A Gay Cabinet Secretary?

Most people probably know that the United States has never had an openly LGBTQ Cabinet Secretary. In fact, we can expand this even further: No head of any Cabinet-level agency (the EPA, for instance) has been openly gay.

Now, this surprised me at first, but it probably shouldn't. We've never had a gay Senator, nor a gay Governor (and no, Jim McGreevey doesn't count) at the time of their election. Neither of the Bushes nor Reagan were likely to appoint "a gay" to the Cabinet, and a looksie around Clinton's group shows a more diverse bunch, but not when it comes to sexual orientation. 

There was a good amount of hope, perhaps misplaced, that Obama would appoint an openly queer person to a Cabinet-level post. A few different names were thrown around, but most of my inclinations centered around Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, a solid progressive member of the US House and a Clinton supporter who campaigned fairly hard for Obama throughout September, when Wisconsin was still polling in the low single digits.

I saw Baldwin as an ideal fit for Secretary of Health and Human Services. She's been involved in health politics for a long time, far before her election to the US House in 1998. She's a prominent supporter of SCHIP, the Children's Health program that helps insure several million low-income children. What probably prevented her ascension to HHS was her support for a single-payer system, long-since disregarded as politically inexpedient by Obama. 

With news that Tom Daschle was to be named HHS Secretary, I figured gays would be shut out of the Cabinet. It seems I may have been wrong:

According to the Huffington Post, labor organizer Mary Beth Maxwell of California is a shortlisted candidate for US Secretary of Labor. Maxwell has strong support in the organized labor community, and is familiar with the ins and outs of the Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA, which will be the most prominent labor legislation to face the House in over a decade, since the Family Medical Leave Act in the early 1990s. She also happens to be a lesbian. 

Now, I don't think that every minority/ethnic/racial/sexual/gender group should automatically expect a position in the Cabinet, but I do think 2008, particularly in a post-Prop 8 world, presents a unique opportunity for Obama to expand his coalition farther into the queer community. I believe pretty strongly that a President Hillary Clinton would have appointed an openly queer person to the Cabinet, considering her long-standing support from the community. It would be refreshing to see a progressive lesbian voice in the Obama Cabinet, particularly as Labor Secretary, to strengthen worker protections and provide yet another glass ceiling shattering moment for queer officials.