by: Pam Spaulding
Fri Oct 09, 2009 at 00:49:46 AM EDT
Oh man, if this is the stale message that the President is going to serve up to the dressed-to-the-nines crowd at the HRC annual dinner, how will they react? And how will that reaction compare to that of the marchers on Sunday? Via the WaPo:
[W]ithin the gay leadership in Washington, established politicians and a freshman class of bolder legislators disagree as to whether the Maine campaign should be central to a larger federal push for equality. Those frustrated voices are lobbying Obama to include a reference to the Maine referendum in his speech. Any failure to do so would be the last straw for many gay activists fed up with the small-bore approach of the Obama White House, the Washington-based gay lobby and the Democratic Party’s gay elders.
(A Democratic source familiar with the White House’s thinking on the speech said Obama will stress incremental advancements as evidence of progress.)
Incremental advancements? Like, say, appointing gay ambassadors…just as Clinton did back in the 1990s? Or offering domestic partnership benefits to federal employees…except those aren’t actually full benefits because federal law bars providing full benefits to gay and lesbian partners in order to “protect” marriage, and where the hell has the Obama administration been on removing that law as it pledged to do? Or any of the other little micro-initiatives that dot the Obama list of accomplishments on LGBT issues, initiatives that are all super in and of themselves, but do nothing to address the fundamental inequality forced on us by federal legislation and policy?
Sean closes with what we’re all thinking — “If that’s what we’re about to get served up as dinner on Saturday night, we should be sending that dish right back where it came from.”
I think Obama’s point is a reflection of his own incremental progress. Back in 1996, he spoke out very definitively for full marriage equality for glbt citizens. He said he would defend full marriage equality from any attack. Since then, he has incrementally grown to embrace the values of Rev Rick Warren that glbt people have unnatural relationships in which “God is not in the mix”. Obama no longer supports marriage equality, he says because of his Christian faith. Is that the incrementalism we can hope for? F U Obama!
Willing to bet before our fierce advocate, President Obama takes any action to give the GLBT community its full civil rights that he and his Administration do everything they can to give the path to citizenship to every individual illegally here. After that, I’d say we will forever be without those rights because the over half a million it costs us per the business journalists from the New York times to live as a gay couple in comparison to a straight married couple will be needed to pay for all the rights to the Social Security, health benefits and income taxes that will be given to every illegal made legal, not to mention any family they will be able to bring here. This Administration got what they wanted from us, our support and votes.
I don’t hate Hispanics, not every illegal entry is a Hispanic, but they do have a better lobby than us. I’d like to see a journalist follow the money and see if any of it is drug cartel money.