Top Obama Gay John Berry: It's Going To Be A Long Time On LGBT Rights

John Berry, the director of the Office of Personnel Management and the president's highest ranking openly gay appointee spoke to the Advocate's Kerry Eleveld after his speech at DC Pride yesterday (which I heard). Berry, who said he was speaking with the authorization of the White House, outlined a four-point list of LGBT rights that the Obama administration hopes to achieve, but stressed that the general timetable for these goals is "under the administration's watch", meaning including a potential second Obama term.

We have four broad legislative goals that we want to accomplish and legislation is one of these things where you’ve got to move when the opportunity strikes, so I’m going to list them in an order but it’s not necessarily going to go one, two, three, four. Obviously, I think the first opportunity is hate crimes and we’re hopeful that we can get that passed this week. We’re going to try, but if not, we’re going to keep at it until we get it passed. The second one ENDA, we want to secure that passage of ENDA, and third is we want to repeal legislatively “don’t ask don’t tell,” and fourth, we want to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

Now, I’m not going to pledge -- and nor is the president -- that this is going to be done by some certain date. The pledge and the promise is that, this will be done before the sun sets on this administration – our goal is to have this entire agenda accomplished and enacted into law so that it is secure.

The Advocate: Does that include a second term? A lot of people have talked about DOMA being pushed back until a second term.

Berry: I say this in a broad sense -- our goal is to get this done on this administration’s watch.

Berry went on to say that the gay community should not "waste energy and angst" attacking the president over last week's DOJ-DOMA flap, and instead should be working on getting the necessary votes to overturn DOMA in the House and Senate.