Attorney General Loretta Lynch ensured this week that May 9 will go down in the annals of LGBTQ history when she made the administration’s strongest case yet for the equal protection of transgender Americans on the very same day that President Barack Obama voiced his support for marriage equality four years ago.
North Carolina lawmakers, she said, had engaged in “state-sponsored discrimination” when they enacted a law requiring transgender individuals to use restrooms aligned with the sex assigned to them at birth.
“This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms,” Lynch explained. “This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them—indeed, to protect all of us.” Four years earlier, President Obama told the American people that lesbians and gays deserved equal treatment under the law in the wake of yet another set back for equality in North Carolina. Just one day earlier, Tar Heel voters had approved a ban on same-sex marriage.
“I’ve just concluded that—for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that—I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” the president told ABC’s Robin Roberts on May 9, 2012.
But Lynch’s remarks depart from Obama’s revelation by virtue of their unflinching boldness and clarity. Obama had been backed into a political corner before making his statement. After his preference for civil unions over marriage equality began to be widely viewed as disingenuous, an ambitious president fighting for reelection amid a sea change in public opinion finally concluded that he could no longer delay the “evolution” he had begun publicly advancing two years earlier.
Aware that his pronouncement could alienate as many voters as it pleased, Obama did what any politician would have—hedged. He said he had hesitated to “nationalize the issue” and believed that it would continue to be worked out “at the local level.” In an effort to sway fair-minded people nationwide, Obama talked about his kids and how they had been pivotal to his change in perspective on same-sex marriage.
Lynch’s declaration of justice, on the other hand, was swift, decisive, and unapologetic. She made an impassioned personal appeal directly to the people of her “great state” on behalf of individuals who are still widely misunderstood and continue to be more marginalized than other members of the LGBT community.
“You’ve been told that this law protects vulnerable populations from harm—but that just is not the case,” Lynch asserted. “Instead, what this law does is inflict further indignity on a population that has already suffered far more than its fair share. This law provides no benefit to society—all it does is harm innocent Americans.”
By the end of the week, the Departments of Justice and Education issued a letter to public school districts nationwide directing them to allow transgender students to use the bathroom facility that aligns with their gender identity.
In part, it’s a sign of how far the administration has come. After all, it was Obama’s Justice Department that had stunned LGBT activists in June of 2009 when U.S. attorneys filed their first brief defending the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act using language and justifications that came straight out of the Bush administration.
But it’s also a sign of how far the nation has come. Even though transgender people still lack the visibility and familiarity that lesbians and gays enjoy, Americans seem less susceptible to the “sky is falling” scare tactics that social conservatives employed to enact some 30 gay marriage bans before the Supreme Court struck them down last year.
Indeed, on Monday, a CNN/ORC poll revealed that nearly six in ten Americans oppose so-called “bathroom laws” like the one enacted in North Carolina, and another 75 percent support laws that guarantee equal protections for transgender Americans.
We are nowhere near achieving that goal, but Attorney General Lynch has now put the full-throated force of her agency behind the effort. It was yet another historic call to justice from an administration that has repeatedly expanded the freedoms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. Only now it’s in an all out sprint to the finish line.
Kerry Eleveld is the author of “Don’t Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama’s presidency.”