Maureen Dowd in the NYT:
Obama is “evolving” on the issue of gay marriage, which, as any girl will tell you, is the first sign of a commitment-phobe.
Maybe, given all his economic and war woes as he heads into 2012, Obama fears the disapproval of the homophobic elements within his own party. But he has tried to explain his reluctance on gay marriage as an expression of his Christianity, even though he rarely goes to church and is the picture of a secular humanist.
While picking up more than three-quarters of a million dollars from 600 guests at a gay and lesbian fund-raising gala in Manhattan on Thursday night, the president declared, “I believe that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple in this country,” even as he held to his position that the issue should be left to the states to decide.
. . .
With each equivocation, the man in the Oval Office shields his identity and cloaks who the real Barack Obama is.
He should draw inspiration from the gay community: one thing gays have to do, after all, is declare who they are at all costs.
On some of the most important issues facing this nation, it is time for the president to come out of the closet.
While we're on the subject of marriage, here's Cynthia Nixon, speaking last year at the New Yorker Festival:
Gay people who want to marry have no desire to redefine marriage in any way. When women got the vote, they did not redefine voting. When African-Americans got the right to sit at a lunch counter alongside white people, they did not redefine eating out. They were simply invited to the table. And that is all we want to do.
2 comments:
The only problem with "let the states decide" is, god, there are so many problems with it....and they will be popping up as more same gender couples marry here and relocate there and adopt children, and divorce, and die, and inherit estates, and own property, and win the lottery, and file taxes, etc.
It's a total copout; he doesn't want to lose the church vote in the black community, is what I figure.
And yes, even though Lincoln had that vision thing about "a house divided" - in point of fact, the nation did live half slave and half free for nearly a century, and then half segregated for another century. So this mindless, cruel state of affairs could indeed go on for a long, long time.
Who cares? is the attitude in middle America. It's only those dirty niggers . . . um, dirty queers.
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