Obama Speech Is Interrupted by Gay Marriage Supporters

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Source: New York Times

President Obama said he expected some heckling and he got it. More than 600 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people paid $1,250 each to attend a Democratic fund-raising dinner in Manhattan on Thursday and, to the vocal disappointment of some, they did not hear him endorse same-sex marriage generally or the bill that would legalize it in New York State.

Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, had said early in the day that the president would not announce any shift in his longstanding but “evolving” position on same-sex marriage — that it is a matter for states to decide. Even so, some in the mostly male audience at the hotel ballroom seemed to hang on his words as if waiting for just such a shift.

Though it never came, Mr. Obama nonetheless got several bursts of applause and standing ovations along with the heckling — a mix that captured both the frustration of many in attendance with the administration’s policies on same-sex marriage and the recognition that Mr. Obama had achieved more than they would ever get from a Republican president.

The “Gala With the Gay Community” was Mr. Obama’s first such fund-raising event as president. Both he and the people who introduced him — the actor Neil Patrick Harris and Jonathan Hopkins, a decorated veteran of three tours in Afghanistan who had to leave the Army last year because of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — cited the repeal of that law, the passage of a hate-crimes law and other administration actions, evoking much applause. The first really enthusiastic response, however, came with Mr. Harris’s mention that Mr. Obama had made the first appointment of a transgender person to federal office.

more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/nyregion/obama-speech-interrupted-by-gay-marriage-supporters.html