Tuesday How To: Fail To Make Immigration Reform Comprehensive

Eight US Senators are super proud of themselves. They’ve come up with an idea for “comprehensive” immigration reform. Except not really. The timing of this reform is important. These Senators rushed their plan out today in order to beat the president, who is planning to speak on immigration reform tomorrow.

He’s what immigration reform requires to be called comprehensive. It needs to address the needs of everyone.

Guess what this proposal does not address in any way? The LGBTQ community. You know who has huge problems with immigration? If you said the LGBTQ community give yourself a gold star.

Remember before how I said it was vital that pall people obtain recognition? This reform bill does the opposite of that. It refuses, utterly and deliberately to recognize that members of the LGBTQ community, let alone the specific problems of said community. We don’t exist by design.

I’ve talked before about how colorblind racism is the most insidious aspect of racism, in that it allows Caucasians to require People of Color to ignore the harm that is done to them in the name “equality.”

Genderblind sexism is the same. “We’re all the same so we can just ignore the long term, continuing sexism in the world!”

This is the same attitude in regards to anti-gay hate. No, not homophobia. We’re not talking about fear here. It’s hate. Call it what it is.

Oh hey the federal government is, once again, organizing around anti-gay hate in an effort to actively harm its citizens. How precedented.

But here’s where it gets interesting. As I said the president is unveiling his plan tomorrow, which will be early identical to the Senatorial plan because they pretty much cribbed it totally from his May 2011 proposal. The difference?

He sees us.

And unlike the Democratic Senators who admit that they sacrificed the needs of the LGBTQ community in order to “maintain bipartisan support,” for their crappy bill he is going to include us in his proposal. Hey recall when he was elected the first time and he specifically said that he was going to be president of the whole country?

This is what keeping his promise looks like.