our gay brothers and sisters, still taunted, still attacked, still denied their rights.”

Read the full speech and see the clip of Obama’s comments on discrimination at Towleroad.

Watch the full speech below:

This has been a week of racial matters. The Republicans, a political organization whose recent racial deeds would make Frederick Douglass swell with pride, parsed, parsed, and parsed some more Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina speech.”

For some in the GOP that speech shows how she is out to make whites the mules of the world. El Rushbo, Rush Limbaugh, peddled that the nominee, and President Barack Obama, are bitter angry coloreds waiting to get back at whitey. For the record: Rush comes from the school of philosophy where the coloreds are now racist. Folks of his skin tone are bigotry free.

It would have been nice if someone in the Grand Old Party looked at Sotomayor’s dissent in Pappas v. Giuliani. Pappas was a racist, anti-Semite, and worked for the New York Police Department’s information division. His bigotry was discovered by his superiors because he sent private emails, from his home, to organizations extolling his kookiness. They canned his racist butt and he sued. The case made it to the Second Court of Appeals, Sotomayor’s court, and you would think this pissed off brown woman would gladly take a knife to Pappas. Isn’t that what those Sharks do? Alas she defended his right of free speech. Bad move Judge. Not the way a sassy Latina is supposed to act.

The day Sotomayor stopped testifying, the man who picked her was talking to the NAACP. The civil rights organization turned 100 this year and in many ways Obama’s road to the White House fulfills the dream of the organization’s founders ( to be fair, I can imagine cantankerous W.E.B. DuBois giving Obama tons of grief).

The speech was standard Obama. Marveling at the country’s history, the travels and travails of the civil rights movement, some personal tales, and an admonishment for personal responsibility. Smarter heads have noticed that Obama has a habit of going the personal responsibility route when he talks to predominately black audiences. When he takes it there, the media goes gaga like it’s something new; however, the media is clueless to race and history. Anyone who knows a smidgen of American history knows the bootstrap rhetoric has been flourished by Ida B. Wells to Huey P. Newton. Heck, spend anytime listening to a number of black preachers and it’s hard not to hear a rhetoric of individual commitment.

Shelby Steele made a great point ages ago that race conversations in America were stymied because everyone wants to be innocent. Whites act as history has no meaning and blacks think history is all there is. So we spout predictable positions (”Sotomayor is a racist” or “If you don’t like Sotomayor you are a racist”) and simmer in our own moral stew about the perfidy of the other side. We served ourselves the same meal this week, learning and hearing nothing. Hopefully one day we can talk about race and how it’s lived minus the comfortable blankets that have little with our actual lives.

Dr. Regina Benjamin is known along Alabama’s impoverished Gulf Coast as a country doctor who makes house calls and doesn’t turn away patients who can’t pay – even as she’s had to find the money to rebuild a clinic repeatedly destroyed by hurricanes and once even fire.

“For all the tremendous obstacles that she has overcome, Regina Benjamin also represents what’s best about health care in America, doctors and nurses who give and care and sacrifice for the sake of their patients,” Obama said Monday in introducing his choice for a job known as America’s doctor.

He said Benjamin will bring insight as his administration struggles to revamp the health care system:

Saying she “has seen in a very personal way what is broken about our health care system,” Obama said Benjamin will bring important insight as his administration tries to revamp that system.

Benjamin called the job “a physician’s dream,” and pledged to be a voice for patients in need – and to fight the preventable diseases that claim too many lives each year, including nearly her entire family.

Her father died with diabetes and high blood pressure, her only brother of HIV, her mother of lung cancer “because as a young girl, she wanted to smoke just like her twin brother could” – an uncle now on oxygen as a result, she noted.

“I cannot change my family’s past. I can be a voice in the movement to improve our nation’s health care and our nation’s health,” Benjamin said. “I want to be sure that no one falls through the cracks as we improve our health care system.”

The surgeon general is the people’s health advocate, a bully pulpit position that can be tremendously effective with a forceful personality. Benjamin has that reputation.

Pushed by the need in her own shrimping community of Bayou La Batre, Ala., and its diverse patient mix – white, black and, increasingly immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – Benjamin, 51, has emerged as a national leader in the call to improve health disparities. She became the first black woman and the first doctor under age 40 elected to the American Medical Association’s board of trustees, and in 2002 became the first black woman to head a state medical society.

“She’s always been very ambitious from a political standpoint. She has always, always been motivated by that ambition,” said Dr. James Holland, CEO of Mostellar Medical Center in nearby Irvington, Ala., where Benjamin spent about three years in the early 1980s as a National Health Service Corps scholar.

Holland said Benjamin’s selection as surgeon general “doesn’t surprise me at all. The only thing that surprises me is that it hasn’t happened before now.”

Medical groups welcomed her ability for straight-talk, whether to patients or politicians, about the dire health needs of much of the country.

“We want to emphasize prevention, primary care and early intervention, and we have somebody now who does that for a living,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, no relation, of the American Public Health Association.

Added AMA President Dr. James Rohack, who has known Benjamin for more than two decades. With “her recognition that if you don’t have health insurance, you live sicker and you die younger, she can bring the real-world perspective as surgeon general of the things as a nation we need to do to keep ourselves healthy.”

Benjamin made headlines in the wake of Katrina, as photographs showed her laying patient charts out to bake in the sun and lamenting the lack of pricey but more hurricane-resistant electronic records. Her nonprofit clinic was rebuilt by volunteers only to burn down just as it was about to reopen. Benjamin later told of her patients’ desperation that she rebuild again, recalling on woman who handed her an envelope with a $7 donation to help.

“If she can find $7, I can figure out the rest,” Benjamin said last fall as she received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” money she said she’d use to help finish that job.

Her nomination for surgeon general requires Senate confirmation.