Politics lag on gay-rights issues

But tomorrow, 250 gay leaders are to join Obama in the East Room to commemorate publicly the 40th anniversary of the birth of the gay-rights movement - a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. By contrast, the first time gay leaders were invited to the White House, in March 1977, they met a midlevel aide on a Saturday when the press and President Carter were nowhere in sight.

The conflicting signals from the White House about its commitment to gay issues reflect a broader paradox: Even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents.

It is reflected in the surge of gay men and lesbians on television and in public office, and in polls measuring a steady rise in support for gay-rights measures. Despite approval in California of a ballot measure banning same-sex marriage, six states have now authorized it.

Yet if the culture is moving on, national politics are not, or at least not as rapidly. Obama has yet to implement a campaign promise to repeal the policy barring openly gay people from serving in the military. The prospects that Congress will send him a bill overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, appear dim. An effort to extend hate-crime legislation to include gay victims has produced a bitter backlash in some quarters.

“America is changing more quickly than the government,’’ said Linda Ketner, a gay Democrat from South Carolina who came within 4 percentage points of winning a congressional seat in November. “They are lagging behind the crowd. But if I remember my poli sci from college, isn’t that the way it always works?’’

Some elected Democrats in Washington remain wary because they remember how conservatives used same-sex marriage and gay service in the military against them as political issues. The Obama White House in particular is reluctant to embrace gay-rights issues now, officials there say, because they do not want to provide social conservatives a rallying cry while the president is trying to assemble legislative coalitions on healthcare and other initiatives.

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a group that opposes gay-rights initiatives, said Obama’s reluctance to push more assertively for gay rights reflects public opinion.

“He’s given them a few minor concessions; they’re asking for more, such as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ being repealed,’’ Perkins said. “The administration is not willing to go there, and I think there’s a reason for that, and that is because I think the American public isn’t there.’’

Conservative Democrats have at best been unenthusiastic about efforts to push gay-rights measures in Congress; 30 Democrats voted against a bill prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation that passed the House in 2007. (It died in the Senate.) And a half-dozen Democrats declined requests to discuss this issue, reflecting what aides called the complicated politics surrounding it.

Interviews with gay leaders suggest a consensus that there has been nothing short of a cultural transformation in the space of just a few years, even if it is reflected more in the evolving culture of the country than in the body of its laws.

“The diminution of the homophobia has been as important a phenomena as anything we’ve seen in the last 15 years,’’ said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who is gay.