The tide is turning in America. People look lovingly at the Clinton era but forget that he was the President who signed DADT into law as well as DOMA…neither being in support of the gay community. I have always felt the Democrats were playing politics with this issue because so called mainstream America didn’t support it…and frankly – it was the anti-gay state level ballots that helped Bush win re-election in 2004. Americans have historically just had a lot of anti-gay sentiment…but times have changed and quickly. No president has done more for the rights of the LGBT community than President Obama. No other President in our history has come out in favor of gay marriage. And it’s about time that Democrats stood up collectively and said equal rights for all.
You can find Andrew Sullivan’s complete essay online HERE:
[It's easy to] be skeptical of Obama’s motives, of how long it took, of whether this is pure and late opportunism. But when you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work. He did this the way he always does: leading from behind and playing the long game.
Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. The America he grew up in had no space for a boy like him: black yet enveloped by loving whiteness, estranged from a father he longed for (another common gay experience), hurtling between being a Barry and a Barack, needing an American racial identity as he grew older but chafing also against it and over-embracing it at times.
This is the gay experience: the discovery in adulthood of a community not like your own home and the struggle to belong in both places, without displacement, without alienation.
Andrew Sullivan speaks to Chris Matthews about the impact on him personally:
