If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Voters ultimately decide more on who they trust and respect than on their stand on a specific issue. Issues, and how a candidate handles the issues, becomes a proxy for voters' judgments about their character.
President Obama knows that a growing number of Americans and people of faith understand this as a simple matter of fairness for all families. Obama has chosen to stand in the gap, even as conservatives manipulate religion to undermine the core value of equal standing before the law.
I personally haven't "just concluded" that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally. I concluded this a very long time ago, when the most loved person in the world to my wife and myself, our young son, told us that he was gay.
Years from now, when historians look back at the long arc of American history, they will see in the president's announcement a significant moment.
The issue of marriage equality to me is not a nuanced legal issue. It's not a moral issue. It's simply a question of: Do you think all Americans should be treated equally?
Opposition to discrimination has always been a morally and politically right position for Obama, and that has included gender and sexual preference, not just racial discrimination. There was no doubt then that it was only a matter of time that Obama would finally say yes to gay marriage.
Legalizing gay marriage would grant rights to a group of people heretofore denied equal treatment in the eyes of the law. And those equal rights for everyone are true to the spirit in which this country was founded.
Obama's statement/ Headlines or just the pre-game?/ Flaming Holiday The rains are coming/ A fire in the City?/ All head to Brooklyn
There are other significant decisions beyond gay marriage and abortion for each man to make. Romney has one last major decision to make, his Vice Presidential choice. Both how he makes it and who it is will be crucial to swing voters.
In 2008, I heard too many pundits imply that African Americans would automatically vote for President Obama simply because he is black. Today, I'm hearing that the only thing that will drive us away from him is the issue of marriage for gays and lesbians. Both assumptions are offensive.
Just now, I think we're in "history-making" territory. Not because of Obama's own "evolution," but because of what his announcement says about the organizing power of the LGBTQ community over the past 20 years.
America's real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites. Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It's a crisis of public morality.
Personally, I salute President Obama for his statement, for speaking out for equality. Now he needs to be the defender of Social Security and Medicare and not the advocate of a "grand bargain." He needs to champion making it in America, not peddle more corporate trade pacts.
Once again President Barack Obama has come tantalizingly close to being terrific. But his failure of courage on the gay marriage issue, in the end, undermined the point he hoped to make Wednesday.
Watching the president sitting in the Oval Office speaking out in support of gay marriage, you couldn't help but notice how comfortable he was. Barack Obama didn't just come out of the closet on gay marriage. He's flaunting it!
We deserve to share our lives with the people we choose to love, and we deserve the equal protections promised by our forefathers. We deserve to, and we must, get equal.
