Before trashing the motives of Obama critics you might wish to put yourself in their place

dsc

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Sat Mar-28-09 02:40 PM
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Before trashing the motives of Obama critics you might wish to put yourself in their place

I have taken alot of shit for daring to critique Obama's record as it stands with gay rights. To be blunt if you aren't gay you don't know what it is like to be gay. Anymore than I can know what it is like to be black or female. The simple fact is that gays still are totally devoid of any protections unless they are lucky enough to live in one of the fewer than 20 states that offer such protections or live in a city which offers them. There is one state, one single, solitary, and frankly small, state that permits gay marriage. Marriage is such a fundamental right that deadbeat parents don't lose it, people who kill their spouses don't lose it, people who rape children don't lose it. Only gay Californians managed to lose their right to marry. 20/20 recently aired a couple of experiments where gay male couples displayed affection (one on an Alabama park bench and the other in a New Jersey sports bar). The one in Alabama didn't go well with the one in New Jersey going surprisingly well. But the whole experiment shows just how far we have to go. The simple fact is that virtually no gay couple feels totally safe with the idea of either kissing or holding hands in public in most of America.

It is with that context that we look at Obama's actions. When he selected Warren to give the invocation at this Inaguration we saw a man who not only took away our right to marry but would, if permitted to, take away every other right we have fought so hard for, given a place of honor at the banquet of Democracy. In Warren's America, an American more than a few of us live in and or lived in, gays don't have job protections, don't have relationship rights, don't get to adopt or foster children, and aren't treated with respect. When he recently selected five religious advisors and four of the five were actively anti gay with the other having no record at all we saw it through the prism of growing up in faith communities that presured our parents to disown us, our politicians to ignore us as we died in the streets, and our courts to declare us outside the protections of the 14th amendment.

I don't pretent to speak of every Obama critic, every gay person, or even every gay Obama critic. But I do ask that just once, some of you who have all the rights of an American citizen put yourself in the shoes of some who don't. Put yourself in the place of the person with glacoma who faces arrest and financial ruin on the one hand or blindness on the other. Put yourself in the place of the gay man or lesbian woman who has to watch his or her partner go without insurance because a bigotted majority just says no. Put yourself in the place of those who want us totally out of Iraq in a year as promised and face a recall if we aren't out soon enough. In short, pretend it really matters if Obama cares about those issues or doesn't.