Please reread that tiny snippet and then go back and look at it in context. (it’s why I post paragraphs, not lone sentences. This isn’t Twitter.) I was careful to specify legal indifference and negligence vs. legal hostility. And that is correct. There is still legal indifference (immigration laws) and legal negligence (DOMA) which ignore or negate the civil rights of gay people. But the law now, with the demise of DOMA, no longer compels any governmental agency to investigate someone’s sexual orientation in order to apply a penalty for having the wrong one.

You are correct that there are hostile politicians and policemen. I did not argue otherwise. Please don’t confuse the distinction. I know it may be a subtle one for some people. But what makes the end of DADT especially noteworthy is that for the entire history of the US, laws have been on the books requiring the active pursuit of gay people. And as of September 20, for the first time on US history, that is no longer the case.

I think that’s a remarkably naive conclusion. Active hostility is exactly why the U.S. lags behind most of the West in granting gays equality and protections. Politicians are not “indifferent”, it’s just that one party supports us and the other party hates us.

I would also suggest you proceed with caution when you assert that no local or state govt can or would conduct an investigation into the sex life of a U.S. citizen. They can. They do. And in most states, there’s no law to stop them.

But our comfort is that this isn’t 1992.

While it is possible that Republicans could gain control of the Senate, hold the House, and take the presidency, and it is possible that they could decide to make reinstating DADT a goal, they would still have the rather difficult task of selling that agenda. After a year or more of DADT being gone, absent some evident breakdown (which is rather unlikely) they have no basis for reinstatement other than anti-gay bigotry.

And there are people in the Republican Party who are wise enough to know that outright anti-gay bigotry will lose votes in this century. In fact, I believe that if the Party were to attempt to reinstate DADT that it would literally destroy the party. I don’t think that it could survive being so strongly associated with an effort that most Americans see as discrimination.

Marriage… well that is less definite and leaves room for evolution of thinking. DADT is politically dead.

How many Republicans in the House jumped to endorse Buck McKean and Joe Wilson’s request for delay? Oh, zero.

But it is still possible. Which is why, as Zeke noted, it’s important that LCR continue its lawsuit.

What you passive-aggressively call “pedantic,” I like to think of as accurate.

But point taken. It’s obviously not a simple point you’re able or willing to concede.

For the very reasons mentioned above it IS necessary to continue with the suit.

Jim, none in particular. Just wondering out loud if there might be such provisions tucked away within immigration law.

What provisions of immigration law are you thinking about? I’m not aware of a case where someone’s sexual orientation per se would bring out such a result.

No U.S., state, or local law enforcement agency could launch an investigation into the private romantic life of a U.S. citizen solely to determine whether that citizen should be legally penalized because of it.

In the last paragraph, I went into the lone exception — the case of military personnel:

Where law enforcement investigations designed solely to determine one’s sexual orientation were legally mandated and often played out in the front pages of newspapers and the evening news, today we have a whole generation for whom such a scenario is unthinkable — with one glaring exception. Gays and lesbians serving in the military still operate under a McCarthyite prohibition based solely on their private lives.

Taken together, I think together the distinction is there. But then I’m not a lawyer, so I tend to be less pedantic with my individual sentences when I have the rest of the post to flesh them out.