By Karen Ocamb

Nine months away, all things political seem pregnant with implications for the 2006-midterm elections. For the LGBT community, much is at stake -- especially on the federal level.

Republicans, fearful of losing control over Congress in a year fraught with GOP-linked scandals, elected a House majority leader to replace indicted former leader, Tom "the Hammer" DeLay, on Feb. 2. Unfortunately for gay people, they chose another friend-of-lobbyists, Ohio's John A. Boehner, an ardent supporter of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and a consistent voter against LGBT rights. In their scorecard on Congressional voting records, the Human Rights Campaign gives Boehner a zero with an added big thumb down.

"We will be reaching out to Mr. Boehner, urging measures that can help the majority respond to the values voters who played such an important role in making them the majority," wrote anti-gay Family Research Council head Tony Perkins in an e-mail to members. One of the measures expected to be pushed in Congress and tied to the 2006 elections will be approval of the Marriage Protection Amendment.

Ironically, the Associated Press reported, one of Boehner's first "new direction" proposals is a recommitment "to reducing the influence of government in our lives."

How Democrats voted, and their view on the filibuster of Judge Samuel Alito's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, will also reverberate through the 2006 midterms, where all seats in the House of Representatives and one third in the Senate are up for election. Alito's 58-42 confirmation was greeted with enthusiasm by right-wingers such as Traditional Values Coalition Director Andrea Lafferty, who boasted about being invited to the White House for a reception honoring the new associate justice. But Alito surprised many on his first day by opposing the court's conservatives and refusing to allow the execution of a Missouri inmate who argued the justice system is racist.

Most LGBT rights groups were disappointed by Alito's victory. "With this confirmation, the Supreme Court likely will shift to the right and become a less welcoming forum for many kinds of civil rights claims," Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin Cathcart said in a statement. "However, it is important for us to remember that the court still contains a majority of justices who ruled in favor of liberty and equality for gay people in Lambda Legal's two recent Supreme Court successes that are the foundation for much of our community's progress -- Lawrence v. Texas and Romer v. Evans -- and those cases remain the law of the land."

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who now becomes the crucial vote for close rulings, wrote the 6-3 Lawrence decision. In that ruling, Kennedy wrote that gays "are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."

Perhaps the biggest indication that the midterm elections are looming was President Bush's State of the Union address Jan. 31, much of which has subsequently been challenged by the media and political and economic analysts.

"With his own job performance numbers and approval ratings for the Republican-controlled Congress sagging only 10 months before the 2006 elections, Bush mostly advanced a cautious agenda that seemed to aim less at transforming the political debate than at helping the GOP survive a hostile political environment," wrote Ron Brownstein in the Los Angeles Times.

Two specific mentions caught LGBT attention: a reference to the federal marriage amendment and support for reauthorizing the Ryan White CARE Act.

"Last night, President Bush declared, 'A hopeful society acts boldly to fight diseases like HIV/AIDS, which can be prevented and treated and defeated.' These words echoed those he delivered in his 2005 State of the Union and that he repeated on World AIDS Day in December. But the administration continues to advocate policies that will produce just the opposite result," said Phill Wilson, director of the Los Angeles-based Black AIDS Institute. "The White House's budget proposal last year -- which shaped the budget now awaiting final congressional approval -- cut funding for the HIV prevention work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by $4.5 million. And it flat-lined almost every aspect of the Ryan White CARE Act for a third straight year. Meanwhile, the administration spent the last congressional session shoving its proposal to gut Medicaid through Congress."

Longtime Human Rights Campaign board member Hilary Rosen was so apoplectic, she posted an e-mail from Tim McFeely, president of the Center for Policy Alternatives, on her Huffington Post blog. "In his meandering, theme-less State of the Union Address last night, near the conclusion Bush declared: 'They [the American people] are concerned about unethical conduct by public officials and discouraged by activist courts that try to redefine marriage,'" McFeely wrote.

In eight seconds, the president dismissed the corruption scandals gripping Congress and his administration and equated these in the American mind with judges who have applied state constitutional precepts on equality to lesbian and gay couples. The reaction? Applause from both sides of the proverbial aisle -- Democrats want to underscore the unethical conduct reference and Republicans want to take another swing at scapegoating homosexuals for the moral decline of America.

"This simple sentence conjoins public officials who pervert their duties by accepting bribes from the Abramoff crowd with state judges who see unlawful discrimination in denying marriage rights to same-sex couples," McFeely wrote. "What's the answer? At a minimum media commentators and the rest of us need to wake up and deconstruct these faulty frames. And all of us need to watch our backs and fight back every time this word-poison is injected into the public discourse."

To keep an eye on how issues are framed, go to www.mediamatters.org, founded by openly gay David Brock, or www.factcheck.org, a service of the non-partisan Annenberg Public Policy Center.