You're Likable Enough, Gay People

[IndianaGreen]

You’re Likable Enough, Gay People

By FRANK RICH
Published: December 27, 2008

IN his first press conference after his re-election in 2004, President Bush memorably declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” We all know how that turned out.

Barack Obama has little in common with George W. Bush, thank God, his obsessive workouts and message control notwithstanding. At a time when very few Americans feel very good about very much, Obama is generating huge hopes even before he takes office. So much so that his name and face, affixed to any product, may be the last commodity left in the marketplace that can still move Americans to shop.

I share these high hopes. But for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month.

As we saw during primary season, our president-elect is not free of his own brand of hubris and arrogance, and sometimes it comes before a fall: “You’re likable enough, Hillary” was the prelude to his defeat in New Hampshire. He has hit this same note again by assigning the invocation at his inauguration to the Rev. Rick Warren, the Orange County, Calif., megachurch preacher who has likened committed gay relationships to incest, polygamy and “an older guy marrying a child.” Bestowing this honor on Warren was a conscious — and glib — decision by Obama to spend political capital. It was made with the certitude that a leader with a mandate can do no wrong.

<snip>

Unlike Bush, Obama has been the vocal advocate of gay civil rights he claims to be. It is over the top to assert, as a gay writer at Time did, that the president-elect is “a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot.” Much more to the point is the astute criticism leveled by the gay Democratic congressman Barney Frank, who, in dissenting from the Warren choice, said of Obama, “I think he overestimates his ability to get people to put aside fundamental differences.” That’s a polite way of describing the Obama cockiness. It will take more than the force of the new president’s personality and eloquence to turn our nation into the United States of America he and we all want it to be.

Obama may not only overestimate his ability to bridge some of our fundamental differences but also underestimate how persistent some of those differences are. The exhilaration of his decisive election victory and the deserved applause that has greeted his mostly glitch-free transition can’t entirely mask the tensions underneath. Before there is profound social change, there is always high anxiety.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28rich.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=opinion&adxnnlx=1230440031-KuZoX1U3Slr9tXr61qxR7w

[Mz Pip]

1. Did Rich voice similar concerns

when Clinton had Billy Graham speak at his Inauguration? Warren and Graham share similar views, certainly in terms of actual public policy. Where was his beef then?

[IndianaGreen]

2. Billy Graham never compared being gay to incest, or pedophilia

So much for your Obama/Warren apologia.

[Mz Pip]

3. Okay fine

You win.

[Mind_your_head]

4. I stopped reading after the third paragraph......

My future President (capital "P") is NOT a commodity.

Commodity's are bought and sold to the highest/lowest bidders (depending on how one is 'playing the game').

Rub mud in your eye corporate world....one world order.

You F*ck us (and ultimately) f*ck your robotic/inhuman selves DAILY!

Barack Obama is a wonderful human being. Got that? HUMAN BEING.

[IndianaGreen]

5. As are the LGBT that he screwed up and offended, not just by the Warren invite

but by his decision to postpone for at least two years the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. A major campaign promise, already broken and he hasn't even taken the oath of office.

[Mind_your_head]

6. ehm, the Warren invite may not have been the "smartest political move on the planet"

but as someone who is more than supportive of gay rights, ehm......I think Ya'll are acting a little *crazy*......expecting too much too soon. Kinda like those anti-abortion folks <---------(take heed LGBT).

Peace,
M_Y_H

[MNBrewer]

8. sigh

"(take heed LGBT)"

What do you intend THAT to mean?

[Fearless]

12. I'd have to assume it means learn from the past.

:shrug:

[ThomCat]

9. WTF?

:wtf:

A person who compares us to pedophiles is being given a high honor, a once in a lifetime national stage, and we're acting "a little crazy" for being upset about this?

When someone goes around calling you a pedophile, and starts successfully passing laws taking away your rights and making you less of a citizen than all the people around you, then you can tell us whether or not we're going a little crazy.

What are we supposed to get from your warning? We're being too outspoken and too angry? Tell you what, why don't you as an unaffected straight person tell us how we should act. :eyes:

[Jakes Progress]

11. Yeah, Don't you just hate all

those uppity gay folk? I see you will support them just fine as long as they know their place.

(Just a little rhetoric left over from the sixties.)

[Skittles]

15. BE CONTENT TO SIT IN THE BACK OF THE BUS, GAY FOLK!!!

STOP ACTING CRAZY!!!!!

[biopowertoday]

7. “it’s now time to move from symbol to substance.” YES, it IS.

.............But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.

Since he’s not about to rescind the invitation, what happens next? For perspective, I asked Timothy McCarthy, a historian who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an unabashed Obama enthusiast who served on his campaign’s National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Leadership Council. He responded via e-mail on Christmas Eve.

After noting that Warren’s role at the inauguration is, in the end, symbolic, McCarthy concluded that “it’s now time to move from symbol to substance.” This means Warren should “recant his previous statements about gays and lesbians, and start acting like a Christian.”

McCarthy added that it’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.” And “for LGBT folks to choose their battles wisely, to judge Obama on the content of his policy-making, not on the character of his ministers.”

Amen...................

[Doctor_J]

10. I was just going to post those same graphs

esp the last one. If Obama tries to triangulate like WJC did, he will be trounced by the media, the GOP congresspeople, and his 2012 opponent. If he gets evangelicals to come around to his way of thinking, and not vice-versa, this could be one of the great presidencies of all time.

[MNBrewer]

13. which way of thinking?

That gay's don't merit marriage equality?

Done and DONE.

[Doctor_J]

14. That gays marrying and having civil rights is not worth fighting over

compared to the rest of the problems affecting the country right now.