An objective look at what the 43rd president of the United States has done for us.

BY LISA KEEN

Two days before Christmas 2008, President Bush signed a piece of legislation called the Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act of 2008. The primary purpose of the bill was to make “technical corrections” to an existing federal law — the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which had been aimed at encouraging contributions to pension plans. Bush had signed that bill, too.

Why is that important to LGBT people? Because both bills corrected an inequity to gay couples in tax law. The fact that Bush signed the bills—instead of vetoing them in order to appease the right-wing anti-gay elements of the Republican Party—is one of only two things gay leaders can point to that Bush did right, as far as LGBT people are concerned, during his eight years in office.

The other thing was signing “PEPFAR”—the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—in 2003 and its reauthorization in 2008. The White House says PEPFAR “supported life-saving antiretroviral treatment for more than 2.1 million men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS around the world.” But the reauthorization version also included a provision to repeal a 20-year-old ban on people with HIV entering the country.

Bruce Carroll, who posts his political commentary at his gaypatriot.net blog, said that, by signing the Recovery Act last month, Bush has “done more for gays than any other President in history.” Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said he took a step “toward eliminating the more than 1,000 inequities that our families face under federal law.”

Obviously, one's seat on the political spectrum can affect one's view of how any particular player is doing or has done. But now that President Bush's two terms in office are over, now is certainly a fair time to ask: What was President George W. Bush's impact in terms of LGBT issues and rights? Can he be blamed for the methodical campaign to ban from gay couples the right to obtain a marriage license the same as straight couples? Did he, by refusing to sign hate crimes legislation to discourage attacks against LGBT people, encourage hostility toward such people? Does he get credit for signing the bill that eliminates a tax penalty for gays who inherit their same-sex partner or spouse's retirement benefits? Was he the best president LGBT people have had thus far or the worst?

“President William Jefferson Clinton signed two laws (DOMA and DADT) that put gay rights progress into full reverse,” noted Carroll in a recent post. “Bush increased American gay rights, Clinton took away American gay rights. Facts are facts.”

Facts are facts. But context and intent are important, too, otherwise, an ambulance speeding toward the scene of an accident is morally equivalent to a bank robber speeding away from the scene of a crime. And in discussing the context and intent under which Bush signed the legislation he did which helped LGBT people, no one is claiming he intended to help them.

Patrick Sammon, outgoing president of the Log Cabin Republicans, a national gay Republican group, agrees that Bush's signature on the pension reform bills “provided important protections for unmarried couples” but he also agrees “it's not like that was the motivating force behind” his signature.

But Sammon gives Bush credit for signing the bills anyway because, he says, Bush “easily could have told Congress to prohibit unmarried couples from taking advantage.”

“I'm sure social conservatives would have wanted that,” said Sammon, “and he didn't do that.”

But it's also true that, at the end of his last month in office, Bush was widely seen as a passive observer of the rapidly deepening recession. He explained his seeming inaction as not wanting to do anything that might interfere with the new administration's plans. And he was handed the Recovery Act by a Democratic Congress as one of several emergency measures aimed at stabilizing a fragile economy.

And it's hard to square a pro-gay compassionate motive to the pension bills when, in 2007, he effectively killed a bill passed to add gender and sexual orientation to federal law aimed at curbing hate crimes. The White House issued a statement saying the president would veto the measure if it reached his desk because there was no need for it. That was a response social conservatives would have wanted. In fact, Focus on the Family's James Dobson had claimed the hate crimes bill was an attempt to “muzzle people of faith who dare to express their moral and biblical concerns about homosexuality.”

On a scale of A to F, Sammon sees Bush's record as “mixed” and gives him a C-minus, mostly, he explains, because “he kept us safe from terrorists.”

Rea Carey, head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, gives him a D-minus.

“The only reason it's not an F is because we don't know if we can really credit Bush for PEPFAR,” says Carey. “It lifted the HIV ban, but the administration didn't drive that. He signed it. And he gets a point for that.”

Ditto on the pension bills: The gay couples' tax equity aspect “wasn't driven by the administration but he didn't block it.”

“He certainly wasn't an advocate by any stretch, but in these instances, which are substantive, there were changes that will benefit the LGBT and HIV communities and he did not block them.”

Not often mentioned, but to his credit, Bush also appointed one openly gay man, Michael Guest, as ambassador to Romania, and another, Richard Grenell, as a spokesperson for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He appointed three openly gay men to high-ranking AIDS-related offices. In his first few months in office, Bush named Scott Evertz to head up the Office of National AIDS Policy and then later named James O'Neill to succeed him. And, in 2006, he appointed Mark Dybul as head of the United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—a global response to AIDS.

But he also appointed several people who were overtly anti-gay. Perhaps most notorious among these was Scott Bloch, as U.S. Special Counsel, an office in charge of investigating alleged discrimination against federal employees. Bloch refused to enforce the civil service's nondiscrimination policy to protect gay employees.

But it was Bush's own acts of hostility toward gays that are best remembered by most LGBT leaders in assessing his legacy. He hosted a conference of groups at the White House to work on efforts to ban same-sex marriage and threw his support heartily behind a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

“He decided to write discrimination into the Constitution through a Federal Marriage Amendment,” said HRC's Solmonese, “and he allowed GLBT people to be used as a wedge issue to get re-elected.” Political analysts of Bush's re-election said his political operative, Karl Rove, devised a plan of promoting anti-gay marriage ballot measures in order to help turn out the conservative vote for Bush in 2004.

“He allowed that to happen,” said Solmonese.

Nan Hunter, a longtime gay activist and now law professor at Georgetown University, put it more bluntly: “His callous, completely unprincipled use of same-sex marriage as a wedge issue in the 2004 campaign led to the enactment of horrible [laws] in all the states in which anti-gay initiatives were on the ballot. We will be engaged in cleaning up the mess caused by those ballot measures for many years. It was a Rove-driven strategy for mobilizing the most conservative voters, and Bush did not hesitate to use it.”

Evan Wolfson, who heads up the national Freedom to Marry group, agrees.

“The worst specifically anti-gay action by far was the orchestrated campaign of anti-gay state constitutional amendments that he and Rove launched in 2004, in cahoots with the anti-gay industry,” said Wolfson.

The best thing Bush did, he adds, “was enabling the election of a pro-gay, African-American leader, and leaving.”