The Gay Debate

Even though I'm a political person, I've been ignoring most of the early political debates. A couple of weeks ago, I watched the YouTube debate and last night I watched the "Gay Debate" on Logo. It really wasn't a debate, it was a forum -- each candidate had 15 minutes to answers questions from the panelists including Joe Solmonese, head of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which was a sponsor of the debate, Melissa Etheridge and Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart. Margaret Carlson, formerly of Time, kept everything moving as the moderator. The candidates spoke in the order they accepted the invitation to the forum. Barack Obama was first and he shone in a way that he has not been able to in the debates. Just the fact that a presidential candidate was sitting on the stage talking about homophobia in the black community and the importance of condom distribution to prevent AIDS was historic.

But what he and all the other candidates (except for Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich) can't deal with is gay marriage. They all talk about equal rights and civil unions and are politically realistic about what can and can't be done. That's ok. But that's not going to satisfy the gay community. For whatever it's worth (and the gay community has many internal debates about this), the issue is marriage. Full access to marriage and all the rights afforded to married couples. None of the front-runner candidates believe in gay marriage. Dennis Kucinich is so amazing on all progressive issues, not just gay issues, that a person on the left has to be ready to tear their eyeballs out over not being able to vote for him. And make no mistake about it, no matter how good Kucinich is, no pragmatic political person will vote for him. Melissa Etheridge could not stop kissing his ass, reminding herself that she was told not to fawn too much. This election is too important for anyone to waste a vote on Kucinich (who reminded viewers that it took him five tries to get into Congress.) He reminds me a bit of Uncle Fester from the Munsters, nice guy, but a little off.

Edwards has lately been coming off as trying too hard and it was evident last night. He took on Ann Coulter and the hate-mongering and asked people to stand up against that "worst kind of public discourse." But, he never recovered from a comment Melissa Etheridge made saying she has read that he was uncomfortable around gay people. While he denied it, it threw him off-balance for the rest of his time. Bill Richardson sunk even further by not listening properly to a question about whether being gay is a choice and answered that it was. He quickly backtracked but the damage was done. Hillary Clinton had to defend her husband's record on gay issues and like the others before her, said she would get rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In her final remarks she scored points by asking for the gay community to be her partner in making the country better.

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